5 ms·
tl;dr: When you have plenty of something, you can rationally plan how best to use it, perhaps entertaining and evaluating multiple scenarios - but when somethin
by PeterWhittaker 13y ago
tl;dr: When you have plenty of something, you can rationally plan how best to use it, perhaps entertaining and evaluating multiple scenarios - but when something is scarce, you tend to conserve it, doling it out piecemeal for only the most urgent needs.
If that thing is time, you spend it - you spend your time - on the urgent only, foregoing the important but not urgent. Eventually, important items left undone become emergencies themselves.
Moral of the story: No matter how little time you have, always take some time to plan, to prioritize. Breath. Relax. Make haste slowly. Tend to the important emergencies, and the important non-emergencies, and try to ignore the unimportant emergencies, if you can. And take the time to know the difference.
- lukifer 13y agoGood advice. I've converged on a catchphrase/mantra in recent years: "Slow down to hurry up." Attempting to rush urgent features or fixes can paradoxically make them take longer to finish.
- gaius 13y agoWe have a saying in diving, "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".
- PeterWhittaker 13y agoNot to mention "breathe, remember to breathe". Do you remember the first time that, while properly weighted, you descended effortlessly, just by really exhaling, for real? I know where I was the first time. It's amazing when it works, and you realize just how much air you had been holding in your lungs, without being aware of it. My air consumption dropped after that.
- erbo 13y agoThat's a truism of orbital mechanics: to speed up, you slow down, thereby dropping into a lower orbit where you go faster. This was used as an effective metaphor (along your lines) by John Brunner in The Shockwave Rider.
- dcminter 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente
- bitwize 13y agotl;dr: When you have plenty of something, you can rationally plan how best to use it, perhaps entertaining and evaluating multiple scenarios - but when something is scarce, you tend to conserve it, doling it out piecemeal for only the most urgent needs. In RPGs this is called Too Awesome To Use. When there are only four Hero Drinks in the game -- and you don't have anything like the W Item hack -- they sit there in the bottom of your pack to be used -- maybe -- on the Final Boss or even That One Boss. FFXII did this with ethers.
- vanderZwan 13y agoWhich just goes to show that the underlying mechanism is a very general one. I wonder how many other (to quote Daniel Ariely) "predictably irrational" human behaviours can be explained using this model, and if this insight will lead to better interventions elsewhere.
- sneak 13y agoBreath is a noun, breathe is a verb.