The fastest pit stop in Formula One history is just 1.82 seconds.
Changing four tires in under two seconds is no easy feat. There are over twenty members of a F1 pit crew. Each one is tasked with a small piece of the tightly choreographed routine. When the difference between winning and losing can be less than a thousandth of a second, a slow pit stop can ruin a race.
If speed matters anywhere, it’s here.
But when Formula One pit crews practice, they don’t focus on speed.
They have one goal: being “smooth.”
Many crews opt not to time their practice pit stops at all. They only care about making sure that each element is as smooth as possible. Trimming every piece of extraneous movement or effort.
They know that if they can get everything to happen smoothly, the speed will come.
In business, we love to focus on speed, and it’s why we get so little done.
My favorite visual representation of strategic thinking, shamelessly copied from Greg McKeown’s Essentialism
Make Haste Slowly
Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, had no difficulty getting things done. During his 41 year reign, he nearly doubled the size of the Roman empire.
But Augustus hated speed. He believed so thoroughly in the idea of slow progress that he minted coins with the motto festina lente - Latin for “make haste slowly.”
It might seem contradictory, but often the only way to get things done quickly is to slow things down.
Some of the reasons for this are obvious. You only have so much time in the day. Even more important, you only have so much energy to put toward getting things done.
But marketers are ambitious folk. We try to find more time in the day. We work late into the night. We don’t like to let people down, so when we’re asked for help, we usually agree.
But there’s one aspect of having too many projects that’s even more important than your energy levels.
And that’s overhead.
When resourcing, we often forget the overhead every additional project puts on your plate.
The meetings. The emails. The task switching. The bureaucracy of approvals.
All of that time quickly adds up. (On smaller projects, you might even spend more time on the overhead than the task.)
The temptation to get started on every project as soon as it lands on your desk is strong. But if you don't balance the overhead, you'll just end up with all of your projects in various states of unfinished.