Happiness by Design

by Paul Dolan

  I wonder what you are distracted by. Now’s a good time to take a few moments to think about three things that interrupt you from attending to your experiences.

  I get distracted by . . .

  1. _______________________________

  2. _______________________________

  3. _______________________________

  Done it? I suspect that at least one item on that list has something to do with texts, tweets, e-mails, or the Internet.

  A wandering mouse

  We’ve all heard about attention deficit disorder but the modern world is making us all victims of “attention distraction disorder.” It is important to note here that I am making a deliberate and important distinction between the two. The former is attributable to the person: some people are more likely to have it than others. Attention distraction disorder, on the other hand, is the result of contextual influences outside the person: some situations are more conducive to it than others, and they usually involve modern technology.

  Although we’ve always needed to deal with the perils of distraction, the modern age is constantly removing obstacles to becoming addicted to checking e-mails or checking the Facebook updates of your virtual friends.58 Medical doctors are now warning about “digital dementia,” which is defined as irreversible deficits in brain development and memory loss among children who spend a lot of time on electronic devices like laptops and mobile phones.59

  Internet addiction was recently suggested to be a major contribution to mental disorders. Naturally, it’s difficult to avoid being distracted when you are addicted to the source of the distraction. There is now evidence to show that the brains of heavy Internet users (people who report symptoms of addiction) literally shrink, just as they do in people who have addictions to heavy drugs such as cocaine and heroin.60 Your brain becomes less efficient at filtering out irrelevant information when you allow yourself to become bombarded by information from the Internet.

  In a recent study of people’s desires and their ability to keep those desires under control, more than two hundred adults were given BlackBerries for a week. They were beeped seven times a day and asked if they were currently experiencing, or had experienced in the last half hour, a desire (described as an urge, craving, or longing) for a range of activities. The desire to engage in media activities was very difficult for the participants to control—they reported desiring them more frequently than sex, smoking, drinking coffee, drinking alcohol, and eating.61 I have the feeling that this is a mistaken desire.

  All in all, we have an “attentional commitment” to our communication devices.62 Even when you aren’t stimulated by incoming updates, texts, or calls, you might imagine them. If you are anything like me, you will have experienced “phantom vibration syndrome”: imagining the sensation of your phone vibrating, only to pick it up and realize that it wasn’t doing anything at all.63 Even when your devices aren’t fighting for your attention, your brain is still wired to pay attention to them.

  So you should look to find ways of breaking free from the addiction of virtual interaction; you have nothing to lose but your chains of e-mails.

  Now, I do appreciate that you might be quite fond of the Internet and your phone. Indeed, I think there are many people out there who would be more affected by losing their phone than the friends whose information is recorded in it. So you’ll probably have to take an initial hit to your happiness as you try to wean yourself off, even if only ever so slightly. But I reckon within a few days you will adjust and be happier than before as you free your attention up for more pleasurable and purposeful activities.

  Distraction is an attentional thief and so you should look to keep the thief out by erecting barriers to being distracted. Some of the design features discussed in chapter 6 can be utilized here. Perhaps your wireless router does not require that extra add-on that extends its range to the backyard, too. It will be much easier to design your way out of distraction by preventing distractions from getting to you in the first place, than to use your willpower to counter them when they occur.

  Use technology to counter its negative effects—set up new defaults by turning off notifications, leaving your phone on silent, turning off the chat function on your computer at work, and taking advantage of the new apps and programs that actually block you from using the Internet. This will allow you to pay attention to your activities and to pay attention for longer because you have designed a distraction-free zone.

  You can also overcome your attentional commitment to your mobile devices with a public commitment to pay attention to your experiences. My friends and family know that I don’t take my phone to the gym and, unless I am out for the night, I turn it off at 7:00 p.m. To avoid your own distractions on a night out with friends, put your phone on silent: you commit yourself to not being distracted by “pop-ups” in your head or on your phone. If your friends were to do likewise, you and they would be happier. It would seem that inventors of the “Phone Stacking Game” (also known as “Don’t Be a Dick During Meals”) agree with me. Before the meal, everyone stacks up their phone in a pile on the table. Whoever touches their phone first has to pay the bill.64 Although purposeful activities are the most vulnerable to distraction, the invention of this game suggests that even more pleasurable ones, like socializing, are also now requiring design-based solutions to overcoming distraction.

  Embed yourself in social networks made of the sorts of people who also prefer not being distracted. My friends and I try to avoid text conversations, which take so much longer than a single real conversation. It seems as though we are in the minority, as it looks like text is overtaking talk as the preferred means of communication. A whopping 129 billion text messages were sent during 2010, which is an increase of 24 percent compared to 2009.65 In contrast, time spent talking on the phone actually dropped by 5 percent from 2010 to 2011.66 If you are going to text chat, at least try to make some of it purposeful alongside the general small talk. This all reminds me of something a taxi driver said to me once. He asked me to imagine that voice calls were invented after text messaging. “Do you really think,” he said, “that anyone would be sending texts? Of course they bloody wouldn’t—they would be bloody marveling at their ability to actually have a conversation.” I think he is bloody right.

  Apologies, I got a little distracted there. There are so many stimuli vying for your attention—sounds, places, people, smells, and your own thoughts rattling around in your head. You only have so much attentional energy and it will make you happier, more efficient, and healthier if you are able to focus it properly.

  Happier by doing

  It should come as no great surprise to anyone that we are happier when we pay attention to good experiences and to people we like being with. The problem is that we act in ways that make it appear as if this is not at all obvious. There are some simple yet effective things that you can do to reorient your attention to being happier. Buy a few more experiences and a bit less stuff, switch between pleasurable and purposeful activities, and listen to music. Make a commitment to spend a little more time each day talking to people you like. And look to spending a little less time each day glued to your computer or phone. Distractions drain you and leave you feeling tired and less happy, so stay focused on one thing at a time—and stop continually checking those darn e-mails and Facebook updates.

  8

  Decide, design, and do

  You are now armed with the three pillars of the production process of happiness. Producing happiness involves deciding, designing, and doing, and the most effective ways to be happier involve joining up these various components.

  To illustrate how to bring them together, let’s consider two behaviors that I think will resonate with many readers: first, how to procrastinate less; and second, how to help yourself by helping others more. Procrastination involves avoiding paying attention to a task that you know you should complete. It is a good example for our purpose
s because most of us admit to procrastinating, which makes us less happy, strains our relationships with other people, and worsens performance at work and school.1 Doing more for others is another good example, I think, because it makes us happy, but our behavior often does not reflect this fact.

  Don’t worry if you feel like these two behaviors don’t strike a strong chord with you; I’m confident that knowing the reasons why we depart from being as happy as we can be in these contexts, and the related suggestions, will surely spark ideas in your mind about how you can tailor them to fit other behaviors that you are more concerned about.

  Dither less

  Procrastination and distraction go hand in hand. If we could completely avoid the task, that would be fine and we wouldn’t need to avoid paying attention to it, but procrastinators worry because the task simply can’t be avoided (and we have seen how damaging intrusive thoughts can be for happiness).2 Distraction also causes procrastination when stimuli other than the task at hand get in the way of getting it done. Let’s first look at how we get into this misery of procrastination and then look for solutions to get out of it.

  Departures from happiness

  The first step in tackling procrastination is to decide whether or not you want to perform the task. Perhaps the task is not worth bothering with at all. A mistaken desire might be driving it, for example. It would appear that we procrastinate more over tasks we deem to be particularly important, like working toward lofty goals, because they require more effort and we seek to avoid expending this effort.3 We also dither over tasks that will be evaluated, such as when students procrastinated over writing essays when they believed their university would randomly select some students’ work and make them read it to students at a local high school as compared to students who just handed in their essays.4 Moreover, tasks that don’t match your skill set get in the way of becoming absorbed in the activity.

  Mistaken projections make it easy to procrastinate. I’m sure we would like more time rather than less. But think about when you have to leave for work early as compared to having loads of time. If you are anything like me, you rush around more when you have more time and not less. This is probably because you will plan for the earlier departure and procrastinate more over being ready for the later one. Medical students evaluate more patients per hour and have more patient contact on nine-hour shifts as opposed to twelve-hour ones.5 Further, as we have already seen, our memories do not accurately recall the duration of past events, and so we will project these errors into the future.6 For example, we would seem to both remember and predict that short tasks of a couple minutes or so take longer than they actually do, but when it comes to longer tasks, we believe they will take less time than they actually do.7 Most things take more than two minutes, so bear this in mind and plan extra time.

  It’s our mistaken beliefs that are perhaps at the root of our procrastination. Many of us mistakenly believe that we work best under the pressure of a last-minute deadline but this is generally not true. A review of twenty-four procrastination studies involving nearly four thousand students found that those who put off their work tended to have lower grades than those who didn’t.8 And even when we know that we tend to complete projects about a day before deadline, we’ll still estimate overly optimistically that we’ll be done about four days ahead of schedule.9

  You might also think you’re more creative under pressure. But when writers for the Harvard Business Review asked nearly two hundred highly educated employees from US businesses to describe, in separate sections of an online diary, how much time pressure they felt at the end of their workday and something that stood out in their minds from that day, they found that greater time pressure was associated with fewer instances of reported creativity.10 You should also have realistic expectations about what you can achieve. Perfectionists are thought to be notorious procrastinators because they set goals that are too high, which they then fail to achieve, though this has been disputed.11

  I would like to add that procrastination can adversely affect policy objectives, too. Together with Caroline Rudisill, I have shown that changing the maximum age that women in the UK can receive a state-funded cycle of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment from thirty-nine to forty-two will almost certainly result in fewer babies being born than before as women, whose fertility is declining, delay trying for a baby in the presence of the new deadline.12 This is one of many examples where policy makers need to consult behavioral scientists (ideally me, of course) before intervening.

  Decide

  So how might you decide to procrastinate less? You can overcome the three attentional obstacles with salient feedback about how working toward your goals makes you feel. Procrastination is about avoiding something you are torn about doing, so what is it that makes you want to avoid it? Consider reconstructing a similar task from the past. How did you feel the last time you did something similar to what you’re procrastinating over? What was the environment like the last time you did it, and who was there?

  You can also look to get more immediate feedback about how it feels to be working toward your goals and achieving them. Loan officers at the Colombian bank Bancamía put this principle into practice to tackle their serious procrastination problem. They had the bad habit of putting off finding new loan clients until just before their monthly bonuses were calculated, during the last two weeks of each month. Seventy percent of these officers reported being stressed or very stressed, and over half reported having trouble organizing their work or sticking to their plans. To shift their workload, they broke down their tasks into weekly elements and received small prizes, like movie tickets and restaurant coupons, for finishing each week. Compared to a group of loan officers who didn’t enter this antiprocrastination program, they increased the attainment of their goals by 30 percent and their bonus payments by 25 percent. As discussed, feedback can help you decide what to input into your production process, as well as set behavior change in motion.13

  Feedback from others can be an important means of overcoming procrastination. Other people might be better placed to help you get things done right now because they are less committed to your present self than you are. Other people can also help you rein in your overoptimism about the time it will take you to complete a task—indeed, perhaps erring on the side of assuming it will take longer than it actually will.14 Ask someone to play devil’s advocate with you and incorporate this into your decisions.

  Being too hard on ourselves, and not accepting the fact that we procrastinate, just leads to more procrastination and makes it harder to change. Students who were self-critical and reported disliking themselves because of their procrastinating past were more likely to procrastinate the second time around than those who forgave themselves.15 If you have never forgiven yourself for procrastinating before, start now; and if you have, remind yourself of how good it felt to do so the last time. The students in this study who forgave themselves also reported experiencing more positive emotions.

  Design

  How might you then design your way to less procrastination? Start by considering whether the primes in your immediate environment are conducive to getting things done. Perhaps a picture of a clean kitchen on your fridge will prime you to do the dishes just as the way clean and fresh smells (like citrus) get people to clean up and to wash their hands. And those of us who work or study in the same location appear less likely to procrastinate because the location nudges us to do what we did the last time we were in it.16 So if you always work in the same place but never get anything done, change spaces, or just rearrange the space, and then see what happens.

  Then what about using a default to preserve your attentional resources? You probably already opt out of many distracting scenarios that breed procrastination, like pop-up ads, and opt into many attention-saving ones, like automatic bill paying. Apply these principles elsewhere when you can. If you can set default deadlines, don’t assume later is better. Most people think t
hey’ll use a gift certificate with an expiration date further into the future, but the opposite is true: they’re more likely to redeem it before it expires if they are given just a few weeks to use it as opposed to if they are given a month or more.17

  Also use the power of commitments and consider how best to spread them out. In a well-known study, researchers hired sixty proofreaders who responded to advertisements placed in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s newspaper and on bulletin boards (little did the applicants know that they were about to read three very boring postmodern texts that often didn’t make sense). Each participant was randomly assigned to do one of three things: (1) submit one of the three texts every seven days; (2) submit all three texts at the end of three weeks; or (3) set their own deadlines. Those with the weekly deadlines found the most errors and procrastinated the least—as did those who set weekly deadlines for themselves.18

  So if you have a big project, consider breaking it down into smaller deadlines that are spaced evenly apart. Someone else could even do this for you (and might do a better job of it). If you get a friend to set your deadlines for you, your commitment will be to someone whom you do not want to let down, and so you might be more likely to meet the target by attending to them as well as it.

  Breaking a project down has also been shown to reduce our tendency to be overly optimistic about how long a task will take. People who estimated the time it would take to prepare an hors d’oeuvre tray with miniature sandwiches, sliced fruit, stuffed vegetables, and skewered shrimp thought it would take about ten minutes less than it actually did, but when they reviewed all of the steps that would be needed to complete it (slicing fruit, boiling shrimp, etc.), there wasn’t much of a difference between their predictions and the amount of time taken.19