Speed Wins.

Growing up, restaurants would sometimes have paper placemats with a picture to color and a few crayons. I would move the crayon back and forth across the page as quickly as possible, with very little concern for whether I was staying inside the lines. The goal, as far as I was concerned, was to finish the picture.

My dad would encourage me to slow down, stay inside the lines, and do it right. He was not someone who believed every task needed the same amount of time and attention. If anything, he believed in getting things done quickly. He just also expected them to be done well. At that age, I was much more interested in the first part.

Piano lessons presented a similar problem. I would learn a piece and then push myself to play it faster because I wanted to finish practicing and get outside. I was not simply racing through it and making mistakes along the way. I could get to the point where I played it quickly and cleanly, without missing notes. The problem was that the music was not always supposed to be played that fast. I could technically play the entire piece correctly and still not be playing it particularly well.

Neither of those approaches was ideal, but they explain something about how I have always approached work. My instinct is to get something started, finish it, and move on to whatever comes next. That instinct existed long before I had a job or any reason to think seriously about productivity, and it has served me well in my career. It has also forced me to learn that speed only helps when I understand what I am trying to accomplish. There have certainly been papers, projects, and pieces of professional work where another hour would have materially improved the result. More often, though, another hour would have produced a slightly different version of something that was already good enough.

Learning to work well has meant getting better at recognizing the difference. I do not need much encouragement to move quickly, and I do not think the answer is to slow everything down. I need to know when speed is helping me and when it is causing me to stop before the work is actually ready.

The more time I spend working with other people, the more I notice that a lot of our pace comes down to two judgments. Someone has to decide what should happen next, and someone eventually has to decide when the work is ready to leave their hands. Neither decision requires perfect certainty in most of the work I do, but both can consume far more time than the stakes justify. We can spend days waiting to feel completely sure about a decision we already have enough information to make, or hours polishing work that was ready to go much earlier.

I think the ability to recognize those moments has become one of the more valuable skills in modern work.

Most Decisions Aren’t as Permanent as They Feel

Early in a career, it is understandable to wonder whether every decision is the one your manager would have made. You are learning the company, the people, the expectations, and all the history that nobody thought to explain during your first week. Something that looks straightforward may have a complication you do not know about yet. Asking questions is part of learning how to do the job. As you gain experience, the questions you ask and the thinking behind them should reflect what you have learned.

The point of asking those questions is to build the context you need to make better decisions. Over time, you should begin to understand how the company operates, what your manager tends to prioritize, and which decisions reasonably belong to you. What concerns me is when someone has accumulated that context but still approaches every new situation as if they are starting from zero. An issue comes up, and the next step is to wait for a one-on-one or bring it to the next meeting. The work waits because the person is uncomfortable making the wrong call. Sometimes the answer does require a manager or additional information. Other times, the person already has enough context to make an informed decision, even if they do not have every possible detail. There is a point where gathering more information stops materially changing the answer and starts delaying the decision.

We have an expression around our office: nobody dies. It is a reminder that, in most of the work we do, making a reasonable mistake is not catastrophic. I work in marketing and franchising, which is important context. I would not apply that thinking to treating a patient, designing a bridge, or making a decision where an error could cause irreversible harm. There are consequential decisions in any business, but much of the work I am talking about can be corrected. A presentation can be updated. A campaign can be adjusted. A process can be changed when something is not working.

That should influence how much certainty we need before doing something. If I have enough information to make a reasonable decision, keep the work progressing, and adjust if new information shows that I was wrong, waiting several days to find out whether someone else would have made exactly the same choice may cost more than the mistake I am trying to avoid.

Our CEO has described decision-making in a way that I think captures this well. There is the right decision, the wrong decision, and no decision at all. The wrong decision is usually the one we are most afraid of making, because nobody wants to be responsible for getting something wrong. But making no decision can sometimes be even more costly. A project stalls. Someone else is waiting on you before they can continue their part. A question that could have been resolved earlier becomes another item for the next meeting.

A reasonable decision that turns out to be wrong can still give us something useful. We find out where our thinking was off, make an adjustment, and approach the next situation with more information. Leaving the decision unresolved prevents us from learning any of that. We are still considering the same possibilities with the same uncertainty, except now more time has passed and other work may be waiting behind the decision.

There can be good reasons to wait. We may be waiting on specific information that would materially change the answer. Someone with the necessary expertise may need to review the work, or the decision may require approval from someone else. In those situations, waiting may be a necessary part of making the right decision. Choosing not to pursue something can also be the right decision, as long as we have actually made that choice. Repeatedly deferring something simply because we do not yet feel completely certain is a different problem.

Giving someone ownership of a project or responsibility also means giving them room to make reasonable decisions within it. As a manager, I need to make clear which decisions belong to that person and support reasonable choices even when I would have approached them differently. If those boundaries are unclear, or every difference in approach gets overruled, waiting for direction can become an understandable response. That freedom comes with an expectation that they learn from those decisions. In my experience, there is generally room for someone to make a reasonable call, discover that something needs to change, make the adjustment, and continue moving forward. Making the same mistake again without applying the feedback is harder to accept. The freedom to be wrong is useful because it helps someone develop better judgment. Eventually, there should be evidence that the judgment is improving.

Ownership Requires a Point of View

There will always be certain decisions that require a conversation with someone above me. I may need their perspective, want to confirm that we are aligned, or recognize that the choice affects something outside my responsibilities. Having ownership of my role does not mean I stop asking questions or making sure the right people are involved. It does mean I should have done much of the thinking before I ask someone else to get involved.

There is a meaningful difference between explaining a situation and asking, “What should we do?” and explaining the same situation, sharing what I think the right decision or next step is, and asking whether there is anything I am missing before I proceed. The person I ask may disagree with my recommendation completely. That is fine. I have still given them something to respond to, and the conversation can start with the decision I am proposing rather than requiring them to work through the entire situation from the beginning.

Part of taking responsibility for a role is becoming increasingly capable of handling the decisions within it. The situations will not always repeat themselves exactly, but previous experience and guidance should begin to carry over. Ownership does not mean making every decision independently. It means needing less direction as your judgment develops.

Someone I know who works in a leadership role once described how exhausting constant decision-making could become. At the time, he was engaged, so there were also plenty of wedding decisions waiting outside of work. After spending eight or nine hours in meetings, weighing options, solving problems, and making decisions, he joked that he got paid to make decisions all day and did not want to spend the rest of the evening making more of them.

I think about that as one of the ways an employee can become more valuable to a manager. Leaders have a finite amount of attention, and there are plenty of decisions that genuinely require their perspective, experience, or authority. Someone who can responsibly handle the decisions within their own role preserves more of that attention for the decisions that actually need it. When reasonable decisions continually travel upward, they consume capacity that could be spent elsewhere.

Even when more context is needed, a manager may not be the only person who can provide it. A peer may have dealt with the same situation. Someone on another team may understand the process better. A quick call, a message, or stopping by someone’s office for five minutes may give you the context you need to make the decision confidently instead of waiting until the next scheduled meeting. Finding the right person and getting the information when you need it can keep a simple question from becoming an unnecessary delay.

I have seen routine exceptions become recurring group discussions even when the underlying process is working reasonably well. A situation comes up, several people spend time discussing it, and a direction is given. Later, a related situation brings the conversation back to the group. There may be a legitimate difference that deserves attention, but there should also be some accumulated understanding from the previous discussion. Otherwise, the group keeps doing the work of interpreting each exception, and the person responsible never develops much more independence.

The cost extends beyond the unresolved decision itself. Time that could have gone toward other priorities is spent revisiting something that potentially could have been resolved earlier, while the decision itself remains open until everyone gets together. If a process needs dedicated attention, it may deserve a separate conversation or meeting with the people who can address it. If it needs one answer from one person, there may be a much simpler way to get that answer. Recognizing which kind of conversation is needed is part of the responsibility, too.

This is also where trust develops. When someone uses feedback to make better decisions, it becomes easier to give them more independence. When the same guidance has to be repeated without changing how they approach the work, a leader may begin taking some of that responsibility back.

I work for a privately held company, and one of the advantages I have experienced is our ability to make decisions relatively quickly. We can move forward without putting every reasonable change through several layers of approval. But that freedom only helps when people use it. If decisions within someone’s responsibilities still wait for the next meeting or repeatedly travel upward, the company may have the ability to move quickly without getting the full benefit of it.

Good Enough Is a Professional Skill

A decision can hold up work before it begins, but it can also hold up work that is almost finished. Creative projects are particularly good at producing that second kind of delay because there is rarely a point at which no further improvement is possible. You can keep adjusting a design or reworking an email campaign for as long as you are willing to look at it. Eventually, finishing requires a judgment about whether another revision is worth the time.

Creative work may make that tradeoff especially visible, but it is not limited to marketing or design. A proposal can always be revised again. An analysis can be reviewed one more time. A process can be reconsidered. In almost any role, there is usually something else you could do before deciding the work is finished. The question is whether doing it will meaningfully improve the result.

The time spent on that revision also affects the work that follows it. An extra hour may seem reasonable when I am only considering the task in front of me. Across several projects, those hours begin to change what else gets finished and when. That is part of deciding whether something is good enough: I have to consider the improvement I am making alongside the work I am delaying.

When I interviewed for my initial marketing role at our company, I was asked whether I would rather deliver a project that was 100% perfect but late or 80% of the way there and on time. My answer was 80% and on time. Fortunately, the hiring manager agreed. I still think the question gets at something important, even though I would not treat those percentages as a standard to apply literally to every project.

Some of the remaining work may be essential. A design with incorrect information is not ready just because it looks polished, and a project missing something necessary to function is not complete because the deadline arrived. I need to separate those requirements from preferences that may change the appearance of the work without making it more useful. But a lot of the time we spend refining work goes toward choices whose effect on the outcome is much less clear. An image moves slightly. A font gets a little larger. An email campaign is reworked, reconsidered, and changed back. The differences feel significant because we have spent hours studying them. The person who sees the final version may never notice.

I know there is a risk on the other side because my natural tendency is to move quickly. “Good enough” cannot become an excuse to stop before the work meets the standard it needs to meet. But caring about quality also does not mean every possible improvement deserves the same amount of time. Part of good judgment is knowing when more time will materially improve the outcome and when we are making small adjustments mostly because we are uncomfortable calling something finished.

Knowing when something is good enough to publish is a professional skill. It requires understanding the goal, what the audience will actually see, and which details meaningfully affect the outcome.

A small delay can snowball into a week or a month of accumulated work as the next project waits and new demands arrive. Everyone can be busy the entire time while the queue keeps growing. Knowing when something is ready affects what the rest of the team has time to accomplish.

Speed Has Changed

For much of my career, being fast depended primarily on how quickly I could do the work myself. Experience and practice helped, but there was still a fairly direct relationship between my own time and how quickly the work could get done.

My early uses of AI mostly fit that same pattern. I could get help drafting social content, generate headline ideas, create a starting point for a blog, or make an email clearer. Getting past the blank page saved time, but I was still essentially doing the same work in the same sequence. AI was making individual tasks faster.

The bigger change has come as the capabilities have expanded and I have gotten better at using them. With the right context, access, permissions, and direction, much more of a process can happen without me manually completing every step. There is work involved in setting that up well, especially at the beginning, and the output still needs oversight. But once those systems are working, the gain is no longer just shaving twenty minutes off one task. It can change how much work I am capable of having underway at once and how quickly an entire project progresses.

A social calendar is one example. Producing and managing social content can represent a significant portion of someone’s workload. With enough brand context, examples, expectations, and review built into the process, much more of that work can now be accelerated or automated. The person responsible still needs to understand the brand and know whether the content is any good, but they can direct a volume of work that would previously have required much more individual execution.

I have seen the same thing at a larger scale with projects like building a website. Work that traditionally would have required repeated handoffs between a developer, an agency, an internal technology team, and other partners can now be taken much further before those people need to get involved. Review and final implementation still matter, but those conversations can begin with work that is much closer to finished. The larger point is that these tools can shorten both the time spent doing the work and the time spent waiting between handoffs.

Speed wins is ingrained in our company culture. It is part of how we operate and what is expected of us. What has changed is the standard for what speed looks like. Something I would have considered unusually fast a few years ago may now be the expected timeline for the same kind of work. The bar has moved because the tools have changed what one person can reasonably accomplish and how quickly certain parts of a process can happen.

That does not mean simply using AI makes someone faster. Poorly directed work can create more revisions, more cleanup, and ultimately more work than doing it manually would have required. Some tasks may still be better handled manually, even with thoughtful direction. The advantage comes from learning how to use these tools well enough that they actually expand your capacity rather than simply produce more output.

And as execution gets faster, the other sources of delay become easier to see. If a task that once took three days now takes three hours, but a routine decision still waits two days for someone to make it, the decision has become a much larger part of the timeline. The person doing the work has become faster, but the process around them has barely changed. Getting the full benefit requires looking at those steps too. Does this still need to wait for the weekly meeting? Could the person responsible make the decision if they had clearer expectations? We can improve the tools and shorten individual tasks, but if the work continues to stop at the same unresolved decisions, we have only moved the bottleneck.

Judgment Matters More

In In Parallel, I wrote about how AI allows more work to happen simultaneously. That additional capacity is useful, but it also creates a new responsibility. If I can have more work progressing at the same time and at a faster pace, I also have to become better at making the decisions that allow all of it to continue progressing in the right direction.

The same standard I expect from my team applies to me. If I have already worked through a certain kind of decision, I should be able to use that experience when a related one comes up. The circumstances may be different enough to change the answer, but I should understand what changed and why it matters rather than reconsidering the entire question from the beginning. That becomes increasingly important as my capacity grows. More projects progressing at once also means more moments when one of those projects needs direction from me. If I treat every one of those decisions as completely new, the time I gained through faster execution starts disappearing while everything waits for me to decide what happens next.

That judgment shows up in different ways. Is something good enough for what it needs to accomplish, or does it need more work? Do I already have enough information to make the call, or is there something genuinely important that I still need to know? Does another person need to be involved, and if so, can I bring them enough context and a recommendation to resolve the question quickly? Faster execution creates more opportunities to make those decisions, which also makes the cost of postponing them easier to see.

AI can help there too by acting as a thought partner. I can explain a situation, provide the relevant context, describe the direction I am leaning, and ask it to help me evaluate the tradeoffs or compare the options in front of me. It may surface a risk I had not considered, identify another opportunity, or give me a different way to look at the situation. That can help me arrive at a more informed recommendation more quickly before putting another decision on someone else’s plate.

But that only helps if I can appropriately evaluate what comes back. I still need to understand the company, the people, the goals, and the history well enough to recognize when an answer makes sense and when it overlooks something important. A confident answer from AI can still miss context or lead me toward a conclusion that does not fit the situation. Using it may help me think through the decision faster, but it does not remove my responsibility for making the decision or for the outcome that follows. If I accept the answer simply because it sounds reasonable, I have not improved my judgment. I have just found another way to avoid using it.

The amount of work I can produce matters less if I cannot make the decisions necessary to use it. Speed creates capacity, but judgment determines whether that capacity actually turns into progress. The more I am able to take on, the more important it becomes that I do not become the thing everything else is waiting on.

The Point Is Progress

I do not think someone should arrive in a new role and immediately begin making changes simply to prove they can. There is value in fitting in before trying to stand out. Learn how the company works, understand the brand and its goals, ask the questions that help you build context, and pay attention to the reasoning behind the guidance you receive. That investment early on is what gives you the ability to make better and faster decisions later.

What I would hope to see over time is a change not only in the questions someone asks, but in what they are able to do without asking. Someone who initially needed direction should increasingly be able to explain what they think should happen, make the reasonable decisions that belong to them, and act on those decisions. They may still need input, but the conversation should begin further along. Experience should also make the work itself faster. You should spend less time rebuilding context you already have, become quicker at recognizing what deserves more attention, and get better at knowing when something is ready.

That kind of development benefits more than just the person doing the job. It gives managers more capacity to focus on higher-value decisions that genuinely require their perspective, experience, or authority. It keeps team members from waiting unnecessarily for an answer before they can continue their part. And it allows a team to actually benefit from the time saved by better tools and processes instead of giving that time back through unnecessary delays.

I still have the same instinct that made me race through a piano piece because I wanted to finish practicing and get outside to play football with my friends. My natural tendency is to push projects toward completion quickly. What I have had to learn is how to make that instinct useful: how to recognize when more time will materially improve the result, when another person needs to be involved, and when I already have enough information to make the appropriate decision and act.

As the tools around us allow more work to happen faster, I think that ability becomes even more important. Speed does not mean rushing every decision or lowering the standard. It means reducing the unnecessary time between recognizing what needs to happen and actually doing it. Sometimes that requires slowing down long enough to get the right information or involve the right person. But once I have what I need, the expectation should be to decide, act, and keep the work progressing.

That is what I mean when I say speed wins. It is not speed for the sake of speed. It is the ability to move quickly without losing the judgment required to move in the right direction.

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