Is Productivity just about speed?

Productivity isn’t just about doing everything as fast as you can so you can do more in the same time.

You can pedal the hamster wheel as fast as you like but you’re still pedalling the hamster wheel. And the faster you go the harder it gets to sustain the quality of what you’re doing.

For a lot of what needs to get done this isn’t too much of a problem. For all the administration you need to do to keep the trains running on time in your business “good enough” is usually “good enough”.

If you know what has to happen you can build workflow systems to take care of most, if not all of it behind the scenes. Then you can add speed. As long as the system isn’t so fast that you compromise the end result then you won’t have a problem.

This will free up much time and energy to invest in the work that really matters. For these high-value projects right in the middle of your sweet spot, quality rather than speed becomes much more important.

If you try to get as many of your high-value projects done as fast as you can, quality will be an inevitable casualty.

If your business is in a race to the bottom, quality isn’t something that your clients are particularly interested in and this won’t be a problem.

But if any part of what makes your business stand out in a crowded marketplace is that you bring more skill, focus, experience, thought and care to what you're doing, optimising for pure efficiency with these projects isn’t going to end well.

Quality will take second place. And once you start down that slippery slope the problem will only get worse. You might try to fool yourself that the quality of what you’re doing is still the same but you can only have one priority.

You can’t choose to prioritise speed and quality at the same time.