Do You Throw Good Resources After Bad? (Part 3 of Cognitive Biases and Organizing)
Welcome to the third installment of my series on what behavioral science can tell us about why we struggle with getting and staying organized… and how we can use this knowledge to flip the script and succeed! In case you missed it, be sure to check out my quick and dirty intro to cognitive biases, Part 1 about why loss aversion causes us to feel decluttering as incredibly painful, and Part 2 about how the endowment effect gives us overinflated expectations of the value of our stuff.
Today, we’re going to keep talking about cognitive biases that make it hard for us to get rid of things we know in our rational minds we don’t need, use, or love. There’s this thing we do, as humans, that is very admirable, and it’s that we commit to things. We commit to activities, jobs, people, homes, pets. Commitment can be powerful and very meaningful.
But like most cognitive biases, not all commitments help us. Some hurt us, and one in particular quite literally costs us. I’m referring, of course to the sunk cost fallacy.
The sunk cost fallacy leads us to continue investing resources in something simply because we have already invested in it, even if the additional investment leaves us worse off overall. You’ve heard of throwing good money after bad… but have you also heard of throwing good space after bad? Or good time after bad? These are all manifestations of the sunk cost fallacy.
Let me explain.
I worked with a brilliant, talented mom of tween girls to declutter in the midst of a divorce. Those are emotional times, and I was honored to be invited into their family to help them reclaim their space.
In addition to an impressive career, the mom is also a really creative person who does a lot of different craft projects both alone and with the girls. As many creative people do, she has amassed tons of different materials and project ideas over the years. And before we started working together, she never had the experience of letting any of them go.
I did my usual thing of asking all the dumb questions. At first, while she answered the questions and started to see where I was headed, she asked us to keep everything crafty, and organize it. In her mind, she had already invested so much of her time and space in working on and storing her craft projects that she didn’t want to let them go.
But then something shifted. She picked up a half done project one day and told me that she really didn’t want to finish it. She had realized the sunk cost fallacy was just that: a fallacy! Just because she had spent time on a project before didn’t mean she had to keep spending time on it.
If you think you might be throwing good resources after bad when it comes to your clutter, I have a few tips for you.
Reframe your decision. The decision is not to invest more resources in this thing or not to invest more resources in this thing. In fact, the decision is how you are going to use the limited resources you have across all your many priorities. When you zoom out like this, you remove the power of the sunk cost fallacy.
Say your thought process out loud, in the presence of someone else if possible. When you actually hear the words to the effect of “I’m keeping this thing because I’ve already devoted so much time and space to this thing” out loud, you’ll realize how ridiculous they sound! My client would often stop halfway through explaining something and just hand me the item for the donation pile.
As always, give yourself grace. As I mentioned above, commitment is a valuable thing, and the sunk cost fallacy is simply a shortcut our brains take because they know this. You’re not a bad person for taking this shortcut, you’re simply human!
Where have you fallen prey to the sunk cost fallacy?
LMW
