of the frog and the boiling water. The story goes like this. If you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water it jumps out as fast as possible to escape. However, if instead you place a frog into a pan of cold water, and then heat the water very, very slowly, the frog acclimatises to the slow increase in temperature and never tries to escape – until it is eventually boiled alive.
Have we indeed become so used to this ‘creeping normalcy’ that we fail to recognise what it means to our working lives now, and even more so in the future? To test this idea, let’s try and recreate a pre-fragmented working day by rewinding to the past rather than fast-forwarding to the future. I’m going to rewind to 1990 because it’s a time when mobile phones were very rare, and when many offices outside of the West Coast of the USA did not have internet connection, and when no homes had internet connectivity.
To get a feel for this, you will either have to recollect from your own experience (as I am able to do), or find someone who was working 20 years ago and can describe to you in detail a typical working day. It’s important, by the way, that they describe the working day in detail – that’s where the important stuff lurks. Here is my memory of how a working day in 1990 played out for me – as far as I can remember.
At that time I worked as a senior consultant in one of the large UK-based consulting practices. I wake in the morning, have breakfast with my husband while listening to the news on the radio, and then leave for work at 8.00. By 9.00 I am in the office and my assistant joins me to go through the letters that have arrived that morning. On average, 20 letters arrive every morning, so we go through these letters and I dictate to her my responses. By 10.00 I spend two hours working on a proposal for a client; this I write by hand and it is then taken through to the typing pool to be typed. By 12.30 it’s lunchtime and I join my colleagues in my office for a quick lunch in the local pub.
By 1.30 I’m back at my desk and ready for two meetings with my team. It’s 3.00, and I’m in a cab to the headquarters of a multinational to present to a group of potential clients. I’m back in the office by 4.30 to sign the letters I dictated that morning to my assistant, to take two more telephone calls, and to check the proposal that’s now back from the typing pool. I make a number of changes to the proposal and send it back to the typing pool. By 5.30 the office is beginning to empty. I round up a few friends in the office and we wander across the road to the local pub for a quick drink before getting back home by 6.30 and dinner with my husband at 7.30.
By the time I reached home, my working day was over. Perhaps I brought home a document or two to read, but not often. I certainly did not write anything at home because I did not have a typewriter at home – and of course there was no computer. So my means of production was pretty much limited to the office hours. I certainly never, ever spoke with clients after 6.00 p.m. They did not have my home number, and mobile phones were not in use.
I don’t mean to be Pollyanna about the past. I could tell the tale again, adding in the fact that this was a deeply sexist work-place (I was the first female senior consultant and considered something of a freak), and that it was very unhealthy (we smoked constantly in the office and drank at lunchtime and every evening). This is no exercise in nostalgia. But as we look forward 10, possibly 20 years from now, it’s useful to also look back. By looking back we can get a good idea about velocity and direction, and about the rhythms and trajectories of working life.
However, before we leave this day in 1990 let me ask you to take another look at this story and consider what’s missing. Did I talk with my friends about where to meet that evening? No – I did not have a mobile phone and they did not ring me at work – so we made the arrangement well in advance with few last-minute changes. Did I have a close working relationship with my clients? Yes – we did not use the internet and so instead we met, spoke on the telephone or exchanged letters. Finally, did I link into clients all over the world? Well, yes and no. I did indeed have a client in South Africa and we exchanged letters and faxes, and talked on the phone. I went over to Pretoria three times a year and stayed for two weeks. At that time, two weeks was considered a decent length of time for what was called an ‘overseas trip’.
What I want to draw your attention to is that, unlike Jill’s, mine was not a fragmented day. If you watched me with a stopwatch you would have found that on average I spent about half an hour on each activity. When I wrote the client proposals I was uninterrupted for two hours. Only 20 letters arrived, they were read and replied to by the next day, no one expected instant responses – and if the timing was too long we could always say, ‘The letter must have been lost in the post!’ There was no internet, in fact I did not have a typewriter in my room, typing was the job of my secretary and the women (they were all women) in the typing pool.
I’ve chosen 1990 as the date for our memory experiment because in many ways this year marked the beginning of the extreme fragmentation of work. Over the following 10 years the forces of technology and globalisation began to snip work into ever-smaller pieces. By 2000, and the following decade, this fragmentation began to become really noticeable. In 2006, for example, the popular author Stefan Klein wrote Time: A User’s Guide – Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity.3 At the same time, the academic community began to study this fragmentation. By 2008 a group of scholars from Australia and Finland had co-authored Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, documenting the time pressure felt by people across the world.4 Work had begun a process of fragmentation that has accelerated over the last decade, and there is every sign that this acceleration will continue over the coming decades.
You could say that because the increase in fragmentation has been ‘creeping’ rather than instant we have all become boiled frogs. I bet if I was to be transported from my life in 1990 to 2010, I would be amazed, probably horrified, by the fragmentation of my life. But like everyone else, it has happened so slowly that I have made very little resistance.
As I reflect on Jill’s storyline, I think about the impact of fragmentation around me, in the programmes I teach, the executives who reach for their mobile phones the moment I stop teaching – even though we have shown how important reflection and concentration are to the learning process. Or the way my children manage to watch television, update their Facebook entry and watch a movie on their computers – all at the same time.
Our world have become ever more fragmented over the last 20 years, and, as we can see in Jill’s story, for many people this fragmentation will only increase in the coming 20 years. Is yours a world of fragmentation? If it is, or will increasingly be so, then it is important to understand the consequences of fragmentation.
When your working life fragments
Does it matter that our lives are so fragmented and will increasingly be so? Does it matter that globalisation and technology will increasingly bring fragmentation to those in developed countries, and also spread it to those in developing countries? What’s the real downside of fragmentation – who really misses out? As we reflect on our current working lives, we can assume that overload and time compression will only increase over the coming decades. So what effect will this have? I believe that fragmentation, overload and compression will decrease concentration, reduce our capacity to really observe and learn, and could make the future working lives of our children more frenzied, more focused … and less whimsical and playful.
The concentration of mastery is lost
When our working time fragments, then one of the first victims is real concentration. Breaking up her life into such small pieces has meant for Jill that she never really has the time, the opportunity or the focus to become very good at anything. She has never concentrated enough to achieve the mastery that would put her in a different league and which, as I will argue later, is going to be so crucial for future success. There is no doubt that Jill is good at what she does, but the challenge is that she has never learnt to be really, really good. The reason for her lack of mastery is wrapped up in her three-minute life. It takes time and concentration to become masterful, and Jill has neither time nor concentration.
The importance of time and concentration is shown clearly in psychologist Daniel Levitin’s study of people who have achieved mastery. He looked at the lives