Slow down to speed up
Pushing hard to make up time? Think again.
Last summer, I vacationed on one of my favorite places on earth, a small gulf island nestled in the Salish Sea. I’ve been going there since I was my daughter’s age (5) and I know the route well… and what it means to miss the ferry before dinner break (you’re in for a wait).
As we disembarked ferry 1 of 2, I saw that the GPS gave us just enough time to make the second ferry, if we didn’t hit any snags.
I had two already overtired and overstimulated kids in the car. Missing the ferry before the dinner break would have meant an extra 90 post-bedtime minutes with two cranky kiddos. So, I decided to do something that, for me, is wildly uncomfortable: gun it in the lefthand lane.
Now, I’ll preface this all by saying: I’m a firmly right-hand-lane type of gal. A “what is everyone in a hurry for!?” driver. The speed limit was written at me, for me.
So, driving a full hour outside of my comfort zone did three things: it took 5 years off my life, gave me carpal tunnel… and it got us to the before-dinner-break ferry with about 20 seconds to spare.
What was wild to me throughout the entire hour of uncomfortable driving (to be clear, we’re talking ~10km above the speed limit here, nothing truly breakneck)... was that my GPS arrival time was. Not. Moving. No matter how uncomfortably fast I felt I was going. No matter how many right-hand-lane-type-drivers I passed from the left. The arrival time barely budged. I couldn’t believe it!
I asked my math-y husband: why is the arrival time not decreasing? What’s the math here? Can this be true!? To which he said, “Yep, it doesn’t really make a difference at these speeds.”
That hour on the highway was a vivid lesson in how little rushing actually buys us. We trade calm for control, but the math rarely works out. Was I happy about making the ferry? Of course. But it was mostly luck and the fortuitous timing of the last few traffic lights, not my uncomfortable highway speed.
It made me think about all the places I’ve tried to “make up time,” at work, in parenting, in building something new, only to realize that the gains were marginal, and the cost was energy and presence. And in this case, the use of my thumbs for the next 24 hours.
It was a good reminder that pushing harder doesn’t always mean moving faster.
I get it, it can be really hard to do, especially when you have a goal that you really want to attain at a certain time. (Oh man did I NOT want to wait 90 minutes in the middle of nowhere with two tired kids!) But at the end of the day, what’s the worst that could have happened? 90 minutes is nothing in the course of a lifetime. Maybe we could have skipped rocks in the ocean. Picked blackberries. Vegged out on TV on our phones. Nothing truly tragic.
Sometimes the best way to “make good time,” in driving, work, or life, is to ease off the gas a little. Slow down to speed up.
And just to think, what could you do with that extra bit of ease?
