I spend most of my days trying to get things done faster. Better systems, better tools, better workflows. That’s kind of my whole deal. So it’s a little funny that one of the things I look forward to most each week is tending to something that will take decades to finish.
I’ve been getting into bonsai. And the thing about bonsai is that the tree does not care about your timeline. You make a cut, and then you wait. Sometimes years. You wire a branch into position and check on it next year. There’s no keyboard shortcut for this.
I trimmed a juniper last fall that I won’t touch again until this summer. That’s the plan. Leave it alone and let it grow. If I get impatient and start fussing with it, I’ll set it back. The best thing I can do for that tree right now is nothing.
That’s a hard lesson for someone like me.
We live in a culture that treats speed as a virtue. Get more done. Ship faster. Optimize everything. And I’m not going to pretend I’m immune to that. I built a career on it. But bonsai has been teaching me that some of the most important work happens slowly. You can’t rush a root system. You can’t shortcut the way a trunk thickens over years of careful pruning.
I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity lately (I went through the Shortform summary first, which is a great way to get the core argument quickly). Newport makes a case I keep coming back to: real productivity isn’t about doing more things faster. It’s about doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and caring deeply about quality. His third principle, obsessing over quality, is basically the bonsai philosophy in business terms. You don’t rush the work that matters most.
Newport points out that many of the people we consider most productive across history, writers, scientists, artists, actually worked slowly by modern standards. They had long gaps between major works. They weren’t optimizing their daily throughput. They were protecting their ability to do the deep, patient work that produced something lasting.
That landed for me. Because when I’m standing at my bonsai bench with a pair of scissors and a tree that may outlive me, I’m not being productive in any measurable way. Nobody’s going to see a result for years. But I’m practicing something I think I need more of: the ability to stay with something without needing to see immediate progress.
It turns out the same patience that makes a good bonsai also makes better writing, better teaching, and better thinking. When I sit down to work on a field guide, the best sessions are the ones where I stop watching the clock and just stay with the material until it’s right. Not fast. Right.
I’m not saying throw out your task manager. But I’ve started asking myself a different question when I plan my week. Instead of “how much can I get done?”, I’m asking “what deserves slow work this week?” Usually, it’s one thing. And giving that one thing the bonsai treatment, patient attention without rushing to a result, has made the work better.
The tree doesn’t care about your schedule. And maybe that’s exactly the reminder I need sitting on my desk.
