When I started reading Mithu Storoni’s Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, I was hoping to find out how to attain a permanent state of maximum productivity. Never again would I waste 30 minutes researching barrel leg pants or combing through the Instagram pages of friends of friends of friends. I would become a machine, tirelessly churning out work, unburdened by human frailty.
Imagine my disappointment when Storoni, a Cambridge-trained eye surgeon and neuroscience researcher, reminds readers that humans are not machines. In fact, she argues against the “linear, continuous, assembly line configuration of work” that the industrial revolution ushered in. In this digital age, she says, human efficiency should “no longer be defined by the quantity of output, but by its quality”.
