What a buzz. Unexpectedly, on a recent trip to New Zealand, I was able to see, up close, the ‘World’s Fastest Indian’. This was the motorcycle made famous in the uplifting film of that name. 40 years on, Burt Munro’s motorcycle still holds land speed records for its class. It got me thinking about the speed of our working lives.
There’s little doubt the world feels faster. “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place,” as the Red Queen says in Through the Looking Glass. Faster communication. Faster food. Ever more instant satisfaction. “Buy today and pay nothing for 40 months!” cries a local discounter’s advertising.
But I suspect we are reaching some limits.
The absolute land speed record was last broken on the same salt plains that Burt Munro achieved his fame. The record, 1228 km/h, remains unbeaten after 10 years. The previous record (a leisurely 1149 km/h!) took 13 years to break. The water speed record, set by Australian Ken Warby, still survives 29 years on.
On a more human level, a new world record has just been set for the 100m men’s sprint – but it took eight years to shave 0.05 seconds off the previous mark. The 200m record still stands after 11 years. In the women’s events, neither of these records has been broken since 1988.
At work we may think that we’re working faster, but a lot of our sense of increased speed is illusory. We’re running ever faster but still staying in the same place.
Yes, computers continue to gain speed. Moore’s Law (which, put crudely, says that the speed of computers will double every two years) continues to hold. In practice though, more and more complex software soaks up this extra electronic horsepower and we don’t experience a lot of it on our desktops.
Yes, mobile phones, email, instant messaging and their ilk seem to be making our communication more efficient. But they are really only making interruption more efficient. The actual communication bit hasn’t got significantly faster since the dial telephone was invented in 1919.
Yes, perhaps the Internet has some more oomph up its sleeve. But even here I wonder about the practical benefit to most of us of being able to transmit a document in 5 seconds rather than ten.
Which raises the real question. If we are close to the speed limit, is it really worth squeezing out the last few drops of velocity? Bill Munro would think so, but then he liked the world passing as a blur. The rest of us might do better just easing off the gas a little and enjoying the ride.
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Great post! I agree with your statement:
Yes, mobile phones, email, instant messaging and their ilk seem to be making our communication more efficient. But they are really only making interruption more efficient. The actual communication bit hasn’t got significantly faster since the dial telephone was invented in 1919.
I believe a company can take advantage of efficient communication by managing the potential interruptions this communication can cause. In my company Mindscape we all keep our email notifications turned off and check our email at two predetermined times throughout the day. Our clients are notified of this via auto-response to avoid any emergencies going unsolved. Since implementing this policy we’ve seen a decrease of over 60% in the time we spend on email. We also use a internal chat system which we mark “do not disturb” if we are focusing on a particular project.
We enjoy coming up with creative ways of capitalizing on efficient information flow instead of allowing it to make us it’s slave.