The People Bulletin

There is a sign on the M25 which informs drivers that they should expect the speed limits to change. Sometimes cars can go at the 70 miles per hour while at others they may be reduced to travelling at 30 miles per hour. When you first see this sign you may want to groan inwardly assuming that it is simply the latest affront to your ability to travel at speed. But you need not worry. For far from slowing drivers down these flexible speed limits have actually speeded cars up. Hold on to the image of a sign that tells you to run at variable speeds, because this is exactly what we are going to explore in this chapter. Few would dispute that we are all living in the fast lane. Indeed, the response of many people is simply to try to put their foot down harder on the accelerator pedal. You don’t need me to tell you that this will just result in burn-out. But I hope I can persuade you of the benefits of going slower sometimes. Here are just a few reasons. While we need to be able to respond with speed in certain contexts, our minds actually do much better in response to many of the challenges we face if we slow down. Complex, subtle issues call for a mind which is working in a slower and altogether less conscious way. It takes time to become expert in anything. When we are at our most creative there is a sense in which time ceases to matter as we are wholly absorbed in the moment of what we are doing. But before I try to make these points in more detail, let me take a moment more of your time.

I started this chapter with the idea of a car but perhaps an aeroplane would have been more apposite. For, a combination of cheap international air travel and mobile communication technology has altered our sense of time as fundamentally as the introduction of the railways and the standardisation of time did in the nineteenth century. The mathematics of travel are easy to compute; we do things in a few hours that used to take us a few weeks. But the curriculum of time involves many other subjects. History changes its meaning. This occurs subtly because, with global travel, the seasons cease to matter, a fact underscored by our ability to eat strawberries, apples and oranges throughout the year. More dramatically, when terrorists flew planes into the twin towers in New York it, a defining historical moment, was visible across the world a few moments later. Geographical distinctiveness is vanishing as global brands turn up in Himalayan villages and Amazonian settlements alike.

These different strands all combine to give us a very different sense of time today. Many people find themselves comparatively rich in terms of money but poor in terms of time. This is an odd twist on our evolutionary tale if you stop to think about it. Once upon a time we lived in tribes as hunter-gatherers. Finding enough food was a daily struggle and at the end of each day we collapsed exhausted into bed. We were time poor and our resources were counted in terms of food in the larder and tools in the cave. Then, after many a while, we learned how to make things in great numbers. Cars, washing machines, irons, refrigerators, radios, televisions and many other useful gadgets rolled off the production lines and we suddenly found that we could do things more quickly. “Couch potato” entered the English language in 1976 to describe the latter day hunter-gatherer with so much time on his hands that he (or she) could idle their time away in front of the television. For a few evolutionary moments it seemed as if we were resource rich and time rich. But for most people technology has not bought time. The ubiquitous Blackberry and its equivalents come with us wherever we go, blurring the line between work and leisure for those who cannot turn them off. The result is that today Homo technians frequently lack time. In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes predicted that “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic concerns”. For several decades this did indeed seem to be the case. Eighty years on and a number of futurologists today reconfigure this challenge to society in terms of high and low skills, suggesting that the latest generation of smart computer technology with its in-built ability to learn and improve will indeed leave those with well-developed skills with time on their hands, while those without will struggle to survive. A more powerful force than Keynesian economics, however, may well be Parkinsonian experience! Parkinson’s Law, you may remember, suggests that work expands to fill the time available. In other words, if technology creates more time for us to use, then we will simply take longer doing the other things we need to do in the time we have available. Interestingly, psychologists have demonstrated the truth behind Parkinson’s Law with a simple experiment involving the solving of anagrams. Subjects were all given three different lengths of time – five, ten and twenty minutes – to solve their puzzles and researchers found that, the more anagrams people were given, the more they solved and vice versa. Perhaps more pertinently, those who started off thinking that they only had five minutes kept up their higher work rate even when they were given longer amounts of time. In other words, we seem to be very good at adapting our work rate to the time available! Mindset matters and, as we will discover later in this chapter, certain habits of mind can be more conducive than others in navigating our way through life. One more thing. The semantics of slow and fast living are frequently not favourable to advocates of slow living. To be a slow learner at school is another way of saying that we are dim-witted. It is also associated with a lack of energy and an unwillingness to act. Even the proverbial “slow and steady wins the race” hardly makes being slow sound attractive. It seems likely that quite different attitudes to time have become associated with those born at different times. If you don’t believe us, take a moment to look at this list:

• A sense of not meeting goals.
• Difficulty in getting organised.
• Difficulty in getting started.
• Too many projects going on at the same time and not being properly seen through.
• A restless search for excitement.
• Low tolerance for boredom.
• Easy distractibility.
• A tendency to drift in and out of conversations or reading resulting in confusion.

Do you recognise any of these symptoms in your life? I have adapted them from Driven to Distraction by psychiatrists Edward Hallowell and John Ratey. If children exhibited such symptoms they would probably be diagnosed as having ADD (attention deficit disorder), also known as ADHD where the extra H stands for hyperactivity. These are the kinds of things that happen when our brains only operate in fast mode. We become dissatisfied dilettantes, flitting from one item to the next and never really engaging with one in any detail, either in normal thinking speed or in the slower more reflective state I am focusing on. Perhaps we are reaching some kind of tipping point in the evolution of the human brain with so much stimulation on offer from technology. Just as our brains expanded to cope with our ability to use language and organise our lives for communal living some 200,000 years ago, so now they might be evolving and adapting as a consequence of the technology on which many of us depend. Maybe we will find shortly that we can achieve the quality of thought we need while multitasking as our minds adapt to the new circumstances in which we live.

  © Bill Lucas 2009

Bill Lucas

Bill Lucas is a specialist consultant on the mind, learning and change. While he was CEO of the Campaign for Learning he created Learning at Work Day and is well known for his thinking about the need for a society committed to lifelong learning for all. He has been co-director of the Centre for Real-World Learning and Professor of Learning at the University of Winchester. He is also chairman of The UK’s Talent Foundation. Bill is a senior visiting research fellow at the University of Surrey’s School of Management and currently runs his own learning strategy business, The Bill Lucas Partnership.

Further detail about rEvolution:how to thrive in crazy times is available here