Why Timesavers Are Often Timewasters
The automobile. There’s no question that, compared to walking or the horse-drawn carriage, it was a quantum leap in terms of efficiency. Instead of sauntering around at 4 mph or rattling over hill and down dale at 10 mph, today you can reach an easy 100 mph on the (German) motorway without any effort at all. Even given the occasional red light, what would you say is the overall average speed of your car? Write down your estimate in the margin of this page before you read on.
How did you make that calculation? Presumably you divided the total number of miles driven per year by the approximate number of hours spent on the road per year. That’s a figure, incidentally, that your car’s on-board computer can provide. My Rover Discovery calculates it at about 30 mph. Yet this calculation is incorrect. There are other factors to take into account: a) the number of hours you had to work in order to buy the car; b) the number of hours you have to work in order to pay for the insurance, maintenance, petrol and parking tickets; and c) the time you spend traveling to work for a) and b), including sitting in traffic jams. The Catholic priest Ivan Illich totted up all this for cars in the USA. The result? An American car has an average speed of exactly 3.7 mph—walking pace, in other words. And this was in the seventies, when the USA had 40 percent fewer inhabitants but just as many motorways. Today the average speed is almost certainly below 3.7 mph.
Illich called this effect counterproductivity. The term refers to the fact that while many technologies seem at first glance to be saving us time and money, this saving vanishes into thin air as soon as you do a full cost analysis. No matter how you prefer to travel, counterproductivity is a decision-making trap, and you’re better off giving it a wide berth.
Take e-mail, for example. Viewed in isolation, it’s brilliant. You can type and send it off within seconds—and for free, at that! But appearances can be deceptive. Every e-mail address attracts spam that has to be filtered out. Worse yet, most of the messages landing in your inbox are irrelevant, but you still have to read them in order to decide whether they require action on your part. It’s hugely time-consuming. Strictly speaking, you should factor in a slice of the cost of your computer and smartphone, plus the time it takes to update your software. A rough estimate puts the cost at one dollar per relevant e-mail—i.e., just as much as an old-fashioned letter.
Let’s take presentations as an example. A talk—given to management or customers—used to consist of a series of coherent arguments. Handwritten notes sufficed, enlivened, perhaps, with a few lines on an overhead projector. In 1990, PowerPoint launched onto the market. All at once, millions of managers and/or their assistants starting sinking millions of hours into their presentations, adding garish colors, bizarre fonts and oh-so-hilarious animation effects. Net gain: nil. Suddenly, everybody was using PowerPoint, so it soon lost its impact—a classic arms-race effect (see Chapter 46). The hidden costs of counterproductivity come into play, in the form of millions of hours squandered on learning the software, installing endless upgrades and, finally, designing and prettifying the slides. PowerPoint is generally considered “productivity” software. Properly, however, it should be called “counterproductivity” software.
The negative effect of counterproductivity may often catch us unawares—but it comes as no surprise to biologists. The effects have been apparent in nature for millions of years. The male peacock—furnished, in a kind of esthetic arms race with the competition, with increasingly long and beautiful plumage—is faced with the impact of counterproductivity as soon as he runs into a fox. The longer and more magnificent his feathers, the better his chances with the ladies—and the easier he becomes for predators to spot. Over millions of years, a balance has developed between sexual attractiveness and inconspicuousness, which ensures survival. Every extra centimeter of plumage has a counterproductive effect. The same is true, incidentally, of a stag’s antlers or the vocal skills of songbirds.
So be on your guard against counterproductivity. It’s apparent only at a second glance. I’ve got used to only using one laptop (there’s no network at my house), keeping the number of apps on my smartphone to an absolute minimum and only rarely replacing still-functional older gadgets. I avoid all other technology. No TV, no radio, no gaming consoles, no smart watch, no Alexa. From where I sit, smart homes are a horror-movie scenario. I’d rather switch my lights on and off manually than use an app I have to install, connect to the internet and continually update. Plus, my old-fashioned light switches can’t be hacked—another counterproductive factor that can be eliminated.
Do you remember when digital cameras came on the market? Liberation! At least, that’s how it felt at the time. No more expensive film, no more waiting for it to be developed, no more unflattering photographs—you can easily take a dozen more. It looked like a huge simplification, but in hindsight it’s a clear case of counterproductivity. Today we’re sitting on a mountain of photos and videos, 99 percent of which are superfluous, without the time to sort through them, yet compelled to schlep them all over the place in local back-up drives and in the cloud, visible and exploitable by large internet corporations. On top of that is the time you now have to spend working on the images, the complex software that periodically demands updates, and the labor-intensive transfers required when you buy a new computer.
The upshot? Technology—usually heralded as full of promise—often has a counterproductive effect on our quality of life. A basic rule of the good life is as follows: if it doesn’t genuinely contribute something, you can do without it. And that is doubly true for technology. Next time, try switching on your brain instead of reaching for the nearest gadget.