Office work: Is working slowly more tiring than working fast?

Dakta

Quality always beats quantity, though quantity is often demanded, one of the gigs I work involves a lot of repetitive data entry with quite severe potential consequences for missed details or errors. The system logs metrics of individuals performance (entry time, entry quantity etc) and so we get some nice charting for who does what.

There are people on the team whos speed I cannot match, even when i'm hitting speeds where you feel like you're not able to do all the proper due dilligence, but there's also speeds so slow it does become boring and it becomes hard but in a quite different way. You have to be in absolutely the right mindset for optimum speed, and it takes some getting into it, but once you've got it you can process quite nicely. I've seen the faster people get pulled for errors, and I've seen the slower people pulled for slacking. Piggy in the middle seems like a good place to sit.

Regarding tiredness and fatigue, again I find both extremes can be bad for it in different ways. Go too slow, not have the focus and the day really is a chore, and you can feel it. try and go faster than your optimum and you fatigue before the days out, i've experienced that brick wall a few times and your output flatlines.

Just a case of finding the best focus and sticking to it, we are pushed quite hard for speed but I've just come to accept my limitations and a forcible attempt to alter them will influence the quality. Everyonme is different though, I think my speed would kill some of the faster ones if they were forced to go at that rate

amandacat

I’m quite similar, have always worked quicker than anyone else with good accuracy. This ranged from me working in a nightclub where I would always take the most money in the night to working in an office where I’d do the most complaint handling and response letters per hour. 

Now I’m in my 40s my brain sadly doesn’t work quite so quickly but I still get bored easily if I think things are going too slow. I’m actually quite bad at team work as a result, if there’s a project to do I’d much rather just do it myself. So it’s not all good in my case.