Sometimes I feel like watching people dig a hole until it starts filling with groundwater. They then start bailing the water out with buckets. They're very busy doing that, so the actual digging work slowly grinds to almost zero. I stand at the edge of the pit, trying to talk to them about electrical pumps and drainage solutions and get yelled at: "I don't have time for your nonsense, can't you see I'm busy bailing water here!?"

It's a good visual story to describe something we all frequently do. We often create our own anxiety.

It's easy to hear "let's slow down a little" as "don't move fast" but it's wrong to interpret that because "slow down" is relative. There is such a thing as "too fast". You want to hear "slow down" just as much as you want you great calls to speed up. When you hear both you should be riding that line of fast but not too fast. It's also good to make sure you have a clear direction. No use in getting nowhere faster.

I'll use another visual analogy. Let's say you and I have a race around the world. I take off running, you move to the drawing board. I laugh as I'm miles ahead, and you go to your workshop, which is in the other direction. The news picks up our little race, and laughs at you as I have such a tremendous lead. I'm half way done, but you come out of your workshop having build a jet. I only get a few more miles before you win the race. The news then laughs at my stupidity and your cleverness, as if it was so obvious all along.

Sometimes to move fast you need to slow down. It takes lots of planning and strategizing to move at extraordinary speeds.

Yep. I feel like this every time a coworker pushes back on a code review “I’m just trying to get this to work”.

Okay but this is the ninth time in a row, and now you’re building on top of all the other half-baked bits, and the confusion from every one of these layering on top of one another is forcing you to do more hacks on hacks on hacks. And then when you finally “get it to work” there will be no way to disentangle this whole mess.