How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

AUTOMATE THE SMALL STUFF
Decision making is tiring for your brain’s deliberate system, whether the stakes
are big or small. Without realizing it, you can fritter away a fair portion of your
mental energy on the day’s minor choices: what to eat, what to wear, when to
exercise, when to sleep, whether to answer the phone, and whether to prioritize
this task or that one. So there’s an argument for “automating” a few of your less
weighty everyday decisions, by setting up simple rules that require no thinking.
It can create head space for thoughts that matter more.
That’s why a number of world leaders choose to minimize the amount of time
they spend worrying about their wardrobe. In an interview, President Barack
Obama once explained: “I wear only gray or blue suits. I don’t want to make
decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. You need to focus your decision-
making energy. You need to routinize yourself.”
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In a similar vein, German
chancellor Angela Merkel is famous for wearing just one jacket design, made up
in multiple colors and fabrics.
Aliceson works in executive search, and her wardrobe certainly contains more
than one jacket. But like Obama and Merkel, she’s found it helpful to automate
some of her daily prioritization decisions. “I’ve tried to turn as many things as I
can into daily habits,” she says. She cites her efforts to exercise and study French
as examples. “I do a few minutes on each every day, rather than agonizing over
whether it’s happening today or not. I just do it. I find committing to a small
daily task takes less mental space than planning to study a few times each week,
and then wondering when or whether to make time.” As a side benefit, she says
it also means she’s done some form of exercise almost every day since she was
sixteen, even when the demands of her workload mean she’s fitting it in by
walking to and from meetings while making calls.
So if you’re feeling mentally exhausted, or if you’re going through a period
where your work is particularly stressful, consider whether you could make like
Merkel. Ask yourself:
Could you decide to do something at the same time or in the same way each
day?

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Could you set yourself a simple response rule, to reduce the amount of time
you spend deciding how to react to common, low-importance situations?
For example, I used to ponder whether to answer the phone when I received
calls from unidentified numbers. I’d spend three seconds wondering whether to
pick up or not—seconds that would often irretrievably distract me from the work
I was doing. But the great majority of these calls were spam, and real callers
always left voicemail, and the time spent on the decision was a pure waste. So I
set myself an automatic rule: “never answer the phone if I don’t recognize the
number.” The result: a small but useful win in the battle to make the most of the
minutes in the day.