It's better to be slow and careful in the right direction than to be fast and careless on the wrong path. Be sure that you are on the right path before you begin to take your steps! - Israelmore Ayivor
Speed is about what's urgent.
In recent years, I have changed my perspective on being busy. I used to associate productivity with busyness and always admired it. I always wanted to be in that state. Additionally, I reinforced this behavior by achieving results and progressing on various tasks. I was pleased that some colleagues had given me the nicknames "problem solver" or "go-to person" for fixing issues. At the end of the day, I was crossing out all items from the tasklist and could also learn from this.
However, I was not dedicating time to reflecting and understanding my goals. I was putting the work that was coming to be as being more important than the one I was considering. I was mainly saying "yes" and very rarely not adding things on my plate. Looking back on this, I only regret not deciding things for myself. It's not a problem in doing things like that as long as I was intentional about it. So, I think it's a good idea to share a principle I've adopted: velocity over speed.
Velocity is about what's important.
Speed is how fast you’re going. Velocity is the speed you’re going in a given direction. Moving fast might look and feel impressive. But it’s useless if you’re not pointed in the right direction. There is no value in winning when the game doesn’t matter to you.
Productive people are the ones that are working on the most important things for them. Great employees are the ones who can communicate and align priorities for both the business and them so that they are aligned. Goals are part of us, and just changing our goals to match the business ones won't be enough. If we do that, we will soon start feeling burnt out.
So what can we do?
The best suggestion would be to find out what you want to do, your dreams and goals, etc. But I know that is a long and arduous process, so let me share other ideas to make things easier.
- Start saying no. The goal is to prioritize things that get us closer to our goals. Saying "no" is a spectrum: it can start with a deflection, accepting but with a new timeframe, accepting by deprioritizing, and so on. What is important is the mental exercise of always being intentional: each time we say "yes," we will increase our speed but not always our velocity.
- Categorize tasks. I like using the Eisenhower Matrix to understand the urgency and importance of tasks. Anything that is urgent and important should be a priority because this moves you the furthest forward. Anything that is neither important nor urgent should be avoided wherever possible.
