快很重要：为什么干活快比看上去更重要
干活快最显而易见的好处是，你在单位时间内能完成更多事情。但除此之外，还有更深层的意义：如果你干活很快，在你心里，去做一件新事情的“成本”就会变低。这样一来，你就更倾向于多做事。
反之亦然。如果你写一篇博客要花半年，那么当你周日下午坐在公寓里想找点事干时，你大概率不会想到写博客，因为这在心里感觉太“贵”了。
更糟糕的是，因为你写得慢，你就很可能会一直慢下去——理由很简单：学会把一件事做快的唯一方法，就是反反复复地去做。
任何清理得太慢的待办清单都是如此。一种萎靡感会悄然滋生。你不断往里加项，却从未勾掉它们。如果这种事发生得多了，可能有一天你干脆就不再往清单里写东西了。
我注意到，如果我回邮件很快，对方就会给我发更多的邮件。发件人学会了期待回信，而这种期待会促使他们动笔。也就是说，速度本身就把邮件从他们那里“吸”了出来，因为在他们脑子里，这次交流的预期成本很低。他们知道自己的投入会有回报，而且快到触手可及。
如今互联网上的人都知道，服务器响应慢会赶走用户。一个慢吞吞的网站让人感觉像是坏了。它挫伤了访问者的欲望，或许还剥夺了他们本该获得的多巴胺奖励。
谷歌将速度作为一项核心特性是出了名的。他们意识到，如果搜索够快，你就更愿意去搜。因为这会鼓励你不断尝试、获取反馈、然后再试。当一个念头蹦出来时，你知道谷歌就在那儿等着。想法和行动之间没有延迟，也就没有机会让那个“想弄明白点什么”的冲动消失。搜索的预期成本几乎为零，它感觉就像是你大脑的延伸。
在职场中，干活快的员工会得到更多工作，这也是个不争的事实。理应如此。人都是懒惰的，想要节省热量，仅仅是想到要把活儿给一个磨叽的人，就让人精疲力竭。当你考虑把任务给一个慢吞吞的人时，你脑子里会预演一遍可能出现的泥潭；你会预见到数日停滞不前的进展。你会想象一个资源——这个慢腾腾的人——被占用好长一段时间。光是想想就累。而那个利索的同事呢——你会觉得他们的时间很“便宜”，意思是你可以塞给他们一件事，并知道他们很快就能空出来。给他们派活儿不会“耗尽”他们。所以，你会把尽可能多的事情都塞给快手。这挺讽刺的：公司里最有价值的资源——因为他们结项快——反而最容易被消耗。
普遍规律似乎是：消化任务快的系统，会被喂进更多的任务。慢的系统则会饿死。
再举两个小例子。个人如此，组织亦然。如果顾客发现你装裱照片要花两个月，他们就会换一家店。如果贡献者发现你合并代码库的请求（PR）慢如蜗牛，他们就会停止贡献。不响应的系统是凄凉的，就像爬满青苔的建筑，像是一种“死亡提醒”（memento mori）。人们更喜欢生命力的气息，他们会奔向那些能迅速反馈的地方。
就在此时，我用的这个文本编辑器的“撤销”功能不知为何突然变慢了。这简直要了我的命。首先，它让我不想去撤销操作。但它可能还在潜移默化地改变我的工作方式。我觉得“撤销”不可靠了，所以如果我想删掉点东西又觉得以后可能有用，我就得把它拷到文件末尾暂存，就像在过80年代的日子。这一切都是因为“撤销”太慢，慢到像是不存在一样。当“撤销”很快时，它是个神技：任何时候你都能钻进过去，借点东西，然后再嗖地一下钻回来。但现在，它感觉像个死胡同。
开始任何任务所需的“活化能”，很大程度上源于你脑海中对这件事的预设。去跑步本身可能并不累，但如果感觉上很累，如果你脑海中的画面是一场苦差事，那你得消耗极大的意志力才能系上鞋带。
而“慢”似乎对这种脑海中的预设贡献尤大。时间极其宝贵，所以当我们意识到一项任务很慢时，它就被贴上了“昂贵”的标签。每当我们再想做这件事，就会看到那个高昂的代价，然后退缩。
这就是速度重要的原因。
对此的处方应该是：如果你想多做某件事并变得精通——比如写作，或者改Bug——你就应该试着做得更快。
这并不意味着要马马虎虎。它的意思是，逼自己一把，快到你觉得有点“不健康”的地步。这是因为这样一来，任务在你心里的成本会降低；它的活化能会变小。所以你会做得更多。而随着你做得越多（只要你是“刻意”在做），你就会变得越好。最终，你会又快又好。
快是很爽的。如果你是个高产的写作者，你会不断地玩转新创意，而不会陷在一次令人畏惧的苦劳中无法自拔。因为你的待办清单总能清掉，你就会不断想出新东西加进去。随着手头的草稿增多，世界的更多部分会在你眼里变得鲜活。你会感到灵活、能干、熟练，以至于当某件繁重长期的任务落在桌上时，你也不会畏缩。
最后，作为一个免责声明，我得提醒你一个规律：任何写博客劝人不要做某事（X）的人，通常他自己就是做 X 做得最烂的那个人。在公司里，我有一堆拖得让人痛苦的项目，而且我通常是团队里拖欠任务最多的人。至于写作嘛，说实话，这篇小博客我断断续续写了六年。
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.
The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you’re sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you’re probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it’ll feel too expensive.
What’s worse, because you blog slowly, you’re liable to continue blogging slowly—simply because the only way to learn to do something fast is by doing it lots of times.
This is true of any to-do list that gets worked off too slowly. A malaise creeps into it. You keep adding items that you never cross off. If that happens enough, you might one day stop putting stuff onto the list.
I’ve noticed that if I respond to people’s emails quickly, they send me more emails. The sender learns to expect a response, and that expectation spurs them to write. That is, speed itself draws emails out of them, because the projected cost of the exchange in their mind is low. They know they’ll get something for their effort. It’ll happen so fast they can already taste it.
It’s now well known on the web that slow server response times drive users away. A slow website feels broken. It frustrates the goer’s desire. Probably it deprives them of some dopaminergic reward.
Google famously prioritized speed as a feature. They realized that if search is fast, you’re more likely to search. The reason is that it encourages you to try stuff, get feedback, and try again. When a thought occurs to you, you know Google is already there. There is no delay between thought and action, no opportunity to lose the impulse to find something out. The projected cost of googling is nil. It comes to feel like an extension of your own mind.
It is a truism, too, in workplaces, that faster employees get assigned more work. Of course they do. Humans are lazy. They want to preserve calories. And it’s exhausting merely thinking about giving work to someone slow. When you’re thinking about giving work to someone slow, you run through the likely quagmire in your head; you visualize days of halting progress. You imagine a resource—this slow person—tied up for awhile. It’s wearisome, even in the thinking. Whereas the fast teammate—well, their time feels cheap, in the sense that you can give them something and know they’ll be available again soon. You aren’t “using them up” by giving them work. So you route as much as you can through the fast people. It’s ironic: your company’s most valuable resources—because they finish things quickly—are the easiest to consume.
The general rule seems to be: systems which eat items quickly are fed more items. Slow systems starve.
Two more quick examples. What’s true of individual people turns out also to be true of whole organizations. If customers find out that you take two months to frame photos, they’ll go to another frame shop. If contributors discover that you’re slow to merge pull requests, they’ll stop contributing. Unresponsive systems are sad. They’re like buildings grown over with moss. They’re a kind of memento mori. People would rather be reminded of life. They’ll leave for places that get back to them quickly.
Even now, I’m working in a text editor whose undo feature, for whatever reason, has suddenly become slow. It’s killing me. It disinclines me, for one thing, from undoing stuff. But it’s also probably subtly changing the way I work. I feel like I can’t rely on undo. So if I want to delete something but think I might want it later, I’m copying it to the bottom of the file, like it’s the 1980s. All this because undo is so slow that it might as well not exist. Undo, when it’s fast, is an incredible feature; at any moment, you can dip into the past, borrow something, and zip back. But now it feels like a dead end.
Part of the activation energy required to start any task comes from the picture you get in your head when you imagine doing it. It may not be that going for a run is actually costly; but if it feels costly, if the picture in your head looks like a slog, then you will need a bigger expenditure of will to lace up.
Slowness seems to make a special contribution to this picture in our heads. Time is especially valuable. So as we learn that a task is slow, an especial cost accrues to it. Whenever we think of doing the task again, we see how expensive it is, and bail.
That’s why speed matters.
The prescription must be that if there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.
That doesn’t mean be sloppy. But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy. That’s because the task will come to cost less in your mind; it’ll have a lower activation energy. So you’ll do it more. And as you do it more (as long as you’re doing it deliberately), you’ll get better. Eventually you’ll be both fast and good.
Being fast is fun. If you’re a fast writer, you’ll constantly be playing with new ideas. You won’t be bogged down in a single dread effort. And because your to-do list gets worked off, you’ll always be thinking of more stuff to add to it. With more drafts in the works, more of the world will pop alive. You will feel flexible and capable and practiced so that when something demanding and long arrives on your desk, you won’t back down afraid.
Now, as a disclaimer, I should remind you of the rule that anyone writing a blog post advising against X is himself the worst Xer there is. At work, I have a history of painful languished projects, and I usually have the most overdue assignments of anyone on the team. As for writing, well, I have been working on this little blog post, on and off, no joke, for six years.