I’ve been reading in today’s newspapers about a study at Heidelburg University in which people were shown a succession of images and had to press a button to show whether they considered each image Good or Bad. The purpose of the experiment was to measure the amount of time it took for people of various ages to make decisions of this type.
According to the press release this involved the participants in three actions for each image:
1) An intuitive decision
2) Pondering it
3) Pressing the button
Apparently after the age of 60 the brain’s speed at carrying this process out declines considerably. As someone considerably older than that I can testify to the truth of the finding!
No further details were given in the articles, but two thoughts struck me immediately.
The first was that it would be very easy to get a good score by cheating
The second was that this is very applicable to the speed at which decisions are made from a to-do list about which task to do next.
So how can one cheat? There are multiple ways. For example:
- push the Good button each time. No decision is made so only step 3) is needed.
- push the Bad button each time. Ditto.
- push the Good and the Bad button alternately. Ditto.
The problem with all of these is that it’s obvious you’re cheating. But you can be a little bit more sophisticated.
- push either the Good or the Bad button regardless of what the image looks like. Step 2 - the longest - is left out.
- decide which button to push before the image is displayed. Assuming there is even a small gap between images, only Step 3 would be needed.
The last one would be the most difficult to detect as cheating.
Now it’s quite possible that there were measures in the actual experiment which would have prevented any of these happening, but they are not mentioned in the brief description.
So if the speed of the decision can be greatly increased by leaving out steps 1) and 2) how is this applicable to the speed of deciding which task should be done next off a list?
Well, there is one way which I left out. It’s not exactly cheating either. And that is to make an intuitive decision and press the button immediately without pondering it.
So what you are aiming to do is to decide immediately without any second guessing. That takes practice but is quite achievable.
As an exercise write down ten tasks which you could do now. Once you’ve written them down, and without reading through the list, run your finger or a pen rapidly down the list (go as fast as you can while still being able to read the tasks). Stop at any point and then do the selected task for real. Do the same several times again until you’ve got the feel for it.
That’s how it’s done. And you will almost certainly find that making your choices quickly in this way will also speed up the work you do on the task.
An important point:
When you are running your pen down the list keep going forward. Do not go back if you think you’ve missed a task. if you find yourself thinking about whether you’ve made the correct choice, stop thinking and just do the chosen task.
Question: Was the choice of tasks any worse than if you had spent time pondering them?