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Attention Span & Productivity – Book Recommendation

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, ADHD, Book Recommendations, Creative Thinking, Leadership, Neuroscience, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Resources, tools, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development, Stress Management
Two goldfish in a bowl, one of them reading a thick book. The other one asks: "You’re reading a book called “Attention Span”? Is this some kind of joke?"

“You’re reading a book called Attention Span? Is this some kind of joke?”

In her book “Attention Span“, Gloria Mark explores the impacts of today’s fast-paced technology on our attention spans, productivity, and happiness. She presents a lot of research done both by her own and other teams. Based on that, she offers advice, not only on how to gain more control over our attention, but also on finding balance between productivity and happiness.

Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity by Gloria Mark (2023). [1]

Here are just a few of the findings and insights I found helpful.

Fun facts about attention and productivity

Have our attention spans really decreased?

Maybe you are feeling it yourself? Or maybe you’ve heard humans’ attention spans compared unfavorably to those of goldfish? Well that was a bit unfair. But is it true it that we are switching our attention more often these days than we used to? As it turns out, indeed we are.

Mark reports dramatic findings from her own as well as other people’s research [1], spanning from the early 2000’s to now. In the early years they shadowed people with stop watches. Later, they used computer logging methods to record precisely how long people’s attention remained on one screen, and when they switched their screens, apps, or websites. The measured average time people spent before switching went down steadily from about two and a half minutes in their earliest studies in 2004, to less than fifty seconds in 2021.

Another change that happened along with attention spans shortening is that people were spending more time at their desks and less time in formal and informal meetings. With that, people were becoming more sedentary during their work hours. (That decline already happened pre-pandemic, when most meetings were in person.)

The three high costs of rapid attention switching

Multitasking has rightfully earned a bad rap. Because our attention cannot be divided into more than one focus, we cannot truly to two things in parallel, unless one or both of the activities require little or no attentional resources. For example, listening to an audiobook while cooking is possible if I cook something that requires minimal thinking. If I’m trying to read and follow a new recipe, I’m quickly going to lose the plot in the audiobook. Similarly, I may be able to speak on the phone while painting, but not while responding to incoming texts or emails. Even if it feels like I’m doing both things at the same time, what I am really doing is switching my attention rapidly between them.

There are three problems with rapid attention switching. All three have been well documented over decades of research:

  1. We make more errors. Whether the switching is voluntary or not, our performance on each task is worse when we switch between them, compared to when we first complete one and then the other.
  2. It takes us longer to complete both tasks (again compared to first completing one, then the other).
  3. It increases stress. Diastolic and systolic blood pressure rises, and heart rate variability increases. Those physical markers are consistent with people’s subjective experience. The faster the switching, the more stressed people report feeling.

How can we improve our attention span and productivity?

What NOT to do:

1. Don’t try to focus as long as possible

Mark aims to dispel several myths in her book. The first myth is that we should try to focus as long as possible in order to be most productive.

It turns out that focusing for lengthy periods of time, especially without breaks, is not natural for most people. Just as we are not able to lift weights all day, we can’t stay focused for long stretches throughout the day without breaks. Sustained focus is associated with stress and can only be maintained for a limited time before our performance begins to decline.

There is a physiological basis in the brain that underlies this. When we focus our attention, the regions of the brain that are involved in that task use more oxygen, and accordingly the carbon dioxide content in the blood increases. This causes blood vessels to dilate to remove that waste from the activated part of the brain. Over time, blood velocity decreases as a consequence. When that happens, and the person remains in that sustained focused state, their performance declines. This change in performance that accompanies decreased blood velocity suggests that cognitive resources are not being replenished fast enough while the task continues. [1]

In other words, our brains hit a physical, metabolic limit, and we need breaks. This leads to another recommendation:

2. Don’t try to eliminate all rote, mindless activities

In line with this, Mark challenges the myth that rote, mindless activities have no value. There is no need to cut out all mindless activity like playing silly puzzle games, browsing the web, watching movies, or other easy and non-productive things.

Mark on the contrary suggests that since our attention is limited, it makes sense to pull away when we feel that we have exhausted our cognitive resources. Letting our minds wander while taking breaks with easy tasks, both online and in the physical world, helps us replenish our scarce cognitive resources. With more resources, we are better able to then focus again and be productive.

3. Don’t feel bad if you can’t get into a flow state at work

Another myth that Mark challenges is that we should all be able to get into “flow states” at work.

Flow, a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is that optimal state of attention where we are so caught up in an experience that we lose touch with the outside world and are unaware that time has passed. We feel joy and excitement, and are at our utmost creative peak. [1]

While people often have flow experiences with creative pursuits such as art, music, craft, design, or also in problem-solving tasks such as coding, Mark and her collaborators found that it rarely occurs in the knowledge workplace. Much of the nature of knowledge work is just not conducive to this kind of creative experience. This doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong.

What can we do instead to improve our attention span, productivity, and happiness? 

Instead of falling for these myths, Mark suggests we aim for balance and well-being by finding a good rhythm for our attention and productivity.

1. Designing your day:

Design your day based on your own rhythm of attention, knowing that you have peak times for focus. Take advantage of these. Most people have peak focus times around 11 a.m. and midafternoon, but your own peak focus may differ from that. Save your hardest tasks for your peak hours.

When designing your day, recognize the value of “negative space”. In art, negative space refers to the area around a figure and is recognized as an essential part of the art work. In Japanese, the term “yohaku no bi” refers to the beauty of empty space. Design your day to include negative space, which is just as important as the work itself because it helps you achieve a sustainable balance.

2. Coping with external interruptions

Having control over interruptions helps people be more productive.

A good time to intentionally redirect your attention is when you reach a break point in a task, such as finishing writing a chapter or completing a budget—natural places to pause.

It that’s not possible and you do need to interrupt a task: externalize your memory of that unfinished task. For example, write a note about your most important unfinished tasks and a plan for the next step. Mark cites a study by Michael Scullin and colleagues, who found that people who wrote down their unfinished tasks fell asleep significantly faster than the other group. In fact, the more detailed their notes, the faster people fell asleep. [1] This finding can be explained by the Zeigarnik effect: as people lay in bed, unfinished tasks agitated around and around in their minds, stirring up tension.

3. Coping with internal interruptions

It is important to acknowledge that interruptions to our attention can be external as well as internal. We tend to self-interrupt, even when there are no outside triggers that would prompt us to switch attention.

Practice meta-awareness (awareness of your awareness). This means being conscious of what you are experiencing while it is unfolding, for example of the moment you choose to switch screens from work to opening your news browser.

Once you have that awareness, you can ask yourself: what value will I gain by interrupting my work and checking the news? If you’re already on the news site by the time you reach that meta-awareness, you can ask: How much time have I spent here already? Am I gaining any value by staying here? When you have meta-awareness, you can switch your frame of mind from being a passive to an active user of your attention.

Developing the ability to use meta-awareness takes practice. The better able you are to gain a meta-awareness of your behavior, the more intentional you can be in your actions.

Practice forethought by imagining how your current actions might affect your future. For example, before you go on social media or play an online game, spend a moment to think ahead and imagine what your end of the morning might look like if you indulge. The more detailed your visualization is, the easier it is to take an action to course-correct if you need to.

Increase friction: make it harder for your attention to switch. For example, if you know that you like to play a certain game, hide the app in a folder so that it’s harder to get to. Having to search for it will make you pause and increase the chances you’ll become aware and get the chance to make a conscious choice.

Best practices for organizations: increasing employees’ attention spans and productivity

Finally, some changes can only be accomplished on an organizational level. Two recommendations stood out to me in particular:

  • Reducing email
  • Designating quiet time, where responses are not expected

It took Gloria Mark six years to find a company that was willing to cut off email for a full work week as an experiment. When email was cut off, heart rate monitors revealed significantly less stress by the end of the week, and more enjoyment of social interactions. What’s more, people’s attention spans were significantly longer while working on their computers. In other words, they switched their attention less frequently. With the caveat that this was a quasi-experiment in the field, rather than a randomized controlled study, this finding nonetheless offers plausible evidence that email may cause attention spans to decline.

Based on her findings, Mark suggests cutting off email as a no-brainer. However, individuals alone cannot solve the email problem by simply cutting off from it. Email is a problem that needs to be tackled at the organizational and even societal level.

Disappointingly (and surprisingly to me) Mark found that batching email does not help. People who read email in batches showed no difference in stress levels compared to people who checked their email continually. In fact, batching even led to more stress, rather than less, for highly neurotic people. However, simply decreasing quantity helped. People who spent less time daily on email were less stressed—even after controlling for their job demands and job autonomy.

Final note

What I presented here is not meant to be a book summary. I selected only a few insights I gained from the book, and gave my notes a different structure than the book did. I hope you find some of it memorable and applicable.

If you would like to discuss how you or your organization could put some of these suggestions into practice, please let me know.

"Get in Touch" Button to Schedule a phone call or coaching session with Ursina Teuscher

 

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

 

Picture Credits:

Image created with the assistance of OpenAI DALL-E and Microsoft Designer

 

Reference:

[1] Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press.

Note: Gloria Mark cites many studies in her book, some of which I mentioned here. I have not read those original studies and am therefore not listing them as direct references for this post.

 


Time Management for Mortals – Book Recommendation

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Stress Management
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman (2023).

Four thousand weeks – Burkeman reminds us – is about all we get in life, if we live to be eighty. In the big picture of the universe, this is an “absurdly, insultingly brief” span. Clearly, it is not enough to do everything we want, even if we maximized our productivity with every trick ever invented.

That is the backdrop of this book, which offers guidance on constructing a meaningful life by acknowledging our limits.

I’ve enjoyed reading it, but am having difficulties passing on its advice. I feel a similar ambivalence toward its wisdom as towards the wisdom we sometimes hear from survivors of near-death experiences. Seemingly only having acquired this insight after almost dying, the survivors tell us that life is short and can end even sooner than we think, and therefore we should appreciate it even more. For example, why not marvel at the wonders of a sweet-smelling rose, instead of picking a petty fight with your spouse? It’s not that I disagree. On the contrary. It’s that those insights seem – well – not new, exactly.

That said, probably no great wisdom is truly new. (This itself would not be a new insight by any stretch.) Passing on old words of advice, even just as reminders, might be a good idea anyway. Most likely, people have been doing just that with memento mori art and related concepts, which seem to appear throughout human history and throughout different cultures.

Memento Mori, obraz

So here are some of Oliver Burke’s points I found worth reflecting on.

My top three selection of time management tips for mortals
  1. Neglect the right things. Sadly, some of the things you’ll need to neglect will be important things. Make peace with those losses. It’s not your fault that you can’t do everything that would be important. Two particular lines of thought might help you decide what to let go of:
    • Limit your works in progress.
    • Resist the allure of middling priorities.
  2. Get real not only about how little time you have, but also about the fact that most things take longer than you expect – even when you take into account that most things take longer than you expect. Plan for enough buffers and breaks, slack and transition time. Since you can’t do everything anyway, you might as well cut out one more thing and instead show up early enough and be present for what you do choose to do.
  3. And my favorite – cosmic insignificance therapy: Remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale. Even the most impactful people in human history don’t make a dent in the universe. Truly recognizing this fact may feel like setting down a burden we didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place. Seen with this perspective, appreciating how little time we have in this life doesn’t mean resolving to “do something remarkable” with it. On the contrary, letting go of an over-demanding standard of remarkableness may help us appreciate the impact we do have on the people close to us, and to not discount the significance of this.

Lastly, this song goes out to (only, I’m afraid) my loyal Swiss-German readers, who might enjoy it as a collectively treasured memento mori:

Picture Credit:

Jendex, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Does Positive Thinking Help You Reach Your Goals?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Coaching Practice, Health Decisions, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Relationship Decisions, Resources, tools
Can positive thinking help you reach your goals? Picture from: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/539763 (Attribution not required)

Can “positive thinking” really help you change your life for the better and reach your goals? Many motivational speakers and writers seem to believe so, but empirical studies reveal a more complicated picture.

If you want to reach your goals, positive thinking seems to come with some pitfalls.

In particular, in her research spanning decades, Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues have discovered a powerful link between positive thinking and poor performance [e.g., 1 – 5]. Oettingen’s book “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation” [6], and her website detail many of these findings. For example, in one study [2] they asked college students who had a crush on someone to engage in future fantasies about them and a person of their romantic interest. Six months later, the students who had engaged in positive future fantasies were less likely to have started up a romantic relationship with the person. The authors found a similar effect with academic performance: the more students engaged in positive phantasies about their performance on an upcoming exam, the poorer their performance was at the time of exams.

As her book [6] and website detail, Oettingen and her colleagues have performed such studies with participants from different demographic groups, in different countries, and with a range of personal wishes, including wishes related to health, academic and professional success, and relationships [1 – 5]. Consistently, they found correlations between positive fantasies and subsequent poor performance. The more people “think positive” and imagine themselves achieving their desired future, the less they achieve. The reason for this may be that positive thoughts and fantasies can trick your brain into feeling like you have already succeeded, thereby sapping you of the motivation necessary to work hard enough to realize your dreams [1].

So if positive thinking isn’t the best strategy to help you reach your goals, then what is?

Instead of positive thinking, Oettingen suggests “mental contrasting”. This method combines dreams and reality. As Oettingen writes in her book [6], the method brings positive thinking up against a visualization of the challenges that stand in our way. The method is explained in more detail on the website woopmylife.org.

Similarly, in her book “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking” [7], Julie Norem suggests “defensive pessimism” as a cognitive strategy. By imagining worst case scenarios, we can improve problem-solving and make our worries work for us. This can help us manage anxiety and as well as perform better.  

Does mental contrasting – instead of simple positive thinking – really help you reach your goals?

On her website, Oettingen cites a number of studies that have tested the effect of this mental exercise. This page provides a list with links to each study.

More recently, an independent group of researchers conducted a meta-analysis, including a total of 21 empirical studies. They evaluated the efficacy of mental contrasting in combination with implementation intentions for goal attainment [8]. They did find some publications bias, with published studies showing on average a larger effect size than unpublished studies. This is a phenomenon that’s often revealed by meta-analyses, and it is one reason meta-analyses are so important to consider. The authors therefore caution that the actual effect sizes may be smaller than the published studies suggest. Nonetheless, their analysis showed that overall, mental contrasting is an effective strategy for goal attainment.

Do you want to try some mental contrasting on your own goals?

If you’re ready to try this method, check out the many resources (videos, worksheets, and even a free app for Android or iOS) on Gabriele Oettingen’s website. If you think you could benefit from continuing support as you move towards your goals, let’s discuss how I might help.

Contact Ursina Teuscher for help with reaching goals

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

Picture Credit:

[1] Photo released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0, Public Domain via https://pxhere.com/en/photo/539762

References:

[1] Kappes, H. B., & Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(4), 719–729. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.02.003
[2] Oettingen, G., & Mayer, D. (2002). The motivating function of thinking about the future: Expectations versus fantasies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1198–1212.
[3] Oettingen, G., & Wadden, T. A. (1991). Expectation, fantasy, and weight loss: Is the impact of positive thinking always positive? Cognitive Therapy and Research, 15(2), 167–175. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01173206
[4] Thinking positive is a surprisingly risky manoeuvre | Aeon Essays. (n.d.). Aeon. Retrieved September 16, 2022, from https://aeon.co/essays/thinking-positive-is-a-surprisingly-risky-manoeuvre
[5] Oettingen, G. (2012). Future thought and behaviour change. European Review of Social Psychology, 23(1), 1–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2011.643698
[6] Oettingen, G. (2014). Rethinking positive thinking: inside the new science of motivation. New York: Penguin Random House.
[7] Norem, J. K. (2001). The positive power of negative thinking. New York: Basic Books.
[8] Wang, G., Wang, Y., & Gai, X. (2021). A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions on Goal Attainment. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 565202. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.565202


When should you quit your job?

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Career Development, Risk and Uncertainty
Fortune Cookies: A new job is in your future

What can poker teach you about when to quit your job?

– You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em –
– Know when to walk away and know when to run –
Kenny Rogers “The Gambler”.

Here’s a surprising fact about professional poker players: they quit – or fold – much more often than amateurs. Amateur poker players play over 50% of the hands they’re dealt, while great players play only between 15% and 25%.

Our natural intuitions about when to quit are flawed

According to Annie Duke, former poker champion and best-selling author of Thinking in Bets, these numbers illustrate just how poor people’s natural intuitions are about when to quit.

In her latest book, she argues that our poor quitting skills extend to all kinds of life and career choices, not just to poker. We tend to stick to our given path, even when that path is no longer promising. There are powerful forces at work that undermine good quitting behavior, and Annie Duke is not alone in arguing this. In fact, decision science has established a whole slew of cognitive biases that work in favor of “sticking it out”, rather than quitting, even when quitting would be more rational. These biases have been widely documented, and you can find them under terms such as the “sunk cost fallacy“, “loss aversion“, “escalating commitment“, the “endowment effect“, and “status quo bias“. (Granted, many of these concepts overlap.) 

However, knowing when to quit is essential for success. Just like bad poker players, we keep losing out if we don’t develop better skills at knowing when to quit. 

How can we find the right moment to quit?

Think forward, not back

Think about your future, not your past. This seems obvious, but is much harder than it sounds. If we were perfectly rational and omniscient, we would quit when the expected value—what we’re expecting to get out of the path we’re on—is no longer worthwhile, compared to other possible paths.

In reality, we do let the past creep into our decisions. We care about our life’s narrative. We want our past investments to pay off, even it means sacrificing more while staying on our course.

A trick that can help with this is to imagine a world without the status quo. For example: if you’re offered new position, ask yourself: if I wasn’t already at my current position, which one would I pick? Would I pick my current position or the new alternative? In my conversations with coaching clients, I’ve been surprised how often this question leads to a very clear answer of “I’d definitely take the new one”.

Don’t make decisions in the heat of the moment

When we’re right in the middle of a situation, we often make bad decisions, because our emotions have overwhelmed us. Instead:

Get clarity on your “values” – then figure out how to best meet them

In poker, you would define the expected “value” of your options simply in monetary terms: the amount you might win or lose. In a career, it’s not that simple. What are your criteria – your values – when it comes to you career? What do you want, and what do you NOT want from your work? Define your criteria, and then start to figure out how to best meet them. Look around to see if you could fulfill them better elsewhere. But also, figure out if you might be able to fulfill them better at your current organization, if you made some changes.

Keep exploring, even when things are good

Annie Duke suggests we take a lesson from the ants: even when most of them are on on their way to a big pile of food, a few of them are always wandering off somewhere, seemingly lost and at random. They’re exploring, always. They never know when their main source of food dries up.

Do the same with your resources: spend at least a little bit of your time on exploration. Create and maintain professional connections with people outside your organization. Take the recruiter calls, just in case.

Get a “quitting coach”

It is hard to see ourselves clearly. Annie Duke suggests we all find someone we can talk to regularly, who helps us see when we’re stuck on the wrong path. Your quitting coach could be a friend, a mentor, a coworker, a sibling, or a parent. The best quitting coach is a person who cares for your long-term well-being, and is willing to tell you the truth of what they see, even if it is uncomfortable. I would add to this that it should be someone who understands and accepts your values.

Don’t quit blindly

As enlightening as the poker analogy can be, it has its limits when compared to career choices. One big difference: when you fold in a poker game, you simply wait for the next round. The odds of your next hand are always the same unknown. In other words, you always get the same clean new start, to which you can compare the odds of your current hand. (By the way, if I ever play poker, I’ll find a way to sneak in this Odds Calculator.)

Your future odds on the job market are much less straightforward. But on the upside, you don’t need to fold first, before getting dealt your next hand. If at all possible, look for another job before quitting, and make sure to get as much information about it as possible. Again, get clarity on your values. Then, figure out which of your next options will fulfill them best.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Photo credit: www.flazingo.com


Improving your Habits with Choice Architecture

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Financial Decisions, Health Decisions, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

Choice Architecture Coaching to Improve Habits Picture credit: Ben Deavin

What is choice architecture, and how can we use it to improve our own decisions?

Choice architecture is the art and science of how to present choices to decision makers. The way a choice is presented to us has a much bigger influence on our behavior than we may realize. For example, children eat more fruit when fruit is placed in more prominent positions in a school cafeteria. Or, people are more likely to enroll in retirement savings plans if the employer makes that plan the default option – which is the option that happens when you do nothing. Similarly, people eat less when the default serving size is smaller.

Two recent books shine a light on choice architecture, and on how it affects our decisions:

Eric Johnson’s The Elements of Choice (2021) offers a guide to creating effective choice architectures. The designers of decisions need to consider all the elements involved in presenting a choice: how many options to offer, in which order to present those options, whether to organize them into categories, how much information to provide, whether to make one of them a “default”, etc. We don’t appreciate those factors enough, and we’re often unaware of just how much they influence our choices every day.

With Nudge: The Final Edition (2021, a revised version of their 2008 bestseller), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein advocate what they call “libertarian paternalism”. This is the idea that it is both possible and desirable (in particular for public institutions, but really for any well-meaning choice architect) to affect people’s behavior for the “better”, while also respecting their freedom of choice. They argue that consumers and citizens should be nudged to help them make the kinds of choices that they would most likely also naturally prefer, if they were making “optimal” (or rational) choices for themselves. What is optimal is not the same for every individual, but I generally define it as the choice that is most aligned with the person’s values.

Both of these books are geared mostly towards “curators” of other people’s choices: for example, the staff of a school cafeteria who gets to decide where to place the fruit, or the employers who present retirement savings plans to their employees. My interest lies more in helping people improve their own choices, but the findings of both books are highly relevant for that. In fact, Eric Johnson concludes his book by advising us to apply the golden rule: “Design for others as you would like them to design for you”. Given that we actually often find it easier to make good decisions for others than for ourselves, I would like to turn this around: “Design for yourself as you would design for others.”

How can you use the tools of choice architecture to improve your own behaviors and habits?

Here are some examples of how you can apply the elements of good choice architecture to your own choices, to help you to improve your habits and change your behaviors in positive ways. It may all sound too simple, and chances are you’ve heard it all before. However, it really does make a difference – in fact, food choices seem to be particularly responsive to choice architecture interventions. Perhaps more generally, choice architecture interventions may be an effective tool for changing habits that are notoriously difficult to change.

1. Defaults:
Set defaults for yourself that reflect your long-term goals. For example: would you like to save more money? If so, enroll in an automatic savings plan, where some amount of your income will automatically be transferred to a savings account. (Increase that default amount beyond your comfort zone if you want to save more aggressively.) Would you like to eat more healthily? Stock your fridge and pantry with healthy options, and move the unhealthy options out of sight and out of easy reach. Do you want to get in the habit of going for a walk first thing in the morning? Get your walking clothes ready the night before, so that dressing in those will be your easiest option in the morning.

2. Primacy effects:
When we’re facing many options, we’re more likely to choose those we see first. How can you make this effect work in your favor? For example: would you like to eat more salads instead of other dishes when you eat at a restaurant? If so, make it a habit to always study the salad section first. You’ll be more likely to find something attractive among the things you read and imagine first.

3. Expecting errors:
Choice architecture has the most impact on vulnerable groups. You may not think of yourself as belonging to a vulnerable group. However, aren’t there times in all our lives when we’re more vulnerable to making bad choices? Maybe early in the morning, or late at night when we feel tired? Maybe after the first or second glass of wine? Be aware of what your weak moments are, and design your choices for those situations with even more care and intention.

If you would like help in applying choice architecture tools to your own live, I’d love to hear from you. I’d be excited to help you design and carry out your own interventions to make your life easier and better.

Contact Ursina Teuscher about choice architecture and coaching

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Bias and Noise in Hiring Decisions

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Leadership, Risk and Uncertainty, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
How can companies reduce not only bias, but also noise, in their hiring and other decisions?

The problem of bias in corporate decisions, such as hiring, promotion and salary decisions, is well-known. However, there is another type of error that has not been talked about as much – perhaps because it is harder to see, and harder to fit into a narrative: noise.

What is noise in corporate decisions, and how is it different from bias?

Noise is a random error in our decisions. Research has confirmed that in many tasks, experts’ decisions are highly variable. Professionals often make decisions that deviate significantly from those of their peers, from their own prior decisions, and from rules that they themselves claim to follow. This is the case even when the stakes of those judgments are high, such as when appraising real estate, valuing stocks, or sentencing criminals.

In hiring decisions, noise would be, for example, a variability in who gets hired, based on who is making the decision, what mood they’re in, or what time of the day it is when that decision is made. In other words, influences that shouldn’t play a part do play a part. What differentiates noise from bias is that the error does not always go in the same direction, as is the case with biases.

Bias and Noise in Hiring Decisions

 

The target-analogy in the figure illustrates this difference. The shots on Target A are accurate. There is no bias and very little noise. The shots on Target B are biased, but not very noisy at all. They are systematically off in one direction – down to the right from the bullseye. Target C on the other hand shows noise, but no bias: the imprecisions in relation to the bullseye cancel each other out. Target D has both bias and noise.

 

Daniel Kahneman’s take on noise:

In his latest book “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment“, Daniel Kahneman makes a strong case that we should indeed care about noise, not only about bias. Noise is more difficult to appreciate than bias. However, it is no less real, no less costly, and no less unfair.

How can companies reduce not only bias, but also noise in their decision processes?

Trying to fix a known bias is a bit like curing a known disease. Knowing what the symptoms are, we try to work in the opposite direction. Fighting noise, on the other hand, must be preventative in nature, because we don’t know in what direction we are going to make mistakes. With that analogy, Kahneman recommends “Decision Hygiene”. Just as physical hygiene prevents all kinds of diseases, including ones we don’t fully understand yet, decision hygiene prevents all kinds of errors – noise as well as bias.

A few practical ways to apply decision hygiene, and thereby reduce noise in your hiring and other decisions:
  • Whenever possible, get several independent judgments and calculate their average. Averaging judgments gets rid of noise. (Averaging judgments does not reduce bias. However, it may still be an important step in fighting bias, because it makes any bias more visible. You can see this effect in the target shot illustration above. The bias is much more striking in Target B than Target D. Anyone looking at Target B would advise the shooter to aim “up and left”. For Target D, this conclusion would be much less obvious, even though there is no less bias.)
  • According to Kahneman, rank orders (= comparative judgments) contain less noise than ratings (= absolute judgments). Therefore, make judgments comparative instead of absolute. In other words: create a rank order of your options by comparing them, instead of rating each option separately on a scale.
  • Break problems into subproblems that you evaluate independently. For example, in a hiring decision, create selection criteria that you evaluate separately. Then apply those in the same way to every candidate. (This values clarification exercise may help with creating criteria.) The next point is related to this one:
  • Postpone your intuition. Structure the process to prevent “premature closure” driven by first impressions. In other words, don’t let your gut feelings call ALL the shots by coming to a conclusion too early. This does not mean that you shouldn’t listen to your (or your colleague’s) gut feelings, but give those feelings a place in the process. For example, in a hiring decision, make the “like-ability” of a candidate one of your official criteria. You’ll need to acknowledge that this criterion might be fraught with bias, because we tend to like people who are similar to us. However, when this is made explicit, you can decide consciously how much weight you want to give that criterion. Is it more important than the skills and experience? Does weigh in with it 10% of the total, 20%, or 80%? This kind of transparency and thoughtfulness will again not directly eliminate bias, but will make it more apparent.

As companies these days are more concerned about biases than they used to, they are hopefully also getting more attuned to the general importance of making good decisions, and to the risk of making bad decisions. That effort should naturally lead them to also tackle noise. Thankfully, many of the remedies that improve decisions will reduce both bias and noise.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

“When something happens, you immediately have a story and an explanation. You have that sense that you learned something and that you won’t make that mistake again.
These conclusions are usually wrong.
What you should learn is that you were surprised again. You should learn that the world is more uncertain than you think.”

Daniel Kahneman

 


How to Deal with Regret

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Health Decisions, Performance, Academic Achievement, Relationship Decisions, Risk and Uncertainty, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
Do you have deep regrets about some of your past decisions?

How to deal with regrets about your past decisionsA solid “No!” to this question should be much more concerning than a “Yes”.  Regrets make us human, as Daniel Pink argues in his new book The Power of Regret. What’s more, regrets can help us become better humans, if we learn something from them along the way.

Drawing from his own research as well as previous studies, Pink claims that people feel regret quite often. He identifies four core categories of regret:

1. Foundation regrets
“If only I’d done the work.”
These are regrets where we opt for short-term gains over long-term payoffs, like not studying hard enough in school or not saving enough money.

2. Boldness regrets
“If only I’d taken that risk.”
These are regrets of inaction, such as not starting a business, not asking someone on a date, or not going on trips. Research suggests that people regret failures to act more often than they regret actions.

3. Moral regrets
“If only I’d done the right thing.”
These often seem to hurt the most and last the longest. They involve taking what our conscience says is a wrong path, such as lying, stealing, betraying or hurting someone. I found it actually quite heartwarming to read some of the examples Pink provided, such as lasting feelings of deep shame about not standing up for a bullied classmate in school. Surely, the fact that moral regrets are the most painful regrets says something nice about the human species.

4. Connection regrets.
“If only I’d reached out.”
These regrets stem from missed or broken relationships, such as when friends lose touch with each other over the years, or families remain estranged over a falling out that happened a long time ago.

How can we make the best use of our feelings of regret?

Pink fights the common idea that it would be a good thing to have no regrets. He argues that regret fulfills an important function in motivating us to do better. He points to three benefits of regret:

  • Regret can improve future decisions. Studies have shown that when people think about what they regretted not doing in the past, they made better decisions later on.
  • Regret can boost performance. Researchers have found that even thinking about other people’s regrets led to improved test scores.
  • Regret can deepen meaning. Examining regrets can help us clarify our life’s purpose and steer toward meaning.
On the other hand – there’s a dark side to regrets

All that said, I also often see that regrets – or rather the fear of regrets – can be paralyzing. My clients often tell me the one thing that makes their decision the most difficult is the fear they might regret their choice later. This fear is often influenced by past regrets that are still painful. So what should you do if the fear of future regrets is paralyzing your current decisions?

While I agree that past regrets can be very powerful in informing our future decisions, I do want to point out that they are not always rational. We often judge our past decisions with hindsight bias. Once we know the consequences of our actions or inactions (after they happen) it’s easy to see how we should have acted differently. In the moment we had to decide, chances are we simply didn’t know all that.

How can we avoid the kind of regret that’s based on hindsight bias?
  • A “therapy” for regret is to remind yourself of what you knew at the time you made the decision. If you considered the possible consequences at the time you made the choice, and linked reasonable probabilities to them, that’s all that can be expected of anyone. In the case of extremely unlikely events, even that may be too much to expect. (If you didn’t take these things into account when you could have, that’s another matter. Then the regret you feel might be a good opportunity to start learning and practicing a more rational approach to your decisions.)
  • Even better than therapy is inoculation. You can “inoculate” yourself against future regret before you make a decision by (a) preparing yourself to live with the worst-case scenario and also (b) preparing to remind yourself of what little was known at the time you made the decision.

Fear of regret can cause decision avoidance or paralysis. These can come at a high cost in the long run. In fact, there’s a sad irony to that, given that people tend to regret inaction more often than action.

Inoculation against regret can therefore play a very important role in helping you be courageous enough to actively and rationally decide in the first place, rather than avoiding the decision and letting fate (who’s not always on our side) take over.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Performing under Pressure

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Neuroscience, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Stress Management
Have you ever choked when you needed to perform under pressure?

We all know what it feels like: you’ve been building your skill – whether it’s in academics, in your career, in sports, in performing arts – but when the big moment arrives, nothing seems to work. You hit the wrong note, drop the ball, get stumped by a simple question. In other words, you choke under the pressure.

Here, I will review a book by Sian Beilock about this topic, along with additional research, and I’ll highlight some findings that can help you perform at your own very best, even under pressure.

A book review and practical applications

Dr. Sian Beilock, an expert on performance and brain science, examines in her book “Choke” why we sometimes blunder and perform at our worst precisely when the stakes are highest. What happens in our brain and body when we experience the dreaded performance anxiety? And what are we doing differently when everything magically clicks into place?

[👆TED Talk by Sian Beilock, author of “Choke: The Secret to Performing Under Pressure.”]

Beilock reveals surprising similarities among the ways students, athletes, performance artists, and business people choke. She examines how attention and working memory guide human performance, how experience and brain development interact to create our abilities, and how stress affects all these factors. The findings she present give us helpful pointers to how we can overcome debilitating performance anxiety, and how to succeed despite the pressure.

What does it mean to “choke” under pressure?
Choking under pressure is poor performance that occurs in response to the perceived stress of a situation. In other words, choking is not simply poor performance. Choking is suboptimal performance. It means that that you perform worse than expected given what you are capable of doing, and worse than you have in the past. It also doesn’t merely reflect a random fluctuation – we all have performance ups and downs. Choking occurs specifically in response to a highly stressful situation.
What are the reasons we choke? Why do we sometimes perform worst in precisely the moment when we care most about a top performance? 
Beilock writes a lot about the effects of an overloaded working memory on performance. While she doesn’t make the following distinction in her book, the findings she presents make more sense to me if we acknowledge that there are two types of performances:
1) There are some skills we have practiced so well that we don’t have a conscious understanding anymore of what we are doing.

The skills of top athletes or musicians are obvious examples here, but we all experience this for skills that require no conscious attention from us, such as running down a flight of stairs. If you suddenly direct explicit attention to exactly what you’re doing with your feet while running, chances are it won’t go so well anymore. This sudden focus on your own movements can happen during a peak performance, and is a well-documented reason for choking. For example, athletes’ tendency to overthink their performance is one big predictor of whether they will choke in important games or matches. In those situations, it helps to add an unrelated thinking task (such as counting backwards) that will distract the performer just enough so that they can’t overthink their performance anymore.

2) On the other hand, there are skills that will always require our full attention, no matter how practiced we are: solving math problems is such an example.

For this type of skill, our performance suffers if we get distracted, because we do need our working memory at its full capacity in order to perform at our best. Worrying about your performance is precisely such a distraction: it takes up precious resources of your usual brain power. When math-anxious people do math, all their worries – about the math, about their performance, about looking stupid – capture a big part of their working-memory, and they are left with less brainpower to focus on the math itself.

When you worry while doing math, something gets sacrificed.
Unfortunately it’s not the worries, but the math.

This is also a well-documented phenomenon. An example of this is the performance hit that is often observed when people are aware of a “stereotype threat”. Namely, bringing up negative stereotypes about how your sex or racial group should perform can be enough to send people into a spiral of self-doubt that uses up valuable brain resources that could otherwise work on the task at hand – resources that are already scarce in high-stakes situations. The mere awareness of these stereotypes can lead to choking under pressure.

So how can you prevent choking, and instead perform at your best when you’re under pressure?

Here are my top five practical tips, based on the science I’ve seen so far (the research findings are taken mostly from Beilock’s book, but see a list of additional references below).

1. Know whether your task requires your full attention or not, and “load” or “unload” your working memory capacity accordingly:

If your task involves fully automated “muscle memory” skills, such as an athletic or musical performance, it may help you if you can distract yourself, in order to avoid focusing your attention on your own movements and getting – perhaps literally – tripped up by your unhelpful focus.

If, on the other hand, your task does require your full attention, such as an academic test, try to “unload” your worries in order to free up working memory. For example, writing about the stressful events in your life on a regular basis can decrease the occurrence of intrusive thoughts and worries. This can bolster your cognitive horsepower. Think of a computer analogy: if a computer is running several programs at once, each one of these programs will run that much slower and be more prone to crash. Getting your worries out on paper eliminates the unnecessary programs from running and helps you focus on the task at hand.

2. Practice under the gun:

Of course, practice makes everything easier, but in particular, make your practice situation as similar as possible to the performance situation. For example, if you need to give a presentation, practice it in front of people, or in front of a camera. Different studies, one with golfers and one with with musicians, showed a very similar effect of this kind of practice: those who had practiced while being video-taped performed better in front of an audience than those who had practiced in isolation.

3. Prepare, don’t worry:

Preparing is not the same as worrying! People thinking about an upcoming presentation while lying in a brain scanner got more nervous, the longer they spent anticipating the stressful event. So, prepare well, but don’t keep thinking about the stressful event more than necessary. Once you are well-prepared, it may serve you better to focus your attention on something other than the upcoming performance.

4. Social support – a mixed bag:

Men who were able to spend time with their spouses before having to prepare their speech showed less of a stress response (cortisol increase) in anticipation of a stressful public speaking assessment than those who didn’t spend time with their spouse. However, the same was not the case (in a different study, but with the same stressful public speaking test) with women: women’s cortisol levels went up when their boyfriends were present beforehand. Before generalizing this finding too much, I would like to emphasize that these were different studies and may have included people in different stages of their relationships.

So then, what to conclude from these mixed findings? Of course, you know it: surround yourself with the kinds of people who make you feel calmer, rather than adding more pressure, when you’re stressed out.

5. Focus on values (not goals):

Interventions that asked students to write a paragraph about their values before a task performed better and were less affected by stereotype threats. This may sound like a weird intervention, but it does make sense. Focusing on values may re-affirm your self-worth and integrity, and direct your focus away from your own flaws and onto the bigger picture.

Note that values are not the same as goals: several studies showed that focusing on goals had no effect on performance, for example in soccer players and race car drivers. This is also not too surprising, since goal setting is a motivational technique, rather than one one that optimizes attention, and motivation is already high enough, if not too high, when we choke under pressure.

What next?

Do you need help with your own performance under pressure?

Are you, or is someone you love, struggling with performance anxiety? Would you like to try some of the here discussed or other evidence-based interventions? I would love to help you think about how to apply these and other ideas to your specific situation. Here you can schedule a coaching session or a phone call to discuss options.

Set up an appointment with Ursina Teuscher to discuss Performance Coaching
I look forward to talking to you!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


References:

J. Aronson et al., “When white men can’t do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35 (1999), 29–46.
M. H. Ashcraft and E. P. Kirk, “The relationships among working memory, math anxiety, and performance,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (2001), 224–37.
S. Beilock. Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. Atria Books.
S. L. Beilock and T. H. Carr, “On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (2001), 701–25.
G. L. Cohen, J. Garcia, N. Apfel, and A. Master, “Reducing the racial achievement gap: A social-psychological intervention,” Science, 313 (2006), 1307–10.
B. Ditzen et al., “Adult attachment and social support interact to reduce psychological but not cortisol responses to stress,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 64:5 (2008), 479–86.
A. J. Fiocco, R. Joober, and S. J. Lupien, “Education modulates cortisol reactivity to the Trier Social Stress Test in middle-aged adults,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 32 (2007), 1158–63.
P. Gröpel & C. Mesagno (2019) Choking interventions in sports: A systematic review, International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 12:1, 176-201
C. Kirschbaum et al., “Sex-specific effects of social support on cortisol and subjective responses to acute psychological stress,” Psychosomatic Medicine, 57 (1995), 23–31.
K. Klein and A. Boals, “Expressive writing can increase working memory capacity,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (2001), 520–33.
E. H. McKinney and K. J. Davis, “Effects of deliberate practice on crisis decision performance,” Human Factors, 45 (2003), 436–44.
C. M. Steele and J. Aronson, “Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African-Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69 (1995), 797–811.
T. D. Wager et al., “Brain mediators of cardiovascular responses to social threat: Part II: Prefrontal-subcortical pathways and relationship with anxiety,” Neuroimage, 47 (2009), 836–51.
C. Y. Wan and G. F. Huon, “Performance degradation under pressure in music: An examination of attentional processes,” Psychology of Music, 33 (2005), 155–72.


Summer Reading List 2021: Five Books that Changed my Mind

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Creative Thinking, Intuition, Leadership, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

This past year gave me a fair amount of time to read and listen to audiobooks. Here are five books I found truly impactful, in that they managed to change some of my fundamental previous assumptions and opinions.

Steven Pinker (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker presents a passionate and persuasive defense of reason, science and progress. He shows with an abundance of data how a commitment to humanitarian values has kept winning – in the long run – dramatically and consistently over the destruction and chaos that would be the easier and more natural course. It is an uplifting as well as urgent perspective that challenges lazy dogmas from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

To get a first impression and hear his own voice, here’s Steven Pinker in an interview with Shankar Vedantam on the “Hidden Brain” podcast:

Beyond Doomscrolling

Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, & Ola Rosling (2018).  Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. 

You may know Hans Rosling from his classic and widely shared 2006 TED talk:

This book offers explanations of why people – including highly educated people – are shockingly and systematically wrong about global trends and facts. Our instincts dramatically distort our perspective: from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them; e.g., poor vs rich etc) to the way we consume media (where fear rules), to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

The two books above share a similar perspective, but they are different enough (and counterintuitive enough!) that I found it very worthwhile to read both. In fact, I suspect I should read them both again in the near future, lest I forget.

Malcolm Gladwell (2019). Talking to Strangers. 

I’ve often found Malcolm Gladwells’s books worth reading, but hard to summarize. This one is no exception. If I had to summarize my take-home, it would be: “stop assuming”. I might be very wrong about other people, no matter how great I think my intuition is. (This past year I’ve listen to both “Talking to Strangers” and his older “David and Goliath” as audiobooks in short succession, and found them both similarly entertaining, informative, relevant for race politics, and thought-provoking, but only half satisfying.)

Sharna Fabiano (2021). Lead and Follow. 

Much has been written about leadership, but very little about followership in organizations (in fact, my spellchecker doesn’t even recognize “followership” as a word). As an internationally recognized dance artist and teacher, Sharna Fabiano has a deep understanding of the complementary nature of those roles in Argentine tango.

In her words: “To a dancer, improvisation does not mean “winging it” or making it up as you go along. Rather, it implies a highly refined system of communication built through specific methods of training. Improvisation for dancers is a synergy between leading and following actions that is greater than the sum of its parts. We already know a lot about leading at work, but not many of us understand how to follow with intelligence, power, and grace, as dancers do. It’s time we learned.”

Sharna Fabiano presents a coaching model that helps us think about those roles and the skills they require through three phases of increasing sophistication: 1. Connection, 2. Collaboration, and 3. Co-creation. It’s a very practical and well written book. As a reader, you don’t need to know anything about tango to understand the metaphors and their applicability to specific challenges in the workplace.

Steve Dalton (2020). The 2-Hour Job Search. 

What I liked least about this book was its title. I took me a while to figure out what exactly the two hours refer to, and I found the best explanation – and indeed the best book summary – here. The book’s focus is on how to get you interviews as efficiently and quickly as possible, without all the emotional investment that comes with a lot of other career advice. One reason I’ve already recommended it to several clients is that it has very useful templates and easy-to-follow guidelines for requesting and conducting informational interviews.

Steven Dalton’ approach circumvents the online job application process altogether. His approach takes into account the fact that many smaller companies never post their jobs online at all (and did you know that almost 99% of US employers have fewer than 100 employees?*), as well as that the odds for online applications are quite terrible, especially for people without very clearly defined and sought-after skills.

* According to 2016 data from the Census Bureau, firms with fewer than 500 workers accounted for 99.7 percent of businesses, and firms with fewer than 100 workers accounted for 98.2 percent.

Ursina reading an entirely different book from the ones on her Summer Reading List

What have you all read or listened to recently? As always, please let me know your favorites! Contrary to what this post might suggest, I also enjoy fiction, escapism, and otherwise simply pleasurable entertainment. Would love to hear your recommendations!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Summer Reading List 2020 – Book Recommendations on Leadership and Career Development

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Career Development, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development

Here are a few books about decision making and leadership that I found worth reading and still very relevant, regardless of how things have changed since they were written.

The first two are not only interesting if you’re leading other people, but also if you are running your own business as a solopreneur. Both books talk about value-driven business models, although in very different ways. I found Simon Sinek’s particularly inspiring:

Simon Sinek (2013). Infinite Game. 

Seth Godin (2018). This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See. 

Aaron Dignan (2019). Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

Brené Brown (2018). Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. 

My last recommendation is a good basic reference if you’re looking for a job. It offers detailed advice and examples on how to write your resumes and cover letters, and how to tailor them to your desired position. As much as I recommend it though: given how quickly the job market and its challenges are changing, I would recommend any book (regardless of how recently published) only as a starting point, and as one reference. Always do a detailed search online for specific advice about your desired position and industry, and get personal advice from people who are working and hiring in that field – or better yet, at that company. In addition, make sure your resume has a chance to get past automated Applicant Tracking Systems and in front of human eyes at all. (This is not a topic the book talks about, but it is absolutely essential in any resume you submit online).

Patricia K. Criscito (2013). How to Write Better Résumés and Cover Letters.

Book recommendation: resume writing

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


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