Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it)

The Maximizer vs. Satisficer Scale

How much of a satisficer — a combination of satisfy and suffice, meaning you set good-enough rules for decisions and take it — are you on one end, versus how much of a maximizer are you on the other? Another word for maximizer: you explore all of the possible options looking for the best thing.

There's not a lot of evidence that maximizers actually make better decisions, even though they spend a lot more time making them. They're less happy with their choices, more prone to regret, less happy with their lives, and much more likely to opt for reversible decisions — even though that typically prevents them from committing one way or the other.

The people who are more satisfied tend to be the ones who say: "Here's what good enough looks like, and once I get to it, I'm going to take it and move on."

Commitment Beats Optionality

Experiment: whether people are able to exchange the goods they bought. The result found that people who are not able to exchange or refund end up happier with what they have — because they're committed.

Ellen Langer: don't make the right decision, make the decision, and then make it right. Since you can't know what the perfect thing is anyway, it's more important what you do with it after you've made the choice than agonizing on the front end.

Anticipated Regret

Anticipated regret — the fear of having made the wrong decision — feels so bad that the idea you might make the wrong decision ends up making you make no decision at all.

Are Constraints the Secret to Great Design?

If you design for the most constrained users, you'll often be identifying problems that are just extreme versions of problems many more users have. That's what shows you where to focus your design effort.

Is Multitasking Secretly Hurting You?

Some kinds of multitasking are possible. We can walk and talk at the same time — when one of the tasks is basically automatic, combining them works. But the way people generally mean it, two cognitively engaged tasks at once, isn't possible.

Gloria Mark: your brain is like a whiteboard, and you erase it when you switch — but there's residue left for the next thing, and it interferes with the next thing, building up over the day until you sleep.

The more switches someone makes in a day, the lower their end-of-day productivity and the higher their end-of-day stress — measured by things like heart rate variability and immune function. The impact on stress is huge.

The scariest finding: your attention gets trained. If you're interrupted by notifications or other people all day, then put those away and try to focus, you will self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rate you've become accustomed to — as if there's an internal distraction barometer that wants to keep a certain cadence going.

The fixes:

• Work in blocks — a stretch of time doing exactly one thing.
• Keep a pad next to you, and when intrusive thoughts pop in, write them down. Cognitive outsourcing.
• The Hemingway principle: make the last thing you do each workday defining the important thing you'll start in the morning, so you don't start the day disrupted.

How to Use Constraints Without Being Trapped

When people are told not only what they have to do but how they have to do it, that's too much constraint — ingenuity and creativity go down.

Ask yourself: could I still surprise myself? If the answer is no, you're way too constrained. The point is to leave wiggle room where you're forced to explore.