The Slow Productivity of the Morning

There is a kind of productivity that moves fast —
urgent, noisy, tangled in a web of demands.
And then there is another kind:
the slow, deep work of becoming.
I find it most clearly in the morning.

The house is still.
The animals are fed.
The world has not yet begun to press its needs against me.
In those early hours, I wake easily, almost naturally, into a rhythm that feels like it was waiting for me overnight.
Writing and thinking come without force.
There is a lightness to the work, a flow that doesn’t strain or grind.
The mind is clear, uncluttered by the sudden storms of the day.
I move through these hours with a kind of wholeness — present to myself, my surroundings, my work.

Later, as the day builds its noise, there will be a different kind of productivity –
meetings, emergencies, demands I could not have anticipated.
This is necessary too, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time.
But it pulls me outward, scatters my focus, fills the hours without always filling the soul.

At night, tiredness folds me into quiet again.
The day is sifted, sorted, gently closed.
Evenings are not productive in the usual sense, but they matter —
like the body’s instinctive sorting of memory during sleep.
A silent, necessary weaving.

Still, the mornings remain the clearest place I see it:
the kind of productivity that doesn’t fracture me but gathers me.
Not faster, not more, not busier.
Just deeper.

In the words of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver),
“I do not want to live outside my body,
boot pressed to chest, breath shallow, life slipping past unseen.
I want the kind of work that makes me more available —
to my family, to my friends, to the work that matters,
to the small beauties that ask only for a listening heart.” #

The slow productivity of the morning teaches me:
true work is not the conquest of time,
but the cultivation of presence.

# On Being with Krista Tippett – Justin Vernon, Being Bon Iver
https://onbeing.org/programs/justin-vernon-being-bon-iver/