Author: Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.

Time well spent removing the creases

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All of us spend a certain number of hours per week at work. Some of us work only the required number of hours because those are the office hours for which they get paid. Some of us work extra hours because they care about what they do and want to do more of it. Some of us remain in the office for the required number of hours but work much less because the work does not interest them. Whatever the reason, work forms a big chunk of our lives and whether we like it or not it affects us in many ways.

Of the many things that work affects in our lives, the one thing it affects the most is our state of mind. If you have a good day at work, you come home satisfied and in a happy state of mind. You relish the dinner, spend quality time with your family (or housemates), enjoy that hobby and go to sleep in a happy mood. Exactly the opposite happens when you have a bad day at work. You eat what you can, you have a fight with someone, you skip the gym and you go to sleep in a frustrated state.

One such thing about work that I care a lot about and something that ends up affecting my mood at the end of the day is my productivity at work. At the end of the day I mentally review what did I end up doing in the day. I also compare how much time should a certain activity have taken (or how much time did I assign for it) to how much did it actually take. More often than not the activity takes more time and puts me in a slightly bad mood. Before you jump to conclusions, let me tell you that I am well aware that the reason could be optimism bias. But it could also be because of something that I realised while ironing clothes today. Let me explain.

The process of ironing clothes involves much more than you actually putting down the hot iron on the piece of cloth and moving it up and down. First you need to set up the ironing board, you plug the iron in, you get your pile of clothes and then, most importantly, you spend time removing the creases on the piece of the cloth laid out on the board. You run your hand over the surface to make sure that you don’t end up ironing on a crease. Some times you even sprinkle a few drops of water so that the cloth softens enough to give you a crisp result. And finally, you put down the hot iron down the cloth and do the ‘real work’.

Even if we take into consideration that we have to do so many things to iron clothes, we often forget to take into account the time spent in removing the creases. It’s that activity which we need to do just before the ‘real work’ that we so easily forget. But without smoothening those creases we cannot effectively iron clothes.

Similarly, in our daily lives at work, even if we take into account the time we need to spend to ready other things for doing the ‘real work’, we often miss out on taking into account the time spent in preparing our mind to do a certain work. If we are not in the right mental state to do something we won’t be able to do it. Often we need to clear our thoughts and focus on the task at hand or we need to stop thinking about what we just finished and then start the new activity. Sometimes we start doing the work without being in the right mental state but very soon we realise that we aren’t really doing the work properly and then spend the time bringing ourselves in the right state to do the job.

You need to remove those creases from your own thoughts to be able to do the work properly. And as it happens we disregard that it is important to do so and in the process never take in to account the real time that it will take to do the work.

I would go to the extent of saying that even those mini-breaks you take on facebook or twitter or when you go for that cup of tea is time you spend preparing (or emptying or refreshing) your mind to do the next job after the break. Of course, the mini-breaks can easily be termed as distraction but only if you don’t care enough about productivity. 🙂

Image from here.

Another human folly has made me think about how I look

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I wondered, "Why do I need to look good? Why?"

I used to think that how I look or what I wear should not matter. The only thing that should matter is what I stand for: my work, my words and my nature. And yet, time and again as a kid, I was told that I should care too look decent. I was made to make my hair properly and tuck my shirt in neatly. When I rebelled, I was given reasons like the cliche, your first impression is your last impression. With no powers over my parents, I obeyed.

I finally have the right reasons to want to dress well and look presentable. Not that I looked like a mess ever before but now I have a reason to really care about how I look. If any parents are reading this post and have kids who won’t do something without a good reason then you should be happy because in this post you will find that good reason for your kids to want to dress properly.

The reason comes from another human folly discussed in the book Sway: The irresistible pull of irrational forces by Ori & Rom Brafman, called Value Attribution. To explain it, the best methods is through an example from the book:

On a January morning Joshua Bell, one of the the finest violinists alive, wearing a baseball cap nonchalantly took out his $3.5 million Stradivarius violin and started playing on a subway station in Washington DC.

Bell’s performance started with Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin, one of the most challenging pieces ever composed for the instrument. Over the next 43 minutes there was no thunderous applause, no cameras flashing and actually no one seemed to care.

Of the 1097 people who walked by, hardly anyone stopped. One man listened for a few minutes, a couple of kids stared, and one woman, who happened to recognise the violinist gaped in disbelief.

This was no surprise to the people conducting a study of which Joshua Bell was part of. Think about it for a moment. Bell looked like an average street performer even though he didn’t sound like one. Without realising it, the commuters attributed the value they perceived to the quality of the performance. As they passed Bell, instead of hearing an outstanding concert, they heard street music.

Value attribution, after all, acts as a quick mental shortcut to determine what’s worthy of our attention.

This human folly creeps up on us all the time. Here’s another neat example, a bank sent out a flyer about an offer to it’s male customers. 50% flyers were accompanied with a really pretty female model and 50% were accompanied by a not so pretty version of the same model. What were the results? The men who got the pretty version of the model were twice as likely to sign up for the offer as the others.

Of course, no one is claiming that if you only look good and don’t act good that you will make a better impression. Instead, all factors remaining constant, looking good might make a better impression on the other person.

The adage about first impressions holds true after all. And yes, we all learn about it through experience but had someone told me this story, I may have been convinced earlier.

Dealing with anxiety by overcoming a human folly

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We all suffer from anxiety at many points in our life. It may be to a different degree depending on the cause of anxiety or on the person dealing with the anxiety. It is an unwanted but unavoidable feeling. Some do well to equate anxiety with irrational fears. In this post I am going to discuss one technique which works quite effectively. But before doing that let’s discuss a human folly: loss aversion.

In Sway: The irresistible pull of irrational behaviour by Rom & Ori Brafman, I was exposed to a fascinating human folly. The best way to explain this is through an example:

Prof. Bazerman’s Harvard MBA class starts with an auction. The prize is a $20 note. Rules: everyone can bid, increment is $1 and the second-highest bidder pays as well. Thus, in short, the second highest bidder is the loser.

As you would expect till about a bid of $16 many students participate in the auction but then by $18 there are only two people remaining, highest and the second-highest. A winner and a loser.

Till now students were in the auction to win but at this point, no one wants to lose. So the bid quickly spirals up beyond $20. As the prices climbs higher, the rest of the students roar with laughter.

From a rational perspective, the obvious decision would be for the bidders to accept their losses and stop the auction before it spins even further out of control. But it’s easier said than done. Students are pulled by both the momentum of the auction and the looming loss if they back down. The forces in turn feed each other – commitment to a chosen path inspires additional bids, driving the price up, making the potential loss loom even larger.

So the students continue bidding to a record of $204. All these years that Bazerman has conducted this auction he has never lost a penny.

The lesson? We, humans, are susceptible to care more about losses. Had the students stopped bidding at $21, the winner would have lost $1 and the loser $20. But in the case of the record of $204, the winner lost $184 and the loser $203.

As an observer, this seems completely irrational to us but at the time the student’s weren’t focusing on the prize, instead they were focusing on the loss: the shame of losing a simple bid. If you think about this for a second, you will realise that this human folly of loss aversion manifests itself in our everyday lives all the time.

One of the suggested ways of overcoming this irrational sway is to look at our situation from a larger perspective. If the students had stepped back for a moment and thought hard about where the bid is headed, they would have realised that it’s not something worth pursuing.

Of course doing this is hard because at that moment all you can think about is the loss. But as the Brafman brothers explain:

Our natural tendency to avoid the pain of loss is most likely to distort our thinking when we place too much importance on short-term goals. When we adopt the long view, on the other hand, immediate potential losses don’t seem as menacing.

So you may wonder what is this to do with anxiety. Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Imagine that you are driving to meet someone very important. The time and place for the meeting had been fixed quite some time in advance. When you are about 30 minutes from the place your car breaks down. A punctured tyre. You look at the watch and realise you have an hour before the meeting. All charged up you start fixing your car so that you can finish soon and drive to the meeting in time. It takes you 25 minutes to fix the tyre. Now you have 35 minutes to the meeting and you are about 30 minutes away. Although 5 spare minutes is plenty of time, all the time while driving you will be anxious. You will think about all kinds of situations that may never happen, what if you reach late? will he find your excuse of a punctured tyre too trivial? what would make for a substantial excuse? will your first impression ruin it all? will you lose that business deal? how will you answer your boss?

All through this process you are anxious. With the clock moving forward, your anxiety only increases. But what is it that you are thinking about really? You are thinking about a loss. You are worried about losing that impression which you could have made or that business deal that you could have got or your value in front of your boss because of a failed deal.

The problem is that your chances of failure have increased as compared to your chances of success. But because the human tendency to avoid losses, you will magnify the chances of failure. This will soon put you in the same loop as the students who were bidding for the $20 note. You will get more anxious thinking about the loss, that will make you think about greater losses which will in turn make you more anxious. In the process you may run over traffic lights or miss out on the correct turn you were supposed to make on the highway. Your potential losses will only increase.

The technique I am going to suggest to dealing with anxiety is simple: Think about gains and not the losses. Think about success and not the failure. Think about the positives and not the negatives.

And to aide you in the process, you can use the Brafman brothers suggestion to help you think about the positives: step back and look at the larger picture.

If you calmed down (step back) and did not worry about the loss of the business deal (bigger picture)  then you will be able to focus on the driving. It could mean that you may reach there in 25 minutes, instead of 30 minutes, a good 10 minutes in advance (positive). It will get you that good first impression (gain), the business deal and your boss’ praises (success). The potential gains may not be as high as the potential losses but stepping back will help you think about the gains. And, more importantly, thinking about the gains will certainly make it less likely to causes the losses. Where as thinking about the losses will only make it more likely cause the losses.

This technique can be applied to any situation in which you feel anxious. Worried about what will happen if you don’t get the grade you need to? Think about what will happen if you do get a better grade. Worried about what will happen if you don’t get paid this week? Well, what if you get paid double this week. Worried about what will happen if you did not finish the project in time? Think about what praises you may get if you finish it before time.

Loss aversion is a strong force, overcoming that may just become easier if you jump to do the exact opposite: gain seeking.