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Doing this all yourself is definitely easy, but it can
also be time-consuming. We have taken on all sorts
of tasks that used to be done for us. In between
everything else on our plates, we have also become
part-time meter readers, bank tellers, travel agents and
gas station attendants; it wasn’t all that long ago that
these were very common professions where people
earned their living.
This phenomenon is also referred to as ‘shadow
work’: a parallel economy where companies shift the
responsibility for performing their services, which you
expect them to provide, to the customer. What this
essentially means is that on top of our normal jobs, we
are also doing other people’s work for them. This eats
up your free time. In his book The Organized Mind,
psychologist Daniel Levitin writes that ‘the promise of
a computerized society, we were told, was that it would
relegate to machines all of the repetitive drudgery of
work, allowing us humans to pursue loftier purposes
and to have more leisure time. It didn’t work out this
way. Instead of more time, most of us have less.
Companies large and small have off-loaded work
onto the backs of consumers. Things that used to
be done for us, as part of the value-added service of
working with a company, we are now expected to do
ourselves...[Shadow work] is responsible for taking
away a great deal of the leisure time we thought we
would all have in the twenty-first century’.LIKE JUGGLERS
All these tasks that sneak in nearly unnoticed and seem
to be only growing in number don’t just eat up time, they
also contribute to an information overload and
overcrowded brains. All day long, we are bombarded
from every side by things we have to do something
about: reading a newsletter with daily bargains that we
don’t want to miss out on, paying an invoice, activating
an account. And it goes on and on. Our brains are
designed to allow us to easily get distracted, and wouldlike nothing more than for us to take immediate action for
every message, because every completed task—every
sent email and created account and so on—gives our
brain a shot of the reward hormone. This is why we like
to quickly do these small tasks in between other
activities. Even though you haven’t finished your work,
you have submitted your meter reading or ordered a
book online, so you have accomplished something.
According to Levitin, at times like this, we are driven
by ‘the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain’ that
induces this feeling of pleasure, not the higher-level
thought centers that deal with planning and scheduling.
And multitasking certainly doesn’t make you more
efficient. The fact that we often think it does is,
according to neuroscientist Earl Miller, a ‘powerful,
diabolical illusion’. Our brain is simply not made to
switch rapidly between tasks. Doing this comes at the
expense of your cognitive energy. Miller describes it this
way: ‘So we’re not actually keeping a lot of balls in the
air like an expert juggler; we’re more like a bad amateur
plate spinner, frantically switching from one task to
another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us
but worried it will come crashing down any minute. Even
though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically,
multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient’.
In short, Miller and Levitin’s motto is not to give in to
temptation to immediately tackle the tasks you are being
bombarded with. Save them up if you can, group similar
tasks together, and complete them at the same time.TIME-WASTERS
We mostly have the computer to blame for all this extra
work we have become burdened with. Automation is
the panacea companies have found to shift the work to
us and save on personnel.
All of this computer nonsense that is being dumped
on us sometimes creates an awful lot of headaches for
us: coming up with and remembering an endless
number of passwords, all of which are preferably