The Age of Speed 114
enactd writes "I feel life is a constant juggle, for every task in hand you have another to react to or let drop. The Age of Speed helps you chart your tasks to keep the important goals in sight while recognizing and reacting to distractions. Being a geek on the cutting edge of technology gets one acquainted with speed quickly, but being able to handle it is another matter and streamlining is an ongoing effort. The goal of the book is to help you decide what is important in your life and extract as much pleasure from those things while minimizing the time spent on the mundane." Keep reading for the rest of Chris's review.
The beginning of the book deals with shedding the guilt most people associate with getting things done quickly. We are lead to believe at an early age that shortcuts diminish the reward or the experience of a task. While there are some tasks where this holds true, overall it is a common myth one needs to overcome in the age of speed.| The Age of Speed | |
| author | Vince Poscente |
| pages | 215 |
| publisher | Bard Press |
| rating | 8.5 |
| reviewer | Chris Alan |
| ISBN | 978-1-885167-67-5 |
| summary | Tips on getting more done with the time you have. |
My favorite anecdote was a fresh look at the Tortoise and the Hare. The common moral one associates with this fable is "Slow and steady wins the race." But the story isn't a condemnation on speed, rather against stupidity. The Hare lost simply because he was dumb enough to take a nap in the middle of the race, in no way did his speed work against him.
One of the major sections of the book splits personalities up into four categories, Zeppelins, Balloons, Bottle Rockets and Jets. The tech world mostly consists of Bottle Rockets and Jets, as long as you don't include managers. The Jets run smoothly and routinely hit their targets while the Bottle Rockets follow pets.com off the cliff.
Whenever I'm behind the wheel and someone asks if I know where I'm going I reply, "Nope, but I'm going to get there quickly." While I'm usually joking, it perfectly sums up the attitude of a Bottle Rocket. While a Jet has a single target and maintains focus until it's task is complete, a Bottle Rocket constantly changes it's target and never seems to be able to hit it before being distracted by a new goal, leaving a wake of unfinished debris. Obviously one should strive to be a Jet.
I finished this book two weeks ago. I started writing the review immediately after finishing the book, but I wanted to see how applying the principles helped me out. My favorite section was titled Aerodynamics and led to an immediate change in how I approach working.
Sometimes I find myself falling into a black hole of needless distractions, constantly switching between email, Twitter, Slashdot and any other diversion I reward myself with throughout the day. If I have too many distractions in a short amount of time I'll fall into a pseudo trance of cycling through them endlessly. Afterward I'm at square one with getting back on task. Directly after reading the chapter An Exercise in Consciousness I turned off my email auto checker. This simple change transformed my work environment from an interruptive process to one I'm in control of. By removing the interruption I don't have the temptation to succumb to distractions and I've felt much more productive.
The only time the author had me rolling my eyes was the shameless self promotion of referencing the Age of Speed throughout the book. If I were reviewing this book for a more general audience I would have rated it a point higher, but people in the technology sector don't have the same speed hang ups as most people, negating some of the insights of the book. However, there are plenty of pointers for even the most hardcore tech geek. Surviving in an always on World is easy, the key is learning how to prosper.
You can purchase The Age of Speed from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Age of Speed on Wall St. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if the author did an analysis of how the Age of Speed helped Wall St. to come to its fabulous current state.
The reviewer says we "live in the age of speed." Maybe so. I see plenty of people doing things too quickly. But does that mean we live in the "age of speed?" How does it differ from the age of non-speed? Is it an improvement, an inevitability? Did we lose something? Would the financial disaster we're in right now have been better off without so much speed?
Before reading more about how to cope with the age of speed, I'd prefer to see something explaining just what it is. Otherwise I'm sure not going to spend my valuable time reading it. Right now it just sounds like a buzz phrase.
Guilty as charged (Score:3, Interesting)
I am guilty of not doing things quickly. I have been ridiculed for years on how quickly I tie my shoes, for instance.
I try to do it faster, but I don't see how it can be done much faster, frankly, and I make sure the things are tied well so that I do not have to do it again.
Mindfulness seems to be slipping away. With twitter and facebook and god knows what else, it really feels like the soul has gone out of much of what we do each day.
I see this all the time in my work: People want to have their finances done in a flash without thinking or answering any fundamental questions about their life. When we cave and make a recommendation because people "just want an answer" they will often come back angry later on because they have no idea what we actually did for them, or they see no value in what has been done for them. The advisors who seem to prosper are the ones who brush off doing any really solid work and explain/charm away any difficult issues with their clients. Those of us who may overthink it, but often bring very key issues to light as a result of it, seem to have been relegated to the role of dinosaur. If you're looking for what happened on Wallstreet, I'd say that's it right there.
I am really sick of "The Age of Speed". We should strive for optimal mindfulness in each action we take, not slipshod whizzbang idiocy, which often seems to be called "clever" or "smart" by speed-freaks and know-it-alls.
People can only do so much, but I'd really like to see other opinions on this.
The juggling analogy again? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a juggler, it's a little annoying when people use juggling as an analogy and get it wrong. So here's an explanation of juggling and how to do it, whether it's clubs or tasks.
It's all in the throw, not in the catch. If the throw is perfect, the catch happens without any corrections or concious thought.
You may have two hands, but your two eyes can only look at one thing at a time. Jugglers just peep at the object as it arcs over and downwards, and that's enough to tell them where and when to stick out a hand and catch it. This has been confirmed experimentally using opaque glasses to block off the view of the objects except around about the top of the arc.
Once you get beyond juggling three objects, you peep at the object but then you have to remember how it's falling while you peep at another, before you stick out your hand to catch the first object. So 1) consistency is hugely important and 2) you have to practise daily until it's completely automatic.
The most important tool for juggling is gravity. That's how jugglers stack the objects and know where and when they'll fall. If gravity wavered, it'd bring the pattern down. You have to know what to expect. Remember in Firefly how something unexpected would happen, and it'd turn out they'd prepared for that contingency? Same thing, really.
Now let's apply the theory of juggling to 'juggling' a bunch of tasks. You have to be able to give each task some impetus and then move on, knowing the point at which you'll have to return to that task. You have to have some method, equivalent to the way jugglers use gravity, that smoothly handles the tasks while your attention is elsewhere. Finally, you have to make it funny. Or perhaps that only applies to juggling? Well, analogies can only be stretched so far.
Re:Age of Speed on Wall St. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually I was thinking more along the lines of the speed with which CDOs and other structured financial investments were created and sold, without anyone SLOWING DOWN enough to say, you know this sounds like a lot of BS to me..............
If you view Wall St. as nothing more than the ability to trade, then yes 'speed' has given more people the ability to trade quickly. But as a consequence it's also contributed to the substitution of speculation for investment (see John Bogle's new book, 'Enough'). Many people would say I think that speed has been the problem with Wall St. as well in speculation gaining the ascendancy over investment.
It looks so easy with our speedy tools: the price is $9.00 on my screen right here; 30 seconds later it's $9.95 on this screen here. So I sell. That is the Wall St. of day-traders and speed does help. It is not investment.
My guess is that in five years when there's been enough time to sort all of this out that people will say speculation was one of the biggest problems here. That and the abandonment of investment. For example do you buy a house as a long term investment, something that you live in for a long period of time. Or do you buy it for speculation, for a quick profit. I couldn't prove it but I think it's true that most of the speed that you say has been valuable for Wall St. was only valuable if you consider to be Wall St. a speculative entity rather than an investment one.
I think we do agree on panic though. It can move a whole lot more speedily now. I wouldn't be surprised in fact if the huge volatility swings that we see these days are more due to the speed of communication than to anything inherent in the market. But if so then that's one more instance where speed doesn't seem so good. Not that there's much that can be done about it.