Super Thinking: Productivity

If I have learned one thing about the brain, attention is highly important to many cognitive processes. If you do not attend to something, then you can’t perceive it. Illusionists use attention against their audience to perform tricks by slipping between their perceptions and memories, taking advantage of “attentional blinks” that cause them to miss certain actions. In a world where our attention is so precious to being productive, yet constantly being pulled in many directions, we are fighting a two-front war. That is, our attention is under assault from so many sides, making it difficult to focus on one task at hand. Through fighting this war, it often disrupts important processes like deep work that leads to breakthroughs. For instance, throughout my undergrad and grad studies I would walk to school everyday without any distractions, which allowed 20-40 minutes of deep work. During this time, I often thought about my research; how to design my study, the theories I was using, the real world application, etc., and I attribute this time to a lot of my academic success.

Taking 20-40 minutes a day for deep work allowed me to build on each day prior – like compounding interest. Each day I built up my principal and the next day I was working from the knowledge of the day before. By the end the 2nd year of my MA, I put in, approximately, over 150 hours of deep work on my thesis from the morning walks alone. this time compounded to provide almost a week’s worth of pure deep work.

Although setting aside an extended amount of time for silent reflection and thinking is important, it may not be realistic for everyone. In those cases where one cannot find the time, organizing the day using an Eisenhower Decision Matrix can keep your mind on track (see table below). An Eisenhower Decision Matrix is made up of four quadrants (Urgent & Important; Not Urgent & Important; Unimportant & Urgent; Unimportant & Not Urgent) that reflect daily tasks or distractions. Quadrant one is the highest priority (Important & Urgent) and requires immediate attention and management. This quadrant has looming deadlines, crises, or things that cannot wait. Quadrant two requires focus (Important but Not Urgent) since these are tasks that are important yet are not temporally urgent. For example, I started this website during the end of my MA and it is very important to me but finishing my MA had more urgency, so The Lit Review required a lot more time management to move it forward. Quadrant three is triage (Urgent but Unimportant) work that would be better delegated to another, outsourced or ignored altogether. Finally, quadrant four is work to avoid (Unimportant and not Urgent), which are activities that encompass busywork or take precious attention to complete them but do not provide any real value. In quadrant four I would put scrolling social media, texting, and anything else that pulls attention away from being productive.

When creating an Eisenhower Decision Matrix, try to consider the opportunity cost associated with each quadrant. I think of opportunity cost as buying something, the more expensive something is (the more significant the decision) the less money you have left over (the less opportunities are left over). Every choice has a cost associated with it and choosing options with the lowest opportunity cost is ideal. For example, deciding who you will start a business with is a higher opportunity cost than deciding to prioritize 20 minutes a day to scrolling through social media over engaging in deep work. That being said, the incremental impacts of always choosing to prioritize social media than engaging in deep work could amount to a large opportunity cost down the road.

When creating your Eisenhower Decision Matrix, there are a few things to be cognizant of. First, not taking anytime to relax and shut our mind off may yield negative returns. A negative return hurts productivity in the long run by yielding burnout or injuries. Striving for perfection can also yield a negative return since it can be counterproductive to goals. For instance, Pareto’s Principle states that in many situations 80% of the results come from about 20% of the effort, so once that 80% is reached, consider the opportunity cost associated with getting to 100% - don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.

Another issue to avoid is the sunk-cost fallacy, which is when investing more time, energy, and money into projects, relationships, assets, etc. starts to yield negative returns. The sunk-cost fallacy is very powerful, especially when there was progress in the beginning, or some emotional value/utility added, but at a certain point these things may stop yielding positives. Since there has been a lot already sunk into it, there is a perception that sinking more will make it better, thus creating more debt, emotional fragility, or burnout if things do not change. For example, playing the lottery is mostly throwing money away, but people perceive that if they stop now then the universe will conspire against them and their time to win is right around the corner (this is known as the gambler's fallacy, such as when a person is playing roulette and they feel owed that black needs to come up since red came up the past 4 times despite every spin being independent from the spin before).

What makes the sunk-cost fallacy so powerful is that people are more inclined to avoid losses than make similar gains since we perceive the future as unknown (e.g., “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t”). So, if people are typically loss averse, then getting out of a bad thing with an unknown future may be quite difficult to do.

In the end, we have a finite resource of attention. The more it gets pulled in conflicting directions the less we focus on what matters. It may be difficult to reorient our focus since we have certain cognitive biases that pull us away, but if we set time aside to engage in deep work, it will yield dividends.