The Perfect Response | EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

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.

_{Mercury Capsule at the Air and Space Museum, Washington}

What happens when the media that have been traditional touchstones to the culture no longer matter? What follows if there is a withering of once common narratives?

When we wonder why we are such talkers and texters, look no further than our natural desire to find meaning in the words and faces of others. While most communication thinkers would accept that we are islands of consciousness, most also come to the view that our social nature gives us the urge to affiliate with various sorts of tribes. Beyond the family, most Americans seek connections with affinity groups organized around schools, religious institutions, work settings, or various avocations. Beyond that, we count ourselves as members of the same culture: less firmly now, perhaps, but it is still a piece of our identity.

Cultures typically share a language, a political history and sets of foundational stories. They are the common property of all. But what happens if the media that have been the traditional touchstones to our collective selves no longer matter to the society’s newer members? What happens if there is a withering of our common narratives? One sign of our weakened sense of affiliation are the 1800 big and small American newspapers that have shut down in the last fifteen years. Many communities are now news deserts cut of from the nation, and often their own communities.

Concerns like these are frequently raised because, while we have the technical means to easily share our culture, we are less inclined to visit its various precincts. There are more interesting distractions to pursue.

I’m 72 and my students are mostly south of 20. And though they are pleasant and easy to work with, it’s increasingly apparent that we come from very different places. At times it can seem if we both flew in from different countries to spend some time together. To be sure, we speak the same language, but the forces that have shaped us and and govern our interests are partly alien to each other.

Mine is the older country of the Vietnam War, political assassinations, the civil rights struggle and stunning leaps into space. We expected to meet future spouses in college. Even today our older selves still celebrate great cars, packed bookstores, jazz virtuosos and film and television benchmarks that are more sanguine than dystopian. Many in my generation also seek a daily connection to the national news cycle and, hence, to America’s sagging civil society.

At the same time, my country has also been hell-bent on the dream of affluence. It’s been somewhat less generous toward the young than those of the previous war generation, who gladly built schools, a vast transportation infrastructure for growth, and ways to provide access to college for veterans and the expanding middle class. Our’s is also a generation that votes in larger numbers, keeping a thumb on the government-services scale that favors the old over the young and poor.

The challenge here is to sort out reasons for the apparent fraying of links that have held together the culture.

By contrast, the young come from a country freed from many of these old cultural markers and some of the bigotries that went with them. That’s expected, and a welcome part of the gift of idealism that is the birthright of the young.

Theirs is a nation of ‘digital natives’ organized around screens and represented more by personal media and fragmented video on-demand. They mostly ignore the more centralized broadcasting of major networks. In addition, for the members of this country, devotion to a marriage partner can wait, while all-consuming devotion to the smartphone comes sooner. The device trades in artifacts of the self rather than the full self. It also feeds off the attractions of celebrity as a measure of self-worth. This is expressed in terms of media markers, where a phone is a gateway to attention that can attract “followers” at a distance. The effect of the ubiquitous online discourse encourages much more interest in the “now” rather than a delayed-but-better “later.”

Of course I’m generalizing beyond what any individual case would allow. And it would be unfair to conclude that younger Americans don’t value social capital. Many are generous with their time if asked to work for social justice causes. But social connections are no longer created around shared discourse about the nation’s political problems. Looming obstacles of the workplace and an independent adulthood matter more. The hollowing-out of the middle class now feeds a generalized discomfort among the young about finding a secure place that can yield the kinds of comfort levels known by their parents.

The challenge here is to sort out reasons for the apparent fraying of links that have previously held together the culture. Generational differences are a given. But the atomizing of experience that is common in peer to peer media shifts our energies toward the personal and away from the political, which is traditionally the realm of core questions about how we should live as a society. So we have to ask: are we still living in a shared cultural space if we don’t share the same stories?