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

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СКАЧАТЬ that make us speedy.) Employers’ demands intensified when salaries rose, driving up the pace. But workers’ choices changed too. The more they could earn, the less time they spent on other activities.

      Self-consciousness about time depletes our ability to relax and relish it. Fascinatingly, if you trick someone into feeling richer, studies find that instantly he also feels more time-pressed. Just remind somebody what they earn in an hour and relaxing to music becomes harder for them. Why? An hour feels less disposable the more we are paid for it, increasing the pressure to squeeze out every penny – even if in theory you can better afford to slack off.

      No wonder that when time pressure intensifies, we often make rum choices. In a 2008 survey, 57 per cent of respondents who identified themselves as busy cut back on hobbies, 30 per cent on family time, but only 6 per cent on work. Perhaps in an era of credit crunch, then at its nadir, these priorities were understandable. Equally, it is possible that those questioned preferred to see less of their family. In order to thrive, love needs space, yet in an age of Velcro unions and widespread divorce, investing time in love instead of a career can feel risky, and deafening cries for me time suggest that our priorities are less collegiate. Fostering love is even harder if we are distracted and the continuum of relationships is interrupted, whether by business trips or our chirruping smartphone.

      When we design our lives, it is easy to underestimate the importance of unhurried time – even those of us who should know better. Such as behavioural psychologist David Halpern, who confessed he is a commuter. ‘We’d probably have been happier in a smaller place with more time at home.’ In his defence, he argued that such trade-offs are common: ‘We buy expensive presents for our kids that they rarely play with, when they – and we – would probably be happier if we had spent the money and the time on doing something with them.’

      Opting to go home instead of earning overtime – even if it means missing those you love – is difficult. Love is shown by what we provide, is it not – and if we do not put in the hours, what will it mean for our promotion prospects?

      Of all the curiosities of time in our speedy world most striking is that our horizons seem increasingly short-termist. Our huge 1,000-month lifespan gives us a greater stake in the future, yet fewer save for old age than in past generations, and external mechanisms, such as government initiatives to compel us to invest in pensions, are weak or vanishing. ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing,’ remarked economist Avner Offer.

      In business too, grab and go is the order of the day. ‘Silicon Valley venture capital firms are starting to seek fantastically short life-cycles for the companies they finance: eighteen months, they hope, from launch to public stock offering. Competition in cycle times has transformed segment after segment of the economy,’ wrote James Gleick in Faster, noting that the turnaround in car manufacturing from design to delivery, traditionally five years, was down to eighteen months by 1997. Everyone wants a fast buck – and they want it faster. Can it be that as a whole we are reluctant to look ahead – to imagine the planet, the climate or the hands that steer the tiller of our global future?

      ‘There is no quality in human nature, which causes more fatal errors in our conduct, than that which leads us to prefer whatever is present to the distant and remote,’ wrote philosopher David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40). Neglecting the joys of the present is no wiser. We need both. But if we are losing sight of the future, it could be because our present is so drenched. It has never been harder to live in the moment, never mind see beyond it.

      2. The great time heist

      ‘If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time,’ wrote architect Norman Juster in 1961. Sadly humanity’s artistry at dreaming up new essentials on which to spend money is exceeded only by our ingenuity at confecting fresh tosh on which to waste time.

      In the decades since Juster made his joke, the industry of easy and useless grew exponentially. As it did, his joke turned into a prediction. Free time is increasingly a thing of the past.

      I have nothing against wasting time. It is a joy, a right and a duty, and an aid to creativity. This is why we have so many plum terms for it: bimbling, dallying, dawdling, dillydallying, dissipating, frittering, idling, lazing, loitering, lollygagging, mooching, moseying, pootling, pottering, slacking, squandering, tarrying, tootling. I am grateful to the nameless men and women who bumbled away their hours conjuring these delicious words. ‘Forget your cares,’ they seem to say. ‘Savour us.’

      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 СКАЧАТЬ