At The Overlap

---

TL;DR

• We often treat delays and friction as problems to eliminate. But some forms of slowness are not separate from the outcome. Instead, they help create it.
• Whether it’s browning onions, reviewing a document, or adapting to new technology, trying to speed up the process can sometimes change the result more than we expect.

---

The Onions Won’t Be Rushed

I never liked browning onions. Why? Because I always feel like doing it properly takes longer than it should.

For the first few minutes, almost nothing seems to happen. You stir occasionally. The onions soften… oh so very slowly. The pan smells good but not that much different from how it smelled at minute. It’s the kind of process that makes you want to turn up the heat. Just a little, just to move things along a little bit faster.

I bet you catch yourself doing exactly that. Especially when you’re hungry and have convinced yourself that a bit more heat will save a few minutes without changing much.

Clever optimization. Or so it feels.

Until the smell arrives.

If you’ve ever burnt onions, you know it immediately. There is a very small window between “almost ready” and “well, I guess we’re starting again.” In trying to speed things up, I’ve definitely managed to create more work for myself more occasions than I’d like to admit.

We all understand that some things take time. When I’m standing over a frying pan feeling impatient, I’m usually not thinking that nothing is happening. I’m thinking the same thing many of us think in situations like this: Surely I can speed this up a little without changing the outcome very much.

But often the process itself is a big part of the outcome.

The onions are not slowly waiting to become browned onions. The slow browning is what creates them.

When Speed Skips the Point

It makes me think about technology, especially because a lot of the tools around us right now are designed to reduce friction. Make things go faster.

Improving productivity is everywhere. The opposite of slowly browning onions.

The vast amount of Generative AI tools has made this increase in speed quite visible. Ideas, summaries, and documents that used to take hours can appear in seconds. And genuinely, a lot of that is very useful. These tools can clear away tedious work and make it easier to move through complex processes, producing outputs that may not even have been possible without help.

What do I mean? Things like noticing when an argument sounds convincing but doesn’t actually hold together when you read it twice. Realizing that a recommendation solves the wrong problem. Recognizing that a document technically answers the question but misses what somebody was really asking for in the first place.

Those parts still take time.

And they are often the parts that determine whether the final result is actually useful.

In some ways it makes those slower parts more important, because they’re easier to skip when everything around them is moving quickly.

The Work That Looks Like Delay

For years I tried to finish reports, presentations, or important documents well before they were due. I’d mark my (paper) calendar with due dates one or two weeks before the real due date, and aim for that.

Let them sit. And then coming back a few days later felt a bit like borrowing someone else’s eyes.

The spelling mistakes were easy to find. More often it was the flow. The missing connection between two ideas. The section that made perfect sense when I wrote it but somehow didn’t when I read it a few days later.

Nothing about that pause looked productive. It looked like time passing.

But in hindsight, some of the most important improvements often happened during that gap between writing and revisiting.

The same is true when reviewing other people’s work. Have you noticed at work that reviews are usually one of the first things to get compressed when time gets tight? From the outside, reviews can look quite inefficient: another round of comments, another discussion, another meeting, another revision before anything actually moves.

But good review work is rarely just about catching mistakes. Some of the most useful moments aren’t corrections at all. They’re the questions that surface an assumption nobody realized they were making. The missing context that changes how something lands. Often times it’s the small inconsistencies that seem fine until they create confusion later on.

Getting someone to review your work, or taking a break to then review your own work, can feel like a delay. But usually it’s doing the same kind of work as the onions. Creating something through pacing that you can’t create by rushing.

You can skip it. The result just changes.

The Gap Between Change and Settling

Thinking about slowness and how it is sometimes quite productive makes me think of the concept of change. Take for example whenever a new communication technology suddenly becomes normal.

I can still remember buying international phone cards and carefully watching the minutes disappear during overseas calls.

The video quality was terrible by today’s standards. Pixelated faces. Voices arriving half a second late, cutting out every two sentences. But it truly felt remarkable at the time.

Eventually video calls became normal. Then expected. In high quality too.

Did you notice though? The technology changed quickly. But getting comfortable with it took longer.

The same pattern appears again and again. The world is changing. New ways of communicating. New expectations about speed and availability and what it means to be reachable. The changes arrive quickly. But for most people, adjusting takes longer.

That gap, between when something changes and when people actually find their footing with it, tends to be invisible because it doesn’t show up on any timeline. The technology arrives. The new normal is declared. But understanding, habit, and genuine comfort develop on a different schedule, and no amount of pressure makes that schedule shorter.

Much like the onions, that adjustment period is often treated as something we’d prefer to get through rather than something actively creating the outcome.

It’s the same problem as turning up the heat. The outside changes faster than the inside. And what looks like resistance or slowness is often just the actual pace at which people integrate something new into how they live and work.

You can push past that process. But you don’t get to skip it. It just moves somewhere less visible.

What Belongs in the Recipe

Kitchens understand this instinctively. Resting, proofing, reducing, simmering.

The process is working hard, even when the visible progress doesn’t seem to appear that quickly.

Not every pause is wasted time. Not every friction is inefficiency.

Sometimes the thing that looks slow from the outside is just the thing creating the result in the first place. Building flavor, or stability, or understanding, in ways that only happen at their own pace.

Some forms of slowness are not simply delays. They are part of the process that creates the result.

And sometimes they belong in the recipe.

Food for Thought

Have you encountered situations where what looked like inefficiency turned out to be an important part of the process?