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People ask me about the house. They see the green farmhouse and the garden and the bread on the counter, and they want to know how to get from where they are to that. I understand the question. I asked a version of it myself once.
But the house did not slow my life down. We were already slowing down when we bought it, and if anything the farmhouse added work. Something here is always broken. There is always a window that sticks or a vine growing somewhere it should not be.
So if you came here looking for how to slow down your life, let me take the house off the table first. The farmhouse is a result, not a method. The method was much less pretty, and it started in a Chicago apartment with a calendar I finally stopped filling.
The short version
You slow down by removing things, not by adding practices. Take two repeating commitments off your calendar and keep them off. Protect one hour a day that is not for getting anything done. Expect a few uncomfortable weeks while you adjust to the quiet.
That is most of it. Everything else, the candles and the slow coffee and the sourdough, sits on top of a schedule that has room in it. The rest of that is lovely. It does not work on its own.
Slowing down is subtraction, not addition
I have read a lot of articles with twenty tips in them. Get outside. Put your phone away. Eat slowly. Notice your breath. Every one of those is good advice, and every one of them is one more thing to do, which is a strange way to fix the problem of having too much to do.
When we lived in Chicago I had something on almost every evening. Workout classes a few nights a week. A pottery class I kept for years. Brunch. Dinner out. If you had asked me then, I would have told you I was busy but happy, and I would have meant it.
What I could not see was that none of it was movable. A full week does not leave room for a slow morning. There is no breathing exercise strong enough to make Tuesday feel spacious when Tuesday already has four things in it.
So the first real step was not pretty. I quit things. Some of them were things I liked. That is the part the tip lists leave out, and I think it is why people try slow living for two weeks and decide it did not take.
Start with the calendar, not the morning
Most people want to start with a morning routine, because mornings are the part that photographs well. I have written about what my slow living morning routine actually looks like with a toddler in the house, and I will say plainly that the routine came last. It was what the emptier week made possible, not the thing that emptied it.
So open your next two weeks instead. Look past the one-off appointments and find the things that repeat, because repeating commitments are what set the speed of your life. Then pick two and take them off.
Not forever, if forever feels like too much. Take them off for six weeks and see what the week feels like with holes in it. You can always put them back.
The test I use is simple. If this showed up on next week’s calendar and then got cancelled, would I be relieved? If the answer is yes, you have your answer. I was relieved about things I had been doing for YEARS.
Protect one hour that is not for being productive
Mine is the first hour after Lochlan goes down for his afternoon nap. For a long time I used that hour to catch up. Dishes, email, the pile of things waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Now I mostly sit in the kitchen with the rest of my coffee. Sometimes I read. Dewey lies down across my feet.
That hour is not leftover time. It is the point. I have an autoimmune disease, so rest is not something I earn at the end of a productive day, it is part of how I stay upright. But you do not need a medical reason to sit down, and I wish someone had told me that years earlier.
If you have a baby or a toddler, your hour might be twenty minutes, and it might land at a strange time of day. That still counts. I wrote about what this looked like in the first year in slow living with a baby, and the honest version is that it was smaller and messier than I expected, and it still worked.
It gets uncomfortable before it gets good
Nobody warns you about this part. An emptier calendar does not feel peaceful right away. It feels strange. You will probably reach for your phone to fill the gap, because the gap is new and you have not had one in a while.
I came to this life through grief, not through a mood board, and a full schedule is a very effective way to avoid sitting with something you would rather not look at. When the schedule emptied, the quiet was not immediately comfortable. It became comfortable later.
So give it a month before you decide it is not working for you. And give yourself room to be bad at it. I meant every word of why perfect slow living is a beautiful lie. Plenty of weeks here are loud and rushed and nothing gets made from scratch.
What to do when you cannot change much
I know slow living is not available to everyone on the same terms. If your hours are fixed, if you are the only adult at home in the evenings, if money decides your schedule for you, most of what gets written about this is not written with you in mind.
Here is what I would do with very little room to move.
Drop the smallest repeating thing you can actually drop. One standing call. One group text you answer out of obligation. One weekly errand that could be monthly. Small still changes the shape of a week.
Stop doing one task to a standard nobody asked for. Pick something you maintain out of habit rather than need and let it go. Ironing is a good place to look. So is anything you are doing twice.
Change the speed of something you already have to do. The laundry is happening either way. You can do it at double speed with a podcast while you answer emails, or you can fold it at the kitchen table with the window open. Same task, different week. Our slow cleaning routine runs on that idea more than anything else.
Say no to one new thing before it reaches the calendar. This is the cheapest one here. Declining costs nothing, and nothing has to be undone later.
None of that requires a farmhouse or a garden or money. It requires being willing to disappoint somebody slightly, which is harder than it sounds and is most of the actual work.
Questions I get about slowing down
Why is it so hard to slow down?
Because a full schedule gets rewarded and an open one does not. Busy reads as responsible, and most of us learned that early. There is also a quieter reason. When there is nothing on the calendar, you are left with your own company, and that is not always restful. Both things are true at once.
What does slow living actually mean?
For me it means doing fewer things on purpose and paying attention to the ones that are left. It is not a decorating style and it is not country living. I went into it properly in my honest answer to what slow living is.
Can you slow down your life with a full-time job?
Yes, but not by rearranging your mornings. If your work hours are fixed, the room is in your evenings and weekends, which is exactly where the optional commitments pile up. Clearing one standing weekend thing will do more for you than any morning routine.
How long before life actually feels slower?
The calendar changes the same day you change it. The feeling takes about a month, and it shows up quietly. One day you notice you are not braced for anything.
Do I need to declutter my whole house first?
No. A full house is much easier to live in than a full calendar. If you want to start there anyway, start small, which is roughly what I did when I wrote about simplifying our home.
Do you have to move to the country to live slowly?
No, and I say that as someone who did move. The move gave us a garden and a porch and a long list of repairs. The slowness came from the calendar, and we started that in a city apartment with neighbors on both sides.
If you take one thing from this, let it be the calendar. The bread and the candles and the garden all came after, and none of them are required.
Start with next Tuesday. See what it feels like to leave it mostly empty.
