Recent research has validated what to most of us is an intuitive truth: thinking is hard. It's unnatural, abnormal. Our brain's ability to figure out very complicated stuff, such as walking, talking and driving, is almost beyond comprehension. But it's actually programmed to stop thinking about those behaviours as soon as possible. It's crying out: "Help! Get this pattern on to cruise control, please! Don't make me keep having to rethink how to tie my shoelaces, brush my teeth or navigate through this traffic. Can we just figure that out as quickly as possible and then put it to rest, for ever?!"
Our whole neurology is wired to automate that process as soon as we can, and it does that extremely well. The vast majority of our brain is dedicated to functional learning and physiological- habit implementation.
But, in order to know what to do with that friggin' email staring you in the face, cruise control won't cut it. There's nothing to put on automatic that you can trust to deal with it. You have to think - again. What the heck is this? Who is it from? Why did they send this to me? What are they asking me to do, if anything? What does this input mean to me, in terms of my commitments in my life? What am I going to do about it? And, oh yeah, how does this relate to all the other things that I'm already committed to?
Welcome to the existential angst of knowledge work, and the source of the greatest volume of stress in today's world: the lack of clear decision-making on the front end about what things mean to me that I have let into my psychic space, and therefore what I need to make happen about them. Emails don't have attached notes that say, "By accepting this email from your sister, you must now determine what, exactly, you are going to commit to regarding your mother's upcoming birthday and what and who needs to take the next action on it."
It would be challenging enough with the volume of such things showing up just to juggle all the outcomes you've identified to achieve and all the required actions to move them to completion. But the primary task is to make those decisions in the first place. What are you committed to finish? And what do you need to do to start the process to make that happen?
Here's a big rub: there's no one on your team. No matter how close you think you are to your life partner or your business cohorts, they're all preoccupied with figuring out what the heck to do with the last email you (or their boss or their sister) sent them, much less a resource available to you to figure out the work that you need to define. And they're absolutely no help, right now, in making it any easier for you to clarify and parse what to do, if anything, about the last communication you got from them.
The front-loaded requirement of assessing the nature of any and all of your inputs, and your relationship to them, is a big job. And it's yours alone.
That's why there are papers, notebooks of notes, emails amassing over the ridge, and a cacophony of thoughts in your mind. To know what to do with them and where they should land, you have to decide what they mean to you. And their meaning is not self-evident - you have to think. Applying focus is required in order to achieve a state of mind unencumbered with psychic dross. It's hard to be available for creativity and the unexpected when you're laden with those internal open loops.
What if you could build in an automated process of how to deal with unclarified "stuff" that shows up? Exactly in the same way you have built in the responses to dirty dishes or an unexpected detour on your journey? It's possible, but it requires approaching your thinking and decision-making behaviours as systematic and repeatable, as if those are mundane commodity practices. It's possible, but it's unnatural. Like driving.
Wired UK, November 2009
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