Be Incorporated

This post is for overthinkers. Really it’s about a specific kind of overthinking; we could call it “over-managing.” It’s when you know what you should be working on at a given time, but instead of doing the work, you continue to deliberate over big-picture / planning decisions.

• “Maybe I shouldn’t start this just yet; it’ll be easier after {future event}.”
• “What about this smaller task? I can get it out of the way first, right? Then I’ll have a clearer head.”
• “Actually, let me sort all my tasks by priority first.”
• “Actually let me color-code them by category, too…”

And so on. You spend so much time making plans about when and how to allocate the work, that you run out of time to do the work (and maybe that’s the point; more on that later). Do you ever feel like you’ve put in a very productive few hours, but you have nothing tangible to show for it? Do you habitually learn popular productivity systems like Getting Things Done or Atomic Habits without actually changing your day-to-day life?

Manager mode

I call this pattern of thought the “Manager.” In the workplace, a manager sees the big picture, plans far in advance, puts the right systems in place, and decides what work is most important. By contrast, the “Employee” does most of the hands-on work, under the Manager’s direction. As productive individuals, we have to be both the Manager and the Employee at different times.

This distinction actually maps very well onto a concept in neuroscience. Large-scale brain networks are sets of specific brain regions that activate together in certain situations. The Default mode network (DMN) or “task-negative network” is the large-scale brain network that’s found to be active when the person has no ongoing tasks: daydreaming, imagining, remembering, planning, and the like, all belong to the DMN. When you engage with a well-defined task, the DMN stops, and the “task-positive network” (TPN) or Dorsal attention network comes on. The task-positive network governs goal-oriented behavior: it’s the opposite of imaginative or wandering; it just deals with the given task.

(Thanks to this old Ribbonfarm post for originally introducing me to the DMN/TPN distinction. I’ve found it to be a really useful model over the years).

The overactive Manager

If you’re an “overthinker” who never stops planning, you’re stuck as the Manager. When you try to be the Employee, the Manager jumps right back into the spotlight. It says, “Actually don’t work on that just yet. Let me think… I’ll get back to you.” And then you’re back in planning mode.

If you dwell too much on Manager thoughts, your brain is stuck in DMN—you’re constantly exploring the space of things you know and remember, looking for opportunities or anything important to act on. On the other hand, if you were doing too much TPN, you’d be constantly “heads down,” never evaluating whether the goal is good or how it fits into your life.

I’ve paid enough attention to this process that I can almost feel it happening now. If I’m at the gym in the morning and I accidentally think for more than two seconds about what I’m going to do later in the day, boom the Manager is there, checking my calendar, sending texts, making decisions. I’m just supposed to be lifting weights! And it’s hard to refocus after that happens—the Manager is having too much fun. It’s a bad habit that has eaten up a lot of my time.

The generalist’s Manager

Not everyone has the overactive Manager problem; some have the opposite and should reverse all the advice in this post. But generalists are naturally more Manager-adept. Any time you switch tasks; any time you decide to do a little work on your side project or hobby after work; and any time you make a plan to reach a milestone in something new—that’s the Manager. And you need it! It’s great to be intentional about balancing all your interests in a way that works logistically. But you also have to be able to call the plan “good enough” and be the Employee.

Why am I over-managing?

What makes a person get stuck in Manager mode? That question is actually mysterious to me, and I think the answers are deeper than the scope of this post. The obvious just-so answers just invite more questions. I’ll list some speculations:

• Maybe you just have a fundamental preference for Manager-style work. It could be a deep personality trait; some result of your genes or early childhood experiences, and now it’s locked in permanently. (Is that even how personality traits work?)
• Maybe you don’t trust that you’re actually good at managing—you’re afraid the plan isn’t good enough, so even if you try your hardest, it won’t work and your effort will be wasted. (But wouldn’t simple feedback and learning-from-mistakes inevitably make you a better and more confident Manager?)
• Maybe it’s the classic fear of failure. You can’t fail if you don’t act, and you can’t act if you’re still planning to act, so you keep planning. (But why is there a fear of failure, but not a fear of indefinitely-delayed success? The latter can be more dangerous.)
• Maybe we all just have a fundamental urge toward inaction/laziness, and we’ll subconsciously use whatever excuse we can find to procrastinate doing work. (But why would we be programmed for laziness? What advantage does that offer?)
• Maybe it’s society’s fault! The modern world favors the Manager by giving us all endless options in our location, work, play, relationships, etc. Choices, choices, forever. Maybe we didn’t evolve for that kind of life. It sure seems like for most of human history and prehistory, the masses did not have many options for filling their free time, if they even had any. Having optional life-paths is a luxury that groups had to earn with a surplus of food, security, and coordination. So perhaps our lives are spoiled with managerial decisions now, in the same way our diets are spoiled with sugar.

We each might benefit from examining this question more deeply… or we might not! Deep introspective self-analysis can easily become another form of procrastination. “My whole issue will dissolve once I figure this out. I just need to meditate every day, and read this book by Freud and this other one by Jung, and maybe the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and then-” No maybe you need to just work!

Taming the Manager

So, the Manager is overactive; practically, how do we get around this? This is a classic productivity problem, which means different people will find different solutions, but luckily there are a lot of solutions to try. Here are some suggestions—definitely not an exhaustive list.

Scheduling (meta-planning): Can we plan when to be the planner? Can the Manger keep itself in check by blocking out chunks of time where “I will not do any managing, I promise”?

• You could have dedicated Manager days and Employee days. On Employee days, you bite the bullet and resist the urge to take a step back and analyze the big picture. On Manager days, you brainstorm and plan out the tasks for the next few Employee days.
• Or maybe within each day, you have Manger time and Employee time. Neuroscientist podcaster Andrew Huberman notes that in the earlier part of the day, we have higher levels of dopamine, epinephrine, and cortisol circulating in our bodies, which predisposes us to the kind of bounded, linear, step-by-step tasks that the Employee handles. In the latter half of the day we have more serotonin circulating, which causes a more relaxed state that’s suited for the open-form, exploratory tasks where the Manager works. I haven’t found this pattern to match my personal experience, but I do have a daily rhythm that works for me (I start the day as Manager, and when I feel like my day is planned well enough I deliberately switch to Employee, and maybe I’ll switch back to Manager later in the evening). It probably depends on your sleep schedule, your meal schedule, and your own psychology.

Mental state induction: These can be used in combination with intentional scheduling: what do you do when it’s actually time to switch modes?

• Audio: Music can be really effective at changing your mental state. Put together a work playlist that gets you into the zone and keeps you there. Mine has a lot of action movie and video game soundtracks because those pieces are designed to connote energy/momentum without being distracting. Or try pink/brown noise. If you’re a very auditory thinker, like I am, you’ll benefit from some kind of audio base layer to literally “drown out the voices” that pull you out of your work.
• Meditation: I’m not a good meditator; I’ve never done it with enough dedication to have deep insights or lasting personality changes. But one thing I’ve found it consistently useful for is switching in and out of these mental modes. I’ll take five minutes where I close my eyes and just think about being the Employee/Executor/Worker and leaving behind the Manager. That’s it. I don’t know if anything “real” is happening when I do this or if it’s just the cost of “pausing my life 5 for minutes” that gives the decision some weight, but I always find it easy to stay in that state for hours after.
• Location: Can you do Manager things and Employee things in different places? Changing locations can be a nice little ritual to reinforce the separation between modes. In the actual workplace, the manager and employees sit in different offices; even in open office plans, my company took care to give managers their own spaces wherever possible. There’s a reason for that!

Tech tools: Is there some technology you can use to keep yourself out of Manager mode?

• Set a pomodoro timer: Do Employee work during the session, and Manager work during the break. Or do an Employee round, break, then a Manager round, break, etc. Any ritual has a decent chance of working, if you do it enough to reinforce its meaning in your mind.
• Set deadlines: Have you noticed that when a deadline is fast approaching, the Manager is nowhere to be found? It’s much easier to be the Employee when you must. This is the basic utility of procrastination. You wait until the deadline is nearly up, because a nearly-up deadline naturally shocks you out of DMN—it doesn’t take any special effort. However, that is a stressful way to live. Most people who live in the procrastinate/cram rhythm would say it’s not ideal… but it does work.
  • The trick though, is that as a productive generalist you’ll likely be setting your own goals and deadlines. A self-made deadline can be self-delayed. You might have to use little schemes with your friends or colleagues to get real external accountability for your own personal deadlines.
• Take notes / write to-dos: This is an indirect solution to the problem. When you have a notetaking system that’s quick and reliable and organized, you can dump fresh ideas into their proper place as soon as you have them, and then promptly forget them; you’ll develop them further when the time is right. A to-do list functions the same way. Your Manager insights could be things-to-do or things-to-think-about or aha-moments, etc. So notes and to-dos are kind of part of the same system here.
  • This is a big part of my writing process. I’ll be going about my day, and I’ll make a connection from some new idea to a topic I’m drafting. I’ll throw the idea into the existing draft and then forget about it. Months or years go by before I decide I’m ready to develop that topic. Then I’ll open the draft and see what I’ve got; I start ordering the ideas and tying them together.

Try any of the above, or all the above, or your own ideas. It doesn’t matter how you get there, but know that at some point you do have to put your head down and do the work. A company of all Managers would quickly fail. Both work styles need to be present and in harmony in the same body—literally, a “corporation.”