If you waste less time, you’ll make more stuff without increasing time outlays.
- Find more leverage, you’ll make more stuff in the same amount of time
- Get better & faster at a task, it will cost less, you can do more of it (see below)
- Figure out where anxiety, dawdling, etc. happen and how to bypass it; less wasted time, more fruitful time
But don’t eliminate waste. Or, deity forbid, margin.
This isn’t about optimization and efficiency. There’s plenty of time to recapture from outright mis-use of time and space.
Nor is it about reducing waste to zero. It’s difficult to tell the difference between waste, play, and escaping local maximums in the moment.
Note to self: next time I’m tempted to get up just a little earlier or stick with work just a little later, ask myself what I did that was obviously a foolish use of resources.
Squeeze shortcomings before squeezing schedules.
James Somer, Speed Matters: Why Working Quickly Is More Important Than It Seems
“The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more." (James Somers, Speed Matters: Why Working Quickly Is More Important Than It Seems)
Dan Luu, Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity:
It’s true that the gains from picking the right problem can be greater than the gains from having better tactical execution because the gains from picking the right problem can be unbounded, but it’s also much easier to improve tactical execution and doing so also helps with picking the right problem because having faster execution lets you experiment more quickly, which helps you find the right problem.
Author’s commentary track: this post started because the title was too great of a rhyme to go to waste. I would say that I did not write this with haste. Probably several weeks passed from writing down the turn of phrase to trying to make this a short post suitable for social media to deciding it was really a blog post and wrapping it up.
