Ask anyone you know how they’ve been, and some very high percentage will say busy. There’s no doubt that some people are busy, but for the rest, which is the majority, they feel busier than they are. If you look at time use studies, average working adults today have more leisure time than ever before AND better and cheaper leisure activities (how much more than $10.99 would you be willing to pay for Netflix per month?). On top of this, we have the lowest labor force participation rate in the modern era for all sorts of reasons, but surely non-caregiving people not in the labor force aren’t busy. Those who are raising children are raising fewer, and recently the US fell behind the replacement rate of child births, so there are fewer parents than ever. Why do people who objectively have more leisure and subjectively more pleasant living and working conditions feel so rushed?
“The rate of change is faster than ever before.” This is the beginning line of countless quick hit business articles touting AI as revolutionary to all enterprises or longform think pieces about how society is being constantly transformed and how this has led X group to rebel/conform/you name it. But it’s completely false. Technological innovation along most measures has slowed, yet most people feel that the technology they interact with has gotten increasingly integrated into their lives. And increasingly disruptive—but not in the sexy sense that wunderkinds and VCs use the term.
Taken together, people feel like they have less time to get work and leisure activities done when they have more, and they think that the world is changing rapidly when it isn’t. These things are intimately connected via an idea I’m calling Technological Unevenness.
Technological Unevenness is the quality of consumer content technology to improve much faster than other technologies and decrease productivity, while creating the perception of faster large scale change.
Technological unevenness leads people to perceive the world in specific, incorrect ways. They feel at risk of being left behind, that they can’t contribute and that the world is getting worse.
None of those things is true.
People think they are busier than ever, but they aren’t.
People report being busier than ever (this is actually kind of hard data to find). But at the very least, they use the word busy or synonyms in their Christmas cards more than ever. And there are now over 30,000 books on Amazon related to the word busy. Despite the softness of this data, it certainly points to an overwhelming concern many people have. But when you ask them to break down their days minute by minute or hour by hour, they are getting less busy. The best longitudinal data is from 1965-1995 and show a big decrease in paid and unpaid labor and a corresponding increase in leisure time.
Perhaps 1995 was before the speed up of modern life and increase of busyness. How many hours of free time per day would you say you have?
If you’re the average American, this is how you spend your weekdays and weekends:
On average, Americans have 4.5 hours of leisure time per workday and 6.25 hours of free time per weekend day. And this is using some pretty specific definitions of leisure time—how much of your eating would you consider leisure time? Also notable is the low hours of work per day—4.5 hours on presumably workdays. This is a little misleading given that we have the lowest level of prime age workforce participation in modern history. So let’s take a look at time use by folks who are employed on days that they work.
Here we see that full time workers do work and work related activities for almost 9 hours and part time workers work for almost 6 hours. It’s important to note that work related activities include your commute and work related eating. Given that the average commute is 25.4 minutes each way, it looks like the full time worker is putting in the standard 8 hour workday. Not amazing compared to Western European standards, but historically quite low.
Looking at the average time use to include people who are not employed including parents and caregivers, they certainly are not suffering from the curse of busyness. But given that the average full and part time workers also average around 30 hours of free time per week, I think we have to drop the hypothesis that people actually are busier than ever. So what the hell is going on? People have more leisure time, but feel busier.
Consumer content technology is ruining leisure and work.
Consumer content technology here is mostly advanced communication tools normally accessed through (or sprung on you by) your smartphone—things like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, text messages and email. These tools ask you to check them every once in a while to see what others are doing and report what you are up to. A seemingly innocuous reason for being, but when everyone is checking in constantly, sharing the latest viral video and posting photos of their latest vacation, the flow information is high quantity, low quality and nonstop. But each notification, scroll through your feed or quick response generates the same dopamine hit as completing a valuable task or getting an in real life social reward. So we check each ping instantly and scroll the feed endlessly to monitor others’ actions and relative social status. Ok, but how much does this really add up to in the course of the day?
A Deloitte study of smartphone habits shows a pretty consistent trend of Americans using their phones 47 times per day. According to a meta-analysis on HackerNoon, those 47 uses add up to over 4 hours per day spent on mobile phones and looking at your phone once every 20 minutes. 4 hours? That’s awfully similar to the average American’s number of leisure hours per day. It looks as though we may be just be dividing up our leisure time into 5 minute bursts every 20 minutes. Which could be fine, except that it creates the perception of having less leisure time than we actually do. And task switching itself creates what’s called time pressure, or the feeling of being rushed. Feeling constantly rushed and like we have no leisure time would be a bad enough effect, but consumer tech is also hurting our ability to be productive at work.
It seems self-evident that constantly checking your phone at work for unrelated notifications is bad for productivity from a simple time use standpoint. Your employer doesn’t want to pay to you to share GIFs with your friends. But labor productivity doesn’t take a hit simply because employees are taking constant breaks, but also because when you switch between tasks you create “attention residue” where some percent of your brain is still focused on the initial task and this creates a drag in performance on the second task. This effect applies even for quick checks of your email or text messages. Worse, task switching frequently changes your brains’ expectation of how long it will focus on one thing, and as that expectation shortens, your ability to focus decreases as well.
You’re mentally clocking out several times an hour, feeling time pressure because of switching tasks, and having a harder time focusing when you return to work because of attention residue, this is a recipe for feeling rushed and like you can’t complete all of the things you need to accomplish. You’re probaby planning your work like you’ll focus on tasks for periods of time longer than 20 minutes and that you won’t constantly sabotage your focus by 20% with attention residue, so it’s quite likely that you can’t accomplish the things you should be able. On top of this, knowledge work is getting harder.
Why on earth did we focus on creating ever better ways of sharing memes?
The original answer is that venture capital saw the internet as a way to create winner take all markets. When I was in the startup world, the conventional wisdom was that B2B startups weren’t all that interesting because there were fewer potential customers and customer acquisition costs were much higher because you needed to hire a sales team. This general trend led to venture capital driving massive innovation in the consumer web.
I’m not sure how much of this was intentional versus luck, but based on market cap, the VCs seem to have been right.
There’s no B2B FANG equivalent.
The winners that we all know, love and interact with every 20 minutes or so, all ended up being what Ben Thompson of Stratechery calls the Aggregators.
““First, the Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.”
“This has fundamentally changed the plane of competition: no longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be aggregated at scale leaving consumers/users as a first order priority. By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle.” (Emphasis mine.)
In short, the best consumer content technologies have commoditized content producers whether news organizations or…us, and then will create ever better user experiences to drive ever more usage (and a moat against potential competitors). The fact that many firms have near monopolistic profits means they will attract the best design and development talent to further their goals and crowd out productive technology.
The flipside of this is that until recently VC investment in B2B technology was pretty sparse and it shows in how bad so many enterprise technologies really are. I’m intimately familiar with customer relationship management (CRMs), the systems that all business use to keep track of the process of selling to and keeping customers. All the major systems are bad. They make it harder for salespeople to sell rather than easier. This is because they were designed for enterprise leaders to be able to forecast better and own the customer relationship rather than the rep. So the process of getting information into the system is just data entry that businesses force on some of their most skilled and highly compensated employees. I struggle to believe that any improvements in forecasting outweigh the costs of the administrivia involved. This story is likely true for most enterprise software. Although I must say I talk with maybe 20 founders of sales technology companies per year, and it seems like there’s finally a shift in talent and capital away from sharing memes and toward making the modern workplace less tedious and more productive. I’m not sure how big this trend is, and if it’s too little, too late.
People think technology is moving fast, but it isn’t.
I don’t want to speculate too much about the impact of capital chasing consumer content technology monopolies, creating giant firms that hurt worker productivity and guess at how much that will hurt global growth. I think it’s material, but there’s not good evidence. My hypothesis is that will be the end result of Technological Unevenness. That consumer content technology innovation will slow down other innovation. But frankly, that discussion isn’t needed yet.
It drives me insane when people in the business world talk about “the rate of change is ever increasing” and show some meaningless graph with an exponentially upward sloping line. Anyone who has ever seen a Fortune 500 company that runs its forecasting off Excel spreadsheets should immediately balk at those statements. People misapply how dramatically their personal experience changed in the face of consumer content technology (and a majority of venture capital on earth driving it) and assume that all technologies are improving at that pace. When in fact it’s probably the opposite. Capital chasing Aggregator-esque monopolies likely slowed innovation elsewhere. Nonetheless, all of our brains having been rewired to get a technological dopamine hit every 20 minutes, we think that innovation broadly must have continued apace.
There certainly have been some exponential improvements in computing power, no one would doubt that. Cloud computing, smart phones, and a government-run GPS has allowed for some cool business model innovations. But if you zoom out from the leaders of the tech sector, you start to see a different story.
Let’s look at the pharmaceutical industry—a sector anyone not interested in dying has a huge stake in. Some analysts are worried that we’re rapidly approaching the point where returns won’t outweigh the costs of R&D at all.
We’ve scooped up all the easy gains, and now we have to pay an ever increasing army of researchers to look for hard to find innovations. Soon it won’t be worth trying to come up with new and better drugs. This doesn’t sound like the rate of change is increasing (at least in the direction we want). If there isn’t dramatic business model innovation, this is a terrifying reduction in innovation after a century of innovation that resulted in massive standard of living gains for everyone on the planet.
On the macro scale, economists look at total factor productivity growth (TFP)—“the portion of output not explained by traditionally measured inputs of labor and capital used in production”—to measure innovations, sub-divided into technological growth and efficiency improvements. So if you have 5 labor inputs and 5 capital inputs in Years 1 and 2, and the result is 10 outputs in Year 1, but 15 outputs in Year 2, then economists would assume that you innovated over time to increase output with the same inputs. TFP is important. It’s pretty much the only way that living standards go up.
So you definitely want to have high TFP growth. The Industrial Revolution and the 19th Century was no doubt a period of innovation (and social change) unlike the world had ever seen. And we continued to have high TFP growth through the post-War years until the mid-70s.
Source: Macro Musings using St. Louis Fed data.
Then the trajectory leveled out a bit. But today, we aren’t looking at an upward sloping line.
Like pharma, but on a massive scale, we’re seeing decreasing marginal returns on R&D. The exception being a lift in productivity growth in the 90s through early 2000s from the implementation of IT technology that drove some efficiency gains. What the data doesn’t paint is a picture of ever increasing change and growth driven by technological innovation. But people feel that way.
People are perceiving changes in their own lived experience and extrapolating out to the rest of the world. They’re perceiving the massive shift from pre-smartphone life when sometimes you were bored or daydreamed or talked to a stranger in line at the grocery. Now you look at a magical device that pipes in all your friends’ photos and funny comments and this is a massive shift from whatever people did waiting in a doctor’s office 20 years ago. This misperception happens because consumer content technology changes really fast, but the rest of the world is changing more slowly.
So what if we feel busy, are less productive and think the world is changing more than it is?
Let me be clear about my position: technological unevenness is a fucking plague. Chronic time pressure and task switching are ruining peoples’ brains during the leisure they don’t realize they have and at the workplace where we’ll all underperforming. This causes everyone to assume a runaway pace of life that isn’t real.
It’s really bizarre that people have more leisure time today than ever before, but feel like they have none. We work at nicer jobs, eat better food and have way more enjoyable and cheaper leisure activities, but somehow feel constantly stressed out and like we don’t have enough time. Despite the average American having 30 hours of free time per week. This misperception is because we’ve decided to chop this time up into 5 minute increments every 20 minutes. Well, decided isn’t the right word. Our brains, prescient venture capitalists, Jony Ive, and the best computer programmers of our generation are working together to make sure that we stare at our phones as much as possible. And today, this is where our leisure time is spent, but it doesn’t feel like leisure. No one thinks to themselves after scrolling through their Facebook feed, “ah, that was a good algorithmically selected set of photos, status updates, and news stories” in the same way that after watching a movie or going for a walk you might reflect. Most of the time if asked people will say they had no leisure time, when in reality, they glanced at their phone for hours. We’ve also replaced previous leisure activities with something literally forgettable and cause us to feel time pressure.
And since we have to do it every 20 minutes, that means we’re spending a lot of leisure time at work. Now whether this extends our workday or shortens it is an open question. But one thing it definitely does is make us worse at work. Switching between tasks hurts your ability to do either activity and primes your brain to switch again making it difficult for you to focus on tasks that take longer than 20 minutes. This would be bad under normal circumstances. But we’re facing falling productivity growth rates as technological innovation and efficiency gains get harder and harder to create. People accomplishing hard things don’t tend to check their phone every 20 minutes.
Whether we think all jobs will be automated because some jobs in their town were outsourced (despite close to full employment) or that American values are in decline (despite the lowest teen birth rate in a half century and low crime rates), the source of modern reactionary behavior is misunderstanding how fast things are changing due to how fast consumer content technology has changed our immediate experience. Everyone is uncomfortable with tech/social change at some rate, although most people are ok with stasis. So creating the appearance of faster change will necessarily increase the number of people who are unhappy, even if the rate of innovation/growth/whatever is unchanged or slowed. It’s easy to joke about the economic anxiety of Trump voters because it’s clear in the data that racial and cultural resentment animated many. The joke is funny because when you look at Trump voters, they are above the median income and live in more rural places, with few immigrants. It’s funny because they misperceive that their world is changing. We laugh and call them racists because we think they’re lying. But what if we believe them? Has consumer content technology fed them the story that they will be replaced and given the rate of change in how addictive their smartphone is, they misperceive how fast that is happening? Obviously, this misperception isn’t the only driver of the populism. But it’s one of them.
Ok, but really, so what?
Global GDP growth is probably the most important priority if you care about getting the most people out of absolute poverty.
- People who think they don’t have any free time likely won’t do incremental activities that generate more growth or donate money to effective redistribution efforts.
- People who are incapable of doing their best work are hurting marginal GDP growth at their current job and likely won’t start successful firms that generate even more growth.
- People who think the world is changing too fast will likely vote for things that are anti-growth.
And those three things are avoidable.
Fine, what do we do?
On a personal level, baby steps are turn off all notifications except for calls and text messages (silence big group texts). Delete social apps—look on the much less well designed browser versions on a laptop. Check email only 3 times a day at work. Practice concentrating for longer periods of time.
On a social level, don’t pull your phone out in social settings. Don’t set your phone on the table. If someone does either of those things, ask if something important has come up.
On a regulatory level, I think we’ll have to regulate consumer content technologies like we regulate tobacco and alcohol. The personal and social sides of this can moderate demand, but we’ll need to restrict supply as well.
It’s possible for you to re-perceive the pace of change accurately, feel less busy and do more focused work. It will feel strange, but it’s possible.
As for the rest of us though. I’m not so sure.