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Yesterday I was to meet a friend at the coffee shop. She showed up almost an hour late and in tears.

I had received an email from her saying she would be 15 minutes late. It turns out that because she was running a bit late to begin with, she was in a rush. In her rush, she was a bit lead-footed on the gas, and got stopped by the police for a speeding ticket.

Because she was hurried to meet me, she ended up being an extra 45 minutes late, with a big fine to pay on top of it.

This is the perfect illustration of a point that I was going to make even before it happened: we cannot get where we are going more quickly by rushing.

Say you’re working on your PhD. Will rushing through your experiments and your writeup get you the degree any faster?

It is unlikely. If you hurry writing your thesis and do a sloppy job, guess what? You’ll probably have to do a lot of rewriting when the cranky professor on your committee gets after you about the shoddy quality and organization of the document.

Or consider a grant proposal. Say you put it off until the last week because you are too busy, then rush the writing (yes, I’ve done this). Are you more likely to get a rejection back? Most certainly. And that rejection means you’re going to have to rewrite it (I’ve done this too!).

There’s a common mentality I’ve encountered – and which I used to have – that goes something like this:

“It’s going to be rejected anyway, so I might as well put it in quickly rather than taking my time to make it good.”

But it is simply not true that “it is going to be rejected anyway.” Since adopting a different mentality, I’ve had multiple proposals funded on the first round of submission. I just got word from someone I helped with a grant that this person received a perfect score (yes, a 1.0 which is 100%!) on an NIH proposal.

On my own grants, and on the successful grants of people I help, we don’t rush. They are planned months in advance, and the actual writing takes a month or more. Getting a great score requires that you iterate multiple times over your ideas, concepts, and approaches. But it is worth it in the end. Going back and resubmitting again and again wastes far more time.

In fact, the few times I’ve tried to help someone to improve their proposal who is in a last-minute rush, my help has been for naught. I won’t do that anymore.

This principle applies to anything you do. You cannot rush your experiments, proposals, degrees, or anything else, and expect to get a result faster. Life doesn’t work that way.

Here are three ideas to help you speed up by slowing down:

1. Don’t focus on the outcome, just focus on what you’re doing right now, and do it really well. Many of us get too tied up in the outcome (will I fail? can I succeed?) and that wastes precious brainpower that could be used right here and right now to increase the likelihood of success.

2. Just do it (yes, I know, that sounds like a slogan from a shoe brand!). Procrastination is the number one way to get yourself in a bind. But if you study the habits of successful people, they don’t procrastinate, they get things done. They dive right in, knowing full well that the first iteration won’t be perfect. However, because they get things done quickly, they have plenty of time to iterate and improve later.

3. Use your creativity to more efficiently overcome problems, rather than just rushing to solve them by brute force. Creativity is a vastly underutilized resource that any of us can tap, and when we do, it can help solve problems in new ways that can save both time and aggravation. But creativity shuts down when we’re in a rush. It works best when the mind is relatively quiet and focused. So slow down, and let your creativity help you! (Creativity is such an important subject that I’m working on a book about it right now.)

I challenge you to try this for just one day. Slow down, relax, take a few breaks, and see what happens. I’m betting you’ll be nicely surprised, as I was when I first started doing this.

If you want to learn more strategies for achieving success and fulfillment in your science career,head over to the Science Career Foundry for your free report on the top five strategies of successful scientists.

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Morgan Giddings is the author of Four Steps To Funding and creator of The Grant Dynamo Course. She is also a professor in bioinformatics and systems biology.