Why Slower Can Be Better

There’s a quote often attributed to Bill Gates: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because they will find an easy way to do it.” The tech industry took this to heart. We’ve spent decades optimizing everything - making it faster, more efficient, more streamlined.

And we’ve succeeded! Modern tools are incredibly fast. Communication is instant. Information is accessible in seconds. Workflows are automated.

But here’s what we’re learning: faster isn’t always better, and efficiency isn’t the same as effectiveness.

What Gets Lost in Optimization

When you optimize for speed and efficiency, you tend to:

Eliminate friction - which sometimes means eliminating the pauses where thinking happens

Streamline processes - which sometimes means removing the exploration that leads to better solutions

Reduce steps - which sometimes means losing the context those steps provided

Automate decisions - which sometimes means defaulting to obvious solutions instead of discovering better ones

The problem isn’t speed or efficiency per se. It’s that we’ve started optimizing for metrics that don’t capture what actually matters.

The Value of Deliberate Work

Some of the most valuable work happens slowly:

Deep thinking requires time and uninterrupted focus. You can’t rush insight.

Creative exploration needs space to try things, fail, learn, and iterate. Efficiency kills experimentation.

Building understanding with teammates happens through conversation, shared exploration, and accumulated context. You can’t shortcut your way to shared mental models.

Complex problem-solving requires time to understand the problem deeply before jumping to solutions. The fastest path to the wrong answer isn’t helpful.

Collaboration Especially Needs Time

This is particularly true for collaboration. The best collaborative work isn’t efficient - it’s generative.

Good collaboration sessions meander. Someone shares an idea that sparks a tangent. The tangent reveals an assumption that needs questioning. Questioning the assumption opens up new possibilities. Those possibilities lead somewhere unexpected and valuable.

Try to optimize that process - keep everyone on track, eliminate tangents, move through the agenda - and you kill the very thing that makes collaboration valuable.

Designed for Thinking, Not Just Doing

This is one reason we’ve been thoughtful about what features to add to Glint and what to leave out.

We could add more notifications to keep everyone engaged. We don’t, because notifications fragment attention.

We could add analytics to track who’s contributing and how much. We don’t, because that optimizes for activity rather than insight.

We could add more structure and templates to make things faster. We don’t, because structure can constrain thinking.

Instead, we’re building space for teams to think together at their own pace. Fast when speed matters, slow when depth matters, with the flexibility to shift between modes.

The Paradox of Slack

Not “Slack” the tool - slack as in slack resources. Extra capacity. Room to maneuver.

Organizations often try to eliminate slack in the name of efficiency. Use every hour. Fill every calendar. Optimize every process.

But slack is where adaptation happens. It’s where you have time to notice problems before they become crises. Where you can explore better approaches instead of just executing the current one. Where innovation happens.

The same is true for collaboration tools. If every feature is optimized for engagement or efficiency, there’s no slack. No room for the kind of freeform exploration that leads to breakthroughs.

Not All Slow is Good

Let’s be clear: we’re not romanticizing slowness for its own sake.

Bad slow is bureaucracy. Unnecessary steps. Meetings that could be emails. Tools that make simple things complicated. Processes that exist because “we’ve always done it this way.”

Good slow is deliberate. It’s choosing to take time when time serves the goal. It’s building understanding instead of rushing to solutions. It’s exploring possibilities instead of jumping to the obvious answer.

The difference is intentionality.

Building for the Long Term

Fast tools optimize for immediate results. But the most valuable outcomes often emerge over time:

• Teams that develop deep shared understanding
• Projects that explore thoroughly before committing
• Solutions that address root causes, not just symptoms
• Organizations that learn and adapt

These don’t happen through faster processes. They happen through sustained attention, accumulated context, and the kind of deep collaborative work that can’t be rushed.

What This Means for Glint

We’re building for long-term value, not immediate metrics.

Rooms persist, so context builds over time. Conversations and artifacts stay together, so understanding deepens. Teams can work at their own pace, whether that’s a sprint or a marathon.

We’re not trying to maximize engagement or optimize for efficiency. We’re creating space for the kind of thoughtful, exploratory, generative work that leads to real innovation.

That’s slower than clicking through a template or having AI generate a first draft. It’s also more valuable.

The Courage to Be Deliberate

In a world that constantly pushes for faster, choosing to be deliberate takes courage. There’s always pressure to ship more features, respond more quickly, optimize more aggressively.

But some things can’t be rushed. Deep work. Creative collaboration. Building something that matters.

The future doesn’t belong to whoever moves fastest. It belongs to whoever builds things worth building, creates things worth experiencing, and solves problems worth solving.

Sometimes that’s fast. Sometimes it’s slow. But it’s always deliberate.

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What are you building that can’t be rushed? Where do you see value in slowing down? Share your thoughts at hello@glint.so