Chris Lewis, Kogan Page, £14.99
It’s unlikely this will be the only article you read today. Throw in TV, radio and social media and the average adult spends 9.8 hours per day consuming media, for both work and pleasure. It’s not hard to understand why this represents a sensory onslaught – or, as journalist and consultant Chris Lewis puts it in this impeccably zeitgeist-surfing book: “The rush [of information] has forced us to process yesterday as if it were trash, and left us no time to recall, review and learn.”
We are, says Lewis, doing too much, and living on the edge as we try to keep up with the internet age – the amount of coffee we drink has doubled since 1975, to say nothing of other stimulants. Aside from health and, sometimes, sanity, the casualty of this frenzy is creativity (which “speaks with such a quiet voice, we don’t always hear it”), defined here as a capacity for reflection and self-examination, essential to pretty much any sector of industry – not just self-professed creatives.
Too Fast to Think is an attempt to diagnose the problem, at a personal and organisational level, and identify potential solutions. This is partly about creating a more humane workplace, and employing fewer ‘Type A’ leaders who ramp up the pace to unsustainable levels. But what Lewis would really like is for us to understand our brains and make space for “sustainable creativity”, where we work more sensibly, listen for the triggers of overload and ensure we’re getting the sleep and self-reflection we need.
The book itself could perhaps benefit from some breathing space: it jumps across a lot of topics, all of them interesting but not all obviously interlinked. But its genius is that it never reaches for clichés or easy answers, and makes a compelling case for reintroducing the long-forgotten tools of discovery and wonder into the workplace. It explains, too, with remarkable persuasion, that all of us could do more by doing less.