If You Want to Speed Up, You Need to Slow Down

This is a life lesson I’ve been learning since I was at least a teenager.

The first time this showed up in my life was as a 12 yr old, at my job in the nearby fruit orchard. One of the tasks we had to do in the Spring was to go around each fruit tree and remove about 80-90% of the green fruit. Trees are dumb - they try to grow so much fruit that when it ripens, the fruit is so heavy that the tree limbs will crack and break off.

The OOPS

I wanted to keep up with the older kids, so between my poor vision, my inexperience, and my haste I often missed clusters of small green fruit hiding amongst the green leaves. One of the other older teens was tasked with checking the work of my younger cousin and me, to ensure we (mostly me) didn’t miss some clusters which could lead to the loss of a branch or even a tree if too much fruit broke it down.

George, the owner, would check the trees, and when he saw a stray cluster he would remind me that, if I slowed down and checked more carefully, I would actually work faster because I would not have to drag my ladder back to a spot and lose time by doing rework.

The Lesson

This same principle applies to software development and to life itself. Slow down, catch mistakes early, when the cost to fix them is small, and you will find yourself going faster - accomplishing more.

Think things through, write some unit tests to ensure the code does what you think it does, so you don't have to come back in three weeks or three months and spend three hours (or days)getting back into the mindset of that chunk of code.

Read the recipe and ensure you have all the ingredients beforehand, so you don't have to hie off to the store mid-mix to grab the missing spice.

By slowing down and being careful and thorough, we often get to complete faster than we do if we just gun it.