We lose with narrow framing

I read about this in Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman and talked about it briefly at the time, but I was thinking about it more over the weekend and came to some deeper realizations.

Two weeks ago I was in the middle of midterm season and my output was super high. I was sleeping slightly less but was getting a lot done because I had to. Lots of exams to study for and assignments to do, so naturally I did what I needed to prepare. During that week I was thinking “I can’t wait until I don’t have all this schoolwork because I can take all this time and put it towards some other things like reading more, maybe starting a new project, learning more about fitness, etc.”

Yet, last week with more free time, my output wasn’t that high.

In each situation I’m faced with the decision of ‘do A or do B’ and when it’s ‘do this thing’ or ‘sleep/hang out with friend’ I have consistently been picking the sleep. I’m thinking, what’s best for me in this moment is doing B despite that doing A ten times will give me more value than B ten times.

Let’s say A is to learn more about health and fitness, which is a recent goal of mine. When I’m faced with the choice of “spend hour #1 on fitness learning or sleep,” sleep gives me more value. That first hour of learning about fitness isn’t going to teach me very much, so when it’s choosing between that first hour and sleeping, I am thinking narrowly and choosing sleep.

The thing is, though, over the course of two weeks, 10 hours spent learning about health would give me more value than 10 hours sleeping (<1 hour per night).

That’s what makes learning something new or starting a new project often difficult.

Being able to take that step back, though, and realize that over time choosing option A repeatedly will be more beneficial than option B is super powerful, and it applies outside of just starting a new project or learning something new.

It could apply when considering whether to spend time with friends or not (ex: today might not be good, but if I go out 5 times, the chance that one of those nights is super memorable makes it worthwhile to go out instead of stay in), or eating healthy (this cookie today is only 200 calories, but eating one every day is an extra 1400 calories over the course of the week that I could totally go without) and so on.

I like broad framing.