Speaking as one who is laid back in a personality sense, I could imagine nothing worse than a life lived non-stop frenetically under the imagined need to speed up all activity in the name of productivity.

Take time to pause, reflect, think, and enjoy your life experiences.

Even when it comes to work-related activity, there are times and places to do things quickly and there are times and places to do them deliberately. If nothing else, just for sanity's sake, it is important to pace yourself through a day, through a week, through a month, through a year, through a career. Even if speed were exactly correlated with maximum productivity and effectiveness, it is vital that you have times when you simply feel you can enjoy being at work, being with people, doing your activities, without everything feeling you have to work like a machine that will be evaluated by engineering standards only.

Even more, we all have different personalities and some people do not work well if they feel they are forced to work at some arbitrarily quick pace as opposed to one that suits their style.

Finally, even speed as a factor can vary with your activities as you develop skills in those activities. When I began years ago to try to write things, I was agonizingly slow about the process. I felt I had a quick mind but the process of getting what was in my mind down on paper made me feel plain stupid. Whatever I did, it would never come out right. Through a very tedious process of writing and re-writing, it would eventually become passable and that was it. It might take me a week in such cases to write something expository of modest length. Yet, realizing this was a weakness, I worked damned hard to fix it and, through a process of many years and countless hours of effort, I reached a breakthrough point where I could do "walls of text" (in the phrasing of some) in 10-15 minutes and produce quality stuff. I now write very quickly and effectively. But had I tried to do so years ago with my limited abilities at that time, all I would have produced was hash.

So, lighten up and do it in your own style. Yes, speed does matter. But it is only one of many factors that will determine how you do at work or, even more important, at life itself. By all means, apply yourself well - be diligent, hard-working, etc. but do it fast or slow as suits your needs and your own style. At least that is how I view it.