Slow down

Seriously. If you want to understand: slow down.

The ubiquitous standards of business has us all focused on efficiency and speed. There are very few corners of life where we aren't racing to the end, trying to get there with as few steps as possible, as quickly as possible.

Just look at genAI for how little time business wants us to spend. Then think about how much you remember about the last time you went on autopilot – like an unremarkable commute, or putting dishes away. Combine them, and it's easy to understand how genAI can lead to deskilling and workslop.

Slowing down is necessary to making sense of things; to questioning how information is hanging together; to knit together information mechanisms and thinking models, and think it through with previously successful personal cognitive patterns; and, to expand domains until seeming paradoxes can become facets of a whole.

As information literacy increases, it will get faster. You'll find scaffolding for how your brain works most fluidly, develop trusted sources to help check that previous-work-done, and learn to spot the ever-changing fingerprints of manipulation. It's like driving a car. The first time you do it, you're not going to calmly and efficiently navigate the New Jersey Turnpike at speed. You have to work your way up to it. You'll get there if you keep practicing.

Also, as you slow down, make things. It builds mental models. Troubleshooting how something is made is navigating information, but with tactile feedback. It grounds the abstracts. I can't tell you how much I have learned about the abstracts of information through making and building and growing. Get dirty while you slow down. Remind yourself how little opinion good tools have.

What will also become clear is that business wants to magically skip the learning and making and fixing parts, and get straight to the using and 5-minute maintenance parts. It's a social dilemma when business models are being touted as the only good way to go about things.