“Debiasing” by Richard Larrick (2004)

September 2012

in Self-mastery

Blackwell Handbook of Judgement and Decision Making

This article contains my summary notes for “Debiasing” by Richard Larrick (2004), a chapter from the Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making. ((Larrick, R. P. (2004). Debiasing. In D. J. Koehler & N. Harvey (Eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making, (pp. 316–337). Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Retrieved from here.))

What You Need to Know (Summary of My Notes)

Human thinking is flawed—there is a gap between how well we think and how well we want to think. How to we bridge this gap? One option is through the act of debiasing.

The very “shape” of our brains causes us to be biased—to make systematic thinking mistakes. There is a central and neglected question in current biases and debiasing literature: “How do you get people to adopt better decision strategies?” Debiasing is the art of reducing biases in human thinking, by finding a variety of useful bias-reducing techniques, and getting us to use them. Larrick groups these debiasing techniques into three categories: motivational, cognitive, and technological strategies.

What has been tried, and how well did it work? Note that the focus here is on personal strategies that we as individuals can implement ourselves; not strategies that, for example, rely on external manipulations of our environment.

Motivational strategies: Incentives aren’t very useful; they often create a “lost pilot” effect: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m making good time!” That is, incentives make you want to work hard, but this is useless without having the right tools or direction. Social accountability is a more promising form of motivation, but has its own problems. If we know what others expect us to decide, we may be biased towards that outcome. If we know what process others expect us to use, we may be biased towards that process.

Cognitive strategies: Teaching people to “consider the opposite” has been very successful at improving decision making. Training in specific thinking rules is also promising, though needs further study.

Technological strategies: Group decision making can work, but you really have to do it right. Decision-assisting software might help, but it needs more research.

There are a lot of challenges to debiasing. We naturally resist change: “You mean I’ve been doing it wrong for the last 50 years?” The benefits of debiasing are often unclear, difficult to measure, and challenging to implement. The techniques that work best are usually simple, easy, domain-specific (applicable to very specific problems), and bottom-up (“grown” in the individual, not mere instructions we are commanded to obey).

The research is promising, but little is known with confidence in the scientific literature. There are many things yet to do, many areas to explore, and many debiasing techniques to study further.

My Notes

There is a big gap between how we actually think and how we would ideally think. ((A “normative-descriptive” gap.))

The obvious question then follows: How can we close this gap? What can we do to improve our thinking?  [click here to keep reading…]

My Pomodoro Project

August 2012

in Productivity & Organization, Self-mastery

The Pomodoro Technique

Update: Added weekly log, and updated some project details.

The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity technique which can be summarized thusly:

Work for 25 minutes. Take a 5 minute break. Repeat. Occasionally take longer breaks. 

There’s a little more to it than that, but that’s the core idea.

I first heard about it at my recent CFAR minicamp. I was skeptical.

I’ve tried similar techniques before, and settled on doing 90 minute work segments, followed by 30 minute breaks. I thought this worked best for me, but I was definitely wrong. Switching to the Pomodoro Technique almost literally doubled my productivity overnight. I can’t believe how effective it’s been! Here are a few more details on the Pomodoro Technique, and my pomodoro project.

How to Get Started

For the short and sweet crash-course, read the pomodoro technique cheat sheet. You should be able to start implementing the Pomodoro Technique within fifteen minutes.

If you want more info read the actual book, which is available online for free—but don’t read it just to procrastinate trying the technique.

My Pomodoro Project

In short, it is this:

Use the Pomodoro Technique as strictly as possible for four weeks two months. At the end, assess the value, brainstorm modifications or changes, and adjust accordingly. The goal is to do “as much work as possible,” though after the first few days two weeks I adjusted this to aiming for 12 16 pomodoros a day—the equivalent of 6 8 hours of solid work.

What I’m Tracking

There are several key things to track in this project:

  • Number of Pomodoros completed.
  • The category each pomodoro belongs to (see the Weekly Pomodoro Log below).
  • Number of internal interruptions.
  • Number of external interruptions.
  • Number of estimated pomodoros vs actual pomodoros per task.

I stopped tracking interruptions after the first two weeks; it was too time-consuming and too much of a distraction in itself. I still mentally track interruptions, avoid them as much as possible, and wait to address them until the current pomodoro is completed.

Daily Pomodoro Log

Weekly Pomodoro Log by Category

I’m also scheduling all of my pomodoros into four general categories. The associated percentages represent my targeted pomodoro distribution between the categories, as follows:

  • Basics (50%) – Hourly paid work which I must do to make enough money to survive.
  • Income Projects (20%) – Other income-generating projects—such as Anki Essentials—that lack the certainty of income from the Basics work.
  • Learning (20%) – Everything related to personal growth, reading cool books, life meta, and writing blog posts.
  • Miscellaneous (10%) – Everything else. This mostly includes things like work around the house, cleaning, organizing finances, and planning pomodoros.

Pomodoro Weekly Log

Work Environment & Other Notes

  • I work from home on various projects, in an empty house. At around 4:30pm my partner comes home, and I strive to avoid working after then for several reasons.
  • I started on a Thursday, simply because that was when I decided to start, and I had no reason to wait until the “start of a new week”.
  • I’m not using the official Pomodoro To-Do List or Activity Inventory because I track my to-do’s and next actions digitally in mind maps.
  • I’m not using an actual Pomodoro timer—a Pomodoro Technique sin, I’ve been told. If this project pans out, I’ll consider investing in one. In the meantime, I’ve been using e.ggtimer.com a pomodoro app on my Mac (which I’m sort-of enjoying).

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My “Inbox Zero” System

July 2012

in Self-mastery

Inbox Zero is an email inbox philosophy that comes from Merlin Mann, the creator of 43folders.

As the site says, Inbox Zero is about getting your brain out of your email inbox. For me, personally, this means getting my inbox down to zero emails, and keeping it that way—whenever it’s not empty I process it as quickly as possible. Inbox Zero also, critically, avoids using email as a tool for information and task storage.

Below are my key pointers for how my Inbox Zero system works. If I were to summarize it in one sentence, it would be:

Keep it simple, reply asap, archive with vigour, and reduce clutter!

What I Do

  • Regularly process my inbox throughout the week. Once a day is fine for me, though it depends on how much email you get. Admittedly, I look at my email much more than once a day, but when I do it’s usually to see what email I just got, and to process it immediately.
  • If replying to an email will take under 60 seconds, do it RIGHT NOW. No excuses! If it’s urgent, I plan RIGHT NOW when I will respond to it. If it’s not urgent, then I approach it again during one of my “email purge” sessions.
  • Archive with vigour. Keeping emails around because you’re worried about losing information? This is 2012: don’t delete anything, just archive it! Get it out of your Inbox! If it’s important project information, put it with the project. If it fits a specific category, then label it before archiving.
  • Keep emails that require replies in my inbox. If the email needs a reply, I let it sit in my inbox until I reply. If it’s been there for a few days, I assess whether I actually need to reply. If yes, DO IT, of not… archive!
  • Use filters. If you use Gmail, then Gmail filters are your friend! Whenever I start getting regular emails that I want to keep, but don’t need to look at right when they come in, I just filter them to a specific folder. For example, I have a Life Dev and a Biz Dev folder that receive emails from relevant email subscription lists. Whenever I want to read some life hacking updates or some business and writing advice, I make the effort to go look in those folders. If I find I’m never looking in them, or don’t find them useful, I’ll start unsubscribing from them, which brings me to the next point.
  • Unsubscribe from clutter. Do you get weekly emails from some clothing store who forced you to give them your email address? How about some email newsletter you signed up for to get a free ebook? If it’s not useful, dump it: Unsubscribe, filter it to the trash bin, or mark it as spam.

What I Avoid

  • Using my Inbox as a to-do list. Hopefully you have some other sort of to-do list organizer or system. If you don’t, then you probably have even more low-hanging fruit to tackle, my friend. I use a system of mind maps, Toodledo.com, and plain ol’ paper to keep track of my to-do lists. But I do not let my inbox become a to-do list!
  • Using stars everywhere. I use stars sparingly. Save it for important stuff. Don’t go starring emails willy-nilly, or else the star becomes meaningless. I use stars to represent things that need my attention and require more than a few minutes, and the email contains enough information that it’s not worth writing out onto my regular to-do and project lists. If it sits there for a while, I’m either procrastinating doing something important—in which case the solution is to do it—or it’s not actually all that important—in which case… archive!
  • Obsessively labelling & categorizing everything. I used to use Gmail labels a lot, but that has seriously dwindled over the past year. I found that I wasn’t using them after-the-fact, ever. If I need to find something that doesn’t fall into one of my main filtered categories (like Biz Dev) then I’ll end up searching for it like I would any other email. So, why bother?

How about you guys? Anyone else tried living an “inbox zero” life? How do you do it?

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“How to Get Motivated” Poster Update

July 2012

in Self-mastery

I just updated my How to Get Motivated anti-procrastination poster. This update includes:

  • Fixed typos. What the heck is “contast”? Whoops. Fixed that, plus a few others.
  • Improved wording. A few of the actions I changed completely, and various others I changed just slightly. I realized that much of the advice in the poster is fairly abstract or vague, so I tried to improve this a bit by being a little more action-oriented in my word choice, and moving a few things around.
  • Improved explanations. I made various subtle wording and grammar improvements in the descriptions and explanations on the poster.
  • Better size. I optimized the size of the poster for printing via RedBubble.com.
  • Removed copyright. I got rid of the copyright. The poster now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 for Canada.

The poster is still completely free for download. I have also switched to RedBubble.com for the poster printing, and away from the rather disappointing Zazzle.

Enjoy! To hell with procrastination!

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