Adam Smith and the Facebook Gnomes

Actually, I was going to call this post Adam Smith and the Facebook Gnomes: Productivity Theft and the Wealth of Nations but it was too long a title to capture anyone's attention seriously. The reason for this post is that the time has come for self-flagellation and sad introspection on the demerits of modern online life.

Adam Smith wrote, in his 1776 masterpiece The Wealth of Nations, "When [a worker] first begins his new work, he is seldom very keen and hearty... for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose. Rural workmen obliged to change work and tool every half hour develop slothful and lazy habits."

In other words, multitasking (the doing of many things in an intertwined way) is a productivity sink. Many studies have shown that quick distractions result in long-term time wasting as the brain attempts to reorient itself. Work breaks actually break work. It is better, for example, to develop the habit of working 4-6 hour stretches on one objective than to work an hour, take a breather, and return to work.

However, the personal experience of modern man is such that most people find it psychologically impossible to work for long stretches. Rather, we make a virtue of short attention spans and call it multitasking. This, as Adam Smith points out, reduces productivity and the quality of work.

On the other hand, there are some specific areas of work which require true multitasking — the seamless perception of reality and its manipulation towards multiple ends through common activity. True multitasking is about doing many things at the same time, not doing bits of things in quick rotation or succession. Most of these areas of work require multiple people: think of the way a restaurant (or an orchestra) works, for example.

I've been letting myself take Facebook breaks too often, I think. I spent a day monitoring my productivity and was aghast to find that a day without Facebook adds about five hours of work at least! Going out for lunch actually takes two hours unless you are very focussed — and further downtime may be added if you then feel dozy after a heavy meal. In one day, I realise that unless I am actually teaching, making notes while reading, or doing active and specific research (as opposed to flitting through the internet) I might be wasting up to eight (!!) hours of my 12-hour working day just doing nothing specifically useful.

Woe is me... I feel a sudden urge to take a good look at the dour Scottish Protestantism that made a virtue of hard and unstinting labour without distractions between sunrise and sunset.

I hear it got a lot less dour and more fun after sunset though.

Engineering Failure

Sometimes I think that zero-tolerance (or at least, very low tolerance) engineering is the downfall of many things in the modern world. Here is an excellent quotation from Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human (Vintage Books, 1992), p220.

The successful transportation of men to the moon and back has demonstrated that lack of experience alone does not necessarily condemn a design to failure. It is rather the combination of inexperience, distracted by overly restrictive requirements, coupled with the pressures of deadlines, and aggravated by concerns for profit margins that initiates the cracking up of bus frames and designers. [stress added by me]

It is the same set of stressors that drives men to multitask, a special talent which men are far less suited to possess effectively than women. Women, after all, are able to locate missing children and animals without so much as line of sight and even in the absence of noise (which is as effective a signal as noise itself, to many of them). Men aren't very good at multiple targets, due to the easily-focussed (some say 'distracted') nature of the male brain.

The American Psychological Association, often the focus of much contentious debate as to its pronouncements, has something to say about the matter which makes a certain amount of sense. They contend that multitasking has a built-in cost associated with switching rule-sets on and off, back and forth. A few tenths of a second are required to activate such switching, and this can make a life-and-death difference in efficiency of response.

I used to feel lousy about not being good at multitasking. I'm glad, for once, to feel normal.