I read that somewhere and I like it.
Sometimes I get agitated about wanting to finish a task fast. The more I’m agitated, the harder it is to finish. And a lot of times I will bail out and start something else instead.
Right now I’m doing a task that is slow and boring. (Reconstruct the past for bills received vs payments made). I’m doing it slowly.
First I hand-wrote the plan of action. How am I going to collect the old bills? What will I do with them when I get them? Same for payments. How will I find proof of payment?
Then I did an email search for what I could find. It took a little while to set up a filter, search, label sequence in GMail but I think I have a complete set of emails from the vendor. (Assuming the emails were archived, not deleted). Slow.
Then I downloaded all invoices as PDFs from the vendor to GDrive. Slow. Lots of duplicates, drafts. Confusing but it’s all in one place.
Now I’m building a GSheet with invoice data. It hyperlinks back to the individual PDF files for each invoice. Slow.
There is a second email address to search as well.
It’s slow. But smooth. I didn’t jump in halfway using someone else’s summaries. (I have two of those, which will be useful for quality control. But they aren’t reliable.)
There is a second task (this one my own). I am taking an online class. I came to the end of week three. Realized, doing the assignment, that I didn’t really digest the lessons of previous weeks. So I’m starting over, this time taking notes. Slow. I didn’t go slow before.
Slow the fuck down. Speed comes later. Be solid at every stage.