Most people to end up pondering about this question: work fast and not-so-deep or work slow and deep? The right answer is, it depends. But, on most occasions, working fast helps.

If the work is periodic and you have a chance to rectify mistakes, which is the case for most of the work that we do regularly, then it is always better to work fast and not-so-deep and iterate from there on. For example, you have to do some task (which is a weekly or monthly activity) and you are not sure at what depth do you need to do it. A lot of in-depth work will take a lot of time and you don’t want to be spending too much effort on unnecessary depth of work too. So, you don’t understand how much deeply you want to do the work.

In such cases, the best approach is to do it fast and not-so-deep work. You can probably skip a few things and complete it first. If what you’ve done is sufficient, then you will not get any negative feedback and you would’ve worked on the overall goal constructively. But if you’ve missed something, you would’ve got some constructive feedback that you can learn and implement the next time or in the next iteration. This process of trying to do things fast holds true especially for work that is periodic in nature. Fast execution (time) matters in business and it is very helpful to learn to do only what is relevant most of the times.

Most of the decisions and work in our work can be re-done, atleast about 50% of them can be redone. So, it is better to not lose time and iterate on the work fast. Some major benefits in being biased for action are:

• You will know what is relevant and what is not so relevant, so that you’ll not spend time on irrelevant details. So you can go from shallow to deep.
• You can fail fast, learn fast and iterate fast.
• Time is usually more important in business and life than 100% correctness.
• Most decisions and work can be redone and are usually reversible.

So, be biased towards action, it helps.

PS: Listening to non-vocal music usually helps, vocal music disturbs the mind.