An app for tough decisions.
You might remember reading in Predictably Irrational that it turns out that when we are choosing between two or more very similar options, we tend NOT to take into account the consequences of not deciding. For example, in the parable of the donkey, the unfortunate creature is placed in the middle of two identical stacks of hay. Unable to decide which stack to go for, the donkey starves and dies.
In another example, a friend of mine spent three months choosing between two different cameras, only to miss countless photo opportunities that he will never get back. And given how similar the two cameras were, he might have been better off simply flipping a coin.
To remedy this situation, I had the idea of creating Procrastinator for iPhone. This application allows you to set deadlines for your hard decisions so that when time is up, if you haven’t chosen an option, Procrastinator chooses for you. Thus, no more endless deciding back and forth, and no more lost time. Procrastinator is really easy to use, and you can have as many decisions as you would like running at the same time. You can find Procrastinator here.
The Upside of Irrationality, explores some positive and some negative ways that irrationality plays out in our lives.
Nice effort. I would love to have this app. But, can you (with the help of students) port it to Android also?
LOL Android.
What about nice, gloomy app that suggests various doom scenarios if you DON’T decide?
But the question is: should I get that app or not? How to decide?
Get it
but I haven’t figured out which smartphone to get yet, and figuring out all those complex data plans, ….
Dan, just downloaded it! great to get the countdown. I’m thinking for a version 2 can there be an added decision tree function were we can break factors down and assign percentages? then have it aggregate to a % yes vs % no?
Dan,
Just finished The Upside of Irrationality. Many follow up books are a disappointment but yours was every bit as good as the first. Thanks, keep it up!
Brian
Thanks so much — it means a lot to me
cool!
i too hope a droid version comes out. : )
Up the street from where I work is a sweet little bookstore called Munroe’s. When I decided I wanted the Irrational first book, I went to Munroe’s. For my recent birthday I asked for a Munroe’s gift certificate.
The purpose of the gift certificate was to allow me to go to Munroe’s and shop — maybe buy, not necessarily — just shop.
Today, in Munroe’s, looking at all the juicy books I might buy, I worried that I was falling into the trap of not deciding. Was I, like the camera guy who was not taking pictures, not reading (maybe the second Irrational book) because I had not made up my mind?
But I do not think that’s the case. I was still enjoying the shopping too much to do anything as mundane as deciding. Maybe the camera guy was too.
Cool – both useful and funny.
What happens if mom doesn’t like the choice the app picked? Then we have something to blame-this is good, but it decreases the likelihood of future use of the app.
Dr. Dan, I would love to have the app too, but I have an android phone. Could you ask your students to bring the app on this platform too? Android users also suffer from indecision you know!
Perhaps you should have waited a bit longer to decide between Android and Iphone.
I hope you’re getting paid as well, not just those undergrad, for coming up with the idea. Or at least a good chunk of the funds will go towards furthering your most useful work.
Also, you should blog a response to the recent NY Times op-ed (by Loewenstein?) critical of recent attempts to apply behavioral economics to policy.
Very interesting and amusing subject. I read with great pleasure.
I can totally relate to those two scenarios!! Because that is what happened to me with the camera. If I have an iphone I would get the application, but just for suggestion though.
Interesting article!
Looking at the screenshots in the app store made me think of an idea for a research project: How does time pressure affect decision making? Maybe this has been done already; I only took one course in psychology in university. Anyway, the reason I thought of this was that the app shows how much time is left to decide with 1 second precision, even when the decision is months away (probably too much information there). Then, I wondered how people might behave differently if more distant decisions were shown with vaguer descriptions of the amount of time left to decide. A vaguer description might just be one with less precision (e.g. round (up down or nearest) the weeks, days, etc.). The ultimately vague description would be none at all. This would requiring the user to remember when something is due, another potential another distraction, except in this case it would be due to a lack of information rather than a surplus.
This reminded me of your large bonus experiment in India, because of the pressure to perform created by the bonus could have the same effect as time pressure and/or deadline awareness. This would give you another avenue to explore the idea that your audience of bankers was trying to convince you of: some people improve their performance under pressure, even though most seem to do worse. If your tests subjects were undergraduate students, you could see if there was any correlation between major and difference in performance under various levels of time pressure and deadline awareness. If the business majors improve, while the other groups decline, maybe there’s something to the bankers’ claim.
I just had another realization: Isn’t the iPhone itself a procrastinator? It even distracts some people from driving as they text!
Another vote for an Android app.
Also, another vote for The Upside of Irrationality. What a great book!
oddly enough, when you claim something is an antique, people will pay more for it.
You should make the app automatically post deadlines on the user’s facebook/twitter accounts. The added social pressure from the user’s peers will surely motivate them even more to make a concrete decision on time.
Friend: Hey Alex, which camera did you end up buying?
Alex: Shit, haven’t made a decision! *Fail!*
or alternatively,
Alex: Got the Nikon! Here’s a cool pic! *Win!*