Donald Knuth, one of the founding fathers of computer science, shares a riveting thought on premature optimization, and its risks.

“Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil”.

Make everything fast < make the most crucial elements fast.

Programmer or not, this lens is a powerful one to apply.