i(don't) showSpeed

If you liked my previous Chemistry analogy post, I am back again with a math analogy. This post would hit a home run for people who do a job. I ll try to write it in a way so that this would be a reminder to you daily, and you’ll unconsciously thank me. Because I thank my mentor who shared this with me very recently and has stayed with me.

We spend a majority of our prime years working. More often than not, there is an innate expectation from everyone to ‘stay busy’. I saw a very funny instagram reel where a man is just walking fast in the office and the caption said - “hack to make everyone believe you are always busy, walk fast in the office area”. When I was discussing the concept of being busy with my mentor, he shared something profound. I would be paraphrasing a lot of what he said. He asked me the difference between speed and velocity

Well, speed is distance traveled per unit time and velocity is displacement per unit time. He asked me are you missing a key component here? After sacking myself for 2 years preparing for JEE, why did I forget ‘direction’ as the key component? Velocity has direction. Speed dosen’t.

You can very well run in a circle without a direction, with a high speed. But you aren’t going anywhere. Like running as fast as you can but on a reverse escalator.

In your job, I guarantee you, there must have been days where you feel you have done a shit ton of things, but it dosen’t feel productive. Let’s say you were supposed to 10 things in a day and you had 7hrs to do so (yeah, I took an hour off for lunch, I’m a good manager), now your attention and mental energy is demanded by 10 different things, which you try to juggle between and somehow it dosen’t feel you’ve made any progress. On the contrary, let’s say you only have 3 things to do, you can make a lot of progress. What did you do differently? you said no to the things which you felt weren’t worth investing your time in, and prioritized important tasks. Repeating this every single day, you can make gargantuan progress.

That was it. A reminder to myself, I have to focus on velocity and not speed. I need to have a direction to feel productive. Everyday, I have to make progress in the direction I want to go, however small it may be. I don’t want to feel busy all the time doing housekeeping tasks masquerading as work. Such a simple yet profound analogy, right?

Don’t you feel, reading these types of posts, that you already know all of this, but somehow you don’t apply the concepts in your life? I want this post as that whiplash of awareness for you. I am a Product Manager, and I read a blog by a PM named Shreyas Doshi who writes about the LNO framework. He buckets tasks into L (leverage), N(neutral) and (O) overhead every single day as a bedrock for prioritization. Leverage is a list of all those tasks that have asymmetric returns. If you focus your energy on these tasks, they can give you massive returns. (naval would be so proud of me right now). And saying no to things is an added cherry on top. I can share lots of quotes by standing on the shoulders of giants (jobs, buffet, musk), but I’m sure you get the point.

Bottomline, remind yourself to show velocity everyday, not show speed.