Getting more done: make it automatic
We live 90 percent of our lives on automatic pilot. Don’t believe it? It may be disconcerting to think that we are so unthinking about most of our activities. Perhaps it seems like you think about everything you do. But think about driving. Think about how difficult it was to learn to drive, when you had to consciously think about everything you were doing. Now you can drive and think about other things, hold a conversation, listen to the radio–all because the many tasks involved in driving have become automatic. They have become unconscious.
You might protest that driving is easy because you simply learned how to do it well. But even if you knew how to drive well but still had to consciously think through each action, had to think, “now I’m going to push on the accelerator until I reach exactly 30 miles and hour, now I let up but not too much, now I see a stop sign so I take my foot off the accelerator and push gently on the brake”—driving would be much more arduous. It’s because it’s automatic that it’s easy. (That’s one of the greatest frustrations of some people who have a stroke—not only having to relearn something, but having to consciously think about activities that were previously automatic).
Now think of all the things in your life that you do in the same automatic way throughout the day. Tying your shoes. Turning on your computer. Simply walking. Out of all the activities that we are involved daily, relatively few require conscious attention on our part.
We also have behaviors that we engage in automatically based on certain prompts. We stand and shake someone’s hand when they great us. We smile at someone when they smile at us. It hits noon and we think about lunch, usually whether we are hungry or not.
The reason for this is that our brains don’t have the capacity to pay conscious attention to much. We think that we are aware of everything going and making conscious decisions about everything we do because the brain fills in the gaps in our perception. In reality, our conscious activity is like a flashlight beam in a dark auditorium. We can only consciously focus on one little thing at a time. When we multitask we are usually switching our attention rapidly between two or more things.
One of the hallmarks of automatic tasks is that they feel easy. Even if the activity is fairly complicated, like driving a car, it feels like we can handle it (except, I have found when trying to swallow an ibuprofen without water while driving, and the pill gets stuck right on the “gag” button in the throat). So one key way to make it easier to get more done is to make more tasks automatic.
What does this mean in practice? It means:
• breaking tasks down into the key parts that can you can learn to perform without thinking about them.
• using specific cues to initiate tasks automatically. For instance, exercising immediately when you get up in the morning. Or running down the list of things you have to do today right after you turn on your car.
• making it automatic that you think about how to make it automatic—always be looking for things in your life that you can move from the conscious column to the unconscious column.
Beneficial, unconscious activities that we cultivate are not new. In fact, that’s really what habits are. But by understanding what is going on in the brain and seeing how dominant these behaviors are in our lives, we can really change how we live.
In fact, that is the true secret to how “The Secret” works, which I will get to in another post.