Speed of execution is the variable no one audits. The Pragmatist philosopher William James noticed something in his 1890 Principles of Psychology that has aged badly in the era of productivity culture: the faster you can act without deliberation, the more invisible that action becomes to you. Habits gain velocity over time, and velocity is exactly what removes them from conscious review. The mechanism that makes a habit efficient is the same mechanism that makes it unexaminable — and an unexaminable behavior is one that can migrate, slowly and without announcement, from the context where it works to contexts where it quietly destroys. James called habits the 'flywheel of society,' but a flywheel that cannot be stopped is not a tool — it's a hazard. The thing worth checking today is not whether your fastest habits are good ones. It's whether they are still aimed at the right targets, or whether their speed has simply outrun your awareness of where they're pointed.

Pick the habit you execute most automatically — the one requiring zero thought. What problem was it originally solving, and does that problem still exist?

Drawing from American Pragmatism — William James (Principles of Psychology, 1890)