Thanks to the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and father of behavioral
economics, Daniel Kahneman, the scientific community has a deeper
understanding of well-being. To wit, Kahneman revealed that humans live
with two minds--our experiencing and remembering selves. In this episode
I'd like to discuss these two selves and how it relates to your personal
productivity.
EXPERIENCING SELF
The experiencing self is that which answers the question, "How do I feel
right now?"…what you sense is most important to your experiencing self.
Sensory-specific, the experiencing self is mostly focused on the present
view of sights, sounds, smells, physical sensations, and tastes.
REMEMBERING SELF
The remembering self, on the other hand, is a past-focused mind and makes
decisions intuitively based on what our brain memorializes of our
experiences. It answers the question, "What happened?"...what you perceive
happened becomes the story you
remember and reenforces it as reality.
One way of looking at it is that the experiencing self
renders facts now while the
remembering self tells stories about
what happened.
YOUR PRODUCTIVE SELF
Do you remember the last time you worked on a really difficult project or
task? Well, it turns out that Kahneman's research explains why we dread,
procrastinate and even remember projects or tasks as difficult. You see,
Kahneman writes about moment-utility (which I've provided a link to his
paper explaining it below); the idea is to capture much more in-the-moment
data as you experience a situation, such as working on a really difficult
project or task. It turns out that when your experiencing self does the
tracking and analysis, you have a better assessment of your
experiences and you also have a better
feeling about positive outcomes. Using Kahneman's findings, I recommend
that when you're dealing with a difficult project or task to answer these
three series of questions:
1. "How do I
physically feel right now?" (The likelihood is that physically you're
fine.)
2. "What does
success, accomplishment or complete look like for me in the next five to 15
minutes?" (This gives you a more realistic view of the project or
task.)
3. At the point of
ending a project, task or a period of finishing some part of either, ask
yourself (and even better, write it down somewhere), "how good/accomplished
do I feel? What have I learned that I can use in the future?" (Ending on a
positive message will give your remembering self something to look back on
to equate your productivity with a positive affect.)
You see, ending on a high note, or on a less negative tone, than the
initial upstart difficulty will inevitably teach your remembering self
that difficult projects or tasks usually only start off that way. And,
even if there are challenges along the way, it's usually only difficult
in peak periods. This rewriting of your brain patterns will make you
leap at new challenges instead of sulking when you look at your project
or task list and see something that might be tough...and this will make
you sincerely more productive.
See also:
Dr. Kahneman's research paper on
moment-utility:
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s11/sh/8a5a784a-c945-4259-91e0-f76186e7073e/4e927594f4170378dd60ab03217d3617
