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

Agreed.

I also don't respect people that always respond to email immediately because it makes me think they don't have anything important enough to work on that requires unbroken concentration.

As a skydiver - slow and carefully is better, but with that one becomes quicker as one does when practising lots. The number of jumps one can have in a day is limited by aircraft availability rather than packing speed. So of course there are 'professional' packers (say army) who are not constrained by aircraft and say have a week or two to repack a couple of hundred chutes - so different number likely apply. Further ones reserve chute needs to be repacked yearly (or so)- and that's one fella that one does wants the packer (needs a certified packer) to be slow and careful with. Thinking about it aviation (and space) seems to be one area where care comes before speed. So dude I think you are right in calling this out. [edited]

There are actually three lessons here:

* Momentum - To stick with something and finish it, you need to use momentum. Lacking momentum, projects languish. Quoting author Steven Pressfield: "Second only to habit, momentum is a writer’s (or artist’s or entrepreneur’s) mightiest ally in the struggle against Resistance."

* Waiting is painful. That's the point behind the examples in the middle section (waiting for an email reply, waiting for Google, waiting for an employee to finish a task). One thing this article makes me more aware of is the concept of getting impatient with yourself. Part of you is the boss or client that wants things accomplished, and it is sizing up the worker part of you, wondering if it assigns a task whether that task will get done quickly or require a lot of waiting, and there's a relationship to manage there. (Perhaps this dynamic underpins the phenomenon of momentum?)

* Quantity Always Trumps Quality - There's a blog post by Jeff Atwood with this title. The point is, if you want to get better at something, do a lot, and don't worry about quality while you're practicing.

Focusing on "speed" is probably a good mental trick for a couple reasons. First, it validates and acknowledges that we hate to wait. Second, it helps overcome perfectionism and the tendency to think and judge instead of doing and creating, by giving us something to measure that is not about quality but is instead correlated with action and progress.

Speed matters and there are more ways to make things faster other than doing them often.

1. If you are coding ensure that your debugging environment is good (simplest example would be if you write HTML how long does it take to see the output or is it auto-refresh itself int the second monitor when you change the file?).

2. If you are building a project how long does it take to deploy? Do you have CI with a one button push to production environment? If you have then you'll deploy faster and more often there is no overhead. If not you won't want to deploy often due to the overhead of the deploy.

etc.

The most important lesson I've learned about speed is that "design your environment and build for speed and remove the repetitiveness" then you can be fast. You can apply this rule to many things. Blogging, ensure that your blog tool makes it easier (how easy to link stuff, find images, does it really necessary to add an image to all posts, do you FTP upload, or do you just copy&paste and image to the editor, what happens if it crashes, do you lose data or does it just recover?)/

From the comments, I think readers are generally failing to take an opportunistic attitude toward this article. Dig out useful ideas and ignore what doesn't help.

Yes, there are situations where working too quickly will bite you, so you can't always do it. But the key idea here is that by working quickly you reduce your expectations of how costly a new effort is. Then you'll actually start it. Inertia is a powerful adversary. Any weapon you can put on your belt to fight it is worthwhile. I'm keeping this idea.