HOW OUR POOR PERCEPTION OF TIME DERAILS OUR DECISION-MAKING
There’s an interesting economics experiment where if you offer people $100 today or $150 a year from now, most people will take the $100 today.2
In economics, this is known as “temporal discounting” — we “discount” the value of having something far off in the future compared to having something now.
In psychology, it’s often referred to as the “present bias” and you see it crop up in all sorts of other areas in life.3 We’d rather eat that double pepperoni pizza every Saturday night than think about the weight we’ll gain a year from now. We’d rather be right in an argument than think about how we might be affecting a friendship a week, a month, or a year into the future. We’d rather have fun tonight than think about how we’re going to feel at work tomorrow.
We tend to overestimate the value of something now and underestimate the value of something later. This is why people are terrible at saving money. This is why we procrastinate important tasks. This is why we put off having necessary but difficult conversations.
Time messes us up in other ways too. Think about this: take a penny and put it on the first square of a chess board. Now put two pennies on the next. Now put four on the next. Continue doubling the pennies for all 64 squares on the board. How much money is on the last square?
If you said $92.2 QUADRILLION dollars, you were right.
But let’s be honest, you didn’t say that. You probably said some generic, large number, like $5 million or something, thinking you were being clever and guessing really high. Meanwhile, you were only off by about nine zeroes.
Our minds are poor at compounding things over time. We overestimate the pain of doing something for 30 minutes today, without realizing the compounding effects it can have if we fail to do it every day for months and months on end.
For example, let’s pretend there’s some imaginary skill that if you practiced for 30 minutes a day, that you’d get 1% better each day for the next year. Now, let’s say you actually did practice for 30 minutes per day — how much better would you be at the end of the year?
Instinctively, you probably think, “Well, 365 days in a year, so I don’t know, like 400%?” If you’re somewhat familiar with compounding functions, you might know to guess extra high, so you say something like 1,000% better.
But the real answer? You’d be 3,778% — or almost 38 times — better than you were at the start of the year.
Weighing options
Do I wake up early each day to write that novel I’ve always dreamed about? Or do I snort some more bath salts?
Again, our mind doesn’t think like that. Instead, we think, “Oh, what’s the big deal if I miss one workout? Not going to kill me.” Then we proceed to say that once or twice a week for years and years and years on end. And because we don’t think exponentially — our intuition thinks linearly — we vastly underestimate how much we’re actually giving up.
Because here’s how much you improve if you only practice that skill every other day, for a year: 611%.
3,778% improvement vs 611% improvement. That’s 6x the difference in results, for only 2x the effort. That’s the difference between being an expert at something and being merely “good” at it. Run that out over a few years and that’s the difference between being a professional and an amateur. Not a sprint of 12-hour days, but a slow, steady marathon of 30-minutes per day, year after year.
None of us think about this shit when we’re going about our lives. That’s because it’s really, really hard. Our brains don’t think exponentially. It strikes us as counterintuitive.
We tend to vastly overestimate the short-term benefits of taking a day off, or skipping practice or bailing on one of our commitments. Missing one workout isn’t a big deal!
And you’re right, it really isn’t that big of a deal. But we don’t consider the fact that, “just one workout isn’t a big deal,” when repeated every week or even every other week for a couple years, can have a drastic effect on our results.