Today's episode is another my favorite tip episode where I go back to interviews from the past and I dig out the thing that was my favorite tip, like the thing that I got out of the interview that really impacted or resonated with me. This extract is from my chat with Professor Scott Sannenshein. Scott is a New York Times bestselling author and professor of management at Rice University. I came across Scott's work a few months ago now
when I read his second book, Joy at Work. Scott wrote Joy at Work with best selling author and Netflix star Murray Kondo, who's cleaning methods I have used in my own home over the years and maybe you have too. In Joy at Work, Scott and Marie offers story studies and strategies to help you eliminate clutter and make space for work that really Matt. Now, I pulled two extracts out of my chat with Scott. There was just so much great stuff in the full interview and in this
my favorite tip episode, we look at decision making. So in this chat, Scott offers a bunch of strategies to help you make significantly better decisions. So let's head on over to Scott.
So there's lots of different estimates about the number of decisions that we make, and I, quite frankly, I can't count all of the decisions that I make, and that's part of the problem that we have is just a
sense of decision overloads. So what I like to recommend to people is we've got to go through a sorting process first, because there are just thousands of decisions that most people are going to make on a daily basis, even though studies show we really only remember about one hundred of them, so we're not even conscious of a lot of decisions that we make. So I like to I like to segment decisions into, you know, different levels of important. So you've got smaller, low stakes decisions, medium
steaks decisions, and high stakes decisions. And I like to separate and say for the small decisions, these are the ones that you either want to just get them done and not think much about them. So you know, this is going to vary by the type of job that you have naturally, but for me, for example, the type of copy paper or printer paper I have, or the type of font I use in a paper, or the type of font I use in the PowerPoint presentation. Those
are small stakes decisions for me. They are not going to have a material impact on the quality or effectiveness of my work, so I don't think about them. I just, you know, default to what I always do. So I'm always going to write, for example, in New Times Roman when I'm doing a word duff. Those are small decisions.
In other types of context, you might want to automate those decisions, so you know, even on a personal level, a lot of my monthly purchases of supplies for the house come through automatic subscription services, so I don't have to think about what I need every month. It just shows up at my door every month, so I don't have to be burthened with an extra set of decisions. Do I want to buy this? Do I not want
to buy that? It just happens automatically. So I think the first part is to just cut down because a majority of our decisions fall into those low stakes decisions, so let's automate them, let's not think about them. In some cases, we might also delegate them to those who might derive more meaning or more satisfaction, or it's more important for the type of job they have. Let them
make those decisions. Then you can focus on the more important ones, the medium stakes and the high stakes decisions, and you can dedicate your limited energy on trying to make better decisions in those areas. So that's the first step is really the try and offload the small decisions, focus on the medium and the large stakes decisions. The next step is to then think about how are you going to structure those decisions. And we have an intuition that you give me more choices, I'm going to have
a better set of results. But there's actually a rich body in the psychology literature about how choice can be really overwhelming and can do some disruptive things to us. So one, it takes more time to process through the choices, but two, we tend to be less satisfied when we have a lot of choices because we think about, well, I picked, I made this decision, but I could have went the other way, and maybe I have some regrets and I have decision decision regret. Maybe I didn't make
the best choice, and you start second guessing yourself. So another part of my decision making process is to try and whittle down choices. So if someone comes to me and says, hey, I want your your insight, and I want you to make a decision about you know, whether or not you know where we should For example, you know this have this class, what type of what type of room do we want? And I'm going to always say, you know, I don't want five or more room choices.
Kind of give me what you think are the three best choices for the class, and then I'll make a decision from a more limited choice set.
So almost getting someone else to do the work for you in part to get to that short list.
Well, you're having someone kind of whittle down the list, so then you can focus on making the best choice among a sec a subsection of that list.
And what other strategies do you use I guess with those more important decisions that are more high stakes to make sure that you're making a good decision, like I know, you know, certainly in psychic literature and I guess cognitive psychic literature, there's been what's written about things like decision fatigue and the benefits of activating the unconscious mind when
making decisions. What are some of the research findings that you tend to apply for when you are making those high stakes decisions.
Well, certainly the unconscious mind helps a lot because we do so much thinking outside of our deliberate thoughts, and in many respects we're more creative. So when I'm facing kind of a decision that involves creativity, so it could be around writing something, or how to present something, or thinking of a research question, I like to take a walk and I like to actually, counterintuitively not think about
the decision that I'm making. And this is hard for people to grasp because they're like, well, you're not working, then how are you actually going to make the decision? And what people need to realize is that the brain is still activated even when you're not thinking about something, and what the research teaches are is that by doing something that takes kind of a low level of cognitive activity, that actually activates the brain to be thinking about more
important things separately. And I'll often find that at the end of the walk, I have some type of epiphany and I solve my problem, and it's almost like the best of both worlds because I feel like I kind of have a semblance of what to do, but I also feel like I wasn't actually working. So I think that's an important part is certainly the subconscious aspect of it.
I think another thing that would really help too is to recognize that, like you know, as an academic, so much of our work is like that last twenty percent, and it's like, how do you get this thing exactly perfect? And you know, maybe when you're trying to submit a research paper or you're writing a book, you really want it to be perfect. But most of the decisions that I make, and most of the decisions that most people make,
don't require that type of perfection. And I think if we relax our standards and we say okay for this decision, even though it's important, is good enough going to be good enough? Do we need to get to that perfection? And is it worth the incremental effort to get that extra ten percent out of it? And in most cases
I would say it's probably not. So I think there's an importance of recognizing that in many cases good enough or in kind of the decision making world we talked about satisfying, that's a viable approach for making these decisions, because otherwise we're just going to burn out from all of these decisions, and later decisions that we have to make aren't going to be as effective because we've just run ourselves into the ground.
That is it for today's show. If you want to listen to the full episode, I link to that in the show notes, so you might want to check that out. And if you are enjoying how I work, I would be so deeply grateful if you just take five seconds out of your date to leave a review in Apple Podcasts. It might be a star rating or a few words, and by doing so, it helps other people find the show and it also brings a huge smile to my face. So thank you to the hundreds of people that have
left reviews. It is so deeply appreciated. So that is it for today's show and I will see you next time.