Your Permission Slip to Slow Down

I've spent a lot of time over the past several months thinking about what it means to slow down. Not as a personal preference, but as a full-blown, non-negotiable life requirement.

My father was recently diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Another close family member is navigating a cancer diagnosis. To round out the chaos nicely, my hormones also had opinions: chronic insomnia, brain fog, and hot flashes. Perimenopause arrived uninvited like that one patron with a massive print job 5 minutes before closing time. As my mom would say, things like this always come in threes.

Through all of it, life simply refused to negotiate. Some days, the most productive thing I could do was be fully present for those I love. Other days, the kindest thing I could do for myself was reschedule prior commitments, ruthlessly prioritize my project list, or wield "no" like a righteous sword.

Did I drop some balls? For sure. Did I disappoint some folks? Yep. Was it SUPER uncomfortable at times? Oh, yeah. But here's the thing: the urge to stay productive, to keep showing up in all the ways I'm used to, didn't disappear just because my circumstances changed. If anything, it got louder.

This experience reconnected me with something I return to often in my coaching work: slowing down is not the opposite of effective leadership. For many of us, it's the only path back to it.

If the pace of your work has felt unsustainable, or if some part of your life has quietly been demanding that you pause, then this post is for you. Below are three practical tactics for giving yourself permission to slow down without losing momentum, credibility, or your mind.

Name What's Actually Non-Negotiable

Most library leaders are operating with an invisible list of things that feel urgent, critical, and essential. And, this list is usually about three times longer than any human being can actually sustain.

The first step toward slowing down isn't rest. It's ruthless clarity. Before you can protect your energy, you need to know what genuinely requires it.

I started by applying a version of the Pareto Principle, the idea that roughly 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. Which tasks were actually moving the needle on my most meaningful work? Which ones just felt important because they'd always been on the list? 

From there, the questions got more specific: What are my top two or three goals this quarter, and which tasks actually connect to them? What are the real consequences of not doing everything else?

When my capacity was reduced this year, this exercise was clarifying in a way I didn't expect. What remained was short, specific, and genuinely important. Everything else could wait — and the world, remarkably, did not end.

Leadership doesn't collapse when you do less. It collapses when you've been doing so much for so long that you stop being able to think clearly about any of it.

Protect Transition Time Like It's a Meeting

One of the sneakiest time thieves in library leadership isn't the big meeting or the long project. It's the space between things. Or rather, the total absence of it.

Most library directors and managers move from task to task, meeting to meeting, crisis to crisis, with zero recovery time built in. Cognitive science has a lot to say about why this is a problem, but you already know it intuitively: the best thinking you've ever done probably didn't happen in the middle of a packed Tuesday.

A practical fix: build 30-minute transition buffers into your calendar between meetings. Block them, name them, and treat them as protected time. Use the space to close out the previous conversation, take three slow breaths, jot a note, refill your water bottle. These micro-pauses are not indulgences; they are cognitive infrastructure.

The same principle applies on a larger scale. When was the last time you took a full lunch break? When did you last end a workday without carrying a pile of unfinished mental tabs into your evening? Slowing down doesn't require a sabbatical. It often just requires the discipline to stop five minutes earlier than you think you should.

Redefine What "Showing Up" Means

Here's something we don't talk about enough in library leadership: the belief that slowing down is a form of letting people down.

For leaders who care deeply about their teams, their patrons, and their communities — which describes virtually everyone reading this — the idea of doing less can feel like abandonment. If there's a staff member who needs support, a board presentation on the horizon, or a program that's barely hanging together, pulling back feels irresponsible. Maybe even selfish.

But full presence at a slower pace almost always serves teams better than a fractured presence at a frantic pace. A leader who is burned out, operating on fumes, and running on autopilot is not actually showing up. They're performing the appearance of showing up. And most teams can feel the difference.

Redefining "showing up" might look like crossing off a meeting and making the remaining ones count. Responding to emails at three designated times instead of constantly. Saying "I need to think about that and get back to you" instead of answering immediately. It might look like being fully present for a 30-minute check-in rather than half-present for three hours of back-to-back interactions.

Slowing down is not stepping back from leadership. It is often the act of finally stepping into it.

You Already Have the Permission

Somewhere along the way, many library leaders absorbed the idea that sustainable pace is a reward to be earned after everything else is handled. Spoiler: everything else is never fully handled. Your inbox refills. The next crisis arrives. A staffer quits. The strategic plan gets a revision.

The permission to slow down doesn't come from a cleared task list or a quiet season or a supervisor who finally says, "Take a breath." It comes from you — from the decision that your capacity matters, that your longevity in this work matters, and that leading from a place of depletion serves no one well.

If this resonates and you're ready to build a more sustainable way of leading — one that actually fits your life — I'd love to talk. My complimentary consultation calls are low-pressure conversations about where you are, where you want to be, and whether coaching might be the right support to help you get there.

Book your free consultation call today and let's figure out what leading at your best actually looks like.