原文：http://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
作者：James Somers
翻譯：Nosee123
進度：翻譯中...
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.
“做得快”顯而易見的好處，就是你每次可以做得更多谍夭。但更重要的是底循，如果你做得快锁右，你就會覺得做事情的成本低贝咙，從而你會傾向于去做更多虑啤。
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.
反過來也是這樣，如果你每寫一篇博客要6個月饱溢。如：在一個周未下午喧伞，你正在公寓里坐著，思考去做點什么事绩郎，你很可能不會去開始寫你的博客潘鲫，因為這時間成本太昂貴了。
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.
更糟糕的是肋杖，因為寫博客是緩慢的溉仑，所以你傾向于持續(xù)緩慢的更新。簡單來說状植，更快地做好一件事的唯一方法浊竟，就是多做這件事。
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.
還有一個事實津畸，任何 To-do List 都是如此緩慢地工作的振定。即使心里莫名的不安，你仍在不斷地往To-do List 添加項目肉拓，但你從沒有劃掉過一個后频。久而久之，也許有一天你不會再把事情列入清單暖途。
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.
我注意到如果我能夠很快的回復(fù)別人的郵件卑惜，則他們會發(fā)送更多的郵件給我。因為發(fā)送郵件的人期望盡快收到回復(fù)驻售，這同時激勵他去繼續(xù)去寫郵件露久。也就是說，速度本身也促進了郵件的來往芋浮，因為他們認(rèn)為這樣的交換成本很低抱环。他們知道他們的努力會得到收獲，而且是很快就有收獲纸巷。
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.
現(xiàn)在網(wǎng)絡(luò)上眾所周知的是，緩慢的服務(wù)器響應(yīng)將無法留住用戶眶痰。因為一個緩慢的網(wǎng)站會讓人感覺崩潰瘤旨，它大大地挫敗了用戶的欲望，甚至影響用戶上網(wǎng)的心情竖伯。
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.
