Don’t draw up your task list in the morning – do it the evening before, when you will have a more distant perspective
What does going on a diet have in common with time management? Here’s a musical clue: Little Orphan Annie sings: “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow – you’re always a day away.” Sheila Hancock’s song “My Last Cigarette” has a more cynical bent: “I’ll give up the habit, I will even yet, when I’ve had just one more cigarette.”
The songs could hardly be more different but the common thread is the way that the promise of tomorrow is transformed overnight into something altogether different: today. Strange things happen to us when tomorrow turns into today. Tomorrow we’ll eat fruit rather than candy bars. Tomorrow we’ll watch Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue rather than Sleepless in Seattle. And yet curiously when tomorrow arrives, we eat chocolate and watch romcoms. Our preferences flip.
This isn’t just my whimsical summary of human nature: the psychologist Daniel Read of Warwick Business School and his colleagues have conducted experiments finding pretty much exactly this behaviour. Experimental participants, given the opportunity to select food or movies in advance, are more likely to choose the highbrow film or the healthy snack. When the moment of truth arrives, they often change their minds if given the option.
Economists give this tendency the charmless name of hyperbolic discounting. Hyperbolic discounting poses some obvious and well-understood problems for those of us going on a diet or saving for a pension. The problem of personal productivity, however, is far thornier.
On any typical day – indeed, from moment to moment – we have to decide how to spend our time. We have a choice of long-term and short-term projects, big and small tasks/jobs, fixed commitments and free time, all within a daily rhythm of productive moments and postprandial slumps. To add to the challenge, unexpected tasks are always arriving in the inbox.
Armed with traditional tools of to-do list and calendar, this already looks like a tough enough optimisation problem. Add hyperbolic discounting and it looks vicious.
“Managing time is almost inhumane in its requirements,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioural scientist at Duke University. He’s right. While trying to figure out the wisest way to spend our time, we are constantly tempted to surf around on YouTube. Or perhaps we engage in busy-work, reorganising the filing cabinet and kidding ourselves that just because it’s work, it’s worth doing. Tomorrow’s priorities – applying for a promotion, starting the next big project, learning a new language – keep evaporating whenever tomorrow turns into today.
What are the solutions?
One possibility is to schedule tasks ahead of time in the calendar. The big presentation, the Japanese revision, the washing-up, all of it gets a diary slot. There’s promise in this approach. It still requires willpower but putting long-term priorities firmly in the calendar helps deal with the hyperbolic discounting problem. But an overstuffed diary is inflexible and one missed target means an entire calendar must be reworked. The system is unlikely to work for all but the most predictable lists of tasks.
Perhaps technology can save us. Ariely is part of a team producing a new smartphone app, Timeful, which aims to deliver the diary-stuffing approach more intelligently. The idealised form of the software would know everything you wanted to get done – from writing a novel to having a drink with old friends to doing the laundry. It would know how long each task would take, by when it had to be done, how important it was and when might be a productive time to do it. The software would also have access to your calendar, and it would tentatively schedule your tasks wherever it found free space. Over time it would learn about your productivity.
This seems enormously useful, although much depends on how close the algorithm comes to this idealised vision – and how much fuss it is to interact with it. (Users of iPhones can give it a try right now.)
. . .
For those who prefer a pen-and-paper approach to productivity, what to do about the hyperbolic discounting problem? I have two suggestions. The first helps bring a long-term perspective to the daily to-do list. Don’t draw up your list of tasks first thing in the morning – do it the previous evening, when you will have a slightly more distant perspective. When you do so, think about the two or three tasks you would feel most satisfied to have ticked off. Put those at the top of the list and make them your priority.
The second suggestion flips the telescope around and brings today’s perspective to tomorrow’s commitments. When being invited to do things months in advance, the diary usually looks pretty clear and it’s tempting to say “yes”. But whenever a new invitation arrives, ask yourself not, “should I accept the invitation in March?” but, “would I accept the invitation if it was for this week?”
The fundamental insight of hyperbolic discounting is that while tomorrow always looks different, eventually tomorrow will be today. If the flattering invitation would be impossible to accept for this week, what on earth makes you think the first week of March will look any different once it arrives? Tomorrow is always a day away – but your rash commitments are not.
First published at ft.com.