Speed Kills (Your Productivity) by Dave Crenshaw

Audio-Only Link (MP3): Speed Kills (Your Productivity)

Text transcript:

Hi, I’m Dave Crenshaw, author of the Myth of Multitasking and I want to share with you the principle that speed kills–not in the way that you think, although that is an important issue–but it kills your productivity.

Here’s a story that happened to me not too long ago: I was speeding. I was speeding in a car, I was trying to make up lost time because I hadn’t prepared properly, I had left something important that I needed for a meeting and I rushed back to try to get it. Well, as you could imagine, pretty soon a police officer got behind me, the red and blue lights were flashing, and I had to pull over and he gave me a ticket.

The cost was greater than just the cost of the speeding ticket. It was a cost in time and it was greater than just him pulling me over. I tried to save five minutes, but it ended up taking me about 15 minutes for him to sit there and give me the ticket, but the cost didn’t end there. I had to go to traffic school to make up for the ticket and that cost me three hours.

Think about the time interest rate on that. I tried to save five minutes and ended up spending more than a 180 minutes; that is a brutal interest rate and this happens to all of us when we try to speed through our day, when we don’t pay attention to an e-mail, don’t give it the credit it deserves, we give a bad answer, and guess what? We have to send another one to explain or maybe even have to have a phone call to apologize to someone because we came across as rude. Maybe we would have to do that when someone is talking to us and we don’t pay attention to them trying to give them a quick answer because we want to fly through things. Speed kills your productivity; not only will you make mistakes, but you’re going to have to retrace your steps.

So, here are three things that you can do: stop, look, and listen.

Stop and pay attention when you are speeding. Sometimes when I eat breakfast with my family I just have the tendency to eat fast and my wife will turn to me and say, “Slow down. It’s okay. You are not in a race.” Well, sometimes we just need to stop and catch ourselves when we are in that speed mode.

Number two: Look. Look forward in your calendar and see where you can budget time to make up for lost time. If you find yourself trying to rush through things because there isn’t enough time, then you need to look at your calendar and find a space where you can schedule time to deal with that incomplete project or task.

And number three: listen to your gut. When you are scheduling things in your calendar, listen to your gut when it tells you that you are over scheduling yourself because over scheduling leads to speeding. You will try to overcompensate because you are trying to cram so much into 60 minutes.

Remember, happiness comes from spending five minutes less than what you have and misery comes from spending five minutes more than what you have.