Slow down, you move too fast

I’ve made more than my fair share of careless mistakes and I haven’t been happy about any of them. Careless errors are especially irritating because they can be avoided.

We all have too much to do today, and too little time to do it. I’m convinced this is a big contributing factor to sloppiness, although there are a growing number of people who just don’t give a damn.

I’ve noticed that more and more people fail to double-check their work. They don’t pay attention to the details. Words and names are spelled incorrectly and phone numbers and e-mail address are inaccurate. We inadvertently forget to copy people we should copy on emails and click “reply all “ once too often.

Waiters hand us inaccurate checks, we receive unsigned checks in the mail and we fail to check out all the potential pitfalls of a situation.

We react too quickly, think too little, and lose our focus. We don’t read documents to the end and we write them too fast in the first place.

We all seem to be in a race, but I’m not sure what’s waiting at the finish line, except perhaps a messier, more muddled world.