TL; DR: Modern work doesn't just make people busier. It fragments attention. Under enough load, individuals and teams lose the peripheral awareness that good judgment depends on. The answer isn't to slow down. It's to build instruments that keep speed from turning into drift.
Today, the Artemis II crew set the record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. Farther than Apollo. The most remote human beings in history.
Everyone focuses on the distance. I keep thinking about the guidance system.
At that range, a fraction-of-a-degree error early in the mission doesn't stay small. It becomes a miss measured in thousands of miles. NASA didn't solve that by asking the crew to stay calm. It solved it with instrumentation: sensors, checkpoints, course corrections baked in before they left the ground.
I keep coming back to that because it feels a lot like how most teams are operating right now.
Everything is faster now. Product cycles are shorter, markets reprice in a day, and competitive moves that used to unfold over quarters now land in a week. This acceleration means more inputs, more decisions, and far less time between them.
This pace inevitably fragments our attention;
If you're interrupted every two minutes, you're theoretically never reaching full depth. You're operating entirely in the shallows.
Here's the part that gets me, though. Speed doesn't just change how fast you move. It changes what you can actually see. Vision researchers have shown that peripheral awareness, the wide field that lets us notice what's off to the sides, physically degrades under cognitive load. As we move faster, our field of vision shrinks.
I think the same thing happens inside organizations. Let's call it the Narrowing Effect.
When the pace rises past a certain point, attention collapses toward whatever is directly ahead. You keep shipping, replying, deciding, and reacting, but you lose the edges of the picture. Unfortunately, those edges are where a lot of judgment lives.
When that happens, good teams start drifting.
None of this usually looks like failure in the moment. It looks exactly like momentum, which is what makes it so hard to catch.
Most people's first impulse is to slow everything down. But in most environments, speed is the right call. The faster you go, the more you just need better instruments.
In practice, those instruments are surprisingly unglamorous.
They look like a planning horizon extending beyond the current fire. Not a grand planning exercise, just enough distance to notice when this week's decisions are quietly pulling against this year's goals.
They look like decision principles written down before the next urgent moment arrives, so every fast call isn't also a philosophical debate from scratch.
They look like a recurring question most teams never actually ask:
And they look like some defended empty space on your calendar. Because a fully packed schedule pretty much guarantees that all your thinking is just reaction to other people's inputs.
The best leaders I know move fast. Often the fastest in the room. But they're also the best instrumented. They have ways to recover peripheral vision before speed turns into drift.
That's the part I keep coming back to with the Artemis metaphor.
The lesson of a moon mission is that velocity without guidance is expensive.
Work is like that too.
The goal is to make sure fast still means forward.
If you're moving quickly right now, it might be worth asking a simple question:
What has your current speed made harder to see?