Think, Then Act

Actually, think some more first.

You’re standing in line at the mall, ready to relax for the evening, when you get a text saying your website’s down. Big deal if the site is your personal blog with a couple hundred pageviews a day — it can wait — but if it’s your day job, and the problem’s yours to fix, it’s a big deal.

In my case, it was due to an odd issue where a page permalink starting with the word “feed” will cause that page to redirect to our RSS feed instead of showing said page. And this time, it’d managed to get the whole site to redirect — or at least that’s how it seemed to me from my rushed iPhone testing. The solution’s simple enough — go change the permalink, flush the cache, and everything’s good. Thanks to the marvels of carrying a computer in our pockets these days, it was something I could do in line and still be ready to eat dinner when our queue number was called.

Rushing worked. I panicked, then saved the day, and still had a relaxing evening. Sure felt good.

That’s one time. But for every time rushing works, there’s plenty more stories of times it doesn’t work. Like the time there’s similar server issues, and hurriedly figure out I can’t fix the issues myself — and so take to Twitter to complain about our CDN and its issues. Not such a good idea, especially when it results in a not-so-friendly call from your boss. Or the other time, when I noticed what must be a major issue in another part of our site, file a bug report with our IT team, then email everyone about it — only to notice 15 minutes later after I’d had time to think that the problem was simply my own confusion.

Rushing kills. You can watch the evening news or just pay attention during your commute to notice that in stark reality. But it also kills us in subtler, slower ways. It’s a disastrous way of life, but one we’re so used to, we don’t know how to live without rushing.

Everything rushes. It’s only normal — expected, even — to rush. Rush through the airport to catch your flight. Skip reading the instructions and license agreement and potential side effects because, well, ain’t nobody got time for that. Vote based on talking points since you definitely don’t have time to research every candidate. Drive the max over the speed limit you can get by with, regardless of safety or fuel efficiency.

We live in a culture that tells us we have to hurry in public, one where media makes us constantly feel behind our peer group. We’d better hustle, or we’ll never be as good as those guys. If you frequent entrepreneurial sites and forums like Hacker News, you’ll know the restless feeling that, if you didn’t invent something as important as Linux or raised a couple multimillion dollar funding rounds before you turn 30, surely you’re a failure.

And then, you’ve got the second-to-second rush of notifications and emails, telling you what you need to be doing right now. This is broken, that needs fixed, the other client is waiting on your email since yesterday and surely replying is more important than whatever you’re doing right now.

It’s insanely hard to calm the storm and simply get stuff done — meaningful stuff done purposefully, not just stuff that’s been pressed upon us by the latest notification. Sure, some things are truly urgent and you need to act on them immediately, but even the aforementioned site problem could have honestly waited until I’d had dinner. That would have likely saved me the heartburn from rushing.

So people tell us to turn off the internet, to block certain sites from our hosts file, to use a separate device or desk for creation and communication and consumption. I’ve even recommended trimming down the number of notifications you get in Issue 3, something I’d still recommend. And yet, none of those things are going to change us, to stop us from rushing. You have to change yourself.

I never sincerely believed driving slower would honestly save fuel — and hey, it’d waste time, so why try? But then, when you’ve had one too many accident affect those closest to you, you start to think it’s time to think more about safety. So I gave up my 120km/hr (75mph) ways, and started driving 90km/hr (56mph, or the normal highway speed limit in Thailand). And, wonder of all wonders, that little change nearly doubled the highway fuel efficiency of my 2012 Toyota Vios.

Not rushing worked. Interesting.

Rashly tweeting my thoughts about my day job’s site’s CDN got me thinking about how little I think before I act these days. We’re so used to answering questions on the fly and posting about whatever’s happening around us in real time that we seldom stop to think if that’s what we really should be saying right then. Think, then speak. That’s not just some fable for last generation, it’s something we need more than ever today.

Sure, you might not be the first person to tweet your brilliant thought about today’s news if you wait a minute to think before posting it. But you’ll likely save yourself a headache — or worse — if you realize that tweet wouldn’t look so good on your profile after all. You’ll save time when you take time to find the best solution for problems instead of rushing to fix them with the quickest solution. You might even save some money on gas. And you might be a tad more honest — at least with yourself — if a recent experiment is correct.

So stop, think, and wait. 99.9% of the things we rush to respond to today aren’t life-threatening emergencies — we’re so busy putting out the millions of tiny flames that we couldn’t possibly put out a big fire if we needed to.

The world will wait an extra minute. It really will. You can’t afford another rushed, non-thought-through tweet — at least I can’t.

Originally published on October 8th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 6

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