Your phone buzzes, so you reach for your hip unconsciously. Your cortisol level spikes briefly, then recedes as you swipe and see the cute dog pic your friend tagged you in.
As soon as you put your phone away, you feel that buzz again. Spike!
This time, it’s work sending you a text to let you know that the servers are down; it’s gonna be a rough morning.
Stimulus. Response. Stimulus. Response.
Is this as good as it gets?
While we are perpetually bombarded with distractions and decisions, there's a more mindful way to navigate. This is where heuristics come in—mental shortcuts that can help you cut through the noise, making efficient and effective decisions.
Understanding Heuristics
Heuristics are mental shortcuts or “rules of thumb” that allow us to make decisions more quickly and with less mental effort. If you’re stuck in a maze, a heuristic might be to always turn right at intersections. Maybe this approach doesn’t work, but it quickly gets you moving and allows you to rule a path out if you don’t escape.
We all have built-in heuristics that arose gradually during our hunter-gatherer days, over tens of thousands of years, and which are still with us today. If you hear a loud sound or see sudden movement, there is an immediate association with danger.
The modern world provides plenty of opportunities for us to create these micro-rules, like the first time you burn yourself by touching the stove, or that one time you put too much garlic into the spaghetti. You tend to recalibrate and remember to look at the stove first, or measure the garlic before throwing it into the pot.
If you think about your own life, you can probably think of dozens—maybe hundreds—of examples of micro-rules you use every day. Is that banana ripe enough? Will you be at this intersection long enough to get your phone out? Should you stop driving so you can pee now, or wait for an easier exit with a rest area?
These heuristics simplify complex calculations into manageable choices.
While heuristics are not foolproof, like the rule that currently says you have to look at your phone every time it lights up or buzzes, they can be powerful little guides if you use them the right way.
Figuring out what areas might best fit “good enough” decisions in the interest of saving time and mental energy—that’s where we’ll spend the rest of our energy here. Pareto’s Principle will be our friend.
Heuristic 1: Hide the Beer
Willpower is a muscle—it gets tired with use. Remember, our world is utterly saturated with decisions to be made. Many of these choices are between comfort or convenience, and what’s best for you longer term.
Relying on willpower to win these battles is setting yourself up for failure.
Let’s say you want to cut down on your alcohol consumption. If you open up the fridge for a snack (or out of boredom), you look straight ahead at the center of the fridge and find a twelve pack of delicious beer, are you likely to grab one? Do you need to wrestle with yourself internally, telling yourself it’s not beer o’clock yet?
You might win this battle a hundred times, but you’ll probably eventually lose. Even worse—remember how willpower is a muscle? It’s also finite.
That means that when you have a really important, consequential decision to consider later on, like accepting or turning down a new position at work, or figuring out where a loved one should be buried, your willpower will be diminished. In other words, you’ll make poor decisions.
Einstein famously understood this concept: he kept several copies of the same grey suit, so he wouldn’t waste a single thought on something so trivial as what he wore for the day.
If you want to “pull an Einstein” with your alcohol case above, try moving the beer to the back of the fridge. If that still proves problematic, just don’t put beer in the fridge until you have other people coming over, or just don’t keep any alcohol in the house.
Abstaining has never been easier than when you don’t see any booze.
Heuristic 2: The 5-Minute Rule
If you’re going to craft simple rules for yourself, they should be easy to remember. The 5-Minute Rule takes the cake for simplicity: ask yourself if whatever task you have in front of you will take more than five minutes. If the answer is yes, do the task right now.
The reasoning behind this is that the effort spent remembering, procrastinating, or even writing down the task often outweighs just doing it. There’s also the unwanted mental clutter you avoid by eliminating an unfinished task from your mind's "to-do list."
If you need to reach out to a coworker to let them know about a quick update, a quick mental calculation will let you know that a short text or email will take less than five minutes. By this heuristic, you should do it right away. No need to add it to a to-do list, no need to put it off for later. Just do it and move on.
But what if the task is something more complex, like preparing for a presentation? If it's going to take more than five minutes, note it down and schedule a time for it. Tackling it spontaneously can disrupt your workflow and may lead to shoddy, rushed results. This is where the heuristic provides a binary decision-making framework: tasks either fall under the "do now" or "plan for later" categories.
Here’s the great thing, though: if you assign something for later, you’re still getting it done, at least insofar as satisfying your mind’s inner checklist. The task you need to do right now is to write the task down for later, and once that’s done, you can now check that mental box.
Heuristic 3: Urgent vs Important
We need one more simple heuristic to tie this all together. Fortunately for us, this is among the simplest yet most effective mental shortcuts you can adopt: understanding the difference between what's urgent and what's important.
The two terms often get used interchangeably, but they mean very different things:
Urgent: These are tasks or situations that demand immediate attention. Squeaky wheels that pull your focus away from something you should be working on, a buzzing phone, a shiny object. “Look at me!”, they shout at you.
Important: These are tasks or decisions that contribute to your long-term well being, or to your long-term goals. These tasks usually don’t require immediate action, but they are the things that need to happen in order for you to get anywhere in life.
I want to encourage you to get into the habit of asking whether something is urgent or important every single time a new task comes up. Figure this out, and gravitate toward the important stuff.
Sure, some tasks can be both urgent and important. Those clearly need immediate attention. But if something is urgent and not important, it deserves less of your time than tasks that are important but not urgent.
By consistently applying this mental shortcut, you not only save time but also channel your focus towards what truly matters in the long run.
The “attention economy” will certainly continue to vie for our time, energy, and focus. We need to preserve our decision-making capabilities for the truly important things we need to get done, and learning to navigate through the noise is more important than ever.
Heuristics offer us mental shortcuts to do just that. By identifying what’s important and ignoring the rest, you can begin to harness your willpower so that you make good decisions where they matter the most. The next time your phone tries to command you to complete an urgent task that’s not very important, try to apply that urgent/important heuristic. Use the 5-minute rule to knock out the low-hanging distractions, and conserve your willpower by “hiding the beer” in your own life.
What are some simple rules you try to follow in your own life? Do you find yourself making lots of these types of decisions every day? Let me know in the comments.
Not just helpful... essential! We cannot compute every logical permutation so we use shortcuts or heuristics. Cognitive biases are hueristics as are stereotypes.
As Jonathan Haidt writes in The Happiness Hypothesis (and I build into my sci fi novel) we are emotional creatures with a late evolving prefrontal cortex. Hueristics reside in the low brain and activate for fight or flight long before our rational brain even gets the information.
I like this. Have you read thinking fast & slow by Dan Kahneman? Very heavy but speaks on this in depth. He speaks about the second mode of thinking as a slower, more deliberate person compared to the quick nature (very useful, sometimes reckless or leads to inaccurate outcomes) fast person.
I certainly rely on internal automations a lot. I like a trick somewhere in between ‘do now’ and ‘plan for later’ by doing 5 minutes now, then 5 minutes in an hour, and so on. Manageable chunks - basic but essential for my engagement style/preferences