On smaller barrels

Welcome to Change, Logged, a bi-weekly newsletter offering 5 minutes of honest thoughts about life, design, and everything in between.

Last Friday, I popped into my local deli, Pastéis de Lisboa, to pick up some cured ham and cheese for a virtual team celebration. While chatting through the different options, the owner pointed me towards the anchovies in the fridge and started telling me about one particular producer: Karmelo Toja.

Based in Bermeo on Spain’s Cantabrian coast, Karmelo Toja is one of the country’s smallest artisanal canneries. What makes them different isn’t the ingredients. They use the same Cantabrian anchovies and traditional curing methods as many others. The difference lies in the scale. While many mass producers cure anchovies in 300kg batches, Karmelo Toja works in smaller 200kg barrels.

Same ingredient. Different taste and quality.

“If you think about a standard 300kg barrel, the anchovies are more compressed, which changes the taste,” the owner explained. “Karmelo Toja’s anchovies are stronger and more premium in flavour, which is also reflected in their price.”

It made me wonder whether there’s a lesson here that extends far beyond fish. At a time when we’re constantly encouraged to do more, move faster and become good at everything, perhaps the real advantage comes from choosing a smaller bucket. Not more volume, but more care, time, and long-term sustainability in mind.

Karmelo Toja’s smaller batches of anchovies allow for greater attention, consistency and control throughout the curing process. They’re not trying to produce the most anchovies; they’re trying to produce the best.

Caught only in the spring season and selected fresh from the Bermeo fish market, the anchovies are cured in salt for over a year as they slowly develop their depth of flavour. After maturation, each one is carefully hand-filleted and cleaned individually, reflecting a process built entirely around patience and time.

Often, craft is not about doing more, but about doing fewer things exceptionally well. Contrary to what we’re experiencing these days, excellence comes from deliberate constraints. It creates the space to go deeper and refine work properly.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again later.

In today’s world, AI has dramatically increased what we can do and how quickly we can do it. It can write code, conduct research and generate designs faster than ever before. It is easy to fall into the trap of expecting more output with less effort, and with that comes a subtle pressure to become a generalist who can do everything with AI as an extension of ourselves.

As Oliver Burkeman explains, becoming more productive often just makes the conveyor belt of life move faster. As life accelerates, people become more impatient. Take email. Email and messaging allow us to respond instantly, but we would not have those messages without the system that created them.

Traditional job roles are already blurring with the rise of AI. More capability often leads to more context switching, even when AI is doing the heavy lifting. The pressure then becomes keeping up with everything at once so we don’t fall behind. But none of this guarantees better work. Instead, it spreads our attention thin and risks losing depth, craft and original thinking.

Even with AI, our time and attention remain finite. So the real question becomes: what do we do with the capacity we have gained?

There will always be too much to do. Let go of the fantasy of getting everything done. Instead, focus on the few things that truly matter. Like Karmelo Toja, the real advantage is in choosing what not to do.

The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect.
— Oliver Burkeman

AI should not push us toward breadth at the expense of depth. If anything, it should create more space for us to go deeper into the work that actually matters. As Steve Jobs once said, “focus is not about saying yes to the important things. It is about saying no to the hundred other good ideas”.

In a world where everyone can create more, true value will not come from productivity and volume of output alone. It will come from the discipline to choose where to invest your attention, and the commitment to develop real depth over time.

So the question becomes: what is your 200kg bucket?

Books that inspired the thoughts on this page — and are worth a look:

• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman