Studies have found that the brain finds making decisions particularly taxing. It also finds it hard work to focus.
If you ever get that feeling that switching tasks feels like turning the Titanic – and you can almost FEEL your brain scraping against that iceberg as you do so, creaking and screeching in protest – well, you’re right!
If we fritter our mental energy away making meaningless or small decisions, like we do in a grocery store, for example ... then we are likely to tire ourselves and – perhaps more importantly - make bad decisions.
The brain capacity involved is easily over-used. Especially in today’s world of split-second decision making, fast cars and fast modems, and not to mention, a plethora of often meaningless choices that we are forced to make every time we enter a shop. And yet we are assumed to welcome a greater choice! Notice how many adverts trumpet the wonderful gift of “wide choice”, “huge range”, “so much to choose from”, “a world of choice”, “lots of options to suit you” and so on.
A morning spent in this way can lead to an afternoon of making important decisions – badly.
Even completely unrelated choices. In the morning it’s which of the fifteen coffees to have, the mocha, the latte, the this, the that – and the afternoon it could be what kind of trust to set up, or how to structure a deal. In this case, the deal is going to suffer, thanks to the coffee choices in the morning.
In this way, your brain is like a muscle. And you wouldn’t go for a long run the morning before a race, would you?
Any kind of choice (which magazine, which breakfast, which coffee) will do this to you. Anything that takes conscious effort and has some kind of consequence, even if it’s not terribly important (decaff or espresso). You could end up making a great decision about breakfast at 8am and a bad one about your finances at 3pm.
Knowing this, it becomes clear that you need to cut down on your choices rather than increase them. Windsurfing or golf? Fishing or a family drive? Wealth Creation or carrying on as before? The black shoes or the brown? The blue tie or the grey? All of these decisions have a price to be paid in terms of your mental energy, focus and effectiveness.
Juggling tasks – what we call multi-tasking – is therefore also not a good idea as you use up energy prioritizing and scheduling things before you even get started.
And the end result is that your judgement suffers. Something we really cannot afford to have happen to us! Other effects – you tend to give up easier when faced with challenges; you tend to put things off repeatedly; the quality of your work suffers; and you even tire physically.
Now – if you were a marketer – signing someone up for an account – knowing this, perhaps you would put a whole string of meaningless and unimportant decisions into your application process (what color card?) , and then when it comes time to negotiate the interest rate, you could benefit from this fatigue! On the other hand, you as a consumer, knowing this, could spot and resist any such distractions and make sure you put your own priorities first!
Remember that Freud’s discoveries about how the human mind and psyche function were used FIRST by the founder of public relations, his nephew Edward Bernays, to help companies and governments control the public ... and only then did they go on to be read and known more widely. A little known fact. Those with the knowledge truly do have the potential of power. The good thing about that is – you can inform yourself, and if you take any action(apply it) to improve your knowledge, you will be ahead of the crowd. Your best strategy, always, is to inform (invest in) yourself.
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