We're all so busy that it's become a defining condition of contemporary life. But why? At least in part it's because we constantly open more loops than we close, a process Adam Gopnik describes as "perpetually suspended communication," a phrase from his 2002 article, "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli," which I take the liberty of quoting at length:
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when bourgeois people were building the institutions of bourgeois life, they seem never to have complained that they were too busy--or, if they did, they left no record of it. Samuel Pepys, who had a Navy to refloat and a burned London to rebuild, often uses the word "busy" but never complains of busyness. For him, the word "busy" is a synonym for "happy," not for "stressed..."
Until sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, the normal affliction of the bourgeois was not busyness at all but its apparent opposite: boredom... Turn to the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, though, and suddenly everybody is busy, and everyone is complaining about it...
What changed?... It was trains and telegrams. The railroads ended isolation, and packed the metropolis with people whose work was defined by a complicated network of social obligations...
If the trains crowded our streets, the telegram crowded our minds. It introduced something into the world which remains with us today: a whole new class of communications that are defined as incomplete in advance of their delivery. [emphasis mine] A letter, though it may enjoin a response, is meant to be complete in itself... By contrast, it is in the nature of the telegram to be a skeletal version of another thing--a communication that opens more than it closes...
Every device that has evolved from the telegram shares the same character. E-mails end with a suggestion for a phone call ("Anyway, let's meet and/or talk soon"), faxes with a request for an email, answering machine messages with a request for a fax. All are devices of perpetually suspended communication. [1]
Gopnik correctly locates the immediate source of the problem, but it's insufficient to simply blame the technology. We get the technology we deserve. And so many of our current modes of communication allow us to live in this state of perpetual suspension, of harried busyness, where closure and finality are the rarest of commodities. Again, why?
There's value in keeping options open, and the rapid cycle times of these technologies make it easy to keep threads going almost indefinitely. By avoiding decisive commitments in our communications, we remain poised to take advantage of any better opportunities that might come along. We also wind up making the perfect the enemy of the good, to use one of my favorite phrases, and drive ourselves crazy chasing the elusive optimum value of everything.
Further, "perpetually suspended communication" is closely related to "continuous partial attention," coined by Linda Stone nearly a decade ago:
With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges. Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities... We've been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time... Now we're over-stimulated, over-wound, unfulfilled. [2]
In this environment, it's difficult to devote much time to any one communique. Thinking in sufficient depth to actually reach closure is a luxury we rarely have (or allow ourselves.) So we hit the high points, take care of the most urgent business and move on, leaving much unfinished.
This isn't a rant against the pace of contemporary life, or advances in technology, or continuous partial attention--I can and do enjoy the benefits of all those things. But just as it's futile to rail against them and pine for a simpler time, it's absurd to pretend that their benefits aren't accompanied by more baleful consequences.
Footnotes
[1] "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli" (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 2002; also available in The Best American Essays 2003)
[2] Linda Stone's address at Supernova 2005: Attention quoted by Nat Torkington, O'Reilly Radar. For more on Stone's concept, see Continuous Partial Attention.