⚡Speed matters

Working quickly matters less for the minutes it saves than for what it does to the price of starting. If a piece of work is cheap in your own head you begin it more often, so you do far more of it, and doing more of it is how anyone gets good. Slowness turns every task into an event and so makes it rare.

My verdict is half agree: true of first drafts, false of replies.

• Read on the tram to Quay House on Friday 27 June, Dov's last day. Six stops. It is a fast essay about being fast, which is at least consistent.
• His point is not that speed saves time. It is that being quick at something makes it cheap in your own head, so you start it more often, so you do far more of it, so you get better.
• I half agree, and I can say which half.
• The half I take. Starting. My drafts are slow because I polish sentence one before sentence two exists, and so a draft feels expensive and I put it off. That became 🔍 Draft badly on purpose for twenty minutes, and then an experiment.
• The half I leave. He slides from quick drafts to quick everything. A reply sent in one minute trains people to expect the next one in one minute. I dropped inbox zero in April for exactly this reason.
• The larger question, whether doing it properly is sometimes vanity, is not his and I have parked it in 🏔️ On craft versus speed.
• No literature note of its own. It gave me one idea and I used it. It sits beside 📖 James on habit and 💎 A finished small thing teaches more than an unfinished large one.
• 🏛️ William James made the point about cost in 1890, 💬 The great thing, then, in all: what is automatic is cheap, and what is cheap gets done. The twenty-minute draft is a 🧩 Minimum viable habit for a writing day.