The drive-thru of fast-food places have adopted a two lane method.

You select the shortest lane, put your order and do the usual drive-thru thing to collect your delicious, but horrible for you goods. Since there are two lanes and less cars to contend with, it feels much faster.

However, when you actually time it, it’s no different than those that only have one lane.

The only difference is psychological, which makes this a brilliant marketing tactic. If you’re driving by a place and see a long line-up of vehicles, you’ll think twice before turning in. If you drive by and see two short lines, you’ll be willing to wait it out because it doesn’t seem like that many people in line.

It’s the illusion of speed.

We’re experiencing this every day with new innovations that promise faster modes of communication. Yes, it’s instant, but the amount of times having to go back and forth before the message is clear didn’t save time at all.

In the writing world, authors are praising the speed at which they can crank out text, but then go silent at how long it takes them to clean up their prose.

Oddly, it’s the ones who type slow and cycle through their text that end up finishing work much faster. They make less errors and end up writing clean first drafts while the speed demons are picking away at their umpteenth revision.

Speeding up a construction job to finish earlier may seem ideal, until the cost of going fast is revisited by numerous contractors to fix issues that happened along the way. Putting some time and care into the project ends up being a faster method as it avoids the need for revisiting.

Speed is best reserved for competition.

In anything else, it’s merely an illusion.