Chapter Content
Okay, so, um, I wanted to talk a little bit about something that's been on my mind, and it's kind of about how we're all feeling a little, well, rushed these days. It's like, uh, George Miller Beard, this nerve specialist, he was talking about how the telegraph was making people nervous, way back when. Can you imagine? The telegraph! He said, you know, before that, prices didn't change as fast, and people didn't know about every little change all over the world, right away. But now, he was saying, bam! Everyone knows everything instantly and it's stressing businessmen out.
And it's funny, because, like, the telegraph is, uh, seriously slow compared to what we have now. I mean, we're talking about fluctuations and trades happening at the speed of light, literally. There was this company, Hibernia Atlantic, they were trying to shave off just five milliseconds off the time it took to send financial data. Five milliseconds! Because in high-frequency trading, even a tiny, tiny head start like that can mean millions of dollars. Crazy, right?
It's gotten to the point where things are happening so fast that our eyes, our brains, can't even really keep up. I mean, your pupils constricting when light shines in them, that seems instant, but it's actually super slow compared to some of these microchips that are executing trades. It’s like the world is spinning so fast you can’t even see it happening anymore.
And the thing is, your brain is always trying to match the pace of the world, trying to keep up with the information. And when you feel like you're racing, the world seems to be speeding ahead, doesn't it? Your perception of time really affects how you feel. If you think you don't have enough time, your brain kicks into high gear, and if you think you have plenty of time, it slows down.
And it's not just about speed, it's also about how we communicate. When we don't have technology, things are naturally slower. We talk slower than we read, you know? Long conversations are more relaxed than texting. And now, we're all about getting information across as fast as possible. We used to write letters with, like, full sentences, and then email came along, and everything became shorter. Sentences became phrases, and then phrases became just words, abbreviations, emojis, in text messages.
So, we're all about stripped-down facts now, instead of analysis and storytelling. You'd think shorter is better, that less information is easier to process, but actually, it can be harder to learn and understand things when they're just presented as statistics or standalone facts. A study showed that it’s easier to learn when data is embedded into a story, believe it or not. So these productivity gurus who tell you "less is more," well, it turns out, less can actually be more mentally taxing.
Because making sense of the world takes time. When you're bombarded with information from every direction, you have to speed up to keep up. But when you're speeding along, it's harder to really focus on anything long enough to actually understand it. You're just constantly ready to move on to the next thing before the last thing has even registered. Someone wrote that the "networked computer" promotes a kind of restlessness, like you can't linger on anything for too long. We are forced to resort to "abbreviated thinking" because of the volume of information we're confronted with and the time constraints. It makes things inefficient because even though a short text is quicker, figuring out its meaning actually takes more effort.
And then there's the whole thing about urgency. The more urgent something seems, the more you feel like you have to process it quickly, right? If you hear about something right when it happens, it feels extra urgent because you don't know what it means yet, and your brain goes into overdrive trying to figure it out. That's why "breaking news" feels so alarming. It feels like you're experiencing the event directly, even if it's happening far away. Shrinking time shrinks space, it's like, you feel closer to it.
But because information is so easy to share now, everything is communicated instantly, no matter how important it is. And most of it is made to *look* urgent, even when it's not. So it's like information inflation: everything is breaking news, and you're drowning in urgent emails all the time. And to handle all that, your brain has to go into overdrive.
Someone I know was telling me about how she tried to manage all her emails at work. First, she prioritized emails marked "high importance," but then everyone started marking *everything* as "high importance." Then she said, okay, use the word "urgent" in the subject line. But then, of course, *every* email was "urgent." So people started repeating "urgent" or adding exclamation marks and asterisks. Then they started looping more people into the emails to get someone to respond quickly. But that just made things worse, because everyone assumed someone else would handle it. So she realized that she pays more attention to emails where the action required is right up front in the subject and the word "urgent" isn't used at all! The constant use of “urgent” places us in a permanent state of vigilance and anxiety, making it harder to shift down a gear to get focused work done.
And the thing about deadlines is that, you know, your brain doesn't work like an assembly line. It's not consistent. It goes faster and slower, and your attention comes and goes. So, tracking mental work with objective time doesn’t work, it’s a false equivalence. Frequent deadlines encourage this, and they can really kill creativity.
Instant communication has also flattened work into this long march of continuous productivity. We have to maintain the same level of attention for long periods of time, but intense, continuous mental work is exhausting. It can take as little as five minutes for your performance to sink. That's why we get "mental blocks," right? Your brain just briefly shuts down to conserve energy. Taking a short five second pause every couple of minutes can help with this kind of work.
More and more, people are becoming supervisors while machines do the work. This causes boredom. If the system is efficient, errors are rare, so the supervisor watches passively for long hours. But it can take just twenty minutes for your performance to drop off in this kind of work. After that, your mind starts to wander. You should take a break for three to ten minutes. It’s more important how often you take breaks than how long they last.
The thing about this passive, continuous work is that you don’t get any sense of progress. There's no real goal, no feedback, nothing to motivate you. If you are just watching things and everything is going smoothly, you haven’t actively done anything. All of the criteria for intrinsic motivation are missing. So even though it doesn't take much mental energy, it feels super laborious.
Still, this kind of work is often really important. A security guard monitoring security video feeds for an intruder is a perfect example. The more laborious the work feels, the more likely you are to be bored and miss something. Someone created something called the “Mackworth Clock Test” to find out how long radar operators could sustain attention before missing targets. Participants have to watch the clock and indicate when the pointer jumps, but most people start missing the jumps after about 30 minutes.
So, organizations are using brain-monitoring technology to keep workers alert. For example, workers at a company in China wear hats with sensors that measure their brain waves and warn supervisors when they’re not focused. This increased profits by $315 million in just four years.
The drudgery comes from the lack of motivation. Introducing feedback and goals can help with this. The world feels more real when you speak to it and it speaks back. So, embedding some kind of result of your action can make a difference. Also, anchoring onto a goal can help you focus. This explains why so many people have to-do lists. Researchers have tested a protocol called goal-oriented attentional self-regulation training. Participants have to do frequent “self-checkups” to see if they're following the goal, and if you find yourself straying, actively bring your attention back with the mantra “Stop, relax, refocus.”
So, monotonous, vigilant work makes it harder to pay attention, which makes it even harder to carry on working. To combat this, you can use stimulation to surprise yourself into raising your gear. For instance, if you clap loudly or hear a loud noise at regular intervals, it can help with paying attention. Multitasking can also help, as long as the tasks are not complex. By demanding more resources, it forces your gear upward.
Anyway, those are just some thoughts. It's a lot to process, I know, but it's something I think about a lot.