We live in a Maggi world. Two minutes and it is done. Groceries arrive at ten. A film waits on demand. The 'queue', that great Indian institution, has nearly vanished, surviving only outside a restaurant someone found on Instagram.

My parents stood in lines for everything. At the bank. At a phone company for a landline connection. At the passport office, with a folder of photocopies and a whole day to spare. At the cinema theatre, to watch a movie, just to be told the tickets were sold out. Today anything that makes us wait feels like a fault. We have been trained, and we are excellent students. 

We have become impatient people. Order dinner on an app, let it arrive five minutes late, and the thumb finds the complaint button, hoping for a hundred rupees of credit. We are in such a hurry that a road safety campaign had to enlist Amitabh Bachchan to tell the country, aaram se aao. A  brand team is made of people who order dinner on the same apps, who carry the same small impatience into the room with a 'dead' line attached. Clients are us. We are one breed. Except no one’s dying. 

Think about the word - instant. Advertising has used it for as long as I can remember. Instant coffee, instant noodles, instant relief, instant credit, instant delivery, each one a small promise that waiting was a problem and we had solved it. We wrote those lines. We sold the instant. And what you sell has a way of coming back for you. The customers we taught to expect everything in two minutes are the clients who now expect it of us, and the promise we made on a brand’s behalf has become the brief we are handed. 

We sold instant. Now instant sells us out!

But look at what instant actually is. Nobody makes a packet of noodles in two minutes from nothing. Somebody cooked them long before you did, and dried them, and sealed them, so that your two minutes would be the last step of a long job. Instant is slow work done earlier. Perhaps the only instant I believe in.

So, when everyone is chasing speed, can creativity still afford to be slow? Mostly it does not need to be, because the question mistakes creativity for a product with a fixed production time. Creativity is a method, not magic, even though it can feel like it. It is pattern recognition and pattern disruption, research and application, the habit of imagining how someone will feel before they feel it. Like any method, it gets faster with use.

Creativity needs a problem to solve. And more often than not it’s not in the brief document. It shouldn’t be. Finding the insight is really one of our main roles. Five whys down, far below the stated want. Everything after it- the idea, the line, the film- is a way of answering that. What it takes is innocence, curiosity, patience for a few honest questions, attention, and sometimes just the wrong person in the right room. None of it needs a month. 

Since 1969, Amul has put the same polka-dotted girl on a hoarding, and she says in her own way what our top journalists do, but butter. The system never changes. 

Most of what an agency makes can be fast, and should be. Familiar answers are perfectly good when the problem is familiar. A brand’s Tuesday post does not need to reinvent the world. What memory needs is inconsistency. The brain discards the predictable and keeps the surprise.

So what the creative has to do is to build a fast, dependable system and then choose, carefully, where the islands of unpredictability go. Those islands are what people remember. Those are the places that deserve time. Speed handles the volume. Time is spent where memory is made. 

Does speed ever hurt the work? Of course it does, usually when a team has not yet learned the pace it is being asked to keep. But quality and creativity are two different people, and it helps to stop introducing them as one. Quality is how well something is made. Creativity is whether the thinking behind it was worth making. Quality may not be able to be rushed, but creativity is the way to get quality faster. 

Too much time is its own risk. Give any of us a month, and we will spend three weeks circling and one week hurrying. A clear brief, an honest timeline, a decision about where the thinking will sit:  these buy more originality than any extra week. 

And don’t get me wrong, I love time. I have less of it than I used to, which makes me respect it more. 

But time, like salt, has one right amount. Every Indian recipe says namak swaad anusaar, but if you have ever cooked for the first time, you know that’s not true. Nobody in a restaurant asks how you would like your salt,  the way they ask how you would like your meat, or how cold your wine should be. The chef decides. 

So the team knows how much time the work needs. Our job is to say how long, say it early, say it clearly, and then mean it. And hope someone else can’t do it faster. And respect them anyway. And try to go faster next time. 

Make the system fast. Spend the time where the surprise lives. Speed is here to stay, and that is fine. 

Forgettable is the only thing worth fearing.

The author is co-founder and CCO, Wife.