on the pace of consumption/creation forms, relative attentional demands, and optimal efficiency as a lifestyle
making sense of experiences versus outcomes, how we get and give information and the ways that affects content, and a theory of life as a product of time (quantity) x attention (quality)
A few years ago, a friend told me a story of a person he interviewed who casually mentioned he was a big reader, and said that he had read 600 books in the last year. This person was not in academia or publishing, but worked in a hospital, and in the subsequent conversation shared that he did this by listening to audiobooks at 6x speed while he worked all day, everyday.
This secondhand story stuck with me both for its absurdity and also for it being an extreme instance of a behavior that appears to be gaining in popularity, at least in some corners of my internet experience. It’s this notion of quantifying an intellectual pursuit, as if it’s only valuable insofar as you can quantify it: the number of books you read as signifier of your intellectual curiosity. My first reaction hearing the bit was immediately dismissive – voices at that speed are high-pitched and barely intelligible, and I certainly don’t count what he did as “having read” those books. And my second thought was: what does it even mean to “count” whether or not he’s read those books?
Listening to a book or podcast at some insane speed – well beyond what you could comprehend, process, and think about in any reasonable way – puts the entire value of that media on the acquisition of information. I’ve certainly felt this, a desire to “have read” a book, to finish it and be able to place it in the collection in my mind of things I’ve read. But if we could just download books or podcasts to our brains, Matrix-style through a port in the back of our necks, we wouldn’t actually be getting the full value of the content – the value in reading, or consuming any information, lies in the attention you give it: the second-degree thoughts and connections you come up with as you relate it to your own life, things you’ve read, and concepts and ideas, and so many of those come while you’re consuming the content.
I’ve thought about this a lot the last few years: how we absorb information and make connections, and how that changes based on how we’re consuming information. Lots of smart people have written about this, from McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” to Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. As I started thinking of the ways I consume information – reading and listening, and then on a screen vs. on paper, in headphones vs. in-person, etc. – I was also writing more. I started thinking about not only how we consume, but also how we create. When I write longhand, with a pen and paper, my writing is very different than when I type, and certainly much different than how I speak, and any of these is only a very thin window into what I think.
I wanted to structure this and started trying to lay this out, and came up with this schema of the average pace of consumption and creation of various types:
Thinking is unfiltered and very fast – it can’t even always be measured in words per minute. Reading a book is quite a bit faster than listening to it, and I also tend to retain it better, which is the opposite of what I’d think based on my rate of consumption (more on that later).
On the creation side, speaking is fastest after thinking, and then it cuts down by about a third to typing, and another third to writing. When I’m typing something, I’ll find myself going down paths and rabbit holes that are quite different than when I longhand write.
The content itself that I come up with is totally different, too – part of this is certainly audience (speaking to someone versus journaling for yourself), but also, if how we create is effectively a filtered rate limiter on outputting our thinking, it makes sense that the trains of thought we pursue and how far we go on something will also be different. Our thoughts don’t slow down while we’re creating, whether it’s speaking, typing, or writing.
If there’s a turn of phrase I think sounds good, it needs to sound really good to be included while writing, because it stands between me and expressing the next idea, whereas the bar isn’t as high if I’m typing. The ease of editing certainly plays a role here, too, as typing feels less committal.
On the creation side, pace is a pretty good proxy for how intentionally something was created, and thus how likely we are to remember it – studies show we remember things better when written versus typed. But the corollary of how much I retain from reading vs. listening to a book is inverted – I can both read faster and retain more of what I read than listening. Pace is a blunt measurement of quantity, but doesn’t take into account quality, which I’ve roughed out in this way:
This is high-level how I’d think of the quality of attention, as the floor for attention is the inverse of how many senses are required to create or consume: do you need your eyes, hands, and/or ears to fully engage? Some of these are up for debate – I can type without looking at the screen, but writing would quickly become a problem for me. Some people can listen to music and read or write, but I find it distracting if the music has words in it. And sure, you can read without using your hands, but how often are you not holding a book and doing something else with your hands while reading a book?
On the creation side (thinking, speaking, typing, writing), there are more senses required and thus more attentional demand – a higher quality of attention required – to engage. But interestingly, that’s not true for the consumption side, and consequently, we’re free to do other things while listening (cooking dinner, driving, or even working at a hospital), and this leads to a higher incidence of distracted attention.
If we think of time as quantity and attention as quality, the product of those two things – how we spend our time and the attention we pay – in aggregate, is effectively how we live our lives: a life is the accumulation of the things we spent our time paying attention to.
If we subscribe to this theory of life as the aggregate of things we spend our time paying attention to, we can squint and imagine that filling up the time we have would be the way to ensure a well-lived life. But of course this ignores the other factor alongside time: you can do all the things you want, but without attention, you’re only getting fractions of a lot of things.
Quick sidenote: the thesis behind the company Dylan and I started years ago, chronos, was that time is our most valuable resource and we as humans don’t always do a great job of spending it well. We were able to measure time with broad strokes inferred via sensor data on your phone, but you can’t get the quality of that time. I still believe the thesis is true, but technology constraints meant we could only offer a directional proxy.
I find the ways we consume and create fascinating, especially in how they’ve collided with this sentiment that maximal efficiency is best, or somehow more moral. How much can you get done in a day? What’s your side hustle? Did you work through lunch? Listen to a self-help podcast on the treadmill? If you’re not multitasking, why is it you’ve decided not to do more1?
This pull towards maximal efficiency is most obvious when it’s performative and egregious – the overcaffeinated VC on Twitter who screenshots a calendar filled with blurred tiles of meetings and blathers on about 5am wakeups, cold plunges, and hustle lifestyle. It’s obvious and easy to roll your eyes at, but I think the pull is much more prevalent, and often subtler – without even intending to, most of us fall into some form of it.
When we respond to someone asking us how we’re doing with the default refrain of ‘busy!’ we’re subconsciously playing into what Tim Kreider calls the busy trap. It communicates that you’re a person who has so much going on as a result of your ambition and importance, and the response is so automatic that we say it not just to coworkers, but to close friends, family, our spouse – a kind of self-affirmation masquerading as lament. And while it can be performative, it’s permeated us all enough that even when we’re alone without an audience, we still have this unconscious pull towards hyper-optimizing.
I’m guilty of falling for this busy trap, and cringe when I feel compelled to label a day as “busy,” forcing myself to take a beat to think what it actually was. But more than just that response, I’ve been thinking more recently that almost everything good is inefficient.
Eating a meal surrounded by friends, slow dancing with your partner, taking a walk in nature, building sandcastles with a child, floating in the ocean, feeling an overwhelming intensity of emotion rush over you: all of these things are completely separate from efficiency, and in fact, are enhanced by not rushing towards the ending but living in the experience. Not maximizing the quantity, but rather, the quality of – the attention you give to – the experience.
Years ago, a good friend started developing an increased interest in food, wine, and flavor profiles. I asked him what sparked it and he shared that he had been treating food as a means to sustenance, getting through meals without really paying attention. He made a conscious decision to pause and see if he could describe the flavors in bites of food and drinks he tried, and trained himself to develop an awareness around tastes and flavors. When he had that vocabulary, he built a sense of combinations that enhanced or detracted from his experience. I always found this admirable, to take an aspect of your life that had been unknowingly on autopilot and to create intention and care around it.
A lot of my life is on efficiency autopilot. I think this is true for a lot of adults, and some aspects on autopilot are for good reason and some are just the result of routine, and this assumption that maximal efficiency is ideal. But I have tried introducing awareness, and quality, into small things – making an espresso, and sipping it to taste the flavor notes instead of treating my coffee as a vehicle for caffeine delivery. Putting a record on instead of Spotify favorites on shuffle, and taking the time to just listen to music as a collection in the way the artist made it.
If you’re like me, you could probably use a minor reset. Throughout any day, without thought, our natural inclination will likely be towards the default path of maximal efficiency. But consider if there’s a choice there that hasn’t been considered, and by ignoring it, if you might be unknowingly losing something by always opting for the efficient. Try giving one or two of your immediate experiences more quality attention and see if you like the feeling of offering attention over efficiency.
That all may sound very woo-woo and trite, and in fairness, it very well may be. For most of us it’s a whimsical dream to live life in a constant state of intentional inefficiency. And honestly, that extreme likely wouldn’t be a life we’d necessarily enjoy. But there is a balance that, if you’re like me, is helpful to be reminded of: checking the most things off a list won’t fulfill you. Listening to books at 6x speed so you can say you’ve read 600 books won’t give you what you’re looking for. If you don’t enjoy the process or the result absent external validation, rarely will it have been worth it.
