always keep a fresh perspective.

the first step to working fast is working less.

How many times has this happened to you?

a) You're working on a project and encounter a roadblock halfway through your day. You try everything you can think of to solve it, but even after hours of attempts the solution still evades you. Defeated, you head to bed. The very next morning, you come up with the perfect solution in the shower. You're glad, but you wish you hadn't wasted all that time just spinning your wheels the previous day.

b) You're working on a project and are excited and proud about how it's coming along. You think it's almost done, but there's just one thing bothering you. You try to fix it, which brings along other changes, and soon you've somehow made the whole project worse while trying to resolve this single issue. All you wish for now is to return to what you had before, perceived flaws and all, but it's gone and there's no way back.

Both of these scenarios can be avoided when you are able to recognize that your current perspective has gone stale. Walking away from a project in the moment can be difficult, especially when there are external time pressures, but consider how quickly problems are solved and nitpicks evaluated by their proper importance once you've had some time away.

This is the fastest and most efficient way to work, in my opinion. The truth is you probably get more done in the first hour or two every time you sit down to work on something than you do the next 4 to 6. Trust that you do your best work when your perspective is fresh, you're in flow, and you are acting and reacting on instinct. Grinding for more hours than you need to when you just want to get something done is always going to be inefficient and often counterproductive.

My favorite way to implement this method is to work on several different projects and switch between them when I feel my perspective on one is starting to go stale. This technique is especially applicable when it comes to the field of audio work, since in addition to your mental perspective going stale there is also a biological component (your ears) that will suffer fatigue over the course of a working day.

"The beginning of a mix is front-loaded with broad decisions, which act as a foundation for all the many detail-oriented decisions you'll make over the course of the mix. If you second-guess those early broad decisions, and you start to change them late in the mix, you're essentially tearing your mix down to its core. While there are occasions when this can't be helped, in general you'd be best to trust your early instincts. There's a good reason to trust yourself where early decisions are concerned-your foundation is laid with a clear head, while your desire to change that foundation is made in an intellectual fog. The back third of a mix is not a good time to go up against the good judgments of the first third."

— Zen and the Art of Mixing (Mixerman 2010)