Deadlines Help You Focus—but Can Also Give You Tunnel Vision

Use deadlines effectively. In one experiment, a teacher assigned two groups of students three papers to proofread in three weeks. The first group had a single three-week deadline for correcting all three. The second submitted one corrected paper each week. The second group's schedule was clearly tighter, yet it submitted late less often and found more errors. As deadlines approached, students became more efficient. British prime minister Churchill once said that British minds work best when time is almost up. A deadline is therefore an effective way to concentrate attention on getting things done. Use deadlines to improve efficiency. Instead of setting one distant, enormous goal, learn to break it into many small goals with a clear path of action. Three papers in three weeks is less effective than one a week. A weekly report is less effective than asking for one page each day. Bring deadlines closer where possible so that you and your team focus sooner. ----- Scarcity produces a focus dividend, but it has a price: you may completely overlook other matters. This creates a narrow view, also called tunnel vision. Focusing on one thing makes us neglect others. Tunneling changes how we decide. Some effects accumulate and take a long time to appear, as with reading and exercise. Any single session seems less important than eating or working, perhaps even less than a thorough housecleaning. Their effects emerge only through persistence. These are the so-called important but nonurgent things. Unfortunately, many people abandon them first to pursue what is urgent but unimportant. Goal inhibition is the mechanism behind tunneling. Scarcity creates a powerful goal—meeting the urgent need—which suppresses other goals and ideas. This encourages short-term thinking, focused only on immediate gains while overlooking risks that persist into the future. So while scarcity improves focus, it also reduces cognitive capacity and executive control. When you are deeply worried about one thing, you cannot divide your attention to do something else. ---- The scarcity trap arises from constant firefighting and tunnel vision. Huge hidden costs lie outside that narrow field of view. Breaking the trap requires changing this pattern. Create slack. Only with slack can you resist the firefighting trap, and firefighting is a frequent source of mistakes. When all your attention is fixed on deadlines, errors often come one after another, wasting even more time. Peter Drucker and Jack Welch's management technique is subtraction: first eliminate ineffective business activities and trim excess, then create organizational slack. Only then can you do the work you focus on well. ---- #老齊讀書圈 — Lao Qi's Reading Circle