TL;DR: In this post, I’ll share my personal perspective on productivity: Is it better to be fast, or to be comprehensive? While my experiences as a software developer shape much of this discussion, I believe these ideas are relevant across many fields.
The main reason I wrote this post is that I’ve recently reflected on my own performance at work. With the constant pressure of deadlines and the need to close tickets each sprint, I started to question which approach to productivity I should use. After some time contemplating, I’ve identified a few key points about both approaches, and when each might be most appropriate.
Going Fast 🏎️ – The Need for Speed
Why Does This Make Sense? 🤷♂️
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SLA and Performance Metrics
Service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) are common ways to measure productivity. When these metrics are the focus, it’s natural for people to aim to close as many tickets as quickly as possible.
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Deadlines and Quotas
In many roles, especially software development, strict deadlines are the norm. The demands of clients and stakeholders often can’t be pushed back, so delivering solutions quickly is sometimes necessary to meet expectations.
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Freeing Up Time for Other Tasks or Teams
Completing tasks quickly is often seen as a sign of productivity. In environments where teams depend on each other, finishing your work promptly can help others move forward with theirs.
Potential Pitfalls (I think 🤔)
- 🤖 This approach can create a culture where people only do what’s asked, similar to a production line, without considering the broader impact after their part is done.
- 🥷 In software development, focusing solely on speed may look productive—more tickets closed, more stories completed—but without thorough reviews and QA, quickly shipped code can introduce issues that surface later.
- 🩹 The pressure to move fast can lead to short-term fixes or “band-aid” solutions, which may result in technical debt or require rework in future sprints.
Being Comprehensive 🧩 – Striving for Completeness
What Is This About? 🤔
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Mindfulness and Questioning the "Why"
Being mindful when working on tasks means seeking input from relevant people and ensuring alignment. This may require more communication, but it’s essential for effective collaboration. Mindfulness also means respecting your teammates’ work and boundaries, especially when working together on a feature.
Asking “why” decisions are made is equally important. Understanding the reasoning behind choices helps us proceed carefully and make informed decisions, aligning with the team’s goals rather than just our own.
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Ownership
Taking responsibility for your work means ensuring features don’t break existing functionality. Even after deployment and testing, it’s important to consider potential edge cases.
Ownership also involves being aware of how your changes affect the system and anticipating any new behaviors they might introduce.
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Writing and Surfacing Documentations
Beyond meeting acceptance criteria and testing, writing documentation is crucial. It’s easy to overlook documentation, especially as implementations change during review and testing. However, documentation should be part of the acceptance criteria to ensure changes are communicated to users, other developers and non-technical members of the team.
If there are technical debts that are incurred during the development of a feature. Writing documentation helps preserve the context of why such decisions were made in the first place. So when time comes to revisit it, the documentation is updated with the context needed to "pay" the tech debt.
The Potential Pitfalls of Being Comprehensive 🕳️
- 🧐 Trying to address every possible scenario can lead to over-optimization. During research, it’s easy to get sidetracked by information outside the current task’s scope, which can be inefficient.
- 😵💫 Being thorough can sometimes lead to overthinking, resulting in analysis paralysis and hesitation to implement solutions. It’s easy to fall into a rabbit hole of ideas, worrying about potential conflicts.
- 🐌 This approach can be slower and may require multiple iterations before a task is considered complete. Ensuring quality and completeness often means double- and triple-checking your work, which can delay progress on the project board.
So, Which Approach Should I Choose?
For me, using a combination of both approaches would be best. But it depends on the situation.
If you have the time to work on a feature, try to be comprehensive and cover as much ground as possible. Ask questions and seek clarity—this will help you gain a solid understanding of the feature, the product, and the business logic. Strive for completeness without over-engineering your solution. Write documentation for the features you develop, and consider setting up monitoring and telemetry to track their performance.
If you’re working on something urgent, such as a critical bug or incident, prioritize speed and aim to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. However, it’s important to “clean up” afterward: document the steps you took so that others—both technical and non-technical—can understand what happened. Practices like root cause analysis and incident post-mortems are valuable for building a habit of documenting incidents and sharing knowledge.
Ultimately, it’s about choosing the right approach for the situation or even a little mix of both. The key is to quickly assess and decide which method to use for each task. There are no hard rules—just conventions and best practices. Discover what works for you, stick with it while it works, and be willing to adapt it 😉👍.
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