Why Speed Is a Byproduct, Not the Goal (with Dawna Ballard)
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We've built entire systems around moving faster — faster responses, faster workflows, faster outputs. But speed isn't something you pursue. It's something that shows up when you've built something worth moving through quickly. That distinction came up early in this conversation and stayed with me long after we stopped recording. If you've ever felt like you were moving fast but not actually going anywhere, this episode is for you.
Dawna Ballard is a professor of organizational communication at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in chronemics — the study of time as it relates to human communication. Her book, Time by Design: How Communicating Slow Allows Us to Go Fast, draws on decades of field research across medical settings, child advocacy networks, and organizations of all kinds to make a case that's both counterintuitive and deeply practical: slowing down your communication is often the fastest thing you can do.
Six Discussion Points
* The distinction between time — the clocks, calendars, meetings, and appointments we design — and temporality — the natural rhythm of relationships, sleep, learning, and meaningful conversation — isn't just semantic. It's the lens through which everything else about productivity either clarifies or collapses.
* The Children's Advocacy Centers case study is one of the most compelling real-world arguments for slow design: agencies handling urgent child abuse cases discovered that pausing for regular 90-minute monthly meetings didn't cost them time — it gave them speed, trust, and accuracy across the entire system.
* The obsession with efficiency didn't emerge from wisdom. It came from factory capitalism, Frederick Taylor's time-and-motion studies, and the industrialist impulse to extract skill from workers and standardize it. For knowledge work, creative work, or relational work, it's simply the wrong operating system.
* Speed activates the nervous system the same way physical threats once did. When we treat every delay as a danger — a long line, a slow inbox, a stalled meeting — we stay in low-grade fight-or-flight. And that's not a state in which anyone does their best work.
* The return-to-office push isn't really a productivity argument. At its core, it's a trust issue dressed in the language of culture — and forcing people into physical spaces doesn't resolve the underlying misalignment between what organizations measure and what actually produces quality work.
* AI is most useful when it handles the quantity tasks — summarizing, simplifying, organizing — so that humans can stay focused on the quality work that requires genuine thought, relationship, and judgment. The key is knowing which is which.
Three Connection Points
1. Time by Design [https://amzn.to/4fdw0OD] — Published by MIT Press, available wherever books are sold, including Kindle/Amazon. This is the kind of book you sit with, not sprint through.
2. Time Thieves documentary [https://tubi.tv] — Explores the Greek concepts of Kronos and Kairos through case studies from Japan, Germany, Italy, and the UK. A rare look at how different cultures experience the collision of time and temporality.
3. Are You Polychronic or Monochronic? — CBC Radio / The Current [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/are-you-polychronic-or-monochronic-struggling-to-manage-your-time-could-be-due-to-your-time-personality-1.7652387] — This is the piece that put Dawna on my radar. It introduces her research on "time personalities" — the idea that chronic lateness or rigid punctuality often isn't a character flaw but a reflection of how someone is wired to experience time. A good entry point before diving into the book.
Dawna references a phrase the Navy SEALs use: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. She reaches for it deliberately. It isn't a rejection of speed — it's a reframe of how you earn it. If you've been treating speed as the destination rather than the evidence that something deeper is working, this conversation is worth more than one listen. And if you want to keep thinking about what it means to stop doing productive and start being productive, that's exactly what we'll keep exploring here.
Until next time, remember: stop doing productive, start being productive. See you later.
If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness [https://mikevardy.com/productiveness].
