[2021-08-03] Thinking vs. doing
When I started to think seriously about retiring, I did what many of my colleagues would do. I called the Pension Centre to get advice. I read my department's information booklet on preparing for retirement. I talked to other people who had retired or recently announced their intention to do so. I consulted a financial advisor and my cancer coach. And I spoke to my HR department to get the form I would need to communicate to my boss my decision to resign from the Public Service.
It wasn't difficult to fill out the form. More challenging was reaching out to my boss. I knew that doing so would kickstart a process from which there would be no turning back. I hesitated to send the email. But as I often do in situations that scare me, I took a deep breath and jumped in, composing my message and pressing Send before I could procrastinate further. I had done the thinking; it was time for the doing.
The challenge in situations like this is deciding how much time to devote to planning and then determining when it's time to take action.
A few years back, I came upon an article called The Doing Mindset > The Thinking Mindset. In it, author Thomas Oppong, founder and editor of a resource site for entrepreneurs, explores the tension between the two activities. "Balancing thought and action will always be a challenge for many people," he says.
He argues that it’s easy to get stuck in the thinking and planning phase of a project or to keep adding ideas to an ever-expanding to-do list. "When you value ‘the thinking mindset’ more than ‘the doing mindset’ you will eventually end up with a note app or notebook full of dozens or even hundreds of ideas and plans," he cautions. This leads to what Oppong calls a tendency to over-plan and under-act.
He doesn’t completely discount thinking and planning, calling them vital to success. But he describes acting as crucial to long-term achievement.
While Oppong acknowledges that action involves risks, he also points out that it’s the only way to make progress. In fact, just getting started triggers what Oppong calls the "first action effect" and which I’ve written about as the Zeigarnik effect. "Producing results builds positive momentum," he writes.
This article validated my own bias towards acting and my suspicion that one can in fact do too much thinking. While I do believe in planning and to-do lists and strategies, I also possess a drive to get things done.
Oppong poses the question: "How much time should you spend thinking vs. doing?" but doesn’t provide a response. So I turned to other sources in search of an answer.
Thinking vs doing: how and when to choose between the two
In The Thinking Mindset vs. The Doing Mindset: Pick One (And Only One), Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing, states: "Research by psychologists Arie Kruglanski, Tory Higgins, and their colleagues suggests that we have two complementary motivational systems: the 'thinking' system and the 'doing' system—and we’re generally only capable of using one at a time."
While Markman doesn’t offer recommendations on when to use which tactic, he does provide interesting advice on how to invoke each of the mindsets.
Stuck on a problem? Need to go back to the thinking phase? Get some distance from the problem, both physically and mentally. "Your workplace environment is strongly associated with getting things done," he asserts. "In order to engage a thinking mindset, spend time working in another place. Change your environment, and you will change the way you think."
Mired in thought? Need to kickstart the doing phase? Stand up and move. Because sitting at a desk limits our movement, Markman says, it’s better suited to thinking than doing. "If you need to jumpstart your doing motivation, get moving. Stand up. Walk around your workspace. Put your ideas on sheets of paper and physically separate them in your space. Walk over to each idea and evaluate it separately. By getting up and moving, you shift yourself from a mode of deliberation to one of selection."
Need to move between thinking and doing and back again? Try changing your deadlines. For example, "the closer the deadline, the more your ‘doing’ mindset is activated," says Markman. So if you need to get something done, experiment with giving yourself a shorter deadline or committing to get an output to another person within a short amount of time.
The pitfalls of planning
In his article If You Want To Be Successful, Don't Spend Too Much Time Planning: A Case Study, Paul S. Brown, a co-author of Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future, explains why an over-reliance on planning is ill-advised: "Researching, planning and gathering resources doesn’t help you much when the world is changing as fast as it is these days. You can come up with a plan that is perfect—for a world that passed you by while you were spending all that time planning. Similarly, you could end up solving for a problem that has either gone away, or been solved by someone else while you were lining up resources."
The problem with planning, says Brown, is that it is based on an assumption that you can predict the future with a fair degree of certainty. Sometimes you can predict the future (Brown uses the example of traveling from Washington, DC, to Boston); other times you can't (Brown offers the analogy of being dropped in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and trying to make it back home). In a scenario like the latter, Brown recommends the act-learn-build-repeat model. Acting would mean taking a small step. Learning would entail assessing whether you seem to be going in the right direction. Building would involve taking additional steps based on earlier successful ones. And repeating would encompass continuing to act, learn and build.
Striking the right balance
One of the most intriguing articles I came across was Finding the right balance between thinking, learning, doing, and reviewing. Blogger Sacha Chua admits: "It can be tricky to find the balance among all these things—to plan and learn and do and review just enough so that you can get to the next stage, and to keep going through that cycle instead of getting stuck."
Chua's approach differs from Brown's act-learn-build-repeat model. Her framework includes the following steps: (1) thinking and planning, (2) learning from other people, (3) doing things, and (4) reviewing. While others might roll learning from others into the thinking stage, I like that Chua has separated it out into its own phase.
For each step, Chua strives for the Goldilocks Approach—not doing too little or too much at each stage but just the right amount.
Not every article I read advocated doing over thinking (including Why Successful People Spend 10 Hours a Week Just Thinking), but most did.
I believe that I struck the right balance between planning and doing when it came to my decision to retire and my approach to announcing it. My conversation with my cancer coach helped me work out how I would tell my boss, my replacement, my direct reports, my staff and my colleagues and the order in which I would do so. As nerve-racking as it was to make and communicate my decision, I knew that I didn't want to drag out the process. Ultimately, I believe that I hit the sweet spot between the thinking mindset and the doing mindset.
