The case for slow tools

There is a particular kind of software that promises to remove every obstacle between you and your work. No loading, no friction, no waiting — just you and the blinking cursor, accelerated to the speed of thought. I have used a lot of it. I have built some of it. And I have come, slowly, to distrust it.

The promise of frictionlessness assumes that thinking is the easy part and typing is the bottleneck. For most of the writing I care about, the opposite is true. The bottleneck is figuring out what I actually mean, and that process is not helped by going faster. It is helped by going slower, and by tools that give me somewhere to pause.

Friction as a feature

A fountain pen is a slow tool. It demands that you keep moving or it blots; it demands refilling; it demands that you write at a pace your hand can sustain. None of these are bugs. They are the reason a page of fountain-pen writing reads differently from a page typed at full speed.

“The tools we choose are arguments about how we want to pay attention.”

— from the notebook, March

When I switched my morning pages from a blazing-fast text editor to a cheap notebook, the writing got worse and then much better. Worse because I could no longer delete my way out of a bad sentence. Better because I had to sit with the bad sentence long enough to understand why it was bad.

What speed is for

None of this is an argument against fast tools everywhere. When I know exactly what I want to do, friction is just tax. The trick is knowing which mode you are in. Production wants speed. Thinking wants room. Most tools are designed for the first and pretend the second doesn't exist.

So I keep a slow tool and a fast tool, and I try to be honest about which one the work in front of me actually needs. More often than the industry would like to admit, it needs the slow one.