Neuroscience and Psychology Tells Us How To Create a Habit of Making Better (and More) Decisions
Management involves a series of decisions—some harder than others. Hundreds of thousands of studies have examined the decision-making process and the mental and physiological mechanisms behind decisiveness. What is clear is that making good, timely decisions is a function of both cognition and willpower.
The need for cognition is pretty straightforward. You can’t make good decisions if you can’t understand your choices. For most people—indeed most managers—the real problem lies in willpower. Willpower is what keeps you from making choices on impulse.
Unfortunately, the line between procrastination and waiting for the best time to act can be extremely blurred – in business, speed is often more important than the small details.
To complicate matters, several factors can negatively affect willpower, including, but not limited to, how much sleep you get when your last meal or break is, social pressures, and your genetic predisposition to compulsive behavior.
Better Decision-Making Can Be Trained
In a study for a
book, self-help author and University of Pennsylvania author Martin Seligman and his colleagues asked two million respondents to rank their personal strengths. Perhaps unsurprisingly, self-control ranked at the very bottom of the list of the 24 skills given.
It’s easy to overlook the fact that self-control is a skill. Not only is it learned, but the ability to exercise it is finite. Think of all the times you’ve been stressed out and then done something you didn’t mean to, like cheating on your diet or making impulse purchases.
Fortunately, like almost any other skill, self-control can be maximized, and willpower can be stretched considerably. It’s not that simple, though. Just ask anyone who’s made a New Year’s Resolution or tried to lose weight.
A popularly cited study (Gailliot et al., 2007) strongly suggests that willpower is tied to glucose levels, citing improved mental endurance in athletes when they drink something sweet or merely swish it in their mouths.
Other studies refute this, saying that activating reward centers in the brain (when test subjects taste something sweet) is the more likely reason. A recent study asserts that decision fatigue only occurs when people believe it exists, contradicting the evidence presented by previous studies.
Proven Strategies for Better Decision-Making
There are plenty of convincing arguments from all sides. Decision fatigue is, however, a very real phenomenon, at least for most people, and this is true whether or not glucose is actually responsible for it.
If you believe they get stuck or fatigued when making too many decisions, it makes sense to try to expend as little effort as possible when making each choice. These are some of the proven methods we’ve found that can streamline your decision-making process.
8.) Avoid Distractions
We’ve previously discussed the effects of distractions in a work setting in a two–part series. While we all could use a distraction occasionally, it can lead to serious dips in productivity and cause your brain to have to ramp up again when you return to your original task.
When it comes to decision-making, diversions, even when related to work, can easily derail you and use up mental resources needed to make other future choices.
Office Distractions: Part One – How Divided Attention Costs Businesses
Office Distractions: Part Two – Simple Ways To Stay Focused At Work
7.) Take Naps
We extensively discussed this in a previous post, but this bears repeating. While the lack of sleep doesn’t reduce cognitive capacity as much as popularly believed, it severely reduces your ability to focus, and your mind will jump all over the place. Your ability to process memories will also take a hit. Combined, these can lead to some bad decisions.
Attack of the Killer Z’s – How Napping Boosts Productivity
6.) Limit Your Choices
In an interview with Vanity Fair, President Barack Obama said, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits…I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make”. Steve Jobs also famously wore a black mock turtleneck and jeans almost daily. Albert Einstein also had multiple suits of the same color and type because he claimed he didn’t want to waste any brain power.
Fewer choices often mean more time and mental energy to think about other things. More choices are often downright paralyzing. McDonald’s has recently reduced the number of items on their infamously bloated menu.
One of the many good reasons they had for it was that it would help speed up customer decision-making. Having plenty of choices is appealing, in theory. However, too many choices can leave you pointlessly bogged down.
Researchers set up a booth with jam samples in a popularly cited study by Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University. They switched from offering 24 different flavors to just six every couple of hours. Regardless of the number of flavors offered, customers sampled an average of two flavors and were given purchase coupons.
What’s fascinating, though, is that while more people (60%) were drawn to the stand when there were 24 choices available, the researchers could only get a 3% conversion rate. When the stand only had 6 flavors, they could get 40% to come over for samples. However, 30% of those who sampled from the small set purchased a jar with their coupons.
While this is all interesting from a sales point of view, it tells us that when we have more choices, we are likely to hold off on a decision. In situations where getting something fast is a lot more important than getting it done perfectly, holding off can be a liability.
Something as simple as a pen-and-paper decision matrix can help you quickly narrow down your choices. Asking others for their recommendations or finding out which choices are popular for the application you need is also a good way to start weeding out the options you don’t really want to pay attention to.
Delegating the decision or letting the matter go to a vote can also make a wide range of choices less of a problem for managers.
Delegating the decision, letting the matter go to a vote, or even limiting conversation topics with a pre-set
meeting minutes template can also make a wide range of choices less of a problem for managers.
5.) Create To-do Lists Based on Specific Goals
You can’t really plan if you have nothing to plan for. If you don’t set clear goals, you will have a much harder time narrowing down your options. When you have something specific in mind for your enterprise, it becomes so much simpler to make informed choices without as much mental effort. If your goal is too general, then that just leaves you with more options to waste your time thinking about.
When you’ve set specific goals, you can work backward to easily figure out what you want done. When that’s done, to-do lists can be immensely helpful in helping you take action without having to spend any more time and mental effort trying to remember them.
To-do lists and set plans are great for helping you stay focused on things that actually need to be done without expending much mental energy—precisely why pilots use them on every flight.
Here’s the pre-flight checklist for a Boeing 747-400 jumbo jet. Even if you trained a pilot to be a mental athlete, it would stretch credibility that they could consistently go through these procedures without accidentally skipping a step after a few hundred flights. Checklists for routine tasks, likewise, greatly reduce the chance you’d make a mistake and help with your own peace of mind.
It’s also important to set quotas for routine items on your list. If you’re new to something, however, it’s important to start small and slowly but continuously ramp up to higher numbers. You don’t want to set unrealistic goals and quotas, as doing so will only set you up for disappointment.
Goals and quotas always work best, though when you:
4.) Give Yourself Time Limits
Back in 1955, Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote an essay that was published in The Economist. The opening line would prove to be far more enduring than his own name:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
The same applies to decisions. Give yourself as limited a time as possible to make them. More time means more time agonizing over them and second-guessing yourself.
Trust your instincts if faced with no clear choice and no time to gather more details. A recently published study demonstrates that gut instinct can be surprisingly accurate than was previously been given credit for. Note, though, that this only works if you have at least some knowledge about what’s happening, so we wouldn’t want you to make rash decisions just to save time.
If you can’t reach a satisfactory decision in the time you gave yourself:
3.) Learn To Let Go
Sometimes, it’s best to take no action and move on. Try returning to it later after you’ve gotten other stuff done.
It’s the same if you decide to make a less-than-ideal choice. Fixing bad choices or opportunity costs you couldn’t correct is unproductive.
If you feel like you did the best you could with the information you had when you made the decision, let go. If you didn’t feel you did, then learn from it and let go anyway. This will help conserve your mental endurance for other decisions you’ll have to make later on.
Another way you could let go is to delegate to someone you trust, of course. Make sure not to hover over them or second-guess them constantly, as that would not only negate the rationale for delegation but could also lead to resentment within your business.
2.) Simple Rituals
Rituals help put you in “the zone.” A few moments of prayer or other forms of meditation, or even focusing on a lucky charm, can do wonders for your cognitive ability and willpower, even if you don’t really believe in them.
Multiple studies (we’re talking dozens if not hundreds of different studies by reputed universities worldwide) demonstrate that meditation boosts neural connections and gives a statistically significant increase in wakefulness, cognitive ability, and relaxation while simultaneously helping reduce stress and anxiety blood pressure – and brain aging.
Even things that aren’t necessarily thought of as meditative help. There is evidence that engaging in extra activities that require some self-control will allow you to stretch out your willpower incrementally over time. These activities don’t need to be related to work either. The idea is not new. Martial artists and monks have been doing these sorts of exercises for millennia.
Activities need not be strenuous, either. Using your non-dominant hand, for example, or committing to doing a couple of simple exercises every time you see some arbitrary object should do fine. Something meaningful, such as contributing a dollar a day to the company’s Halloween party fund or a charity, would be even better.
Increasing the amount of willpower available to you should, in theory, help you make more decisions throughout the day before your prefrontal cortex finally decides to quit.
Lastly:
1.) Make All These a Habit!
The only way to ensure that you set yourself up for consistently making good decisions is by repetition. This might be the most challenging thing to do out of everything on the list. What you are trying to do here is literally rewire your neural connections. As anyone who’s ever tried to learn a specific skill knows, this part takes time.
The problem we often encounter when we try to learn to increase or maximize stuff like willpower or cognitive efficiency is that it’s all abstract, and tracking progress can be difficult or impractical. This makes it far too easy to fall off the wagon.
You can only notice yourself getting better at it after an extended period of time, depending on how well you stick to your routine. It’s the same as when you learn to paint or play instruments. Even the best painters and musicians start out pretty horrible. Their transitions through fluency and eventual greatness are all gradual and as slow as it gets.
So if someone says you could learn how to increase your willpower in weeks, you probably shouldn’t believe them. The process of creating habits involves building neural pathways in your brain – and this takes a heck of a lot of time.
How much time? In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says 10,000 hours. Another author says it takes approximately 45 days.
Everyone is different, and as all authors like a good digestible factoid to throw around, it might be reasonable to suspect it may take much longer—10,000 hours, let alone 45 days.
How long it takes shouldn’t matter though. If you plan to be in the entrepreneurship game for the long haul, learning to be genuinely decisive is one of the best investments you could ever make.
Sources and Additional Reading
- Habit Formation – Psychology Today
- Self Regulation Failure – Goal Setting And Monitoring – Psychology Today
- Habits are Everything – Psychology Today
- Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? – New York Times
- Here’s What Happens When You Focus Too Hard – Inc.com
- Restricting Temptations: Neural Mechanisms of Precommitment, Molly J. Crockett,Barbara R. Braams, Luke Clark, Philippe N. Tobler, Trevor W. Robbins, and Tobias Kalenscher
- Principles of self-regulation: The nature of willpower and self-control. Mischel, Walter; Cantor, Nancy; Feldman, Scott Higgins, Edward Tory (Ed); Kruglanski, Arie W. (Ed), (1996). Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles. , (pp. 329-360). New York, NY, US: Guilford Press,
- The Physiology of Willpower: Linking Blood Glucose to Self-Control, Matthew T. Gailliot; Florida State University, gailliot@psy.fsu.edu; Roy F. Baumeister, Florida State University
- When choice is demotivating: can one desire too much of a good thing? Iyengar SS, Lepper MR. Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027-6902, USA. ss957@columbia.edu
- Understanding Impulsive Aggression: Angry Rumination and Reduced Self-Control Capacity Are Mechanisms Underlying the Provocation-Aggression Relationship Pers Soc Psychol Bull June 1, 2011 37: 850-862
- How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world, Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, Jane Wardle; Article first published online: 16 JUL 2009; DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.674
- A self-control model of depression Lynn P. Rehm,University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA , Behavior Therapy, Volume 8, Issue 5, November 1977, Pages 787–804
- “Brain damage and addictive behavior: a neuropsychological and electroencephalogram investigation with pathologic gamblers,” M. Regard, D. Knoch, E. Gutling, and T. Landis, Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2003, 47-53. Address: Marianne Regard, Dept. of Neurology, University Hospital Zurich, CH- 8090 Zurich, Switzerland.
- A family study of obsessive-compulsive disorder, Am J Psychiatry 1995;152:76-84.
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