Cool Down (9 page)

 

 

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.

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
.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.