Work Faster Not Smarter

Faster is more productive because it is a multiplier on tasks you spend a lot of time doing (thinking, writing, typing, debugging).

Being faster takes practice and most people don’t try to improve.

The way to be efficient in many problems is to be smarter. Counter-intuitively, being faster helps you learn faster and have better thoughts.

Read Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity From Dan Luu.

See also:

• Speed is undervalued explains how product value changes with speed (time really).
• You can invert everything Dan says with inefficiency—slowness begets more slowness by becoming a habit.
• Surprise plus memory equals learning and being surprised more often (iterating quickly on different solutions) helps you learn more.
• Learning fringe programming languages makes you faster because you see more ways to solve a problem which are often transferable.

Links to this note

• Productivity Is Bounded by Decision Making

  At a certain point, optimizing productivity becomes optimizing for speed of decision making. After all the tools, shortcuts, and hacks, that build up raw speed to get tasks done, you’re left with the cognitive load of decision making. That email you received? It’s a decision disguised as a reply. That Slack message that remains unread? You’re procrastinating because a decision needs to be made that you don’t want to confront.

• Moving Quickly Lowers Activation Energy

  Speed matters because it lowers the activation energy needed to start a task. If tasks feel quick, the perceived cost of doing it is lower and you are more likely to do it. Conversely, if tasks feel like a slog, you are much less likely to do it because the perceived cost will feel higher.

• Remove Low-Velocity Work to Improve Overall Velocity

  In Double your productivity without more work or stress, the author makes the argument that the way to increase overall velocity is to decrease the amount of low-velocity periods of work. That’s because high average velocity (e.g. being “more productive”) is bounded by low-velocity activities over time.