Reference reading
Impatience
Treating necessary duration as though it were a defect in the process.
Habitual unwillingness to allow the time or process that a worthwhile purpose reasonably requires.
Imagine this: Someone treats the necessary waiting time as a defect that must be squeezed out of the process.
How the pattern works
The clamp is doing useful work while the hourglass runs. Squeezing the glass cannot make the joint ready. Impatience resists the time or process a worthwhile result reasonably requires, as though the strength of the desired deadline could supply what the task still lacks.
There can be reasons to move quickly, remove delay or change a slow method. The impatient pattern does not distinguish a wasteful wait from a necessary one. It interrupts the explanation before the important qualification, opens the work before it can be checked or changes direction before a fair test has produced an answer.
What it costs the work
The apparent gain in time can return as rework, confusion or an assurance nobody can support. Other people are asked to absorb a pace that follows the requester’s discomfort rather than the work’s requirements. A promised immediate result may make the eventual dependable result more distant.
A distinction worth keeping
Urgency is not itself a vice. A needless procedure may deserve to be shortened, and an immediate hazard may require prompt action. Impatience concerns intolerance of duration that has a reason. Recklessness discounts significant consequences; Irresolution avoids settling a choice. A person can be impatient about receiving a decision and still be unable to make their own.
What a useful response can change
The reason for a waiting period can be made concrete: what is changing, what information will become available and what would justify proceeding sooner. “Because we always wait” is not a sufficient explanation either.
A deadline can be compared with the work and resources it requires before it becomes an assurance to somebody else. A smaller dependable result may be more useful than a rushed complete-looking one.
Where delay is wasteful, changing the arrangement is more effective than expressing permanent urgency toward the person inside it. The distinction protects both timely work and necessary care.
Questions for reflection
- What actually becomes ready during this interval?
- Who will have to repair the result if the interval is removed?
Other perspectives
If, however, prior experience and training have developed an attitude of patience in a condition of doubt, a capacity for suspended judgment, and a liking for inquiry, indirect control of the course of suggestions is possible.
John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source
Dewey makes patience an active capacity for examining a suggestion, rather than passive delay. Waiting becomes useful when it preserves the inquiry a premature conclusion would end.
Iterations are commonly loss of time; but there is no such gain of time as to iterate often the state of the question; for it chaseth away many a frivolous speech as it is coming forth.
Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source
Bacon observes that restating the real question can save time. A pause that prevents irrelevant discussion may advance the work more than an immediate rush to an answer.