I’ve been slowly reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity — do fewer things, at a natural pace, with obsessive care. This week, Cal nudges us one step further: slow down your thinking itself.
Long Thinking
In his latest podcast, he revives an almost forgotten craft — long thinking. The kind that doesn’t just solve a problem, but wrestles with it until new ideas emerge. The kind that needs paper, patience, and a bit of fog.
“We talk about brilliant thinking, fast thinking, deep thinking. But here we’re talking about something different: long thinking,”
Says Giovanni Emanuele Corazza of the Marconi Institute for Creativity at the University of Bologna.
“It’s as if you were reading poetry or listening to music. You don’t judge the single notes. You don’t judge the single words. It’s the ensemble that gives you a feeling and takes you far.”
That image — music, not metrics — resonates deeply. Long reflection requires space. It asks you to sit beneath a tree, gaze at the page, and allow ideas to come together before rushing to complete them.
My ask
I recently asked my readers to do this exact thing for me as a favour:
RELEVANCE: a gPage turner on a slippery subject (working title)
“Here’s where you come in. I’d be grateful if you’d read the introduction to my draft manuscript. But don’t just scroll through it at your desk. Find a tree you like. Sit under it. Let the shade and the stillness hold you while you read.”
Newport tells of doing precisely that years ago in a eucalyptus grove at Berkeley. Notebook in hand, he walked his mind toward a solution, line by line. A decade later, he can’t remember the precise theory, but he remembers the feeling — the satisfaction of thinking long enough to touch something real.
What we are losing
And that’s precisely what we’re losing. The act of long thinking stands as a quiet rebuke to the modern workplace — fast-paced, digitised, and increasingly dominated by AI. Silicon Valley keeps urging us to think faster, ship sooner, prompt smarter. But our best ideas don’t come from acceleration; they come from absorption.
In an age of prompts and pings, maybe that’s the radical act: to stay with a thought long enough to feel it unfold.
Grab a notebook. Go somewhere quiet. Work on your own “Beast.”
The world can wait a few hours.
Stay long, stay whole.
