Memory versus Willpower

Strong intentions are no match for appropriately-placed reminders

Strong willpower can be undone by weaker memory, according to counselor and author Meg Selig. She recounts how these two forces clashed when she recently thought of an important task while driving home:

But I had to hold that thought in my head for 20 minutes. I can't always remember why I went into the kitchen. What chance did this thought have? Without my to-do list at hand, I was virtually helpless. If I weren't en route, I could call and leave a message for myself--a favorite tactic--but after those statistics comparing cell phone use to drunk driving, no more cell calls from my car. Was I doomed to forget what I wanted to remember?

I decided to use a favorite tool from my mental toolkit--behavior rehearsal. I imagined myself arriving at home, throwing down my purse and pack, walking into the kitchen, and picking up the phone to call Linda.

It didn’t exactly work out that way; the radio and the drive overwhelmed Selig’s rehearsals. Upon arriving home, she fell into her routine and forgot the call for several hours.

Even though her technique failed her in this case, other experts also recommend it. Her description reminds me of the implementation intentions described by Selig’s fellow Psychology Today blogger, Timothy Pychyl, in a January post:

An implementation intention supports this goal intention by setting out in advance when/where and how I will achieve this goal. In this case, it might be "When I put the toothpaste on my toothbrush in the evening (something which is a habit for me), I will then stop and get out the floss first." Essentially what I've done in making this implementation intention is to put the cue for behavior (putting the paste on my toothbrush) into the environment, so it serves as a stimulus for my behavior. I don't have to think about or remind myself about my goal. The moment I put the paste on my brush, my behavior is cued. In time, this should become as automatic as my teeth brushing is already.

So why did Selig’s intentions fail her that day in the car? And why, generally, are we bad at following through on our ideas of what we should, could, or might want to do? Selig says that the problem is limited memory and attention:

As I define it in my book, Changepower, pure willpower is "using only the thought of your motivators to guide your behavior." In this case, my motivator--friendship--was a strong one. My goal was clear--set up a lunch date. No latent or unconscious motivators were involved. I used as many mental tricks as I could to emblazon the intended task into my brain. Both the spirit and the flesh were willing, but the memory was weak.

Psychologist Walter Mischel, he of the famous marshmallow experiments, believes that the crucial skill in developing strong self-control (willpower) is the "strategic allocation of attention." In this view, willpower is like a spotlight. To increase your willpower, deliberately focus the spotlight of your attention on whatever will help you reach your goal.

Attention is the key to willpower, but attention is limited. Memory can bring attention back to the goal--Selig eventually remembered to call her friend--but it is fallible. It doesn’t matter how badly you need or want to do something if you don’t remember it when and where you can do something about it.

All of which strikes me as a good argument in favor of solid time-management tools. For instance, FranklinCovey’s time-management trainers recommend carrying you day planner (or at least a mobile component of your planning system) nearly everywhere; reminders of your “highest priorities” are always at hand, and you can capture incoming information and organize it so that it can be found when it’s needed again. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, repeatedly emphasizes that the mind is for having ideas, not holding them. Allen says the mind does a terrible job of reminding you of what you need to do precisely when and where you need that information. Like FranklinCovey, Allen recommends having what he calls a “ubiquitous capture” tool at hand to collect new ideas and tasks wherever they occur, and that time-management tools must allow you to review lists of reminders when and where you can actually act on them.

Similar to Selig and Mischel, David Allen and FranklinCovey understand that the key human failure isn’t always the will. When choosing a new time-management tool or evaluating a new technique, remember that the best are built to compensate not for the failings of willpower, but of memory and attention.

Monday, March 8, 2010 Posted by Max at 10:41 AM | Contact

Zero-Tolerance For Multitasking

Why we multitask, why it’s a bad idea, and how far one man will go to stop it.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a David Glenn article entitled Divided Attention (hat tip: Freakonomics blog). Glenn recounts findings that chronic multitaskers--those who believe they are a good at multitasking--actually perform worse than habitual singletaskers when dividing their attention. I had heard this from various news outlets last year, but I was still surprised to learn how seriously some of the researchers have taken their findings.

Extreme Singletasking

Whatever you think of the research by University of Michigan psychologist David E. Meyer, you have to admire his commitment:

"I don't want to see students with their computers out, because you know they're surfing the Web. I don't want to see them taking notes. I want to see them paying attention to me."

Wait a minute. No notes? Does that include pen-and-paper note-taking?

"Yes, I don't want that going on either," Meyer says. "I think with the media that are now available, it makes more sense for the professor to distribute the material that seems absolutely crucial either after the fact or before the fact. Or you can record the lecture and make that available for the students to review.”

Other researchers quoted in the article, including Stanford psychology professor Clifford I. Nass, still permit laptops. But why, if they are so clearly distracting?

Technological progress?

Many sources of the worries of these researchers arise from technology. A cellular phone in an automobile may draw a driver’s attention from the road. Facebook, computer games, and web-surfing may draw a laptop-toting student's attention away from the lecture.

And yet, technology also empowers us to use our attention more judiciously. For touch-typists, properly-used laptops might yield more complete notes than pen and paper, while diverting less attention away from the lecturer. Meyer also mentions recording lectures and making them available for students to review. I’ve only had a single professor record and podcast his lectures, but it made a world of difference when test time arrived (and allowed me to be more relaxed in my note-taking).

Technology is not an attention-management problem, per se. Even Meyer admits that when he mentions recording lectures. And yet, he banishes students’ electronics from the classroom. Why is Meyer so opposed to multitasking that he bans even note-taking, its most venerable academic form?

Switching Time

In Glenn’s article, Meyer offers an example of the problem, albeit on a small scale:

He might, for example, ask students to recite the letters A through J as fast as possible, and then the numbers 1 through 10. Each of those tasks typically takes around two seconds. Then he asks them to interweave the two recitations as fast as they can: "A, 1, B, 2," and so on. Does that take four seconds? No, it typically requires 15 to 20 seconds, and even then many students make mistakes.

"This is because there is a switching time cost whenever the subject shifts from the letter-recitation task to the number-recitation task, or vice versa," Meyer says.

Two tasks that each take 2 seconds when done alone take 15 to 20 seconds when done in tandem. That’s about four to five times as long as it would take to do them serially. I couldn’t find a ready reference about whether or not these numbers scale, but they are quite damning if they do. If you could plan a vacation or write a report in an hour, then you could do both--each in turn--in a couple of hours. If, out of boredom or lack of focus you start switching frequently between the two, it could mean a whole afternoon spent on what could have been done by 2:00 PM.

So why do we do it?

With all this evidence arrayed against multitasking, why do we do it? Why do we let distracting second and third tasks crowd our strained attention?

Near the end of David Glenn’s article, Nass supplies a compelling explanation:

"I don't think that law students in classrooms are sitting there thinking, Boy, I'd rather play Freecell than learn the law," Nass says. "I don't think that's the case. What happens is that there's a moment that comes when you say, Boy, I can do something really easy, or I can do something really hard."

Much like what Timothy Pychyl says about procrastinators, when faced with odious tasks, multitaskers “give in to feel good.” The solution might be to change the context--as Merlin Mann says, make sure the right thing to do is the easy thing to do. Meyer’s solution--to take away all student distractions--might not be so extreme, after all.

Friday, March 5, 2010 Posted by Max at 10:26 AM | Contact

Extreme Visualization

How both proponents and detractors of visualization go too far

In the continuum of pop psychology advice, somewhere between goal-setting and meditation lies the technique known as visualization, the practice of vividly imagining a goal or behavior. Authors from Jack Canfield to Stephen Covey to Rhonda Byrne encourage us to employ our imagination and focus our thoughts on what we want to create in the world.

This process is sometimes described as harnessing seemingly supernatural powers (witness Byrne’s characterization of it in The Secret), which may lead skeptics to discount the entire practice. However, there is some evidence that visualization--at least in some forms--holds real value. Such is the basis for Matthew Hutson’s Mind Your Body: Going Through the Motions, an article on PsychologyToday.com:

In one study at Texas A and M, medical students learning venipuncture received 30 minutes of guided physical practice followed by either 30 more minutes of practice, 30 minutes of guided mental imagery, or no more training. When tested, the first two groups performed better than the third, and just as well as each other. The same effect was seen in students learning to suture.

Mental rehearsal can be even better than physical practice because it activates more abstract neural representations of physical skills (with less specific detail about the muscles used), reports Erica Wohldmann, a psychologist at California State University Northridge. If you physically practice your tennis backhand with a coach, and then practice it incorrectly on your own, rehearsing the wrong movements could hinder relearning the right technique later.

Mentally practicing a clumsy backhand is not muscularly detailed enough to hurt your swing. It is detailed enough to prevent forgetting what you've already learned, though.

Hutson never mentions the v-word, but this mental rehearsal is very much of a piece with the kind of visualization discussed by Stephen Covey in The The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, in which he encourages readers to relax and vividly imagine a scenario and how they would respond to it, and to replay it in their minds over and over again until it becomes their natural response. It bears mentioning that this is not the same as the “thoughts become things” visualization taught by The Secret. In Byrne’s film, footage of astronauts and athletes appears with a voiceover describing exactly the sort of mental practice Hutson discussed. However, The Secret prescribes this technique not only (or even primarily) to become better at something, but as a way to get anything one desires; prominent examples include visualizing dream homes and new cars. The process of visualization, according to the “teachers” in The Secret, activates the “Law of Attraction” and automatically draws desired things to us.

Purveyors of the “Law of Attraction” blur the lines between visualization as a mundane mental process and visualization as a supernatural force, but they are not alone. Bob Waldrep makes this very leap in an Apologetics.org essay entitled The Shifting Paradigms of Stephen Covey. Waldrep doesn’t come right out and say “visualization is witchcraft!” but I am struck by how little his argument would change if he did. Waldrep seems to feel that the inclusion of visualization in The 7 Habits, given the fact that visualization appears in a variety of New Age and occult teachings, automatically puts The 7 Habits on a dangerous occult footing. To be fair, Waldrep cites a number of other ties between Covey’s material and the New Age movement. Still, the examples I remember most vividly from Covey’s book involve visualizing reacting with patience and love to a child’s misbehavior, or helping his son visualize plays before college football games. In other words, Covey encourages behavioral rehearsals, exactly the sort of visualization supported--at least tentatively--by research. Focusing self-centered or materialistic goals may be un-Christian, but I would be shocked to learn that this sort of mental rehearsal conflicts with mainstream (or even most fringe) Christian doctrine.

Assuming that you are open to the possibility that mental imagery works, and pretty sure (as I am) that it is not the work of The Devil, how can you put this process to work for you? Hutson advises making the mental practice as vivid and detailed as possible. He also recommends slowing a process down in your mind if you are a novice at a given task. I expect visualization works better when rehearsing things that you have done at least a few times before, rather than practicing entirely new pursuits. As Hutson notes, mental practice “is detailed enough to prevent forgetting what you've already learned.” If you haven’t learned enough to even rehearse, then you may be using visualization in the mode of The Secret--not as useful mental practice, but as a form of magical thinking.

Monday, March 1, 2010 Posted by Max at 10:55 AM | Contact

Clarity creates completion.

Reduce uncertainty to curb procrastination.

Do you procrastinate some tasks despite the fact that they appear on a tidy to-do list (possibly several lists) somewhere in your life? It happens to me with all kinds of things: small, innocuous, easy actions; major, onerous tasks that beg procrastination; and even things I ostensibly like or want to do.

As I said in my previous post on Stale Tasks, the way I record a task matters. “Talk to John,” is only meaningful as long as I remember what I want to talk to John about. If one issue is so contentious and dominant that John will instantly know what it’s about when I phone him up, he can remind me. Otherwise, I need to write something more akin to “Talk to John about ________.”

Based on my own deep catalog of ancient to-do lists filled with now-obscure tasks, the purely mechanical problem of memory offered good reason to eschew vaguely-written tasks. Still, I thought that there was something more at work; vague tasks just seem to have an icky-ness (to use a technical term).

Turns out there’s something to this intuition. As procrastination researcher Timothy Pychyl wrote in 2008, on the subject of uncertainty:

We often don't know exactly what to do next. That's part of life, both our personal and professional lives. Uncertainty can be a wonderful challenge in life that sparks our creativity and makes life interesting. It can also be seen as a threat, potentially undermining our well-being.

If uncertainty is threatening, like any threat, it will evoke negative emotions. . . .

What does this mean? Usually in this situation the mood regulation involves leaving the task, or procrastinating. We escape the negative emotions by escaping the uncertainty which means walking away from the task . . . at least for the moment we say as we rationalize our choice.

Of course this focus on mood regulation undermines our volitional skills related to the task. Instead of using our volitional skills to self-regulate our behavior to stay on task, perhaps mustering our creativity to make a plan of action, we self-regulate our emotions. Mood takes precedence, and we pay the cost in terms of task delay.

This brings to mind two conflicting feelings about my lists: the sense of clarity and manageability that comes with making a list of things I need to do, and a feeling of uncertainty about what to do next or how to do it that sometimes appears even as I review that same list.

There is a tension between these two feelings, but it can be resolved by minimizing uncertainty when we make the list.

First, even when a given to-do item seems crystal clear now, take an extra second and write a good task: use a clear verb (“write,” “call,” “e-mail,” “cook,” “buy,” “pack,” “tell,” etc.) and, as appropriate, a subject or object. “Christopher” = bad task. “Call Christopher re: Anderson project report” = better task.

Second, check in with yourself to make sure that you know what to do next about the task. If you don’t even know where to begin with the aforementioned hypothetical “Anderson project report,” unless you are calling Christopher to find out where to begin, you might need to do something else first. If you need to know or do something before calling Christopher, don’t take for granted that you’ll know what that is in the moment. If, on reflection, you realize you really don’t know what to do next, then capture a to-do item to find out. Write down “Research Anderson project report in project files” or “Brainstorm anticipated questions Christopher will ask re: Anderson report.”

Third, consider the context. I found the piece mentioned above through a more recent Pychyl post on the subject of implementation intentions. An implementation intention is a plan in advance of when, where and how you would take action towards a goal. As Dr. Pychyl explains, such an intention puts the cue for the behavior into the environment, and also reduces some of the uncertainty. This how/when/where format reminds me of David Allen’s next action lists in Getting Things Done. Rather than a catch-all to-do list, Allen recommends making lists by context: at work, at home, at computer, errands, things to talk to my spouse about, etc. This creates a clearer implantation intention (by making "when" and "where" a part of the task list). It also helps the list-maker avoid having to think through, “What can I actually do right here, right now?” each time they scan the list.

If you find yourself procrastinating, consider whether your list is clear enough. Do you know exactly what each item means and what you need to do about it--and where, when, and with (or to) whom? If not, get clear on your tasks so you can clear the path to completion.

Friday, February 26, 2010 Posted by Max at 9:07 AM | Contact