Crazy But Able

Oh great, a blog post about financial goals… BORING! Well, I’ll try not to make it too boring.

I was reading the internet a week or so ago, and I came upon an interesting idea from Paul Buchheit [wiki] [blog]. If you’re too lazy to click the Wikipedia link, he’s the guy who came up with and was lead developer for Gmail.

His thesis is that everyone has tunnel vision (which isn’t very original in and of itself), but he has a novel idea for the reason why we all have tunnel vision. You’ve probably heard about the research which suggests that everyone can only store seven things (plus or minus two) in their short term memory. I always interpreted that as being true just for short term memory, that is to say, really short term memory. For example, let’s say we’re building some shelves, so we’re thinking about measuring and sawing this board, the wood glue is over there, and the clamps are right here, and so on. Details! The seven slots hold details all the time and most of the time we’re not even aware of them.

His idea is that it works a little differently. We have seven slots in our brains, but it’s more like, we can stuff anything we want in there, whether details or big-picture things. Back to the shelves: we’re thinking about sawing and measuring the board, but when we’re done and we go to find the wood glue we don’t really remember where it is, we look for it. Not all the details deserve a short-term memory slot. The whole time we’re working on the shelves we’re *also* thinking about running some errands, we’re getting hungry and should eat some lunch, this song on the radio totally RULES, etc.

So we get the shelves clamped; humming that catchy upbeat song from the radio, we go upstairs and turn on the news while we make lunch. And we hear about the exploding oil pipeline in Minnesota. The war in Iraq. Sub-prime mortgages. Global warming. George Bush mooned Ahmadinejad. Our favorite presidential candidate screwed up in the recent debates.

Wow. Suddenly our seven mental slots are filled with bad news. We go out on our errands and some jerk cuts us off. If our slots were filled with happier thoughts (like, how awesome it’s going to be when we get these shelves done and didn’t we make a lot of progress on them today), then we’d just shrug it off. Stupid jerk. Glad I’m not him, his life must suck. But no, we’re still thinking about Iraq and higher gas prices and all these negative things, so when something negative happens to us, we get angry, and tense.

Now, I want to add a little bit to this mental slot theory of thinking. It’s a small point, and a smart guy like Buchheit probably didn’t even mention it because he thought it was so obvious. But he phrased his original theory in terms of computer architecture, and while this little piece I want to add in is a no-brainer if you know a lot about how computers work, I’m trying to reword it so that my non-computer nerd friends will understand what I am talking about.

Imagine you have emptied out your seven slots. Now: what are you doing for Christmas? I bet when I asked you that question, a list of things started popping into your head. Here’s my point: when we put something in one of our slots (for instance, “what am I doing for Christmas?”), our brain automatically starts filling in the rest of our slots with things it thinks we might need: get a present for Aunt Maxine, call our high school friends to see if they’ll be home at the same time we are, get a new set of tires before we leave for the trip, and so on.

So that’s his main theory, with my little addition. Buchheit also points out a more sinister implication (emphasis in the original):

This seven [slot] limitation also makes people very subject to manipulation. If you can control what is getting loaded into their attention, you can largely control what they think and how they feel. For example, if people keep talking about Iran and how scary they are and debating what to do about them, then pretty soon Iran will seem like the biggest, scariest problem in the world, and no solution will seem too extreme. The truth is that there are probably 100 more important problems, but it won’t seem that way because all seven registers are loaded with the same topic. The subject of the debate is more important than the content.

Political manipulation is a touchy subject: I know most of the readers of my weblog, and I can see your blood pressure rising from here. But forget about politics: manipulation is manipulation right? And who is better at manipulation than the advertising industry? I mean, I see ads on the blogs I read, on big flashy electronic road signs (my favorite is the new one on my commute right before the big curve in the interstate; this winter should be interesting), on the sides of buses, on TV screens next to the registers at Wal-Mart, and now I’m even going to see ads inside PDF files. Enraging!

The problem with ads is the context switch. A couple minutes of ads on the radio feels like eternity. It’s fatiguing: you’re listening to your favorite radio program, and suddenly it’s car dealership, diamonds are a girls best friend, drink coke, weather, news, watch this new TV program, and then the D.J. talks for 30 seconds about a radio station promotion before finally playing some tunes. Tiring! The ads keep knocking the things we’re trying to think about out of our seven slots, and we have to keep shoving them back in there.

What was this post about? Oh yes, financial goals. We all have financial goals, and when we think “financial goals”, our financial goals start getting filled into our mental slots. Fortunately, my wife keeps me in line on all of the major financial goals. We decide on our main goals as a couple (right now its save for a new car and pay off student loans early), and she manages all of the details.

However, Peggy and I each have our own little slice of the budget to do with as we please. And, of course, there’s a list inside my head of things I want. I’ve been adding to it for years, and even if every manufacturer stopped making new products and stopped all advertising it would still be decades before I could afford everything I want on my list.

Having a list of things you want is fine. For some people, like my wife, their internal want list rarely, if ever, interferes with their financial goals. In fact, if you look at it another way, their financial goals are on their want list. I am not blessed with this outlook on life. I want things, and I want them right now.

Here is an extremely small portion of my want list:

• A new laptop.
• A Leica CL with the Rokkor 40mm f/2 lens.
• A 75 gallon aquarium with fishes and plants and stuff.
• A new lens for my camera: the 60mm EF-S Macro.
• A new laser printer.
• DVDs of the first season of The Dukes of Hazzard.
• A Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED film scanner.
• One of those sheepskin seat covers.
• A few All-Clad copper clad pans. Just a few, I don’t need all of them.

You get the idea. I’ve got some expensive things on that list, and some pretty inexpensive things. My problem is, I churn through my list. I start out with a main goal: right now my goal is getting the 60mm macro lens. That’s 360 dollars and change. I’ve been saving for this for a while, and I’m a little over halfway there. I’ve decided, right?

But then I go to run some errands. I get in the car, and boy is it cold. Sheepskin seat cover sure would be nice. I go to Petco to pick up a new collar for the kitty. I’ll just look at the little fishies for a minute. I get home and look up a recipe on the internet. It’d be nice to be able to print this recipe instead of copying it out by hand on to an index card. When I start cooking, I think about my crappy pans and how nice the all clad pans would be. The 60mm macro lens has been completely knocked out of my mental slots, and if I’m not careful, I’ll wind up impulse buying a printer or worse, a house for my forty brand new fishy friends. I’m back to zero dollars saved for my macro lens, and upset at my fickleness.

And finally, the whole point of my blog post: for the past week or so my solution to this churning problem is to try to keep my goals in my mental slots. I do this by looking at pictures of the macro lens I want, and reading reviews and forum posts about it. I go to Flickr, and I look at cool pictures people have taken with it. Just by visiting a few websites every few days or so, I’ve been able to stick to my spending plan and reduce the stomach-churning stuff anxiety that I normally have.

I’ll make a quick point here that another easy thing you can do to help to stick to your financial goals is to cut out as many ads as possible from your life. You can’t put stuff in your mental slots if you don’t know about it. I cut back on ads by eliminating TV for the most part, although I’ve also heard of this Tivo thing you can use to fast forward through commercials. Cutting out TV ads is great: those survey companies call me up and ask if I’ve seen their ads for ski wax, or gum, or whatever, and after I sit through a half an hour of questions about gum ads, eventually I just say “you know, I haven’t seen any ads for gum in two years” and laugh as their heads asplode.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.