Last month, New York all but banned private cars from 14th Street, a major thoroughfare in Manhattan, in an effort to let buses travel faster. The city’s permanently aggrieved car lobby – loud when leaning pointlessly on their horns, equally loud when complaining they’re hard done by – predicted chaos. They warned that the traffic would be displaced to narrower nearby streets, thereby just shifting the problem, or making it worse. It hasn’t happened yet, though. The reason is a reverse version of “induced demand” , the phenomenon whereby making roads wider, in an effort to ease congestion, attracts more traffic, eliminating the benefits. (There’s a 26-lane highway outside Houston, Texas, probably the world’s widest road, where evening commute times increased by 55% in the years following an expansion.) So, when capacity is reduced, as on 14th Street, it follows that demand will fall.
The logic here isn’t hard to see – provide more of something, or charge less for it, and people will use more of it – but it’s easy to overlook how many areas of life it affects. One well-known example is electricity usage, where the Jevons paradox explains how making appliances more energy efficient can backfire by stimulating demand. It’s massively cheaper, and kinder to the environment, to keep a bottle of milk cool in 2019 than it was in 1940, but the result isn’t that we use less electricity on refrigeration: it’s that people buy bigger fridges, or multiple fridges, and that more people lower down the global income ladder have fridges to begin with. This brings many benefits, but lower energy consumption isn’t among them.
Less obviously, the same issue afflicts struggles with email overload: get more efficient at processing email, and you’re effectively reducing the cost to others of emailing you, so it’s more likely they will. Work expands to fill the time available – which is why people who transform themselves into 26-lane highways of productivity often find they’re no less busy than before.
Even the relationship dynamic known as “overfunctioning and underfunctioning” is a disguised case of induced demand. If you’re the overfunctioner in your house – the one who always cleans the kitchen, otherwise it won’t get done – you’re keeping down the price of not cleaning it, from your partner’s perspective, thus reinforcing their decision not to bother. And should you find a way to do it faster, so it eats less of your time, you’ll be actively reducing the price, making it even more likely you’ll find yourself cleaning the kitchen tomorrow, or next year.
What to do? The rule of thumb is: just because your problem is one of strained capacity, don’t assume increasing capacity is the answer. It may make more sense to emulate 14th Street and reduce, or at least put a ceiling on, your capacity instead. Resolve to process email for a certain period each day, rather than trying to answer it all, and you’ll moderate the incoming flow. Stop cleaning the kitchen for a week, and your partner may reach a threshold of disgust and pick up the mop themselves. And so on. Beware the struggle to “get everything done”, which is equivalent to the struggle to make space for every driver who wants to use a given stretch of road; often, the result is just to increase the size of the “everything”.
Read this
In 2016’s Deep Work, Cal Newport explains one way of reducing overwhelm by limiting your capacity – ‘fixed-schedule productivity’.
