There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting our troubles with time are somehow all in the

Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind. It’s not that these efforts are arbitrary: our anxious days include tasks and appointments that really do need to get done. But once you realize, as McPhee did, that this exhausted scrambling is often orthogonal to the activities that m

describes what happens as a result: “our lives become about the struggle to keep up.” She continues, “To truly feel our experience with depth and presence, we would have to slow down a lot (which would make us less efficient consumers, students, workers, prisoners, soldiers…).”