On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast

If there is poetry in distraction it is because diverting people is an art, and poets are prodigality’s special envoys. In his 106th sonnet, William Shakespeare summed up literature as ‘the chronicle of wasted time’. Luckily he had enough of a work ethic to write down his musings; he was, above all, a businessman, and made his fortune by writing plays distracting enough to entice Londoners to sail the Thames for the stinking stews of Southwark, not to be waylaid by dancing bears, taverns or brothels, but to spend time, and cash, in his theatre.

Business has always sought to capture attention. But arguably, attention grabbing is today’s leading enterprise. We were promised the age of information, but stand back and it looks closer to the age of inattention. Although information may appear to be free (provided you have Wi-Fi), in reality it is a greedy, tireless consumer of an infinitely valuable resource: attention. That is, your time.

The greatest stunt that digital media pulls off is to persuade us it saves time, whilst encouraging us to overstuff it. Many theoretically time-sparing tools are time thieves in practice – each smartphone a portable shopping mall, the kind where somebody is always tugging your sleeve to spritz you with perfume. Things were bad enough with the invention of television, since the advent of which we sleep on average two fewer hours per night (not forgetting the average nine years Britons devote to that pastime). Heaven knows what the cumulative lifelong impact of Facebook and Tinder will be. But a 2011 study calculated that in a typical company of over a thousand employees, the cost of time diverted by digital distractions amounted to more than $10 million a year.

Love it or hate it, virtual reality threads experience so completely, it is our new sixth sense – and it is filling the space formerly occupied by the original one, our conscious, reflecting self.

To give an idea of how nimbly the great time heist is proceeding, when in 1999 the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed over 2,000 eight- to eighteen-year-olds, it found that young adults were using media for 6 hours 20 minutes a day. The report’s authors concluded they were close to ‘saturation’. A 2004 survey seemed to confirm this, with media use up only two minutes per day. Yet five years later it had leapt to 7 hours 40 minutes – or if multiple devices were separated, to 10 hours 45 minutes a day (for leisure alone, and excluding work or study). Doubtless these figures underestimate current norms, since they were recorded before Snapchat hoovered up what was left of teenagers’ social lives. As commentator Tom Chatfield has observed, this is not saturation: it is integration. ‘Time away from digital media is … no longer our default state.’

Saying no to technology is fast becoming the greatest time pressure in our lives. With constant access to shopping, newsfeeds and social networks, how not to overdose? Even if you log on with a specific purpose, how not to get waylaid by the ever-expanding brain buffet on offer? How to choose what to buy, who to trust? Do you rely on habit, Google, or diligently research all your options, gorging yourself daft on the boggling banquet of choice? And for each thing you choose to do with your time there is far more to refuse – magnifying scope for regrets.

In a situation without precedent in history, time alone with our own thoughts, time fully present within the moment or exclusively with another person, is something we must actively cultivate. Top-flight attention thief, the film director Steven Spielberg, hardly a technophobe, lamented this, calling technology potentially the ‘biggest party-pooper of our lives … [it] interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.’ Essentially, we are participating in an unfolding experiment in a new way to be. There is no opt-out for anybody participating in the economy or a social life. If every second is colonized, the notion of free time is itself a misnomer.

Why did Apple mastermind Steve Jobs ban his offspring from using Apple’s iPad? I suspect, like Spielberg, he feared the death of daydreams. I do. It is impossible to imagine today’s teen spending hours lying on a bed, watching shadows tickle the ceiling, grubbing up thoughts, as I once did, not unless a mindfulness app explains how.

Our technologies are full of useful potential. But only if used as tools. What Jobs will have known, and is increasingly widely understood, is that digital media are addictive. Pierre Laurent, formerly of Microsoft and Intel, who also forbade his children computers or smartphones until the age of twelve, explained why one glance into the wormhole of Facebook can easily turn into a lost afternoon:

Media products are designed to keep people’s attention. In the late 1990s, when I was working at Intel and my first child was born, we had what was called the ‘war of the eyeballs’. People don’t want you to wander and start playing with another product, so it has a hooking effect … And there’s a risk to attention. It’s not scientifically proven yet, but there’s an idea that attention is like a muscle that we build. It’s about being able to tune out all the distraction and focus on one thing. When you engage with these devices, you don’t build that capacity. It’s computer-aided attention; you’re not learning to do it.

What Laurent is suggesting is that not only are media products designed to have a hypnotic appeal, but their strength might weaken our apparatus for concentrating. For evidence to support this theory, how about the 2015 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Students, Computers and Learning? It concluded that ‘most countries that invested heavily in education related IT equipment’ witnessed no appreciable improvement in student attainment over ten years. OECD education director Andreas Schleicher added: ‘Students who use tablets and computers very often tend to do worse than those who use them moderately.’ Moderate use requires self-restraint – but this is not something digital media encourages. If you never feel the slave of a smartphone, congratulations; however, it may only be a matter of time.

Theoretically our horizons are broader, our intellectual reach enhanced by computers’ memory, pace and data, yet our engagement is often shallow, compressed. We cram thoughts into ever slighter packets of time and space (140 characters or less). Our powers of concentration are also depleted if our time is monopolized by what writer Linda Stone described as ‘continuous partial attention’, grazing multiple media instead of zoning in and focusing – the old and still optimal way to get things done.

Snapchat demonstrates how slyly digital media evoke compelling time pressures. Users exchange messages that self-destruct in seconds, eradicating potentially embarrassing backlogs. This should make time feel freer (unlike email silt, which haunts our inbox). But Snapchat does not offer the deeper social satisfactions of face-to-face contact: it scratches the social itch rather than satisfying it. Each time a message vanishes it creates a void – and the compulsion to fill it.

No gadget or app yet – not even by Apple – has added a millisecond to our day. Arguably, technology shortens it, since our distracting toys rip gigantic holes in the space-time continuum because our brain cannot compute frictionless, virtual time; we evolved to grasp it through memorable experience. The stimuli delivered by this technology locks us into dopamine loops, often triggering fight-or-flight stress responses, even as our bodies are perfectly still – stranding us on a toxic neurochemical plateau, unable to escape it in the way we are designed to (by fighting or fleeing). Meanwhile the hours that are hoovered up by gadgets must be taken from something else – such as daydreams.

I did not sign up to a life divided between a load of junk hours and a few good ones, but this is exactly the deal we risk striking if life becomes a spectator sport. Who will lie on their deathbed fondly remembering their Facebook posts, unnecessary work meetings, or zingers on Twitter? Life gains perspective from experiences – first-hand ones that you can share.

Spend too much time online and you become less yourself. Social media addict Andrew Sullivan grew so unsettled that he could not read a book:

In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: ‘Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?’

He went off on a retreat to relearn how to live in the moment. One day he noticed something beautiful – then was beside himself when he realized that he had no phone to share it with his followers.

The quality of your time – how fast, fun or deadly it feels – depends on the quality of your attention. Our attention is us. It is no coincidence that yoga, meditation, mindfulness apps, and – what must be the definition of voluntary tedium – colouring books for adults, are boom industries amid all these time pressures. Some claim that such trends reflect a thirst for spirituality in a godless world. In fact, what unites them is that they all help us to focus our minds. We turn to these tools to nurture our capacity to pay attention. And well we might. Otherwise someone else will snatch it.

A great battle for our attention rages. Each time you surf the net or saunter into an online store, you participate in tacit tests designed to sniff out smarter ways to detain you in these wonderlands, so they can convert what were once experiences and opinions into crunchable data. Google routinely runs parallel experiments to see which web pages intercept the most pairs of eyes, which shade of blue holds the greatest goggle-appeal. Alas, the trillions of insights aggregated by algorithms from the information we generously donate when we go online exceed the ingenuity of a billion distracting Shakespeares.

Eyeball grabbing is not always subtle. Witness the shouty, freakshow journalism that empurples once-stately broadsheet newspapers, desperate to monetize flighty readers with clickbait (the more people click on an article, the higher the advertising rates). Witness the soap opera storylines: psychopaths, aeroplane crashes and baby theft are standard fare in hitherto staid fictional villages. Witness computer games like Candy Crush, devised to render you a fairground duck, ready to be hooked. In this context, the allure of slow-moving Nordic television serials might appear out of kilter. It is not that thrillers gain gravitas when mumbled in Danish, but that viewers have to read the subtitles or they lose the thread. How delightful and rare to concentrate wholly on one thing, without a gadget.

Think of those intriguing, big-bottomed celebrities or grumpy cats whose mountain of renown is founded on a pea of proficiency – primarily their talent at diverting vast numbers of us from what we should be doing, perhaps for ten seconds, but fast – and long enough for advertisers to pay top dollar to hire eye-space on their YouTube channel. Now ask this: who benefits most from our increasingly waylayable attention? When you consider that advertising is the chief force driving the internet’s development today, the implications are scary. Who wants to end up feeling like a bystander in other, more scintillating, fat-bottomed lives?

‘Several “generations” of children have grown up expecting parents and care takers to be only half-there,’ observed sociologist Sherry Turkle. A dangerous message to send anyone, let alone a child. Paying attention is not just polite and loving but a skill and, like sensible time use, we need to cultivate it. Rare is the soul who likes hearing ‘I’m bored’ or feels relaxed watching children climb trees, yet both such experiences are pathways on the scramble to maturity. The quiescent children we see in cars or cafés, their ears stopped by headphones, their eyes fused to tablets and DVDs, are glazed into silence by technological dummies. They look happy, as do adults ogling smartphones. But whatever our age, let hypnotic media syphon off opportunities to conduct conversation, to notice and engage, and wellbeing suffers. Why do we need to silence children anyway? Are they not interesting – or at least, not quite as interesting as emails?

Being online teaches us to be impatient, to want more and more – right now! That is why computers have spinning daisies: to show us that something is really happening, that the screen has not frozen – to soothe us when we are forced to wait three seconds for data to upload. But we are too ready to imagine that we are not responsible for our impatience – as if rush were some impersonal force, a malignant god whom we must helplessly follow.

‘I do not have time for this’ is the message that we send the world, and the people we profess to love, when bustling about in myopic fugs of busyness. There is a recognized phenomenon of ‘time entitlement’, in which people imagine time moves more slowly because they consider wherever they are or whatever is going on around them to be unworthy of their attention. It suggests an explanation for why we need our time to be so full – and to proclaim as much, burrowing into busyness as if to make ourselves feel more important. Rather like paranoia, all this time-stuffing resembles a self-cure for insignificance. We are one of six billion, after all, so we cannot hope to lay a fingerprint on posterity.

We may have less time to play with in future. Quantified working policies prevail in many companies, with employees’ actions monitored and timed throughout their working day. In 2005, the Ford Motor Company permitted workers a total of forty-eight minutes per shift to go to the bathroom. By 2014, Chicago’s WaterSaver Faucet company felt six minutes a day would suffice for ablutions (presumably saving water). It appeared refreshing in 2016 when Aetna, a US insurer, paid staff a $25 bonus for every twenty nights they managed to sleep seven hours or more rather than stay up late on their gadgets. But how telling that such incentives are necessary.

Manipulating our time, nudging it in a remunerative direction, is where the money will be; it always has been. Already we have Google spectacles to steer us to the nearest coffee shop. Next AI will infiltrate our clothing. When self-driving cars rumble along our streets, it seems inevitable that certain routes and information will be preferred, leading the traveller to certain stores and rest-stops, past certain billboards, which will sponsor the technology provider for the privilege.

‘Quality time’ is the phrase parents and lovers murmur when trying to justify how little they spend with us. It always sounds like a crap excuse. But we desperately need to think about the quality of our time. The greatest beneficiaries of our new sort of time recognize this. Microsoft’s Bill and Melinda Gates are masterly time managers, scheduling meetings to discuss their children’s progress, treating each strand of their lives as a project to be nurtured. Carving out space to let their interests blossom – and to have a date – is their religion.

Custom-fitting time to suit you is a noble goal, but also rather high-maintenance. Personally, I would prefer the rhythm of my life to do the time management, leaving more for me. As Paul Dolan writes in Happiness by Design, ‘It’s worth thinking about how you could find more time without having to plan more time.’

For some, busy will always be a boast. No problem – unless the resulting tradeoffs do not stand up to scrutiny. Fixate on being on it, all the time, in the tense present, and we feel we have no time. Because the Achilles heel of lightning-speed living is us: we cannot keep up with it. Tragically this does not stop us trying.

As boundaries dissolve, distraction breeds distraction, and pressures seem to intensify. It is easy to believe time itself is beyond our control. Or to overpack our days, leaving no slack time, space or pause for thought. This overwhelms us. No wonder procrastination is also rising. If it seems crazy, consider this: what better way to assert that you will do things in your own good time? Now that our relationship with time is dysfunctional, it seems only logical that our timekeeping should go awry too.

The result?

Never enough done. Never enough time.

We need time in all its dimensions in order to live fully and well. Daydreams. Plans for the future. Spontaneity. Time for reveries about nothing. And the ability to think things through, then carry them out in linear, organized stages, not chaotic flexitime.

I will defend unto death your right to fritter away your time, but having it stolen is another matter. Throw it away and we are complicit. Control is the heart of the matter: it is what makes us feel that we are living by our own priorities, or constantly racing to catch up. That way lies the hurry trap.

Fast incites us to speed up, but changing our response changes the situation. The range of choices available to us may be daunting, but slow down and you can exercise them. No need to turn your back on the wonders of this fast-forward world. Transformation is available at the point where you encounter it, the bit that you are in charge of. You.

To survive in a world without limits is simple. Set your own.

BUSY (#u1ad2347a-dfed-5dfa-ab66-b68d6c261695)

When I am in a flap – texting, talking, eating, fixing meetings to discuss meetings I did not attend – I often think of the fly in Aesop’s fable, the one who sat on the wheel of a chariot crying, ‘What a lot of dust I raise!’

‘How are you?’ friends ask.

‘Busy.’ I may smile, but basically it is a non-answer, just one boastful notch up from ‘Fine’. Like a stock cube, the word condenses life’s banquet into a deadly four-letter word. This makes it ideal for shutting down unwelcome lines of conversation. Curiously, although everybody understands that busy is dull, it is our proudest alibi for whatever we do all day. Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom, suspected that a lot of busy is a time-filling tactic – one that enlarges the vacuum it aims to fill:

The most hyperactive of us are precisely those who have the lowest boredom thresholds. We have an almost complete lack of downtime, scurrying from one activity to the next because we cannot face tackling time that is ‘empty’. Paradoxically enough, this bulging time is often frighteningly empty when viewed in retrospect.

In the short term, busy makes us feel important, the buzz of even bogus tasks generating a seductive sensation of efficacy, like static fuzzing a TV. But while engaged in our frenzied show of bustle, what are we omitting to do? It is a question posed by two very different men, both of whom transformed civilization in their way.

The first was Socrates, a lapsed stonemason with a face like a punched potato, who is said to have cautioned, ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life.’ By all accounts he lived out this philosophy, downing his tools to become a free-range teacher. He roamed Athens with a retinue of wealthy students, collaring citizens with sly questions that made them feel silly, expertly getting up the noses of the elite while leaving his wife to bring up their three sons, whom he ignored. Until 399 BC, when he was put on trial as a public menace. The guilty verdict brought a choice: exile or execution. Typically, he argued that leaving Athens was not worth the bother and downed a cup of hemlock. A noble death, wept the flower of Athenian youth, perhaps forgetting Socrates’ family, left with neither wealth nor a noble name to protect them.

Socrates became the wellspring of Western thought without writing a word (he left that to students such as Plato). It is tempting to take his warning against busyness for the counsel of the original dude. But he was too subtle a thinker to underwrite a slacker manifesto. Why else would his warning have been echoed twenty-four centuries later by the most industrious man in history?

‘Being busy does not always mean real work,’ said Thomas Edison. ‘There must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose. Seeming to do is not doing.’ Edison was an arch doer. The indefatigable wizard of Menlo Park’s inventions, including the phonograph and film camera, secured 1,093 patents in the US alone and sired several major industries. ‘I have got so much to do and life is so short,’ he told a friend. ‘I am going to hustle.’ Edison had a simple scam for packing it all in: pickpocket time. On average he worked eighteen maniacal hours a day (up to sixty on the trot for truly intractable puzzles), snatching a few hours’ sleep a night and taking restorative daytime catnaps in one of the cots that dotted his workstations. By the age of forty-seven he estimated his true age was eighty-two, since ‘working only eight hours a day would have taken till that time’.

You may shudder to measure your life’s output in Edison years, and no healthcare provider would recommend it. Fittingly, it is thanks to him that everybody’s day stretches beyond its natural limit, courtesy of the light bulb.

I doubt whether Socrates’ and Edison’s definitions of a time-rich life would have had much in common. However, both recognized a timeless danger: if you mistake frothing from task to task for meaningful activity in its own right, you will fizz about like a pill in a glass of water, expending vast amounts of energy on increasingly invisible returns. It is also a licence for rudeness and thoughtlessness, for avoiding events we do not want to attend, relieving us from the responsibility of interrogating our choices. Not my fault: I’m just too busy! Margaret Visser, a historian of everyday life, wrote:

‘No time’ is used as an excuse and also as a spur: it both goads and constrains us, as a concept such as ‘honour’ did for the ancient Greeks. Abstract, quantitative, and amoral, unarguable, exerting pressure on each person as an individual, the feeling that we have no time escapes explanation and censure by claiming to be a condition created entirely out of our good fortune. We have ‘no time’ apparently because modern life offers so many pleasures, so many choices, that we cannot resist trying enough of them to ‘use up’ all the time we have been allotted.

In reality busy is a hollow word, a descriptive term for effort; it reveals nothing about whether that effort is productive, purposeful or a waste of disorganized time. Next time I feel busy, I will ask myself, what for?