By the time you read this issue of The Analyst, your thoughts will probably be lingering around those warm days of past summer vacations, cottage weekends, or that one outstanding golf game. Your mind will not be on the upcoming end of the quarter or fiscal calendar year—or the inevitable colder weather and snow.

But ask yourself this: as regular work, home-life pressures, and a growing agenda come back into full swing, is now the time you should slow down to speed up? Popular theory suggests it is. And one of the ways to energize your life more is by doing less. In fact, proof that sustained busyness offsets most “restful” gains is accelerating. For example, a study by Jessica de Bloom of the University of Tampere in Finland suggests that “holiday gains” wear off within two to four weeks of returning to normal routines.

The idea of work/life balance is not new. However, the topic has gained strength and is now trending as an important issue in the most recent member surveys of both CFA Institute and CFA Society Toronto. Employers have also taken notice. UBS AG recently introduced its Take Two program, which encourages employees to take two hours per week of personal time on the company’s tab (as long as the work is covered by others), and JPMorgan Chase instructs bankers to “take weekends off” as long as live and important deals aren’t in motion.

All About Flow

In Carl Honoré’s book, In Praise of Slow, he focuses on the idea of making more conscious choices about how our time is spent and not necessarily about how to accomplish all the same tasks in a slower fashion. It’s within those choices that the benefits of slow actually accrue.

Ferris Jabr agrees. In his article “Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime,” published in the October 2013 issue of Scientific American, he writes, “Downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation, encourages productivity and creativity, and is essential to both achieving our highest levels of performance and simply forming stable memories in everyday life. A wandering mind unsticks us in time so that we can learn from the past and plan for the future.”

Creating this downtime—or what’s now being referred to as a state of mindfulness—is simpler than you think. You can practise it anywhere, and it doesn’t imply long “unplugged” vacations or chanting in a dark room. In fact, it’s relatively easy. Consider the following actions:

• Turn off your smartphone for 15 minutes a day.
• Look out your office window for a short period and take a deep breath.
• Extend the amount of time you eat lunch or dinner (and savour the meal).
• Take a quick midday walk around the block (some research suggests a garden walk has materially larger benefits than a city walk; welcome to the concept of ecopsychology).
• Engage and maintain a few moments of simple silence.
• Invoke a mental break during “in-between” moments such as riding the subway, or waiting in a line, or whatever your in-between moments might consist of.

What’s the Body Without the Mind?

With the change of season right around the corner, maybe that golf game or long bike ride is more difficult to accomplish; however, you can still maintain or enhance those physical and mental gains you made over the summer. According to Totum Life Science founders Dr. Stacy Irvine and Dr. Tim Irvine, there are several easy ways to do this:

• Continue to spend some time outside, preferably in natural surroundings. Set your alarm a few minutes earlier to give yourself a chance for a quick walk outside before the busyness of the day begins.
• Organize social activities in places that will allow everyone to disconnect from their devices, engage with one another, and focus on the activity at hand (e.g., a game of ultimate Frisbee, a pick-up basketball game, or a family outing).
• Take a few minutes every day to unplug (with a walk or a look out the window) and visualize yourself in a particularly relaxing moment to help re-experience that feeling.
• Set a date for a break from your usual routine, even if it’s a short one, with either exercise or an activity to optimize the experience. This will give you something to focus on and look forward to. When it comes to living a healthy life, attitude is everything.

Daunting as it might seem, taking the potential time to go slow might actually allow us the mental downtime for greater amounts of creativity, problem solving, and speed going forward. Maybe taking the time to read this short article was in itself the first step of that process. Now, on to finding the time to go slow…