In March I spent forty minutes watching a man teach his son to skim stones on Lake Ukiel, on the western edge of Olsztyn. They were not good at it. The boy threw like he was angry at the water. The father kept saying the same thing about the angle of the wrist, and the boy kept ignoring him, and eventually a stone went four skips and they both shouted.
I was supposed to be somewhere. I cannot remember where.
That is the problem with writing about slow living. The moment is ordinary. Put it in a sentence with the word intentional in it and it turns into something you would see printed on a candle.
So I am going to skip the philosophy. Below are 31 things that actually happened, in an ordinary year, in a small city in north-eastern Poland. Some took five minutes. Some took a season. Four of them are things I did that looked like slow living and were not, and that section is the one I would read first.
If you want the definition, it is in what slow living means. This page is the other thing — the part where you see it before you name it.
Nine Examples From an Ordinary Weekday
These are the ones people ask about most, because a weekday is where the theory usually dies.
1. The first hour has no screen in it. Not as a rule I am proud of. As a rule I broke for two years and then kept, because the days I broke it were measurably worse. Coffee, the window, the dog if she is awake. The phone stays in the kitchen until I have been upright for an hour.
2. I write the three things down the night before. Three, on paper, before I close the laptop. Not a system. It means the morning starts with a decision already made, which is the whole point of it.
3. Lunch is eaten away from the desk. Twenty minutes, at a table, usually alone. This was the hardest one to keep and the one that changed the afternoon most. There is more on why that works if you want the research.
4. One walk, in daylight, whatever the weather. Between October and March in this part of Poland there are days with about seven hours of light, and if you wait for a good one you will not go. I go in the early afternoon, because that is when the light is best and the calls have stopped.
5. Email twice, not continuously. Late morning and late afternoon. Clients were told once, in a sentence, and nobody has ever complained. I expected somebody to complain.
6. The afternoon has a hard end. Not a soft one. The laptop closes at a time and the time does not move for anything that is not actually on fire. Almost nothing is on fire.
7. Cooking something that takes longer than it needs to. Twice a week, not every day. Soup that sits. Bread that proves overnight. The slowness is not the health benefit. It is forty minutes where my hands are busy and my phone is not in them.
8. One conversation that is not about work. With my wife Julia, usually at the kitchen table, usually about nothing. It is the item on this list most likely to be skipped and the one whose absence I notice fastest.
9. The evening ends in the same place every night. Same chair, same lamp, book or not. Bodies learn rooms. Mine knows that chair means the day is finished, and that knowledge does more for my sleep than any of the advice I have read about sleep.
Seven Examples From a Weekend
Weekends are easier to romanticise and harder to get right. Most of mine are not photogenic.
10. One day with nothing in it. Saturday or Sunday, no plans made in advance. The discipline is in not filling it on Friday evening, when filling it feels productive. This took about four months to stop feeling like waste.
11. A market instead of a supermarket, once. The Sunday market in Olsztyn, forty minutes, half the list. The other half still comes from the supermarket. I mention that because every article about this pretends otherwise.
12. The same route walked in a different season. There is a path along the Łyna that I have now walked in every month of the year. Walking a route you already know is the opposite of how travel is sold, and it is the version that has taught me most about Warmia and Masuria.
13. Something repaired rather than replaced. A chair leg, a jacket zip, a bike. Usually badly. The point is not the money saved, which is small. It is that the object stops being disposable to you.
14. A visit with no end time agreed. You arrive, you stay until it is obviously time to go. This is the most Polish item on the list and the one visitors from cities find most uncomfortable for the first hour.
15. An afternoon in one place rather than four. One lake, one café, one museum. We did this at the museum in Olsztyn earlier this year and spent most of the visit in two rooms.
16. Sunday evening prepared for, not dreaded. Laundry, the three things for Monday, the kitchen cleared. Forty minutes that buy back the thing most people lose on a Sunday night, which is the Sunday night.
Five Examples That Cost Money
Most writing on this subject is careful not to mention money. That is a mistake, because the reader is already wondering, and the honest answer is more persuasive than the silence.
17. Working four days instead of five. The most expensive item on this list by a long way. For a one-person business it costs you roughly a day of billing a week, and whether that is affordable depends entirely on your rate. I wrote about what fewer hours actually did to the revenue separately.
18. Living further out. The flat is cheaper and the journey is longer. That trade only works if the journey is on a train you can read on. It stops working the moment it becomes a car in traffic.
19. Buying the thing that lasts. A good knife, a good pan, boots that get resoled. Each one costs two to four times the cheap version and is still in use. This is slower on the way in and much slower on the way out.
20. A season tested before a move. Renting in the countryside for a few months before committing to anything, which is the single best money I have spent on this. The full argument for testing a season first is its own article.
21. Paying for a thing to be quiet. Better windows. A door that closes properly. A chair that does not hurt. These are unglamorous and they are the ones that changed how the days felt.
It is worth saying plainly that several of these require money you may not have, and that the free examples below did more for me than two of the paid ones. If the money side is the part you are actually stuck on, that is the problem I wrote the Discover Slow Living escape plan to work through — the cost and location maths, mostly, rather than the mood.
Six Examples That Cost Nothing
22. Leaving earlier instead of moving faster. The same arrival time, a completely different journey. This is the cheapest change on the page and the one I underestimated for years.
23. Not photographing it. Some things get a photograph and most do not. The stone-skimming on Ukiel did not, which is probably why I still remember it in that much detail.
24. Letting a conversation run past its purpose. You got the information. You stay another ten minutes. Almost everything I know about this region came from those ten minutes.
25. One evening a week with nothing scheduled. Not a rest night. An empty one. The difference is that a rest night has an activity in it.
26. Noticing the light. Specifically: what time it arrives, what time it goes, and what colour it is in the month you are in. This far north the change is fast enough to track by eye, and once you are tracking it you have a relationship with the year that you did not have before.
27. Finishing a book you are not enjoying, or putting it down on purpose. Either one. What costs you is the third option, where it sits half-read on the table for five months and quietly makes you feel bad.
A short note on this group. These six are the ones I would start with, and they are also the ones that sound least impressive written down. That is not a coincidence. The cheap changes are cheap because nobody can sell them to you.
Four Things That Looked Like Slow Living and Weren't
I did all four of these for long enough to be sure.
28. The morning routine that took ninety minutes. Journalling, stretching, a specific order of things, the whole apparatus. By month two it was a second job that started before the first one. A routine you can fail at is a schedule wearing different clothes.
29. Buying the equipment for the slower life. The ceramic pour-over, the linen, the hardback notebook. I enjoyed buying them. None of them changed a single day. Shopping for a slower life is the fastest available version of not having one.
30. Moving somewhere beautiful and keeping the same week. This is the big one. I moved from Warsaw to Masuria, a region with roughly 2,600 lakes, and then worked the same hours, took the same calls and looked at the same screen, with better scenery outside a window I was not looking through. The place changes nothing on its own. It took about eight months to understand that, and it is the reason slow living in a city is more achievable than most people assume.
31. Documenting it. For a while, the slow moments were worth having because they were worth posting. That is a fast life with a slow aesthetic on it, and it is the version most of what you will read about this subject is actually describing.
If you take one thing from this page, take that group of four. Every one of them was easier than the real version, which is why I did them. The real version is mostly subtraction, and subtraction photographs badly.
How to Pick the Three That Fit Your Week
Thirty-one is too many. Nobody adopts a list. Here is how I would choose from it if I were starting again.
Take one from the weekday group, one from the no-cost group, and one from the weekend group. Three, for six weeks, before adding anything.
Pick them by this test: which one, if you did it tomorrow, would you not have to tell anyone about? The changes that need an audience tend to be the ones from the fourth group. The ones that survive are usually boring and private.
If you want a starting three, these did the most for the least: the first hour with no screen in it (1), leaving earlier instead of moving faster (22), and one weekend day with nothing in it (10).
Six weeks is the number because the first two are uncomfortable, the next two are fine, and by the fifth you stop noticing you are doing it. That is when it has taken. Then add one more.
One thing that helps if you cannot tell which change you need: track where your attention actually goes for three ordinary days before you change anything. I built a short worksheet for exactly that — the Attention Leak Audit — because guessing at this is how I wasted most of my first year. It takes about five minutes a day and it is free.
There is a longer version of this as a 30-day structure if you prefer a plan to a principle. And if screens are the specific thing in your way, the evidence on digital detox is the place to start instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does slow living look like day to day?
Day to day, slow living looks like a small number of structural changes repeated: a screen-free first hour, lunch eaten away from the desk, email checked at set times rather than continuously, one walk in daylight, and a fixed end to the working day. It is closer to a set of boundaries than to a set of activities.
Most of what gets photographed as slow living — the linen, the pour-over coffee, the open notebook — is the aesthetic that grew around it rather than the thing itself.
What do people who live slowly actually do all day?
Mostly the same things as everyone else, in a different order and with fewer of them running at once. They work, cook, travel and answer email. The difference is that the day has edges: a start, an end, and single tasks instead of overlapping ones.
The common misreading is that slow living means doing less. It usually means doing the same amount sequentially rather than simultaneously, which takes about the same number of hours and feels completely different.
Can you practise slow living with a full-time job?
Yes, and most people who practise it do. The changes that fit around full-time work are the daily ones: the screen-free first hour, lunch away from the desk, batched email, a hard end to the day, and one unscheduled evening a week. None of them require time off.
The items that genuinely need flexibility — a four-day week, a move out of the city — are a small minority of the list and not the entry point.
Is slow living expensive?
Some of it is and most of it is not. Of the 31 examples on this page, five cost money, and only two of those cost a significant amount: reducing to a four-day week, and renting a season somewhere before moving. The other twenty-six are free or close to it.
The free changes are also the ones with the fastest effect, which is the opposite of how this subject is usually sold.
How is slow living different from minimalism?
Minimalism is about what you own. Slow living is about how your time is arranged. You can live slowly in a cluttered house, and you can own very little while working at a destructive pace. They overlap in that both involve removing things, but they remove different things.
There is a fuller comparison in slow living vs minimalism and mindfulness.
How long does it take before slow living feels normal?
About six weeks for a single change, in my experience and in what readers report. The first two weeks feel like restriction, weeks three and four feel neutral, and by the fifth or sixth you stop noticing you are doing it. That is the point at which it has taken.
Adding several changes at once resets the clock rather than shortening it, which is why three is the number worth starting with.
