On Not Being Efficient and Going Slow
About midway through her book Syllabus, Barry describes how students in one of her classes hated her crayon assignments. While crayons had been very successful in the past, this one class despised them. Why? Because, she realized, she gave them too much guidance in her efforts to make the process easier and faster for them.
I told them to color hard in order to do it right. And go straight to using force–thinking I was showing them a short-cut. This took away the way of coloring they would have found on their their own. By telling them just how to do it, I took the playing around away, the gradual figuring out that brings something alive to the activity, makes it worthwhile…
Lynda Barry
She concluded that we should forget shortcuts and that the most efficient way to do things because, “The fastest way is the slowest way” (94).
I’ve often read/wrote/thought about how taking your time increases your ability to think critically and to resist. I like how Barry links going slow and avoiding shortcuts with the creative process too. When I taught at the university, I frequently chose new assignments and readings because I was always trying to fight against the urge to shortcut/streamline the process for the students or for me. I felt that if I become too comfortable and used to assignments or classes (when I taught them multiple times), I would lose the creative/critical energy and passion for what I was doing and how I was doing it. I found that focusing on the “right” way to do things (which is like becoming the Expert) can prevent you from playing around and enjoying the process.
This idea of efficiency reminds me of something that I recently read about inconvenience. In his keynote for the 2015 Personal Digital Archive Conference, Rick Howard reflects on the potential value of personal digital records as inconvenient to collect and preserve. He writes:
But I think that inconvenience has its virtues. Wrangling with inconvenience is like choosing to write by hand instead of typing or dictating. You learn more about the words you are processing….Archives are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, and wrestling with the inconvenience of certain kinds of records causes a kind of reprocessing to commence, in which records can serve completely new purposes and often new interests.
Rick Howard