We have designed friction out of modern working life, but some of the spaces we removed may have been doing something more important than we realised.
We have learned to live efficiently, perhaps sometimes too efficiently. From the moment we wake up, many of us reach for our phones and almost immediately enter a sequence of emails, messages, meetings, appointments and decisions, with our days increasingly organised around making sure that very little time is wasted. Modern executive life has become extraordinarily good at removing friction from this process. Communication is instant, meetings can happen from almost anywhere at the click of a button, transport is faster and more private, and digital tools can organise our schedules so precisely that we can move from one conversation to another without even leaving the chair.
We consider this progress, and in many ways it undoubtedly is, but I have become increasingly interested in what may have disappeared alongside some of that friction. What if some of the pauses we have eliminated were also creating natural boundaries between one demand and the next?
Imagine finishing a difficult meeting in which something you said was dismissed, or perhaps you raised a concern that nobody really acknowledged. You may have felt unheard, embarrassed or frustrated by a colleague’s response, but the meeting finishes nevertheless; you close the laptop or walk out of the boardroom, the appointment disappears from your calendar, and technically it is over. Psychologically, however, the ending may not be quite so clean.
Perhaps you are now on your way to collect your child from school and, while travelling there, you continue replaying the conversation. You wonder why you didn’t say something differently, why somebody reacted in a particular way, or whether you were too direct. By the time you reach the school, you are physically somewhere completely different, yet part of your attention may still be sitting in that meeting, rehearsing and analysing what was said and what you might have done differently.
Your child runs towards you, you smile, give them a hug and ask about their day, and they begin enthusiastically telling you about a project they have been working on with their friends. You hear them, you respond and perhaps you even nod at all the right moments, but somewhere underneath that interaction your attention is still moving between what happened before, what is happening now and perhaps what needs to happen next. Nothing dramatic has occurred, and you may not even notice it, but in a very ordinary sense you have not fully arrived. By that I simply mean that what happened before has not quite closed, while your attention has not yet fully opened to what is in front of you.
There are several established areas of research that give us useful ways of thinking about this experience. Research into what has been termed attention residue, for example, has shown that when people switch away from a task, particularly an unfinished one, some attention can remain with what came before and affect performance on the subsequent task. Experimental research into task switching has also found that changing task sets can create event boundaries in how continuous experiences are organised in memory. These findings do not establish that every transition in everyday life works in the same way, but they do raise an interesting broader question about whether physically moving from one demand to another necessarily means that our attention has moved with us.
Occupational psychology approaches a related issue through research into psychological detachment, broadly referring to our ability to mentally disengage from work during non-work time. A systematic review covering 159 empirical studies describes psychological detachment as an important recovery experience and places it within a modern working environment increasingly characterised by communication technology and blurred boundaries between work and private life. Again, this does not mean that every unfinished thought or difficult meeting is harmful, nor that people should somehow achieve a perfectly clear mental state before moving on. Human attention simply does not work that way. What it does suggest, however, is that the transition itself deserves more attention than we usually give it.
This is where I begin to wonder whether efficiency may have created a problem that we rarely recognise as one. We have learned that planning and organisation give us control, keep us productive and allow us to fit extraordinary amounts into a day, yet in making movement between demands increasingly seamless, perhaps we have sometimes confused physical transition with psychological transition. A meeting ends and another begins, so we assume the transition happened somewhere in between, even when the “somewhere in between” has been reduced to clicking Leave Meeting and opening another window.
The obvious answer might be to create more time for recovery or reflection, but that is not always realistic. It is not always practical to meditate for twenty minutes between meetings, write in a journal after every difficult conversation or continually stop a demanding working day in order to process whatever has just happened. Nor am I convinced that this should be necessary. What interests me much more are the small spaces that already exist: walking between buildings, travelling home, waiting for somebody to arrive, closing a laptop, making a drink, sitting in the car for a moment before going inside, or simply experiencing those few seconds after one conversation finishes and before another begins.
Research into commuting provides an interesting example because the journey between work and home has been considered not simply as travelling time, but as a potential period of transition between different roles and an opportunity for psychological recovery. This makes me wonder whether some of the ordinary spaces we increasingly regard as inefficiencies or obstacles in a busy life might sometimes be useful precisely because they create a boundary. The point is not to deliberately make people’s lives less efficient or to suggest that every transition requires an intervention; rather, it is to question whether eliminating every pause is necessarily the same thing as improving the human experience moving through it.
Perhaps the practical change is not to add another recovery technique to an already crowded day, but to stop automatically consuming every transition that already exists. When a meeting ends, resist the instinct to immediately open the next email, make the next call or mentally begin the next task. Instead, allow even a very small boundary to remain and notice what is still occupying your attention before you cross into what comes next. This does not require you to resolve the previous meeting, suppress the thoughts it created or somehow empty your mind. The purpose is simply to stop treating the end of one demand and the beginning of another as though they have to happen at exactly the same psychological moment. Before you move straight into what comes next, give yourself a moment in between and notice what you carry with you.
This is one of the questions I am currently exploring through HypnoBond Private: can we become better at recognising and designing the transition between what just happened and what needs us next? At HP, we are beginning to investigate these moments more deliberately, including what, if anything, people carry across them, how attention appears to disengage and reorient, and whether there may be particular points within a transition when a very small intervention is more useful than at others. There is still a great deal to understand, test and challenge.
What keeps bringing me back to this question is a simple observation. We have spent decades designing increasingly efficient ways of moving people, information and decisions from one point to another, and perhaps the next challenge is not simply making that movement even faster, but understanding what happens to the person in between.
Because ultimately, arriving somewhere physically is easy to measure. The more interesting question may be whether, when we get there, we have actually arrived.
Quote:
“In making movement between demands increasingly seamless, perhaps we have sometimes confused physical transition with psychological transition.”
