How to pay attention and make clear decisions in a chaotic world.

Uncategorized Jun 11, 2026

We are living in an age of unprecedented information overload. The sheer volume of input is beyond our capacity to manage it. This is leading to a state of overwhelm.

Nobel laureate Herbert Simon explains it this way. In a world of excessive information, the information consumes something else. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

David Epstein's new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better makes a counterintuitive argument. In a world of infinite options and constant noise, constraints don't limit us. They free us. His BCS framework gives you three practical tools to work with your attention rather than against it. Here's what they are and how to use them.

B: BATCH

Batch your work so you're not toggling all day

Managing attention and focus is so hard. I really struggle with this especially as a divergent thinker. I need to go deep and focus on one thing. I really want to implement this batching. I do it at times and then I have other days where I don't do it and I just feel so much less productive.

Reduce context switching by grouping similar tasks together instead of toggling all day

Gloria Mark, Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine, found the following:

In 2004, the average person spent 2 minutes 30 seconds on a single screen before switching
By 2012 it had dropped to 75 seconds
More recently it's down to 47 seconds

The cost of each switch is the critical finding. Once you break focus, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully regain deep focus. Errors increase, performance degrades and stress goes up measurably (Mark used heart rate monitors and thermal imaging to prove this).

TRY IT: Mark's research shows that people checked email an average of 77 times a day. She recommends you rather set one or two specific times to batch check email rather than letting it interrupt everything else.

There's also a fascinating finding on self-interruption. Once you're habituated to a certain cadence of interruptions, even if all external notifications disappear, you'll unconsciously increase your own self-interrupting to maintain the same frequency. Turning off notifications alone isn't enough, you have to deliberately retrain the rhythm.

C: Commitments

Make your commitments visible so you can subtract the right ones.

I am a big believer in making things visible, to signal to your brain, remind your brain what it's going for, like having a vision board. I believe this works on a neurological level, to bring things front of mind and activate your reticular activating system. Also this idea of helping us remember all the commitments we have available, especially with our very busy complex lives. This is something we are looking at in our business to improve our visibility on dashboards of everything that's going on.

A team at the Broad Institute, the MIT-Harvard biomedical research centre, was drowning. Too many projects, too much fragmentation. So they tried something simple. They wrote every ongoing project on a Post-it and mapped them all onto a wall.

Two things became immediately clear. Nobody knew all the projects that were on the go. And there were at least twice as many projects underway as the team could realistically handle.

The fix wasn't a new system. It was just seeing it. Once everything was visible, the question changed from "How do we get all of this done?" to "What comes off the wall?" They cancelled lower-priority work and added this rule: nothing new goes in until something comes out. In two years, they cut projects by more than half, and completed more.

Epstein concludes, we don't have a capacity problem. We have a visibility problem.

TRY IT: Before adding anything new, write down every live project and commitment and put it somewhere you can see it all at once. Then decide what comes off the wall. The decision about what to drop tends to make itself.

A NOTE ON AI: AI tools are great at the production side - generating, summarizing, coding, drafting, replying. They offer almost no help with the harder question: Should this be getting done at all? By making production cheaper, they can make the underlying problem worse.

S: SATISFICING

Use satisficing rules to make decisions without drowning in choices.

I am definitely a maximizer. I overthink lots of decisions. I suffer from FOMO and want to do everything and choose everything. I love this idea of helping myself with rules and decisions to not overthink and to just make a choice and go with it. My husband often says to me, "Just make the choice and go with it." I definitely want to be more of a satisficer.

Satisficing is a word coined by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon. It's a blend of satisfy and suffice. His insight is that humans have limited cognitive bandwidth. So we shouldn't try to find the very best option. We should define good enough criteria upfront. The moment something meets them, we commit and move on.

The opposite is maximising: endlessly searching for something better, keeping every decision reversible, always wondering what else is out there. Research consistently shows that maximisers are less satisfied, more prone to regret, and less happy overall, even when they make objectively better choices.

Simon practised what he preached. He wore the same brand of socks, ate the same breakfast every day, and lived in the same house for 46 years. It gave him the mental bandwidth to win the highest awards in psychology, economics and computing. Satisficing the small things frees up cognitive energy for the things that actually matter.

Epstein also references Fredkin's paradox: the closer two options feel, the less the decision actually matters. So the time you spend agonising is almost always wasted on the decisions least worth agonising over.

TRY IT: Pick one recurring decision that drains you: what to eat, when to exercise, how to respond to a certain type of email. Set a simple "good enough" rule and follow it without revisiting. Notice what that frees up.

The BCS framework won't fix everything. But it gives you three places to start.

Batch your attention. Make your commitments visible. And satisfice the small stuff so you have energy left for what actually matters.

I'll be honest, I couldn't eat the same breakfast every day like Herbert Simon. I would not go that far. But there are many, many ways I want to become more of a satisficer. We're working on all three of these ourselves. We'd love to know which one resonates most with you.

Nina Pearse

Author

Nina Pearse is a dynamic and creative facilitator with a vision to transform business and society by helping people tap into their creativity. Nina has an honours degree in business science from the University of Cape Town. She is an adjunct faculty member at the Gordon Institute of Business Science.