Are We Missing the Mental Downtime of Inefficiency?
Technology has automated the in-between tasks out of our workdays
Another Monday morning and I have eighteen tabs open for four different tasks. When I finish reconciling the deposit accounts, that closed tab makes way for my inbox where I reply to the three new inquiries that came in while I worked. After that it’s over to Quickbooks for today’s invoicing.
I have a meeting in two minutes, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop working — my meeting is just in another tab. In fact, I can keep working after I’ve joined, while I wait for everyone else to arrive. It’s only after my boss starts us off that I’ll tab back over and drag my attention from the last thing to the next.
Maybe if I’d needed those two minutes to walk down the hall to a meeting room, unable to fill those minutes with work, my brain wouldn’t feel so wrung out. But I don’t have time to wonder about that. I don’t have time to wonder about anything.
Productivity bottleneck
The rise in productivity of office work is both well documented and intuitively self-evident. The typical workload of, for example, a receptionist in the ‘80s can now be accomplished in a fraction of the time with the help of technology we take for granted. The shift of record keeping, payment processing, and communication from paper to digital has supercharged our ability to get things done.
This is obviously a windfall for companies, but what does it mean for the people actually doing the work?
Back before the internet and paperless billing, way before the post-pandemic work-from-home conversation, office jobs looked fairly different. The tasks were largely the same, but there was a practical limit to how fast you could get things done. Working with paper was an information bottleneck, and no matter how streamlined the process was, there was always a time cost for writing or printing, filing, and mailing.
In the day-to-day, this meant that no matter how cognitively intense your work was, when you finished a task you probably got up to go get something from the printer, went to file the documents you’d been creating, or walked down the hall to ask John about his part of the project. The physicality of the medium and the space meant that moving around, and moving things around, was necessarily part of your day.
These days, finishing a task means hitting send and moving on to the next task.
In-between tasks
When everything is digital or automatic and communication is instant, that in-between time is missing from the way we work.
I wasn’t around yet in the ‘80s, but by virtue of some people being behind the times, I had a largely paper-based office job a few years ago. I know what it feels like to finish a difficult project and then get to push away from the desk and go stand at the printer while it spits out the results of your work. And it feels like rest.
In between the “productive” parts of my job, which demanded focus and brainpower, I also did things like filing and mailing out paper invoices. I removed staples from stacks of old reports before shredding them. I walked full records boxes across the building to the storage room. I shuffled through filing cabinets to find the invoice a customer was calling about.
Once, I spent an afternoon folding promotional T-shirts.
It was boring work, for sure, but what I didn’t appreciate at the time was that it offered a mental rest in a day during which I otherwise had to be “on” — solving problems and processing information. In an eight hour day of nonstop work, these tasks meant I still had moments when my mind could wander and I could think about other things.
In the midst of a mentally demanding job, taking an hour to fold invoices was something to look forward to. There was a kind of subtle, tactile satisfaction in aligning the corners, creasing the paper, and watching the stack on my desk shrink one invoice at a time. And meanwhile, I was able to rest.
This is not to say that I want a boring job. Boring jobs are their own kind of psychological hell. Interesting and challenging work is satisfying and adds meaning to our jobs. But when it’s interspersed with tasks that give your brain a break, the challenging work becomes both easier and more enjoyable to get back to. shows that our brains work best when we switch between focus and non-focus.
Less and less
My current job still has some simple repetitive tasks, usually in the form of data entry. It’s something I can do between harder projects, while listening to music or even with YouTube on in the background. But it doesn’t allow me to mentally check out the way that stuffing envelopes did.
It’s also, notably, the sort of work that I have less of every year as business and accounting software improves. Mindless repetitive work is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit for automation that has been rapidly disappearing from our work. This is very obvious in the office settings that I’m familiar with, but it’s also true of countless other types of work, including the aforementioned .
As tasks have gotten quicker and more automated and our in-between work has rapidly disappeared, we have continued to work eight-hour days. Ostensibly, it’s the same amount of work as before, just with higher output. But in reality, it means our eight-hour days are more concentrated with complex tasks — the problem solving, communication, and decision making that are more difficult to replace with technology.
A on burnout and mental health found that 51% of respondents said they felt “used up” at the end of their workday. It’s no wonder people seem to have no energy for anything but crashing in front of the TV after work when they haven’t had a chance to stop thinking, or think about anything outside their jobs, for eight straight hours. That mental rest isn’t built into our days anymore the way it used to be.
So what’s the solution?
Well, I’m always happy to talk about why the 40-hour work week is a relic that needs to go. But until we manage to demand a shorter workweek from our policy-makers, I think the answer is to give yourself breaks.
Make yourself a cup of tea. Go for a walk around the neighborhood or the office park. Lie on the floor with the cat for a bit if you work from home. If your boss is giving you trouble about taking a breather, you can tell them you need some time to think through the problem you’re working on, because you do. You need time to think. Or not think.
have shown that humans are not actually capable of focusing for eight hours and the amount of work that people get done in a workday is usually closer to . Some say it’s even less.
Taking breaks is necessary to be productive as well as to stay sane and healthy and keep from burning out. It’s great that we don’t need to fold so many paper invoices anymore, but it also means we need to make sure we get that rest somewhere else.
