Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

Figuring Out when the Lights are On

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Picking  the wrong time to perform a demanding task is the penalty we pay for not knowing our own efficiency curve.

We are in a waking state most of the day, roughly two thirds of our life.  But being awake and being alert are not the same thing.  All of us have an efficiency curve: a line that tracks when we are least and most able to face the big mental challenges that the world throws at us.  Many tasks don’t require knowing the moment of one’s peak performance.  Answering phones in an office or helping customers in a retail setting may require more stamina than a period of intense focus and concentration.  But for many others, finding the moment when the lights are really on is an important workplace survival skill.

I was reminded of this by reading Janet Malcolm’s profile of MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow.  Malcolm asked her subject why she started work in the early afternoon.  (Maddow’s show airs live at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time).  Maddow sensibly answered that she had to pick her moment.  She noted that you can only have your brain ‘light up’ for a limited time. She needed to perform well in what amounts to a series of extended narratives delivered in her prime time spot. It is possible to hit the high point of her curve if she starts preparing for her show after lunch. Her particular ‘high noon’ happens at 9 in the evening.

A lot of writers note the importance of the same natural curve, with many finding that mornings are when they are their most productive. In my own scheme for getting a book done, mornings are for writing; afternoons are reserved for rewriting or polishing. The curve flips for others who work best late at night.

It is true that a jolt of adrenaline might be enough to overcome encroaching mental dormancy. A pianist about to perform a set of demanding solo pieces for a paying audience will probably find hormonal reserves to carry them past the torpor caused by a sleepless night.  But that’s no way to live.

Students are often slow to learn their own curve, sometimes making the mistake of saving the toughest mental work of the day for the periods when their minds are fallow. High school schedules don’t help. They often require punishing early morning starts of classes forced upon nearly comatose teens. Many are simply not ready to handle an A.P. Physics at 7:30 a.m.

 

Is it good to be the first surgery patient on a Monday morning?  What if the doctor was at the Tiki Bar in Costa Rica just 15 hours earlier?

 

We all know the feeling of staring at a blank page or screen waiting for inspiration that may never arrive. Picking  the wrong time to do a demanding task is the penalty we pay for not knowing our own efficiency curve.

Sometimes it bears not thinking about potentially consequential mismatches of work tasks against a person’s natural curve.  Is it good to be the first surgery patient on a Monday morning?  What if the doctor was at the Tiki Bar in Costa Rica just 15 hours earlier?  And how about pilots flying a ‘red eye’ coast to coast?  One can hope that at least somebody in the cockpit is a late riser.

I had a friend who worked on a car assembly line one summer. In the days before robots and computers he swears that they managed to partly assemble a three-door sedan early into the first morning shift.  Workers on the line realized too late that the company was making a two-door car on one side and a four-door car on the other side.  Clearly someone was off their game.

red concave bar 1

Looking for Listeners

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                                Photo: Moira Clunie

The smartphone has a special role in our drift towards inner-direction. By its very nature it is primarily self-referential.  Who has called or texted or mentioned me?  Has my tweet been shared? Has my post been sufficiently “liked?” 

In any hierarchy of communication deficits, the availability of receptive and interested listeners must be near the top.  Good listeners are in relatively short supply while eager talkers are a dime a dozen.   What the composer Igor Stravinsky lamented about pipe organs applies to the overly loquacious: they can be “monsters” that never seem to take a breath. The challenge is finding those souls whose lives are sufficiently centered in their lives to be open to experiencing all that another has to say.

We pay to hear others perform music or theater pieces, maybe stand-up comedy or an occasional TED Talk. As Neil Postman famously noted, if our culture fails in some ways, we are at least ‘the best-entertained society on earth.’  If not to hear what is on Aunt Bertha’s mind, we will still make time for the biggest spectacles our media giants can produce. By contrast, we rarely expect to be enchanted by the everyday thoughts of others.

This means that the verbal and digital traffic that clutters our lives is mostly outbound. Many of us are on lifelong quests to find others who might want to consider our thoughts. By contrast the incoming lanes that can reach into our consciousness are mostly empty, or sometimes closed for lack of use.

Few teachers would perhaps acknowledge it, but one of the joys of having students is that they are a captive audience. Even if they are not exactly in the thrall of a teacher’s words, students will humor their instructors enough to allow them to believe it.

 

The ‘me decade’ never ended.  It’s becoming the ‘me century.’ 

 

This problem of a shortage of truly open ears extends to nearly every realm of human contact. Nearly all of us who write books receive modest returns as royalties. Theater and even motion picture producers usually know the dread of a nearly empty house. I’ve been the organizer of public meetings and town halls where a sense of doom sets in when the invited presenters show up to see a room of mostly empty chairs.  Most of us are simply too insistent that we be the recipient of our own attention. Figure in hours for digital grazing, and we hardly have time left to give ourselves over to others.

The heavies that contribute to a problem are represented in the self-mocking phrase, “Well, enough about you.” They include over-indulgent parents, work culture that easily robs employees of a sense of agency, dismissive judgments couched in mental health categories, and commercial messages that insist that we should treat ourselves as if we are ‘Number One.’

I’d reserve a special role in the shift away from other direction and toward inner-direction for the smartphone.  (If you know this blog, you knew this was coming.)  By its very nature it is primarily self-referential.  Who has called/texted/mentioned me?  Has my tweet been shared? Has my facebook post been sufficiently “liked?”

So if others like us are broadcasters more than receivers, we must arm ourselves to go into the world ready to absorb the self-referential barrages. It’s one reason that more of us sense the need to rebound from an evening spent listening to overactive talkers with enough solitude to help us rediscover the joys of the larger universe.