Choices, choices

17 December 2009

Choice is a good thing. I think that having lots of options can feel very freeing. But when there are too many choices, it can be very hard to make a decision. I was reflecting on this today because I started out the day actually scheduling what I was going to do every hour. Today I’m playing catch-up after a visit to my family in Washington state. There’s a whole lot of disarray in the house and lots of email to catch up on and I found myself being pretty ineffective in the two days since I’ve been home.

So I wrote down my tasks and then I wrote down which tasks I was going to do each hour. These are all pretty mundane tasks, mind you. Well, the schedule did the trick! I didn’t have to think about what I was going to do next, I just did what was listed for that hour. I set myself up for success by padding the time and I ended up doing a few extra things as well.

It was terribly freeing and I feel really productive. Sometimes scheduling tasks this way makes me feel hemmed in and I resent it, but today it was great.

Another illustration of how limiting choices can be beneficial is a new feature in Wii Fit Plus, the video exercise program. In the original Wii Fit, I would choose from the 40 or so different exercises. After awhile, I found myself choosing the same exercises, usually the ones I particularly enjoyed or was excelled at.

With the Plus version of Wii Fit, there are actually more exercises to choose from. But, if requested, the software will now choose my exercises for me, based on what I tell it about the benefits I want. Even if I were to choose the same benefits each day, I’d get a different mixture of exercises. This means that I’m doing a wider variety of exercises and I don’t have to make the decision about what to do next. Plus there’s a little suspense because I don’t know what the next exercise is going to be. It’s excellent and has made exercise more fun.

It’s not like I originated the idea that many choices lead to indecision. A fascinating article by Barry Schwartz in the April 2004 issue of Scientific American, called The Tyranny of Choice points out that the more choices there are in a decision, the harder it is to make. “Although some choice is undoubtedly better than none,” Schwartz writes, “more is not always better than less.” If you have a few minutes, I encourage you to read this article.

The lesson here? As in so many things, less is often more. By limiting the choices you’re required to make on a daily basis, you can make your life run a little easier.

Tagged with: decisions, exercise, scientific american