A couple matters of personal psychology for today.
NY Times, guest essay by David Epstein, 12 May 2026: The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness [gift link]
If in making decisions you are often guided by a search for the best, you are going about decision making all wrong — and you’re also probably less happy for it.
In an age of information and choice abundance, we assume we can find the best of everything if we look long and hard enough. Psychologists call that tendency maximizing.
But searching for the best is the wrong goal. That is because searching is itself a cost, and most people forget to account for it. If you did, you would see that the optimal strategy isn’t optimizing at all.
There’s a better way to make decisions. To understand it, you should know about Herbert Simon, a pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, as well as a Nobel laureate in economics.
It’s about being efficient, or calm, and not being obsessively perfectionist.
Mr. Simon demonstrated that for most decisions, humans can’t really evaluate the options available — there are too many, our information about them is incomplete and our minds aren’t built to weigh them all — and so we rely on mental shortcuts. He coined the term “satisficing” — a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice — to describe how we consider a limited set of options, then choose one that is good enough and move on to live our lives.
When Mr. Simon faced a decision, he considered a few alternatives, sometimes asked for advice, chose and moved on. He didn’t agonize, and he didn’t second-guess. “The best is enemy of the good” was the mantra he lived by.
I have probably mentioned this idea before. I had a friend in college who was an obsessive shopper. When he wanted a new pair of sunglasses, we visited three department stores (in those days, probably, Sears, Fedco, and the like) so he could examine all the options, before picking something (which probably entailed driving back the first store). Similarly with camera equipment.
Whether in reaction to that, or by personal instinct, I have done the opposite. Most of the time. I do recall, when ready to buy my first SLR camera, back in the early ’80s, I bought all the camera magazines for a couple months and assimilated their data. Then I went to the nearby camera store, knowing what I wanted, and bought a Pentax. Similar my first car, in the same era; I bought a Honda Accord. I suppose I still do this for cars, though the last car I bought was 15 years ago. Even then, I did all sorts of research online, for weeks, and knew exactly what I wanted before I visited the BMW dealer. (I bought a 2011 M3.) But for ordinary purchases, mostly clothes, I find something suitable, online or in-store, buy it, and get it over with.
At the same time, I admit to being a perfectionist in finishing my big website at sfadb.com. For years, nearly a decade, I’ve been working to install ‘rankings’ for best SF/F novels of all time. I keep working on it, but slowly. Is perfect the enemy of the good? Perhaps.
The essay ends:
Mr. Simon would not have been surprised they never met again. Whether you’re searching for a dishwasher or a date, set a good-enough standard. Stop when it’s met. Save your cognitive resources for things that matter.
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And then there’s this. But, should we obsess about spending our time in the most efficient way? Isn’t that a little like the obsessiveness of the previous item? But let’s see what it says.
Vox, Bryan Walsh, yesterday: You have more time than you think. Here are 5 science-backed ways to find it, subtitled “There are 8,760 hours in a year. You can spend them better.”
There’s an issue here about how life was better in the old days, as people think. Inaccurately.
If there’s one thing Americans can agree on — beyond the fact we hate data centers and love Dolly Parton — it’s that we’re busier than ever, and it’s all too much. We don’t have time to socialize, we don’t have time to sleep, and we don’t have time for fun. We’re a uniquely overworked and overbooked people who now get more joy out of canceling plans than we do following through with them.
Except that narrative is not quite true. For one thing, Americans actually work far fewer hours than our great-grandparents did, with annual hours worked in the US falling from around 2,300 per worker in the 1920s to about 1,750 today; the average American work week is now 34 hours, not 40. If we were truly so ridiculously busy, we probably wouldn’t be averaging more than two and a half hours a day in front of the TV.
This keys off a book by Laura Vanderkam, Big Time: A Simple Path to Abundance. Here’s an Amazon link.
The author tracks her receipts, her time in 30-minutes chunks since 2015. The article identifies this techniques:
- Track your time for a week
- Run a weekly planning session
- Engineer a better workday
- Claim your golden hours
- Dream big, plan small
The essay concludes,
You don’t need more hours in the day. You just need to harness the ones you already have.
So, I admit to having explored various techniques like these. In Excel spreadsheets, in checklists in a manual notebook. I maintain both to this day. Have they enabled me to finish all my projects? Well, no, but they enable me to make progress every day. As I’m doing. I just have to live another few more years, to finish.
