Three tools I use to slow my life
on tilting, the WIP and lowering my standards, plus my next retreat announcement
(This voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. It’s unedited, and today features a few words stumbles and maybe my snoring dog. If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it regardless!)
A couple of weeks ago I asked what topics you’d like me to cover here on The Tortoise, and the answers were delightfully varied. What stuck out most to me was a particular desire – both mine and yours – for more practical stuff. I enjoy long-form think pieces as much as anyone (probably more than many!) but while I want The Tortoise to be a place where we think and learn, of course, I also want it to be a place where we do and experiment.
So this is the first in a series of letters over the next few months where I want to get a little more hands-on, a little more nitty-gritty, and look at some of the tools we can use to slow down. To dig into not only the why, but the how of things.
I thought I’d start with some high-level tools that I use to help find slowness despite the busyness, or to be okay with the fullness that life often brings. But before I get into it, a quick caveat:
These are offered not as examples of things I’m nailing in life, or things I think you should do, but more as an idea of things I do/have done that have worked for me, at some point in my life. As always, I invite you to read them, look at them through the lens of your own experience, adopt and adapt as needed, or leave them where they lie.
Slow living is about making space for things that are important to you, by letting go of things that aren’t. Sometimes that means using tools like the ones I talk about below, and sometimes that means saying, ‘Not for me,’ or, ‘Not right now.’
And with that, let’s get into it.
Three tools I use to slow my life
1. Tilting
In short, tilting is anti-balance, and in order to do it, we first need to throw away the bullshit myth that if only we work hard enough, write enough to-do lists, schedule meticulously enough and hustle hustle hustle, we will arrive at that mythical state where all our energies and efforts are miraculously and evenly spread across all the important areas of life. We will have achieved…(cue heavenly voices singing)…work-life balance.
No. What we will have achieved is (probably)…crushing burnout.
So instead, I tilt. I willingly throw myself out of balance. I tilt my attention and effort towards the thing in front of me, the thing that needs my energy, the thing that is my priority – in that moment. I give it what I can/what it needs (sometimes they’re different things, which is a topic for another day) and then I move on, tilting in another direction.
If you think about the physical act of tilting towards something, not only are you leaning into one thing, but you’re also leaning away from everything else. To tilt is to acknowledge both sides of the act. We tilt into something and we tilt away from other things.
As I write in Destination Simple:
We can’t be everything to everyone in every moment, and tilting makes it clear that by saying yes to one thing, we’re saying no to another.
Of anything I’ve ever written (my own eulogy included) this is the idea that resonates most with people when they hear it, and I think it’s because it gives us permission to let go. Let go of the expectation that we can be all things to all people at all times. We can’t. And what’s more, we don’t have to expect ourselves to be.
It’s very human and gentle and, at least in my experience, ironically quite efficient. (It’s also why I’m currently finishing this letter in the car while I wait to pick our 14-year-old up from drama class, and why this letter is a few hours later than it otherwise would be. I’m tilting, baybeee.)
2. Lower standards
The second tool I use is closely related to tilting and might be best considered as an adjustment rather than a tool exactly. It’s all about lowering my standards and reducing expectations.
In her most recent post on Substack, the wonderful
said:If you set a low bar, you enjoy yourself more, because you are never disappointed.
And while this is something I very much struggle with (recovering perfectionist over here) I 100% agree with her. Learning to expect less is really about questioning where those expectations come from in the first place, and gradually unpacking them.
Do I really expect that my kitchen should be reset to zero every night, or is that something I picked up from minimalism influencers back in the day?
Do I really expect that my face should look exactly as it did ten years ago, or is that something I picked up from relentless beauty standards in media?
Do I really expect my garden should look pristine and be constantly productive, or is that something I picked up from watching too much River Cottage and reading too many garden books?
We all pick up these shoulds, over many years. It’s part of life I think. But when we commit to lower expectations, we not only commit to querying those shoulds, but we also give ourselves permission to put some of them down. Sometimes forever, sometimes just for a little while.
Because the advice to ‘reset your kitchen to zero every night’ is not bad advice. And there are probably many times that it’s exactly what I needed, but when it becomes heavy, or feels like another pressure added to a mountain of pressures, it’s important to ask the question of whether slightly lower standards might help alleviate that tension.
You can see how this relates so closely to tilting. We often have to decide between two or more actions when we tilt, which inevitably means some things will get left undone. Lowering our standards a little is a way to feel okay about that, to know that we’re being intentional, and that the little voice of judgement that pipes up in our head is talking from a place of fear, not-enoughness and comparison.
It's okay to leave things undone sometimes.
3. The WIP
The final cab off the rank is hands-down the cornerstone of keeping our shit (relatively) together. It’s our weekly work in progress meeting, also known as the WIP, and Ben and I try to sit down together every Monday morning to have one. If we can’t do it Monday morning, we will do it over dinner prep on Sunday night, or in the car on a Friday afternoon… Point is, it’s a non-negotiable. And those weeks where we’ve skipped it…hoo-boy, don’t I know it.
The WIP is our one-stop shop for all things work, home and life-admin. In the space of around 30 minutes we drink coffee and:
compare diaries, noting each other’s meetings, appointments and general movements
list major work tasks that need to be done, and by when
plan the week’s meals (truly one of my least favourite things to do every week)
list any errands that need doing
write food shopping lists
note any major house stuff that needs doing
work out who will be doing sport/drama/art class pick-ups and drop-offs, who is taking which kid to which sport on the weekend and if we’ll go visit family or friends
schedule time for our own training, hobbies and other self-care-type things
Ben suggested we try this when he first started working for himself and I honestly thought it was overkill. It didn’t take me long to see the wisdom in it though, and eight years later it’s still an integral part of how we do life.
It gives us a chance to understand what the other person has on that week and a chance to get prepared. We can divide our work in a way that works for us, move projects around and prepare for times when we’re both going to be busy.
It’s not so much about Being Productive (although it does help), but more a combination of being prepared, being flexible, being self-aware and understanding what the other person has on their plate. Because it’s really easy to get caught up in our own things, our own deadlines, our own to-do lists and priorities, forgetting that others have their own pressures and needs that are just as real and important. If half an hour a week (which is way less than 1% of the week – nudge, nudge) can help us each feel heard and appreciated and validated, it’s half an hour I’m happy to spend. What’s more, we start the week with a plan. And as much as I like to think I’m completely loosey-goosey, the reality is…not that.
Over the years, I’ve honed this practise down to a fine art, and barely think about the how of it anymore. But for anyone playing along at home, who might like to try your own version of the WIP, here’s my step-by-step:
Start with a blank page in my everyday notebook, adding the date.
Check diaries for scheduled events – meetings in the city, Zoom calls, podcast recordings, doctors’ appointments, birthday parties, training, after-school classes etc – and note them down as times that are already spoken for.
Break the main to-do list down into various segments (Ben’s work, my writing work, combined projects and family/home) and work through each of them one by one. If there’s a shared project, we talk about where we’re at with our parts, what the next steps are and what we need to get done by the end of the week.
I’m not sure what Ben does with his list, but at this stage I like to assign each task to a day of the week, then use this master list to write my daily to-do list every morning throughout the week. Anything that doesn’t get finished is transferred to the next day’s to-do list, or, occasionally (OK, fairly regularly) to the next week’s WIP.
Quick question:
4. BONUS TOOL - Rhythms
Just like I’m not a particularly loosey-goosey person, I’m also not very good at being regimented. But that didn’t stop me from creating strict routines for myself for years, believing that if only I could stick to them long enough, I’d feel happier/kick the goals/get more done/be successful/yada-yada.
What I really needed, though, was rhythm – the friendlier, more flexible cousin of routine.
Where routine is rigid and inflexible and always made me feel that a set sequence of events needed to happen precisely as expected or I would feel like a failure (6am: get up, 610am: in the shower, 620am: pack lunches…and so on) rhythm knows what needs to happen but allows me the space and fluidity to change the order as needed.
Put another way, while we march to routine – its steady metronome keeping time – we can dance to rhythm. Find our groove, let go a little, speed up or slow down the tempo as needed.
Creating a solid rhythm for my morning (or evening, or weeks, or seasons, or even years) means I don’t have to constantly think about what’s next, because I already know. I’ve done the head-work and can simply follow the dance moves, knowing that all the important things will happen. And if they don’t, I know they’ll happen tomorrow.
Coming soon: The rhythms retreat
I’m super excited to tell you that the next mini-retreat for paying subscribers will be all about rhythms.
Starting Sunday 21st May, I’ll be holding a two-week online retreat here on The Tortoise, where we dive deep into the power of rhythms:
Identifying the inputs into our lives
Examining the way we use our time and energy on those inputs
Learning how to get intentional with how we spend our time
Discovering what we mean when we talk about rhythm vs routine
Learning how to create our own rhythms (think: morning, evening, weekly, even seasonal rhythms)
How to bend, grow and flex with them over time
The sessions will be pre-recorded and made available here for all paying subscribers. If there’s a lot of questions, I’m also happy to do a Q&A session in early June, to answer any queries you might have.
If you’re not yet a paying subscriber and would like to take part in the retreat, you can join us for just AU$5/month or $50/year and get access to not only the upcoming rhythms retreat, but also the 3-part values workshop we had back in March, and future quarterly retreats. This payment also gives you access to the full archive of The Tortoise, the monthly 1% posts and several extra paid posts per month.
Hope to see you there!
I’m currently…
Thinking (still) about Guardians of the Galaxy 3. We watched it last weekend and oh my stars. I really loved it but it was a heart-breaker. Sobbed in the cinema. Multiple times. If you loved the other Guardians movies, definitely watch it, but maybe not when you’re having a bad day.
Reading The Way of Kings (it was a slow burn to begin but I am really enjoying it now) and excited to dig into my growing to-be-read pile which currently includes an advanced copy of the brand-new
book, The Hummingbird Effect, as well as Isles of the Gods, the brand-new beauty from and Nightbirds, the debut novel from Kate Armstrong. So many wonderful books to read.Watching Alone Australia. It’s so cool to see local wildlife and country on the screen. I have definitively decided I could never do what the contestants are doing. They’re all amazing.
Wondering whether this letter is too long. I didn’t mean for it to be so chunky, but here we are.
Looking forward to seeing my family on Mother’s Day and wishing all the mums and mother figures a lovely day. I see you and all you do.
Here’s to a wonderful weekend. Take good care.
Brooke xx
Super helpful -"read i in the car when I should be inside my home tilting with my grown up daughter!
Loved this Brooke! Thanks so much. I’m loving Alone Australia too 😊