Most adults, for example, can handle seven digit phone numbers quite well. Most of us can handle three or four projects at one time by alternating our attention from one to another. But Mother Nature built in some real limits to our marvelous capacity. Move the phone number to ten or twelve digits, and watch people scramble for a piece of paper to write it down. Our need for order and priority is so strong that we will create our own, if it is not otherwise available.
Most people react to uncertainty in pretty predictable ways.
High levels of uncertainty usually hit us very hard. While some have a high tolerance for ambiguity, most of us are confounded, confused and demotivated by uncertainty in large doses. While personal strength and stamina may vary somewhat from individual to individual, most of us have a limited amount that we can bring to a work situation. While we all may be able to work for short periods of time in sprint mode, none of us can sprint a whole marathon. We can get in better shape and eat more nutritious food for added energy, but even that cannot add ten or twenty hours to our productive work week for the long haul.