Practice
Craft
On working slowly
I am not fast. I have made peace with it, partly because the work is better and partly because the alternative was going to end badly. But I want to be precise about what slow actually means, because it is usually described dishonestly.
Slow is not the same as unhurried
The romantic version of slow practice involves long walks and waiting for ideas. That is not what happens. What happens is that the same problem gets attacked four times in four different ways, three of which are thrown away, and the throwing away is the expensive part.
The hours are the same. The difference is how many of them produce something the client ever sees.
Charge for the discards or stop making them
For two years I worked this way and priced as though I did not, which is a straightforward route to resentment. The fix was not to work faster. It was to stop presenting fixed-price quotes built on an optimistic count of rounds, and to be explicit that exploration is the deliverable and revisions are not a failure state.
Some clients do not want that and should go elsewhere. That is a feature.
Where speed genuinely matters
Responding. I am slow at making and fast at replying, and clients experience the second one far more often than the first. A same-day answer to a question buys an enormous amount of patience for a two-week silence on the actual work. The reverse — fast work, slow replies — makes people feel abandoned no matter how good the output is.
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