Autopilot by Andrew Smart Page B

understanding of “the biological nature of man” is constantly being updated, Einstein was correct in realizing that our brains have limits. Though our lives are easier, we exist on the same spectrum as a Chinese laborer. The price of achievement is the same price. Increasingly, information companies are trying to have “flat” organizations. However, the less explicit the hierarchy is at a job, the more responsibility each worker is typically expected to take. The line between life and work is blurred as the endless list of tasks becomes distributed to everyone.
    Your mobile devices ensure you are available 24/7 to handle work-related requests. There is no longer any physical place in which you are not able to work. Your mind can never truly rest. A modern information worker may actually never feel she is not working. From the point of view of capitalist investors, inducing this fear of losing an endless competition is more effective than employing bosses to intimidate workers. This compulsion to work is a form of externally imposed order and it can be a schedule, a to-do list, a business process, inane projects, and time management activities, or directives from a customer who wanted results six months ago.
    At the other end of the spectrum, we find workers like Tian Wu at the Foxconn factories in China. They pay the price of our digital mobility, sometimes with their lives. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin wrote, “The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.” What he meant was that if some of us are enslaved, none of us are truly free.
    In Wealth of Nations , Adam Smith writes, “Great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together, is in most men naturally followed by a great desire of relaxation, which, if not restrained by force or by some strong necessity, is almost irresistible . It is the call of nature, which requires to be relieved by some indulgence, sometimes of ease only, but sometimes too of dissipation and diversion. If it is not complied with, the consequences are often dangerous, and sometimes fatal, and such as almost always, sooner or later, bring on the peculiar infirmity of the trade. If masters would listen to the dictates of reason and humanity, they have frequently occasion rather to moderate, than to animate the application of many of their workmen.”
    We must ask why, and for whom, are we doing all this work? Recall that your brain has hundred billion neurons, each connected by two hundred trillion synapses. Its activity is regulated by a spectacular orchestra of electrical activity that synchronizes and desynchronizes neurons and brain regions to produce the complex harmony that allows us to be human beings.
    An underlying assumption of productivity and time management is that the natural way human beings work must be suppressed for the sake of organization and productivity. For instance, time management expert David Allen’s productivity strategy is to remove non-essential thoughts from your brain. He admonishes us to get whatever we’re stressing about out of our brains and into some type of preferably automated to-do list manager: such as one of the countless productivity apps on your iPhone. Errands, emails to write, bills to pay, accounts to manage, inventories to check, strategic marketing plans to syntheoptimergize, whatever occurs to you during the course of your hectic day. When you have a physical record of these tasks, they don’t have to occupy memory space in your brain, you are less likely to forget them, and you don’t have to worry about them.
    Nowhere in Allen’s imperative to “become a wizard of productivity” does he suggest that if you must rely on perpetual mnemonic and digital gymnastics to get through your day, maybe you have too much to do. As I’ve pointed out, the human brain has limits. A modern scientific understanding of our brains shows that each of us has a unique order and structure,