🧠 Thoughts & Readings
Always keep looking forward and never look back.
This quote allegedly comes from the most influential poet of the year 2016 aka Justin Bieber [1]. While I do not know the context in which he dropped that very thoughtful statement and therefore don’t want to make any accusations against him, I would like to point out that research does not agree with him.
Some context: Looking back on what you have done in the past is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for reflection. And reflection helps you to improve in the future.
I guess there is a consensus out there that doing some reflection will ultimately make you more successful. The tribe of people that doesn’t agree has probably been eliminated by evolution, latest the second time they wanted to go pat the wild tiger.
And while this applies to survival, it also applies to almost any other area in life: Running a business. Dating. Raising a child.
The crucial question is just how much time should you invest into reflecting and how much time into doing?
Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning
Consider for instance a cardiac surgeon in training. She has completed ten operations under the eye of an instructor. It is in everyone’s interest for the cardiac surgeon to get better as fast as possible. Imagine she was given a choice in planning her agenda for the next two weeks. She could spend that time doing ten additional surgeries, or she could take the same amount of time alternating between a few additional surgeries and time spent reflecting on them to better understand what she did right or wrong. Every hour she spends reflecting on how to get better is costly in terms of lost practice time. Conversely, every hour spent practicing consumes time she could have spent reflecting on how to get better. What would be the optimal use of her time?
Assuming that you can spend your time only either on 1) building/doing or 2) reflecting/thinking, I would argue that the relationship of time spent on reflection with productivity looks something like this:
When you go from running straight towards the tiger to reflecting for 5s and just staying put and not moving, your likelihood of survival will massively increase. When you reflect even more and make sure to keep a 1km to any wildcat, that’s even better. However, increasing the distance from 1km to 2km will not make much difference and spending all day thinking about how to avoid meeting a tiger will make you starve.
Likewise, going from not reflecting at all to spending a small amount of your available time on it, will make productivity increase heaps. Research in a call center showed that new hires who spent a cumulated 1.5 h journaling within their 2 weeks training period, scored 23% higher in their final assessment [2].
However, most probably there are diminishing returns to time spent reflecting (i.e. the 5th hour of reflection will add less to your productivity than the 4th hour) and at some point the downside of loosing time to actually do things will outweigh the benefits of reflection.
Obviously, all of this is vastly simplified and there is no formula to calculate the sweet spot here. Nevertheless, research showed that, at least in experimental settings, when given the chance to decide how to spend their time, participants mostly chose the option to gather more experience rather than thinking about the past [2]. Nevertheless, the latter one resulted in significantly greater performance improvements, suggesting that most of us are still located somewhere to the left of our sweet spot (i.e. spend too little time reflecting).
Preliminary conclusions:
The more repetitive the tasks someone has to perform on a daily basis, the lower the curve in general -> reflection is no really helpful if there is little new to reflect upon
The more unknown tasks the higher the curve -> that’s why there is so much emphasis on learning when it comes to startups
The more (important) decisions someone has to make, the more the bump moves to the right -> many CEO’s have gone from a hustle life style to embracing thinking time
Allocate deliberate time slots for reflection, particularly when a big amount of new experiences has accumulated -> build, measure, learn
Sorry by Justin Bieber
Cause I just need one more shot at forgiveness
I know you know that I made those mistakes maybe once or twice
By once or twice I mean maybe a couple a hundred times
Interested in more articles like this?
✨ Random
Pro- Advice #6 from The Guardian on what to do when encountering a tiger: Do not urinate in it’s territory.
This robot wins every single game of rock, paper, scissors
Relationship between film length and rating
[1] 2016 Song Charts
[2] Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning