I found a new framework I love for thinking about speed and how it relates to work.
In this video, Alex Hormozi is talking about overcoming procrastination and says that one of his company’s core values is, “speed is king.” You’d be excused for rolling your eyes – a lot of companies say stuff like that to justify a frantic culture and inability to prioritize. It gets old.
But he takes it in a different direction.
“It’s not what a lot of people think,” he says. “It’s not about being impatient. It’s not about trying to get a hundred things done. It’s about knowing how to get things done that matter…”
Here’s framework I love: He goes on to define power as the gap between thoughts becoming reality.
So an all-powerful, omnipotent being would think things into reality immediately, and at the other end of the spectrum you’d have someone who was completely powerless – unable to turn a thought into reality no matter how much time they were given.
We are typically somewhere in between, and (ideally) should be working our way left on that line.
I love this because it seems both simple and universally true. Across all times, and in all situations, the person with the most power is the one who is able to transform their ideas into reality the fastest. And over the course of your career, a way to measure progress or mastery in your craft is to assess whether you’re moving left on this scale.
I also like it because it puts useful guardrails on the old adage of “move fast and break things.”
“Speed isn’t doing things fast,” Hormozi says. “It’s basically just not being distracted by other shit that doesn’t matter. It’s being able to prioritize.”
Which brings me to the last reason I love this framework – it lends so much more weight to the importance of prioritizing, avoiding multi-tasking, and saying “no” to more.
Multi-Tasking Drains Your Power
I’ve been studying manufacturing recently. It’s a field that values precise thinking, and out of necessity, they’ve gotten good at analyzing systems, looking for bottlenecks, and removing them – something more knowledge-work companies should learn from.
One of the key thinkers in the space was a man named Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt who came up with something called The Theory of Constraints.
One of the keys to that theory is the idea that multi-tasking is bad. He liked to show this using the example below:
Imagine you have 3 projects that need to get done, and you can do them either sequentially, or you can multi-task between them. Depending on your choice, your timeline will look like one of these.
On its own, this graphic does a great job showing two things:
- Multi-tasking significantly delays any individual project’s completion, which is a problem because the work isn’t useful until it’s done.
- Because you incur a slight switching cost every time you change focus, all three projects ultimately take longer to finish overall.
But when we layer on Hormozi’s idea-to-reality principle, we see that what’s really going on here is that multi-tasking is tangibly decreasing your power. It’s moving your further to the right on the idea-reality line.
A lot of people talk about the importance of focus, or of being able to say no. But they I still say yes to too much. Focus feels like a nice-to-have. The first thing on the chopping block when things get tough.
But power? No one in their right mind would knowingly undermine their own power, or the power of the organization they work for.
This applies to both big-picture projects, and the way you spend your time day-to-day, hour-to-hour.