Want to be More Productive? Slow Down.

Growing up in the UK in the 1980s, there was a government road safety campaign with the slogan “Speed kills.” This campaign aimed to prevent drivers from speeding. The campaign was hard-hitting, which probably was why it has stuck with me.

Although TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s contrary view: “Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that’s what gets you.” did bring a smile to my face — you can’t argue with that logic.

Yet, there are some things where speed is essential. For me, that is helping a student retrieve their password or doing something my wife asked me to do NOW! Paramedics and doctors attending to critically ill patients and firefighters getting to a fire all require speed.

But for the most part, our work does not need speed. Whether you reply to an email now or in a couple of hours is not going to create an issue (seriously, it’s not!) or responding to your boss’s Teams message this second or in twenty minutes.

We may have conditioned ourselves to believe these things need a speedy response, but they don’t. You will not lose a client because it took you two hours to respond to their email, and your boss will not fire you because it took you twenty minutes to reply to their message.