We need to understand when we need to go slow

September 30, 2024 1:05 AM

We also regard time as a kind of commodity, as if it’s fungible, as if 10 blocks of 10 minutes is the same as one chunk of 100 minutes. In human terms, this is absolutely not true. “The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” That’s Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into lots of little chunks of time, your productivity is massively destroyed even though the time available is pretty much notionally the same. from Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? [The Behavioral Scientist]
posted by chavenet (2 comments total)

This is great—so many good pull-quotes that I've stopped pulling them, and will instead just say: take the time to read it.

It reminded me of a personal example of the impact of optimising for speed (and price). In the late 1990s I was travelling from Vancouver to Alberta to meet my in-laws for the first time. We had travelled up via the Pacific Northwest on a flexible schedule, and ended up with less time than planned to get across, and money was tight... and so we caught an overnight Greyhound across the Rockies to Edmonton.

Not the best way to see the Canadian Rockies for the first time. Not that "see" is relevant here, although I remember seeing the bus station at Kamloops when we pulled into it. A bunch of bright lights through a rainy bus window in the dark.

I did get to enjoy the Rockies in winter a few years later, fortunately—in the daytime.
posted by rory at 3:22 AM on September 30

One of the worst mistakes we ever made was making email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer

schedule send.
posted by HearHere at 3:49 AM on September 30