Why Rushing Makes You Less Productive (And Costs You Time)

(Note: This is a formatted and slightly edited, AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through. Please excuse any spelling, grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

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Fast is not the same thing as forward. You can move at top speed all day and still end up circling back to the same task tomorrow. That’s what I’m getting into today. Two ways rushing is costing you. The first one is a bit obvious, but the second is one where most solopreneurs didn’t even realize connected back to rushing

Are you tired of competing priorities, a messy task list, and constantly feeling behind? Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, and I help overwhelmed solopreneurs embrace faith-led productivity through simple systems for life, home, and business. So if you’re ready to clarify your priorities, honor your energy, and feel accomplished every single day, welcome to the Cheers to Better Systems podcast.

All right, so let’s get into this episode. If you’re a solopreneur, your default fix when the week gets full is probably to move faster. You want to get more done in less time, which is what Lucy says she helps me with. You want to catch up and get ahead, and finally feel on top of it.

So when I tell you that I actually want you to slow down, I already know that it sounds like it’s advice from someone who doesn’t know, who clearly doesn’t know everything that you have on your plate. And listen, I am not just talking about just doing less here. Like, I’m not just saying to just drop everything and do less.

I’m also not talking about resting more. I actually cover the topic of resting on episode 133. Today, I’m talking about the speed at which you’re doing things at, as in you’re rushing and you’re speeding through tasks trying to get them done, which is completely different than the latter But before we get into it, if you’re already thinking you don’t have time to slow down, that’s exactly what my free workshop is for because a lot of the rushing comes from not actually being able to see what’s on your plate.

It’s all floating around in your head. It feels endless, so you speed up to try to outrun all of the tasks that keep following you on your to-do list. And so my free workshop, Three Steps to Say Goodbye to Task Overload, gets it all out of your head in about an hour or less because that is one of the steps that we work through and then you’ll finally get to see what you’re working with instead of guessing and you can actually make a plan for it.

It’s free so go head to the show notes to sign up. All right. Now let’s get into what we’re going to be talking about today because I really don’t want you to be rushing. However, I know the feeling because sometimes I do it too. Like most recently I have been going through my products. I’ve been going through all of my offers which I’ve been in business for several years, at least five years now and I have built a lot of courses and templates and I’ve had memberships, so there’s that extra content and I’ve had a lot of stuff that is still genuinely good.

But I’ve had multiple years creating this content and now I’m going back through them, I’m checking the quality, I’m looking to see what needs updating and this has been months in the making. I have another episode where I talked about how I did this process and I retired a bunch of products, but now I’m going through it with the products that I decided to keep and that process in itself is also a lot.

That backlog is still a lot. And so when you see a list that long it, it can go two ways which is what happened to me. It’s you either freeze and you do nothing or you rush and you get through as much as you can. So yeah, I for a little bit froze, like I didn’t know what to do. I was so overwhelmed. I was spiraling a little bit.

and then I was like, “You know what? Let me just, let me just work through it. Let me just go and go and go and go and go and go.” So I started to rush a little bit and I started to move through them trying to do all of it and then I started spiraling again and making a little bit mistakes or going back and be like, “Oh, I should’ve done this earlier.

Oh, I should’ve done this. Oh, whew.” So I had to stop and actually look to see what was going on, what my plan was, what I was going to do, what were my priorities. Like, there was so much that I had to figure out. And here is what I found when I finally took a breath and paused. Like I mentioned, I had made some mistakes, and rushing through trying to get all of those products updated, it did not get me further ahead.

It really just got me kind of a shorter list, or it looked like a shorter list, but I had a bunch of problems now. So even though I thought I had gotten some of the things done, I was still gonna have to go back and redo some of it, which brings me to the first cost of rushing. Rushing makes you redo things.

You are not saving time when you rush. You’re technically just borrowing it. Like, that’s what you’re doing. You move fast, right? You move fast and you’re thinking you’re saving time. “Yay,” you know, “I’m saving time because I’m going faster, and you’re working through this faster, and I’m getting to cross things off faster.”

But then once you’re done, maybe it’s right away, maybe it’s a few hours later, a few days, a few weeks, then you spend time, more time, going back to fix what you rushed through. Why? Because rushing doesn’t leave room for you to catch what you missed. Okay, so if you picture yourself literally rushing through, you know, it’s kind of like the phrase of, “Slow down and smell the roses.”

If you’re rushing, you don’t even notice the roses on the side. You don’t notice the birds flying. You don’t notice anything. You don’t notice that, “Oh, I missed this. I skipped over this very crucial step because I was trying to work so fast.” So that is where mistakes come in, and sometimes they’re evident.

Sometimes you can see them. Sometimes you catch them right away, and sometimes you don’t catch it until you receive that customer support ticket saying, “Hey, I tried to go and buy your offer and the link wasn’t working.” Because you skipped the part, because you rushed through, you skipped the part where you go back and make sure that you updated that link.

So even though you saved, kind of, quote-unquote, you “saved” two minutes at the time that you did it, now you’re actually spending, like, 20 minutes later to go back and fix it. In Proverbs 19:2 it says, “Enthusiasm without knowledge is no good. Haste makes mistakes.” It literally says it in the Bible, “Haste makes mistakes.”

And when I first read this and it first came up for me, it was through a moment in my time when me and my husband, both individually and separately, were making mistakes in our businesses because we were rushing, because we felt like we had a lot going on. We felt like we had a lot to do. You know, bills were also coming up and we’re like, “Oh, my gosh, we need to figure out how to make more money and pay the bills this month,” and we started to rush, and rush, and rush, and rush, and rush.

And that goes off, you know, on a whole different topic and conversation around trusting God. But in this example, it says, “Haste makes mistakes.” Like, we’re going to make mistakes if we are rushing through things. And not to say that this is always the case, but it definitely makes you more prone to making them.

And if it were me, like, I would not want to make mistakes. And I know sometimes mistakes are inevitable because, you know, we’re all human and we’re learning, but rushing- Is gonna cause more of them. So I would rather really try not to rush. And I want you to also reflect on this. I want you to reflect on maybe a recent time when you rushed through something and see, did you find mistakes afterwards?

Like, maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. I don’t know. I don’t know your life and your circumstances. But reflecting will tell you something. It will tell you whether, like, oh, actually I don’t remember a time when I rushed, and I did or did not make mistakes. Or you’re gonna be like, “Yep, I have a very clear, vivid memory of the time that I rushed, and then, yep, you’re right, Lucy, I did have to go back and fix some mistakes that I made.”

And it’s all information for us. It’s all good for us to slow down and reflect because that tells us what is, right? Like, it is what it is. That’s something I say all the time. Like, it is what it is. I can’t change it. I can’t change the past. I can’t change the time when I rushed and made a mistake, but now I know that I do it, and so I can do something about it.

So rushing leads to mistakes, I feel like is an obvious thing that some of us know happens, and we still do it anyways. Ugh. But there’s another thing that I think kinda slips past us a little bit more, and it’s the fact that you can’t hear when you’re going at top speed. And what I specifically mean here is you cannot hear God’s voice when you’re rushing.

Sometimes you can hear yourself, like your own thoughts, because your thoughts can get loud, and those thoughts might not be the best thoughts, especially if you’re in this moment of anxiousness, if you’re spiraling, if you’re worried, if you’re in fear. 1 Peter 5:8 says, “Stay alert. Watch out for your great enemy, the devil.

He prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” Like, the enemy is coming to get you in those weak moments, okay? And based on what I have read and learned, you know, I’m still considering myself more of a baby, toddler Christian, you know, have not read the whole Bible, but it’s a habit I’ve been doing daily.

God’s voice is low. God’s voice, I’ve heard, is more of a whisper. It’s … God is not going to speak above the other voices in your head. So if you feel a voice, like I have explained to my husband, sometimes I hear this nagging voice, “Oh, you should do it, do it, do it, do it, do it.” For me, that’s the enemy. Like, you want me to do something so bad, like, get out.

Get out of my head. And there’s sometimes where it’s like that doesn’t feel like a bad idea, but the voice is a little bit louder. And if God’s voice is lower, then I’m not gonna be able to hear it over my loud thoughts. You know, it’s just like when you’re in the crowd. If you picture s- yourself being in a crowd, you can hear the person directly in front of you, but if they’re talking low, then you’re gonna hear the person behind them who’s talking louder above that person, and that’s God.

That’s basically what it is. So if you’re rushing through, if you’re rushing, right, you’re running, and you’re trying to hear, it is really hard for you to focus. It is really hard for you to hear His voice because you need to be in stillness. Be in stillness and quietness, and really try to focus on your thoughts.

And when we’re rushing, it feels so crazy to think about just, like, completely stopping and, like, slowing down and doing nothing. Or, yeah, completely stopping and just doing nothing. Like, I like to close my eyes. I try to clear all my, my thoughts. I take some deep breaths. And I just, like, try to picture nothing and try to quiet all the voices, and then I just try to see wha- what happens.

But sometimes that feels hard, I know But those are also the moments where I hear His voice better, and His plans are better than my plans, so I’m gonna listen to Him. If I feel like I heard Him tell me something, I would rather listen to His voice over my voice, but I can’t do that if I’m rushing. So we need to slow down to be able to hear God’s voice, even in the middle of the chaos, even in the middle of all of the tasks that we’re trying to get done.

So an action step that you can do here, like, if you are finding yourself in these moments of rushing, and you do want … You’re like, “I want to hear God’s voice. I, I don’t know that I hear it, but I want to,” then I want you to intentionally build in one pause when you’re not doing anything. It doesn’t even have to be long.

Sometimes a minute is all it takes. It just needs to be quiet, and it needs to be intentional. In the last episode, I actually talk about how to make time with God even when your schedule is full. So you can take some of those tips along with this one to be able to combine, um, finding the time and making the time with the stillness.

But like I said, it doesn’t even have to be long. Sometimes a few minutes is good enough, and those few minutes of stillness will beat however long you were rushing every single time. And also, we’re a podcast about systems, but this is also a reason why your system’s on sick, the rushing. Setting up a system costs time now to save time later, We know that. That’s why so many people don’t wanna do it. That’s why sometimes I push off the task of doing it, because I’m always having to create new systems for myself. I think of a new project, “Oh, I need a system. Oh, I don’t have a system. Oh, maybe I should do something else.” Setting up a system costs time now to save time later, and when you’re rushing, now is the exact thing that you don’t have.

So there’s a cycle that happens. You keep doing it manually anyways, which keeps you rushing, which keeps you too busy to set up the system. That’s a cycle. Or you sit down, and you actually create the system. But then you rush through that too. You rush through the system-making process, so you either half finish it or you, you just never really take the time to set it up properly in a way that you’ll actually use it.

And two weeks later, you’re kind of back using, you’re back to using sticky notes because you try making a system, you technically say, are saying to yourself like, “Look, I made a system, it just didn’t work.” So now you’re giving yourself evidence, quote, “evidence,” that the systems just don’t work for you, that they’re just not for you, that you’re just not a systems person.

Like, I’ve heard it all. We have other episodes on, like, the things we s- we tell ourselves. But it’s not because the system doesn’t work, it’s because you didn’t take the time, because you were rushing through it when you created it, to really set it up in a way that’s gonna work for you and your business and your brain.

You didn’t slow down long enough to finish the system. So we don’t want to rush through anything, and we don’t wanna rush through our systems when we’re setting up these systems, right? And listen, you don’t fix all of this rushing, you don’t fix all of this by just finding a better system or a better tool.

Like, I’ve talked about, like I’ve said multiple times now, you fix it by slowing down long enough to see what you’re actually working with. Okay? You have to be in stillness. You have to slow down. You have to be intentional about being like, “What is it that is actually on my plate? What do I need to do?”

And that’s the whole reason why I made the free workshop that I mentioned earlier in this episode, the same one that is linked in the show notes. It’s not a system, but it’s the step before the system. We need to get everything out of your head first, so that way you’re looking at a very real list of everything that’s on your plate, everything that you have going on, instead of a version that you think.

“I think I have to do this,” or, “I know I need to do this, but I don’t know by when. Oh, this, this is, you know, a task that’s only going to take 15 minutes, but every time I do it, somehow it takes me a two, two hours and I don’t know why.” So this workshop is going to help you see why your list keeps growing instead of going down, and you’ll figure out what’s actually a project versus a simple task.

Because a lot of what feels overwhelming is really one big thing that never got broken down. And once you can see it, you can take it one step at a time, which is a whole lot easier to do when you’re not rushing, because when you’re rushing, you’re trying to take leaps forward. And trust me, I am the queen of trying to take leaps forward.

You can ask my husband. However, we have to slow down and take one intentional step at a time. So here is what I want you to take with you. Rushing doesn’t save you time. It borrows time, which you’ll pay back later by fixing what you moved too fast through the first time. And when you’re moving that fast, you can’t hear anything.

You can’t hear God. You can’t hear the quiet nudge that’s telling you that the thing that you’re working on isn’t the thing that matters. And it’s also the reason why your systems never stick, not because systems don’t work for you, but because you never slowed down long enough to finish one, to create one that genuinely is going to work the way that you work.

So this week, just catch yourself, and when you notice that you’re rushing, don’t push through it. Don’t continue. Don’t continue rushing. Slow all the way down on purpose. It might feel uncomfortable. It’s gonna maybe go against what your nervous system is used to doing, but slow down, even for a minute, to avoid those mistakes and to hear your thoughts clearly And when you’re ready to actually do something about it, start with my free workshop, Three Steps to Say Goodbye to Task Overload.

It’s about an hour, and by the end, you’ll have everything out of your head and in one place so you can finally see what you’re working with instead of just guessing your way through all of it. That’s the part that lets you slow down. You can’t stop rushing through a list you can’t even see. So the link is in the show notes.

I hope that this, this episode really spoke to you, that it really spoke to your heart, and that it reminds you that there is true cost to rushing, and they’re, they’re quite big ones. They kind of go against the very desires that you have. So don’t rush, slow down, and I will talk to you in the next episode.

If this episode inspired you, challenged you, or gave you a fresh perspective, I want to encourage you to take one small action today. And if you want to go deeper and connect with other solopreneurs on a similar journey, come hang out with us inside of our free community. It’s where we keep the conversation going. And be sure to follow the podcast so you don’t miss what’s next. Talk soon, and cheers to more peace, faithful steps, and steady progress, one system at a time.