Fast can be good
Sometimes we think a work of art, or great creation is because of hours of effort poured into it. This certainly can be true. Additionally, if someone does work really quickly maybe we don't value what they did. We may think because it's fast they didn't try hard enough or they cut corners. From the customer service perspective there's a balance to be struck here. If someone is waiting a long time for food for instance they aren't going to be happy either. If it takes a year to clean their house, and they can't be in their house while it's being cleaned that's not good either.
Having started a new job a few weeks ago one thing I've noticed is there isn't necessarily a big push to do things super fast. Considering that I am working at a 10 year old company in the financial services space it makes sense that things don't proceed at the fastest speed, because they should be cautious due to the nature of the work, and there is a lot of work in place so it can take more time and consideration to make changes. Additionally, there's something to be said for rushing for no purpose. As an employee if you are constantly told that everything is important you are either going to get worn out, and or you might conclude that nothing is important.
Nonetheless, a lot of the times we place constraints on ourselves that aren't real. Patrick Collison (CEO and co-founder of Stripe) has a list of things that were accomplished very quickly. Interestingly he observes that a lot of the things that were done quickly happened prior to 1970, and he refers to other work discussing why that may be. One big explainer seems to be bureaucracy, but I won't delve into that particular topic. I do think Parkinson's Law is worth considering which is the idea that work expands to fill the time we give it. A related point is that the number of workers regardless of the work to be done tends to grow, which could help tie into things taking longer.
One unhelpful spin on this that I saw in my last company is that a product manager set unrealistic expectations for a deadline in order to incentive people to work more quickly, basically using Parkinson's law to their advantage. That is give people less time to do the work, and hopefully the work will get done faster. In this case the outcome wasn't helpful because it really only led to the team being stressed and overworked.
When I took an EDM production class a few months ago the teacher would give us 5-10 minutes to create a basic beat. In the class the teacher would talk about how you could create a lot of presets to save you time as well. In addition to how the act of creating beats quickly can be a good creative process to get ideas out there. Initially I was surprised. I thought the creative process would be looked at with more care. I thought there would be the idea of not rushing the process, but instead we were trying to do things quickly. If you treat the creative process as too precious you run the risk of not completing anything. Earlier this month George RR Martin admitted that he may never finish the next Game of Thrones book for instance.
There's also extremes to the fast idea. In the realm of music production there are people that do speed runs on how fast they can create songs. These activities are more for the fun of the process itself, but I am sure there are benefits to being able to do your work more quickly. When you free yourself from interrupting your creative though process you can more closely connect with your creation.
Once at a jazz summer camp a camper said he could learn all 12 scales in a day. The teachers laughed at him, and sent him off to try. At the end of the day the kid came back. They made him show his progress in front of the whole room, and when he failed we laughed at him. This is a pretty faint memory. In hindsight though I think that kid should've been celebrated more. He set an ambitious goal, and he wasn't afraid to try to achieve it. I think generally we can all benefit with setting more ambitious goals for ourselves, while managing to be patient with ourselves as well. You can run a marathon with no training which is cool, but then you might be injured might not do any other activities or run again. Alternatively, you can do some training and when you run a marathon you can run it faster!
I don't know how to conclude this, but resolving that more carefully would slow me down!