Maintenance Windows: Keep it short or use it all?

So I heard about an interesting encounter which started a debate with our team. An engineer on our team was working through a maintenance window and was prepared for the event with all of his configs and the order of operation to complete the maintenance as quickly as possible. This was all shared with the customer. Even though there was an hour set aside for the window with change control, our engineer wanted to use as little of that time as possible for downtime and stick to the change as specified, making the impact to users minimal. The engineers on the customer end said “We have an hour, there’s no rush.” so took their time moving cables without any prior preparation or planning to do so quickly. The customer also seemingly had no urgency to make the configuration changes quickly to keep downtime to a minimum, assuming they had plenty of time. This experience started a conversation about this and our team came to the conclusion that this perspective was pretty common.

There is something to be said for being methodical and carefully working through the maintenance. That said, I would contend that a sense of urgency to complete the maintenance quickly reduces impact to users and gives more time to troubleshoot if any issues arise. I personally make it a point to get the maintenance done quickly with as little downtime as possible but it seems that some choose to use the all of the allotted time.

If it was your maintenance window to run with, how would you handle it? Get it done as quickly as possible with as little downtime as you can or take your time and use the whole time window available?