CHAPTER 3
PERSONAL BLUR
Time for a quick review. In Chapter 1, I highlighted how human nature forces us to constantly want to take in more and more information (Parkinson’s Law), and how this “brilliant haze of light” leads to a point of finite productivity (The Law of Diminishing Returns). In Chapter 2, I illustrated how this high-speed appetite has resulted in a reduction of interpersonal communication (Intellectual Isolation) and of productivity (Presenteeism). The next issue that needs investigation is how speed has conditioned us individually into living within a type of “event-to-event” thinking, which leads to hasty decisions and a further loss of opportunity due to not perceiving all the necessary details before acting.
THE ILLUSION OF SPEED
In the 100 years or more since the development of the first horseless carriages, automotive power has risen from 12 horsepower (hp) inside a 1904 Duryea Phaeton to 250 hp for a modern family car, and much, much more for those Porsches mentioned in this book’s introduction. Progress is constant and astonishing. James Bond’s beautiful Aston Martin DB5, for example, which was considered a super-car in 1962, can now easily be outpaced by a well-tuned Honda. But as speed has increased, so has it decreased.
Take traveling, for instance. Though the available horsepower in a typical family car has increased twentyfold, people are not able to travel twenty times faster. For although cars themselves are capable of a great deal more speed, they seldom get to exercise this ability on major streets and highways. This is due not to any physical fault of the car, but to congestion, caused most often by the poor driving habits of aggressive, speed-obsessed drivers and lane-hoppers.
In China, where the desire for personal advancement has itself taken a great leap forward, 30,000 new cars are being added to the streets of Beijing each month. That’s 1,000 additional cars every single day.
1 The traffic jams are unbelievable, and though the traditional bicycle is now being usurped by upwardly mobile urban Chinese people, it is often still the fastest way around town.
Regardless of the country, this rush hour paradox—faster cars but slower traveling—is a classic example of what happens when people think speed rather than efficiency.
The Cool Approach to Commuting
A study, performed in 1999 by Donald A. Redelmeier and Robert J. Tibshirani, sought to identify whether aggressive lane-hoppers really benefited from constantly switching lanes when driving in congested traffic. The study was based on a principle they called
roadway illusion, namely, “that the next lane on a congested roadway appears to be moving faster than the driver’s current lane even if both lanes have the same average speed.”
2 Their findings showed that unless there was an actual lane obstruction such as an accident, no lane is faster than any other during high-volume rush-hour traffic. It appears to a frustrated driver that the cars and trucks in the other lanes are moving more quickly, but this is because most observers only really take note of such vehicular injustices when they themselves are being passed, and they are not so likely to see them when their own lane temporarily becomes the faster one. In addition, cars that pass an observer tend to remain in the field of view (up ahead) longer than those that have been passed.
Furthermore, many other traffic studies have shown that the slowdowns and bunch-ups that are commonplace during rush hour are caused, more often than not, by erratic acceleration and braking patterns rather than actual accidents. One car picks up speed, for example, and then is forced to brake as the traffic ahead slows. The driver of the car behind then often tends to over-brake, in order to allow for additional stopping distance. This creates a ripple effect, which quickly extends many miles backwards through the traffic, creating the slowdowns that seem to have no cause.
Our own research into discovering the existence of a truly faster lane has led us to conclude that on a congested road, the best lane to remain in is the outside lane—the one everyone merges into and exits from. This is primarily because as soon as the other drivers merge in, they quickly switch to the middle or inside lanes, expecting them to be faster. So, even though the outside lane handles more cars, it quickly disperses them. As a result, the best advice for getting somewhere quickly and coolly in congested traffic is to aim for the slow lane, because it’s the quickest.
EVENT-TO-EVENT THINKING
The above examples of the relationship between cars, speed, and traffic jams highlight, by extension, the high-speed mode of thinking that causes problems in other areas of life. Delays cause stress primarily because any stoppage becomes an impediment between where a person is and where he or she would rather be. Life has conditioned us into a mindset that runs “event to event” (think about the pause-less sequence of shows and commercials on TV, for example), without factoring in intermediary time. People plan their days and fill their agendas as if they knew (or hoped) they had access to the transporter room on the deck of Star Trek’s Enterprise.
Consider what I said about meetings in the previous chapter. The problem is not only that they often run less than optimally but that they are often booked too closely together. This is because the people doing the planning as well as the participants are trapped into thinking “event to event” and “meeting to meeting.” How many times have you had to deal with a schedule full of back-to-back meetings? How often have you attended a conference in which the second event starts late because the opening address ran over the scheduled time? People tend to schedule things according to the old notion that one event must follow another in close succession because gaps of wasted time are evil.
I’m going to challenge that.
Certainly gaps of wasted time are not what people want in a day. But gaps need not be wasteful; in fact, they can make the difference between a reasonably productive day and a fully productive day. Meetings, activities, or events that run back to back, for example, are physically and mentally exhausting. Late starts impact the quality of the information to be delivered, and late wrap-ups impact subsequent events. Often it is the breaks that are sacrificed, which further threatens the success of the entire occasion. Such difficult days offer no opportunity to regroup, refresh, and prepare, which results in participants whose mental tachometers end up distressingly low.
Techniques for Running a Successful Multi-Meeting Day
• Schedule realistic times between events. I suggest 20 minutes. Give people enough time to refresh, go to the bathroom, and check their email. They will pay you back by participating more thoroughly.
• Start events at times other than “on the hour.” For example, event A could run from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., with event B running from 10:20 a.m. to 11:20 a.m.
• Allow time for small talk and venting, if you feel this is needed.
• Use a tool such as a bell or tapping a pen on a glass, or dimming the lights to usher people back to their seats quickly.
• Seek out meeting rooms that have copious sources of natural light.
How many different types of event-to-event situations can you identify in your day? What about getting up in the morning and getting your family and yourself out of the house and on their way? How about your commute in, your morning meetings, your travel itinerary? How about back-to-back phone calls, or ad hoc requests for your time in an already busy day? There are so many situations in which we force ourselves into an event-to-event mindset, and as each task block butts up against the one before it, we start to suffocate intellectually and the blur thickens.
What Are You Doing for Lunch? Cubicle for One?
I’m always amazed at the number of people who tell me they work through lunch. It’s easy to see why. There’s so much to do. Parkinson’s Law stands at the ready to ensure that no matter how much gets done, there will always be a reason to do more during this valuable time, and event-to-event thinking creates the expectation that work must continue, no matter what. Personal time is so easy to sacrifice. After all, what value could it possibly have compared to the pressure of getting more done? It is intangible and subjective and therefore easily becomes secondary to work in terms of its significance. Personal time is not as definite or as firm as a scheduled event such as a meeting or a conference call. Consequently, when you meet someone in the elevator or kitchenette carrying his lunch back to his desk, you think little of it. It’s normal. It’s expected.
It’s hard to cool down and take lunch when it’s perceived solely as a self-indulgent act. But what if individuals and teams could be educated towards the idea that slowing down and taking a few minutes away from work actually increased productivity during the afternoon? What if people were able to see how taking a break from work for just 15 or 20 minutes to eat a healthy lunch (not fast food), not only replenishes the body with vital nutrients for the afternoon but also gives the creative mind a chance to step away from the momentum of the tasks at hand and refocus and condense the energies required to deliver quality? That might mean something: the idea that rest actually pays off.
A short midday lunch break also bolsters the metabolism in two important ways:
First, it energizes the body against the dreaded mid-afternoon trough, a period that occurs roughly around 2:30 p.m. and lasts between 30 minutes and an hour. For nine out of every 10 people, tasks become harder at this time, the brain becomes a little sluggish, and the body becomes a little sleepy as it seeks to take a quick afternoon nap. This physical depression is due to our innate 12-hour echoing of the deep-sleep period that occurs at around 2:30 a.m., but it can be lessened substantially by eating the right types of foods at the right pace. That means taking lunch and snacking on healthy foods throughout the day.
Naps, by the way, are not a solution to productivity problems even though they’re precisely what people think of when they first hear about the Slow movement. Though some studies have shown that the nervous system does need a break in the mid-afternoon, the general understanding is that actual sleep in the mid-afternoon simply robs the body of depth and quality rest later on when it comes to overnight sleep. Overnight sleep is a multi-hour trip through various levels of brainwave activity that starts when you first doze off and ideally continues uninterrupted for six or more hours. Napping merely takes some of that sequence away and places it in the middle of the afternoon, leaving less rest for the night, and reduced quality of rest overall. Many people who allow themselves breaks throughout the day, along with adequate nutrition and fluids, find they don’t need a nap. The breaks and refreshment are enough.
Optimum Lunch/Snack Choices for Productive Afternoons
• Foods that balance protein and carbs include tuna or chicken sandwiches on whole wheat bread.
• Snacks that can be stored at your desk include crackers, dried fruit, canned fruit, juice boxes, rice cakes, cereal, granola bars, instant soups and pastas, and almonds.
• Lunch/snack items that can be stored in the lunchroom fridge include bagels, bread, bran muffins, yogurt, cottage cheese, fresh fruit, raw vegetables, cheese, milk, and salad greens.
Foods to Avoid
• Heavy foods laden with carbs, fats, and starch
• Potatoes, pasta, pizza, hamburgers, and fast food
This conscious choice of taking time to eat the right types of foods helps to level out the metabolism and thus maintain energy throughout the day, while simultaneously bolstering the immune system against colds and infection. This is profound. It has direct economic value: By simply slowing down enough to eat a small lunch, and therefore minimizing the afternoon trough, each of your staff members or colleagues stands to gain one hour of extra productivity per day. If you have eight people on your team, this simple technique will win you back one person-day each week. By assisting your people in fighting off colds and other infections, you also help to cut back on both absenteeism and presenteeism, adding hundreds of more fully productive person-hours per year.
If this intellectual argument in favor of lunch breaks away from the desk hasn’t grabbed you thus far, how about some purely biological facts? Studies have shown that eating over the keyboard is a health hazard, pure and simple. It has been proven that a computer keyboard and mouse contain 100 times more bacteria on their surfaces, nooks, and crannies than a kitchen table, and 400 times more than a toilet seat.
3 Their surfaces are constantly touched, often by many people, either directly or indirectly (think about shaking hands with someone and then returning to your computer). Germs and other nasty things can survive for hours, sometimes days, on dry surfaces such as computer equipment. Consequently, an employee might be able to squeeze 15 minutes more out of the day by working through her lunch, taking a bite of her sandwich, then working a little on her computer, then taking another bite, but when she then has to spend the next few days sick at home, or sick at work, her forehead tachometer will drop and stay dropped for a long time. And once the tachometer drops below 50 percent, all tasks, from the simplest phone calls to the most challenging knowledge work will take at least twice as long.
Speaking of Washrooms …
The same goes for bathroom breaks. We need only recall the economic impact that disease outbreaks such as SARS and influenza had, and still have, on business. These illnesses are transmitted through contact with surfaces of all kinds. Following the SARS outbreak, a great number of organizations worldwide took the initiative and posted hand-washing instructions on the walls and mirrors of washrooms. The problem is, if people do not feel they have time to follow the posted procedures, the signs are pointless. The urgency of speed follows an employee right to the washroom basin. People who have to work too fast and think too fast will inevitably wash their hands too fast (far more quickly than the 15 seconds recommended by health authorities). And although that may seem like a personal thing, when it’s your people who do this, who then interact with other people and with common tools and areas of the office, physical contamination will spread with the same efficiency and rapidity as a computer virus. Many companies have already calculated the financial cost of network-borne viruses to their IT infrastructure. But what will it take for them to create an environment in which human beings are afforded the same opportunity for health and safety? It’s not soap and water that’s missing; it’s the attitude.
We did some analysis to see if this whole washroom thing was actually a real problem. We chose four companies at random, and posted an interviewer outside the door of selected staff washrooms (both men’s and women’s) at random times of the day. We asked the following simple questions:
a. Did you wash your hands?
b. If yes, how long did you wash them for?
c. Did you use paper towel or a heat dryer to dry them?
d. Which hand did you use to open the bathroom door upon exiting?
The results were interesting to say the least. Although most participants, 83%, said they washed their hands, few did so for 15 seconds with lathered soap. When asked why, the answer was “not enough time.”
The reason for the fourth question—the one about which hand they used to open the door—is because regardless of the amount of time any individual spends washing his hands, once he touches the taps to turn them off and then grasps the inside door handle of the washroom in order to leave, he re-infects himself with the traces of all those who used the facilities before him.
This, then, is an example of how speed eventually reduces productivity, in this case through illness caused by insufficient hygiene. Busy individuals tend to neglect proper and complete hygiene procedures due to lack of time. Their minds are preoccupied with work, and therefore they don’t take the time to consider the importance of this simple task.
What Are You Doing for Lunch? 100 M.P.H.?
Hagerty Classic Insurance, a provider of classic car insurance, used data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to identify the 10 most dangerous foods to eat while driving, since up to that point this data was largely unavailable to insurance companies.
4 They discovered that two of the biggest offenders are chocolate and coffee. You’re most likely to spill or burn yourself with coffee, and chocolate will most likely get you into a swerving situation, or worse. Chocolate is sticky, it gets onto the steering wheel, and even worse things happen when it falls into your lap and starts to melt. With chocolate it’s not the eating that’s dangerous, it’s the cleaning up. The other eight members of Hagerty’s top-10 list are: hot soup, tacos, chili, hamburgers, barbecued food, fried chicken, jelly-filled or cream-filled donuts, and soft drinks. None of these foods, with the possible exception of soup, are particularly healthy to begin with, and since cars were never designed to be steered with the knees, they are simply dangerous, as are all other foods that are eaten while driving. They negatively impact safety, productivity, alertness, and health.
But people need to get where they’re going. And as long as we live and think “event to event,” lunch on the road becomes like lunch over the keyboard—a space of negligible personal time that can be sacrificed in the name of keeping up. A preoccupied mind, combined with an overloaded schedule, conspire to eliminate our awareness of how things could be done better.
• Driving while eating robs the mind of its driving talents. The first to go are realistic, defensive assessments of braking distances, followed by acclimatizing to changing road surfaces or obstacles (particularly in construction zones).
• Driving while eating further robs drivers of the ability to anticipate other drivers’ actions. Reading a driver’s body language can help predict fast lane changes, for example, or can help assess the safety of intersections in which other people are turning in front of you or running yellow and red lights.
• Food never stays where it’s supposed to when you eat and drive. Even the easiest foods to eat tend to spill or crumble, often landing in hard-to-reach places.
• When it comes to hygiene, a steering wheel is just like a keyboard with regard to retaining and spreading germs.
• The final major danger of eating while driving has to do with food stains. They do nothing to enhance a positive image and can be a great source of stress.
I have spoken to many a road warrior who has learned, sometimes the hard way, that there is greater value in pulling over for 10 minutes to grab some lunch, rather than eating on the fly. Here are some of the comments they shared with me:
• “I find I eat slower if I stop driving. Then I don’t get heartburn in the afternoon.”
• “I don’t get so hungry so quickly if I eat slower and stop driving. It’s helped me lose weight.”
• “It really cuts down on highway hypnosis.”
• “I get a chance to check my schedule. If I can call people and tell them what time they can expect me, then there’s less waiting around for me. I can actually see more of my customers by calling them just after I eat my lunch.”
• “Sometimes I have to give my client a lift. Sometimes even my boss. It’s really embarrassing to invite someone into your car when all of the lunch stuff is still there. When I stop to eat, I can also make sure my car is presentable. That means a lot in my business.”
• “It’s just nice to get away for a while. I’m in my car, with my music on, or sometimes a book on CD. It just feels good.”
Later I asked the person who made the fourth statement above, what would happen if he realized his schedule was too tight and that he couldn’t make all his appointments that day.
He answered, “That has happened to me, and it’s not a problem. My customers like to know that I’m looking out for them. If I tell one that I can’t see him today, but that I will be able to come by tomorrow, he’s fine with that. He’s busy, I’m busy, and we know that. He’s actually grateful for the call. It shows that I respect him.”
This is a great example of how “high touch” wins out over “high speed.” The customer is happy. He feels looked after. The road warrior is happy. He feels in control. His health is better since he has eaten slowly and carefully, and he will be in a better position to drive safely and still make his other commitments in the afternoon.
HIGH-SPEED AT THE CUBICLE FARM
Consider for a moment the deathbed anguishes of Robert Probst. As a designer, working for office furniture giant Herman Miller in the 1960s, Probst came up with the modular, three-walled work area that we now know as the cubicle. Seeking to create a high-productivity space for commercial innovation, Probst conceived the “Action Office,” whose surfaces, both horizontal and vertical, allowed for clear thought, freedom of movement, ample storage, and the ability to lay out plans and drawings (there were no personal computers back then), all in a semi-open, semi-private configuration. Sadly, as is the fate of many creative architects, he watched as his modular workplace morphed into an economic convenience for the companies for which they worked, in which creative space gave way to an ice-cube tray-like formation, and the priority shifted away from ergonomic needs to economic ones. As
Fortune writer Julie Schlosser puts it, the cubicle “still claims the largest share of office furniture sales—$3 billion or so a year—and has outlived every “office of the future” meant to replace it.”
5 There are at least two ways in which the modern cubicle existence has contributed to the issue of lost productivity through speed.
Ambient Momentum
First is the idea of ambient momentum. The open-concept environment created by the cubicle provides sight barriers in three out of four directions, but it does nothing to lessen the distraction factor of ambient noise and activity. The atmosphere of the typical workplace delivers a host of distractions: conversations, phone calls, drop-in visitors, laughter, food aromas, mumblings, rustlings, arguments, gossip, and general busy-ness in a pretty constant fashion. There are some who can tune out this assault, but many cannot. Alongside distraction, which is costly enough, this activity creates its own momentum, a counterproductive speed of thought and action. When a person absorbs this ambient momentum, simply by sharing the same physical space, he ramps up to a higher, more frenetic level of thought and reaction without reaping similar levels of productivity or focus.
Ambient momentum, then, refers not to workplace noise itself but to the constant awareness of speed in the background, a subliminal presence that urges people on, beyond the pace at which the mind works best. The existence of ambient momentum is best proven by looking at the primary perk given to executives upon promotion: a corner office with a nice view and a closeable door—a refuge. Nothing contributes more to creativity and productivity than isolation and focus. It is a prize, a reward.
Examples of ambient momentum exist everywhere. Observe, for example, people’s acceptance that meetings and events must be held back to back. In other words, the event-to-event mindset is nurtured by ambient momentum. So, too, is the act of over-booking schedules and over-committing to tasks. People who drive too fast are carrying over ambient momentum from the office. People who have trouble getting to sleep at night are taking ambient momentum to bed with them. Ways to combat ambient momentum are highlighted in the box on the following page, and are implicit in all of the other descriptions and solutions within this book. The idea is to understand that although ambient momentum can be disorienting, which does nothing for productivity or stress management, it can be controlled, quite simply, by cooling down.
Techniques to Combat Ambient Momentum
• Find an unused office or boardroom and “hide” there for an hour with your work. Leave a note letting people know when you’ll be back.
• Go to a coffee shop and work there. The noise of other people’s conversations will be less distracting due to their irrelevance.
• If you can only work at your desk, invest in a pair of noise reduction headphones (approximately $200). These help reduce ambient noise and tend to dissuade people from disturbing you.
• Position yourself away from direct sightlines of passersby. Avoid the temptation of looking at people during your period of focus. Use your body language to create a “shell.”
Erosion of Human Contact
The second danger of cubicle existence has to do with its isolationism—the very thing Robert Probst sought to eliminate. The irony here is that although the cubicle grid structure of the typical office allows many people to work closely together, it has done little to improve actual human-to-human contact skills. People feel more comfortable hiding behind email than they do talking issues through, face to face, in a well-structured, dynamic discussion.
One example of this erosion can be seen in the case study of Karen and Vern in the previous chapter, who were unaware that an option other than email ping-pong was possible. It wasn’t that they’d never heard of face-to-face meetings. Of course they had. But ambient momentum blurred such alternatives and made them invisible. Let’s now consider some other examples. How would you deal with these situations?
• An accountant is busy preparing a client’s tax return. There is some bad news about the return that is going to cost the client more money than she’d expected. The accountant procrastinates, agonizing for days over the phone call he’ll have to make. He doesn’t want to deliver bad news, and he doesn’t know how to do it.
• A customer sends an email message inquiring about how to return a defective product to the company. The employee at the company sends back a standard email response he’d created just for this purpose. Too rushed to proofread the letter, he sends it with the wrong date, customer name, and product name on it. Distracted by a manager dropping by his cubicle wanting to chat, he forgets to schedule a follow-up call.
• An office employee is beginning to dislike a co-worker for her lax attitude towards punctuality on the projects she’s been assigned. She puts her thoughts into a vindictive email and sends it to their mutual manager.
• A junior in a professional services firm gets exasperated by the fact that the senior partner keeps sending tasks for her to do by email, even though they work side by side. The junior recognizes that additional tasks are part of the job, but she feels that her senior is unaware of her current workload and unappreciative of her efforts and initiative.
These are examples of opportunities for interpersonal contact that have been eroded due to ambient momentum and the walls of the cubicle environment. In all of the cases above, solutions or resolutions could have been found and resolved faster if the people involved had known a little more about the value of human connection within the business process.
• The accountant, for example, could recognize that he need not be solely the bearer of bad news, but that he could apply his expertise to become part of the solution. With only a little courage he could guide his client through her short-term challenges and stay with her as a regular, reliable, and recommended supplier of business. She, in turn, would stay with him as a loyal client and a possible source of referral business.
• The employee who sent out the standardized, yet incorrect, email response could have increased his sales and won over the dissatisfied client by taking the time to talk to her on the phone, to agree with her complaints, and to demonstrate his acknowledgement of her distress as the first step in resolving the situation to her liking.
• The office employee who dislikes her colleague’s lax behavior might do better to visit and talk with her, perhaps in the company of a third person as mediator, in order to learn more about where she’s really coming from. Perhaps there are circumstances beyond the office walls that are contributing to this person’s conduct.
• The final example highlights the disconnect that often happens between members of a closely knit team when clear communication and mutual understanding get shunted aside. The junior partner’s talents are going wasted due to confusion, frustration, and anonymity. By working together, the two of them should be able to exceed the sum of their individual contributions.
The stories above might appear to be isolated examples. But they are analogies for many hundreds of other types of situations in which people miss out on faster, more productive opportunities due to personal blur. It’s as destructive to individual efficiency as intellectual isolation is to groups. By being consciously aware of its presence, you will be able to identify blur as a threat and then strategize how best to cool down in order to achieve your goals more quickly and efficiently.
Ambient Momentum and the Departure Lounge
To demonstrate, let’s make a parable out of two travelers in an airport departure lounge. This again is a situation-specific scenario whose lessons extend to many other areas of life.
It’s hard not to be caught up by the tension of travel. It’s a rootless existence where people stand halfway between home and their new destination, unable to access either. They battle jetlag, fatigue, and exasperation, while having to keep their wits about them to avoid missing important announcements. It may seem that boredom or frustration is the theme of the airport departure lounge, not personal blur. But let’s observe how, when the moment hits, it’s the cool, clear thinker who wins out.
Two travelers, Frank and Ernest, are sitting in the departure lounge. The PA system announces that due to a last-minute equipment change, the plane for their flight has been changed to a smaller one, and hence the flight is oversold.
Frank succumbs to the urgency of the moment. He leaps up and joins the other passengers, who all storm the agent at the gate. They demand answers, they vent their frustrations, and they demand to know how this situation will be resolved.
Ernest, however, does not. He knows there’s no need to rush over and join his irate traveling companions in line. There’s a cooler, more effective way. He takes out his wireless PDA and goes online to the airline’s website. There, isolated from the contagious confusion of the departure lounge, he rebooks his flight online, with no extra cost or inconvenience.
Having circumvented the chaos, Ernest takes advantage of the privacy that the departure lounge offers. He intentionally left his office an hour early in order to negotiate city traffic and airport security with ease. He arrived unstressed at the terminal and now proceeds to get an hour of focused work done.
Frank, the unseasoned traveler and caught in the vortex of speed, did not see any value in planning ahead. Instead, he worked to the absolute last minute at the office, grabbed a taxi, and paid the driver double to drive as fast as possible. He saw no point in arriving early just to sit in an airport. And now the vortex continues. He still hasn’t got a flight, and his blood pressure is dangerously high.
Ernest, on the other hand, works away on his laptop until his new flight is called. He takes his time, and strides toward the gate.
Which person would you rather be? Which one of these people reflects your current approach to crisis?
What can we learn from these cases? When people are forced, through the stress of speed and momentum, to gloss over the parts that complete the process, relationships remain incomplete and success becomes elusive. Such is the price of personal blur.
We’ve now spent enough time looking at damage. In the next chapter, we’ll pause and see how situations like Frank’s above gave rise to the actual global Slow movement. After that we will be in a better and cooler position to observe how we can accept and practice the techniques espoused by this movement in our busy lives.
KEY POINTS TO TAKE AWAY
• Although cars are physically capable of traveling faster, poor driving habits, fueled by an expectation of speed, cause wasteful delay.
• Event-to-event thinking forces people to act without factoring in necessary intermediary time.
• When planned for, gaps of time are opportunities for rest and creativity.
• The benefits of cooling and slowing down go far beyond the immediate and affect the quality of subsequent work, as well as the way you sleep at night.
• People who work through lunch do not gain as much as those who take a break, away from their desk.
• People who eat lunch while driving not only run the risk of being involved in an accident; they get no chance to mentally regroup and prepare for upcoming activities.
• Ambient momentum refers to noise and other activity within an open-concept environment that subconsciously drives people into a high-speed mindset.
• Ambient momentum also contributes to the decline in the human ability to communicate and resolve problems face to face.
HOW TO COOL DOWN: TIPS FOR AVOIDING PERSONAL BLUR
Blur
• Take stock of your day. Observe the moments when blur happens the most.
• Describe to yourself the cost of blur. Is it making you productive or is it ensuring you just tread water?
Lunch
• How often do you skip lunch?
• How often do you work through lunch?
• How often do you have “working lunches,” or meetings in which lunch is brought in?
• Would you be able to schedule at least 15 minutes a day for lunch away from your desk?
• How would you alleviate your colleagues’ worry about “losing” you during this time?
• Make sure your lunch includes time away from your desk, as well as a few minutes outside, for a change of air, light, and scenery.
Choosing What to Eat
• Do you feel you choose your at-work foods wisely?
• Do you tend to eat small amounts throughout the day, or just a single lunch at lunchtime?
The Dieticians of Canada Association Suggests
• To store at your desk: crackers, dried fruit, canned fruit, juice boxes, rice cakes, cereal, granola bars, instant soups and pastas, peanut butter, canned fish
• To store in the lunchroom fridge: bagels, bread, bran muffins, yoghurt, cottage cheese, fresh fruit, raw vegetables, cheese, milk, salad greens
• To eat while on the road (after pulling over to a safe place): baby carrots, celery sticks, bagel bits, rice cakes, apples, crackers, pretzels
The 11:00 A.M. Snack
• At the very least, try snacking on low-fat yogurt around 11:00 a.m. and see how that affects your hunger an hour later. Most people notice that they feel less ravenous and are then able to choose a better lunch and to eat it less quickly.
Immediacy and Blur: Recognize That There Is Always an Afterwards
• Try to avoid getting caught up in the heat of the moment. When a large pizza or cheeseburger seems to be the most desirable choice for lunch, try to avoid succumbing to the temptation and look for better alternatives. All foods have the capacity to make you feel pleasantly full in about 20 minutes, so why not go for something healthier?
• If a high-stress situation occurs, remember there will be an “afterwards” to that, too. Knee-jerk reactions may not take you exactly where you want to go.
• Note your victories over personal blur in a diary. Don’t let them die unrecorded.
Driving and Blur
• Perform the Outside lane test for yourself. Next time you find yourself in busy highway traffic, look for a unique vehicle that is near you but in a different lane, perhaps a yellow truck or a tour bus, and use it as a marker. Observe which of you gets through the jam first. Odds are good that you, in the outside lane, will win four times out of five.
Pulling Over to Eat
• A lot of people resist the desire to pull over somewhere to eat. Their initial reaction is to keep going. Is this you? Why is it so hard to want to stop and eat? Picture yourself enjoying a few minutes of quiet, of privacy of time to yourself as you eat you lunch, even if it is in the driver’s seat of your car. Wouldn’t it add more to your day than 15 minutes more of rushing?
Meetings and Blur
Could you influence the timing of meetings or your arrival and departure?
• What would this imply?
• Who might object?
• What might you say to them to sell them on the idea
• Who could you ask, e.g., a mentor who has been successful in scheduling well-paced meetings?
1 Friedman, The World Is Flat.
2 Redelmeier, D.A., and Tibshirani, R.J, “Why Cars in the Next Lane Seem to Go Faster.” Nature, 401, p. 35.
MANY BOOKS TEACH SLOW
THE CHALLENGE: TO GET THROUGH THEM.
A SPEED-READING CLASS?.