I want my life to be as good as it can be.
You might think that everybody’s like this. I don’t think that many people would come out and say they want their life to be worse, but there is a particular personality type that actively tries to make things as good as they can be, always searching through options in search of something better. These people are optimizers.
What does it mean to have a good life? We’ll get to that. But for now, let’s assume that optimizers actively try to make their life better, whatever a better life means to them.
My name is Jim, and I’m an optimizer.1
I’ll give you an example of what I mean. At the time of this writing, I use an iPhone 6 for my cell phone. iPhones have virtual pages of app icons. Some people leave the app icons where they first appeared. But if you’re optimizing icon location, you will move them around.
One kind of optimizing is to move the app icons around so that the apps you use pretty often are on the front page, and the ones you use the most often go in the “dock,” where they are visible no matter which page you’re looking at. So if you play Hearthstone a lot, it would make sense to put it on your front page.
My optimization of this is a bit different. I put on the dock and front page not those apps I use most often, but the apps that I aspire to use most often. If I’m hooked on a game that wastes a lot of my time, if I can’t bring myself to delete it completely, I’ll bury it in a folder on page three. I do this because I know that if you add some cognitive speed bumps to a task—make it just a little bit more of a hassle to do, you’ll do it less often.
Throughout this book I’ll refer to what matters, what unmatters, and what antimatters. When you’re trying to optimize, it might feel like everything is equally important, but when examined more closely, and more scientifically, you find that some things matter much more than others. Figuring this out requires thinking in terms of the magnitude of something’s impact. This isn’t always easy to do, and requires modern tools, data, and ways of thinking that aren’t natural. If you decide things with your gut, or intuition, you won’t optimize very well. Emotions can often draw us to things that antimatter, so using data can help us stay away from having our emotions override reason to detrimental effect.
There is lots and lots of advice you can read on these topics already, but most of it is not based on any science at all. I know because I’ve looked at most of it in researching for this book. I’ll give my opinion on what science says matters and what unmatters, but the main takeaway is how to think about these things. With new data, different values, or better reasoning, you might disagree or change your mind about what matters and what unmatters. That’s great, as long as you’re using science, rationality, and data to inform your decision. Although I do draw conclusions in this book, they are all preliminary.
It’s the way of thinking I want to communicate: using science, respecting magnitudes, and to never stop reflecting on how you’re living your life.
Productivity is a word that gets thrown around without a lot of reflection on what it really means. The root of the word invokes the notion of some “product,” which, in its more crass meaning, is some commodity that can be aggressively sold to people. Its more benign meaning suggests something that is produced. A nicer notion, but it still has connotations of creating widgets of some sort or other.
For many professions, the widget idea isn’t too far off. If you’re a professor like me, your widgets are books, papers, and competent students. If you’re a painter, you want to produce paintings. If you run a theater company, you want to produce shows—which are, appropriately, called “productions.”
But sometimes productivity is less tangible. If you’re a defense lawyer, being productive means handling many clients. If you’re a social worker, your productivity is helping people help themselves with their lives. If you’re an athlete, productivity might mean getting better at your sport.
Every endeavor has its own definition of what productivity means, and what non-productivity means. I’m using the word “endeavor” because your career or your job might not be what you care most about optimizing. You might do blue-collar work for money, but are a novelist when you’re not working. You might have different standards for productivity for different endeavors in your life.
Whatever you are trying to do in your life, there are activities you engage in that interfere with those goals. How much time should you spend directly pursuing your most important goals? How much time should you rest? What counts as busy work and what makes real progress? Let’s see what the science says.
Sometimes I like to think of my life as a saw. Being really productive, to me, is like using the saw to cut wood and build things. But you can’t cut wood very well with a dull saw, so I have to spend time sharpening the saw, too. Sharpening the saw isn’t productive, exactly, but it makes it so you’re more effective when you do cut something. Sharpening the saw is improving yourself, and cutting with the saw is effecting change in the world.
This part of the book is about productivity, which is different from making yourself happy. If you’re lucky, being productive makes you happy, but when I talk about being productive here, simply making yourself happy doesn’t cut it. You have to effect change in the world beyond your own mind. So even if you like to get high and play video games all day, even if it makes you happy, it’s not being productive.
Let’s look at reading. Reading is a wonderful thing, providing the reader with new information about the world, new ways to approach things, the perspectives of other people, and stories and examples the creative mind can use for a lifetime. It’s also fun. With all of these benefits, some people believe that reading books is, all by itself, productive, but I don’t see it that way. I read because I want to do something with that information. Reading is not inherently productive, it only prepares you to be productive later on. Reading is sharpening the saw, not cutting.
To take an extreme example, imagine a person who does little else with their life other than read books. Even if they’re reading great books, they’re not using what they’ve learned from those books to do any good. They spend their whole life sharpening the saw and never cutting anything. There is an important caveat here—if the person enjoys reading, there is some happiness gain, which is important, but a fairly small contribution to the world, given how much wisdom they must have gained from a lifetime of reading!
Reading, education, training, and even networking are all ways to sharpen the saw. It makes sense that younger people should spend more of their time sharpening the saw than cutting anything. For many activities, young saws aren’t yet sharp enough to cut much very effectively. Even when they do produce things, they’re not all that good, for the most part, and that’s okay. They are producing things for practice. They have to write many, many terrible essays, or play the violin many, many times, or draw horses over and over before they create something anybody else can appreciate.
But as you grow older, you should spend more and more of your time cutting and less time sharpening. Again, an extreme example is helpful: suppose we have a ninety-year-old man who is too old to travel. He doesn’t know anybody who speaks German, but has always thought he should learn it. Finally, at ninety, he starts learning German. Your first instinct might be to say “good for him!”
But from a productivity point of view it makes no sense to sharpen the saw of someone when they’re not going to have an opportunity to use that skill for cutting anything. There is nothing inherently good about learning German, or any other language. If that old man has sharpened his calligraphy skill for thirty years, he should be producing works of calligraphy, not learning new skills. The saw is sharp enough, and an older productivity optimizer needs try to cut as much as possible before they die. I feel this acutely, and sometimes try to estimate how many books I’ll be able to write before I run out of time. Remember, we’re talking only about productivity here, not happiness, which we will discuss later.
Near the end of one’s life, one might lose the ability or drive to do much cutting with the saw. This is a time of retirement from productivity (which might or might not coincide with a retirement from one’s occupation). I look at this time as one of pure appreciation. When this happens to me, my mission, if you can call it that, will be to enjoy myself and appreciate the world around me, hopefully without making it much worse in the process. A person in productivity retirement should only do saw-sharpening activities that they find enjoyable. That might be reading or learning German, but that’s not because it’s productive, but just because those activities happen to be fun to do.
You can further break down sharpening the saw into two categories: the first one I’m going to call “maintenance.” Maintenance activities are those that help you maintain your general well-being. These include things like meditation, time with friends and family, writing in a journal, exercising, and so on. In terms of health and happiness, socializing with people you care about is about the most important thing you can do. It’s one of the most important maintenance-sharpening activities. Objectively speaking, socializing should take priority over exercise. So keep that in mind, even if you’re the kind of person who prefers exercise to socializing. Keeping yourself happy and healthy is an obvious prerequisite for optimizing your productivity, so at least some amount of this saw-sharpening is necessary.
But there’s another kind of saw-sharpening that you can do, and that includes improving skills that you can use later in life. Things that you want to get better at, like learning to write, fixing a bicycle, or washing a horse.
How much sharpening versus cutting you should do every day should be based on an estimate of optimizing the amount of (and quality of) cutting that you will do over the course of your entire life.2 Crudely put, this means that the best thing you should do at any given time will be affected by how much time you have left to live.
We can make an analogy with eating at restaurants. Suppose you have no plans to move out of the city you’re in. If you’re in the mood, you might want to explore and find a new restaurant. You might not like it, but it might be a new favorite. It’s risky. But imagine that you are moving out of this city in two weeks. The benefit of exploration is much lower. You would probably try to hit all of the restaurants you already know you love in the remaining time that you have. The situation is analogous to sharpening and cutting. Sharpening is preparing for the future, and it makes less sense the less future you have to take advantage of that preparation.
I think it’s good to think about all the ways of sharpening the saw that are important to you. Recently I did it for myself, and I’ll describe my thinking process to give you an idea of how it works. There are several things that I want to get better at, and they include drawing, math and statistics, computer programming, writing fiction, dancing, playing guitar, cardistry, and calligraphy. I also have a lot of saw-sharpening activities that I have abandoned, like martial arts, swing dancing, and comedy improvisation.
Of the things on this list the most important ones to me are drawing, math, programming, and writing. The benefit of three of these (drawing, programming, and writing) is that I’m already good enough at those things that while I sharpen the saw I’m also cutting with the saw. That is, the drawings that I make will be useful for something (I’m illustrating a serialized fiction story in Altered Reality Magazine, so these drawings will be published), the programming practice that I do will probably contribute to my scientific progress and productivity, and the writing that I do I might very well be able to publish someday. Producing is also practicing, so I simultaneously cut and sharpen. That makes my inner optimizer very happy.
I want to learn more math so that I will be better at understanding scientific papers and have more mathematical sophistication with my science down the road. But the process of learning math, at this point, is not going to be anything that’s productive for the world, or leading to publication. It’s more like traditional formal education; pure saw-sharpening without producing anything useful along the way.
With this list of your most important ways to sharpen the saw you can try to think about what kind of schedule you want for yourself, so you can make sure you get to them pretty regularly. The bottleneck is your limited time and energy. How do you prioritize doing meditation, exercising, journaling, practicing drawing, practicing writing, learning programming, all while doing your actual job, commuting to said job, sleeping, hanging out with your friends, and having a bit of leisure time to watch new Star Wars content? There’s no easy answer to this. If you work forty hours a week you’re not going to have a lot of free time to dedicate to all of these other things. If you have to take care of young children, your time is extremely limited.
There are two ways to deal with it. One is simply to prioritize. Of the ambitions that you might have to make yourself a better or more skilled person, or to make yourself happier, some ambitions might have to be simply dropped. If there’s something that you really want to get to every day, then you can give that priority, but something else might have to fall by the wayside. (I miss you, martial arts!)
The other thing you can do is to schedule different things on different days. This allows you to do more things, at the expense of slowed progress. If you want to do it this way, it’s best to follow the standard cyclical notions of time: we have the hours in the day, the days of the week, and the days of the month, because it’s simpler to keep track of. If there is one thing you want to practice more than anything in the world, you should try to make time every single day to practice it. If you have seven things that are very important to you to do, you can dedicate perhaps one half hour every day of the week to doing a different thing. Drawing on Monday, learning programming on Tuesday, and so on.
If you have thirty things that you want to do, then you might want a bit of time dedicated on a different day of the month to each of those activities. Although you might scoff at the idea of having thirty activities that you might be interested in doing, one thing that could probably be applied to everyone is reinforcing social connections with people you care about. If you can come up with a list of thirty people you most want to stay in touch with, it might be worth dedicating a half hour a day every day to making sure you’ve reached out to some particular person for each day of the month (you get to rest on the 31st). If today is Tammy, you send her a little note, or give her a call if you haven’t corresponded with her in a while, expressing gratitude for her, or asking how she is. But if we’re talking about general skill-building activities, one half hour a month spent in practice is very little time, and improvement will be very slow.
Another interesting finding from the psychology of expertise is that not all practice is equal. When I was young, I took piano lessons. My teacher told me to practice a half an hour a day. I tried to keep to this, but in retrospect I see that I did it poorly: I spent the half an hour playing the songs I was already good at playing. I was enjoying the good feeling associated with doing something well. What I wasn’t doing was deliberate practice: working on the things I was bad at. The most efficient way to practice, in terms of time, is to practice what you are bad at, not what you’re good at. Unfortunately, this takes more effort, energy, and is less fun—which is why I didn’t do it. But to the extent that you care about getting better over having fun, you should engage more in deliberate practice.
For me, I really want to get better at drawing. So when I practice drawing, I try to draw things that are going to turn out terrible, because I need to work on my weaknesses. I also play the guitar, but I decided that I don’t really care about getting really good. I play guitar only to have fun, and getting better at it, though it is happening, isn’t very important to me. So when I “practice” the guitar, I allow myself to play songs I already am pretty good at. I’m just happy I can play some Paul Simon songs. (It feels good not to optimize everything!)
Keep in mind that some endeavors matter more than others. This is important to think about when you prioritize your list of saw-sharpening activities. You might find yourself with a goal to complete a difficult video game, or get better at playing pool. I understand the draw of these activities, but it’s important to reflect that the skills you gain when you get better at video games or pool are limited, and you might want to prioritize other skills more. I’m a sucker for this, and have to keep myself in check. There’s a game I like to play—Hearthstone—and it’s so easy to get caught up in the ambition of improving your rank, getting better decks, etc. It feels productive when I make progress on these things, but it all unmatters. I’m climbing ladders that don’t lead anywhere.
For purposes of this book, doing anything productive is cutting with the saw. If we are going to optimize productivity, we need to cut effectively. We need to do it at the right times, for the right lengths of time. Likewise, we need to cut where it’s most efficient and effective.
One important aspect of being productive is being able to completely focus on what you’re doing. Cal Newport calls it “deep work,” and defines it as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”3
Working without distraction seems to be getting increasingly difficult. Computer technologies are so advanced that a large and growing number of people on Earth regularly carry around supercomputers in their pockets. (I’m talking about smart watches and smartphones.) Email, web surfing, social media, and video games all vie for our attention, and many of us are unable to resist. Part of this is because there are lots of very smart people designing these systems to optimize your paying attention to them. Companies have created applications that, in many cases, are diabolically designed to draw attention to themselves. Design ethicist Tristan Harris said, “There are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”4 These smart people are working hard to make technologies designed to keep you from working hard.
Things are constantly happening in our environments, and we ignore most of them. The ones that are likely to become distractions are ones that are surprising or salient. Something can be salient for many reasons. You might get excited when your phone makes a ping sound—it’s distracting because you know you got a text message, and you’re used to being rewarded by reading texts. A similar sound from a truck backing up outside is not as distracting because it doesn’t mean anything to you: it is a signal of something that is irrelevant to your life.
In 2012, the average “knowledge worker” spent 60 percent of their workweek dealing with email and searching the Internet.5 Young people have a reputation for always being on their phones. A study of students showed that most of them weren’t even able to get through ten minutes without checking some kind of device, be it a phone, tablet, or e-reader. Some students switch tasks every two minutes!6
Chris Bailey, author of The Productivity Project, confesses to how he used to start his day: “After I woke up, I would immediately reach for my phone and then mindlessly bounce around between my favorite apps in a stimulation-fueled feedback loop for about thirty minutes, continuously bouncing around between Twitter, email, Facebook, Instagram, and several news websites until I snapped out of my trance.”7
The reputation that younger people have with constant interaction with technology is true: the younger someone is, the more likely they are to multitask with texting, music, television, and other technologies. But careful studies show they aren’t any better at doing it.8
Distractions come in a few forms. Some distractions are forced upon you. If someone walks into your office to tell you that vampire rappers are the original sucker MCs, then you either have to deal with them or risk social rudeness trying to get them out. Either way, you are distracted.
Incoming phone calls are distracting, even if you don’t answer the call. You can turn off your phone’s sound notification and vibration, but many people are loath to do this because phone calls are sometimes important. You should know that on many phones there is a function that allows a call to come through even if the phone is on silent if the caller is in your contact list, and they call twice in a row. This allows you to have your phone quiet a lot of the time—at the very least, when you’re sleeping, but allowing emergency communications to come through.
Similarly, text messages are external interruptions, but they are the kind that you can turn off. That is, when you want to concentrate, you can make your phone silent. (And by silent I mean you are not aware of any notifications. Phone quiet, not vibrating, screen down.) In general, notifications on your phone that interrupt you should be kept to an absolute minimum.
The same goes for email. Reading email puts your mind into a stressed mode, and cutting yourself off from it makes you more relaxed.10 Just about everybody should turn off notifications for email, and check it only periodically.
So how bad is it, really, if you check your email in the middle of working on a paper? Science shows us that it’s pretty bad.
The most obvious problem with checking your social media (and I’m including email in this concept) is that while you’re doing it you’re not doing something else. This is the “opportunity cost.” The cost of what you’re doing isn’t just time, money, and other resources you invest to do it, it’s also the cost of not doing all of the other, better things you could be doing with your time.
So if you play an hour of video games, that’s an hour you aren’t being productive.
But it’s worse than that. Because when you switch from one task to another, say, from manipulating a spreadsheet to playing Mario Kart, or back again, you are just a little bit dumber for a short time. If you’re switching a lot, you’re just plain dumber a lot of the time. There are many studies that show that if you’re rapidly switching from one task to another, you suffer performance deficits in at least one of the tasks.11
Multitasking
Doing more than one thing at a time is often called “multitasking.” Sometimes this is true multitasking, such as when you’re jogging while listening to an audiobook. But in general, when you multitask, you’re worse at all the things you’re doing. For example, talking on the phone while driving makes your driving worse. (Laws that allow hands-free cell phone use in the car don’t make any sense, because it’s the talking that distracts you, not whether or not you’re using your hands.)12 Because we crave constant stimulation, multitasking “rewards” our brains with novelty, creating a constant dopamine rush, effectively training your brain to enjoy being distracted. At the same time, it causes stress (increased cortisol) and increased adrenaline (putting you in fight-or-flight mode).13 Though it can be exciting, it is not good for your long-term prospects.
But most of the time when people talk about multitasking they’re really talking about rapid task switching. If you’re texting while watching television, for example, what you’re really doing is paying attention to the show, then the text conversation, and back to the show. While you’re typing out a text, you miss what’s going on in the show.
I often listen to audiobook novels while I walk my dog. This isn’t a problem, though, for two reasons. First, even if my “performance” drops for dog-walking and novel-listening, it unmatters. The stakes are really low. Second, these tasks don’t interfere with each other very much because they use different parts of my mind. Dog-walking involves watching my dog and navigating my physical environment, and listening to a novel involves verbal comprehension and imagination. Interference is worse when two tasks are competing for the same functions in your mind—listening to (and comprehending) an audiobook while you read a magazine is impossible, for example. When the tasks are similar you get much higher costs. When you’re watching TV and texting, the two tasks are visual and verbal, and when your mind is occupied with one, it has no resources left to process the other. Experiments in which people did a visual task while engaging in a voice chat experienced less of a performance drop than they did for tasks that drew upon the same kind of thinking.14
There are exceptions, times when multitasking is okay. Listening to instrumental music while you study or do computer programming can sometimes help.15 Doodling during a boring lecture helps you retain more of the lecture. This seems to be because when an important task is really boring, your mind actively tries to search for something else to do. If you’re listening to a boring lecture, your mind might wander, looking for a more interesting thing to think about. In one study, the students who were instructed not to doodle often detached completely from the lecture, getting nothing out of it. But the doodling students were less bored. With part of their attention on the lecture, and part of it on doodling, they were better able to attend to the lecture content.16 Now we’re talking doodling here, not making some masterpiece. It has to be relatively mindless or you’ll be too cognitively engaged in the drawing to have any attention left for the lecture.
So if it’s a boring, cognitively engaging task, you can do another task at the same time, as long as it’s not cognitively engaging—walking, instrumental music, doodling. But if your main task is cognitively demanding and engages your interest, you would be best off not doing anything else at the same time.
For noncognitive tasks, multitasking is a good way to optimize your life. Let’s take exercise, which I personally find so boring that I can’t get myself to do it for very long. My solution has been to play squash, which is a game that I find fun (also it’s a game I can play year-round). But if you are into weight lifting, or running, or some other repetitive, non-game exercise, listening to music helps you enjoy it more, and might even make you exercise harder or longer.17 If you have a long commute, listening to podcasts or audiobooks might help pass the time, and you get to read a lot of great books. Since I started listening to audiobooks, in addition to traditional reading, my book consumption has tripled. (Audiobooks are not as bad as having phone conversations in the car because they are not interactive and can be turned off pretty easily or safely ignored when driving gets hairy.)18
So if you’re going to multitask, it should be with tasks that don’t use the same parts of your mind, because switching tasks has a cost. The trick to it is not to multitask anything that really requires thinking. Don’t listen to the radio while you write a report. Don’t have the TV on while you’re doing your taxes, but listen to music while you exercise.
Task-Switching Costs
Scientists have put numbers to these costs, in terms of time. So what is the task-switching cost? Measurements range from 200 milliseconds to 25 minutes.
Wha—?
With a range this big, we need to dig a little deeper into the research. The 200-millisecond measure comes from psychologists studying people doing tasks on a computer screen. For example, they might show people a series of faces, some happy, some sad, some male, some female, and instruct them to identify the gender of the face as fast as possible. The task switch is to start identifying the facial expression instead. In this study, switching from gender-identifying to expression-identifying cost about 200 milliseconds (one-fifth of a second) in response time.19
The 25-minute measure, on the other hand, came from real-world, observational studies of interruptions at the office. You might be working on a budget, and a coworker comes by your cubicle to tell you about how they binge-watched Fringe over the weekend. This kind of thing happens all the time, and the U.S. economy suffers an estimated loss of $650 billion a year from these distractions.20 Computer scientist Gloria Mark found that when people got interrupted like this, it often took them a while to get back on track—often about twenty-five minutes.21 It often takes over a minute to even remember what you were doing before you got interrupted, and sometimes people never got back to what they were doing at all.22
We often are vaguely aware that distractions and interruptions make us less productive, but the scary thing is that a lot of times we don’t. Often people think they are just fine at multitasking, and are oblivious that their performance suffers.
Can You Get Better at Multitasking?
You have to wonder what the long-term effects of multitasking are. On the one hand, frequent multitaskers get a lot of practice multitasking, so maybe they get better at it. On the other hand, perhaps all that training is rendering them less able to focus when they need to, because they are “addicted” to the dopamine rush of the constant novelty associated with task switching. Really, these are separate, independent questions: does habitual multitasking make you better at multitasking, and does habitual multitasking make you worse at focusing?
Multitasking seems to be difficult for two underlying cognitive reasons. The first is that when you change to a new task, your mind has to prepare to do it. Think of your mind like a desk. When you’re working on your taxes, you put the stuff on your desk that you’ll need—your tax forms from work, your donation receipts, and so on. When you want to do some painting, you clear all that stuff off and get out your painting stuff. Your working memory is a bit like this. When you switch from one task to another, this “advance preparation” means activating in your mind the right representations, responses, and internal processing mechanisms you’ll need. Because they are somewhat different from the previous task, it takes some time to prepare them, causing a time delay, and sometimes a performance reduction as well. The other problem is that after you switch to the new task, the activation of all of those things related to the previous task are still active and potentially interfering. These take time to become less active, in a process known as “passive decay.” It’s the combination of these two factors that generate the lion’s share of our task-switching problems.
Advance preparation is related to fluid intelligence, and heavy multitaskers seem to be a little better at this aspect of multitasking, though we do not yet know if they got this way through practice. The studies to date are correlational, and don’t shed light on causation.
Passive decay, in contrast, is unrelated to intelligence and seems to be independent of how much multitasking a person does, which suggests that it doesn’t get any better with training. This is a large enough factor, though, that we see in some studies there seem to be no differences between heavy and light multitaskers.23 Unfortunately, the science on this isn’t conclusive. Another study shows that frequent multitaskers have higher task-switching costs and are worse at ignoring irrelevant information than low-multitaskers.24 But again these studies don’t show whether multitasking causes poor task-switching, or that people with poor cognitive control can’t help but be distracted more often, and multitask more.
Adam Gazzaley created a video game called NeuroRacer to test to see if practice at multitasking could make people better at it. Specifically, the game required you to drive while attending to some distracting signs while ignoring others. Playing this game improved people’s multitasking abilities.25
In sum, the science of getting better at multitasking is inconclusive. We know that frequent multitaskers are worse at it, suggesting that you probably are not going to get much better at multitasking by doing it more. In the modern world, so many people are so distracted that the ability to concentrate is like a superpower. Learn to harness it, stop multitasking, and you will have a competitive advantage.
Work at the Office or Work at Home?
One way to get more concentrated work is have your door shut at work, but that’s only possible if you’re lucky enough to have a door (see sidebar “What a Workplace Should Look Like”). But another option is to work from home, or telework. Many of us were able to experiment with telework during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. You’ll likely experience predictable benefits and drawbacks when you spend more than half of your workweek teleworking.26 This is assuming that you can concentrate at home, don’t have to do your own child care, have a good Internet connection, etc.—something not everyone had access to during the pandemic. Further, many people have only laptops at home, which have smaller displays. Using a large monitor helps your productivity because you don’t have to constantly switch between windows—you can just move your eyes.27
On the bright side, at home you’ll have less work-life conflict, greater job satisfaction, less stress from meetings and interruptions, less exposure to office politics. Telework also reduces commuting, which means more time for work as well.28 You’d think telecommuting would save energy, but this is doubtful.29
On the downside, you’ll have lower quality relationships with your coworkers. A study of scientists showed that teams have more impact than people working alone, and that collaborators had the most impact when they were physically close together—preferably in the same building.30
Now, communications technologies have gotten so good that you can work from home and really stay connected to the people at work. The problem with this is that the more intensely one engages with this, the fewer benefits one derives from teleworking in the first place! One gets more interruptions, and gets involved with discussions they might otherwise have been able to avoid.31
In a typical work environment, people average about two to three minutes on a task before switching to something else. This is fairly rapid task-switching, and performance suffers from it. The younger generation checks its mobile phones every fifteen minutes, and about 75 percent of young adults sleep with their phones nearby, with vibration or the ringer on so as not to miss nighttime alerts!32 This is a terrible idea.
There are two important parts of removing distraction from your life. The first is the removal of external interruptions—other people, and your devices, alerting and interrupting you. The second is the removal of internal distractions, which is your own mind sabotaging your concentration by giving in to temptation to check your phone, daydream, or otherwise screw around when you should be working. Most interruptions are of the internal kind. A study of workers found that over half of the interruptions involved “checking in” with social media or something else, with no alert or notification prompting them to do so.33
So if multitasking is distracting, and impairs productivity and performance, then why are people doing it so much?
When you ask people why they multitask, many say they believe it helps them. Without their beliefs in the right place, they have no motive to make a change. Hopefully this book will fix this for you. People think they’re good at multitasking. Young people believe they can successfully juggle six forms of media simultaneously.34 But in truth, heavy multitaskers are worse at multitasking than light multitaskers.35 This is really important: you cannot trust your feelings about your productivity when it comes to multitasking. But even if you know it’s bad, it’s hard to stop.
Sometimes people switch tasks because they get frustrated with what they are doing. They don’t know the way forward, and that doesn’t feel good, so their minds start looking for something that is more rewarding. Switching tasks can feel amazing, and gives the feeling of productivity because you’re responding to so much.36 You get a notification, and your brain anticipates that it might get a reward. It might be a message from someone you like, or a cool picture. This anticipation can build if you don’t check the notification, causing you to obsess about checking in, causing further internal distraction from what you’re trying to concentrate on.37 So you give in, and check the notification. Your curiosity is satisfied, but you’ve distracted yourself from what you were doing, and also made the checking more of a habit, making it harder to resist phone-checking in the future.
Unconsciously, we discount future rewards, like eventually getting some major project done. Switching to another task feels rewarding, and we can get that reward right now. This is how we can constantly switch between tasks, feel great and productive, and yet never get anything accomplished.38
If you want to optimize your productivity, you have to fight this instinct.
People are tempted by multiple, competing needs all day long. The most common desires that people get include wanting sex, sleep, or food. But stopping work, including checking email and social media, wanting to watch television or listen to music, are also very common distractions. This was found in a study where they gave people beepers that randomly went off, and asked people what they were thinking about.40
To understand this, let’s back up and look at why anybody does anything: people have various brain functions simultaneously trying to control the body and what the conscious mind focuses on. Each of these works in a different way—you might think of them as valuing different things. Often, the behaviors being pushed by those brain areas are different. It’s like a board meeting, where the board members disagree on what the company should do. But instead of reasoning, each just shouts as loudly as it can. The board member (or brain function) who shouts the loudest determines what the company (or your body) does.
We can look at multitasking as an attempt to gratify multiple needs. The varying strengths of those needs determine what we turn our attention to at any given moment. Over time, a social “need to connect” might grow in one’s mind, making turning attention to chatting with someone or checking in on social media more likely. When this temptation is indulged, the need is satisfied, and becomes low-powered enough that other needs (such as a cognitive one, such as curiosity about a book you’re reading) end up determining behavior in the next moment.
Suppose a student is studying because of a cognitive need to understand class material. As the studying progresses over time, other needs grow in strength. The need for social engagement is held at bay for only so long, but when it gets stronger than the cognitive need, the student checks their social media accounts to see if they got any “likes” recently. They got a few, so they are satisfied and return to studying.
Or perhaps the studying is boring, or depressing, and the student has an emotional need to be happier. The student turns on music, which improves mood. The emotional need is satisfied, and the student studies while music is playing, even though it renders the studying less effective. A study by Zheng Wang shows that this happens, but the emotional need is subconscious. That is, students don’t turn on the music because they will be emotionally satisfied, but they end up getting emotionally satisfied anyway.41
Crucially, these self-interrupting behaviors are reinforced by the gratifications they cause. If listening to music while studying makes the student happier, then they are more likely to listen to music in the future during study time. This is conditioning.
It’s also important to realize that there is often a mismatch between gratifications sought and those actually obtained. That is, sometimes we engage in a behavior to satisfy some need, but that behavior actually doesn’t pay off the way we want it to. This is clear in cases of uncertainty—a person might attempt to initiate a conversation with a stranger on a bus because of a social need for human connection, but if that stranger blows him off, his need is not satisfied. Or a person might check Facebook to get a mood boost, but come away feeling worse because they attend to someone else’s life that looks so much better.
Another way to think about our constant task-switching is in terms of foraging for information. Just like an animal will spend some time at a location until it seems to be exhausted of food before going off to another location, we too gather information at a “location,” like Instagram, and then feel the urge to switch to another source of information, like television or email. The instincts that guide this behavior evolved in a world where switching locations had a higher cost. But in today’s world, we can have a hundred information locations on our phone. The cost to switch from one to the other is so low that we overestimate the utility of switching. We also get bored more quickly than we used to with the information we’re getting from one source. Unfortunately, our instincts lead us astray: we often are better off staying at one particular information source than switching. If you follow your feelings, you are likely to go down the rabbit hole, jumping from app to app on your phone, wasting the day away, not getting anything done, feeling productive the whole time, but feeling bad afterward!42
Procrastination
Try to be the kind of person who doesn’t need to have others remind you to pursue your own goals. Part of being like this is avoiding procrastination.
Procrastination is what we call it when your immediate needs for gratification win control of your behaviors at the expense of your longer-term goals. Let’s take an example that many people have to deal with: doing their taxes. Let’s assume that you are going to do your taxes at some point, it’s just a matter of when. There is a span of a few months before the spring deadline when you have all the information you need to do them. If you don’t enjoy doing your taxes, then it’s an easy thing to procrastinate. Even cleaning your house might seem more promising, in terms of expected reward, than doing your taxes, at every given moment.
We feel the temptation for procrastination when we expect to feel worse doing what we should do than some other, more fun thing you could be doing instead. Which means that, ultimately, procrastination is about emotion. The things you’re likely to do when procrastinating, are, by definition, temptations: things that feel good but don’t move you toward your greater values and life goals.
Thirty-one percent of people admitted to procrastinating at least an hour a day, and another 26 percent said they wasted more than two hours a day. And these are just the people willing to admit it. My colleague Tim Pychyl found that university students wasted about a third of their waking hours procrastinating.47 So if you have a problem with procrastination, join the club.
Tasks are much more fun when you think they can be finished, offer novel challenges or things to learn along the way, and you get feedback according to how well you’re doing while working on it. Tasks you are tempted to procrastinate are those that are boring, frustrating, ambiguous, difficult, or lacking in meaning or a good reward structure.
We procrastinate because it feels good. But it’s a classic short-term gain with a much worse long-term payoff, like eating junk food now and gaining weight later. That’s why you should try to eliminate procrastination from your mental diet. If you want to abandon a task, do it for the right reasons.
Not every problem with getting things done is due to procrastination—some people have trouble starting projects, and some have trouble finishing them.48 In these cases, a coach, either formal or informal, can help with these specific problems.