The Art of Choosing What to Do  ## Metadata - Author: [[TED Radio Hour]] - Full Title: The Art of Choosing What to Do - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/cfc0c385-9909-4726-9ccc-29e4b3f4e885 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Clock Time Vs Event Time** - Anne-Laure Sellier identifies two time styles: clock time and event time, which shape behavior and perception. - Relying on the clock correlates with feeling less control and seeing the world as more chaotic. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi As events or by the clock. So what are these styles? Clock time people schedule out every moment of their day. Anna waking up in the morning. A classic clock timer prefers to stick to a schedule that dictates when she wakes up, 10 minutes as she does every morning, then she proceeds to having breakfast for 20 minutes. Anne-Laure Sellier You get the idea. Naturally. On the flip side, an event timer moves from one activity to another. She stretches. She goes to the shower. When it feels like the right time to do so. It could be a long breakfast, a short breakfast. She'll have breakfast for as long as it feels appropriate. Manoush Zomorodi Of course, these are extremes. Most people fall somewhere in the middle. But as technology has advanced, as people and economies have become more interconnected, as work has become more regimented, there is an expectation that most of us live by the clock. ([Time 0:02:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/db596dcc-771d-4632-8804-e77640006d80)) - **Schedules Outsource A Sense Of Control** - Clock timers treat activities as independent time units and outsource schedule control to external clocks. - This externalization links to a greater tendency to attribute outcomes to chance or powerful others. Transcript: Speaker 5 Now, it also comes with two implications, though. Because the time units are independent, it means that they are not correlated, let alone causally related, right? So, my going to lunch with my friend does not cause me to go to the supermarket afterwards, right? The second implication is that when you rely on the clock, you put control of your schedule outside of yourself. And we know from psychology that when people do that, they tend to believe that things happen in the world as a result of fate, chance, and powerful others more. Now, if you look at event timers, we're looking at a very different animal. Events are interdependent, right? They look more like a necklace. If you need to move one of the events, you need to move a whole string of events with it, just like if you want to move a pearl, you need to move the other pearls with it, right? And that means that it's likely to be associated with a bigger belief, a greater belief, that things happen in the environment due to your own doing more. Manoush Zomorodi Did this surprise you, any of the things that you found? Anne-Laure Sellier What surprised was the extent, the magnitude of the effect. That was remarkable. The feeling of control, it's really important. ([Time 0:05:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3fc49788-ee22-4767-a45a-5e8177e069a3)) - **Event Time Enhances Agency And Savoring** - Event timers see activities as interdependent and feel more causally connected to outcomes. - They savor positive emotions more intensely and sustain them longer than clock timers. Transcript: Speaker 5 Between clock timers and event timers, we found actually that clock timers recognize causality in the world at large significantly less than event timers. Now this is very important because it means that since our event time ancestors were left behind and we increasingly relied on the clock to schedule our activities, we also began to Perceive the world as a more and more disconnected place. A more and more random place. A more and more chaotic place. Clock timers believe the world is more chaotic than even timers. Now, if you think that's bad, there's actually worse. We know that when people locate control externally rather than it tends to make them feel less happy. So we wondered, are clock timers less happy than event timers? Well, if you think about it, event timers rely on their emotions. They are very attuned to their emotions because they rely on that all the time to decide when to move from one activity to the next, right? Clock timers, on the other hand, they don't need to be attuned to their emotions because they surrender to the clock. The problem is, psychologists now know that in order to be happy, we need to be attuned to our emotions. And particularly, we need to be able to savor positive emotions. Okay, that is a critical antecedent of happiness. ([Time 0:07:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2479341c-b941-4154-9241-9481a9ca7719)) - **Match Time Style To The Situation** - Use clock time when coordination and punctuality are essential, like attending class or appointments. - Use event time for leisure, parenting, and savoring moments like sunsets or play. Transcript: Anne-Laure Sellier Number one, right? I'm not claiming, we're not claiming that one is better than the other. But indeed, one is better than the other at a given moment. If I need to be in class at nine, clock time is better. I'd better leave Paris at, you know, 7.30 to be trafficked to make sure that I'm in front of that amphitheater on time. If I'm on that beach watching that sunset, even time is better. If I'm playing with my child or my child is playing with another child, even time is better. Children function in even time, little children, until they read time. We teach them to read time. Think of it, right? It always cracks me up when I see parents of very young kids who are like, honey, five minutes and we're leaving. And you can see the child looking at them like, what does that mean? No clue, right? So a better answer is, honey, you play a little more and then we're going to go. So you can still signal that you have to go soon. But referring to minutes or to clock time, it makes no sense. The takeaway is think that these two things exist and embrace what feels ([Time 0:11:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a88cc171-1d49-4c44-bcae-d6a9890e47ed)) - **Finitude Reframes Productivity** - Oliver Burkeman reframes productivity by emphasizing our finite lifespan — roughly 4,000 weeks. - Embracing limits redirects energy from optimizing everything to prioritizing what truly matters. Transcript: Oliver Burkeman Our lives are short. Specifically, they're finite, right? And that finitude, that basic limitation really courses through all our lives and everything that we do in our lives. But we spend a lot of time, a lot of effort trying to avoid it, trying not to think about it, trying to feel less limited than we are. And I think a lot of the kind of quote unquote bad self-help and productivity advice is ultimately helping in psychological avoidance rather than the job it should be doing, which is Bringing the most richness and depth and meaning to the time that we do have. Manoush Zomorodi Confronting his own mortality and giving up on productivity, ironically, launched Oliver's career as a self-help writer. His first book, The Antidote, came out in 2012. It critiqued positive thinking and encouraged people to, well, feel badly. Oliver Burkeman Perhaps one way of putting it is that it's good to experience failure and goallessness and unhappiness and all these things. But I guess more so that a lot of what goes on in classic positive thinking is really to do with shutting out at least half of the human experience and sort of deeming it unacceptable. Manoush Zomorodi He followed up in 2021 with the best-selling 4,000 Weeks, the average time he estimated that each one of us gets on this planet. ([Time 0:17:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/680d3482-b3bd-459b-87fc-0fc7a4e3b924)) - **Decide To Create Momentum** - Make decisions consciously because choosing reduces avoidance and generates momentum. - Treat everyday choices as defining acts that free psychological energy for action. Transcript: Oliver Burkeman Looking at things this way, indeed, you might argue that making a decision is the defining act of the limit embracing life. As we've already seen, the fact that your time is limited, plus the reality that you can only ever be in one place at any instant, means that in every moment you're opting not to take a thousand Alternative paths through life. From each of these paths branch another thousand alternatives, and so endlessly on, like a vast river delta through which you could only follow any one of an immense variety of streams, But only one. That's why indecision can feel so oddly comfortable. It's a form of postponement, a temporary avoidance of the painful sacrifices involved. Put differently, it's a way of trying to dodge the inevitability of the consequences of your actions. To make a decision, any decision, is to take ownership of the situation instead. It takes a little willpower, but the reward is usually an immediate boost of motivation as you withdraw your psychological energies from denial or avoidance and focus them on action. Momentum starts to gather, and each decision proves easier to take than the last. ([Time 0:21:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/551abde6-deac-4100-b12a-fa7c3b19347f)) - **AI Pushes Toward Sameness** - Oliver warns generative AI exerts a pull toward the generic by averaging human inputs. - Human-authored work matters because it establishes a relationship with a conscious, emoting sensibility. Transcript: Oliver Burkeman Something important about the kind of the effect of generative AI on certainly any industries that involve sort of, you know, writing about things and talking about things, that is, There's something about those large language models that is, exerts a pressure towards the generic in quite a subtle way. Like I'm not making the argument that the only thing that ChatGPT does is to regurgitate plagiarized sentences. I think there's an argument there too, but that's a sort of simple version of this. There's something about the whole way that those things work, to the extent that I understand how they work, that is sort of exerting a force towards sameness. And that you can, I believe, I hope, I think, make a living setting yourself against that rather than just joining the race to the most generic place. Manoush Zomorodi So I'm having a very strange experience with it. I'm actually really enjoying it. And it's kind of messing with my head in that I think it might be able to make me more efficient, Oliver. And yet I worry that it's tricking me into thinking that. Oliver Burkeman Yeah, I have to say at this point, I do find that I really don't want to be using generative AI for any but a very sort of specific delineated set of tasks. So I think there is this phenomenon where convenience, things that strike us as very convenient, have this repeating tendency to involve getting rid of not just the effort that we wanted To save, but also the very kinds of friction and engagements that made the thing worth doing in the first place. So I think that's an important distinction. I feel like I can sort of imagine and start to put different AI use cases into those two buckets. Like, well, in this case, I'm just completely happy not to have that task in my life anymore. But in the other case, like, there could be quite a lot going on that I don't realise I will miss when it's not happening inside my own conscious mind. For a long time, there was this sort of debate going on, which on one side had people claiming that an LLM would never be able to write a novel to as high a standard as a great human novelist. And on the other side, kind of, you know, AI boosters saying, like, that's ridiculous. The important thing for me in reading a novel written by a human is not that only a human could have written it. It's the fact that a human did write it. And it's the fact that I'm in some kind of relationship with a conscious, emoting sensibility. ([Time 0:35:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d725e49d-65c2-45c1-81e0-a346eda7f25a)) - **Be Wise To Restore Motivation** - Change circumstances or reframe your thinking to regain motivation; you don't 'own' motivation. - Set goals you enjoy pursuing and shorten middles to avoid motivational collapse. Transcript: Ayelet Fishbach To be motivated, you either change the situation or the way you think about the situation. This is the science in one sentence. You change the circumstances or the way you think about the circumstances. So if you want to be more physically active, there is no point in yelling at yourself. I yell it. You should walk more. Instead, I got a puppy. She loves long walks. Your journey starts with setting a goal. My friend wanted to be motivated at work, so she identified a project she wanted to complete. That was a goal, and it's a good motivation strategy. Goals pull you. The problem, my friend identified a project she wished he had already completed, not something she was looking forward to doing. Have you ever said a goal you wish you had already completed but had less interest in actually completing? In our research, we found that most goals are abandoned not because they are not important. Most goals are abandoned because people don't enjoy pursuing them. Your enjoyment is what predicts whether you will stick with the goal. ([Time 0:46:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b60bcf38-e25f-4721-9ecd-ffb1d1c56bc5)) - **Shorten Middles And Use Social Lighthouses** - Anticipate temptations and shorten goal cycles (daily/weekly) to sustain effort through middles. - Use social ties: enlist others who will hold you accountable and provide support. Transcript: Ayelet Fishbach Well, motivation is going to be high when we just start on something and toward the end. But it will decline in the middle. We call it the middle problem. My friend might start her project with much enthusiasm, then her motivation will decline. Toward the deadline, it will pick up again. She will regain her motivation. A few years ago, we asked people who observed the Hanukkah holiday to let us know whether they were lighting the first candle on the first night, the second on the second night, the third Night, so on, until the eighth night. Most people admitted to only lighting the candles on the first and last night. They were procrastinating in the middle. The solution? Make middles short. A monthly exercise goal, a weekly exercise goal, even a daily exercise goal are easier because as the end is near, it is easier to stay motivated. If only Hanukkah was just two nights. Some goals, let's call them temptations, should take less warm on your plate. However, instead of trying to push them out of mind, it might be wise to anticipate them in advance. When you anticipate all the alcohol that will be served here later today, you can better control your consumption. When I anticipate that my colleague is going to be upset, I can better control my emotion in a heated debate at work. In one study, when we reminded employees of all the times they will be tempted to take office supply for personal use, they were less likely to do that compared to those in the control Group. ([Time 0:48:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/302bb156-5120-4628-83c5-fdcb86a79dbe))