Our brains are hardwired to sabotage our productivity. Can we do anything about it?
Illustration by Vicente Niro
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Economists used to believe that human beings are fundamentally rational creatures.
They based their models on the assumption that – when faced with a trade-off and armed with complete and accurate information – people choose the option that maximizes their well-being.
It’s unclear if these economists had ever actually met a human being.
We procrastinate and eat junk food and don’t save for retirement.
We miss deadlines and say yes to things we don’t have time for and stay in careers that make us miserable.
We complain about not having enough time and then fail to use the time we do have wisely.
In short, we’re kind of bad at making good decisions.
In the 1970s, Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman turned the field of economics upside down by observing what, in hindsight, seems obvious: people act against their rational self-interest all the time. But where many people saw random quirks of human psychology, Tversky and Kahneman saw patterns.
Over decades of research and experiments, the pair found that we all tend to make the same mental mistakes, and we make them over and over again. Humans are irrational, yes. But they are, as psychologist Dan Ariely named his book on the subject, predictably irrational. Which is very good news for us.
There’s not much we can do about random irrationality, but predictable irrationality can be studied, cataloged, and maybe – just maybe – avoided. Tversky and Kahneman’s work sparked a whole new field of study called behavioral economics to do just that. To date, behavioral economists have identified over 100 of these persistent mental errors – called cognitive biases – that distort our decision-making in all sorts of ways every day.
This being a blog about productivity, we’re going to focus on the seven cognitive biases that have the biggest impact on the way we spend our time, prioritize our tasks, and achieve (or fall short of) our goals – with concrete strategies to avoid them:
Skipped that introduction? Here’s what you need to know:
Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that distort our decision-making, leading to objectively worse outcomes. These mental errors shape our lives every day in ways big and small, from where we get our news to what we decide to eat to how we spend our time.
