Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

Summary

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more. The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you're sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you're probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it'll feel too expensive. What's worse, because you blog slowly, you're liable to continue blogging slowly—simply because the only way to learn to do something fast is by doing it lots of times. This is true of any to-do list that gets worked off too slowly. A malaise creeps into it. You keep adding items that you never cross off. If that happens enough, you might one day stop putting stuff onto the list. * * * I've noticed that if I respond to people's emails quickly, they send me more emails. The sender learns to expect a response, and that expectation spurs them to write. That is, speed itself draws emails out of them, because the projected cost of the exchange in their mind is low. They know they'll get something for their effort. It'll happen so fast they can already taste it. It's now well known on the web that slow server response times drive users away. A slow website feels broken. It frustrates the goer's desire. Probably it deprives them of some dopaminergic reward. Google famously prioritized speed as a feature. They realized that if search is fast, you're more likely to search. The reason is that it encourages you to try stuff, get feedback, and try again. When a thought occurs to you, you know Google is already there. There is no delay between thought and action, no opportunity to lose the impulse to find something out. The projected cost of googling is nil. It comes to feel like an extension of your own mind. It is a truism, too, in workplaces, that faster employees get assigned ...