Doing things fast

I was thinking about deadlines--papers and exams to grade--and realized that doing things fast is a similar kind of challenge to making things small. Companies try to fit phone electronics into as spatially thin a region of spacetime as possible, while runners try to fit a run of a particular distance into as temporally thin a region of spacetime as possible. (And while sometimes small spatial and temporal size has "utilitarian value", as in the case of getting my grades in, in the phone and running cases, the reasons are mainly of the aesthetic variety.)