Under Acceleration

I’m a multi-tasker and proud of it. I got my college degree without taking out loans, as everybody in my family knows, by working one full-time and three part-time jobs. I’ve spent years where I owned a business, worked at Tektronix, sang in the opera chorus, was a church soloist, had twenty voice students and was the mother of a toddler – all at once. As I’ve matured (some call it “aging,”) I’ve noticed that my ability to do more than three things at a time is becoming compromised. This is disabling, but I’m starting to come to terms with it, much as I have come to terms to bifocals. Grumpily.

Now my multi-tasking feels more like meandering. I looked in the hall closet this morning at 6:30 a.m. to find my son a hat, while booting up my computer to read the New York Times and eating my breakfast. Three hours later, the contents of the closet are strewn around the room waiting to be sorted and put into other closets, my breakfast sits uneaten, and the Times has become the jumping off point for this essay.

Whether you stack time vertically or take the more linear approach, having enough time to accomplish everything in a day has become one of our highest anxieties. According to the Times, there are now 111 million people on the road working while driving. They e-mail, talk on the phone, eat lunch – sometimes all at once. This, despite research showing that people who talk on the phone, even it it’s hands-free, are four times more likely to crash.

“It’s a seconds-count economy,” one worker said. In other words, he believes that you absolutely must risk your life, and the lives of other people on the road, in order to do the minimum required to do your job well. He’s right, too – in this tight economy, the first person on the spot wins the job or lands the customer. If you take a breath, sit down at a table to eat your lunch, wait until you get where you’re going to check your e-mail or take a phone call – well, you might as well be Bob Cratchit, scrivener. It’s all so quaint, and you’re history, just like a Dickens character.

However, we are still the same one-thing-at-a-time mammals that we were before “the seconds-count economy.” Our brains just don’t evolve that fast. Brain research shows clearly that we aren’t built to multi-task well. My teenage son and I will both argue this point, but we are wrong. In order to do two or six things at once, the brain switches back and forth between tasks. This makes it less efficient, and lowers significantly the quality of brain function. So if you’re multi-tasking to save time, you are more likely to make a mistake that you’ll have to fix later. Or you’ll learn something incorrectly. If you’re driving, you might die. Or kill somebody. And that’s too high a price to pay for staying competitive, folks.

Trying to do several things at once shortens our attention spans, too. Just as TV has trained us to pay attention for one- or two-second flashes of information, the brains of multi-taskers are being trained to jump from task to task, so that it’s harder to investigate and think critically about more complex ideas.

We know in our heart of hearts that it’s not always comfortable or safe to cram so much into each moment. Why do we do it?

Well, time is the most precious commodity of all, isn’t it? We hoard it, schedule it, slice and dice it and package it up in our electronic devices or even, anachronistically, on family calendars posted on the fridge. We probably obsess about having enough time more than we think about having enough money. And if we have the feeling that there ARE no more “normal” days, that every day feels like a crisis and we just can’t get to everything any more, we are right.

There’s no lack of opinions and studies to support our nostalgic belief that we used to have more time. We DID used to have more time. Americans work more hours now than the Japanese, who sometimes commit suicide because of job pressures. We work WAY more hours than the Europeans. (Many Europeans believe that if you’re going to work in the U.S., do it before you get married and have children, because an American job precludes the possibility of spending time with them.)

Ironically, we may not even be keeping up with the growing demands of our lives by working longer hours. We’ve got 16 waking hours in a day. (I’d like to assume that everybody is in bed for the other eight, but then I’m a dreamer.) There’s just so much you’re going to get done in those 16 hours, no matter how efficient you are.

But wait. Remember those studies that showed that we made up for the loss of buying power by sending the other adult in the family to work? If one person can’t keep up with the modern cost of living, a second person can make up the difference. If we’re lucky enough to have a partner in the household, and have the willpower to delegate and the communication skills to job-share our lives, we really can keep up with our insistent schedules.

We think. Although sometimes I wonder, “What happens when we need a third adult in the house to get a job?”

I’m not advocating polygamy. I’m just asking.

Just as we need a second adult to earn enough money to stay ahead, we may find that we have to delegate to everybody over the age of ten in the family, do five things at once, sleep less, and eat in the car, just to stay up with the minimum required to make our lives work. How do we have enough TIME to do everything necessary to get a job, keep a job, do a job – without endangering our health, our sanity, or relationships, or the lives of people on the road?

My friend Sara is one of the most efficient people I know. She and her husband both work full-time. They have two children, who attend two different schools. These kids are busy and bright, with lots of friends and activities. Her house is always clean and she manages to have people over to dinner often, and she’s got a network of friends that would make Margaret Mead sit up and notice.

But she’s constantly on the road, managing life from her cell phone. She’s tired. She’s grateful…she is aware of her blessings and takes many of her precious moments to give thanks for a great life. But she is amazingly, unrelentingly BUSY. And she’s typical of most working people I know.

For most people, personal time comes out of sleep time, or sitting down and eating time, or quiet time. Children don’t have time to sit and dream or run over to the neighbor’s house to play or dawdle over their breakfast. (Well, that ship sailed decades ago, anyway.) Even worse, work time comes out of sleeping or eating time. There is no personal time.

This takes a toll, make no mistake about that. A 2005 Washington Post article cited an “avalanche” of studies that showed that human beings who sleep less than six or seven hours a night have a much higher risk cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Recent studies in the U.S. and Europe show that, due to an increase in work hours, we have fewer friends and spend less time with them than we used to. We’re a service economy, in large part, because we don’t have time to cook our own dinner or do our own taxes. We may not have even had time to learn how to cook. We were too busy working.

It’s a seconds-count world. What happens when the time deficit gets bigger? When one or two efficient, sleep-deprived, motivated, multi-tasking adults just can’t get it all done? Make no mistake, we will get there. We may be there now.

There aren’t more than 24 hours in a day. We can layer those moments and fill them up vertically. We can slice into our sleep time. We can delegate to our spouses and children. We can schedule efficiently and yes, we can e-mail and talk on the phone while driving. But when the demands on us become so great that we just need another six hours a day, even at peak efficiency, to get everything done, at that point, we’ll just have to re-think the whole system.

Harold Ross, legendary editor of The New Yorker, used to bawl, “The system’s falling down!” Has it fallen and we were too busy to notice it?

And what’s the alternative?

I don't know. But I think we'd better get cracking on it...in our spare time.