The relentlessness of this bombardment has an impact. A Microsoft Research study which tracked over two thousand hours of employee computer activity found that once distracted by an email alert, computer users take an average of twenty-two minutes to return to the suspended task with the same level of focus.17 In 27 per cent of cases, it took them more than two hours to return to the task they were doing in the first place.18 More recent studies have revealed that tasks take a third longer when interrupted by email.19 Whilst a study of employees at the communications firm Porter-Novelli suggested that the combined effect of incessant phone calls and emails can lead to a temporary drop in our IQ of an extraordinary and disturbing ten points.20
As for open-plan offices, the constant background buzz of other colleagues and office equipment makes us 66 per cent less productive.21 Phones ringing on desks, the background hum of conversations we are not part of, and the chime of emails arriving in our inbox distract and demotivate us at work.22
The drip, drip, drip doesn’t just make us less able to think, it’s also exhausting us. We are spent. Unable to sleep, headaches ever looming, always tired; our bodies cope with these new demands by keeping us, as we will learn, in a constant state of hormone-induced stress.23
Yet we crave these interruptions like catnip. Despite their pernicious impact, we actively seek them out. Forty per cent of people continue to check their work email after hours or while they are on holiday.24 Eighty-six per cent of us use our mobiles while watching TV (this figure rises to 92 per cent for the 13-to-24 age group25). An informal poll of friends reveals a geneticist who checks news sites every five minutes while at work, a TV executive who catches up on his emails on the phone while he’s on the stationary bike at the gym, an art dealer who logs on to the Daily Mail website sixty times a day.
We are addicted,26 stressed and overwhelmed, and it’s often while we are in this state that big as well as small decisions have to be made.
Whether we can be switched on if we remain switched on is a question I will return to.
The Age of Disorder
Alongside the constant distraction and the drip, drip, drip of the deluge, the third defining characteristic of our times, the triple of the triple whammy, is disorder – a combination of the breakdown of old, established orders and the extremely unpredictable nature of our age.
For this is an age in which accepted wisdoms have been dramatically overturned. An era in which Lehman Brothers – a bank that was ‘too big to fail’ – proved to be expendable. A time when, rather than preventing women from getting sick, it turns out that regular screening for breast cancer may actually make them sicker.27
An era when certainties can no longer be presumed certain.
Who would have thought, ten years ago, that serious conversations would be taking place about the Chinese yuan replacing the US dollar as the world’s main reserve currency? That a Eurozone country – Cyprus – would impose draconian capital controls? Or that, closer to home, we might no longer be able to trust in the safety of investing in bricks and mortar?
Things we thought we could rely upon now seem ever more vulnerable and chimerical.
Moreover, those who we depended upon to translate and curate the old world order for us have, in just a few years, lost their monopoly of knowledge. Librarians are being usurped by Google, travel agents by TripAdvisor reviewers. Doctors are being challenged by the shared experiences of patients. Grey-haired newspaper proprietors by twenty-something social-media moguls.
Established orders are collapsing all around us.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In an age in which our most famous economics sages failed to predict the financial crisis, in which our intelligence services failed to predict the Arab Spring, in which Facebook groups can prove to be better diagnosticians than medical experts (more on this in Step Six), and in which the tabloidisation of the broadsheet press makes us unable to blindly trust even supposedly respectable papers’ claims, the increasingly competitive information landscape is in many ways positive.
But that is not to say that this trend is categorically good. What are the agendas of these new curators? How trustworthy are they? Which is more likely to steer me to the right hotel – Joe from Idaho’s TripAdvisor testimony, or the advice of my long-trusted travel agent? And while it’s true that Wikipedia is in some subjects now as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica,28 will the ‘crowd’ always have my best interests at heart?
In a time of disorder, the past can no longer be assumed to be the lodestar for the future, the future cannot easily be foreseen, and accepted truths and conventional curators of information cannot be unquestioningly relied upon.
Disorder can bring about positive change and innovation, but it can also leave us feeling compass-less and uncertain.
It’s really hard to know who to believe. Who to trust. And who to rely on to help us work out what the future will hold.
Get with the Programme – How to Be an Empowered Decision-Maker
OK. You’ve got the picture now. The context in which we have to make decisions is, to say the least, challenging.
And yet, of course, we still have to make choices. I still have to decide which doctor’s advice to follow. The President of the United States still needs to decide whether to strike Iran. The mother hearing her baby cry still needs to decide whether to pick him up or to leave him to cry through the night alone. You still need to decide who to hire for your business, or where to put your retirement funds. We still have to make decisions, important, life-changing decisions, regardless of how distracted we are, how much data swirls around us, how unpredictable and uncertain our world now is. Regardless of how exhausted we feel.
Over time, we’ve developed ways to do just that, developed short cuts and coping strategies – some conscious, some not – for navigating this difficult terrain. Strategies for gathering information and then processing it in ways that fit with the realities of our distracted, deluged, disordered lives.
We must ask ourselves though how good these strategies really are. Most of us are going through life without interrogating whether our decision-making processes are fit for purpose. And that’s something we need to change – especially when the stakes are high and the decisions are of real import.
We need to take more control of our decisions and how we make them. We need to become empowered thinkers.
Without quality information we can trust and effective methods for interrogating it, our decisions are bound to be at best sub-optimal, and at worst very damaging to our needs and interests. So in the coming Steps I’ll be expanding on our information-gathering blind spots, and showing how we can do better.
How attuned are you to the most common flaws in experts’ thinking? How good are you at spotting statistical cons?