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You possess a finite amount of attention that can be directed towards processing information.The challenge is to ensure your attention is directed towards the things you want it to be. This is non-trivial, due to the chaotic nature of the brain, the fact that so many things compete for our attention, and the amount of effort it takes just to allow us to live (obtaining food, paying taxes, yada yada).
As I’ve said in previous posts, developing the right systems and the right habits provides the easiest path to freeing attention.
Let’s say you want to think about quantum mechanics as much as possible. You should make sure your bills get paid automatically, food gets made without making decisions (and ideally no effort), the grocery list is always ready and includes the optimum items that you want (or delivered directly to you)…..
Essentially, non-enriching activities should be distilled down to a set of optimized processes that take as a little time and thought as possible. If you want to direct your attention only towards items that you care about, you want a fully operationalized life.
I imagine a lot of people think this sounds a bit bizarre creating this roboticized lifestyle such that time and attention is so finely tuned. But, if there’s a formula that maximizes your personal enjoyment and impact on the world, why not find it, optimize it, and let it crank?? (Note: a “formula” for living can and should include exposure to randomness, fun, doing new things. A formula does not exclude these things. )
But let’s go with this disgruntled line of thinking. Can total operationalization be a bad thing? To delve into this questions, companies offer an interesting model.
A business is a repeatable process that makes money. The goal of most businesses is to take that process, improve it, and make it as efficient and effective as possible so it can turn out more money.
As a company grows, it adds more people and refines its operations as it better understands their money-making process. And once the company grows large enough, each of these people act as a cog in the machine, carrying out their particular process, in order to take advantage of specialization.
The problems arise when the world changes. The highly optimized process that the business carries out becomes obsolete or ineffective. However, the company can’t react because it has the wrong set of cogs and they can’t turn a set of cogs for one machine, into a totally different machine.
In this example, a fully operationalized process is rigid and slow. The company loses its agility and ability to adapt. When things change, it can’t react. Additionally, all the energy is focused on carrying out the process as efficiently as possible, and does not put an adequate amount of energy into learning about the world and seeing what else is going on out there.
1) Lack of adaptability. Do your operations allow for continuous improvement? Allow you to learn about what’s going on in the world? Expose you to randomness?
Operationalization within companies has another side-effect on people in large companies. If you’re carrying out a set of processes within a big machine, it’s easy to become disconnected from the purpose the processes ultimately serve, particularly since any process is out of date almost immediately since everything around it is in constant flux. Thus, over time, carrying out a process means you’re slowly carrying out an increasing amount of purposeless activity (until the process is revamped).
2) Aggregation of purposeless activity. Do the processes constantly hone in on the goal? or are you just carrying out activities that are just “part of the process”? do the processes update themselves?
Carrying out a single process, like a cog in a big company, leads to repetitive motion injuries–both physcial (carpal tunnel) and mental (boredom, insanity).
3) Repetitive motion injuries. Are your processes sustainable? or are you gonna burn yourself out?
It’s hard for human brains take all factors into account, and we generally almost always leave something out of the equation. It’s hard to account for everything.
4) Missing pieces. Do your processes suffer from “tunnel vision”? For instance, is fun a key ingredient to recipe? or have you left that out of the formula? How will you know if you’re missing something?
In looking at this list, I’ve encountered almost all of these in some form, not necessarily in my personal system, but in business as well. Operationalization is tough–the world changes so damn fast.
For personal systems, these problems can be avoided through a well designed process. And when it comes to developing these personal systems, keep in mind that it’s about your habits, and consequently, the right design strategy is to add one “feature” at a time following a bottom-up approach.
-Kevin
6.25.2010
