Wellbeing

There’s a lot of focus on making ourselves as efficient as possible: cramming our days with conspicuous activities, multitasking, and listening to podcasts at double speed. This might make sense during the good times, but we come unstuck when everything gets a bit squirrely – during a pandemic or a recession, for instance – then we suddenly realise our regime isn’t really serving us. As Andrew J. Scott and Lynda Gratton explain in The New Long Life, if we’re too focused and efficient – what they refer to as tunnelling – we can end up in a place of scarcity. With few options to choose from, we make bad decisions. Furthermore, those decisions made with a scarcity mindset are both limiting and often short-term. For the basis of this idea, see Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means so Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. What we need instead is slack, a pool of personal resources that gives us more options. This could be savings, protected blocks of time for experimentation, or regularly learning new skills. The point is not to plan for exactly when we’ll need to deploy these resources, but to have them in reserve if they’re needed. And they will be at some point. ...

When we want to quit a destructive habit, it’s common to be hard on ourselves. We don’t just start with a gentle 20-minute canter around the block, it has to be a 5k run before breakfast. Every day. There’s nobility in suffering and, of course, we crave fast results. This punishing schedule proves unsustainable and we’re confronted with yet more evidence of our flakiness. Nevertheless, many self-help books urge us to pursue dramatic change. ...