Slow Down to Move Faster
On noise, FOMO and expert advice in times when one should trust the process and stick to one's guns.
Many don’t dive into note-taking and knowledge management as profoundly as I do because the process can feel like procrastination—not the TV show binge-watching kind, but the kind where additional effort provides marginal benefits.
We’ve previously discussed the illusion of note-taking competence in this issue.
Some don’t do it because of laziness. Still, many deliberately prevent themselves from going beyond the twenty per cent of the work the famous Pareto principle suggests we stick to.1 What doesn’t move the needle is a waste of time. It’s a school of thought like any other, and as long as it’s not an arrogant overestimation of one’s mental capabilities, I won’t argue with it. Instead, I’ll provide an argument favouring being more realistic and pedantic about one’s notes because I know myself. I tried it, tweaked it, and it works.
Early Reality Check
The phase of my career when I focused on business and functional analysis, an act of “translating” business needs into engineering parlance, forced me to capture vast amounts of siloed and dispersed information to agglomerate, synthesize, and organise it later. Without knowing it, I was managing my clients’ knowledge. Theoretically, we could jokingly call it CKM or Client Knowledge Management, but the world doesn’t need another acronym.
Although there are many ways to skin the cat, my preferred approach to keeping the head above the ever-increasing water level of “knowledge” thrown at me became audio recordings. I’d begin every conversation with stakeholders with a cliché American disclaimer: “You’re under active recording. Everything you say may and will be used against you in the final deliverable.”
Then I’d bring those tapes and coffee back to my office desk and patiently listen to hours of rumbling, skipping through awkward pauses and many of my dumb questions. I decided to experiment with audio because it quickly became apparent that my way of capturing and handling information had vast room for improvement.
Just as it did appear to be a massive waste of time to some of my customers, who were reluctant to pay me for experiencing the same workshop several times, I was unwilling to leave the comfort of taking notes during my typical workshop and sacrifice much time listening to two- to four-hour-long interviews several times.
Yet I trusted the process, and the result was a significant reduction in the number of workshops required to capture the same critical mass of data, which sensibly accelerated my deliveries and, as a byproduct, lowered my clients’ bills.
Slowing down allowed me to move much faster as, from listening to those recordings, I realised several embarrassing things that only became apparent through an out-of-body experience of listening to myself from the third-person perspective:
Many of the questions I was asking had already been answered.
Often, the information provided by the interviewee already gave enough hints, making my question redundant.
I only needed one interview for every business rule, as re-listening would ensure I would never miss anything. If it were recorded, it would be captured. The client could forget or contradict himself, but I wouldn’t.
With every subsequent workshop, the number of times I needed to listen to a recording decreased. Over time, I gradually became much more familiar with the analysed business. This is a great indicator that you’ve captured most, if not all, of it. Every subsequent recording added less and less new information to the stash, so the Pareto rule was still applicable in this circumstance, just in a more efficient way.
Important things to know were often expressed non-verbally. The speaker would emphasize a lot of political tension or muddy waters through giggles, sighs or things like “buckle up, my friend” or “Hah, I hope you have a few years to spare”. So, for those who’d count on meeting summaries by AI, you’ll likely miss this essential non-spoken aspect.
“He knew too much.”
–HAPPY CUSTOMER
This experiment re-confirmed that one shouldn’t be afraid to take a few steps back now and then. Sometimes, what feels like a waste of time is a tremendous time-optimisation strategy.
This is easier said than done. Thinking that we know better than what data shows is characteristic of most human beings2, myself included.
When In Doubt, Trust the Process
“You can’t stand to see your neighbour getting rich.”
— WARREN BUFFETT
Recently, a good friend,
, the CEO and founder of AirAlo, proudly stood back-to-back with his co-founder, arms crossed and smiling at the camera. They’ve just raised a series B round of 60 million US Dollars.Having spent a significant portion of my life in the startup ecosystem trying to build a successful business, I witness such announcements daily. They come from my peers with whom I recently talked about the everyday struggles of building a business. We were in the same boat a couple of months or years ago, drinking the same cheap coffee and wondering how to be scrappy about advertising expenses.
In times like these, I find myself questioning my actions. After all, I’ve never seen Bahadir obsessing about the minutia of note-taking or managing and cleaning his data. It never felt like he and his co-founder were slowing down. They were just moving fast.
Bahadir is one of the best guys on Earth, and his success is 100% deserved. But my egocentric side wonders if I’m doing it all wrong. Have I wasted time with all those slowing downs after all? I know I’ve won battles, but why haven’t I still won a war?
I guess it depends on the yardstick of success you choose. An ilk of social media posts goes along the lines of: “I was bad at English, math and sports. Yet I earn more monthly than all my teachers make yearly.” Such posts attract a lot of eyeballs because they summarise what most people consider to be meaningful–the definition of success. If this is your yardstick, you might feel ups and downs, and it’s a very human thing to do. It’s difficult not to compare your achievements with those you’d like to be.
Whenever I feel this way (which is quite often), I remind myself to trust the process. If I’m bulking, I should embrace the extra fat for a few months. If I’m learning a language, I should ignore the mockery when watching Peppa Pig because that’s all I can handle. Perhaps I should ignore the advice “don’t waste your time” when managing personal knowledge.
PKM is a lot of fun but also a lot of work. It’s a habit, a muscle you use or lose, an investment. But do trust the process. It will yield, even if the yield’s not necessarily hard cash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect