How to Make a Decision When You Have Too Many Options

People are having trouble figuring out what to do. Analysis paralysis is the not so technical term for the experience of feeling frozen in the face of often big decisions, sometimes small decisions like figuring out what show to watch can feel overwhelming. But when it comes to deciding on a career path, on a relationship, on a major life transition, whether to have a kid, where to move or which house to buy, it can feel absolutely overwhelming.

The rulers and religions that structured much of life for better or worse, have receded in importance. And now people are on their own. If we don’t know how to manage these moments, we can freeze. Inertia takes over, and we choose to do nothing at all. There is a better way, my friend. And on today’s episode of Love, Happiness and Success, I have invited a very special new friend to come and talk with us about this.

I’m David Epstein, I’m a science writer and former investigative reporter. And I write books that, look at the science of human performance. And I take that very broadly from athletic performance to finding satisfaction in life. He is a New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, the most recent is called Inside the Box, which specifically addresses how we can cultivate clarity, confidence, and also contentment in the decisions that we make.

David, it’s such a pleasure. Welcome to the show.

I feel like we’re in this strange era where there are so many charismatic people with strong opinions and great haircuts, talking about all things related to, you know, how how we should live that when you really dial into it are are really their opinions or based on their own life experience, which is certainly not without value grounded in research, which to me, as a different layer of trustworthiness.

I appreciate that. So it’s and also my haircuts not good enough to make it in that other way. I appreciate that. It’s good. But yeah, I mean, I came out of my background before I was a writer. I was training to be a scientist in in environmental science. So not in the social sciences, but I lived in a tent in the Arctic, and I was studying the carbon cycle. And so, no, no kidding. And and so I kind of have always been grounded in the research. You know, when I became a writer, I felt that was, the unique value I had, like a very interested in science.

I had a strong quantitative background and those sorts of things. And so that’s just sort of always been part of the DNA of my, my writing career, basically. And I also, to be quite frank, it’s probably not maybe the best way to be in this day and age, but I’m just like, not a hot take kind of person. I just don’t know what I think about a lot of things when they first happen. Maybe I’m just a slower person. I need to stop and think about it, and I’m often not that confident in my first reflexes. I mean, my first book. I spent a year figuring out that everything I thought and wrote in the proposal was wrong and then had to start over.

And so, yeah, I just I’m not confident in my own takes until I’ve spent a lot of time with the research.

hear you well, I get that. And that’s I think why I, I struggle with that as well. There are so many complexities and different things are true for different people. And so what I hear you saying is you take a more thoughtful and nuanced approach, which actually is kind of bringing us into that, that central topic.

Right? I mean, so your latest book, well, why don’t you give an introduction of your latest book? So I don’t butcher it, but sure, like the choice, right. Yeah. It’s it’s called Inside the Box How Constraints Make us better. And it’s about how, we overvalue limitless freedom and how boundaries can actually be the best tools we have for everything from prompting creativity to to finding personal contentment.

And I think we often underestimate how how useful some constraints can be. Oh my gosh, this is going to be so good. Because, David, I think I probably one of the people that you wrote this book for hurt. Tell me more like all the choices, right. And I like possibilities that I get excited about things. But I think I also suffer personally because I try to do all of the things and get to this point where I’m like, overwhelmed and it’s too much.

And so I think maybe there are some, answers to my, my problems in your work. So is there take us into this. There’s somebody like me. I’m Exhibit A, I like options, I like. Yeah, freedom. What’s the problem with that? Yeah, I mean, that’s not abnormal, right? That’s how we’re wired. Because for most of history, for most of history, having too much choice and too much freedom was a non-issue.

So you don’t you don’t you don’t really see this issue of having too much choice. That’s but you that it was a non-issue, that people were limited just by virtue of it. Very much so it’s not really until like the late 19th century, when you start to see it pop up among preeminent philosophers, this issue of people are having trouble figuring out what to do.

You know, the rulers and religions that structured much of life, for better or worse, have receded in importance. And now people are on their own to figure out what to do, and they’re struggling. And anxiety is rising.

And so I think the issue is that we always want more options and more freedom, because we think that that will lead to better decisions that will make us happier.

And that is, in fact, how humans are modeled in neoclassical economic theory, that the more options is better because you have more things to choose from, you’ll make a better choice. But in reality, it actually doesn’t work out that way. And when people have too many decisions one they’re more likely to just not make a decision at all to just step back from it.

And even when they do, they’re more likely to be unhappy with that decision, because there’s they’re thinking about all the other things that they could have done because we’re these comparison engines, basically, our brains are. Yeah.

And it has we have a bias. Humans have a bias called additive bias. And its cousin, subtraction neglect bias, which are named for the fact that we always try to solve problems by adding more things.

And again, because probably in the environment in which our brains evolved, having too much was not a problem, but having too little was. And so we’re wired to accumulate and do more and add more. And there’s all this interesting research showing that people overlook subtractive solutions for things that involve taking away and to always pile on more tools, more obligations, you know, more than they can actually get done.

And it’s unless we’re forcibly subtracting, we will end up overwhelmed. And I honestly think in the AI age, it’s it’s even worse. Like it’s never been easier to do too much because the cost of starting things goes to zero. And so people are starting this incredible number of things and not doing the hard work of figuring out what it is.

They should not be doing. That’s the hard part. What what are the things they should not be doing? Wow. Okay. There is so much to unpack here. If we could just slow down. Can I just like, rewind a tiny bit? Absolutely. I’m a very digressive person. So yeah. Yeah. So you need to rewind me. I need it here.

So you were talking about how difficult it becomes for people when they have so many choices that there can be this paralysis. Or also, if you do make a choice, that was it the right choice, because there were all these things that were immediately started coming into my mind. Or two examples of this. So, you know, I’m a therapist and a coach should do a variety of things, but like, I have clients who would like to do something different with a career and these are bright, competent, resourceful people who could really, quite plausibly go in a lot of different career directions and would probably be successful and relatively satisfied in a variety of different occupations, you know, and so they actually have a lot of legitimate choices. And it comes down to what what do you enjoy the most? What would be most in alignment with your career path? And people are so paralyzed. Yeah. Making the wrong choice. And I’m also thinking of a different example of this with dating. I’ll get you to talk about that one in a second.

But first is, is this what you’re talking about with like, I could literally go in every direction. So yeah, the and there’s actually some evidence that people with more options end up sort of less happy with, with the decisions that they, they do make, which is obviously contrary to to what you would normally expect. And I think, I think there are a number of reasons for that.

I mean in my previous book I wrote about the benefits of doing lots of different things, and I think those are, those are real. I think the challenge is in the scenario that you’re talking about, where people could go in these different career paths, people are often sort of trying to optimize without having information that would really allow them to do that.

So the the Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon wrote about this, where we we think we can evaluate all these options and make the best decision. But but we actually can’t because we have limited ability to compare things. We have very limited ability to predict the future and the repercussions of our decisions. And so I think one helpful thing is to try to shrink that decision to some degree and not make it feel so big, so that you don’t feel like you’re having to make it perfectly.

So. Herminia Ibarra, for example, a professor at the London Business School, studied people, followed people through real life work transitions, just sort of documenting how it works when it’s successful and when it’s not. And the the not pattern was more like how I think of, you know, Clark Kent running into a phone booth and coming out as Superman.

It’s like I’m making this huge flying change. I’ve decided on it. That’s what I’m doing. The successful pattern was much more like, here’s a key, here’s a small, lower stakes way that I can get a little bit of exposure to that possible career path. And if that seems good, then I’ll get a little bit more exposure and a little more and a little more.

And so instead of having to, to, to to think like I’m choosing this path and all the other ones are office. Right. Exactly. What’s the what’s the smallest way that I can dip a toe into this and get a little bit of, feedback and so I think that can be helpful for people when they’re overwhelmed with options that, that just to shrink it so they don’t feel like I’m making this decision once and for all and, and burning the boats, as you said.

Well, that’s a really good idea. And to make space for. You know, I think there’s always such a difference in how we think something will be when you’re not actually doing it yet. We can imagine all kinds of stuff versus the experience, which is so instructive. Absolutely. And, and, and how we’ll feel about it. Right. Like we’re terrible at affective forecasting. People are really bad at knowing how they’re going to feel about something.

So the idea that you can make that perfect decision and it’s going to be what you thought is just not true. So then you have to find other ways to to proceed productively. Basically. How did you get into like you’re doing something unusual here, right? This is not being a podcast host, is not your, academic background. Right.

So how did you start dipping your toes into this career? That’s obviously become something, maybe larger than you thought it would when you started? I don’t know, maybe, you know, I I’m still having a good time, so I, that that’s really the win here, David. But that’s a good question. And honestly, it was motivated by a couple of things.

I think, like you, I think we’re cut from the same cloth. I love learning and I am a sponge. I like learning new things and interesting people and research. I’m like, oh, that’s really cool. So I’m a naturally curious person. I think that’s part of the reason why I went into counseling. Psychology is like, I’m curious about this person that’s going on in the situation, but also just I think on a more macro level, like sociology, how do people tick?

Why are things the way that they are? So for me, that was part of it. But then also, I think there’s a big value system around, like being of service in the lives of others. And I know that there are so many people who could benefit from this kind of information who might not. Well, when I started this podcast may not have had access to it otherwise.

Now, I think you can just ask Claude and he’ll be like in this book by David Epstein. He mentioned these, you know, five takeaways that you weren’t sure in life. So I feel like there’s definitely more information. But, yeah, that accessibility piece and just interesting stories. I mean, so that’s that’s great because you identified something that you want it, right?

Satisfy your feed, your curiosity and something that you thought was of service. And then this just happened to be a vehicle for it. So I think that’s like really instructive too, is instead of this career path or that career path, what are some things. And this actually showed up in this study called the Harvard Darkhorse Project, about how people find fulfilling work, where they would kind of bounce between things and start to identify less with a particular job and more with what are the things that they like or that they find engaging.

It’s curiosity service. And then you find the vehicle for it. So sometimes I think we’re doing it backwards. It’s like this is the job. Instead of spending the time thinking of what are sort of the things that I find engaging and meaningful and what are the sort of potential vehicles for that. Yeah. And then I’m, I don’t know if you’re saying this, but this is kind of like what I’m hearing, that it’s not like you’re playing mental mind games with yourself, per se, but I’m sort of hearing you say, don’t actually make a choice, just like kind of do it a little bit and see how it feels and kind of get deeper into the pool without, you know, planting a flag. And like, this is what I am, you know, because that’s when it gets not only overwhelming, but also probably premature. Absolutely. Yet. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, as computer scientists would call it, premature optimization, where you, you lock in your code before you’re really totally sure what you should be doing. You know?

Yeah. Okay. Well that’s wonderful. So giving yourself permission to just experience something now, if it’s okay with you, let’s talk a little bit when it comes to relationships and you know that level of choice. Because what I see there and so, you know, my my background dual psychologist I’m also a marriage and family therapist. And so I work with people a lot around relationships.

And I think it’s a big, pain point for many people, especially in the world these days, where there feels like this infinite ocean of possible partners and so many different options and a lot of people that are feeling very frustrated because it feels like they’re, you know, trying things out and talking to a lot of different people, but not really finding what they want.

And maybe there’s something better out there. And so, I don’t know, maybe that’s true. But at the same time, I think that there, especially in the early days of a relationship, be like less, I don’t want to use the word commitment, but, it’s easier for people to just kind of like, move on with the expectation that there’s going to be something better just right around the corner, and that the fact that idea of so many choices, whereas in the past we really didn’t have as many options.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think that ability to always say there might be something better around the corner can be really harmful. Like it’s good you want to get a better fit in partner. You want to take some data, you want to learn about yourself. You want to learn about your options. Yeah, but but the infinite, comparison ability.

And often on dating apps, it’s often a blind auction basically where, you know, you have no idea what’s really going on behind the scenes there. And it it reminds me of this, story I love by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, where he writes about these two young people who meet and they just intuitively recognize that they are the, as he put it, the 100% perfect match for one another.

And they hold hands. They sit on a park bench, they talk for hours. But then this, this sliver of doubt creeps in and they say, you know, is it really okay for someone to find happiness this easily? So they come up with an experiment where they’ll part and if they meet again, clearly it was meant to be, and they’ll get married on the spot.

So the boy walks off east and the girl west, and they never meet again. They really were 100% perfect match for each other, but they never meet again. Right. And so I feel like that’s that can be some of what’s going on where there has to be. Like, nobody is perfect and there has to be some level of of good enough and relationships take work.

And one of the things I find a little scary is this research done by the relationship psychologist Scott Stanley, and what he calls sliding versus deciding where he’s finding that younger people, particularly are doing what he calls sliding, which means that they’ll get into a relationship. But because they’re like, there could be something better around the corner, they’re they’re not committed in their mind, but they’ll stay in the relationship because it’s nice to be in a relationship.

So the commitment will will start escalating, even though they’re saying I’m keeping my options open. But really, as time goes on, commitment escalates because that’s how relationships work. And so if they do that and they end up sliding into marriage, for example, they’re much more likely to get divorced and be unhappy versus people who decide and say, you know, either I’m in, I’m out, and you make a decision instead of just proceeding always with part of your mind saying, I’m keeping my options open, like at a certain point, optionality.

You don’t want optionality to become an end unto itself, right? You want options to get to a better decision, but it should have good enough criteria for for everything in life, like there might be a better job, there might be a better place for you to live, there might be a better whatever it is you’re buying on Amazon.

But having good enough criteria for for your needs and not basing them on someone else’s vacation on Instagram, I think is, really important in this day and age. It really is to to be able to know yourself well enough and to be able to, understand the options. Well enough to say, I choose this with some confidence because, I mean, what you’re really talking about.

Between the lines here right now is like the ability to find peace and contentment. Yeah. Is that it? Yes. Yes. And I mean, you’re doing a really good job of much more succinctly making my points than I am. And like the the psychologist Mihai Mihai, who is most famous for coining the term flow to describe the feeling of immersion in an activity he wrote some about.

Impressed with your pronunciation? Oh, oh, I I’ve yeah, I, I made sure to hear it many times from people who knew him. And he, he wrote some about relationships and saying that, you know, accepting certain limitations can be liberating. Like one of the good things about being in a relationship, if you’re committed, if you’ve committed by your own choice.

Is that you can stop spending all your energy wondering how to live and start spending that energy living. Yeah. And so I think to some degree, the problem with infinite options for dating is that you might never get to a headspace where you say, to make this good, it’s something that I have to work on and instead can just be like turning the page endlessly.

And that’s probably not a recipe for satisfaction for most people. No. Oh my gosh, this is really powerful stuff. I’m thinking of my this is a much lighter example of what you were just talking about, but I don’t know. Can you relate to this? I have literally spent an hour and a half of flipping through all the possible shows I could watch.

Evening, Netflix, HBO, we have all the channels and I watch all the trailers, and then finally I just hand the remote control to my husband and I’m like, pick something. You have good taste. And he does. And it’s always a dystopian horror show, but it’s still interesting anyway. But it’s like, it’s that kind of thing. But applied on very large scale with relationships, with career choices, with where I want to live.

That breeds this like angst, that it’s always the wrong thing and it is really getting in the way. I think of happiness and completely I mean, what you’re describing is essentially one of the questions and the questionnaire, what’s called the maximization scale. So the scale started, you know, like 20 years ago. And so first it was like 50 people were flipping to radio stations, you know, and say, if you’re if there’s something on the radio and, and you like it, but you’re still need to flip through all the stations to see if there’s something better, you know, that would score you some points as a maximizer.

That’s on one end of the scale and the other end of the scales is satisfying her, which is a portmanteau between satisfy and suffice. Meaning like you have good enough, criteria. And the main finding of that research, if I had to kind of condense it into a small nutshell, is that it’s almost always a bad thing to be a maximizer.

Not always, but almost always. We’re maximizer. So these are people who are really want to evaluate as many options as they can before they make a decision. I also have these tendencies, so as to, tend to be less happy with their decisions. They tend to be less happy with their lives because they’re more prone to regret.

They often prefer reversible decisions, even though that just prevents them from committing one way or the other. And they’re happier, it turns out, with irreversible decisions. And there’s some evidence that maximizing tendencies are on the rise throughout the world. I don’t think anybody knows for sure why. You know, I think my guess would be the endless comparison engine that is social media.

So I think it’s for me, after having read that research, you know, you came up with a fix, you hand the remote to your husband. That’s a good fix. Like in some of this research, Maximizers, who knew their own tendencies would, would find ways to block themselves from seeing tons of options. And, you know, it’s so I think for me now, I often before I make a choice like, especially before I get on Amazon, I decide what is the thing that I need this item to do.

And once that is met, I don’t look for the item that does all that, plus has lasers shooting out of it or whatever it is, right? I don’t read every single review. It’s like if it meets the criteria I set ahead of time, I’m done because the search is a cost itself that we usually discount. Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you how much of my life has been spent scrolling through the options and watching the videos and reading the reviews.

It takes hours, I know. Yeah, and you probably end up more likely to feel like whatever you got is like, maybe not the best one. Well, it comes and then I’m like, oh, should I exactly. You’re saying here that it wasn’t one very power powerful lever we can all pull in our own lives to feel happier, more peaceful, more content with where we are.

What we have is to operate with it more of a constraint or restraint type mindset where choices are actually limited. But as you pointed out earlier in our conversation, we are living in a moment in history where there have never been more options for literally every single thing. Yeah, like brain power to sort through. So in this context, I cannot wait to hear your advice on how we can start to limit some of those things and feel good about it so that we can achieve this.

The Zen of which you speak.

One, I think exercise that’s really useful for people that I’ve found useful for myself. And I’ve excuse me, and then I’ve seen used with teams is to try to make all of your current commitments visible. Everything you’re doing this could be volunteering. This could be your job, it could be parenting, whatever it is.

And typically what happens when people do this is that they realize that they are overcommitted because we tend to only add things to our to our plate and then to do a subtraction audit, basically say, you know, if I had to cut out one of these things in the next 90 days, what would it be? And then take that thing out or move it to the backburner and you’re probably not going to be able to get to all those things anyway.

So moving something off might feel bad, but it actually forces you to clarify your priorities. And because we only add an ad, an ad, if you do this regularly, you probably end up with sort of more time and energy focused on the things that are most important to you. And when I did this, I realized that I had things that were kind of medium priorities, that were competing with some of the bigger priorities.

And so really sort of stripped some things out of my life that would have been nice to do. But but we are finite. And so you have to face our mortality and, and prioritize ruthlessly. Okay. Hold on, hold on. Because like as you’re talking about this, I’m thinking of my own task list, even just in like the business part of my life, I actually abandoned a project management system once because there were literally thousands and thousands of tasks that were, for me, that I was never going to do and like, yeah, even handle it anymore.

So, you know, there are all these things that we put on our list. It’s the intention of doing. And you’re saying that even if it feels bad to intentionally say, you know what? I’m never going to do that. The reality is that you aren’t anyway. But yeah, for somebody like me, because of what comes up for me, it’s I think, oh, what I really want to is I’m just going to keep this here.

Oh. Me too. Maybe it’ll work out. And, like, I don’t want to let it go. And I think it’s not wanting to let go of the possibility of it. That’s right. How do you how did you manage that when you were like, delete. Yeah. There’s something important you said there, which is the possibility of doing it because we have this like strong impulse to think that if we just got the right system down or we just cleared the decks of everything we have now that we can do that other thing, or that if we just figured out the right productivity hacks, all of this stuff would be possible.

But it’s really an illusion. You know, you’re still the bottleneck, ultimately your attention. And so you just need to cut some of those those things out. But it’s very, very it, you know, it’s very, very difficult to to do that. Because that illusion, if I can get this done so, so let’s say one of the things I’m super attracted to, I read a ton, but I’m also if I, if I’m online, I see articles like every Art.

You know, so many article headlines appeal to me and I see them and I’m like, I have to know what this thing says. Like headline writers just work on me and so I would sometimes spend like hours reading articles that were legitimately interesting. But I would get to the end and often say, you know, I think that half hour or hour was not aligned with my most important priorities.

So now I have a system where if I see these articles, I will bookmark them and put them in a certain folder. Right. And this, this gives me the feeling of, oh, it’s saved somewhere. And if it’s still in my mind, like a day later that I need to read that thing, I will actually go back and read it.

But this means that 90% of those things, I never go back to, and I don’t worry about it because I feel like it’s saved. So I marked it like the possibility is still there, but it’s not really going to happen. And so I try to, put a little delay between my impulsiveness for consuming things. And then if it’s really important or super interesting, I’ll come back around to it.

Okay. This is I’ve actually implemented in my own life. I have to keep not just a list of what I need to do, but a list of ideas I have to have. Like a oh yeah, a corral for like all the ideas spark list articles or the books. I still have way too many books, but like, yeah. So those are some of the things we can do to like, manage the reality of having way too much.

Yeah. And having that I mean, I consume a ton of information. I have spark lists that I call with all these different ideas that I turn to. I buy books that I’m not planning on reading right away because I want shelves that I can surf, you know, for the right time. So I’m not against any of those things.

It’s just, you know, it’s it’s like, again, we have this feeling that, you know, I’ll get to my important thing when I clear the decks of all this other stuff, and the decks are never going to be clear. So, you know, Oliver Burkeman talks about this, like, if you’re going to if you’ve identified something as important, the impulse shouldn’t be.

I’m going to get to it as soon as I clear all the other stuff out of the way it should be. I’m going to do it now, because there’s never going to be a time when all this stuff isn’t in the way. So. So for me, an important practice I use that I’ve come to call the Hemingway principle for myself, because Ernest Hemingway would stop his writing days in the middle of a sentence because it gave him the next day he knew the important place he was going to start.

So I make my last act of every workday. I write down the important thing I’m going to start with the next day, and I think it kind of helps save me from mindlessly drifting to my inbox or to various feeds, and helps with what’s called the mere urgency effect, the fact that people will prioritize things that feel urgent, like answering an email over things that are actually important.

And so you mentioned this sort of endless list of things to do that you had in this, you know, project management tool high that were to do list, right, with the to do list, would grow to do lists and eventually turn it over because it was so stress inducing to look at. And then I’d like throw it in the garbage and start it over.

Now it’s I have one thing at the top that if that one thing gets done, like something was accomplished this day, there can be other things that are bonuses. But there’s one thing that I know is the important thing that if that gets done today, it was a productive day because too many of the things you just like end up opting for things that are can be done more quickly or feel urgent over the thing you identified as important.

So can I ask you a question, a question if this is okay? You know, going back to your question for me, like, why did you start doing this podcast? And I think, you know, yes, curiosity being of service. But I also I’m so excited to talk with people where I can also like learn something personally that I apply in my own life.

Because I’m still doing my own work and I’m always so curious about my guests and I wondering if this is true for you. If part of the motivation to turn the the laser beam of your scientific inquiry to this specific topic, Cape pain point in your own life, like was there a time and space when you were feeling that overwhelm paralysis like oh, hate what is going on?

Or this is something else? 100%? I, my publisher, told me never to use this word, but there’s a huge amount of research in the book, like I’m researching something exactly what it is. Yeah, I was researching something that I was they said, you know, don’t say that word because it’ll make people feel like the book is only for you.

And I’m like, well, they’re probably other people struggling with this, too. But, I mean, there’s a reason I’ve written three books and it’s been 6 to 7 years between each one. And part of the reason for that is that I’ve been terrible at drawing boundaries around my own work, and so it just expands and expands. And because I’m really curious.

And so with the first two books, I wrote, basically 150% of the length a lot, and then had to cut back to get a book. That’s an incredibly inefficient way to work. You know, once I became a parent, I didn’t want to be taking research trips that weren’t going to be useful or that weren’t going to end up in the book.

And so this time around, I forced myself like I came up with all my notes and things. I ended up with 100,000 word notes sheet, basically printed it out, read it, and then forced myself to outline on one page and one page only, like a structural plan for the book. And that forced me to prioritize ruthlessly. And if it wasn’t on that page, it didn’t go in the book.

It’s actually this is this is the page have, you know, this is the page. As you can see now, sir, and as you can see, I wrote as small as humanly possible to try to like, defeat my own system but and loophole. But it really it really made me, made me prioritize. And I did this exercise that actually one of the people I interviewed, this guy, Tony Fadell, who was the lead designer of the iPod and co-founded the smart thermostat company nest.

He was one of the first people I talked to about constraints before I knew I was writing a book, and but I was interested in the topic, and he he was like a zealot for putting constraints on his teams. For nest, he made them design the box before the product because he said, this will force us to prototype this to get on the box.

Only the things that we think are the most important features to communicate to a consumer. And so if it doesn’t fit on this box, we’re not doing it now because it protects against what designers call feature writers. Right. Like your desire to put every cool thing in, which is what I had that vision of feature writers in writing, and he encouraged me to write the press release for the book before I started writing the book.

And it was a really interesting exercise because it forced me to, condense the problem I thought I was approaching onto one page, think about the people I thought I was writing it for, even make up. You know, you encouraged me to make a fake blurbs about what do I hope people would say about it once it’s done.

And I found that incredibly helpful. And so this book, I actually turned in early and didn’t write over length. And so I think the whole process of the book was partly me addressing something that had, made me both less productive. You know, if I had been using the process that I had now, I would have written more books than I have and, just feel more chaotic while I was, you know, it made me it made me feel less chaotic compared to how I had been in the past while I was doing the work.

So, yes, 100%. It came out of things that I was bad at. Wait. But but it’s so amazing though, because like in the crafting of the book itself, you were able to prove the concepts that you were writing about and, and really have this be an example of the power of doing this in your own life. And so you applied it to your work.

what are some of the strategies that you uncovered through your research and your writing that could apply to so many different dimensions of life, where people are feeling so overloaded from shopping online to you, just like opening up email or social media or yes, everywhere.

Where do we even begin? Yeah, I want to talk about something that might feel narrow, but that I actually think in in facts most of those places, and that is how we structure our attention. So I spent a lot of time researching and writing about the work of a psychologist named Gloria Mark. And professor Mark has been studying people at work for about a quarter century.

This started with literally her sitting behind people in their office with a stopwatch, and then it progressed to all sorts of, you know, digital tracking and all these things. Yeah. And and what she found when she started about 25 years ago was that people were switching tasks about every three minutes on average. And then by 2012, it was about every 75 seconds.

And then by 2022, it was about every 45 seconds. And the average person at work was checking email about 80 different times a day, 77 on average. Exact, and that the number of switches that someone makes one is a negative predictor of their productivity at the end of the day. And two is a positive predictor of their stress, as measured by physiological measures like heart rate variability.

Yeah. And so these switches, they were constantly doing are terrible for us. We’re worse than you think. Like as as professor Mark says, your brain’s like a whiteboard. And when you switch tasks, you erase. But there’s that residue left, like on the whiteboard. And that takes up some of your cognitive bandwidth for the next thing. And you do that all day long, and then you can’t really clear it until you sleep, essentially, or not sleep as the case may or not sleep, right?

I mean, I’m just thinking about, like, the blah that comes when you do that. Yeah. There’s even some new evidence that it might be the amount of switching you do might impact your immune function in a, in a bad way. That’s kind of a budding area of research. But, it’s it’s bad for you physically and professionally. And so I think we have to find ways to limit that.

Multitask. Let’s say you need to answer all those emails that you were answering when you were checking 80 times a day. What do I do? Answer them. But instead of doing 80 different little blocks of email answering and checks, can you put that into one or 3 or 5 larger blocks over the day where you’re doing email and then you’re not doing email?

So is not infecting every other thing that you’re doing throughout the day. You just want to limit the number of switches that you’re doing so that you’re monotasking, and then longitudinally doing different things through the day in monotasking blocks, basically with little breaks between them like I have. Yeah, emails for the next 20 minutes and this is all I’m doing.

And then you’re not doing emails for the next thing, right? Yeah. So so batching batching your work. And that can be just being able to monotask is like magical, I have to say. Like again, since you’ve been asking about things that I’ve used, that is a game. It was a game changer for me. You have to be a little more thoughtful ahead of time about structuring your work so that you’re not just it, say, well, maybe I feel like checking email now.

You know, you plan it out and I’m going to do this in this batch and this other thing in this certain time. So you have to put a little more forethought. But there was a time when I felt so scattered that I really wasn’t enjoying my work anymore, which is work that I’ve chosen because I’m curious and I like researching and writing.

And then I got back to having monotasking blocks. I remembered I love my work when I’m allowed able to focus on it. For, for some blocks. And so this would look different for everybody depending on what their work is. But if you can decrease those switches even modestly, it, it pays dividends in how you feel about what you’re doing.

Yeah. You know, one more thing just to kind of float here as we’re talking, something is coming up for me and, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the relevance of, like, personality or core wiring when it comes to this. And relationship to choice. Okay. So here’s what’s coming up. So part of what I, you know, podcast host.

But because I am also curious and interested in different things, I have different facets of my career. And one of the things that I’ve been spending a lot of time in over the last few years, actually, is, counselor education so different training programs for professional therapists to advance in their careers. And because I value choice and agency, I attempt to teach people a framework to find their own way of doing things.

And what I’ve learned is that there is a subset of people who really like that. They do not want to be told specifically what to do. They want some freedom. And so that’s like compatible. And I’ve actually modified some of my curriculum to have a pathway for people who are like, tell me exactly what to do in what order.

And one I will do this session. Two, I will do that. Interesting. This they want to be told, because I think there’s so much anxiety that comes when they have to kind of figure things out. And, and I’m, I’m wondering if that has come up in your research at all around that, feeling like you’re kind of locked into a pathway can feel very comforting and almost a reduction in anxiety for some people.

I mean, I think up I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, I think individual personality differences are important in literally every aspect of life. And I think some of those are innate. I mean, I my first book was about genetics, and the first law of behavioral genetics is that all behaviors have at least some genetic component. Sometimes it’s big, sometimes it’s small, but it’s always there when you come back on that.

So it’s about that sometimes because I’m sure have that conversation. Sure. And my and I’m speculate a little. My speculation is that some of this has to do with personality type. Some of it might have to do with like where I feel with myself, where once I became a fully independent writer, I think I started, you know, when I was more, when someone else was kind of structuring my work for me, I was craving more freedom and do it my own way.

And then once I was responsible for everything in other areas of my life, I was craving a little more, you know, like maybe telling me how to do it because. Yeah. So I’m not making every decision about everything at all times, right? I noticed even when that happened, once I became sort of in charge of all my decisions in my own work, I simplified my wardrobe.

You know, I think it was sort of an outgrowth of, all right, I’m just getting five versions of the same T-shirt. And, and so I wonder if some of it also is just to some degree like a balancing of of what feels unbalanced based on the rest of the person’s life. That’s my speculation. But that’s also a great point and a good takeaway, too.

And so there’s like learning styles and stages of development and all of that. But but that what a powerful takeaway like, especially if you’re a person who maybe professionally, you’re in a role where you do have to make a lot of decisions and there is no defined pathway. You have to figure it out, like if you’re an executive position or whatever, that there might be other areas of your life where every single day I wear the same thing and this is what I have for breakfast, and this is my routine and it’s, yeah, quite constrained so that you have space for this other stuff.

Yeah. Is that a strategy that you would advise or would you think of that differently? No, I would I mean, again, I’m speculating a little there, but that that makes sense to me. And Rick Rubin, the great music producer, writes about this and in his book about how it’s this, this sort of discipline and ritual and habit that frees these incredibly, you know, he’s worked for some of the most creative people alive.

That frees them up to then play in the sandbox within that. And so it felt to me reading his work, that there was this, like balance between the structure and the total freedom. Well, then, before I let you go, David Epstein, give us an example of what that might look like, you know, maybe even a story of transformation before someone implements these things.

And then what structure reduction, you know, can look like in practice? Oh, I mean, let’s take someone like, I don’t know if this is the kind of example that you’re, you’re looking for, but like Maya Angelou. Right? Obviously an eminent, writer and she was so, focused on focusing that when she would do her work, she would go to a motel and have them take even the artwork off of the wall so that she wouldn’t be distracted.

Right. Supreme focus. But then she would also bring things like, crossword puzzles. And she called this toggling between her big and little mind where when she was using her big mind for writing, she had this incredibly you know, structured approach. But then she wanted to toggle over to these other spots where she gave that a break and kind of did whatever came up and what came easily in these sorts of things.

And that turned into her work ritual, basically, and that toggling is what really helped her produce the incredible things that she did. And obviously, I mean, I’m a writer, so I’m interested in writers. But that’s so much of a theme if you look at great writers, like one of my favorites. I write about Isabel Allende, who’s one of the greatest living writers.

I mean, she she didn’t really start publishing books until she was 40, right? She was all over the place. She’d been a journalist for a little while. Then she was running a school and all this stuff, and life was kind of chaotic. And then she developed this writing habit where she would have certain hours every day, she would need quiet.

Sometimes that would be in a closet. When she started, she would go in a closet and close the door. She would find ways to start and stop her workday, like lighting a candle to start it and and blowing it out to stop and saying it’s done. And this led to her this sort of ritual. It was almost like she moved into this phase of her life where if you ever see a basketball player and they, you know, bounce the ball two times and clap their hands twice and touch their face before they shoot a free throw, it’s like doing these things that that became associated with getting in her performance mind space.

And that ultimately led to her writing a bestselling book about every 18 months for the last 44 years. And this started midlife when she really came up with this, this ritual and structured this was I don’t know where this ends, but it’s a thing that I’m doing every day at this certain time, in this certain way. And 80 million books later, copies of her books later, she’s she’s, you know, one of my favorites and one of the great living writers.

Well, what an inspiring place to land. David. You know, this idea that as much as people like me have this, like, you want me to say no to things. What? You’re really saying is the the laser beam of focus that comes when you can commit to something to one thing. This is what I’m doing. And use a variety of different strategies to help yourself stay locked into that.

Is very, very powerful stuff. Thank you so much for sharing some of these examples. And I’m sure there are so many more in your book. So tell us just a little bit more about that and then where to to find it, where to find you if people want to stay connected with you. Yeah, it’s inside the box.

How constraints make us better. And it’s, just became a New York Times bestseller, so that’s nice. And the the stories range from kind of thank you from business to art and music and to to personal things. And people can find more information on my, my website, davidepstein.com. And I just started, a YouTube channel that’s making videos about some of this content.

So it’s just just my name. It’s just my name. It’s just David Epstein. My YouTube handle is davidepsteinauthor. So, yeah, as new. Look, I love it. Well, congratulations on the book and the channel and I, I’m already excited about book number four. And now that you have all of these strategies, you too are going to have 80 million books like me.

Amazing. Well, thank you again so much for spending this time with us today. David, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

What a good conversation. I would strongly encourage you to check out David’s latest book, Inside the Box, to get more insight into the research behind the things we were talking about today, as well as some of the strategies he suggests to be able to reduce the chaos in your mind, get clear, and then commit with confidence to a decision.

I will also say that sometimes it can be really helpful to have a ideally therapist who is trained as a coach to help you dig into this, particularly to help you get that clarity around the big picture stuff. Who are you? What are your core values? What do you care about the most? What is most meaningful and important?

You know what is your lighthouse? That you want to sail towards? Because then you start to have a filter that will help you weed out the things that don’t match. The big picture must haves in your life. And you start to create more confidence in the things that do fit what you’re looking for, so that you can say yes to the right things easier and more effortlessly.

Of course, if you’d ever like to do that type of work, come check out the opportunities we have available for you in my group. Growing Self Come to GrowingSelf.com to request a free consultation with one of the very well qualified specialists in my network, all fully licensed therapist certified coaches who can help you dig deep into relationships, career or just yourself in your life.

Additionally, you may have heard me talk about this on the show before. We have a very special program. I call it unstuck in eight weeks, where you get to work for a deeply discounted rate like 70% off the usual cost of coaching with one of the therapists going through my coach training program, which is exclusively for licensed mental health professionals to become board certified coaches.

If you want to learn more about that, come to GrowingSelf.com/grow and I think at this point you can join the waitlist for that program, for when it enrolls again. All right. Thanks again for spending this time with me today. I hope this is interesting for you. As it was for me, I got so much out of this conversation that I’ll be back in touch with you again very soon for another episode of Love, Happiness and Success.