Deadlines are approaching, deadlines are getting shorter, the injunction to be efficient is turning into pressure, expressed as stress, impatience, frustration or guilt if it isn't met. Speed of execution comes with demands for mastery and appreciated effects, but tolerance is not one of them.
We are sensitive to speed, and readily associate it with competence: for equal quality, the person who achieves the result more quickly is bound to seem better. Control is, to some extent, the basic requirement for speed: staying focused and precise, with margins compatible with reaction time.
If there is an intoxication with speed, it has consequences for quality: quality of production, quality of life, quality of interaction, quality of decision; certain thresholds cannot be exceeded without risk. Few professionals are able to work fast and keep up the pace over the long term; those who have reached this level have nothing to fear from the competition.
Our agendas organize our future and define its limits with alerts and reminders; our sporadic availability is effectively fragmented between vital, economic and social necessities. The remaining availability is coveted and absorbed by an insatiable digital world.
Against this backdrop, it's obvious that learning, the creation of connections, situated experimentation, appropriation and other processes essential to the development of real competence, all take time, a continuous time that biology demands and that can hardly be compressed. Biological rhythms can be adjusted, but within fairly narrow limits, well below the acceleration made possible by technologies, with AI at the forefront. So, considering our organic reality, the current use of technology in teaching is pertinently called into question.
There are still deadlines, set by necessity, others or ourselves, the key ingredient of all good suspense, the revealer of procrastination, the nightmare of the end of term, the stress of the start of vacations and scheduled departures. We're in a hurry, but who's in a hurry? In a hurry for what?
Denys Lamontagne - [email protected]
Illustration: Shutterstock - 2204705483
