Can You Trick Your Brain Into Being Organized?
If you’ve gotten into Atomic Habits, or listened to Freakanomics episodes about the professors Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman, then you’re already familiar with the concepts I’m about to introduce. Nerds unite!
If you haven’t, let me give you a quick rundown. The world of behavioral science is vast but can be distilled as the study of cognitive bias. Contrary to other biases you may be familiar with, a cognitive bias is both unconscious and shared among all humans. Cognitive biases are essentially mental shortcuts that we evolved over millenia, and in general they have helped us survive and multiply. But sometimes, as all shortcuts can, they trip us up.
I want you to take away two things about yourself from the existence of cognitive biases:
You’re not a bad person. These biases are truly unconscious! You’re not actively deciding to take a shortcut or do something you know in your rational mind is a bad idea - you’re just being a human, flaws and all.
You’re not an exception. These biases are universal! You are just as subject to these irrational-seeming patterns and choices as anyone else on the planet. In fact, Kahneman himself said that those who believe they are exceptions to the rule are actually MORE susceptible to such biases!
Now why am I, a professional organizer, talking about behavioral science? Because the process of getting and staying organized is behavior. It’s not a thing you buy, it’s a system you implement, and that system is a combination of physical stuff and behavior patterns.
So if organizing is behavior, and our behavior is driven at least in part by cognitive biases… then it stands to reason that by learning about the cognitive biases we all share and how they apply to organizing, we might be able to use that knowledge to outfox our own brains! We can, in a word, trick ourselves into getting organized.
I’ve been talking to my clients for years about the cognitive biases that crop up in my organizing work with them, and now I want to share those insights with you. Over the next several weeks, I’m going to dive deep into some of the most common cognitive biases, how I see them come up in the field of organizing, and how you can harness knowledge about them to trick your brain into doing the things it needs to do to keep you organized.
It’s nerdy, but there are going to be some cool insights. I hope you join me!
LMW
