At Witz End

I'm a hardcore extrovert, so I love getting to know people. I find the question "What do you do?" to be terribly boring and limiting. I like open ended questions that give the recipient space to take it wherever is most interesting to them. I'll cover the topic of better questions in a future email, but one question I tested out a handful of times was, "What kind of things do you think about?" This question was often met with a blank stare, and a muttered, "I don't know, nothing?" I didn't understand. How do you not know what you are thinking? 

The classic example of autopilot thinking is getting into the car, driving to work, and arriving having no recollection of the entire commute. Thinking is such an automatic and invisible process, we don't often give it much thought. A core part of evolutionary success is conserving energy, and our brains have turned transforming tasks from conscious to automatic into superpowers (even highly complex ones like driving). Living and acting entirely by autonomous thinking processes, though, sacrifices the opportunity to reflect and consciously make improvements. Some people have real hobbies, but I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about my thinking.

One of the many tactics the Farnam Street blog introduced me to for improving the quality of my thinking and decision making is called "decision journaling." The idea is to: 

It's a powerful reflection technique, especially for major decisions which can't easily be reversed. I followed the recommendation in the article and bought a nice, big notebook dedicated to recording all my decisions. I was going to make the hell out of some decisions. Nine months later, it sat empty. I grew increasingly frustrated and confused, because I felt like not only was I not making any decisions worthy of journaling, I was struggling to recall any decisions I was making.  Here I was, supposedly far down the path of my journey of self discovery, and day after day I'm not able to tease out a basic thought process that must be happening several hundred times per day. I don't understand. How do I not know when I'm making a decision? 

I still struggle with this every day, but with a lot of effort and prompting, I'm starting to see glimmers of awareness. "Oh, that was a decision!" will occasionally pop in my head. I've still only used the decision journal twice - once when deciding whether or not to take a new job, and recently when deciding whether or not to press more deeply into writing by syndicating the content of these emails to a blog.