But there was more to the relationship between time and work in early agricultural societies than the tedious reality of being tied to an inflexible seasonal cycle. One of the most profound legacies of the transition to farming was to transform the way people experienced and understood time.

But even if work offers people a sense of community and belonging, the kinds of communities that Durkheim imagined might coalesce around the workplace have not materialized to the extent he predicted. Indeed, when Durkheim pictured the city of the future as being made up of a mosaic of work-based communities, he hadn’t quite come to grips with the changing nature of employment and work in the industrial era.

In fact, just the other day I was sent an analysis of this phenomenon by Alan Lightman, physicist and writer:

By not giving ourselves the minutes – or hours – free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us. The destruction of our inner selves via the wired world is a subtle phenomenon. The loss of slowness, of time for reflection and contemplation, of privacy and solitude, of silence, of the ability to sit quietly in a chair for fifteen minutes without external stimulation – all have happened quickly and almost invisibly.

The situation is dire. We are losing our ability to know who we are and what is important to us. We are creating a global machine in which each of us is a mindless and reflexive cog, relentlessly driven by the speed, noise, and artificial urgency of the wired world. I would like to make a bold proposal: that half our waking minds be designated and saved for quiet reflection.

We need a mental attitude that protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner self; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.

We often have two contradictory feelings about the time we have available to us. On one hand we sense a time famine and feel that there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything that we need to do, let alone that we want to do. On the other hand, we tend to think that in some unspecified future we will have a time surplus, as if we’ll get to a place in our lives where the kinds of things capturing our time right now will cease to consume us.

This cognitive ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is one reason some of us feel so busy—not because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation.

Recent findings in neuroscience have shown that our conscious minds cannot do more than one thing at a time. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. Switching from one task to another takes energy and a measurable amount of time. Then, when we switch back, it takes another period of time to really wrap our minds around the original object of attention. And it’s not only about the time cost; it’s about the quality of our attention. If we are always switching from one thing to another, then we are never able to truly focus and experience the pleasure and effectiveness of a focused mind. Instead we live in a state of constant recalibration, or what the writer Linda Stone perceptively calls “continuous partial attention.”

Human awareness is not the speedy, nimble creature some of us believe it to be. Our brains have evolved to be more like owls than hummingbirds: we notice something, turn our attention to it, and focus in. It is in this state of intense, solitary focus that we are in possession of our most uniquely human and powerful mental faculties. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive.

But in the screen-heavy environment of the twenty-first century, our mind-owls, large and unwieldy, are treated like hummingbirds, and they end up flopping ineffectively from one thing to the next. Doing this day in and day out accommodates us to what is actually an unnatural, anxiety-producing mode in which the mind struggles to find nourishment.

Which owl is going to feel busier, the one focusing on the sound of a mouse in the snow, or the one trying to draw tiny bits of nectar from a thousand flowers? And which owl is going to be, in the end, better nourished?