Our incentives are often not easy to understand. But I think they are predictable by Cognitive Load. We start every day with X amount of cognitive energy, and we spend and earn cognitive energy depending on what we do with it.

In this study Carly Robinson and Jana Gallus showed that awarding students for perfect attendence backfired completely. Resulting in students on average attending less.

This shows that students start trying to “hack the system” and go for the award, instead of attending. Paul Graham says this is a common thing YC needs to train founders to stop doing.

Another study I’ve read, but unfortunately couldn’t find, paid kids to play (legos I think). The group that was paid found it less fun and played for shorter periods than the control group who got no reimbursement.

This shows kids being disincentivised to play. Something they would happily do for free, became less interesting when there’s an award.

Why does this happen? I think it’s because we’re shifting the incentive from a rather vague intrinsic one to a clear extrinsic one. We’re going from play to gathering points.

Does this mean extrinsic motivators are more valueable? No, but I think they’re cheaper from a cognitive load sense.

If we’re working on a complicated task, or doing something for the first time, it’s easier to do checkbox tasks than it is to actually do good work.

As cognitive load increases it is simply more economic of us to reach a clear threshhold and stop than it is to keep working.

This is why all work we consider important is more effortful than less important work. Writing your novel is harder than it is to send emails, even though you end up writing the same amount of words.

This is also why the great works will be made by people who are interested in the topic. If you have a genuine interest, you are more likely not to stop at a surface level goal.

We can use this to our advantage, first by structuring important work we are not interested in into clear chunks. The classic checklist is a great tool. So is timeboxing.

Secondly by giving us enough time to really dive into the topics we’re genuinely interested in. So that we can get further than the checkbox task.

Another thing we might need to take from this is that when you are inspired it’s time to do the work. Because it’s likely that the motivation is not going to be there tomorrow. Making your deep work session into a checkbox task.

We can also use this to our disadvantage by adding rewards, points, or grades, to things that are already interesting making us less motivated.

Experiment to try:

1. Look at your tasks for today, clarify everything that doensn’t interest you into very clear achievable goals and batch them into a timebox. Then work on the stuff that does interest you for the rest of the day.
2. The next day, do the complete opposite.
3. Then reflect on the outcomes. Think both about the amount of work done, but also the quality of the result.