Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Psychology”

31 Mar 2012
2 Comments

How to get things done and why we self-sabotage

Over 1.3 million of us annually ask Google ‘how to get things done’. Productivity, personal effectiveness and time management are concerns which hang over modern humans like a mild, but persistent headache. Commentators blame the increasing pressure on information overload; the always-on, hyper-connected nature of modern communications. Others point the finger at the requirements of the 24/7, 365 business world.

Unfortunately I think the answer is far simpler, but the implications create a far more difficult problem to solve.

We are emotional creatures that have developed a consciousness through evolution. This means that our emotional filtering and weighting of all stimuli tends to lead our response before we apply rational thinking. Our conscious brains appear to work on an automatic pattern basis, endeavouring to recognise a stimulus eg. a red stop light, and respond according to the pattern programme i.e. we stop without really thinking about it.

We procrastinate and end up with ever-growing to do lists containing the important stuff because of how we have emotionally weighted the items on the list; and probably even because of the existence of the list itself.

In simple terms I think we don’t get things done that we feel resistant to. Obviously we feel resistant to either hard or unpleasant things – like a tax return. But also to things that we do not have a pattern for; the things that are new or strange like writing a report or starting a new project at work. We take on, or are given, tasks without knowing how to do them. Equally, we just take on too much and feel resistant to the sheer volume.

This emotional resistance only becomes counter-balanced when we hit a deadline where we have to do the task. Invariably we then do it – and marvel at how easy it was. Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Decision making, Execution, Habits and Routines, Productivity, Psychology, Time Management
10 Sep 2011

Evolutionary rationale for positive illusions.

Johnson and Fowler offer a fascinating explanation for why 70% of us (and 90% of college professors) feel we are above average in physical skills, intelligence, leadership, importance to our groups, driving skills, healthiness of our behavior, etc. etc. The authors make the striking suggestion that biased self-beliefs can actually lead people to make the right decision, whereas unbiased self-images would lead to a suboptimal decision. In their model overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable over a more wide range of environments than realistic populations, and they suggest this “may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars.” Here is their abstract:

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health to sports, business and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence—believing you are better than you are in reality—is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition. In contrast, unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars.

via Deric Bownds’ MindBlog: Evolutionary rationale for positive illusions..

Posted in Habits and Routines, NLP, Psychology, Vision and Goal Setting | Leave a Comment
19 Jun 2011

There will be a last time…

There will be a last time you hear the sound of snow falling, watch the moon rise, smell popcorn, feel the warmth of a child falling asleep in your arms, or make love. You will someday eat your last meal, and soon thereafter you will take your last breath.

- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)

Posted in Change, Control, Deliberate Practice, Habits and Routines, Happiness, Mindfulness, Psychology and tagged , , | Leave a Comment

Post Navigation

← Older Entries