Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up

I don’t post a lot on LinkedIn and when I do it’s usually just after my annual vacation – and this year is no different.

We’ve just returned from a two-week cycling holiday in Holland. Yes, that’s two weeks, travelling hundreds of kilometres, and no car! It took some persuading to get the kids to buy into it and, now we’re back, they have both stated categorically that they are never riding a bike ever again. I think they enjoyed it really and I’ve found again that getting away from it all can have a profound effect.

With a car, you have flexibility. You can easily change plans, go anywhere and drive many miles in a day if you want. The thing about cycling is that you travel very slowly and have a limited range (especially with two teenage children) and that forces you to slow down. To make the most of our time we planned our days ahead, organised our route and made sure we saw as many of the sights near to our route as possible.

In the work place we’re all familiar with multi-tasking and often proud of our ability to manage many different activities and priorities at the same time. We all think we're good multi-taskers. However, there is growing opinion that we are actually less efficient when we multi-task and we would be better off being focused on fewer tasks or one task at a time. As I cycled around the beautiful and relatively flat Dutch countryside with little on my mind except our destination for the day I found myself focusing on just the moment, the plan for the day and not lots of other things, all at the same time. That didn’t mean we achieved less, in fact, we crammed a lot into our two weeks.

So maybe at work we just need to slow down a bit. Take time to plan better, think about priorities, what we want to achieve and what is really important. Maybe by slowing down a bit we will achieve a lot more and enjoy the journey more as well.