I know that the year literally just started, but surgery lab already has me feeling a little discouraged. It's always taken me a much longer time to pick up motor/technical skills, and surgery so far has been no exception. I just can't get the proper movements down... we practiced a simple interrupted pattern today and I couldn't even keep up with the professor on the monitors because it was taking me so long to mentally process what I had to do and where my hands and needle driver needed to be, let alone actually performing the knots/ties. I eventually gave up because I was so lost and I didn't think that my suture job was going to be salvagable, anyway.
That said, I'm sure that it will get easier as I practice more and more (which I plan on doing over the weekend). I'm just slightly frustrated that I couldn't do one of the most basic suture patterns when everyone around me seemed to have little to no issues following along.
It'll come, I promise. Don't worry about speed so much (you mention time a few times in your post) - just make sure your knots are square and snug. A well-tied square knot that takes 30 seconds is 1000x better than a poorly-tied square knot that takes 10 seconds. Speed is eventually essential, but not until you are very confident in your knot security.
The biggest mistakes I see students making are not keeping track of which way their hands should be going, not keeping their hands low (you should be tying as flat as your working surface will allow, not up and away), and (this is maybe the biggest) equal and opposite tension. It's super tempting for most people to pull on one free end and not the other (especially with instrument ties - people tend to pull harder on the side held by needle drivers. When I'm teaching, getting people to use flat, equal, and opposite tension usually gets the most improvement most quickly. Sometimes it takes some gentle mid-surgery hand slaps, but never more than one or two before they start forming good habits.
Look on the bright side - it might be the most basic suture pattern you're struggling with but really, everything is based on it. Once you get that basic pattern down, (most) everything is easy because it's just building on it. So pretty soon you're going to have an "ah ha" moment where suddenly your suturing will take off. And you can do almost everything with a square knot on top of it, from suturing a line to ligation. A constrictor knot is useful but not necessary. An Aberdeen knot is useful (and actually, my preferred way to finish a continuous line), but not necessary. Etc. Get the square knot and in theory you could quit learning knots. At that point you just need to master patterns, like a cruciate, simple interrupted, simple continuous, some inverting pattern (like a lembert), a few ligation techniques ..... and you've got 99% of surgery. And all of those can be tied with a basic square knot.
Don't let this one get you down. You may never learn to love it, but you will learn to do it well. Guaranteed.