Mental Tax Shelters
🧠 Planning for Serendipity 💡
“Serendipity always rewards the prepared.” -Katori Hall
I love my junk drawers.
A few years ago, I got a new desk with no drawers, mainly because it saved space in my home office (the desk could be placed on top of a radiator I will never turn on).1 In hindsight, I realized that this was an excellent decision for me because it meant that I no longer had any places to put extra junk…
I’ve been a hoarder for most of my life, and not just books. I love old articles, letters, cards, pictures, etc., and have a very hard time letting them go. Turns out that one of the ways I could reduce this junk was by eliminating my ability to store these items somewhere.
Our brains work the same way.
Bandwidth Tax
The goal of Moneyball Judaism is not to make you more efficient.
I am certain that if I asked each new subscriber why they signed up, I would get some variation of the answer “I want to be more effective and efficient at my job.”2 Have no fear: I also want you to be better at your job. But before we can build ourselves up, we need to keep breaking ourselves down so that we can reduce one of my favorite ideas, “the bandwidth tax.”
A few months ago, I featured a book by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldan Shafir entitled Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, and the high cost of scarcity. And while I hope that you read the entire book, in honor of Balaam and his donkey, it’s time to focus on a single concept introduced by the authors.
Pretend that you work in an office with a window next to train tracks; every time the train goes by, you do not “stop” working, but the noise of the train is sufficient to distract you for five seconds each time the train passes by.3 As such, every time the train passes by, you pay a small attentional tax. Even if you pretend that the tax is “cheap,” the equivalent of 5 cents per instance, over time the total impact of that tax will compound and grow. And since you do not typically calculate time the way you would calculate money, you have no way of knowing how much progress you lose over time.
However, while the cost of a noisy subway may be small,4 most of us have far more distractions in our day than just a subway. As such, when you are dealing with a subway plus interruptions, pointless meetings, and weird sounds coming from your phone every time you get a text message, all of a sudden the bandwidth tax starts to get out of control.
To clarify, this is slightly different from the concept of “opportunity cost,” the implicit or explicit cost of choosing one priority over another. In the case of the bandwidth tax, you might be working on the most important priority for that moment; however, the attentional tax limits your ability to focus on that task, even when you know it is the most important one.
While Mullainathan and Shafir’s primary focus is how the bandwidth tax affects outcomes related to poverty (and with good reason),5 they also argue that the bandwidth tax has a subtle, yet corrosive impact on everyone’s effectiveness over the long term:
“The tax places us in a position where we are prone to make mistakes. The busy person is likely to commit an even bigger planning error; after all, he is likely still needing to attend to his last project and is more distracted and overwhelmed-a surefire way to misplan. With compromised bandwidth, we are more likely to give in to our impulses, more likely to cave in to temptations. With little slack, we have less room to fail. With compromised bandwidth, we are more likely to fail.”6
This passage captures the lesson that motivates my work: the goal is not to be more efficient; the goal is to succeed. When we pay a bandwidth tax or force others to pay a bandwidth tax, all we are really doing is making people less effective.
The Organized Mind
Daniel Levitin is a cognitive scientist who wrote a dense but surprisingly readable book on managing information overload entitled The Organized Mind. To the extent that there is an idea that informs my approach by which Jewish leaders can thrive in a world of finite time and limited resources, this is it. I know few organizations that do not pay a “bandwidth tax,” but that doesn’t mean we can’t optimize our mental tax shelters.
I’ve explored in previous issues some of the concepts Levitin analyzes in greater depth, such as decision fatigue, attention as a muscle, and why there is no such thing as multitasking. Levitin embraces these principles to one degree or another, which is why he argues that “the most fundamental principle of organization is…Shift the burden for organizing things from our brains to the external world.”7 Whenever possible, do not keep ideas in your head; “place” them somewhere where you can look when you need them.
Levitin explains this principle by comparing it to sifting through his junk drawer:
“While I meticulously separated the rubble into categories, it occurred to me that our junk drawers provide a perfect metaphor for how we live our lives. How had I accumulated notepads of old friends’ shopping lists and broken door handles from my great aunt’s rental apartment? Why did I feel the need to hoard five pairs of scissors, three hammers, and two extra dog collars? Was it a strategic decision I made to stockpile various tape brands in the kitchen? Did I use Thomas Goetz’s decision tree in deciding to place the NyQuil next to the crescent wrench, or was it an unconscious memory association between the NyQuil (bedtime) and the wrench (crescent moon in the nighttime sky)? I think not.”8
Our junk drawers contain many things we do not need, things we have no idea why we even wanted to keep in the first place. However, those drawers occasionally contain ideas, mementos, and pieces of inspiration that we forgot about. Our minds are no different, and the more mentally organized we become, the more we are able to recall our best insights that came in moments of serendipity.
For these reasons, Levitin argues that “Getting organized can bring us all to the next level in our lives.”9 The more clutter we remove from our minds, the more we can find the things that help us be at our best, and, by extension, the organizations we serve. And that is a mission worthy of pursuit.
As such, the bandwidth tax and Levitin’s notion of the organized mind are perfect examples of why a moneyball approach has a transcendent purpose. The goal is not to be a cyborg, with no feelings or passions. The goal is to do great things for the Jewish people. And the more effective we are, the greater we will be.
David Allen and Daniel Levitin
Not surprisingly, I love Getting Things Done (GTD). See how the two relate.
Weekly Links
Shameless Self-Promotion!: Last week, eJewishPhilanthropy published my latest piece, “Planning to Fail: Why Your Most Expensive Mistakes Are Mental.” Welcome to the over 60 new subscribers who signed up after reading it. I couldn’t do it without you.
What Was Nate Silver’s Data Revolution?: Not surprisingly, I’m a big Nate Silver fan, and his impending departure from 538 raises questions about the future of data journalism. Here is a thoughtful piece on the subject in The New Yorker.
Just How Bad Is Denominational Decline?: In short, the answer is “really bad.” But it’s more subtle than that, so read carefully. Almost none of the journalism on this subject in the Jewish Community is evidence-based, but this piece asks far better questions.
The Poop Detective: No, this is not bathroom humor. Wastewater surveillance is one of the key strategies for preventing another pandemic. Here’s why.
Apple’s Mixed Reality Headset: I have no intention of spending over $3,000 on Apple Vision, which was just launched a few weeks ago. That said, I want to understand it, and so should you.
Shoutout to Bogdan, my favorite TaskRabbit. Remember, I am not handy.
Originally, I would have assumed their answer would be, “Josh made me do it.”
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldan Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books, 2013), 42.
Of course, colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary know exactly what this is like, having worked next to an above-ground subway line for years, perhaps decades. Fun fact, it took me years to realize that the Women’s League Seminary Synagogue (WLSS) has soundproof windows, which is how you can pray in the synagogue while not hearing the trains passing by. Again, I’m not too bright.
Continuing with the subway analogy, if you hear the subway 4 times an hour during an 8-hour workday, this would come to a $1.60 in attentional time lost that day. Over a month, it’s $48. Over a year, $584. You get the idea…
The authors conducted research about students performed when one group had to frequently the sound of a train passing by, and the other group did not. I imagine that you can guess which group performed worse, and what societal groups are more likely to go to schools where this is an issue.
See Footnote 3, 83.
Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (New York: Dutton, 2014), 371
Ibid., 381-382.
Ibid., 383.
I’m getting better with clutter but still love a junk drawer!