Slow Down to Speed Up

Why Fast Rarely Finishes First

Aug 14, 2025

In 2017 I walked into the office of the President of Microsoft US for the first time. I'd met Kate Johnson before briefly, but this was my debut in the inner sanctum.

I quickly scanned the room, taking note of the trampoline in the center, but decided to park my questions about that and just listen to what she had to say.

"Paul, I want you to slow down," she said.

Well, that was odd. I'd never been told that by an executive — particularly when starting a new role.

"I want you to slow down… to speed up."

Now she really had my attention.

Kate went on to explain her goals for my new role, which centered on driving innovation by building solutions with our customers and learning from these interactions to change how Microsoft sells. I took in every detail I could and went back to my desk. But I couldn't get that opening phrase out of my head.

"Slow Down to Speed Up."

That evening, I went home late and parked my car outside the garage — like I always did, because the garage was full of… stuff. But before I went in the house, I opened the garage door and took a look at it. As I glanced over the mess in front of me, I thought about all the times in the previous months I'd searched around there for something. Add up that time and it was way more than the couple of hours I'd need to get things organized in there.

Then, after dinner, I opened up my notebook where I kept my most important thoughts. As I scrolled back through the pages, I came across all the ideas I'd had in the last few weeks. They were clearly important enough to write down at the time, but I couldn't remember most of them — and many I couldn't even read.

I wondered if all this was connected. Did I need to slow down to speed up?

Life in the Fastest Lane

We live in a work world where there is always more to do than time to do it. Always. And success only makes it worse. Every successful meeting? Action items. Every new partnership? More action items. The better you are, the more you need to do.

Look all around social media, and you'll see proposed solutions to this. Get up at 5 a.m. (or earlier)! Time block! Use AI to do the work of 10 people! In other words, the world needs a faster you — so get faster.

And of course, the social media environment itself is largely all about speed. From X to Reels to TikTok — get that message across in a few seconds, because after all, we don't have time for anything else.

There's nothing wrong with getting messages across quickly or using proven productivity techniques to get more efficient. But taken in isolation, the results are not as great as you might expect. Sure, some productivity techniques can help us use our energy more effectively, but there is still a limit. In fact, most of these techniques acknowledge exactly that. Take the Pomodoro technique, for example. It includes 5-minute breaks between every 25-minute focus period, and a longer break (typically a minimum of 20 minutes) after four focus periods. Why? Because experiments proved that people who took those breaks got more done overall. In other words, when they slowed down for periods, they sped up overall.

And it's not just the amount of raw energy we have. There's also the issue of the cognitive load placed on us when we go fast. The higher that load, the more difficult it is for us to make good decisions — or even keep track of what we're doing. At BillionMinds, we've measured this by asking people to describe off the top of their head what they did the previous day. A large proportion of people cannot remember one single thing.

Diminishing Returns

Work consistently over your natural speed limit, and you’ll almost certainly end up with a feeling that you're working as hard as ever but getting less and less done. In other words, you just cannot maintain the speed you're trying to, no matter what productivity technique you use.

We've seen many historically high performers lose their motivation for work, struggle to switch off at the end of the day, find work unnecessarily difficult, and feel stuck — unable to change their situation.

One reason this happens is the system our body uses to keep us going at high speed. Our stress hormones, specifically adrenaline and cortisol, are used to give us the boost we need to keep going. These can work very well in the short term, but over time, they can cause significant physical and mental health challenges.

If you regularly flood your body with stress hormones during work hours, you might see it in terms of reduced cognitive flexibility, which inhibits your ability to think your way out of problems. And when the stress is finally reduced, perhaps when you take a small break, there's even a good chance you'll get a vacation illness as your immune system "backs down" from its heightened alert.

The Strategic Benefits of Slowing Down

I'm sure Kate cared about my health, but she wasn't thinking about that when she asked me to slow down. She wanted me to slow down because she knew it would benefit the business more.

There are four practical ways in which slowing down can deliver forward momentum to you, your team, and your organization.

First, slowing down makes room to tackle the productivity killers that everyone complains about but nobody fixes. These are your equivalents to my garage and my notebook. For you it might be the monthly report that takes six hours to compile, and with a tweak could take one. Or maybe it's the meeting room the team could fit in comfortably if only someone took a moment to rearrange the furniture. When you're moving at top speed, these irritations become background noise. But when you slow down, they become obvious targets for improvement.

Second, you can discover assets you already have — or problems you’ve previously solved but aren’t making use of. Stored away, particularly in large companies, are treasure troves of brilliant but forgotten work. When you go too fast, you forget what came before — and scramble to reinvent highly effective wheels.

Thirdly, you improve your decision-making because you have the time to process information and weigh consequences more effectively and under less stress. Perhaps you do fewer things, but you wind up doing a greater percentage of the right things.

And lastly, slowing down creates mental clarity that can lead to transformative change. Thinkers as far back as Lao Tzu and Socrates advocated for thoughtful contemplation. And tech leaders from Bill Gates onwards have consciously taken regular time to step back. This is not usually a reaction to being exhausted and needing a break — it's because the downstream results are clear to them.

These benefits don't just apply to individuals. Teams that consciously slow down are able to see opportunities that others cannot. And when it's time to accelerate, they’re actually capable of doing it.

And this is not just theoretical. Harvard Business Review studied 343 businesses and found something remarkable: companies that embraced “slowing down” initiatives averaged 40% higher sales and 52% higher operating profits over three years.

By stepping off the accelerator just a little, these companies not only maintained their position but also dramatically outperformed their always-on-the-go competitors.

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How to Actually Slow Down

Slowing down is logical for busy people and comes with many benefits. But for many, it feels like a luxury they cannot afford. After all, there is too much to do!

So, if you're going to slow down consciously, it's probably going to need to start with a mindset shift. Immerse yourself in the benefits by reading some of the links I've included in this article. Then stop and have a conversation with yourself. Are you always looking for the next productivity hack to squeeze more out? Are you comfortable slowing down or even stopping? Do you feel guilty when you are not working fast? Your responses will be individual, influenced by your upbringing and early jobs.

Once you understand where you are, then it's time to start practicing small, scheduled periods where you slow down. The cup of coffee in the sun without your smartphone. The 10-minute walk between meetings. Don’t just take them — observe how they benefit you, and how innovative thoughts appear when the brain is unwound just a little bit. This will help you identify when you are going too fast and when slowing down can be beneficial. And once you do this regularly, you may also notice that the positive effects linger in a way that they don’t, for example, with alcohol as a relaxant.

From there, you can start to embed more conscious efforts to slow down across the weeks, months, and years — making sure that you aren’t trying to operate at one speed all the time at work, and using mini-breaks, longer breaks, and vacations strategically to help you work better overall.

What Teams and Organizations Should Do

Teams can and should normalize this behavior, as it will likely have a very positive impact on their output. In part, this is about encouraging team members to slow down occasionally. But it's also about the activities you perform AS a team or organization.

I've mentioned the Eisenhower matrix before in one context — figuring out how to prioritize what you do as an individual.

But it's also useful in a team context: making sure you spend enough time working on things that are important but not urgent, by consciously scheduling time for them. That's the key for a team. When do you set aside time for people to focus on those things and slow down to do them? Urgent tasks often demand high speed. Important ones often benefit from a comparatively slower approach, allowing you to see the big picture, understand the reasons, and innovate.

How It All Came Together for Me

I decided to take Kate's guidance seriously and slow down to speed up. The first thing that happened? I did get sick as the stress hormones plummeted. But once I'd recovered, some interesting things started to happen.

I spotted all kinds of things throughout my life that were holding me back, and decided I wasn’t going to put up with them anymore. I stopped just scribbling my ideas in a book that I would never look at again. Now I documented them in a structured ideas log, and over the next few months, I acted on many of them. I found a way to track customer and partner relationships in a way that actually worked with my brain. Oh, and I even got my garage so tidy I could park the car in it!

As a team, we looked through every piece of content created in Microsoft that we could learn from, studied it, and figured out how to reuse it. As a result, we built a reference architecture used by partners in about half the usual time.

Our decision-making improved — and perhaps counterintuitively — sped up overall, because we could be confident in the decisions we made and didn't need to revisit them.

And perhaps most importantly, we figured out how to move beyond pure technology innovation and into business model innovation — uncovering new revenue streams for Microsoft in the process.

I'm convinced it would never have happened if we hadn't slowed down to speed up.