One thing I've been noticing recently is the cost of not being decisive enough. There are a lot of times when I have things to do, but I can't decide which things, or I don't fully commit to one of them. So maybe I want to either do some work or relax, but because I can't decide I end up doing something silly like working with the TV on, which is way less productive and less relaxing than either option on its own.
Decisiveness is always a bit scary because you're ruling so much out every time you make a decision. You gain one thing that you can do at the cost of a million things you could've done. Of course, if you think about it that's total nonsense. You could never have done more than one thing, but that abstract truth doesn't seem to translate well into system 1 monkey brain reasoning. It's so easy for that pure unrefined potential to start seeming valuable when you're not paying attention.
The whole multitasking culture is based on this crazy idea that it's better to half-arse a bunch of things than fully arse one thing at a time. I mean, the motivation is pretty obvious; everyone wants to believe they can do more, and to the extent that believing it makes you spend more it's obviously a behaviour that a lot of industries want to encourage. This is kind of related to yesterday's post, but the benefit of having more options only really kicks in after you've selected one of them (hopefully the best one). Up until that point the extra options are just a cost you pay in time and cognitive load.
Getting through the decision stage quickly and on to doing is best. Overthinking and taking ages to decide is worse. But even that beats never deciding at all.
I've noticed that with some things I work on, I can actually get a lot of benefit by just giving myself less time to work on them. I'm not talking about Parkinson's Law, that scary enabling vehicle for chronic underestimators everywhere, just an observation that for some tasks I paradoxically seem to get better results and enjoy the work more when I have less time to do it in.
Having reflected on this a bit, I think it's to do with a terrible addiction to optimisation. When I have a bunch of options - like say, a menu at a restaurant - it takes a lot of time to sort through all of them because I'm trying to optimise for the best result. One way to fix that is by limiting the number of the options on the menu. But another, more practical way is to restrict the amount of time I have. That way I'm now optimising for the best result I can get in 5 seconds. A much more tractable problem!
As applied to work, I think there are many cases where you don't need the best solution, just a good enough solution. The time restriction can often make you focus on getting that good solution without worrying about whether there's a better one. And less time optimising also means less time until you get results, which shortens your feedback loop and gives you better information to make decisions with.
I have a small mystery on my hands: why is my tea strainer singing? My initial thought was something to do with the water running over the holes making it vibrate like a reed instrument. But it only seems to happen when the water is hot, not cold. What's the heat got to do with anything?
I was talking to a friend today who'd made his own scientific relaxation soundtrack by mixing together nature sounds and music he'd selected based on research-indicated tempo, modality and instruments. It was kind of amazing, and it reminded me of a really exciting idea that Philip K. Dick nearly had in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
In that book, everyone has a Mood Organ, which is a device that allows you to dial in any particular mood you want to feel. So, if you're feeling a bit down you can punch in the code for happiness and it'll improve your mood by tramsitting special mind-control waves into your brain. Amazing idea, but I don't think the Science Waves were really necessary. We already have mood-influencing waves: music!
How many times have you played a happy song to bring on or reinforce a good mood? Or a fun fast song for driving or riding? I think we have all the tools we need to make a real Mood Organ. The missing piece is a solid understanding of what properties of music are best suited to bring on certain moods. Some research already exists, but usually only with an up or down mood, and only with specific songs.
What would be really exciting is if you could actually do some kind of component analysis on different kinds of music and use that to generate an infinite stream of new music for a certain mood. The Mood Organ would be a kind of radio where instead of picking a "rock" or "classical" station, you tune into "wistful" or "angry".
Could be a lot of fun. Or a lot of angst. I guess it depends on what you're into.
I've seen a few different panel and debate shows and I've always thought it's a real shame that the people are arranged in such an uninteresting way. John Oliver famously held a proportional debate on climate change with 97 people on one side and 3 on the other. Obviously, that was a shambles to make a point, but I think there could be a useful and interesting format hidden under the guise of comedy.
A while back I learned about sociometric games, where you get people to represent their relationships with each other using dimensions in physical space. It's a lot of fun to get people to run around and stand where they were born on an invisible room-sized map, and you often learn some surprising things too (the birthday paradox works in space as well as time).
Anyway, my idea is this: why not make a sociometric panel show? As John Oliver did, get a roughly representative group of people (though maybe not quite so many) and lay them out in a space according to some axis of their beliefs. Then you can see the clusters of agreement laid out physically, interview whole groups at a time, and maybe even - on rare occasion - see someone adjust their beliefs and move to a different spot.
Ideally that would get you the best of both worlds: fringe viewpoints would be represented, but clearly identified as fringe by the small number of people supporting them. Mainstream viewpoints would get less time per person (if interviewed in groups) but seem more authoritative by weight of numbers.
Of course, it'd be a lot of work to make sure it runs smoothly. The lighting and camera setup would be very tricky. And most importantly you'd have to be very careful to avoid a Robbers Cave type situation. The last thing anyone wants to see on TV is people with different opinions fighting each other.
