the art of slowing down to speed up.

Today’s world is all about instant gratification; we don’t want things now we want things handed to us before we even know we need them. Everything has to be now and when that’s not the case we end up feeling like they should be. This leads us to always being in a state of hurry; or at least too often it seems that way.

Think about how quickly days go by, when was the last time you stopped to read a book?

Our world is filled with sound bites and quick blurbs. The net result is, that with all the rushing around we don’t have the time to put the proper level of thought into what we do. Too many projects with knee jerk reactions or half-assed efforts. We need to learn the art of slowing down – the result will be that we speed up.

There are very distinct benefits if you actually manage to slow down:

• You gain the perspective needed to come up with the right solution, as opposed to the first one that comes to mind.
• You don’t rush though a project and most importantly you do it once, with far fewer mistakes.
• By slowing down you can actually ask the questions that need to be asked to solve the problem at hand, as opposed to dealing with the symptoms only.

What does this mean in a digital world? Well, a lot. It is arguable that it is more important than ever to slow down. Essentially everything digital falls into the mentality of instant gratification. If you think back even 10 years, iPhones didn’t exist and texting wasn’t nearly as big as it is today. Why reference this example? Back then, if we wanted to look something up on the web we actually had to sit down to do it. The world didn’t seem quite as focused on needing everything now. Today’s smart phones are a great thing and a benefit all the way around but because of them we keep going at break neck speeds and we forget to slow down.

What does this mean from a digital development point of view? Very often ideas come to us not as refined as we’d like and with very little time to implement them. Unfortunately this leads to quick hack solutions, not nearly enough QA time and not enough thought given to where a solution might be in the future. In other words, not nearly as rosy a picture as you’d like to think. For some campaigns this is not as critical as with others, but too many times it’s not the case and the negative effects can be significant.

How do you solve the potential minefield of digital projects hanging around that can cause grief? The easy solution is to slow down, take a breath, and tackle the problem correctly. It starts from the very beginning. When planning the project, give yourself enough time in development so that you have the time to architect the right solution. A solution that not only is properly thought out, but that also leaves enough time for testing and full documentation, keeping in mind future considerations and uses. This gives you proper finality and execution of the project that you can then potentially reuse or expand on going forward without catastrophic growing pains.

Slowing down will let you actually speed up in the long run because you’re not mired in rushing though executions that really needed extra thought or more clarity. The end result will only be happy clients whose actual needs were not only met but also exceeded.