If you read almost any book about ”productivity”, ”efficiency” or similar, one of the tips you’re bound to get is to have fewer meetings. In my job, I’d say I have a meeting on average twice a month. So I must be the happiest, most efficient worker in the history of the universe, right? Not exactly.

I’ve found out that I love meetings. Not because they are often basically a group of people sitting around, drinking coffee, and pretending that the discussion totally justifies spending 15 minutes on the current state of politics, sports, or playing didyouseethatarticleaboutthethingilove. Or how many meetings are just rehashes of the old ones, because people a) don’t remember what you talked about last time, and b) haven’t done what was agreed on previously. So you pretty much keep going through the same points again (well, at least you won’t need new slides).

All this aside, I’ve found that meetings have an important motivational effect on me. Working from Germany for projects in Finland means that on a lot of days, I’m basically sitting alone in my yuge office (well, huge for a PhD student). We do have lunches together with colleagues at the office – but otherwise the social interaction is very academic: everyone says “hi” in the morning, and then retreats to their own cave…I mean room for the day. So, for most of the time it’s just me and the computer. Actually, it’s me and two computers, since I’m carrying a laptop to work in the train. Fantastic, twice the capacity for procrastinating online!

Oh yeah, the meetings. It may sound silly or obvious, but I see now that it’s way much easier to work, when you get to have a meeting every once in a while, talk to your supervisor about your work, and get at least a fleeting feeling that someone actually cares about the project you’re working on. I do realise that research is very much driven by intrinsic motivation – most people do the PhD because they’re really curious about some topic, not because they want to get a better wage or impress someone else (btw, these reasons seem way more common in Germany). But the fact that someone else is also invested in the project totally sparks me. I don’t know why, but so far I get the feeling that it’s related to a sense that I’m not willing to let other people down. So, at least for me, there definitely seems to be a floor level of meetings that I should have, because it helps to keep up my motivation. No book has ever mentioned this effect, but I guess most workplaces are chock full of meetings, so that this is not a relevant risk – unlike coffee and bun overdoses.
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With these thoughts in mind, I can honestly say I’m really looking forward to flying to Helsinki tomorrow, and attending some meetings! Another point to improve motivation would be to somehow make me seem more connected to our work group when here, but so far I’m lost on how to do that. If anyone else has any good tips from their teleworking experiences, help is appreciated!

A concept that comes up pretty often in decision research is the one of aspiration levels. They are meant to reflect some kind of preference levels, meaning levels of attributes that the decision maker would like to have in an ideal situation. The idea behind the concept is that such levels can guide both the decision maker and the analyst to look for portions of the alternative space that’s relevant – better to search close to the optimal levels.

Now that’s nice and all, but for practical purposes I think an inverse concept is perhaps even more useful. By inverse I mean rejection levels. Or, as I like to call them, what-the-hell-I’m-absolutely-not-willing-to-accept-that levels. The idea is simple enough: rejection levels signify the worst attribute levels you’re willing to accept. A value worse than that means you’ll discard it immediately and look elsewhere.

The benefit is that if you have many alternatives, rejection levels can be used to make the search space smaller very fast. Imagine you’re buying a bike, and there are two criteria: cost and quality. You probably have some aspiration levels – the ideal bike. That’s reflected in the upper left corner (low price, terrific quality). But that only tells us the portion of the search space with the best alternative, but unfortunately very likely a non-existing one. Looking at the picture below, it’s clear there’s still a lot of search space remaining.

The trick with rejection levels is that you need to set them before looking at the options. A bike can be bought without issues, but any more complex decision and trouble arises. For example, house buying is of considerable difficulty in itself. And what marketers know is that if the house makes a good first impression, you’re likely to start coming up with reasons for why that house was just so lovely, convenient, and so on. As a result, people tend to exceed their budget after falling in heavy with a single house.

To avoid this, rejection levels are a great technique. If the price goes above the rejection level, you can confidently say thanks, but no thanks and just move on. By making the rejection decisions with a rule that you’ve committed to beforehand is much, much easier than mulling over each and every option you come across.

A study of the different biases and human irrationality may at times look like a depressing task. After all, one is mostly finding out all the ways we screw up, all the ways we behave unoptimally and just make stupid decisions. Well, thankfully, the same findings can be used in another direction – helping us to make wiser, sounder decisions. This is usually called nudging, a term coined in Thaler’s and Sunstein’s prize-winning book Nudge.

At the heart of nudging is the idea that we don’t have unlimited amounts of free will and energy. No, we get lazy, tired, worn out and sometimes just don’t pay attention. However, to coerce people would be immoral. We all have our right to choose – no matter how bad the choice. That’s why nudging focuses on the choice architecture. That means changing the decision situation so that people will in fact choose better, i.e. they are more likely choose what they want in the long term, instead of succumbing to the willpower or attention deficits in the immediate situation. It’s like building hallways that make more sense, and lead you more directly to where you want to go. You can still choose to go someplace else, getting what you (usually) want has just been made a little easier.

Thaler’s and Sunstein’s book focuses on the implications of nudging for public policy. But in this post, I’ll take a narrower perspective, just looking at how you can nudge yourself to better decisions.

The main finding from the last decades is that we have two main ways to make choices. The first is System 1, which is a fast, associative and unreflective way. System 1 is the one we use most of the time, because it’s easy and requires little effort. System 2, on the other hand, is slow, reflective, and requires a lot of effort. That’s one big reason why we cannot use System 2 all the time. As it stands, System 1 is quite error-prone: with bad decision architecture, it can focus on wrong cues and lead to really stupid choices. But with a good architecture, choosing is smooth sailing. Choosing with System 2, on the other hand, is tough and effortful, but should in most cases lead to a good choice.

This very rough and simplified theory leads to two main ways to nudge: improving the architecture for a better System 1 choice, or engaging System 2 for the choice. Both are legitimate and powerful options. Which to use – well, that depends on the context. Let’s look at some known examples:

The 20 second rule

You’re at home, watching your favorite TV show with pleasure. As often is the case, you feel a slight twinge of hunger – a snacking hunger. What do you eat? Usually, at this point people go to the kitchen and get somethinIg that’s in easy reach and doesn’t need preparing – like chocolate, or chips. What if the chips were on the top shelf? Would you still get them?

That’s the point of the 20 second rule: you’re more likely to choose something requiring little effort. Just having the chips on the top shelf is likely to stop you from getting them, just like placing the scones out of reach at a meeting will decrease their consumption heavily. This is such a common tip that there are tons of examples: laying out your running gear for the morning, hiding the remote to read books, or setting up a site blocker that you can set to require a time-consuming task before you can launch Facebook. All these have the same aim: guiding your System 1 towards choices you would – in a more energized and reflective mood – approve as the better ones.

Default routines

A variation of the 20 second rule is to create default routines. That means creating patterns, which will be beneficial for you and which you will execute even when tired. For example, our PhD seminars have time and again told us to write in the morning, every day you come to work. For one thing, writing is important, and this pattern ensures I’ll have time for it. For a second thing – and I think this is even more important – having writing as a default routine ensures I’ll start writing even when tired, confused or just “not feeling like it”. But usually, once I get off the ground, I’ll be in the mood. 

Another example is a guy from SF I once talked to. He had this habit of always cutting up about 500g of vegetables when he arrived from work. Having done that, it was easy to blend them into a smoothie or make a salad. And having them already cut up usually meant he ate them, too, since he wouldn’t want to waste food. I thought this was ingenious!

Blocking easy cues

For engaging System 2, it can help to block cues that System 1 would like to use. For example, a known problem is the halo effect, meaning perceiving one good attribute will cause us to evaluate other attributes more highly, too. For example, people tend to think better looking people are also more intelligent. If you’re evaluating project proposals, you could hide the names of the proposers and evaluate the proposals just on their own terms. Having the names visible might influence you in a bad way. After all, you wouldn’t want to approve a project just because it’s been proposed by a colleague you like to play tennis with? Or, to remove the effect of visual design, have the proposals submitted on a template, so they all look alike (a lot of foundations seem to do this). Making decisions based on template proposals without names is going to be harder - but that’s the point. Necessarily, you will have to focus on the content, since System 1 doesn’t have a lot to go on anymore. And, being a diligent person, your System 2 choices will outperform the System 1 choices.

So, as a wrap-up, here are the two main pathways to nudging towards better choices:

1.       Helping System 1 to better options by better choice architecture

2.       Engaging System 2 by blocking System 1

Which option to go for depends on the case. The more complex the decision at hand, the better option 2 is going to be. In contrast, the more often a choice situation occurs, the more sense it makes to use System 1 on that, saving energy.