Overworking is never a good thing. There are those who even bring their work at home yet end up feeling guilty about it. Taking in lots of workloads can spill over the rest of your life, stealing time and mental bandwidth away from your friends and family, leaving you with no room to have fun or enjoy. This will leave you feeling exhausted and resentful. And even if you tell yourself that you will resolve the pending issue tomorrow, you may inevitably find yourself back on the treadmill of busyness.
Busyness and tunneling explained
A researcher, Antonia Violante, who had been doing a project on work-life balance had seen a lot of the said scenario at workplaces in the United States. Behavioral researchers and scientists like her call this particular scenario as tunneling. When we are stressed and feeling pressured for time, our attention and cognitive bandwidth narrow as if we are in a tunnel. It can sometimes be a good thing, as it can help us hyper-focus on our most important work, said Violante.
However, tunneling has a dark side. When we get so caught up in a time scarcity trap of busyness, we might only have the capacity to focus on the most immediate, often low-value tasks right in front of us instead of focusing on the big projects or the long-range strategic thinking that would help keep us out of the tunnel. Violante added that they often see people end up tunneling on the wrong thing.
False rewards
Email is the perfect addictive, attention slot machine, according to Violante. Our brains are wired for novelty, so we love being interrupted with every random ping of a new message. And humans enjoy feeling productive and easy. Combine time scarcity with that pull of novelty and our busyness craving and it is easy to see how we end up focusing our attention and time on whatever is right in front of us, which is email.
Humans who loves to be busy have such an aversion to idleness. Violante says that it is easy to be swept up trying to keep on top of your email inbox. It allows us to be busy, which feels good. But it leads to a false reward. Like mistaking busyness for productivity. To get out of that particular busyness tunnel, Violante suggests experimenting with checking your email on a schedule.
That idea was adopted by Violante herself. And this idea was based on research that found smokers who are given a smoking schedule had greater success in quitting than through other methods. The reason is that a schedule will not only give people practice and confidence in not smoking, but also break the link between habitual smoking cues and actually lighting up. A similar idea holds true for email.
In 2015, a study showed that those who checked their email on a schedule felt happier and less stressed out than those who checked constantly, which many of us do, spending about five hours a day nosing about our inboxes.
Violante also suggests that teams set communication protocols for when a response is expected and agree to send emails only during work hours. This is to help preserve mental bandwidth. She added that it is not about having zero emails in your inbox, but having no ambiguity about what is in there and having a plan for what is most important to respond to. Though she recognizes that it is not easy because even behavioral scientists have addiction problems with email.
A professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, Anuj Shah, says that scarcity creates its mindset. He said that when we look at our calendar six months from now, it often appears wide open and free of all commitments. So we can over commit ourselves, which often lead to more time scarcity and tunneling in the future.
Shah says that once we are short on time, we are already in a bad situation. But if we learn to manage the time beforehand, we can keep that from happening in the future.
