How Fast Should You Be When Learning?

How quickly should you try to do things in order to improve performance? One way to imagine this is look at something like chess. You can painstakingly calculate an exact answer, or you can ball park it using some guessing. The research on transfer shows that when we train skills, they tend to be learned quite narrowly. So tons of time learning to do back of the envelope calculations may not improve your explicit calculating skills as much as you'd expect. By slowing down the speed of your overall process, you can devote more attention to each aspect of the problem. Only once you are able to do it correctly does it make sense to try to do it faster.