Slow Down to Speed Up

The strategic case for producing less and meaning more.

Content is going up. Bandwidth to consume it is going down.

So I did the opposite of what most of the advice says. I produced less. Six weeks of less, in fact, the longest I've gone without writing to you since I started sending regular emails to this list 10 years ago. And those of you who've been here a while will have noticed my usually fairly regular fortnightly or so blog posts went quiet too.

Not because I ran out of things to say. If anything, my head has been full. It's because I wanted to come back with something potent rather than another thing for you to scroll past. I don't take it lightly that I get to be in your inbox, especially now.

Here's what those six weeks were actually about.

The irony I'm proud to own

I launched a book about Solar System Marketing®, and then I went quiet to reflect on and re-evaluate my own.

It's been a good six months since I last did a proper re-evaluation of my own positioning, and the act of writing the book, then re-reading it once it was finished, pulled me back to my own solar system. I found myself wanting to redo it in the light of my recent work, not because that work is any different to what came before, but because it builds on it. An extension of the same foundations, still true to them.

That kind of re-evaluation requires going inward before going outward. You can't reposition for a marketplace that's shifting if you haven't sat with where you actually stand in it. So I did, behind the scenes, while the outward stuff carried on looking busy.

Slowing down to speed up

I'm a big believer in slowing down to speed up. I've written about it before in different forms, because it's a principle I keep coming back to, and it's deeply counterintuitive.

It does not mean missing opportunities. It does not mean sitting still or pulling back from the work. I've actually been busier than ever publicly over these weeks. Privately, it's been a different story. What it means is not hurrying through. Allowing space for perspectives to shift before you act on them, rather than reacting to every shift in real time.

For me, that often looks like a few weeks of going inward. Which is its own kind of irony, given that so much of what I do is about showing up outwardly and visibly. From the outside, the last six weeks have looked active. I've been speaking, partnering, travelling, in rooms with sharp people. Underneath all of it, it's been a season of assimilation and processing.

That gap between how active you look and what's actually happening internally is one of the most honest things I can share about how I work.

Less, but more potent

The trend right now is to produce more. More posts, more content, more everywhere, all at once.

I've gone the other way. Content is increasing while the bandwidth to consume it is shrinking, and I think that makes the case for less, but far more potent. More considered. More depth. I'd rather create fewer things that genuinely matter than flood the channels and add to the noise everyone is already drowning in.

This is also why I went quiet. I needed to disconnect from going through the motions, whether that motion is human or technology-supported, and get back in touch with how and in what way I actually want to use this platform. Because I do want it to be insanely valuable to you. And you can't manufacture that on a content treadmill.

Where my creative energy has actually gone

The other thing I've been heads-down in is a big piece of work on how leadership distribution is changing in 2026.

My 2026 insights report looked at the marketplace shifts, and I saw a lot of those coming early and wrote about them months ago. This new piece goes a layer deeper. It looks at what those shifts actually mean from a week-to-week, practical implementation perspective across every platform and outlet.

I did it for myself and my own businesses first, because I needed to understand how each platform is changing so my own attention isn't scattered and fragmented across channels. I want to show up coherently, without losing potency, wherever I am. And because I get asked about this constantly, by clients and at events, I built it knowing it would serve them too.

That's where my thinking, my writing and my creative energy have gone. Into working out what I'm building from here, how it all fits together, and how I can keep providing value in a meaningful and impactful way without ever compromising on depth.

What I've been testing in the room, not just on the page

A few of the highlights from these weeks, because they're where a lot of this thinking got forged:

- A Deakin livestream for alumni, students and faculty on augmentation versus automation, and what it really means to use AI to amplify rather than replace.

- A Deakin roundtable with faculty and the business community on brand and trust in the AI era. The central question we sat with: when everyone has access to the same tools and the same capabilities, what's left to differentiate you? My answer hasn't changed. Brand and trust.

- A co-partnered and sponsored Deakin event on AI adoption and implementation, with some high-profile speakers including Google.

- A meaningful and rewarding tech project that took me to Queensland, in a beautiful spot, working on something I'm genuinely excited about.

Where I've landed

It's less about the tool, the technology or the terminology, and more about the result. The use case. How it's implemented, and what it actually delivers.

I've been working behind the scenes with a couple of businesses, going deeper than implementing technology for technology's sake or efficiency's sake. The real question is how you do it in a way that builds tangible brand trust, team trust and customer trust. More on that in a later email.

So here's where I've landed, and it's the same thing I'll keep saying as the noise gets louder. Showing up intentionally, with the right energy, potency, creativity and meaning, matters far more than how often you do it. 

Whether that's daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly or quarterly. Cadence is important, I won't pretend otherwise, but what's inside the message matters more than the timing of it.

That's the standard I've consistently held myself to through every iteration of how I've approached marketing, and it's the one I'll keep letting guide me as we steady our ships and anchor them in the choppy waters around us.