Well, I tried. I made a serious effort to go through the entire day moving at half speed. Doing everything really slowly makes some tasks much more enjoyable. Others just seem really strange. But the upshot of it all is that I couldn’t seem to KEEP doing everything really slowly. I kept speeding up, fueled by that constant sense of hurry and urgency we’ve got going all the time in the working world.

On the topic of doing things slowly, though, I thought I’d share some fun tricks I’ve picked up for efficient driving. I’ve gotten into the habit of finding counterintuitive ways of saving money, partly because I want to have as much as possible available to fund whatever unique new experiences I want to collect.

One of my favorite sets of counterintuitive tricks is for maximizing gas mileage. Very timely, right? I use these to get between 34 and 40 miles per gallon in my non-hybrid Honda Civic.

The great part about counterintuitive tricks is that they are often surprisingly simple. This one really has just a couple of main rules:

Rule 1: Use the brakes as little as possible.
Rule 2: Use the accelerator as little as possible.

That’s it.

Now, I realize that the ultimate use of these rules would be either sitting in your driveway going nowhere or putting the car in neutral and having someone push you around, both of which are sort of dumb. Obviously you need to use both the brakes and the accelerator to get places safely in your vehicle. A better way of putting it might be:

Waste as little as possible of your forward momentum through braking.

The obvious and very tempting way to drive is to keep the car going at a steady speed until you reach a place where you have to stop, and then braking. Every time I do this, though, I chop off all the momentum my car still has. If I take my foot off the accelerator pedal, but don’t brake, the car will keep going a long way, especially if I’ve been driving fast. You can try this on a flat, empty street if you want. I keep being amazed at how far you can go with no acceleration at all.

So, whenever possible (it isn’t always, of course), you want to coast to a stop instead of braking. One of the best examples of this is when you’re coming up to a red light. Without enraging any lines of frantic drivers behind you, you want to stop accelerating as soon as you see a red light (or yellow or green light you won’t make it through) and coast the rest of the way to the light.

People behind you may seem really antsy to get to the red light as quickly as they can. If they want to make a right on red, they could be justified, but otherwise this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If I zoom towards the red light at 70 mph, passing the car that’s doing a more stately 5 mph, I end up waiting at the same red light anyway, while the other car coasts to a stop behind me. I’ve gained a whole 10 feet on the slower car behind me. I haven’t gained a second of time, and I’ve burned a little more of that gasoline for which I just paid two bars of gold and 50 oxen at the gas station down the road.

It’s also useful to leave a lot of space between you and the car (or truck, or armored tank, or stampeding elephant) in front of you. Why? Well, say you’re driving right in back of a red VW Beetle. The driver of the Beetle spots a porcupine crossing the street ahead, and screeches to a halt. You have to slam on the brakes to avoid careening into the Beetle. More of that 50-oxen gasoline goes down the drain. If, on the other hand, you have a nice big space between you and the red Beetle, when you see it stop suddenly for that hapless porcupine, you can just take your foot off the accelerator and let your car coast for a while. You’re not losing any time—you’d have to wait for the porcupine to cross anyway, whether you’re coasting or idling five inches behind the other car.

It took me a while before this idea made sense in my brain. It does, though; trust me. You have to wait anyway, so you might as well save the gas.

I can’t take credit for any of these tricks. If you want to see the shocking extreme of fuel efficiency, check out this article.