On weather-paced work

There is a tomato plant outside my window that does not know what a quarter is.

It does not have a launch date. It has not picked a vertical. It is not optimizing. It is just a tomato plant in May, which means it is mostly making leaves and not yet making tomatoes, and this is not a delay, it is a tomato plant in May.

I think about this when I am behind on something.

Most of what we do at the studio is paced by a calendar that came from somewhere else. A product launches in October because retailers buy in March. An essay goes out on Sunday because Sundays are when people read. A newsletter is biweekly because that’s what we said. These are useful rhythms. I am not against them. But underneath them is a different pace — the pace at which a thing actually wants to be made. The pace at which a thing is ready.

That pace looks, from the outside, like weather.

Some weeks something gets made. Some weeks it doesn’t. Some weeks the thing that gets made is small — a few pages, a fixed line in an old card deck — and some weeks a whole product walks out of the studio with its shoes on. Looked at week by week, this is uneven and slightly worrying. Looked at over a year, it evens out the way a season does. The summer is hot. November is not. Aggregating them gives you a year, which is the unit at which a life is actually lived.

The hard part is not believing in weather. Most people believe in weather. The hard part is sitting through a slow week without translating it into a moral problem.

You will translate it. I do. Every time the studio is quiet for more than three days, I begin to suspect myself. Are we behind. Are we losing it. Is this the part where it all stops working. The voice that says this is not, I think, a personal voice. It is the voice of a calendar that came from somewhere else, asking, very politely, why you are not producing.

The answer is: because nothing wants to be made this week. Or: because the thing that wants to be made next is still arranging itself in the back of my head and I cannot rush it without breaking it. Or, most often: because the body that makes the things needs to walk around outside for a few days, and it knows this, and I should listen.

This is, broadly, what we mean by made slowly.

We do not mean: handcrafted, in the artisan sense. (Although some things in the shop are.) We do not mean: better than fast things. (Some fast things are great.) We mean: paced like weather. We mean: I am not promising you a thing every Tuesday. I am promising you that when something arrives in your inbox, it arrived because it was ready, and not because the calendar said so.

There is one practical effect of working this way that I will name plainly, in case it is useful. You will ship less. You will ship later than people who do not work this way. You will see them produce a great deal of slop, very quickly, and you will sometimes feel that you are being lapped by the slop. You are. The slop is fast. The slop is faster than you. But the slop is also slop, and most slop is gone within a season, and the things you are making slowly will still be in someone’s drawer in five years. That is the trade. Take it or don’t.

The tomato plant is still making leaves. By August, if no one yells at it, there will be tomatoes.