The Slowsteader: Calm Living

What inspired it

The bread on our slowstead is mixed at six in the morning and turned four times, half an hour apart, as I pull the dough up at twelve, three, six and nine o'clock. It is usually during those turns that my thoughts wander towards everybody who would love a slower life and cannot yet see where to begin one. So many of us live in a flat, on a tight budget, with a houseful of people and a phone that asks for our attention every few minutes. From there, a slower life can look like something reserved for people with land, money, spare time and a calm household.

I sat on the swing under the passionfruit arch one morning with a cup of tea and filmed a short video of the garden. There is construction going on across the road, but I had been listening to Bruce-the-buff crowing and the ducks foraging for food. It was only when I played the video back that I heard the building noise at all. We can choose what we concentrate on, and that choice is open to anybody, wherever they live and however busy the house is.

That is the heart of slowsteading, a term I use for a mindset that informs a lifestyle. Urbanites create a home environment that encourages small-scale gardening and whole-food cooking, where creativity and joy are cultivated, and all of it is made possible by a decluttered home and a decluttered mind. My mission has always been finding peace and happiness inside a busy, full life rather than escaping it, and I have proven many times over that slowsteading is a practical and sustainable antidote to burnout and exhaustion.

Most of our attention now lives on a screen in our pocket, so it made sense to meet people there and then send them gently back to the kitchen counter and the garden bed. The Slowsteader gathers years of my research and writing into a companion for anyone who needs a reset, so that they can find some peace right where they are.

What Slowsteader gives you

Inside The Slowsteader you'll find slowsteading activities drawn from the eight areas that have enriched my own life immeasurably. They are cooking, baking, preserving, gardening, pets and animals, hobbies and crafts, the apothecary, and relationship and community. You are free to choose your own corner of them and leave the rest for another day.

Many of the activities take less than ten minutes from start to finish, and I once tested this by setting a timer on the couch to see whether I could crochet a dishcloth in ten minutes, and I was lathering it up nine minutes later. Doing things with your own hands is one of the finest ways I know of sparking a dream and letting it grow.

The activities sit alongside the five pillars of slowsteading, which are Dream, Declutter, Design, Develop and Do. They are not a staircase but five things happening at the same time in the same life. There are journal prompts to carry with you through an ordinary day.

How we built it

I began with the writing long before we wrote any code, going back through my three decluttering books, the Joyous Journal, Bringing It Home and dozens of blogs, and choosing what belonged in an app that lives in your pocket. My son is an incredible developer and he very generously agreed to develop the app to bring my writing home.

The app is built with React Native and Expo, which let us write it once and bring it to both iPhone and Android, and Supabase sits behind it for accounts and sign in with Apple and Google. Supabase also keeps the searchable library of my writing that Speak to Renata draws on. Most of the content travels inside the app itself, so the recipes, journal prompts, garden guides and walkthroughs are there even when the signal is not, and your own journals and cook logs never leave your phone. Subscriptions run through RevenueCat, which looks after the Slowsteader Premium entitlement, the monthly and annual memberships on the paywall, restoring a purchase on a new phone, and the Customer Center where members manage their subscription. That freed us to spend our time on the content and the feel of the app instead of on billing.

The Slowsteader has a look of its own, set in Newsreader for headings and DM Sans for everything else, with olive green and teal on a clean white page, and mustard and a deep cherry kept for accents and the rare moment something needs your attention. Every colour was checked for contrast against white, so the words stay easy to read in bright sunlight at the bottom of the garden.

Where it asked the most of us

Most apps are designed to keep you inside them for as long as possible. A slowsteading companion has to do the opposite, giving you one thing to do and then sending you out of the app to go and do it. We left out streaks and counters, because a journal with dates on it is a streak in disguise. In their place you receive a gentle suggestion and permission to close the app again.

Asking for money in my own voice was the hardest writing of all, since I have never been comfortable with a hard sell. The paywall needed to read like an invitation to pull up a chair at my table.

My natural writing is long and turns back on itself before it lands. Fitting it onto a phone screen without losing its warmth took many more drafts than I expected.

What I learnt

My great-uncle Ben planted a grove of pecans the year he turned eighty. When somebody asked whether he knew that pecans take many years to bear, he said he had more than enough time to harvest the nuts. He lived to ninety-eight, many years past the first good harvest, and I thought of him often while this app was being built.

Building Slowsteader taught me what the vegetable garden did, which is that every feature we cut made the app feel more like home. You don't need more motivation, you need permission to start small and to rest when the day has asked too much of you. That is what we have tried to put in your hands.

What comes next

We would love to grow the eighth area, relationship and community, into a place where slowsteaders can share what they are making. We also hope to bring the Five Pillars audio course fully into the app, add recipes from my cookbooks, and expand upon the functionality of the app as this is naturally only and MVP.

What would you try first if you knew the smallest step counted, and if nothing comes to mind yet, what is one thing you have always wanted to learn to make with your own hands?

Built With

• react-native
• revenuecat
• supabase