Busy, p.5
Busy, page 5
System One and System Two
There is mindlessness in lots of our daily behavior. We make choices, and reach constantly for more just because things are there in front of us. The reason for this is energy conservation. The brain has developed a smart way of managing the energy required for decision-making. It has to do this because, although your gray matter only accounts for about two percent of your body weight, it uses about 20 percent of all the energy you consume. It’s the 4 x 4 of your organs. The worst offender of all is the part responsible for decision-making, the most recent part of the brain to evolve: the prefrontal cortex. This isn’t just any old 4 x 4, it’s a 6.6-liter Hummer! This means that making rational choices is hard work, so the brain does all it can to avoid the effort.
Psychologists, such as the Nobel Prize–winning Daniel Kahneman, have split our thinking into two forms: System One and System Two.2 System One is fast, automatic and unconscious; System Two is slow, effortful and conscious. Both systems are always on while you are awake. System One automatically and effortlessly responds to experiences, generating immediate impressions, intentions and feelings. The more energy-sapping System Two prefers to take things easy when it can, spending most of its time coasting along, vaguely scanning what is generated by System One. On the whole, System Two accepts System One’s impressions, which become beliefs; it accepts intentions, which become actions. By doing this, humans have evolved into an incredibly energy-efficient thinking machine: only about 2 percent of all mental activity is effortful and conscious. It’s like having a hybrid car that runs silently and cheaply on battery power for 98 percent of the time!
This works fine most of the time, but in a world in which the default behavior and social norm is frenetic busyness, we are mindlessly drifting to toxic levels of activity and consumption. The only choice any of us seem to be making is for “more.” We reach out, mindlessly, for more stale popcorn, and we grab our smartphone, mindlessly, for more empty activity.
Justifying Mindless Choices
The first thing we have to accept about mindless choices, is that we are not aware of how mindless they are. If questioned, we genuinely believe we are making rational choices. An example of this comes from the world of education. In one study, five professors rated the attractiveness of 885 economics students (with an even gender split) on a scale of one to five (five being most attractive). Those who were rated a four achieved a 36 percent better mark than those rated a two.3 This is an example of what’s called the “attractiveness halo effect.” Now imagine asking these eminent professors why they gave the “twos” such low grades. They will point to flaws in the student’s work, they will give a strong rationale, and they will remain oblivious to the effect attractiveness had on their grading.
If I asked you why you are busy, you would be able to give all kinds of rational explanations. You might describe the state of the economy or the fact that your business is short on staff at present, you might describe a demanding manager or a demanding project, or you might explain your commitment to the children’s extracurricular activities. The point is, you will have a justification for your busyness. You will have a story you tell yourself and others. All I ask from you at present is to accept the possibility that some of your busyness has come from dumb, irrational and mindless choices.
The Power of the Default
Imagine you have just started in a new job. One of the attractive benefits being offered is an employee 401(k) retirement plan. It is universally accepted to be a good deal, with your firm matching your contributions: it’s virtually free money. Would you join? You probably think your answer to this question would be most influenced by the details of the plan, the quantity of money at stake or your current financial situation. However, it is likely that the biggest factor in your decision-making on this important financial question is whether you had to fill out a form or not. In one study, economists Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea found that when employees had to opt into the scheme, only 20 percent joined in the first three months. In contrast, when membership was automatic—the default condition—initial enrollment was 90 percent.4
The Default of “Busy”
One of the most common forms of mindlessness involves defaults. In the context of busy, they are particularly relevant since busy is the default, standard condition. The default for all communication is to ingest (read or listen) and respond. Let’s take emails for instance. How many emails do you get a day? Let’s say you currently receive 200 emails a day, a figure that has doubled in the last three years. At what point do you need to fundamentally question the value of reading and responding to all these: when they get to 400, 1600, 12,800? At some point we need to take a stand in favor of thinking instead of mindless reactivity.
Many people moan about the number of meetings they “have to” attend, how time poor they are, and how disruptive it is to their day. Yet I find very few people with a solution. One of the issues is that it is so easy to invite people using Outlook or Gmail. Given that the inviter can see your calendar, can see you are free, there becomes something of a default expectation that you will accept. Acceptance is a click; opting out requires an explanation. This is especially evident in the curse of all office life: weekly meetings. These meetings happen whether there is a purpose or not, but since they are regular, by default, you are expected to attend—and another hour is lost.
How are defaults shaping your life at present? What are the unspoken assumptions and expectations that are driving a large amount of activity for you? Some of these defaults may serve you well, some will not. Collectively they are strangling you.
A Reimagining
If you were to redesign your working life from scratch, what would it look like? Reimagine your work in order to maximize your capability, to rekindle your excitement and harmonize it with your personal life. You probably imagined a working life free of a lot of the unhelpful defaults. Choose one default that’s getting in the way of a more satisfying working life, and redesign how you respond. Choose to be less mindless.
The Lure of Social Norms
How would you persuade people to recycle towels in hotels? A famous study by Robert Cialdini into social norms revealed that the standard environmental plea persuaded about 30 percent of people to recycle.5 When the wording was changed slightly to state that most guests choose to recycle at some point in their stay, 26 percent more people recycled. When the wording was made even more specific, stating that most guests staying in that particular room had chosen to recycle, the percentage increased by 33 percent. This influence doesn’t happen at a conscious level, but we are affected by the social norm. The reason the more specific hotel card worked even better is that the more similar people are to us, the more their behavior influences us.
The quantity of work you do, and your perpetual busyness, develop because that’s what everyone else is doing. The effects of social norms are even more powerful when we compare ourselves to people we actually know. Everyone we come into contact with is incredibly busy. The fact that they are frantically juggling too many things powerfully shapes our expectations and behavior and makes it difficult for us to rationally assess how busy we should be.
What’s wrong with the norm? There is nothing, in principle, wrong with going with the herd, if the herd is going in the right direction. In the case of busy, the herd is definitely not going in the right direction. We need to find our own unique responses to our challenges; we need to create a better way of communicating and delivering. The answer does not lie with the herd.
Awareness of the Norm
When you compare your busy behavior to those around you—what do you do that is just the norm? Remember, “the norm” isn’t the degree to which you have an intellectual rationale for your behavior; you always will. It is the degree of similarity to those around you. If it’s similar, it’s probably driven by the norm, in which case, it is not your behavior. You didn’t choose it; you are simply acting out the collective pattern like a faithful worker bee.
Choose a Different Role Model
When was the last time you met someone who explained how unbusy they are? When was the last time you traveled to work on a train not filled with people tapping away on laptops, phones or tablets? Think about how their behavior might be affecting your own feelings of busyness.
To combat this, identify the behavior you most want to change and find people in your organization, in your personal life or in your family who model good alternative behaviors. Spend time with them, and build relationships with them. Ask them about what they do, observe closely how they behave and how they think about busyness. Do all you can to start making their behaviors your norm.
Be the (Different) Norm
Just for the fun of it, next time you’re in a conversation and the other person has just described how busy they are, say you’ve decided not to be busy. (I dare you!) Say you’ve decided that you want to create time to think, instead of endless, mindless busyness. You’ll get different reactions—alarm, pity or envy—but you’ll get a reaction.
Step out of the herd (or even lead it).
Busy Is the Easy Choice
How do you behave at a buffet table? If you’re anything like me, you pile your plate high with all kinds of weird and wonderful flavors and end up with something you would immediately send back to the kitchen if a chef served it up. We would have a far better meal if we chose better. More specifically, we’d have a better meal if we asked the right question.
When we see the chicken korma we ask “whether or not” we’d like it. We then ask the same question when faced with sweet-and-sour pork and with steak pie. For me, the answer to all three of these questions is usually “yes,” and so I end up with a culinary disaster. The question I should have asked is “Which would I prefer?” The thing is, “whether or not” is a much easier question to answer than “which.” The price I pay for not choosing “which” is a terrible meal.
Busyness is buffet table madness. We make the easy choice of “whether or not” we should do this or that, and end up overwhelmed as we pile too much on our plates. By choosing the easy option, we choose busy. Mastering a world of too much involves making the tougher “which” choice more of the time.
The Perils of “Whether or Not”
Paul Nutt, business school professor at Ohio State University, was keen to understand how businesses made important decisions. He looked at how companies went about making the decision to buy another company. Corporate acquisitions are costly, complex and risky. When he looked at how 168 acquisition decisions were made, he found that only 29 percent of those decisions involved more than one option. For the other 71 percent of the companies, the only question being asked was “whether or not” they should buy the company in question. When Nutt then followed up on those decisions, he found that 52 percent of the “whether or not” acquisition decisions failed, as compared to only 32 percent of those decisions where they asked “which” of two or more alternative options were better.6
In their book Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath use this study and a number of others to show two things: that more often than not, we slip into “whether or not” choices and that “whether or not” choices are ineffective; they fail to take the broader implications of the decision into account.7 This is all too true in the case of busyness. However, I think there are two additional reasons we should be especially mindful of “whether or not” decisions when it comes to fighting busyness. The first is, as with the buffet, the answer will be “yes” much more often than it should be. When deciding “whether or not” to check your email, or attend that meeting or sign your child up for another after-school class, since all of these activities are worthwhile, why would you respond in any other way than yes? And so we become busier. Finally, the more busy we are (or the more we are focused on managing our time) the more narrowly we’ll think—the more likely we are to narrow choices down into “whether or not” decisions, rather than see the impact of these choices.
Chip and Dan Heath describe “whether or not” choices as one of the “Villains of Decision Making”; I would add that they are one of the villains of busyness too.
Opportunity Cost
Dwight D. Eisenhower was effective at making tough decisions. To avoid the perils of “whether or not,” he reminded himself and others of the true consequences of his choices, of the alternative options. For example, in his first term of office he explained “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.” Everyone, in the early years after the war, would say “yes” if asked whether or not the government should buy more bombers. But were they more important than thirty schools?
Dwight D. Eisenhower was aware of the opportunity cost of his decisions. Opportunity cost is a concept from economics that describes what we miss out on, or lose, through making a decision. If I buy a new laptop, I might no longer have the money for that trip to Vegas, or to buy a new grill and throw a neighborhood barbeque. A quality decision involves choosing “which” alternative is the highest priority (since they may all be attractive).
In a study into opportunity cost, Shane Frederick told participants about a movie containing their favorite actor or actress. He explained it was available at a special sale price of $14.99. He then gave them two options:
a) Buy this entertaining video
b) Not buy this entertaining video
Perhaps unsurprisingly, 75 percent of people opted to buy the video. He then changed the wording of option b slightly to “Not buy this entertaining video. Keep the $14.99 for other purchases.” Clearly, to any sane adult, the additional words are obvious. However, this simple reminder of the opportunity cost of the decision meant that the number of people who decided not to buy the video doubled.8
“Whether or not” choices are dangerous in the case of busyness. They are too likely to lead to a “yes” decision. The opportunity cost in the case of busy might be time to think, or focused attention, or precious moments with loved ones. The cost of the “yes” decision may be less immediate and obvious than its benefits, but there is always a cost.
To combat “whether or not,” simply ask yourself the following questions whenever you are considering saying “yes” to more work, activity or stimulation:
• What am I giving up by making this choice?
• What else could I do with the same amount of time or attention?
Good Choices Take Energy
Jonathan Levav, professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Shai Danziger, psychology professor at Tel Aviv University, reviewed more than a thousand parole decisions made by judges in the Israeli prison system. After hearing each case, judges decided whether to parole or not. In this situation, the tougher decision was to release, since the parole board needed to make a complex choice between the relative priorities of prisoner freedom, risk and cost. On average, each judge approved parole in about one in three cases. However, a very strong pattern occurred: Of those prisoners who appeared before a judge early in the morning, 65 percent were paroled; of those who appeared late in the afternoon, only 10 percent were paroled!9
The explanation for this shocking, but very human, lack of consistency is something called ego depletion. We have only so much mental energy to go around. When our brain gets tired, we begin to avoid decisions altogether or make the easier choice, like the judges later in the afternoon.
High-Energy Decisions
The working day in a typical office places a lot of strain on our brain; we get rapidly ego-depleted. In this state, we will be a lot less likely to try to make tough “which” decisions about relative priorities. We have to accept that at certain times of the day, we are going to be pretty poor at making clear, strategic choices about the best use of our time.
“Which” decisions are demanding on the brain and so are most effectively done when the brain is fresh, normally first thing in the morning. Give yourself time each day, before diving into the treadmill of activity, to think clearly about which task will deliver the most value, and make the necessary brutal choices on where you will place your attention. In addition, the study above did not find a gradual decline of parole (difficult) decisions through the day. They found that after each break or lunch (where food and drinks were served) there were spikes of higher parole levels. The boost in glucose levels increased the likelihood that the board would make the harder choice. So, take regular breaks, and have a small snack during each break to replace some of the glucose. Then, when your brain is refreshed, review your progress and reprioritize.
Loss Aversion
When a friend took up kite surfing, I felt a kind of pain inside. It wasn’t envy or resentment. It was a sense of loss. My life wasn’t allowing me to kite surf (or skydive or even play golf). One of the reasons we load our plate up so high is that we hate losing out on things. We hate narrowing our options.
In one of his experiments, Dan Ariely had people play a game. In it, there were three rooms people could enter by clicking on a red, blue or green door. Once inside the room, further clicks would be rewarded with money. In total, participants had one hundred clicks. Each room had a different range of payouts, so the challenge was to find the room that gave the highest average payout and spend the rest of your one hundred clicks in that room. Then they added a twist. When subjects were not using a room, the door to that room would start closing. After twelve successive clicks, if a door had not been clicked, it would close forever. As you will realize, the rational strategy here is still to find the highest paying room, and stay there—to let the other options close. Yet that is not what people do. Ariely found people tended to get into something of a frenzy, desperately racing from room to room to avoid the loss of a closed door. In doing so they earned, on average, 15 percent less (and had a much more frenetic game).10
