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 over the last few months I did the opposite of what most of the advice says. I intentionally produced less. Five weeks of less, in fact, the longest I've gone without writing regular blogs and emails since I started doing them 10 years ago. 

Not because I ran out of things to say, or didn't have the time to create. If anything, my head has been full. I had more fresh insights than ever. 

Two months ago I launched a book about Solar System Marketing®, and after a flurry of book promo activity, I decided I was ready to go inward and reflect on and re-evaluate my own "solar system" (again). And that took all my creative energy. 

(it's a beautiful thing to step back apply your creative energy to your own big picture review and reflection, by the way) 

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. In fresh, new ways. An extension of the same foundations, while still being true to what's at my core.

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 continuing all the delivery stuff too.

Events, keynotes, travel, cool projects - all the type of things that inspire me and get me going. That was outward - while inwardly I allowed space for yet another shift to unfold. 

Stepping away from the day to day so you have the mental space, clarity and bandwidth to think deeply about WHERE you want to be and HOW you'll make that happen, in light of the context we're operating within today, and our personal capacity in this current season.

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 over the years, because it's a principle I that's held me steady over many seasons, and in many ways 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 the thinking. 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 - protecting my inputs, and my outputs. 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 very 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. Urghhh. That just makes me tired thinking about it

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 content. 

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.

To really understand this and work out what my potency was going to hone in on, 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 for this new season we're in.

And to be clear, none of this was about stepping away from the tools. The opposite, in fact. Virtually Myself® is what gave me the freedom to go inward, and the ability to have my "digital twin" my second brain, at the ready. The brain that remembers everything I've written and said over the years, and has the context of my business, my brand and my bandwidth.

This allowed me to pour my energy into the thinking and the inputs, and the rest just follows beautifully and supports the thinking. But it starts with the quality of the thinking. 

I do want all of my content outputs to be insanely valuable. In a way that protects my bandwidth too, and helps those I share with tangibly - and to adapt to the current landscape I needed to go deeper internally first, and sit still with a lot of the massive shifts I'm observing, and mull over how I'll personally adapt, before I can package those insights in a meaningful expression of content to help others. 

Where my outward creative energy has been directed of late

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 (highly recommend reading if you haven't yeet) , and I saw a lot of those coming early and wrote about them six 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 compiled my thinking and insights into a report 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.

Refining the insignts from the frontline

I did use several of my public appearances to explore some of my insights and musings. 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.

- The other one is an Agentic Conference at the MCEC last months where I talked about trust, brands and what it means for brands to differentiate when everyone has access to smilar tools and agentic capability (which will inevitably happen soon enough)

- A co-partnered and sponsored Deakin event on AI adoption and implementation,and wrote a fresh thought leadership piece for the white paper coming out of it, which will be released soon.

-A meaningful, rewarding and hugely innovative tech project that took me to Queensland, working on something I'm genuinely excited about that will unfold over the coming months.

What I'm feeling now.

With any action - be it internal or external, 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 will emerge in coming months. 

So here's where I've landed, and it's the same thing I'm pretty sure I'll keep saying, even as the noise gets even more intense over the next few months. 

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.