There is a stretch of road between my house and the school gate where, if the wind is right and the lights are with us, my children and I learn that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. We learn that a sloth's digestion is so slow it can in theory die of starvation with a full stomach. We learn that there is a man in Wales who has a passport for his pig.
We learn these things because we are listening to No Such Thing As A Fish, at the speed at which it was recorded, by people who I assume have eaten breakfast and would like to be understood. The presenter says a fact. There is a pause. Someone laughs. We laugh as well, in the car, the three of us, like a small mobile pub quiz with no prize and no questions.
What I do is anticipate the swears.
The presenters of NSTAAF are clever and warm and very much grown-ups, and several times an episode they will say a word I am not yet ready to explain. I have learned to recognise the small inhalation that precedes one. I lean across, turn the volume down at the right moment, then back up again, like a man jamming a hostile radio frequency on behalf of childhood. When I miss one, I tell the kids that this is naughty adult language, and that while they are clever people, they should not fucking swear.
They look at me. They keep eating their breakfast bars.
This takes about twenty minutes. It is the best part of the day.
Then I drop them off. The gate closes. And, on the way back, by myself, in the same car, with the same speakers, I become a different person.
I put on a productivity podcast. I put it on at three times the speed.
I would like to draw the court's attention to the fact that, according to data Spotify gave to Business Insider, 98.5% of listeners never change the playback speed at all. Only about 0.1% are out there at 2x. At 3x I am, statistically, alone. I am in a small stuffy room with an unknown number of American men explaining to me how to wake up, except they sound like the lads in the chipmunk songs, and I am pretending this is normal. (Some people listen fast because their attention won't stay on anything slower; that is not what I am describing. I am describing me.)
I have been doing this for years. I will name names. I switched to Downcast specifically because the Apple Podcasts app capped me at 2x and I wanted to go faster. Audible, I salute you sincerely for this, will let you go to 3.5x, which I have done, on books I will never recall a single sentence from. I once listened to a 14-hour history book in three days at 3x while doing other things. I cannot tell you what was in it. I can tell you the cover was yellow.
The man on the podcast is talking about the four habits of resilient leaders, at a speed that the human mouth was not designed for. There is a paper from 2018 which found that comprehension drops by about eleven points when students listen at 1.5x. I am well past where the research stopped feeling optimistic. I am taking nothing in. I am moving the audio across my head from one ear to the other, like a man dragging a hosepipe across a lawn.
If you'd asked me, a week ago, why I was doing this, I would have said: because I am behind. I have a queue of audiobooks, a queue of podcasts, a queue of newsletters that I subscribed to in good faith and then betrayed.
There are around seventy thousand new podcast episodes published every day. The school run gets me, generously, about half an hour if traffic is on my side. I am several orders of magnitude behind, before I have even put my shoes on. I am not the deviant on the curve. I am the curve, just a little further along.
The car is not the worst of it. The tube is the worst of it. On the Central line, podcast at 3x, I will be reading my email on the same phone, and occasionally swiping over to the news headlines if the podcast says something I have already heard. Three streams of input, all going through the same one head. I get off at my stop having finished none of them and feeling, somehow, even more behind.
The podcast was about a book I have not yet read. Toxic Productivity by Israa Nasir. Nasir's argument, as the podcast told it to me, is roughly: when you cannot stop being productive, you are not managing your time. You are managing your emotions. The to-do list is a way of not feeling something. The 3x is a way of not feeling the school run, the empty seat, the morning, the year, the fact that the kids are getting bigger, the everything.
That sentence sat in my chest for about a week. Or possibly a month. I lost track because I was busy.
Harvard Health has a tidy clinician's definition: "an internal pressure to be productive at all times and prioritize your to-do list at the expense of your mental or physical well-being." I have been doing this for many years and was, until recently, quite proud of it.
There is a longer history to this, which I can feel pressing on me even at 3x. There was a man called Alexei Stakhanov who, on 31 August 1935, reportedly mined 102 tonnes of coal in a six-hour shift, against a quota of seven, while Communist Party officials watched from the gallery and the assistants whose work had been arranged in advance were, conveniently, not in any of the photographs. They gave him the Order of Lenin. They raised the quota for everyone else. Anyone who couldn't keep up was a wrecker. Stakhanov, reportedly, lost the medal in a brawl in a pub.
I think about Stakhanov on the way home from school more than is probably healthy. The modern phrase for him is "10x developer." Stakhanov in a hoodie. Same fellow, different lanyard. It's the same trick they have been pulling for centuries: take one person's atypical output, on one staged shift, and reissue it as everyone's moral standard.
Joel Spolsky wrote, in 2005, that "five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever." It's a great line. The trouble is, I'm a Salieri. So are most of you, on the balance of probabilities. So this isn't really a strategy. It's just a way of feeling worse on the way home.
There is a phrase I have been carrying around for years, that I have never quite connected to this. Imposter syndrome. The feeling that you are not the person other people think you are; that you got here on a series of small kindnesses and any minute now they will work it out. According to a 2024 study of software engineers across twenty-six countries, 52.7% of them experience this frequently or intensely. Most of the room. We are all Salieri, looking around for Mozart and assuming it must be the other one.
Here, I think, is what listening at 3x has been for. If you can consume more, more books, more lectures, more habits of resilient leaders, perhaps you can convert quantity into qualification. Perhaps you can outrun the part of you that thinks you are not enough. The trouble is, the part of you that thinks you are not enough also gets faster. It listens at 3x as well.
Anyway.
The newer mutation of the disease is the AI tools. I should declare my interest. I work, in the daytime, around the edges of the UK public sector, where there is currently a great deal of pressure to be twenty per cent more productive by Tuesday, using AI. I have used them. I quite like them. They are also, and I say this sincerely, slot machines.
There is a study from METR, in July 2025, in which sixteen experienced open-source developers were given AI coding tools on real tasks. They were 19% slower with the AI than without. They believed they were 20% faster. That is roughly a 39-point gap between feeling and reality, which is, give or take, the same gap as between me listening to a productivity podcast at 3x and me actually doing anything with my life. The trouble is, my dashboard is me, and I am compromised.
Mark Craddock has written about this, and he calls these tools limerence machines. I had to look up limerence. It's the early-stage obsessive infatuation thing, the one where you can't stop checking your phone in case the person has texted, except it has been engineered into the tools on purpose. It's the same trick as a fruit machine. Maybe the next one will be the one. Maybe this episode will fix me. Maybe at 3.2x I'll finally hear the sentence that explains why I'm like this. Then I can tick it off. Then I can rest.
Someone, somewhere, is paid to make sure the queue never empties. Good luck to them. I have been doing their job for free.
I haven't rested in a while.
The thing about a good slot machine is that you don't realise it's a slot machine while you're at it. You think you're refining your inputs. You think the next pull will be different. The audiobook queue is a slot machine. The little red badge on the email is a slot machine. The school run, mind, is not a slot machine. The school run is twenty minutes with two children and a flamboyance of flamingos. That bit was always free.
So. Two or three small things, which I might break by Wednesday, but here they are.
I have bought Toxic Productivity. The book. By Israa Nasir. The one I keep mentioning. I am going to listen to it on the next drive home, and the one after that, and the one after that. At 1x. The audiobook is seven hours and fifteen minutes, which previous audiobooks I would have demolished in just over two and a half. I am going to take it slowly. I am going to let it last as long as it lasts. I am going to let myself hear the whole sentence before I move on to the next sentence. I find this prospect more frightening than I would like to admit.
I am going to do one school-run-home a week with the radio off entirely. Just the road and the noise of the road. I will probably hate this. I will try to do it anyway.
And I am going to unsubscribe and delete a podcast unfinished, on purpose, soon. Possibly today. The one I have in mind is one I have been listening to at 2.4x for about four months, retaining nothing, feeling worse each time. It feels like throwing away a part of who I am supposed to be. Which is, I suspect, the entire point.
The kids, by the way, are alright. They have, as far as I can tell, inherited the love of trivia and the joy of facts, which is the bit I hoped they'd get; they have not, so far, inherited the urge to do the trivia at three times the speed in case there's more trivia waiting. They listen at 1x. They laugh at the right bits. One of them recently told me, with total seriousness, that an octopus has three hearts and that this is "quite a lot of hearts for one octopus, when you think about it." I agreed that it was. I'm not sure I've ever agreed with anything more.
That's the bit that I'd like to keep, if any of this is on offer. Not the productivity. Not the queue. Just the slow speed and the small voice in the back of the car saying that's quite a lot of hearts for one octopus.
(Views in this article are my own.)