I’ve been thinking about the paradox of choice and optimising our ability to handle tasks through better decision-making.

Here’s a short thread on how to manage your cognitive bandwidth : /1

It’s an interesting paradox that many of us feel busy—as busy as we’ve ever been—but technically humans are the least busy they’ve been in centuries.

Here are the stats: /2

What has actually changed is the number of choices available to us.

Way back when, you might be born to a baker, and you’d be the baker’s apprentice, so you’d work 12 hours that day and go to bed. There was no need to aspire much further. Life was far less complex. /3

We now have so many options that every choice seems to ripple through your life and drastically change your fortunes and future opportunities.

The knowledge that you have a near-infinite number of things you can do results in a perception of time scarcity. /4

Perceived time scarcity has a drastic impact on cognitive bandwidth and the mental room you have available for productive decision-making.

As you devote more mental resources to dealing with scarcity you have less and less for other things in your life. /5

Here’s a quick equation for managing cognitive bandwidth:

[Cognitive Throughput + Cognitive Overhead ≤ Cognitive Bandwidth]

Terms defined in next tweet > /6

Throughput: Thinking done per unit of time—this depends on the complexity of what you are working on.

Overhead: The mental awareness and monitoring cost of organization, planning, etc.

Bandwidth: Perceived processing capacity—this is often fixed although it can be optimised. /7

Improving performance requires:

1. Understanding your personal mental bandwidth—you need to know your limits and capabilities in order to navigate them effectively.

2. Ensuring that the cumulative workload of active tasks and concurrent monitoring do not exceed those limits. /8

For computer nerds another analogy is knowing your CPU processing power, the amount of active memory each program requires, and being aware of the RAM you have available to switch tasks effectively. /9

Likewise, If your cognitive throughput and overhead exceed your current total bandwidth, your performance on each task will begin to deteriorate and the penalty for switching/monitoring tasks will increase. /10

An important caveat is that not all tasks are equal. The issue is that different tasks (throughput) require different amounts of mental energy to execute optimally (overhead). /11

It’s not to say you can’t do many things at once, but that you should be careful with the type of tasks you juggle and understand the mental penalty of balancing them. /12

Managing cognitive bandwidth applies equally to work and play.

Choosing what to buy or watch or eat or do raises the opportunity cost of leisure (ie, choosing one thing comes at the expense of choosing another) and contributes to feelings of stress. /13

@gregorymckeown wrote that “our options may be things, but a choice—a choice is an action”.

A choice isn’t just something to be made, it is a positive expression of action and the result of deliberation. You could also choose to not choose. /14

Considering each choice you make as an action fits with what we understand about decision fatigue, i.e. that the more decisions you need to make, the more your ability to make decisions will deteriorate. /15

In sum:

– Abundance of choice leads to perceived time scarcity

– Be wary of cognitive bandwidth—weigh up the active workload + organisational processing when approaching new tasks

– Every choice is an action. Failure to streamline will hamper your decision-making ability /16

At some point I’ll probably do a thread / write a newsletter issue with more practical tips on how to combat decision fatigue.

For now, if you want to read the full issue this thread was based on, you can find it here: http://bit.ly/tkissue17 

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