"You have to work harder to get the job done faster," explains Gianmaria Falasco, a researcher at the University of Luxembourg as he sums up the results of his latest work with Massimiliano Esposito. This will come as no surprise to anyone with any experience of racing around trying to meet appointments and deadlines, but by defining specific parameters for the relation between work expended in terms of dissipation and the rate at which a system changes state, Falasco and Esposito provide a valuable tool for those developing ways of manipulating non-equilibrium systems, be that the behavior of living cells or an electronic circuit. Additionally, the "dissipation-time uncertainty relation" they developed to define this behavior is tantalizingly suggestive of other uncertainty relations in quantum physics.