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Dear friends,
How are you? I am looking optimistically towards spring, and I hope you are too. This month I am going to talk about buying towels. Not kidding! I promise there’s a career lesson in my recent quest for new linens. In discussing this purchase with my spouse (scintillating conversations in my house, I know!), he suggested that it would be more efficient to buy towels online. While I saw his point, the idea of sitting down in front of my computer to search made my heart sink. Our contrasting approaches made me want to dig deeper.
This discussion uncovered two concepts that I think are useful in career decision-making. The first concept, which I suspect will be familiar to most of you, is system 1 versus system 2 thinking. This distinction comes from behavioral economics. System 1 thinking is more automatic, like reading facial expressions or walking along a familiar route. System 2 thinking is deliberate and effortful, like finding a friend in a crowd or doing a complex math problem. This idea has been used to explain unconscious bias related to race, gender, and class, and to explain why medical diagnoses can be subject to error. System 2 thinking is much more tiring than system 1 thinking. Going back to my shopping plan, going into a store, I could automatically, without conscious effort, evaluate and choose towels. With the paucity of information for me to take in online, I would need to engage more system 2 thinking.
When I think about efficiency, I think about managing both time and energy. In this case, expending a ton of mental energy to make a good online purchase seemed less efficient than driving to a store. Think about your professional tasks in this way, too. Sometimes it is wise to spend time in order to save energy! This could look like moving a discussion from context-poor environment (email exchange) to a context rich environment (in-person check in). I also think the System 1- System 2 distinction can help us understand why zoom is so exhausting- we don’t have enough information for unconscious processing, so we end up spending a lot of conscious mental energy.
The other point that came up here was being a maximizer – a person who looks for the optimal resolution or choice in a given task or decision- versus a satisficer- a person who selects a “good enough” option and moves on. According to this article, maximizers can achieve more optimal outcomes, but they also tend to experience more regret, especially when they have more options. Many of us instinctively know which category we fall into by default, but it is worth deciding whether any particular task requires maximizing. Making an acceptable decision from a limited range of options is usually fine, as in the case of my new towels.
So this month, I urge you to think not only about saving time but also saving cognitive energy. And try being a satisficer for a low stakes task or decision. Let me know how it goes! As always, please share widely and, if you are so inclined, sign up for the blog here. Keep in touch and do share good news so I can amplify your successes!
Warmly,
Urmimala