In a perfect world, quality work would preempt speedy work in every case. The world is not perfect. Therefore, speedy work often overrules quality work.
In some instances, speedy work isn’t done because it is preferred to quality work. It is done because it has to do for the time being. Other pressures exist, and they require more attention. A family member is ill or has lost a job. A heart is broken and finds it difficult to do any work, be it quality or speedy. A client needs additional work to be done. Because that work pays the bills, it receives priority, resulting in other work having to be done in haste.
Quality work, though, is the preferred work. It is the work that takes more time and attention. It is the work that demands labor. It is the work that, strangely enough, often results in faster work. The hard work done on one piece of work results in the sudden ease of the next.
Some quality work simply requires time no matter how skilled the worker. Glassblowing, for instance, is not work that can ever be done in haste. Certain temperatures are required. The glass has to be warmed and reshaped, warmed and reshaped. The worker has to endure the heat of the fire in order to do the work, and she does so because she is looking for the reward that will come of it: a perfectly shaped, miniature hummingbird; a multi-colored vase; an abstract, organic sculpture. The work may be exhausting and hot, but that is what the work demands, and the worker who is dedicated to quality over speed doesn’t hesitate to give it.
Image: Andreas Karsten (Creative Commons)
[…] work in more detail at her blog. She poses questions about what constitutes it and asks whether quality is supreme to speed. She also riffs on the idea that one’s work can be fast and good, cheap and good, or fast and […]