Notes on speed drills

Lately I’ve been trying speed drills when working on my long-haired mannequin heads. I’ve got my one-length cuts down to a tight 15-20 minutes, but my uniform layer cuts still trend longer than I’d like, often hovering around one hour.

Why speed drill?

On one level, I just need to get the hair short. I only have so much money to spend on heads, and I’ve been cutting as little as possible to get the most practice out of each one. There’s nothing wrong with that, but at this point, I just need the opportunity to practice shorter cuts. The hair needs to come up.

On another level, I just need to get faster! My instructors keep insisting that speed will come with time, and that it’s more important to practice using good methods and getting good results. I don’t strictly disagree, but I do think that taking my time is beginning to hold me back.

I’ve never had a strong internal clock. It’s why I’m drawn to more structured forms of work: if a task doesn’t have a clear deadline, or my time isn’t chopped up into clear segments, I will expand any given task to fill the largest possible amount of time. Left to sprawl out long enough, this can make tasks more intimidating than they ought to be. But if I need to wrap up what I’m doing in 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour, I always manage. And the more I do that, the better my sense of how long a given task actually takes.

There’s nothing wrong with learning how to do something correctly before learning how to do that thing fast. But I know how to do these cuts correctly, and I’m starting to let perfect be the enemy of good. I’m sure some people do get faster the more they practice, but that will never be me. To get faster, I need to get faster.

Turning up the pressure

For now I’m just taking my start and end times for each cut, building my awareness of how long it currently takes me to do things. For easier cuts like the one-length, just doing that much has been enough to increase my speed. But it hasn’t meaningfully touched my speed on the uniform layer.

I think I need a different approach for more complicated cuts with layering and blending. I could just start setting a one-hour timer at the start of each cut, but I think it’d be too easy to get absorbed and then caught flat-footed when the bell rings. Maybe carving each cut into 15-minute segments, rather than giving myself an unstructured hour? The four segments could correspond to the four major sections (top, sides, back) or to different phases of the cut (clippers, scissors, blending, cleanup).

At any rate, 15-20 minutes for a one-length cut is pretty good! I need to remember to celebrate my wins and not just nitpick myself.