How best to manage time in the age of information overload

Furthermore: objectively, the number of things to do is increasing? Perhaps we are also witnessing the paradox that succeeding in making time more efficient has the side effect of increasing the ambition to get more and more items onto our (and our organisations') 'to do' lists, in a chase that risks appearing endless (and I will deliberately not address here the very divisive issues about the echo of anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist positions that it is difficult to leave out completely, if it is true that Taylorism and Fordism may have given the go-ahead to the first subdivisions of time - man as hourly commodity).

A key reading that I find interesting and propose again is in a book that I have just picked up while preparing my speech. It is by a British journalist and writer, Oliver Burkeman. Many of you know him for a column he wrote in Italy for many years in Internazionale; his book first came out for Vallardi with the title "How do you have more time?", and in a second edition with the title "Quattromila settimane" (TEA publisher).

The positioning from the titles sounds like that of a self-help book, and while it is true that it closes with a short appendix containing ten techniques to implement what it says in the text, the reasons why I find it interesting are others: I will tell you three.

One is the link between time and attention: given the overload, the real challenge has shifted to how to manage our attention, rather than time. And in this, Burkeman is clear: the war for attention is lost at the start, with an army of professionals ready to do anything to conquer it. But above all - and this is the key to interpretation that I found most intriguing - human beings are evolved to be distracted: exercising such great control over our attention would mean not being enraptured by an unexpected sunset, or being run over by a bus because we are completely focused on something else. In short, by seeking such total control "we make the mistake of recognising one of the human limitations (time and the consequent need to spend it well) while denying another (it is almost impossible to achieve total sovereignty over attention)." Added to this is a very relevant theme: "distractions are not why we get distracted, but places where we find refuge in order not to face the limits." We may hermit ourselves and ditch social media, but if "focusing on what's important continues to be unpleasant we will find other ways to distract ourselves and ease the pain: daydreaming, taking one too many naps or, a great classic among productivity maniacs, reorganising the list of outstanding tasks and tidying up the desk."

The second issue is that many of the recent approaches to time management, which consider attention as the real issue, have the inherent limitation of treating it as a resource. Instead, according to Burkeman, "to call attention a 'resource' is to misunderstand the centrality it has in our lives. Most of the resources we rely on, such as food, money and electricity, serve to make life easier, and in some cases it is possible to do without them at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, is life: the experience of being alive coincides with the sum of everything we pay attention to."

The third, in no particular order, is a 'natural' consequence of the impatience that grips us, both individually and socially and organisationally. The author explains it well, I come out of it in three moves: 1) individually, the more we get used to speed, the faster we want to go ("if Amazon's home page takes an extra second to load .'); 2) socially, 'humanity has responded not with satisfaction at all the time saved (by innovations and technologies) but with a growing agitation at the impossibility of making things move even faster'; 3) organisationally: if you are immune to the lure of speed, but your job requires you to 'respond to forty e-mails within an hour, your job stability may depend on knowing how to do it, regardless of what you think about it."

Antidote? Patience, which 'enjoys a terrible reputation'. Burkeman promotes it with three principles and a couple of enlightening examples, which I anticipate only with the title of the chapter that talks about it: stay on the bus. I trust that you will be intrigued enough to go and read it, and above all that you will find the time and attention to do so.

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