On Time

Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast

Catherine Blyth

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780008225551
• eBook ISBN: 9780008189990
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Management

Part One

How Time Went Crazy

Includes: how time created consciousness; why Singapore is faster than New York; why delivery boys feared the noose; how wealth accelerates us but the costlier our hours, the poorer they feel; why we should listen to Steven Spielberg; the battle of the eyeballs; and what Socrates had in common with Thomas Edison.

1

Is the World Spinning Faster?

Why time feels less free

This is the mystery:

We have more hours at our disposal than any humans in history. Few of us toil for the six 12-hour shifts that constituted our grandfathers’ working week. Many of us also enjoy flexible employment arrangements. According to current estimates, lucky citizens of the developed world may enjoy around 1,000 months on this planet. The average man’s life expectancy is 80 and is increasing by six hours a day. Women’s rate of improvement lags behind slightly at four hours per day, but given that their average lifespan is 83, they can afford to take it slower.

Better yet, what we can do with our time transcends anything yet seen on earth. Our present has been transformed by astonishing powers of telepresence. Own a smartphone and you can operate in multiple time zones, see, learn or buy pretty much anything, interact with almost anyone, whenever you wish, with a swipe of a finger, without leaving bed. Never have we been able to accomplish so much, so fast, with so little effort.

Yet despite these everyday miracles, many of us feel time poor. Why?

The short answer is that we are living in a new sort of time, and it is creating a new sort of us. Our instinctive response is to speed up, but we would gain far more from these glorious freedoms if we slowed down and concentrated.

This is not always welcome news. ‘I am fed up with being told to be “in the moment”,’ said my friend, when she heard I was writing about time. ‘Please do something about it.’

I feel her pain. I associate this advice with a certain kind of lifestyle guru – the wealthy, ex-film star kind, who has never ironed a shirt without a stylist or a camera crew to immortalize this act of humility. But although this phrase sounds like twaddle from certain lips, it is harder to dismiss if you recognize it as the echo of wisdom that reverberates across continents and centuries.

‘What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there,’ said the Buddha, two and a half millennia ago. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who beat a solitary retreat to Walden Woods, Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1845 to ‘live deliberately’ for two years, riffed on the same theme:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains … You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Anyone too busy to take off to a log cabin in search of enlightenment might be annoyed by Thoreau’s lovely words, since they imply we may be missing out on the times of our life. But that is a philosopher’s job, to ask the nagging question, how to live well. And there are signs that it is increasingly urgent.

The architecture of time in our lives is being dismantled at an astonishing rate, in an astonishing variety of ways. Previously, days were paced by work schedules, TV schedules, meal times, home time – with breaks built in; moments to rest, reflect, plan. These rhythms managed time for us. Now these boundaries are crumbling. Linear time coexists with flexitime, its disruptive pulse the irregular chirrup of smartphones. It is a social and technological revolution, with profound, personal consequences that we have been tardy to recognize.

This is the situation: as the steady and sequential are displaced by the instant and unpredictable, our time can be freer than ever. The complication is that this brings pressures and responsibilities. We need to manage time more actively or else we can feel we are falling apart.

Using time effectively is not an innate gift. It is a skill, though one sadly not taught in schools. We acquire it – some of us better than others – through interaction and experience. But nobody has inherited the cultural knowhow required for this new sort of time; our parents could not teach us, it is all too new. And managing time is itself a pressure that can make us feel we have less to spare.

You need not be Stephen Hawking to understand that time is a dimension. But, each waking moment, we also create our own sense of it. And when that sense alters, we behave differently too. Of course everybody’s relationship with time is always changing – we are all getting older; however, today’s changes are redefining the quality of experience. With small, practical steps, we can use it to improve our quality of life. Or alternatively, we can trip into the hurry trap.

Long ago, our ancestors depended on moving fast to survive. The fight-or-flight response was an emergency gear designed to speed them out of trouble. Today our tools and toys can do the fast for us. This is the great gift of our new sort of time, if we use it. We can custom fit our hours to suit us. If we really want, we can do what nine-to-fivers have always dreamt of and live like guitarist Keith Richards, Lazarus of the Rolling Stones, who for years slept twice a week – ‘I’ve been conscious for at least three lifetimes,’ he boasted – and, mystifyingly, grew old. (Note: the hazards of such a lifestyle include being crushed by a library, plummeting headlong from a palm tree and mistakenly snorting a line of your father’s ashes.)

This chapter explores why, rather than seize the freedom to set our own pace, instead we are speeding up – and how this is a problem.

1. Why time sped up

The twentieth century was the age of acceleration. Obsession with speed summoned planes, trains, automobiles and rockets, culminating in the design of a mighty particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, the construction of which began at Cern in 1998. Breaching human limits was of equal fascination.

Who does not want to go faster? In the 1950s a young neurologist decided to learn how. In particular, he wanted to find out why overdoing physical activity leaves us breathless. It was widely held that as muscles burn energy, lactate alters the blood’s acidity, increasing the nerve impulses to the brain – in effect saying ‘Breathe harder! Oxygen required!’ But he suspected something more: that when we push ourselves beyond a certain point our lungs cannot deliver enough oxygen, stopping us in our tracks. Sampling arterial blood could confirm his theory; however, opening an artery mid-workout was not safe. Instead he took the indirect route, recruiting a team of athletes, a treadmill and a stopwatch.

Each runner sprinted to exhaustion. After giving them a period to recover the neurologist called them back, strapping on facemasks that delivered oxygen in concentrations of 33 per cent, 66 per cent and 100 per cent (20 per cent is a normal concentration in air). Those who received 66 per cent saw a drastic improvement in their performance. Most went twice the previous distance. One finally quit out of boredom, another to catch a train. The hypothesis was correct. Stamina was a matter of both resources and willpower.

A few years later, distinguished exercise expert Professor Tim Noakes interviewed the neurologist. What was the most important limiting factor in exhaustion? The young man did not hesitate. ‘Of course, it is the brain, which determines how hard the exercise systems can be pushed.’

His answer is to be trusted. He too was an athlete. His name was Roger Bannister, and he well understood the mind’s power to overmaster time.

On the morning of 6 May 1954 Bannister was due to attempt to run the mile in under four minutes, which would make him the first man to do so. But he awoke to blustery winds, and these would add one second to each lap. His best practice time for a lap to date was 59 seconds, so triumph would require him to run faster than his sunny day’s best. He did not want to try, dreading failure, having already been vilified by the press for previous disappointing races.

He travelled alone on the train from London to Oxford, brooding on his dilemma. Apparently by chance, although surely by design, his coach, Franz Stampfl, was in the same carriage. Stampfl pointed out that Bannister’s rivals were due to race in the coming weeks. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘if there is only a half-good chance … If you pass it up today, you may never forgive yourself for the rest of your life. You will feel pain, but what is it? It’s just pain.’

Bannister arrived at the Iffley race track determined to run for his life. Later that day, three hundred yards from the finish, his pace lagged, his body exhausted.

There was a moment of mixed excitement when my mind took over. It raced well ahead of my body and drew me compellingly forward. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim. Time seemed to stand still, or did not exist. The only reality was the next two hundred yards of track under my feet. The tape meant finality, even extinction perhaps …

With five yards to go, the finishing line seemed almost to recede. Those last few seconds seemed an eternity. The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace after the struggle. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me only if I reached the tape without slackening my speed. If I faltered now, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would seem a cold, forbidding place. I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last desperate spring to save himself.

In 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, Bannister had changed history. But he would be prouder of his later achievements, becoming a leading authority on the autonomic system – the hidden clock that controls the most vital beats in your life and mine, our heart and breathing rate.

The lessons of Bannister’s early breathing experiments are transferrable. We can increase our pace, mental or physical, given the right resources. But our mind is in charge. Unless it has the means to remain in control, speed wears us out, fast. Yet we can test the limits, and even feel, as he did in Iffley, that time no longer exists. Controlling time makes us powerful if we take choices.

So what do you want to do today?

Perhaps this seems a frivolous question. Perhaps you are fully occupied by what you need to do. Before you answer, it is worth reflecting that your ability to ask it is a privilege unique to our species.

‘We all have our time machines, don’t we,’ wrote H.G. Wells in The Time Machine. ‘Those that take us back are memories … And those that carry us forward, are dreams.’

Being aware that one day we must die is the cruellest term of the human condition. But to compensate, we also have the capacity to appreciate that since this is a one-way ticket, why not embrace the adventure?

Our powers of mental time travel make this possible. They endow us with the riches of culture and knowledge, not to mention aeroplanes that (in theory) run on time, as well as computers, virtual worlds and machines to roam outer space. And how wondrous it is to be able to walk outside after a hard day and – if you are lucky, if the night sky is not cloudy or gelded orange by city lights – turn your eyes heavenward, as I just did, spot a white smudge hovering above the shoulder of Pegasus, and appreciate that there is Andromeda, our nearest major galaxy, one trillion stars and 2.5 million light years away – a vision that began travelling to earth around the time that your immediate ancestor, Homo habilis, ‘handy man’, first picked up a tool, 2.3 million years before a mind like yours or mine existed.

And here we are. Here is your hospitable consciousness, meeting mine, leaping through time, long after I flung these words into a laptop, late one summer’s day. It is impressive, given that we started out as apes and, rather longer before that, as stardust.

Time travel – the ability to understand and organize our actions – is a commonplace marvel. It matters because each conscious instant of our life presents a decision: where to allocate our time and attention. Consciousness enables this, not only by performing the feat of simulating our outside environment inside our head, but also furnishing us with an inner reality. Our every moment is infused by previous moments, anticipated moments – giving life depth and perspective, and us our sense of self.

Grace of these riches, our mind’s eye, as if wearing magical spectacles with lenses fashioned from a clairvoyant’s crystal ball, is able to serve as a questing prosthesis for our other five senses: it supercharges the insights they glean from the world around us to let us see beyond where we are into the possible future, supplementing it with information drawn from memory and knowledge to plot a wise and (it is to be hoped) safe course through space and time.

The desire to peer around life’s corners is surely the evolutionary mechanism that summoned consciousness. Certainly, it distinguishes humanity from other animals, freeing us to control our path. These faculties enable you to remember birthdays, plan a surprise for somebody you love, cook a meal without burning down the house, force yourself to study for exams, judge exactly how long it is safe to loiter in Starbucks before running to catch that plane, know you will never like liquorice, watch Dirty Dancing, sing along and have the time of your life. Time is the foundation of your sense of self. Your sixth sense.

Strangely, although everyone agrees that time is scarce and precious, it is remarkable how readily we give it away. Statistics suggest that whilst we wonder where the time goes, in truth we have plenty to spare. In 2013 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey found that on average men aged 15 and over had 5.9 daily hours of leisure. Women had 5.2 hours, and employed workers an average of 4.5 hours – a sizeable chunk of the waking day.

This does not tally with how busy we feel. Are we deluded?

What these numbers do not reveal is the form this leisure comes in: whether those free minutes are scattered through the day or available in useful blocks. Time leaks from us in many ways, after all. Count them, however, and you may feel queasy.

In 2014, Ofcom found UK adults spent 8 hours 41 minutes a day on media devices, 20 minutes longer than they spent asleep. Of this tally, four hours went on TV – the same for children. (On average, Britons donate nine irreplaceable years to box-goggling.) Across the Atlantic, in 2014 the average US citizen watched six hours of TV per day, spent an hour on a computer, another on a smartphone, and almost three listening to radio. Tot them up. It sounds a lot like leisure.

Yet other information suggests that the pace of life is accelerating. The rate at which we walk is a good indicator. In 1999 sociologist Robert Levine led a study of cities and towns across thirty-one countries and found that urbanites march significantly faster than their less wealthy country cousins. London, one of the world’s richest cities, topped the speed list. A decade later, similar research concluded that the average tempo had risen 10 per cent. Far Eastern cities accelerated the most, with Singapore (up 30 per cent) becoming the new global leader.

Why are we hurrying up? Researchers concluded that several factors increase a country’s pace of life: economic growth, large cities, rising incomes, accurate, plentiful clocks, an individualistic culture and a cool climate. (Asian tiger economies sped up with the spread of air conditioning.) Imagine those lonely hordes, their collars upturned as blistering wind chases them into their skyscrapers to put in another twelve-hour stint.

The picture these statistics paint is confusing: of fast-moving, exhausted individuals, who spend half their existence slumped in armchairs while imagining they are hurtling about at full throttle. This contradictory image begins to add up when you consider the engines behind economic growth: flexible hours (of employment and consumption) and hyperfast communications.

If the steam engine fired the industrial revolution, the driver behind wealth in recent decades has been semiconductors. As they got cheaper and faster, so did computers, enabling us to do more, faster, without moving an inch. The possibilities are endless. What is less obvious is that acceleration has psychological, physiological and practical side effects which are increasing time pressures, with complicated consequences.

Speed has long been both the goal and the index of human progress. The history of civilization hops and skips in innovative leaps that let us do more in less time: from the invention of the wheel, to bank notes that let us transmit funds without trundling about caskets of gold, to machines for washing clothes. Swift communication unleashed scientific discoveries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries via epistolary relationships between the likes of Galileo and Kepler, thus hastening the Enlightenment. In the same way, great cities are superconductors of knowledge, gathering together like-minded people – as in California’s Silicon Valley, where dreams of the future led to where we are now, with the boundaries of space and time defeated, and more or less every idea under the sun available more or less instantly, Wi-Fi server permitting.

It is worth pausing to consider how extraordinary today’s fast is. When the Royal Mail relaunched in 1662 after the restoration of Britain’s monarchy, a letter dispatched in London would reach a continental city between three and twenty-five days later. Postmen travelled on foot at a regulated seven miles per hour between March and September, five miles per hour in the winter months. (Horses were not used, since they lacked staying power, while ‘footmen can go where horses cannot’.) Priority was given to letters of state, carried in a separate bag known as the ‘packet’. If the packet went astray, an official letter was easy to recognize by the forbidding motto on its exterior: ‘Haste, Post, haste for thy life’. In case the postboy was illiterate, it was accompanied by a grim sketch: a gallows with a corpse hanging in a noose. Arguably today’s fast should also carry a health warning.

Undeniably speed enlarges minds and fortunes. It is an article of faith among management consultants, citing a popular study, that a product that runs 50 per cent over budget will be more profitable than one that strolls in six months late. Fast technology conjures myriad new businesses, some great, some questionable – such as high-frequency stock trading, in which tech-savvy individuals exploit differing lengths in computer cable between exchange...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: There is enough time
• Part One: How Time Went Crazy
• 1 Is the World Spinning Faster? Why time feels less free
• Part Two: What is Time and Where Does it Go?
• 2 How Time Gives Us the World: Why we invented it, how it reinvents us
• 3 Slaves to the Beat: Why time changes speed and so do we
• 4 It’s Not Working: How overload, digital distractions, productivity myths and time-poor thinking addict us to hurry
• 5 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Procrastination: And how to stop
• Part Three: How to Get it Back
• 6 Body Clocks: Living by your biological timetable
• 7 Time Rich: How to hurry slowly, spend time better and lose it well
• 8 Time Thieves: A handler’s guide to bogus convenience, meetings, email and other botherment
• 9 Timing: Making time serve you
• 10 Sticking at It: The secret life of routines, plans and deadlines
• 11 The Life Edit: Refurbishing habits, decluttering your day
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• Index
• Also by Catherine Blyth
• About the Author
• Praise
• About the Publisher