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Event Series: Procrastination and ADHD Follow-Through

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, ADHD, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Neuroscience, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Resources, tools

Free webinar series with Vicki Lind (MS) and Ursina Teuscher (PhD) on Procrastination and ADHD.

Banner for Webinar Series on Procrastination and ADHD with Vicki Lind and Ursina Teuscher

Do you procrastinate? Do you have ADHD? Stalled on a project? 

Start 2023 with a clear plan and support by joining my colleague Vicki Lind and me in a webinar series and support hub. Do you struggle with procrastination or ADHD, or know someone who does? Learn more about procrastination and how to beat it, and get the support you need to follow through on your plans.

Vicki and I will teach three free interactive webinars together in January. Each week has a different focus:

Tue Jan 10, 9-10am PST: Support from Your Heart & Head
Tue Jan 17, 9-10am PST: Support from Others: Co-working, Bookending & Rewards
Tue Jan 24, 9-10am PST: Support from Your Tools: Your Calendar, Lists & Rewards

Following this series, Vicki will offer a February Support Hub, beginning on Jan 31st, Tuesday at 9 am. If you attend two webinars (in the past or now), you are invited to join Vicki and four other members in regular co-working sessions and ongoing encouragement as you carry out each clear, concrete task.

In our first webinar on January 10th, you will:

  • Identify the thoughts that get you off track and learn how to replace them
  • Understand some things about the brain, and what they mean for best practices
  • Get support for one or two essential action items that fit you
Are you ready to spend an hour with us to move ahead?

​Reserve your spot: vicki@aportlandcareer.com or 503-575-8217 or sign up with the form above

Vicki Lind, MS, Speaker at the Webinar on Procrastination and ADHD Ursina Teuscher, PhD, Speaker at the Webinar on Procrastination and ADHD

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


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


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.


Workshop: Job Stress Management

Posted on by by Posted in Career Development, Coaching Practice, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Stress Management

Wednesday August 16, 11am-1pm (Portland, OR).

Is your job causing you a lot of unhealthy stress? In my last post, I wrote about the “Sort and Tackle” Technique, and how and why it can improve your stress levels at work. You can now give this technique a try in a guided setting and start sorting out and tackling some of your own biggest challenges at work. In this interactive workshop, I’ll help you prioritize which stressors to tackle first, and design a plan with specific next steps. Find more information and register here.

Workshop on Job Stress Management

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


How to Manage Stress at Work

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Career Development, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Resources, tools, Self-Assessments, Stress Management

If your job is causing you a lot of stress, you’re not alone. In a 2014 survey in the US, almost a third (31%) of the workers reported that they typically feel tense or stressed out during the work day. This number is even higher among millenials (18-34 year old workers) than among any of the older generations.

What are the most common causes for stress at work?

So many issues can cause stress at work. The survey lists the following, with the most commonly experienced stressors on top:

  1. Low salariesHow to Manage Stress at Work: Learn a technique that helps you take control and start tackling your top stressors.
  2. Lack of opportunity for growth and development
  3. Uncertain or undefined job expectations
  4. Job insecurity
  5. Long hours
  6. Too heavy of a workload
  7. Unrealistic job expectations
  8. Work interfering during personal or family time
  9. Lack of participation in decision making
  10. Inflexible hours
  11. Problems with my supervisor
  12. Commuting
  13. Physical illnesses and ailments
  14. Problems with my co-workers
  15. Unpleasant or dangerous physical conditions
  16. Personal life interfering during work hours

Does any of this sound familiar when you think or your own job?

What can you do to manage stress at work?

When you search for “stress management techniques”, you’ll mainly find different versions of relaxation techniques. While being able to relax is a good skill to develop and practice, it only gets you so far. It doesn’t really help with most of the work stressors we’ve found here. Also, since there are so many different causes of stress, there is no one remedy that will help them all. Nonetheless, here is my suggestions for a specific technique that can get you started. I call it the “Sort and Tackle” Technique. All you need to begin with is a stack of index cards.

The “Sort and Tackle” Technique

Keep a stack of index cards nearby at work. Whenever you notice that you’re stressed out or frustrated about something, write it down on one card. Once in a while (you can do this as often as you want), do a “sort and tackle”:

1. Sort the cards. There will be some cards that describe stressors you have no control over whatsoever. For example, you may not be able to negotiate your salary. However other cards will describe issues that you may be able to improve in some way, if you are willing to invest some effort, take some risks, or just try something new. For example, you may be able to resolve a conflict with your co-worker, or change some habits to improve your own time management. Move the cards to the top of the pile that describe something you may be able to change. Move the other cards to the bottom that describe issues out of your control. If there are cards about which you are not sure, leave them in the middle for now. You can revisit them later and give them some more thought.

Extra credit: Use the back of each index card to list all kinds of ideas (even bad ones) of how you could improve each stressor. There’s no need to tackle all your problems at once, but collecting your ideas whenever they occur to you will give you something to choose from, once you’re ready to take specific steps.

2. Tackle one. Once you’ve sorted your cards – with the most hopeful, potentially improvable issues on top – pick just one among your top five cards that you want to tackle next. Make a specific plan about how to deal with this issue. For example, if you want to discuss your workload with your boss, you might start by scheduling a meeting with her, or you might start by asking a friend for advice on how you might approach the issue with your boss. Whatever your next step is, define it specifically as to what you are going to do when. It’s better to have a small next step in your calendar than a big but vague “to do” in your head.

And what do you do with the rest of the cards? For now: nothing at all. Until you can come up with reasons to move them to the top of the pile, that is. As long as you have no idea how you could improve the situation from your end, there is also nothing you need to do about it.

Here’s the beauty of this technique: even though you’re only tackling a small part of your problems at any time, this often has positive side effects on all of your stressors. Namely, knowing that you are taking active steps to improve your situation where you can, will give you more peace of mind about the issues that remain out of your control. It truly helps to acknowledge that there are parts of your work that simply suck. Since you can’t do anything about them, there is no point in worrying about them. So don’t throw any of the cards away – keep the whole pile and add to it whenever something new (or old) comes up that stresses you out. However, focus your active efforts and interventions on the top of your pile: on the issues you might be able to improve and are ready to tackle next.

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


Productivity Wallpaper

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Resources, tools

Organize Your Desktop Strategically with this Productivity Wallpaper

Productivity WallpaperLoosely inspired by Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Principle, I designed a Productivity Wallpaper that  you can download here as a template. It is a customized desktop background that helps you stay focused by organizing your tasks in a spatial layout.

The idea is that it gives you room to arrange your documents, folders or apps according to when you want to use them:

  1. In the upper left quadrant of the screen, you would place stuff you need for your most important tasks. By important, I mean tasks that you truly care about, that have long-term significance, and that make your life more meaningful. Typically, those are bigger projects, often without a deadline (because they matter to YOU, more than to other people). They are therefore most in danger of being infringed upon by other people’s more urgent demands. For the same reason, they are also the most likely to fall victim to procrastination. Those are the tasks you’ll want to tackle during your “prime work time”, that is, during the time of day when you’re at your best, most focused, most motivated. You’ll want to protect the very best hours of your day or week for the tasks in that quadrant.
  2. By contrast, the upper right quadrant of the screen has room for tasks that you also need to do, but that tend to take too much of your time. Those are typically tasks that other people give you in some form or other. For example, you may need to respond to emails, prepare for meetings, solve your coworkers’ problems, and so forth. If your personality is on the conscientious side, you already know you will get those tasks done anyway, because you don’t want to disappoint people or get into other kinds of trouble with colleagues, customers, bosses, etc. For that very reason, these tasks are often not the ones that deserve your very best “prime work time” – the challenge is rather to limit the time spent on those items.
  3. The bottom right quadrant hosts fun, distractions, and personal stuff – in other words, not really work at all, but stuff you might do during off-time, such as reading, browsing, chatting, social media, watching movies, and all the other guilty pleasures that shall remain unnamed.
  4. On the lower left side there is room for “Other” stuff – whatever items are left that need space on your desktop.

After using (and tweaking) this productivity wallpaper for a while myself, I can truly recommend it. What I like about this setup is that I can use my desktop as a space to arrange a sort of free-style To-Do List with my task items. Or I guess “To-Do Space” would be more accurate. I found this works best if I create alias icons that I place on the desktop, rather than dragging actual files around. The document or application itself can then remain wherever it belongs in my folder structure. The advantage of alias icons is that I can now give each icon a name that stands for my current task, and when I’m done with that task, I can simply delete the icon and get it out of my sight, while the document itself stays safe.

If you want to give it a try for yourself, you can download the empty template (background) for the productivity wallpaper here as a large image that you can set as your own desktop wallpaper. If you like the general idea but would prefer some things to look different, let me know your thoughts and wishes in the comment field below.

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


Decision Fatigue: Time for a Break Now?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Health Decisions, Intuition, Neuroscience, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

It turns out that making decisions is tiring and wears us out, more so than other (similarly difficult) mental tasks. At this point, a large body of research shows that whenever we make many choices in a row, the quality of our decisions gets worse over time.

 Examples: one study looked at more than a thousand parole decisions made by experienced judges at an Israeli prison. At the beginning of the day, the judges were likely to give a favorable ruling about 65 percent of the time. As the morning wore on, the likelihood of a criminal getting a favorable ruling steadily dropped to zero. After the lunch break, however, the likelihood of a favorable ruling would immediately jump back up to 65 percent. And then, as the hours moved on, the percentage of favorable rulings would fall back down to zero by the end of the day. Regardless of the crime, a prisoner was much more likely to get a favorable response if their parole hearing was scheduled either early in the morning or immediately after a food break, than if it was scheduled near the end of a long session. In other words, the outcome of a decision was highly influenced by how many decisions the judges had already made previously.
Experimental studies have also shown that people are less able to exert self-control after making a series of choices. In one experiment people made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices. Making choices led to many different forms of reduced self-control afterwards: less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and poorer performance on math problems. It is noteworthy that making actual decisions seemed to wear people out a lot more than just thinking about options. 

Decisions that are especially taxing are those that involve self-control. For example, when people fended off the temptation to eat M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations later on.
Nourishment and Recovery
Self-control tasks and decisions also require more glucose in the brain than other mental tasks. Low or hypoglycemic levels of glucose lead to impaired decision making, poor planning, and inflexible thinking. In contrast, simple psychomotor abilities, such as responding quickly to certain cues, seem relatively unaffected by glucose levels.

Rest and Sleep

This pattern is in line with other things we know about impulsive behavior and typical self-control problems. For example, research on addiction and criminal behavior suggests that self-control failure is most likely during times of the day when glucose is used least effectively, and when people are tired. We also know, for example, that alcohol reduces glucose throughout the brain and body and likewise impairs many forms of self-control.

 What is it about decision-making and self-control in particular that makes them so susceptible to glucose? 
Prefrontal CortexThe answer to this question is still somewhat controversial. One reason is probably that since self-control processes are so costly, requiring larger amounts of glucose than other tasks, they’re also be the first to be impaired when glucose drops. Another reason could be that when glucose drops, the brain functions that are most central to survival (e.g., breathing, physical coordination) have first dibs on available glucose, not leaving enough for more advanced mental operations.Both of these ideas are consistent with the general rule that abilities that developed last are the first to become impaired when resources are limited. Self-control, planning and decision-making are all processes that involve the frontal areas of the brain – the pre-frontal cortex, to be specific. This area is the most recently developed part of our brain in evolutionary history, and it is also the part that takes longest to mature fully in human adolescents and young adults. 

What does this mean for us?

While metabolically healthy adults can fast without their blood glucose levels being affected, they still need rest to recover from decision fatigue. Sleep and rest replenish the ability to exert self-control.

The finding that that our psychomotor abilities are not as easily impaired as our abilities for judgment and decision-making suggests that we may often not realize our impairment, because the very capacity (judgment!) that we would need to recognize it is the first one to be impaired. This means planning is essential!

  • Get enough breaks, rest and sleep
  • Avoid making important decisions when tired
  • Plan ahead to get into healthy routines

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling, LLC

References:
Baumeister, R. F. (2002). Ego Depletion and Self-Control Failure: An Energy Model of the Self’s Executive Function. Self and Identity, 1(2), 129– 136.
Boksem, M. A. S., Meijman, T. F., & Lorist, M. M. (2005). Effects of mental fatigue on attention: An ERP study. Cognitive Brain Research, 25(1), 107– 116.
Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(17), 6889–6892.
De Jonge, J., Spoor, E., Sonnentag, S., Dormann, C., & van den Tooren, M. (2012). “Take a break?!” Off-job recovery, job demands, and job resources as predictors of health, active learning, and creativity. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 21(3), 321–348.
Gailliot, M. T., Baumeister, R. F., Nathan, C., Maner, J. K., Ashby, E., Tice, D. M., Brewer, L. E., & Schmeichel, B. J. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(2), 325–336.
Gailliot, M. T., & Baumeister, R. F. (2007). The Physiology of Willpower: Linking Blood Glucose to Self-Control. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(4), 303–327.
Hagger, M. S.; Wood, C.; Stiff, C.; Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2010). Ego Depletion and the Strength Model of Self-Control: A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136 (4), 495–525.
Henning, R. A., Jacques, P., Kissel, G. V., Sullivan, A. B., & Alteras-Webb, S. M. (1997). Frequent short rest breaks from computer work: effects on productivity and well-being at two field sites. Ergonomics, 40(1), 78–91.
Jansen, N. W. H., Kant, Ij., & Brandt, P. A. van den. (2002). Need for recovery in the working population: Description and associations with fatigue and psychological distress. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 9(4), 322–340.
Landrigan, C. P., Rothschild, J. M., Cronin, J. W., Kaushal, R., Burdick, E., Katz, J. T., … Czeisler, C. A. (2004). Effect of Reducing Interns’ Work Hours on Serious Medical Errors in Intensive Care Units. New England Journal of Medicine, 351 (18), 1838–1848.
Lieberman, H. R. (2003). Nutrition, brain function and cognitive performance. Appetite, 40 (3), 245–254.
Lim, J., Wu, W., Wang, J., Detre, J. A., Dinges, D. F., & Rao, H. (2010). Imaging brain fatigue from sustained mental workload: An ASL perfusion study of the time-on-task effect. NeuroImage, 49 (4), 3426–3435.
Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94 (5), 883–898.


Featured Video: Can You Make Yourself Smarter?

Posted on by by Posted in ADHD, Creative Thinking, Intuition, Performance, Academic Achievement

This RSA talk by Dan Hurly is a bit slow (I recommend listening to it while doing something else, rather than watching), but I found the content excellent, well-researched and important.

(The actual talk starts at 1:30 and ends at 27min, the rest is Q&A.)

Here’s why I believe it’s so important:

1. Smartness matters. 
Intelligence is often underrated as a geeky and nerdy quality, irrelevant for practical purposes, or even worse, as being a hindrance for emotional and intuitive skills. That’s very wrong: general intelligence is highly related to emotional and social skills, and even to health and longevity.

2. Yes, we can become smarter.
Therefore I think we should make that effort – not just for ourselves, but for the coming generation. Let’s remember that the children who are now in school are the ones that will make decisions for us when we’re old. Let’s give them the best possible chances of becoming smart!

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


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