The Slowening

Has anyone else discovered that as you become more proficient, it's actually taking you longer to do the same tasks?

I'm wondering if that's another thing that's unique to my (obscure) field. When I started, it made sense to use other people's work as a template (by which I mean, I'd change the pertinent facts but leave the rest exactly as I found it). I was almost religious about it – I felt even a tiny change was too risky, like the way that the original was written was the absolute epitome of legal perfection in all ways.

That was, of course, ridiculous. Yet I only recently became comfortable changing things up. I was probably hurried along my way when the recipient of one of my glorious works mocked it online, but that's a story for another day.

The point was valid – there are things in the templates that are clunky, outdated, or otherwise undesirable, and I've started making those changes. Sometimes I just start entirely from scratch. Which means that the five-page piece of prose that once took me two hours now borders on eight, much to the chagrin of...nobody, it seems, since I haven't heard a peep about it. They used to express amazement at how quickly I once did things, especially since they were so pleased with the work product (what amazed me was that people seemed not to recognize that I'd just used their own previous work virtually verbatim).

At least now I will fully deserve any further online mockery someone might see fit to bestow upon me.