Letter the third

A Letter on Hurry, and What It Costs

Dear reader,

I want to make a distinction in this letter that I find useful and that very few people make for themselves. It is the difference between speed and hurry.

Speed is a property of the work. A task takes twenty minutes or two hours; a message gets a reply today or next week. Speed can be read off a clock, and some days simply ask for a lot of it.

Hurry is a property of the person. It is a state, and mostly a bodily one: the shoulders a little raised, the breath a little shallow, the jaw set, the sense of being already late for the next thing while still in the middle of this one. Hurry can be present at any speed. It is entirely possible to be hurried while doing almost nothing, and it is possible, though it takes practice, to work fast without being hurried at all.

The reason the distinction matters is that hurry is expensive and speed is not. Speed costs effort, which is what effort is for. Hurry costs something else. People in a hurried state make more small mistakes, read the same sentence twice, snap at whoever is nearest, and finish the day with the odd feeling of having run all day and arrived nowhere. Researchers who have looked at how people perform under time pressure describe a point beyond which the pressure stops helping and starts costing, and that point tends to arrive sooner than the person expects.

So the first thing I would suggest is just to learn to feel the difference, in your own body, between the two. Where does hurry sit in you? For many it is the shoulders. For some it is the stomach, or the hands. Once you know where it lives, you can check, in the middle of a fast morning, whether what you are feeling is speed, which is fine, or hurry, which is not required and is quietly charging you for the privilege.

The second thing is a small daily practice that I have seen a number of people take up with some benefit. Pick one thing you do every day, something short and unimportant, and do it at the pace you would use on a day off. Making coffee. Walking from the car to the building. Washing a single plate. Not slowly for its own sake; at an unhurried pace, which is a different thing. The task takes perhaps a minute longer. What it does is remind the body, once a day, what the unhurried state feels like, so that the state is available later, when it is actually needed.

Some people notice, after a few weeks of this, that they can switch to that pace on demand, briefly, in the middle of a busy afternoon, and that the work does not slow down when they do. Often it goes better. That is the whole point: the slow minute is not a rest from the work, it is a calibration for it.

I should add that hurry is not always a personal habit. Sometimes it is the honest shape of a situation: too much to do, too few hands, a manager who confuses urgency with importance. A letter cannot fix that, and I would not insult you by pretending otherwise. But even inside a situation like that, the distinction holds. You can be asked to be fast. Nobody can actually require you to be hurried; that part is yours, and it is the part that can be set down.

Last, the thing I say in every letter. If the hurried state has stopped switching off, if it is there at the weekend and at night and in the shower, then it has become something other than a habit of work, and the right place to take it is to someone qualified near you, in person. Letters are for the everyday version.

With regards from the fifth floor,the practice

That is the last of the three. Back to the pile, or read about who writes these and why.