I’m a hopeless fan of Eastern philosophy. One of the thyI love about it is how it embraces contradictions—or rather, things that the Western mind sees as contradictions. One of my favorite examples of this is one I’ve seen exemplified quite often as I push myself to be more productive: “slow is fast, fast is slow”.
The idea is simply that especially when you’re trying to push to get something important done, to rush it is to systematically slow down the process in any number of ways.
If you approach something in a rushed manner, and continue to push it through with a goal of meeting a timeline, several things can happen to make progress happen more slowly:
- There will be push back that will slow down the progress. This is easy to see when you’re working with a group, but even on your own, it’s true. The more important a task is, the more important you know it is that it be done well. As a result, rushing becomes a potential problem—and your subconscious mind will probably resist your own attempts to expedite the process.
- The quality of the work will suffer, which means more time spent correcting errors.
- Completion (the finish line) becomes an illusion, and there will continue to be loose ends discovered that need to be tied up, because the speed didn’t allow them to be addressed
We often approach projects or work with the mindset of needing results now, and needing to do a million things at once. But what we don’t realize is that the more important the results are, the more beneficial it is to take it slow.
So, you may feel like you only want to spend 5 minutes planning, so you can invest the rest of your time getting to work. But turning that 5 minutes into 10 or 15 could save a bunch of time and effort in the future. Go slow, so you can go fast.
