Ro: The Calm-First Approach to Productivity
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Ro is a Swedish word Lana Blakely translates as calm, tranquility, peace, and it functions as her operating philosophy rather than a relaxation technique. The mechanism is a swap of the input state: instead of generating output through urgency, stress and task-switching, you deliberately approach the same to-do list from a calm baseline and let the work be pleasant. Her claim, supported in the conversation by Ali Abdaal's Derek Sivers cycling story, is that frantic energy feels more productive than it is, and that the calm version yields comparable results with far less depletion and far more enjoyment. Practically it means designing a life where you return to calm daily: unhurried mornings, silent walks, homes and relationships that give ro rather than take it, and small stolen moments inside a hectic job.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Define what ro actually feels like for you
Pay attention across a normal day and notice where you are at ease, where nobody is bothering you, where there is a calm feeling in your body. Lana's markers are an unhurried morning coffee with her dog and long walks with no audio at all. Yours may be entirely different.
Pro tip Look for the meditative quality, not sleepiness: ro is being energised through something simple and calming.
- 2
Build one daily habit that reliably returns you there
Choose a repeatable anchor and protect it: waking early enough to sit before the day starts, a walk with no podcast, journaling before bed. The point is a place you come back to at the end of a long or stressful day, not an occasional treat.
Watch out The anchor usually costs a trade, most often an earlier alarm. Decide the trade consciously instead of hoping the time appears.
- 3
Audit your environment and relationships for ro
Ask of your home and of each close relationship whether it gives you ro or gives you stress and anxiety. Lana treats this as a design constraint: the home should be that place, and a person who reliably drains calm is a signal, not a fact of life.
- 4
Approach the same workload with the calm attitude on purpose
Take the identical task list and change the framing: coffee, dog in lap, this is going to be interesting, rather than I have to do this and this and the deadline is coming. Ali's version is the Grey's Anatomy line, it's a beautiful day to save lives, let's have some fun, applied to ordinary work.
Pro tip When you catch a frantic surge, take one breath and restate the task as something you want to do rather than have to do.
- 5
Steal micro-moments inside a hectic life
If you have a job, kids and no spare hours, use two-minute windows: eat lunch alone away from the group, stand on the balcony with no devices and take a few breaths, take the coffee break your colleagues skip. Most people have two minutes somewhere in the day.
Watch out Do not skip these because you fear looking odd. Lana's experience is that nobody notices or cares when you step away for a few minutes.
- 6
Ignore the feeling that calm equals slacking
Expect an internal objection that if you are not rushing you must be underperforming. Treat that as a bias to override, not as evidence. Check output against results, not against how stressed the process felt.
Pro tip Time one task done calmly against your usual frantic version, the way Derek Sivers timed the relaxed bike ride, and compare the actual numbers.
In the wild
While Lana was still working a full-time job and building the channel on the side, her ro habit was training at a nearly empty gym very early in the morning. It cost her sleep, which she names as the sacrifice, but it bought a slot in the day that belonged to nobody else: not work, not YouTube, not other people. It was not frantic, it was something good for her that she chose, and it set the tone before the job started.
→ A protected daily calm anchor that survived both a full-time job and a side project.
Ali recounts Derek Sivers cycling the same route repeatedly, always pushing to beat 42 minutes, huffing and puffing the whole way. One day Sivers decided to enjoy it instead: no timer, waving at people, listening to the birds. He got home, looked at the clock, and it read 44 minutes. Six months of maximum effort had been buying two minutes.
→ Same result within a rounding error, a completely different experience, and a durable argument that frantic effort is often paid for nothing.
Common mistakes
Treating calm as a reward you earn later
Ro is not the thing you get after the stressful sprint. If it only exists once the deadline passes, the next deadline deletes it. It has to be a daily habit and an environment you build, otherwise it never arrives.
Mistaking stress for productivity
Both Lana and Ali describe the instinct that being productive means running around, switching tasks and feeling slightly stressed. That instinct rates the feeling of effort, not the output, and it reliably pushes people into a mode that produces worse work and more exhaustion.
Claiming there is no time for it
The habit does not need to be long. Two minutes on a balcony with no devices, or lunch eaten alone in the car, does more than people expect. The barrier is usually self-consciousness or guilt rather than the calendar.
From the transcript
“Basically what it means ro is just like calm, tranquility, peace.”
“somehow we feel like if we have more of a calm approach to things we're not as productive, you know, it's not as efficient.”
“I can actually approach things being more chill with that Grey's Anatomy quote attitude and I can still yield the same results and enjoy the…”
From the episode
How To Find Tranquility, Meaningful Productivity and Healthy Relationships - Lana Blakely
Lana Blakely