He paid out those fifty-five minutes from his pinched little purse of time because his brain performed better if he let it go soft before changing track.
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The Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir, authors of the book Scarcity, have concluded that we make bad decisions when we are strapped for time, too busy to think, and struggling to manage our obligations. Even if we take only a few hours a week of unplanned time, we can develop a bigger-picture focus or strategies for how our business actually runs.
These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.
Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes. Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.
Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes. Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.
The mistake must have been to work on the problems that happened to be in front of him, and not to seek other, more promising ones. He’d been sucked in by the work itself, by his capacity for it.