We discussed “Choosing Rocks” earlier this year, and I wanted to return to Four Thousand Weeks again to discuss distraction and control.

On the true nature of saying “no”:

Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, “it’s much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”

This is the principle of the popular “One Thing” argument: with finite time and energy, we are always saying no to things inadvertently by omission. Saying yes to reasonable or even awesome things can be a mistake if it distracts from your true priorities. If you really want to coach your kid’s sports team, even the most engaging opportunities may be a no to your priority as a parent.

French philosopher Henri Bergson tunneled to the heart of Kafka’s problem in his book Time and Free Will. We invariably prefer indecision over-committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.” In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy. “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” Once again, the seemingly dispiriting message here is actually a liberating one. Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.

The liberation is perhaps a bit more bittersweet than Burkeman suggests, but this is a fantastic paragraph.

Distraction from Without and Within

So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. In the words of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, they sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want.”

Frankfurt also wrote the delightfully-titled short book On Bullshit.

In T. S. Eliot’s words, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

It’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief.

Ugh. How many times have people harped on the advice to change the notification settings on your phone? Yes, of course that helps to an extent. But I am perfectly capable of distracting myself thank you very much.

Mary Oliver calls this inner urge toward distraction “the intimate interrupter”—that “self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels,” promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand, to whatever’s unfolding one browser tab away. “One of the puzzling lessons I have learned,” observes the author Gregg Krech, describing his own experience of the same urge, “is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing. I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish.”

Burkeman suggests an extension of the timeless classic Pascal quote (from—get this—1654!): ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’

No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no limits apply—where you can update yourself instantaneously on events taking place a continent away, present yourself however you like, and keep scrolling forever through infinite newsfeeds, drifting through “a realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present,” to quote the critic James Duesterberg. It’s true that killing time on the internet often doesn’t feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained.

The overarching point is that what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. The reason it’s hard to focus on a conversation with your spouse isn’t that you’re surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table. On the contrary, “surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table” is what you do because it’s hard to focus on the conversation.

Satisfaction = reality minus expectation:

The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.

Control Is an Illusion

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining “Hofstadter’s law,” which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

So a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied—no matter how much you plan or fret, or how much extra time you leave to get to the airport.

I remember struggling to get through Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in high school (my father kept telling me to read it, I wasn’t quite that big of a dork). Some of the references and predictions have aged out, but it’s still something else (really been meaning to re-read it sometime).

What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

Yet it turns out to be perilously easy to overinvest in this instrumental relationship to time—to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are—with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the “real” value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.

Always beware the arrival fallacy.

Last year, we also discussed Inescapable Finitude and the Productivity Trap.

From the excellent Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland:

In theory, you can’t be too logical, but in practice, you can. Yet we never seem to believe that it is possible for logical solutions to fail. After all, if it makes sense, how can it possibly be wrong?

[…]

If you are a technocrat, you’ll generally have achieved your status by explaining things in reverse; the plausible post-rationalisation is the stock-in-trade of the commentariat. Unfortunately, it is difficult for such people to avoid the trap of assuming that the same skills that can explain the past can be used to predict the future.

The world trades in stories, but compelling stories aren’t necessarily true. See also: hindsight bias. The post hoc seeming inevitability of where we are now is a mirage.

Adam Smith, the father of economics – but also, in a way, the father of behavioural economics – clearly spotted this fallacy over two centuries ago. He warned against the ‘man of system’, who: ‘is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it . . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse [sic] to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.’

This chess piece argument is also a metaphor favored by conservative economist Thomas Sowell as the key failing conceit of central planning.

The problem that bedevils organisations once they reach a certain size is that narrow, conventional logic is the natural mode of thinking for the risk-averse bureaucrat or executive. There is a simple reason for this: you can never be fired for being logical. If your reasoning is sound and unimaginative, even if you fail, it is unlikely you will attract much blame. It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.

[…]

The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.

The primary function of managers is to preserve their position within management. The second function is to be promoted. The distant third is to actually manage people well or improve their organizations. (Further Reading: Academic Medicine and the Peter Principle)

The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’*

[…]

It is fine to provide up-to-date magazines in reception to show that you care, but when the urge to show commitment to patients involves performing unnecessary tests and invasive surgery, it probably needs to be reined back.

Yes. I am reminded of Patient Satisfaction: A Danger to be Avoided.

If you want to change people’s behaviour, listening to their rational explanation for their behaviour may be misleading, because it isn’t ‘the real why’. This means that attempting to change behaviour through rational argument may be ineffective, and even counterproductive. There are many spheres of human action in which reason plays a very small part. Understanding the unconscious obstacle to a new behaviour and then removing it, or else creating a new context for a decision, will generally work much more effectively.

Behavior change is hard. I can barely control a whole host of my own impulses, let alone guide others.

The self-regarding delusions of people in high-status professions lie behind much of this denial of unconscious motivation. Would you prefer to think of yourself as a medical scientist pushing the frontiers of human knowledge, or as a kind of modern-day fortune teller, doling out soothing remedies to worried patients? A modern doctor is both of these things, though is probably employed more for the latter than the former. Even if no one – patient or doctor – wants to believe this, it will be hard to understand and improve the provision of medical care unless we sometimes acknowledge it.

[…]

To put it crudely, when you multiply bullshit with bullshit, you don’t get a bit more bullshit – you get bullshit squared.

[…]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb applies this rule to choosing a doctor: you don’t want the smooth, silver-haired patrician who looks straight out of central casting – you want his slightly overweight, less patrician but equally senior colleague in the ill-fitting suit. The former has become successful partly as a result of his appearance, the latter despite it.

The Taleb reference is commonly referenced even if it may not always work in real life. It’s one of those lightbulb-generating remarks that strikes that magic of being surprisingly intuitive after seeming counterintuitive.

There is an important corollary: proxy metrics (patrician manner, various training factors) don’t actually mean what we want them to mean. You want to see a Harvard-trained doctor because you assume they are better through the implied meritocratic scarcity of an elite institution and the presumption that therefore, surrounded by other geniuses and some presumably fancy digs, their training was uniquely better—but there is no actual basis for this belief.

In making decisions, we should at times be wary of paying too much attention to numerical metrics. When buying a house, numbers (such as number of rooms, floor space or journey time to work) are easy to compare, and tend to monopolise our attention. Architectural quality does not have a numerical score, and tends to sink lower in our priorities as a result, but there is no reason to assume that something is more important just because it is numerically expressible.

Measurability does not equal importance. See “Overweighing what can be counted” in Munger’s Incorrect Approaches to Medicine.

The more data you have, the easier it is to find support for some spurious, self-serving narrative. The profusion of data in future will not settle arguments: it will make them worse.

…I naively thought Covid would bring people together. And it did, for maybe a week or two. Then the dueling data wars began.

We are flush with data. Absolutely awash in data. If the past few years of social media have taught us anything, it’s that information isn’t truth. It’s raw material for storytelling. Yoval Noah Harari does a nice if depressing job discussing information networks in his recent book, Nexus.

There’s a common first-things-first productivity parable of the rocks and the jar. It goes like this:

Imagine you have an empty jar that represents your life, and you have different sizes of rocks that represent different priorities and commitments. The big rocks represent the most important things in life, like your family and health. Medium rocks would be secondary priorities like intermediate career goals, social commitments—other worthwhile but less crucial activities. And finally, the small rocks and sand represent the minor daily tasks, distractions, and time-fillers that can easily consume our attention.

The thrust: If you fill your jar with sand and small rocks first, you won’t have room for the big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, then the medium rocks, the sand will filter down into the spaces between them—and everything fits.

From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:

Here the story ends—but it’s a lie. The smug teacher is being dishonest. He has rigged his demonstration by bringing only a few big rocks into the classroom, knowing they’ll all fit into the jar. The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks—and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar. The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.

That tracks.

The Art of Creative Neglect Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time. I’m borrowing this phrasing from the graphic novelist and creativity coach Jessica Abel, who borrowed it in turn from the world of personal finance, where it’s long been an article of faith because it works.

Abel saw that her only viable option was to claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. “If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.”

From both of these passages, my takeaway is that we can’t hope it actually choose all the rocks in some cohesive way. Avoid some of the useless filler sand, sure. But, maybe, don’t wait and just choose a rock sometimes:

Thinking in terms of “paying yourself first” transforms these one-off tips into a philosophy of life, at the core of which lies this simple insight: if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.

The easy trap is the too many coals in the fire:

The second principle is to limit your work in progress. Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important.

I’m trying to work through a backlog of abandoned work, but at this point my inability to focus, attend, and limit possibilities is a core character flaw.

From “The how we need now: A capacity agenda for 2025 and beyond,” published by the Niskanen Center think tank.

What are the forces making the government so slow? The first of those dysfunctions is what Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan calls the “procedure fetish,” and we dub the bureaucratic anxiety cycle. Anxiety about legitimacy and accountability drives critics to demand, and bureaucrats to seek refuge behind, more and more layers of procedure that show things have been done “by the book.” But all that procedure further erodes both legitimacy and accountability by overburdening the bureaucracy, reducing its ability to deliver meaningful outcomes.

In the addition to the government, tell me this doesn’t summarize every large company you’ve ever dealt with, especially any that deal in a high-regulation industry like healthcare.

They go on to flesh out the “Cascade of Rigidity” with a helpful infographic:

Well-intentioned laws and regulations become increasingly inflexible and counterproductive as they evolve toward implementation. The authors argue part of the solution is shifting focus:

The revised system must shift its emphasis from compliance to meeting mission needs. This means power to make decisions must shift from compliance personnel to the people closest to the work.

The vicious cycle of growing bureaucracy and procedural bloat requires a reversion to our ultimate goals: a need to serve the mission and not its own machinery.

“This means power to make decisions must shift from compliance personnel to the people closest to the work.”

No easy feat.