Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed

You can’t force yourself to think faster. If you try, you’re likely to end up making much worse decisions. Here’s how to improve the actual quality of your decisions instead of chasing hacks to speed them up.

If you’re a knowledge worker, as an ever-growing proportion of people are, the product of your job is decisions.

Much of what you do day to day consists of trying to make the right choices among competing options, meaning you have to process large amounts of information, discern what’s likely to be most effective for moving towards your desired goal, and try to anticipate potential problems further down the line. And all the while, you’re operating in an environment of uncertainty where anything could happen tomorrow.

When the product of your job is your decisions, you might find yourself wanting to be able to make more decisions more quickly so you can be more productive overall.

Chasing speed is a flawed approach. Because decisions—at least good ones—don’t come out of thin air. They’re supported by a lot of thinking.

While experience and education can grant you the pattern-matching abilities to make some kinds of decisions using intuition, you’re still going to run into decisions that require you to sit and consider the problem from multiple angles. You’re still going to need to schedule time to do nothing but think. Otherwise making more decisions will make you less productive overall, not more, because your decisions will suck.

Here’s a secret that might sound obvious but can actually transform the way you work: you can’t force yourself to think faster. Our brains just don’t work that way. The rate at which you make mental discernments is fixed.

Sure, you can develop your ability to do certain kinds of thinking faster over time. You can learn new methods for decision-making. You can develop your mental models. You can build your ability to focus. But if you’re trying to speed up your thinking so you can make an extra few decisions today, forget it.

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Beyond the "hurry up" culture

Management consultant Tom DeMarco writes in Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency that many knowledge work organizations have a culture where the dominant message at all times is to hurry up.

Everyone is trying to work faster at all times, and they pressure everyone around them to work faster, too. No one wants to be perceived as a slacker. The result is that managers put pressure on their subordinates through a range of methods. DeMarco lists the following examples:

• "Turning the screws on delivery dates (aggressive scheduling)
• Loading on extra work
• Encouraging overtime
• Getting angry when disappointed
• Noting one subordinate’s extraordinary effort and praising it in the presence of others
• Being severe about anything other than superb performance
• Expecting great things of all your workers
• Railing against any apparent waste of time
• Setting an example yourself (with the boss laboring so mightily there is certainly no time for anyone else to goof off)
• Creating incentives to encourage desired behavior or results."

All of these things increase pressure in the work environment and repeatedly reinforce the "hurry up!" message. They make managers feel like they’re moving things along faster. That way if work isn’t getting done, it’s not their fault. But, DeMarco writes, they don’t lead to meaningful changes in behavior that make the whole organization more productive. Speeding up often results in poor decisions that create future problems.

The reason more pressure doesn’t mean better productivity is that the rate at which we think is fixed.

We can’t force ourselves to start making faster decisions right now just because we’re faced with an unrealistic deadline. DeMarco writes, "Think rate is fixed. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can’t pick up the pace of thinking."

If you’re doing a form of physical labor, you can move your body faster when under pressure. (Of course, if it’s too fast, you’ll get injured or won’t be able to sustain it for long.)

If you’re a knowledge worker, you can’t pick up the pace of mental discriminations just because you’re under pressure. Chances are good that you’re already going as fast as you can. Because guess what? You can’t voluntarily slow down your thinking, either.

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The limits of pressure

Faced with added stress and unable to accelerate our brains instantaneously, we can do any of three things:

• "Eliminate wasted time.
• Defer tasks that are not on the critical path.
• Stay late."

Even if those might seem like positive things, they’re less advantageous than they appear at first glance. Their effects are marginal at best. The smarter and more qualified the knowledge worker, the less time they’re likely to be wasting anyway. Most people don’t enjoy wasting time. What you’re more likely to end up eliminating is valuable slack time for thinking.

Deferring non-critical tasks doesn’t save any time overall, it just pushes work forwards—to the point where those tasks do become critical. Then something else gets deferred.

Staying late might work once in a while. Again, though, its effects are limited. If we keep doing it night after night, we run out of energy, our personal lives suffer, and we make worse decisions as a result.

None of the outcomes of increasing pressure result in more or better decisions. None of them speed up the rate at which people think. Even if an occasional, tactical increase in pressure (whether it comes from the outside or we choose to apply it to ourselves) can be effective, ongoing pressure increases are unsustainable in the long run.

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Think rate is fixed

It’s incredibly important to truly understand the point DeMarco makes in this part of Slack: the rate at which we process information is fixed.

When you’re under pressure, the quality of your decisions plummets. You miss possible angles, you don’t think ahead, you do what makes sense now, you panic, and so on. Often, you make a snap judgment then grasp for whatever information will support it for the people you work with. You don’t have breathing room to stress-test your decisions.

The clearer you can think, the better your decisions will be. Trying to think faster can only cloud your judgment. It doesn’t matter how many decisions you make if they’re not good ones. As DeMarco reiterates throughout the book, you can be efficient without being effective.

Try making a list of the worst decisions you’ve made so far in your career. There’s a good chance most of them were made under intense pressure or without taking much time over them.

At Farnam Street, we write a lot about how to make better decisions, and we share a lot of tools for better thinking. We made a whole course on decision-making. But none of these resources are meant to immediately accelerate your thinking. Many of them require you to actually slow down a whole lot and spend more time on your decisions. They improve the rate at which you can do certain kinds of thinking, but it’s not going to be an overnight process.

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Upgrading your brain

Some people read one of our articles or books about mental models and complain that it’s not an effective approach because it didn’t lead to an immediate improvement in their thinking. That’s unsurprising; our brains don’t work like that. Integrating new, better approaches takes a ton of time and repetition, just like developing any other skill. You have to keep on reflecting and making course corrections.

At the end of the day, your brain is going to go where it wants to go. You’re going to think the way you think. However much you build awareness of how the world works and learn how to reorient, you’re still, to use Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor from The Righteous Mind, a tiny rider atop a gigantic elephant. None of us can reshape how we think overnight.

Making good decisions is hard work. There’s a limit to how many decisions you can make in a day before you need a break. On top of that, many knowledge workers are in fields where the most relevant information has a short half-life. Making good decisions requires constant learning and verifying what you think you know.

If you want to make better decisions, you need to do everything you can to reduce the pressure you’re under. You need to let your brain take whatever time it needs to think through the problem at hand. You need to get out of a reactive mode, recognize when you need to pause, and spend more time looking at problems.

A good metaphor is installing an update to the operating system on your laptop. Would you rather install an update that fixes bugs and improves existing processes, or one that just makes everything run faster? Obviously, you’d prefer the former. The latter would just lead to more crashes. The same is true for updating your mental operating system.

Stop trying to think faster. Start trying to think better.