Going Fast Isn't the Same as Rushing
Going too fast makes us careless
Right now, you may be rushing to get some work done. Maybe you’re working nights or even weekends just to meet the deadlines.
You’ve been in meetings all day but you still have to check at least 2 boxes from your to-do list. And you’ve got an hour left before a dinner you promised to go but these tasks are going to take longer than that. So what do you do?
You rush.
You frantically start clicking away at Excel or prompting ChatGPT to write that report. You copy and paste as fast as you can. Your eyes dart around as you skim through things. And somehow, you got it done.
And it feels good. It’s tiring but through that herculean effort, you managed to finish not one but two tasks within the hour. You make it to your dinner, your boss values you and you get a good night’s sleep after such a hard day of work.
The next day, motivated and full of caffeine, you sit down to tick more tasks off your never-ending to-do list. It’s a new day and you have no meetings scheduled. It’s looking good.
Then, you get a message.
“Hey, you put in a new paragraph that doesn’t make any sense, you got to re-write that section”
Well, fuck.
It’s okay, it’s a minor thing. You jump on to fix that section real quick. It takes like an hour. Then finally, you go back to tackling that list.
But you get another message.
“Awesome. But the calculations you did don’t support what you said in the report, did you use the right data?”
Ah shit.
Okay, another minor setback. You jump back on, fix that Excel file and again, you go back to your list. No problems. You still have time to get some things done.
Except, you got 5 more messages all regarding the problems that you’ve overlooked. You end up spending most of your day solving them but your to-do list is now even longer.
Now, there’s only one more hour left in the day.
So, what do you do?
You rush.
If it wasn’t obvious. When I say “you”, I really meant me.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m the type of person that goes for speed over quality. If you’ve ever played any kind of game that requires you to be well prepared to fight the boss, I would instead rush and brute force my way through. A lot of times, I would fail but I can be so stubborn that I’ll keep trying until it costs me more time than actually doing it correctly the first time.
It’s one of my weakest traits. Even though I have improved a lot, I still have to actively remind myself to slow down. For some reason, I seem to want to rush all the time.
I was recently reminded of this when I deployed some features haphazardly for a client and it broke the tool. Not only that, it broke while I was working with another client. So I effectively had to do double the work in the same amount of time. Not to mention, the two clients were vastly different. It was like being pulled in two different directions at the same time.
I remember rushing to fix the tool because I still needed to get work done on the current project. Then, I would rush work on the project because I needed to put a fix in for the tool that was currently broken. I alt-tabbed so much that the text on my keyboard wore out. okay, that’s a joke, but it felt like it at the time.
Going fast vs. rushing
There’s a difference between going fast and rushing. I think everyone should work fast. That means going at the speed you can without compromising on quality. It’s when you know exactly what you need to do and just do it as efficiently as possible. In other words, you’re in a flow state.
But the minute you only focus on speed, you’re rushing. You throw caution to the wind, you start sweeping problems under the “fix it later” rug, and you do everything for the sake of speed. Rushing is when speed becomes this false hope you use to avoid spending more effort solving the problem the right way.
You’ve heard the saying “measure twice, cut once”. Well, when you’re rushing, you don’t measure, you just cut. But then, you have to cut a few more times because you didn’t measure. So, it ends up taking longer than if you did it properly the first time. It causes more long term problems.
When I was fixing those problems for my client, I wasn’t deciding which ones mattered most and cutting the rest. I wanted to impress them, so I crammed everything while still trying to work on a project.
What I should have done is be honest with them. Tell them my current capacity and figure out a way forward that respects my time and doesn’t make me rush. Yes, they would get “less” but it would end in a better overall result than trying to do everything at once.
What I do now
Over time, I’ve put blockers in for myself to hedge against this bad habit. Things like phased delivery. Setting a cap on the amount of hours I can spend on a given task. Or even just making a rule that I have to document things as I go. All of these force me to slow down and do things correctly, instead of focusing on speed all the time. I find that documenting my own work, slows me down and make me intentional about the way I am solving things.
I still end up rushing sometimes. Especially when the pressure to deliver gets to me. But I’m not pretending anymore that rushing is the same as going fast.
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