The Find: The ability to make good decisions is key to management and rests on a brain function called “executive function,” but psychologists warn that this decision making function is far more easily depleted than once thought. - The Source: A fascinating article in Scientific American.
The Takeaway: Scientific American rounds up the latest scientific research on decision making, regulating attention and maintaining determination (sound like your day?) and comes up with some startling conclusions, especially for procrastinators:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise.
What do cookies have to do with careers? Both resisting the allure of the chocolate chip and weighing the pros and cons of a new gig exercise your executive function — and you only have a limited supply. Everyone knows that after a demanding exam your ability to think clearly and make decisions is drained, but even keeping your hand out of the cookie jar or picking out shoes at the mall can deplete your limited reserves of decision making power: researchers found that shoppers who made more choices were then less likely to do well solving simple algebra problems.
It’s a straight forward enough insight but one that yields solid, real-world advice: beware the downstream decision. Even seemingly small decisions will, over time, fatigue your brain, leading decision-making to “become reliant on a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process.” In other words, it’ll get worse. Bad decisions can lead to massive and complicated problems, but luckily the danger of executive function fatigue seems to be easily avoided. Keep tabs on your mental acuity and make sure to face the toughest calls first.
The Question: Have you ever been a victim of executive function fatigue?
(Image of man with extreme brain fatigue by Kevin Lawver, CC 2.0)
