Introduction
If you've followed the two previous chapters, you can now (1) organize your work by identifying important tasks and scheduling them, and (2) stay highly focused without constantly getting pulled out of your flow.
Now we'll teach you how to press the pedal with the last part of this method: speed.
There's a quote from Abraham Lincoln I love: "If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening my axe."
What it means is simple: preparation matters as much as - and often more than - execution.
For example, when developers work on truly complex projects, they can spend up to 80% of the time designing the system before writing the first line of code.
So before you start, sharpen your axe.
Picture this: it's 7:30 PM, you're alone in your kitchen, surrounded by grocery bags, and fifteen friends are about to show up for dinner. You have one hour to cook a big meal. Total chaos.
To get through it, you'll obviously:
1, organize: start with passive steps like preheating the oven or boiling water.
2, focus: turn off the TV or put on some music.
But that might not be enough.
What you need next is speed. And it happens in four steps. That's what we called the FAST method: Fundamentals, Automation, Speed, Twenty-Eighty Rule. Sorry for the English - but it gave us an acronym that's easy to remember.
Fundamentals are the basics: building a solid foundation that saves time on every future task. For dinner, that means taking a breath, clearing your counter, and sharpening your knives.
Automation means automating repetitive actions. For dinner, it could be borrowing a blender and an electric whisk from a neighbor instead of doing everything by hand.
Speed is about making manual actions as fast as possible. For example, learning techniques to peel and chop vegetables faster. Some people get this from cooking shows; I watched a lot of YouTube videos to learn the most efficient way to cut each vegetable. Honestly, it's useful knowledge I use almost every day - a great lifetime return on investment. You should do the same.
The last part of FAST is the Twenty-Eighty Rule - the famous Pareto principle. The idea is to do the 20% of effort that delivers 80% of the impact. In our dinner example, that probably means dropping the spicy red-currant sauce and making a simple mayo.
So those are the four pillars of FAST: Fundamentals, Automation, Speed, and Twenty-Eighty. And while they work in the kitchen, they work even better at work.
In this chapter, we'll cover a series of pages for each pillar - starting with fundamentals: set the right working conditions.
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