Fast-tracking straight into oblivion
Why don’t we fast-track the rotation of the Earth? Just for fun. Just to see what happens.
Why have we never heard of someone fast-tracking her way through pregnancy? Or a plant fast-tracking its way through healthy sprouting? Or someone fast-tracking his way through sleeping? Arnold Schwarzenegger once advised us to “sleep faster” (6h instead of 8h) if we think we don’t have time to do it all 🙂. While this is a funny idea that can spread like a bad virus, actually sleeping well is the key to waking up ready for life. And this is what matters each morning, when we wake up. Although time is a very relative notion, our daily holy number is 1,440 no matter how we spend our daily pool of minutes.
Fast-tracking has transformed from horse racing in the mid 1800s into a business mindset in the early 1960s. The obsession with mass fast-tracking (aka: speeding up or rushing) our way through everything, from learning to living our lives through our experiences, is a mass, mindless, and highly destructive trend with the goal to produce more & faster results, without understanding whether faster is the right approach or not in each situation. Actually, faster is usually the enemy of progress, if not the antidote to it. It is reminiscent of the Orwellian 1984. The cookie-cutter approach to life. That spirit that Apple Computer positioned itself against in 1984 and won. Fast-tracking is the cookie-cutter obsession rejected by human nature itself.
While we are all the same in our most basic universal needs, biology, emotions, and cognitive processes, we share some common traits with some others as far as culture, family, and experiences are concerned, but we are quite unique as far as our personality, stories, and DNA go. Our peculiar and unique idiosyncrasies translate into a real need for bespoke solutions, as opposed to a universal panacea equally applicable to all things and all people.
The individual natural rhythm is not a poison that should be cured with increased speed, but a personal path to progress, very unique to each and every one of us. Speed has nothing to do with quality. If anything, increased speed leads to lower quality. In most car-related stories, speeding up is a shortcut to death. In education, as in medicine, the ideal for each human being is the Personalized Individual Approach, because each person is unique in a way that cannot be replicated or fast-tracked. Our brains tell this story, our actions, our perceptions, everywhere we look, we see things in highly unique ways. Live fast, feel nothing, die soon seems to be the signature of fast-tracking through our lives.
There are situations in which speed can be adjusted to optimize processes, but speed is not the universal panacea for everything life has to offer, nor is it a good solution for everybody. Each person and process has an optimal speed at any given moment and a max. speed for integral and sustainable results, that might change in time, but this process cannot be forced or fast-tracked on command. On the contrary, more often than not, faster is the enemy of good.
I cannot help but wonder: Faster than what? Faster than before? Faster than the sound? Faster than the speed of light? Faster than the competition? Faster for the price of sameness? Algorithmically faster, as in computational? What does fast-tracking have to do with being human? We certainly don’t have to waste our time, which is limited, but fast-tracking through life is not a good solution for optimizing life or making it more meaningful. Maybe building habits and rituals that serve a good life, with the help of discipline, might be one way to optimize time? Maybe discernment can also reduce time-wasting? Maybe a good education can achieve that too?
More often than not, faster leads to underperformance. Poor results generally translate into a waste of resources, from time to energy, to making our dream chasing a pure nightime activity which ends when we wake up in the morning. Yet fast-tracking is still a frequent word combo in our Pavlovian approach to business and life. While speed is important, one cannot speed up a car safely before learning how to drive it properly, or fast-track through learning. The learning process is a step-by-step, consistent effort that takes time, not a quick, fast-track process. The obsession with fast is pandemic. Widespread and blindly applied to everything, with a mindless tendency to dislocate fast from its righteous place, where it produces good results, up into the initial phase of learning, in which fast only yields incomplete results, that are not going to pass the test of time. Fast is a rotten foundation.
In learning, developing fully-fledged competences, which consist of a triad of theoretical skills + guiding values + practical skills, might be a lot more meaningful and important than fast-tracking through learning one-dimensional surface-level skills, which lack not only key guiding principles, but also the time needed to plant and grow the seed of learning a new competence. Nothing is a race in life (except for … races 🙂), although 1,440 is the one key daily number for us all. Rhythm is not the key, although it is not of no importance, but the daily perseverance (aka: the dripping water) produces in time, meaningful and long-lasting results.
Learning fast and furious in bursts is not the key; rather, daily, consistent learning produces long-lasting results. Not speed, but consistency. Doing stupid things faster or smart things slower? Neither is best, but we’ve seen this matter being polarized in this fashion so many times. All competences need to be learned first (theory + value + practice) and further exercised in order to be optimized. The fast-tracking comes in later on, not early on. Then, and only then, time can be compressed. Optimized. Essentialized to increase performance with optimal results.
Let’s see what science has to say about fast-tracking.
The studies on concurrent engineering and schedule compressing show that fast-tracking not only fails to improve but also frequently harms long-term productivity and project success. Why? One poor idea has not one, but many destructive ramifications throughout the process. While intended to speed up delivery, the fast-tracking approach leads to poor quality, error and burnout. A trio of failure born out of a blind chase for More.
1 | F.T. reduces quality and increases costs: fast-track projects are riskier, with a higher likelihood of construction errors, design changes, and poor productivity, often leading to reduced sales and lower operating profits.
2 | F.T. leads to burnout by increasing stress: fast-tracking often implies excessive multitasking and corner-cutting, which are always bad ideas; it also reduces morale and increases turnover. Studies show that multitasking is the equivalent of doing multiple things in parallel, in the worst possible way, as opposed to doing one thing well at a time.
3 | F.T. productivity theater: rushed, monitored environments lead to people performing superficial tasks just to appear busy and productive (e.g., staying “green” on Social Media, etc.), rather than focusing on high-value, meaningful creative work. If they also happen to speak faster than the average, they might pass as very interesting and valuable workers and gain fast access to management positions, which in turn becomes a massive threat to real intelligence and productivity.
4 | A.I. intensity: while A.I. tools can intensify work, leading to faster paces, they can also lead to more hours worked without increasing the productive output. Brain rot and shorter attention spans are the offspring of TikTok and its Skibidi Toilet-like brainless content. Parkinson’s law proves that we will consume all the resources we have at hand to produce the aimed result, and sometimes we’ll take time for granted when we have time-wasting toys at hand. Tail chasing is an energy-consuming activity too, which weakens our brain activity and reduces our neural density, which is a long and polite definition for getting stupid.
5 | The paradox of pace (aka: faster is better): Slowing down for thoughtful, deliberate action, rather than rushing, can actually increase efficiency, reduce errors, and improve long-term sustainability.
Conversely, sustainable and high-performing teams often thrive on a culture of trust and autonomy, which allows for, and often even demands, a slower, more considered approach to complex tasks. Stop tail-chasing, say sayonara to fast-tracking, and hello to life.