“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Brian Christian – TED-Ed Lesson Transcript
In the summer of 1997, NASA’s Pathfinder spacecraft landed on the surface of Mars, and began transmitting incredible, iconic images back to Earth.
But several days in, something went terribly wrong. The transmissions stopped.
Pathfinder was, in effect, procrastinating: keeping itself fully occupied but failing to do its most important work.
What was going on?
There was a bug, it turned out, in its scheduler. Every operating system has something called the scheduler that tells the CPU how long to work on each task before switching, and what to switch to. Done right, computers move so fluidly between their various responsibilities, they give the illusion of doing everything simultaneously.
But we all know what happens when things go wrong. This should give us, if nothing else, some measure of consolation. Even computers get overwhelmed sometimes.
Maybe learning about the computer science of scheduling can give us some ideas about our own human struggles with time.
One of the first insights is that all the time you spend prioritizing your work is time you aren’t spending doing it. For instance, let’s say when you check your inbox, you scan all the messages, choosing which is the most important.
Once you’ve dealt with that one, you repeat. Seems sensible, but there’s a problem here. This is what’s known as a quadratic-time algorithm.
With an inbox that’s twice as full, these passes will take twice as long and you’ll need to do twice as many of them! This means four times the work.
The programmers of the operating system Linux encountered a similar problem in 2003. Linux would rank every single one of its tasks in order of importance, and sometimes spent more time ranking tasks than doing them.
The programmers’ counterintuitive solution was to replace this full ranking with a limited number of priority “buckets.” The system was less precise about what to do next but more than made up for it by spending more time making progress.
So with your emails, insisting on always doing the very most important thing first could lead to a meltdown.