The perfect nudge

Design your life like a choice architect:

• Encourage smarter decisions you want to do by making them more accessible.
• Add friction to habits you want to quit, making them less accessible, or remove the option to perform them completely.

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.” 

Before jumping to a conclusion, think about the long-term consequences of your decision.

We may respect those able to fling themselves into a hard problem and make a quick choice with seemingly little thought, but making a meaningful decision needs to be done with care for the long-term effects.

It’s important to be aware of what state of mind you’re in before tackling a hard choice.

Decision fatigue happens when the mental energy required to weigh the tradeoffs of our decision becomes too much for us to handle. 

The threat, uncertainty, and anxiety related to the pandemic lead us to make short-sighted decisions:

• we crave more information so we are spending a lot of time looking for news updates relating to the virus and its spread. But too much negative news causes stress and distraction.
• the lack of agency causes people to seek out actions that will make them feel more in control. Early on, this took the form of buying hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol.

People want to take action quickly, even when inaction might be more prudent.
Faced with anxiety, some are making quick decisions about finances as well and started fear selling their stocks. But this is taking a paper loss in the present that is likely to come back in the future (given the way stock markets have acted in the past).

When consumers are faced with many alternatives, they often experience choice overload that increases anxiety and hinders decision-making.

Consumers try to reduce this anxiety by selecting only a couple of criteria (say price and quantity) to determine the best value for money.

A decoy steers you in a particular direction while giving you the impression that you are making a rational, informed choice.

Consider the price of drinks at a well-known juice bar: a small (350 ml) size costs $6.10; the medium (450 ml) $7.10; and the large (610 ml) $7.50. The medium is a slightly better value than the small, and the large better still. The medium is designed to be the decoy, steering you to see the biggest drink as the best value for money.

If you buy the biggest, was it because you made a sensible choice, or have you been manipulated to opt for bigger than intended?

When you consider making a decision, who do you turn to?

• If you seek your point of reference internally, you will make the decision for yourself.
• If you seek your point of reference externally, you will reach out to people for their feedback and validation.

What drives you in your work?

• If you are a possibilities person, you focus on the possible choices in a situation. You are likely curious about the potential your job has for growth.
• If you are a necessity person, you are content not to think outside the box. You prefer being shown what to do and enjoy knowing how to do your tasks well.

[Researches Argo and Shiv] found that 85% of diners in restaurants admitted to telling white lies when their dining experiences were unsatisfactory (i.e., claiming all was well when it wasn't). The real interesting finding was that diners who told white lies to cover up their dissatisfactions were then likely to leave bigger tips than those who did not. 

Consider the polygraph machine. It doesn't actually detect lies, specifically, but rather the signs of stress that accompany telling them. 

According to a study, those who were instructed on how to lie less reported improvements in their relationships, less trouble sleeping, less tension, fewer headaches, and fewer sore throats.

You need to find out just where your time is going currently. You can use a pen and paper, a spreadsheet, or an app to visualize where you spend most of the hours in your day.

• Block your time for specific types of work, not individual tasks.
• Block your time for core work like coding, designing or writing, for shallow work like daily tasks and maintenance, for meetings and emails, and fill it with frequent breaks to replenish yourself.
• Give yourself space between blocks so that you can decompress and keep your energy levels high.

People who are told that the risk of something bad happening is lower than they expected, tend to adjust their predictions to match the new information. But they ignore the new information when the risk is higher.

Part of this overly optimistic outlook stems from our natural tendency to believe that bad things happen to other people, but not to us. 

Sometimes we make poor comparisons or the compared items are not representative or equal.

We often decide based on rapid comparisons without really thinking about our options. In order to avoid bad decisions, relying on logic and thoughtful examination of the options can sometimes be more important than relying on your immediate "gut reaction."

Describe your own behavior in detail, and search for clues you might have missed before. Find your trigger.
If you have a habit of making coffee, it might be triggered by entering the kitchen. Some people eat in response to boredom or buy stuff in response to their desires.

Take an existing cue you have, but trick yourself into triggering a different behavior.
If you want to quit coffee, you could give away the coffee machine and put a box of tea or a glass of water on the countertop.

• It can help people cope with difficult events from their past.
• It can  help people deal with socially distressful situations.
• Useful because of our tendency to display high levels of wise reasoning when we give advice to others, but not when we decide how to act for ourselves.
• It reduces decisional biases and improves decision-making during times of information overload.

• Use self-distancing language:  refer to yourself in the second or third-person.
• Try to view the situation from an alternative viewpoint, that is different from your own.
• Try to visualize the perspective of  someone you admire, and then ask yourself what would they do in that situation.
• Try expressive writing: write about your thoughts and feelings when you’re trying to analyze an event that you’ve experienced.