Life a is Desk. Clear Yours

To prehistoric man, life was a spear. Today life is a desk. Joe Sugarman, in his book, Success Forces, explains that by clearing your desk every evening, you automatically have to choose what to work on the next day. This is a discipline that yields a marvelous sense of breathing space with which to start each day.

To ensure that your desk and office environment supports you, invest in yourself. If you need them, room dividers and sound barriers are available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and can improve upon any existing sound barriers.

Use the end of the day and slow periods to keep your desk orderly and better prepare yourself for high octane output when you're ready to get started again.

Every evening, after you've cleared your desk, acknowledge yourself for what you accomplished that day. Don't beat yourself up for what you didn't do. If you can do better, you will, maybe not at once, but soon enough.

The Tyranny of Choice

"Logic suggests that having options allows people to select precisely what makes them happiest. But, as studies show, abundant choice often makes for misery."
Barry Schwartz, "The Tyranny of Choice," Scientific American, April 2004

Let Your Unconscious Decide

'Sleeping on it' best for complex decisions
February 16, 2006 New Scientist (vol 311, p 1005)

“Complex decisions are best left to your unconscious mind to work out, according to a new study, and over-thinking a problem could lead to expensive mistakes. The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result with which people remain happy than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem.”

“Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with.”

Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands says “We found that when the choice was for something simple, such as purchasing oven gloves or shampoo, people made better decisions – ones that they remained happy with – if they consciously deliberated over the information.”

“But once the decision was more complex such as for a house, too much thinking about it led people to make the wrong choice. Whereas, if their conscious mind was fully occupied on solving puzzles, their unconscious could freely consider all the information and they reached better decisions.”

Expectation counts
The unconscious mind appears to need some instruction. “It was only when people were told before the puzzles that they would need to reach a decision that they were able to come up with the right one.” If they were told that none of what they had been shown was important before being given the puzzles, they failed to make satisfactory choices.

“At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things,” Dijksterhuis says.

Too Many Choices: A Curse?

For too many people, an abundance of choices has become a curse, not a blessing. In the 1984 movie Moscow on the Hudson, Robin Williams portrays a Russian defector who settles in New York. He goes to the supermarket to buy some coffee. The markets he knew in Moscow were small and poorly lit. The Manhattan supermarket is dazzling. The coffee display overwhelms him – there is instant, freeze dried, dark brew, etc., in boxes, cans, and jars of different sizes and colors.

Confronted with all these choices, he has an anxiety attack, faints, falls forward, and knocks over the whole display. That scene got a big laugh, but it makes a point about our lives – too many choices. I suggests that you avoid engaging in low level decisions. If a toothbrush is available in red or green, and it's all the same to you, just grab the closest one or take the one that the sales clerk hands you.

Whenever you catch yourself making a low level decision, consider: does this really make a difference? Get in the habit of making only a few choices a day – the ones that count.

Books to Explore

Books to explore:

The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, by Robert Lang, Yale University Press, 2001

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz, Ecco/Harper Collins, 2004