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“My life is too short for me to hurry.” That quote from British author and former gardener Marc Hamer jumped off the page as I was reading his book, “How to catch a mole, wisdom from a life lived in nature.”
The logic of it at first doesn’t add up, if life is short shouldn’t one try to get as much as possible from every day at a fast pace. In newspaper world the second hand on the clock is more relevant than the minute hand, seconds ticking away towards an ever present deadline.
As the world moves to online and everything is run by artificial intelligence, will deadlines cease to exist? No more, “Stop the presses and get me rewrite” yells into the newsrooms of old movies from the ’40s and ’50s. Today, the 24/7 stream of information flows like a river, always something arriving as the old news floats downstream.
But in the hybrid newsroom of print and online it turns out there are more deadlines than ever. First, the early print deadline around mid-day as stories and print wind their way through a labyrinth of news desk stops and then out to offsite planners and designers before arriving back in New England at the printing press in Providence, Rhode Island. Then an overnight ride back to Cape Cod for the final destination in a subscriber’s driveway or on the morning newsstand.
Online, stories, photos and videos are sent into a revolving queue based on page views and reader traffic set to specific times throughout the day aligning with website metrics calculated for the best times to catch the most “eyeballs.” As the 21st century moves into the 2020s, online monitoring is constant. Check out a pair of new shoes on a website and suddenly you are bombarded with popup ads for similar products. Indeed Big Brother is watching, no matter where your mouse and web browser might go, so act fast.
Circling back to Hamer’s observation, perhaps slowing down is the solution for our short lifespans. A moment remembered turns into a memory. Time wasted chasing a daily checklist may yield nothing more than a completed list. Like a busy bee in a field of flowers, a person can really only take on one thing at a time, best to be in the moment and enjoy.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Photo Shoot: No Need to Rush
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