Comment by grellas
10 years ago
Speaking as one who is laid back in a personality sense, I could imagine nothing worse than a life lived non-stop frenetically under the imagined need to speed up all activity in the name of productivity.
Take time to pause, reflect, think, and enjoy your life experiences.
Even when it comes to work-related activity, there are times and places to do things quickly and there are times and places to do them deliberately. If nothing else, just for sanity's sake, it is important to pace yourself through a day, through a week, through a month, through a year, through a career. Even if speed were exactly correlated with maximum productivity and effectiveness, it is vital that you have times when you simply feel you can enjoy being at work, being with people, doing your activities, without everything feeling you have to work like a machine that will be evaluated by engineering standards only.
Even more, we all have different personalities and some people do not work well if they feel they are forced to work at some arbitrarily quick pace as opposed to one that suits their style.
Finally, even speed as a factor can vary with your activities as you develop skills in those activities. When I began years ago to try to write things, I was agonizingly slow about the process. I felt I had a quick mind but the process of getting what was in my mind down on paper made me feel plain stupid. Whatever I did, it would never come out right. Through a very tedious process of writing and re-writing, it would eventually become passable and that was it. It might take me a week in such cases to write something expository of modest length. Yet, realizing this was a weakness, I worked damned hard to fix it and, through a process of many years and countless hours of effort, I reached a breakthrough point where I could do "walls of text" (in the phrasing of some) in 10-15 minutes and produce quality stuff. I now write very quickly and effectively. But had I tried to do so years ago with my limited abilities at that time, all I would have produced was hash.
So, lighten up and do it in your own style. Yes, speed does matter. But it is only one of many factors that will determine how you do at work or, even more important, at life itself. By all means, apply yourself well - be diligent, hard-working, etc. but do it fast or slow as suits your needs and your own style. At least that is how I view it.
> a life lived non-stop frenetically under the imagined need to speed up all activity in the name of productivity.
I don't think that is quite what the article is suggesting. I think it was reminding us to thinking about the effects of the speed at which you accomplish things. If there is a behavior you are trying to encourage in others (e.g. requesting a code review), focusing on responding quickly can be crucial to helping foster that behavior. Similarly, if there is a communication channel (e.g. Slack vs. email) that is not being adopted, holding yourself back from quick responses to those emails while responding quickly to Slack messages will help foster the transition.
This doesn't mean that you need to do everything as quickly as possible. It does mean that if there is something that you do slowly that you want to improve on, it may be helpful to be aware of the additional mental cost you associate with the activity so that you can compensate for it. Similarly, if you are trying to improve the quality of your writing, focusing on improving the speed of your writing (or even just the speed of your typing) while maintaining the same quality might pay off faster than just focusing on improving quality.
One of the tenets of Extreme Programming is, "Quit when you're tired." Why? Because it's faster.
It's not faster today - if you kept working, you'd presumably get more than zero done. But you'd also create more bugs, and you'd come back more tired tomorrow. Coding is not an assembly line; your brain needs to be fresh.
Taking time to pause, reflect,and think is the same. It's slower in the next minute, maybe in the next hour. But stopping to think and realizing what is the right thing to do can save you days of waste.
My first boss said, "You need to learn when the most productive thing you can do is go look out the window for 15 minutes." After 30 years, it's still good advice.
I'm ignoring your point about work-life balance here. All I'm saying is, too much emphasis on speed slows you down, even only considering work.
As someone who's just finishing nearly four weeks of non-stop work including weekends, I approve of this message.
Or as the people who fight wars for a living say: "slow is smooth, smooth is fast."