Parole
Decision fatigue and the uneven mind
Have you heard the one about the parole board?
No, really. In 2011 some scientists studied the decision-making patterns of a parole board in Israel. They looked at decisions the board made as a function of the crimes of parole applicants, their time served, their ethnicities, and—interestingly—the time of day their case was heard. The default decision—the easy decision, if you like—for a parole board is to deny a petition, and all else being equal there should be no discernible pattern in which petitions are accepted and which are denied. But the scientists found something else. As many as 70% of the petitions were accepted early in the day, but by late in the day this rate had fallen to as low as 10%. Time of day was a factor in whether or not the default was overridden.
This finding led to the identification of the phenomenon of decision fatigue. Early in the day or after a break, the members of the parole board had more decision-making energy, and were more easily able to use that energy to overturn the default and grant parole. Later in each session, tired by being asked to make choice after choice after choice, they fell back to the default and parole rates declined.
Physical effort drains us; and mental effort does, too. And this has not been a secret for some time—this study, after all, is fifteen years old.
So why, then, do we treat our workdays as though our mental abilities are perfectly uniform from daybreak to sundown, as though the brain is a battery that drains evenly from nine to five? And why do we allow others to, for that matter?
Since the pandemic we’ve been quite successful in rethinking how we treat our working weeks, at least in white-collar jobs. If you pay attention to the stats rather than the harrumphing from a few CEOs, you’ll see that we’ve settled into a pretty stable 3-day in-office, 2-day remote pattern. But I suspect that many of us have yet to apply this same flexibility within the working day itself.
I was chatting to a friend recently who shared that she schedules all her meetings in the morning (“I don’t do afternoon meetings” were her exact words) because she’s a morning person. She uses the afternoons for email, responses to questions, breaks for her mind, outside time, and to-do-list items. The only live conversations she’ll have after lunch are catch-ups that explicitly don’t involve decision-making.
My friend hadn’t heard of the parole board in Israel until I mentioned it to her, but then immediately recognized that this was her pattern, too. Decisions while energy is high; other stuff later in the day.
My pattern, however, is different, at least in one respect. When I’m working on a writing task—which, believe me, involves all sorts of decisions about structure and cadence and word choice—I often get a burst of energy at about 4 p.m. I can turn out prose at other times, for sure, but it’s remarkable how much of my daily output shows up at the end of the afternoon.
Hence my completely unvalidated tweak to the decision fatigue finding: our ability to make decisions varies throughout the day, but it varies at different times for different people.
So, again: How to put these insights into practice?
I have two suggestions. The first is to rethink the amount of control we have over our time; the second is to rethink what it means to be productive.
On the first of these, it’s true, particularly in large organizations, that our schedules aren’t always fully under our control. And, because having our agency circumscribed annoys us, the times when we’re told when and where to show up without being given the option are particularly salient. But consider how often you are asked if you can make a meeting at a certain time. Your being asked implies your control over the answer—and “no” is a complete sentence, as they say.
One of the strangenesses of organizational life is that we tend to imagine that other people are paying much more attention to what we do and say than they actually are. Most of the time, our colleagues are more focused on what they themselves are doing and saying, and if we tell them a particular time doesn’t work for us they will move on to the next option without much more thought. As a result, we have more leeway to control our time than we imagine. Not complete leeway, but enough to protect a pocket of high-focus time most days.
To the second suggestion, I fear that we have somehow been taught—by the ever-present visual of the open calendar reminding us of time unspent, by the exhortations from the c-suite telling us how important and urgent everything is every day, and by the distortions of social media where it seems that everyone else is pounding out content at a truly intimidating rate—that productivity is all about using every minute of every day, and that anything less than constant output is failure. But if you pay attention to people like Cal Newport (whose book Slow Productivity I inhaled over the holidays), you realize that productivity on the scale of a day isn’t very important at all. The truly important achievements take time, and along the way some hours are productive, and some less so, and it’s vanishingly rare that the people we look up to as having the most impact on the world (who are, therefore, in an important sense the most productive) are extracting maximum value from every passing minute.
We live in a world where, to overstate only slightly, optimizing every minute is an expectation, and failure to do so is shameful. (AI is so enticing in part because it looks like an output, in no time at all!) But achievement is longer-limbed. As Anne Lamott (and later, Ted Lasso) said, “Bird by bird”: one step at a time, day by day, some days big steps, some days small; worrying less about the rate of steps, and more about the accumulation of steps in whatever way makes sense, and whatever way pays heed to our own particular waxing and waning energies over the course of a day, a week, or a year. A good schedule is one which respects what we—team members, team leaders, and parole board judges alike—need in order to be at our best.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.