The adolescent brain today receives the same amount of information in ONE WEEK, that it did in ONE YEAR in 1975. (Dr Harris Eyre, Psychiatric Neuroscience Researcher, James Cook University). A copy of the daily New York Times contains more information than the average 17th-century Englishman encountered in a lifetime. (Nunberg)

And we wonder why we’re exhausted. Why it’s hard to focus. Why we’re hitting the wall so early in the day, scrambling to remember things and keep up with all that’s going on. We wonder why the idea of sprawling on the couch with Netflix and ‘numbing our brains’ with banal TV shows is so very attractive.

And meanwhile, a UK study found recently that the average worker spends two hours and fifty-three minutes a day working productively. In response to this, and the ever-increasing pile of distractions we face, a heap of leading organisations have trialled different approaches, like shorter working weeks, mostly based on 'Parkinson’s Law', that work expands to fill the time available, and the '80/20 Principle', that says 80 per cent of productivity is achieved in 20 per cent of our time.

Do you ever wonder what it would feel like to time-travel back a few decades — even back to the 1980s? Can you imagine the culture shock we’d face, with the slower pace? A lot of us are wired so tight, and programmed so ‘fast’, we’d find the lack of frantic, constant connection disconcerting at first. And yet a life like that exists in most of our living memories.

We’re considering these points deeply as we research our next book, I Can’t Be Bothered, which is about finding more energy — and not necessarily finding the energy to do more. We’re keen on circuit breakers and disconnection, slowing the pace and fitting fewer things in, but many more of the most important things to each of us.

You can find out more about our fresh approaches to time and energy at our workshop this Saturday in Canberra. Ticket sales close tomorrow.