Speed Matters

I spent a lot of years in places where a "fast" project took two quarters. Now I ship things in days. The difference isn't that I got smarter. I just stopped letting work take as long as it wanted to.

Speed isn't really about doing things quickly. It's about how often you make contact with reality. Every time you ship, reality tells you something you couldn't have guessed from a plan. Move fast and you collect those answers weekly instead of yearly. The person planning the perfect approach is still on their first data point while you're on your tenth.

Speed forces focus

Give a project six months and you'll find six months of work to do. Give it two weeks and something useful happens: the unnecessary parts vanish. There's no time for the meeting about the meeting, no room for the feature nobody asked for. You get pushed down to what actually matters, because that's all that fits.

This isn't an argument for sloppiness. It's an argument for honesty. Most of what we call thoroughness is just discomfort with shipping. The extra month of "research," the fifth round of revisions — usually that's fear wearing a nicer outfit. Commit to moving fast and you can't hide behind it anymore.

Time is the denominator

A week is about 2% of your year. When a "quick" project quietly drags into a quarter, that's a chunk of your year spent on one thing. I find that clarifying. If I can do something in three weeks instead of six, I haven't saved three weeks — I've doubled how fast I learn. Do that across everything and the gap compounds into something nobody catches up to.

So I start before I feel ready and ship before it's clean. I can always make it better. I can't get the time back. Move fast, and you learn faster.