Why so fast? Could a little more friction be fruitful?

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In this forum, I often read (and have written myself, I suspect) that “X is much faster than doing the same in…” or, “This new workflow eliminates X steps …” or “I can find X much faster…”

This got me thinking, “Why are we so obsessed with everything being “fast or faster?”

Don’t get me wrong; I understand and am an advocate for efficiency, but could there be a benefit, perhaps a mental one, to slowing down a bit and not feeling as if we must shave every nanosecond off our workflows? Paradoxically, are we adding cognitive load unnecessarily by focusing so intently on saving time? Would we be more relaxed, perhaps more creative, if we moved more slowly, not always attempting to zip through every action with the speediest automation and shortcuts?

“Could the occasional inefficiency make us more effective?”

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If the inefficiencies involve learning something, yes.

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Let’s not forget that Cal Newport wrote a book about “Slow Productivity”.

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And slow is fast, fast is slow.

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If an improvement removes busywork or admin from my life I’m all for it. Anything repetitive should be done by a computer, it’s what they’re great at. Anything which provides me more time to make a difference with changes or new processes is welcome.

One of the issues I have at work is that I don’t always have time to step back and take a breath.

But there is a risk that we just try to cram more and more into a day.

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I am dependently wealthy, and I work so that I can do the things that matter to me. And if I can get my work done faster, then I’ll have more time to do those things that matter.

For those things, friends, family, hobbies, and such, I spend as much time as I can. Alas, they seem to go much too fast on their own.

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Cognitive load. If inefficiencies creates cognitive load, then going slow is not productive or useful. Being productive is not about shaving of time, but being able to place to right concentration on the things that matter. More time for the right things.

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I agree

The issue is that technology held the promise (and still does I suppose) that it would take away the mundane to give one more time to spend on other parts of a role. Unfortunately, that time is filled with more work, not more time to look at the same work.

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Falling. Something definitely done better, if done at all, slowly.

I think @NiranS is on the right track. To me “doing something faster” is better if that means spending less of my mental bandwidth on it.

In recent years (and advancing years) I have often had to explain to people “While I have the time to do it, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do it.”

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I think there’s an underlying confusion between “quality” and “quantity” in a great deal of productivity discussion, including around how we work with computers.

If we are involved in high quality work, that is worthy of our talents, has just the right amount of mental and physical challenge and is intrinsically worthwhile to us, why would we want to do it more quickly? As in the “flow” state, time becomes irrelevant: it will flash by anyway. We don’t want to be somewhere else or doing anything else.

If we are doing low quality work, that does not challenge us, that is not worthwhile, we want it to happen as fast as possible, or someone or something else (like an automation) to do it for us. That’s when people start fretting about every “unnecessary” mouse click or key press.

Of course, most real work is a mixture of qualities: we have to tidy up after writing or sculpting or baking, for example, but it’s also human to need some displacement or less precisely focused activity: it allows parts of our brains and minds to work that are not immediately in our consciousness and can improve the quality of the main work we are doing.

I have to say I am often puzzled by “power user” feedback to developers that complains because they have to click a mouse (instead of a keyboard shortcut) or that they have to choose something from a sub-menu and not directly. I can see the relevance of such things if I am working in a very constrained way (e.g. trying to produce a lot of programming code, quickly) but almost everything that I would consider quality work benefits from not trying to go flat out all the time.

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Some examples of fruitful friction that spring to mind:

  • My dad likes to tell a story about, how he was in grad school, he would load statistical programs or data sets onto a computer one floppy disk at a time. Insert one, let it load into RAM, eject the floppy, insert the next one, let it load. But as computers got more powerful and disks got bigger, this became unnecessary. He would use that “loading time” to think about the problem, wrap his mind around it, and take time to “context switch” as he loaded the program. With the more “efficient” model, he lost all that thinking time.
  • My wife and I have decided – a few years in a row now – not to get any smart devices that automate things in our house (thermostat, light switches, locks, etc). We’ve decided that we prefer being forced to interact with our house, and stay mindful of our physical surroundings. It also forces us to get up and move around a bit more than we would otherwise. Like an Apple Watch stand reminder when we get too cold. :slightly_smiling_face:
  • I used to be very deep into Obsidian. Daily notes, a web of extensions to manage to do lists, integrations with Jira, Google Calendar, etc. It was very “efficient”. But in my very elaborate PKM, I was stifling my ability to knowledge-share with the rest of my team. I moved away from that, and committed to having my only personal notes be a single running Apple Note. Having an limited personal notes environment like this forces me to put notes in shared locations with the rest of my team: comments in Jira, or as shared Google Docs.

p.s. on a micro-level on my computer, I am still a big proponent of automating 6 clicks into 1 hotkey, etc. I feel like there are many administrative mini-actions that take me out of flow when I have to think about coordinating intermediate steps. But I would say this is less about efficiency and more about lowering the surface area for distraction.

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I’m reminded of this from Douglas Adams:

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

  1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
  2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
  3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Do you use a remote with your television? :slight_smile:

Does anyone remember the fun times of loading diskettes to update an OS? 13 for Windows 95, 22 for Windows NT? (I had to look these up - I had blocked them from my memory.)

How many pine for the days of using a paper phone book? Or the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature?

How many of us would tradie in our washing machine for a washboard, tub, and nearby stream?

Would you trade your stove for a fire place and an ax? (And not just for a camping trip!)

Do you long for the days before garage door openers were a thing? Before cars were a thing?

Wish you could get your water from a well? (Well we do, but it is automated with a electric pump, no bucket and crank for us thank you.)

Once upon a time these were all new. And changed how people lived. Just like smart devices are doing today. As I noted above, I welcome the time this gives me to do the things that matter to me.

It is up to each of us to make good use of any time gained.

None of this is meant to disparage the choices made by others. Nor are the comments meant to be snarky (ok maybe a bit snarky). But how much of this is nostalgia?

I’ll leave with another quote, this by Jerome Lawrence, from Inherit the Wind:

“Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it.

Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, "All right, you can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.

Henry Drummond, a character in Inherit the Wind”

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I agree with the general points you make, however, not so much about smart devices if you are referring to home automation. I’m not against smart devices per se, but I’ve read and heard enough, including on tech podcasts, to believe that it would take years to break even on the time invested in setting them up, and more significantly maintaining them, compared to the time “saved” by the automation.

Some day, home automation will be as reliable as my TV and toaster, until then, I’ll also get up to turn lights on and off and burn a calorie or two while doing it. :rofl:

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Once upon a time these were all new. And changed how people lived. Just like smart devices are doing today. As I noted above, I welcome the time this gives me to do the things that matter to me. It is up to each of us to make good use of any time gained.

If you’ll forgive me, your comments illustrate the underlying confusion between quality and quantity. Progress is (or should be) what makes things better, not what makes things faster. Where increased process speed can be important is in allowing higher quality results in the same time. That’s partly why new technology has not yet resulted in us all having vast amounts of leisure time. We’re expected to use the same working day to produce much more - in terms of quality and quantity. For example, try reading everyday typewritten documents from before word processors: riddled with errors, only some of which were corrected; ugly and often fading and very hard to read, especially the carbon copies. Almost no-one would accept similar documents today: the standard was raised beyond recognition by the introduction of word processing. The same applies even more strongly in any visual or audio field - we really won’t accept seeing the joins in movie special effects any more or cope with standard definition TV for more than a few minutes, and we won’t put up with scratchy sound recordings unless they are exceptionally important historically.

My smart home allows the heating to vary in each room instantly in response to other sources of heat (like the sun shining through the window), to be set appropriately by time and room for the purposes I need and to make sure that my wife (who has mobility problems) isn’t ever left searching in the dark for the light switch. But I long ago stopped using smart tech for the sake of it. Most of our switches are just switches. Better, not quicker.

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Maybe, if you are willing to wait another decade or so.

I live in a 2 bedroom townhouse and my home automation consists of 8 smartbulbs. I can count on them to turn off when I leave and turn back on when I arrive home. But as soon as I ask Siri to control them their grade drops from a B+ to a D, on a good day. So I normally use the Home app to change thing manually.

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I am. There’s nothing particularly compelling about home automation that makes me in a hurry. :slightly_smiling_face:

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You are clearly in Adam’s category three! :slight_smile:

But seriously, your grand kids with think it is normal.

I have a number of smart plugs and find them quite useful. I don’t have much else though (I too am in category 3.)

Cheers.

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Are you serious?

People today have so much free time that some of them wrote and entire operating system in that free time. And they gave it away for free!. It’s called Linux, perhaps you’ve heard of it?

I was in Madagascar in November (on vacation, something my grand parents would have never dreamed of doing). Most people are without electricity, running water, and cars. We saw people who would need to walk four plus miles to the nearest village to get that days food, while other family members went to get water, and still more when to find firewood. Just to do it again tomorrow. My nearest grocery store is ten miles away. I can shop for the week in one hour. Which of us has more leisure time?

Now realize that this was how my great grandparents lived. Technology has most assuredly increased leisure time.

My dad was an executive. To send what I would today send as an email he would call in his secretary. He would dictate and she would write it down using some fancy stenographer code. She would then go type it up, using white out to make corrections. Dad would read it over, send her back to make any needed corrections and changes. Once good those carbon copies would be made, and off it would go via interoffice mail. His office was on the 15th floor. A message to the 3rd floor would go in a mail slot on his floor. It would be picked up and delivered to a mail slot on the 3rd floor. It would be delivered to the recipient the next morning. The recipient would repeat the process. Now if the message had to go to another office …

I can get an answer from my colleagues in the Ukraine in under an hour. And because emails have spell check this is somehow worse?

Are you actually arguing that we should all go back to barely readable documents with poor grammar and spelling?

And I think most of us can recognize a well written document. :slight_smile:

So the person with mobility problems is required to get up to turn on a light, instead of just saying “Hey Siri turn on the bedroom light”. And that is somehow a better process? (Or if instead of Siri just clicking a button on her iPhone?)

[And while we are on the mobility issue, why is it that the handicapped stalls in most restrooms are the farthest from the entrance? Who designs these things? That is just plain nuts.]

To sum up, I get more done, with better quality, in my job today, then I did at the start of my career. And I have more leisure time then any of my ancestors. Better and quicker.

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One of the areas my team is responsible for is automating and processing data for a variety of business needs. The desire to automate and streamline everything is so tempting, and at times extremely beneficial, but it comes with overhead. Your comment reminded me of this https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/automation.png

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As I recall, the Harvard school of business once determined the cost of sending a letter by the process you describe cost approximately $50, in 1972. That would be around $350 in 2024 dollars.

And at a lower cost.