Busy, busy, busy

Nearly everyone I know feels short of time, enough so that it’s diminishing the quality of their lives. Our homes and workplaces are filled with labor-saving devices but most of us are laboring more, not less. In the sixties, people assumed that by the turn of the century robots would do the work. Our biggest chore was going to be figuring out what to do to fight off boredom.

Many time-savers have entered my life in the last quarter century: word processing instead of typing, Google instead of going to the library, sending mail without heading to the post office, driving a car that never breaks down and needs maintenance but once a year, and using a personal computer that runs 700 times faster than my original IBM-PC (and more than 5000 times faster than the first computer I ever programmed). My house has more computing power and information access than a Fortune 500 company when I graduated from college. So where, oh where, is all the time these things are saving me?

Our individual lives echo the productivity paradox noted in business and government. Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow has said that we see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

When personal computers were sufficiently novel that I religiously read every issue of PC Magazine, the editor observed that the PC you want always costs $5,000. Price per unit of performance was halved every 18 months, but Microsoft bloatware gobbled a lots of the new cycles, and consumers had ever-higher expectations, always keeping your dream machine out of reach.

We face the same predicaments in how we live and work. Until recently, I didn’t need to spend hours re-charging my cell phone, evaluating mobile phone billing plans, syncing my phone and computer, and figuring out how to use the damned phone itself. Once upon a time, if I wanted to fly somewhere, I called my travel agent. Now I have routines for finding the best tickets and price by double-checking several online services; finding a reasonable hotel sometimes burns up another hour. The human equivalent of software flab is spending more time coordinating things and less on getting things done. Simplify, simplify.

The analogy to expecting more from our computers is expecting to accomplish more with our time. I’m speaking in London tomorrow morning without leaving Berkeley. My clientele is global: why not? Phone calls to Paris are free. Deliveries that once took weeks arrive overnight. I once kept informed by reading Newsweek and the New York Times, but now I keep tabs on all manner of journals, feeds, and friends. My goal was once to attain a certain salary level; now I’m out to change the world.

No wonder my time is squeezed. I’ve upped my output ten-fold or more. Frenzy is unhealthy. I think I’ll go to bed, and let the important stuff rise to the top on its own. I do my best work when I’m asleep.