Limitations to Thinking

There are at least three activities which sap our energy and make it hard to make difficult decisions. Our brains remain incapable of concentrating on more than one thing at a time. Even though people may think they can operate by multi-tasking, instead it leads to alternating attention and not providing the person with a coherent, streamlined method of thinking. The second limiting factor is that humans short-term memory can only hold 7 items (+-2). Combining multi-tasking with trying to remember a large number it items leads to doing tasks at a level lower than can be expected or what one is capable of. The final limiting element is will power. Because of the research by Roy Baumeister, it is now believed that willpower is like a muscle. When it is overworked, it becomes tired and gets sloppy.

Over use of will power leads to poor control of self and environment, including decision making. Baumeister writes that "results suggest that a broad assessment of actions make use of the same resource. Acts of self-control, responsible decision making, and active choice seem to interfere with other tasks that follow soon after." Baumeister's findings suggest even if we are excited by the work we are doing or are in a time crunch, we should give ourselves break time to recharge our attention and ability to think clearly. The break allows the brain to process information and make new, unique connections between ideas and prepare it to receive new information.

Instead of just "pushing through" or forcing ourselves to take notes, read or write, we need to find a way to make us feel like doing any activity which truly moves our work closer to completion. I doubt that rewarding ourselves truly works, since doing something with the idea of a reward makes us realize that it is something we don't want to do. What is something that people want to do and how can that be used to keep themselves engaged? How can they flip the idea from having to do something to getting to do it? The other element is that it will have to be able to be done without much mental gymnastics, because people generally won't spend the energy trying to come up with those connections. It will have to be something easy, but effective to do.