Too Busy to Ride the Bike

My grandmother told a story about a woman in her village. The woman was rushing to church, practically running, pushing her bicycle along beside her. My grandmother stopped her and asked, "Why don't you get on your bike?" The woman said, "I'm in too much of a hurry to get on the bike."

I do not know whether the story was true, or a parable, or whether my grandmother was talking about herself. She is gone now, so I cannot ask. What I do know is that I have quoted that line in more meetings, more architecture reviews, and more standups than I can count, and every time I say it, at least one person in the room does the recognition nod — the slow, slightly ashamed nod of someone who knows exactly what I am describing because they did it this morning.

Festina Lente

The woman with the bicycle would have understood Augustus Caesar, though I doubt they moved in the same circles.

Around 19 BCE, Augustus adopted a personal motto: festina lente — make haste slowly. The phrase became an emblem. Literally. The Aldine Press of Venice took the dolphin-and-anchor as its printer's mark — the dolphin for speed, the anchor for deliberation. Erasmus included it in his Adagia in 1508. Two thousand years of intellectual inheritance, from a Roman emperor to a Venetian printing house to a Dutch humanist, and the lesson is always the same: the fastest way forward is not always forward. Every culture arrived at this independently — Ecclesiastes, the Muromachi poets, the Chinese woodcutters, the British since the fourteenth century. Technologies change. Human nature does not.

Then there is the one everybody attributes to Abraham Lincoln: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." Lincoln never said it. The earliest known source is from 1945, eighty years after his death. The misattribution tells you everything. We do not just ignore the principle — we fabricate historical endorsement for it, which is exactly what the woman pushing her bicycle was doing: performing urgency as proof of commitment. Engineers have their own version: "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning." The joke works because the pattern is universal and universally violated.

Then Like Now

I watch this in engineering teams every week. Someone sitting at a machine that can generate, test, and refactor code — a machine that is, in the most literal sense, a bicycle for the mind — and they are pushing it along beside them. Writing the same boilerplate they wrote last year. Manually testing what could be automated in an afternoon. Copying and pasting between terminal windows because setting up the script would take twenty minutes and they do not have twenty minutes because they are too busy copying and pasting between terminal windows.

The research calls this action bias. Bar-Eli and colleagues studied penalty kicks and found that goalkeepers who stayed in the centre saved more often — yet almost all of them dive left or right. Doing something, anything, feels better than doing the right thing if the right thing looks like standing still. Bellezza showed in 2017 that in Anglo-Saxon corporate culture, being busy is a status signal. The woman pushing her bicycle is not failing. She is performing.

It is both criminal and deeply human.

And it is not only individual psychology. In many organisations, the incentives are structural. People push the bicycle because the system rewards visible motion — sprint velocity, tickets closed, lines committed. A contractor who stops to build the automation looks idle; a contractor who types furiously looks billable. The dashboard measures the pedalling, not the arriving. Until organisations learn to measure outcomes over output, the bicycle will keep being pushed uphill by people who know perfectly well how to ride it.

The Distinction

Now, you might reasonably point out that this is all very well — get on the bike, sharpen the axe, automate the toil. And most of the time, that instinct is right.

But the story is more complicated than "just ride."

Because there is a difference — a sharp one — between the woman who pushes the bicycle out of irrational urgency and the person who chooses to walk because the walk itself serves a purpose. The grandmother's woman could ride. She had the skill, the bicycle, the road. She pushed it anyway, out of a compulsion that mistook motion for progress. That is one mode. The other is the engineer who builds the thing by hand not because they are afraid of the tool but because the problem is not yet stable enough to automate, or because the manual repetition is teaching them something they have not yet articulated.

The Default Mode Network — the brain's resting-state network — is where creativity lives. A Stanford study found that walking boosts creative output by 81% compared to sitting. Walking, not cycling. The bicycle would have got you there faster. The walk would have got you there with an idea.

So the diagnostic is not "are you riding or pushing?" It is finer than that.

If the task is repetitive and the automation would teach you nothing new, get on the bike — you are wasting daylight.

If the task is not yet stable enough to automate, if the requirements are still shifting under your feet, then wait — building the machine now means rebuilding it next week.

If the slow execution is building understanding, if pushing the bike is how you learn the gradient of the hill, then push deliberately — that is craft, not cowardice.

But if you are pushing out of habit, out of fear of the twenty minutes it takes to learn the tool, out of a need to look busy for a system that rewards visible effort over invisible thought — that is the problem the grandmother saw. That is inertia dressed in urgency.

Here is a test I have found useful: if someone automated this task for you tonight, would you feel relieved or robbed? Relieved means you are in the fourth mode and should have got on the bike weeks ago. Robbed means you are in the third, and the walk is doing work your calendar cannot see.

Still Learning

Some things never change. The woman in my grandmother's village is every engineer who will not write the script, every manager who will not block out thinking time, every organisation that holds the meeting about the meeting instead of cancelling both. That is the crime.

But the wisdom — the quiet, counterintuitive, deeply human wisdom — is knowing the difference between refusing to ride and choosing to walk.

My grandmother, I suspect, knew the difference. I am still learning it.

(Views in this article are my own ...and my grandmothers.)