How does rapidity increase our work life balance?

Hi friends, let’s discover how speed might be the key to our work-life balance.

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Speed matters - by James Somers

In his essay, James S. asks why working fast is better.
For him, it starts with the human nature of wanting to preserve calories, impacting our ability to do something new, mainly driven by the energy cost attached to it.
The author argues that if a task is done quickly, its cost seems “lower in mind” and inherently we would be inclined to do more of it.

Time is at the center of James’ theory, for example, once we learn that a task is slow whenever we think of doing it again we look at it as an expensive task.
Hence the prescription of the author: “If there is something we want to do a lot of and get good at we should try to do it faster”.

For that, one of Janes’ advice is to protect the impulse needed to start a task by erasing the delay between thoughts and actions.

Doing the same thing a lot of times is how one can learn to do it fast, which would trigger the following virtuous circle mentioned in the essay:
”The task will come to cost less in our mind, which makes us do it more and as we do it more, we will get better at it”.

When becoming fast and good, we are in a better position to manage our work-life balance as we gain clarity on what to focus on, at work and in life.

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8 Questions to Transform Your Week - by Justin Welsh

In Justin Welsh’s article, work-life balance is described as a “thoughtful process”.
Every Sunday, the author looks at his schedule for the week and checks how it supports what’s truly important to him: His Life.
For the author, most people's weekly schedule is often “crammed with tasks and commitments […] without time for creative work”.

To have a better weekly schedule, Justin W. does two things:

First, “Trimming the fat” by eliminating and delegating tasks helps him make space for urgent and important things, and focus on what’s genuinely critical.
This might sound easy but the author admits “ I waited far too long to delegate anything”.

Second, “Engaging with the world” to nourish creativity by prioritising trips, dinners, middle-of-the-week lunches with friends and time away from a computer screen. Justin W. himself identifies the latter as an “everyday challenge”.
Challenges are part of everyone’s week, and creativity helps to overcome them.
The author described how “engaging with the world” by having fun with his family and friends is the source of his most creative ideas.

Justin’s article expressed how work-life balance is nourished by habits, one of them is about being fast (as described in James’ essay), to decide what must go and what must stay in a weekly schedule.

And there is where the dots connect!

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