Steve Cooper

Over Christmas, I spent six and a half hours driving from York to Pembrokeshire, to stay with Clare’s parents. What should have been a hellish drive was significantly more pleasant than expected. I’m going to talk about why, and make a wider point about life hacks.

Long-distance driving, especially somewhere you’ve never been before, can often be nasty. You have to juggle several things at once – planning the route, controlling the car, talking to your passengers, etc — and you have time pressure, too. For me, this means stress.

Two things, I think, made the journey much more pleasant;

1. I drove an automatic,
2. I used GPS to navigate.

This offloaded several tasks from my brain; I no longer had to plan a route; everything was handed to me in simple-to-follow left/right/straight on choices, and if I made a mistake (which I did a couple of times) the GPS just routed round it, giving me a new route which got me there.

The automatic gearbox also made things easier. That part of my brain that would normally be making sure I was in the right gear was no longer occupied.

Life was simpler, so life was sweeter.

Joel, of the ‘Joel on Software’ site, uses the analogy of automatic transmissions when he talks about some benefits for programmers (scroll to ‘Automatic Transmission Wins the Day’). The wider point really is that freeing up your mind from one type of detail is like juggling with one fewer ball; it’s much, much easier.

So this is my wider point; anything fully automatic (I mean really and truly don’t-make-me-think automatic) makes your life less stressful.

The flipside, of course, is control. You always sacrifice a little control to the system. You lose precise throttle control in an automatic car. You lose control of exactly what stocks you own if you buy an index-tracker ISA.

I think this scares people, but really shouldn’t — this level of detail will probably tire you, stress you, and give very little benefit over the automatic method.

I’ll finish with a fantastic quote from Alfred North Whitehead, co- author of the Principia Mathematica;

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like calvary charges in a battle–they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.