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The Convenience Trap

Our brains are a lot like water; they like to follow the path of least resistance. All too often, this means doing the work that’s right in front of us instead of focusing on the most important tasks. But the most convenient tasks rarely yield the richest rewards.

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Imagine you’re driving home from work. You got stuck late at the office, your kids are going to be hungry, and it will take an hour to prepare the meal you had planned. Instead, you pick up some fast food, because it’s convenient.

 

Sometimes, we’re truly pressed for time. We all eat a little fast food now and then. But convenience food is not healthy food. The same is true in business. But if we’re constantly looking at our inbox and tweaking the words in a presentation, we’ll fall short of our long-term goals.

FACTS:

  • Our brains are wired to do the most convenient work – the work that is right in front of us.

  • The most convenient work is rarely the most important.

  • If we don’t choose deliberately, we will default to the most convenient task.

  • Convenience robs us of agency by creating a strong bias for what is easiest.

In our always-connected, fast-paced world, email and other technology shoves work in our faces. It’s easy, but easy is not the same as fulfilling. As task after task becomes easier, hard things can seem annoying and irritating. Is that a muscle we want to build?

 

Our increasingly fast-paced, ad-hoc email-driven, business culture only makes this problem worse.

 

When we do what is convenient, we sacrifice our own agency. We’re responding to an email instead of working on an important proposal, or reading a report instead of making the effort to be truly present during a meeting. Deliberately allocating your attention on a moment-to-moment basis – despite the Storm’s distractions – is not a skill you learn in business school.

SOLUTIONS:

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Change your environment to alter the path of least resistance.

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Make challenging tasks into habits

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When you commit to something on your Attention Budget,
really commit to it.

“Convenience decides everything. Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences.”

 

– Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder

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© 2022 Sherpa Performance Guide and Peak Business Performance

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