Since the productivity push of the last few decades has led to levels of burnout some experts are calling an epidemic, the Slow Work movement is rising to the fore. Rather than Zero-Inbox and ‘rise earlier, work harder’ philosophies, workers and companies alike are turning to practices such as ‘monotasking’ and ‘timeboxing’, and ‘mindful questioning’ that bring us back to focused work aligned with our physical and mental capacity and our values. In other words: a way of working that is sustainable for human beings.
These are the tools of the Slow Work movement. Although you might benefit from a select couple of AI software tools (and time devoted to learning and ‘training’ them properly – remember Dragon Dictate?) adopters of the ‘slow productivity’ movement, such as Slow at Work author Aoife McElwain and Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, suggest the first and most life-changing step is to work out your values, write down the most important things to you in work and life. And let go of the rest.
For example, if you can assume your mum will live another decade, how many more times do you want to see her – Twenty? Fifty? How many weekend trips or half-Wednesdays is that? Do this for your kids, your partner, your fulfilling hobbies… Book them in, and see how much working time that leaves you. Are ethics important to you? Create a benchmark list of jobs or client types you won’t mess with. McElwain warns not to turn everything into work – do a hobby badly, or irregularly; don’t turn it into a side-hustle.
Burkeman says the Industrial Revolution shifted us away from a sense of ‘the afterlife’, towards a ‘YOLO’ approach, and we wrongly assumed this meant ‘squeeze more in’. The way to less stress, he says, is to accept you can’t. You will miss out, it’s inevitable, so ensure you miss the right bits for you.
Sounds wonderful but can you achieve it if you live in your work, surrounded by your clients and customers, or your staff and livestock? I talked to John Bacon, of Kangaroo Valley Rural Supplies, and Kristen McLennan of Kangaroo Valley Pastured Eggs.
Having worked closely with John, I felt I recognised these concepts and the McLennans, I knew, often research best business practice. Had they adopted ‘slow work’ practices?
Although the Rural Supplies is open seven days a week, John and partner Helen Gelberman seem to have time for their sons Jack and Reuben, their home and farm animals, and for friends. He’ll often mix it up, too: although he doesn’t take general enquiry calls outside of working hours, he’ll often do work at home. “But at the same time, I will go shopping, or to an exhibition, or do work on the farm or catch up with the boys, when it would otherwise be Rural Supplies time.” John seems happy in his work, even though it seems to take up a lot of his life.
“I don’t really separate work from the rest of my life”, John says. “I think a lot of people in jobs see going to work as not a good thing, they view Friday afternoon as a good thing, but that’s not how I feel or how I operate. The business is one part of my life. The boys are another, Helen is another. They’re all together in the same basket. I think that’s really important for me, in terms of longevity, in terms of enjoyment: it’s not separate.”
Longevity, or sustainability, is a crucial part of the slow productivity model because it protects against burnout. When the State of the Future of Work Report was published by the University of Melbourne in March 2023, the high levels of burnout reported rang alarm bells.
Kristen McLennan of Kangaroo Valley Pastured Eggs relates to this. “We’ve been running the eggs on a small scale for about eight or nine years now, so a long, long time, and I’m so used to doing everything myself […] and I’ve just had enough.” Although it aligns with her ethics, pastured eggs was never Kristen’s passion. Kristen and husband Mark also have two young daughters, the Delicious Gardens business, and sometimes holiday accommodation too. It can be a lot.
“We’re so culturally bound to our upbringing, which is you just have to work harder. If something’s not working, you just work harder. Those beliefs have meant that I’ve been working really hard for a really long time and I’m really tired. You know, it’s 40+ years of cultural upbringing.”
Trying to think differently has led the McLennans to podcasts, courses and, most recently, business – and life-coaches at the Farm Owners Academy. The Academy also organises conferences, where farmers can get together and learn from each other as well. As the founder says on the website, “Many farmers have a passion but lack a business model” and “there’s a lot more to running a farming business than just being a good technical farmer.”
This was never truer than in the modern era, when farming involves a tonne of emails, online ordering and negotiation with suppliers and markets, and often an active social media presence. And then there’s the staff. And that’s before you even get to the hands-on farming.
“Mental healthwise, to have the amount of pressure in running a livestock business – and production based – it’s really tough. So one of the things I’m working on with my coaches is mindset and finding time in the day for things that bring you joy. You know, all those wonderful mindfulness things that are really really hard to implement.” She laughs.
Tools Kristen is working with include the ‘bricks list’ or ‘brain dump’ of all the tasks on her mental load list. That list ties in with a goals list, broken down into smaller chunks, from five or ten years down to quarterly goals, and to-dos this week. “Then you just focus on one goal.”
This echoes ‘monotasking’ – the opposite of multi-tasking – where mindful attention is on one task at a time, only for the time allocated. From previously trying to do everything that turned up in front of her, but hampered by interruptions, this focus works.
“I go ‘Okay well I’ve looked at my bricks list, what can I do this week? I reckon I can get those three things ticked off on Monday, I can do that on Tuesday, and my team can handle that, that, and that’. [Then] at the end of the week I go ‘Wow, look at all the things we’ve achieved this week and I’ve still had time to have a coffee and I still had time to ride the horse—which I don’t currently really have time to [do] but I’m trying’.”
Kristen also starts her day with settling and preparation of her brain and body through meditation and exercise.
Toby Schwartz and co. shared the effectiveness of a ritual to prepare for work in their 2009 book The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, which came from their research conducted at major corporate entities. They found top performance requires that four key human energy needs are met: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Without them, performance drops and workers reach burnout.
John uses lists too, and a lot of ritual. He has wanted a farm since he was eight years old, and has followed that dream through a degree in Agriculture, a stint in farming – “it was repetitive [and] there weren’t enough people for me” – and a much longer stint in community farming “where there are loads of people” to arrive at the Rural Supplies. He takes real pleasure in his work, from providing customers with well-researched, useful products to building relationships and occasionally friendships with them. He gets a thrill from seeing the junior staff blossom – even if they’ve taken a while to train at the beginning. Such patience pays off, with the current ‘boys’ James and Brynn having been there for six and seven years respectively, and Brynn working also on the gardens of the home property and accommodation business, Auntie Eileen’s.
The chickens have just come in the day I speak to him, and John spends time phoning customers who’ve expressed interest in the birds. He approaches retail with a lot of humanity and compassion, and Helen too, offering patience and care to older residents and generally connecting with the humans, not just the sales, although a good sale can be a buzz too.
“I really like the gambling aspect of the job,” John says, “in that you never know how much you’re going to take at the end of the day. It’s not predictable. Some days, like today, you see lots and lots and lots of people but they don’t spend very much; some days you see lots and lots of people but they do spend a lot, so it’s quite fun.”
There seems a Burkeman-like acceptance within John that life won’t immediately be as he wants it, and can’t contain everything, but can be trusted to contain small joys; staff will move on, but someone else will always turn up; they’ll need training but it pays to stick with it and commit to a hire. “Go with the strengths”, he says, before telling the story of James’s recent triumph with an AIRR order on the forklift.
Now the Rural Supplies is on the market; how will it feel not to be working? “It took quite a while for me to let go. […] I’m not fed up with this, I’m not particularly done with it, but it’s time for me to do other things I want to do.”
Are you feeling overwhelmed? Try the Business Stress Test two-minute survey
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