Your environment influences your decision-making more than you realise.
Just as what you keep in your kitchen influences what you eat, your office environment influences how you make decisions.
Unfortunately, for most of us, the modern office makes rational decision-making extremely difficult.
Most of the modern offices designed today are with open floor plans with transparent partitions made to make interactions fluid. While this may be good for the exchange of ideas or collaboration, it also makes for a noisy environment full of distractions. Its complete lack of privacy can inhibit open and honest communication essential for effective decision-making while encouraging blind conformity and groupthinking.
Worsening the problem, the first thing most people do is dive into their overflowing inboxes, trying to tackle urgent emails. Soon, phone calls and unexpected tasks start cropping up, interrupting their workflow. Before you know it, the day’s over, and we barely make progress on anything.
We waste time moving inches on the non-important stuff when we could dedicate our time to moving 10 feet on one important task.
On top of it, our work culture is dominated by appearances and politics over actual progress. Signaling is more important than doing any actual work.
Not an ideal environment conducive to focused thinking and sound decision-making.
Contrast this to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
They have no computer in their office. They’re not distracted every few minutes by a new notification. Their days aren’t full of meetings. They don’t have an annoying boss that comes around and asks for something “tangible” that they’re working on. Warren Buffett spends most of his time reading and thinking.
No wonder he’s so good at it.
It’ll be a huge mistake to put Buffett in a modern office. His superpowers would disappear if he isn’t able to think and concentrate.
Our environments influence us, whether we realize it or not.
We like to believe that we are in charge. That our brains are only influenced by our conscious thoughts. It sounds good, but it’s wrong. Our conscious brain is much smaller than our subconscious brain, and our subconscious minds have a much greater impact on how we behave. Focusing only on improving our conscious thinking is not going to be enough if our environment’s holding us back.
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all environment for everyone. Different people thrive in different surroundings. However, you can take concrete steps to get ahead :
- Ask to create designated quiet zones or rooms in the office where you can go to focus on your work and make important decisions without distractions.
- Flexible work policies like remote work can allow you to have some quiet time when you need to concentrate better and make well-informed decisions.
- Tackle the most important tasks, like making hard decisions first thing in the morning when you’re most productive. Emails and meetings should be pushed to later.
- Dedicate blocks of time for focused work. Getting into a state of flow is not easy. It could be thinking about a problem in a three-dimensional way or refining a report that you’re writing for work. If you interrupt this time, it’s expensive to get back to where you were, often taking 25 minutes or more to recover. Keep that in mind when you interrupt others.
- Make it easy to follow effective behaviors: Keep your phone in silent mode when concentrating on a given task. Get noise-cancelling headphones for when you need to focus at work. Make a list of the most important tasks to be mindful of in your notebook to help structure your thoughts and make better decisions.
It’s no secret that our physical and cultural environments matter. While you can’t control every aspect of your surroundings, you can make significant changes to get more out of your brain.
Focus on what you can control and optimize your environment for better decision-making.
