Lately, I’ve been writing about improving energy. Recent essays include why we should manage energy rather than time [1], the saga of ego depletion research [2], and the paradoxical relationship between stress and energy [3].
Today I want to talk about effort. Why do some tasks feel harder than others? And how can we make the hard work we need to do feel easier?
What Makes Something Effortful?
Why does solving a math problem in your head feel mentally effortful, but scrolling on your phone or playing video games does not?
A naive answer might be that some tasks are effortful because they use more of our brain. Casually speaking, we sometimes talk about “turning our brain off” when we’re exhausted and can’t do mental work.
It’s an intuitive idea, but ultimately false.
Simply opening our eyes generates an enormous amount [4] of neural activity in the parts of the brain that process vision. Thus, if effort simply corresponded to using our brain, watching a video should be more effortful than trying to solve a math problem with our eyes closed.
A better answer would say that not all brain activity feels that effortful, but brain activity associated with deliberate control often does. The parts of the brain most clearly associated with the subjective feelings of effort are those associated with working memory [5] and executive control.
But here, too, we run into some difficulties. Playing a video game doesn’t feel effortful the way that solving math puzzles in our head does, but both require total concentration. In contrast, staring at a blank wall requires no working memory, yet is incredibly effortful to sustain for more than a few minutes.
The best explanation I’ve heard for this is that effort is a sensation of opportunity costs [6]. Basically, our working memory is limited and needed for most tasks, so we must use those resources wisely. When we engage in low-reward activities that monopolize those limited resources, we experience it as effort.
This helps to explain why video games, despite being cognitively demanding, can feel effortless, and why boring tasks, like staring at a wall, can feel effortful. Video games are designed with all sorts of intrinsic and immediate rewards that sustain our engagement. Staring at a blank wall is hard, because we could be using our brain for something that’s more rewarding.
Effort and Fatigue
Thus motivation, in particular the immediate rewards predicted by the dopamine network in our brain, plays a critical role in the sensation of effort. If we’re doing an activity that is steadily giving us rewards in the here and now, we’ll find it less effortful.
In contrast, if an alternative activity (including daydreaming) would provide a better stream of in-the-moment rewards, it will take more effort to keep on task.
This opportunity cost [6] theory of effort is one I’ve shared previously. I believe it holds true, but I think when I wrote that article I was missing the kernel of truth buried in the now somewhat-tarnished ego depletion [2] research: namely, that our capacity for effort isn’t constant.
When we are well-rested, energized and optimistic, we have a higher capacity for effortful activity. In contrast, if we’re exhausted, sleepy or depressed, even moderately effortful activities can feel impossibly hard.
Consider two different activities. One is low effort, and has low long-term rewards (such as phone scrolling). Another is high-effort, and has high long-term rewards (such as studying for an important exam). Which we choose to do will depend, in part, on our energy levels—it isn’t impossible to study when low on energy, but we’ll be much less likely to choose that high effort/high long-term reward task.1 [7]
This can help reconcile the “energy as a resource” and “energy as motivation” perspectives. When we are depleted of energy, it tilts the motivational landscape so that effortful activities must promise even greater rewards to get us to take action.
Three Paths to Making Hard Work Easier
All of this suggests that we have a few levers we can pull to make the hard work we need to do easier:
- We can make the tasks less effortful.
- We can make the tasks more rewarding in the long-term.
- We can increase our baseline energy to make effort itself easier.
Let’s take a look at each:
1. Finding Flow: Make Tasks Less Effortful
Since effort is a sensation of the opportunity costs of using our general-purpose executive control faculties, there are a few ways we can directly reduce the effort of tasks.
We can make hard tasks easier. This can be done by lowering our standards (e.g., aiming for a lousy first draft or not allowing censoring when brainstorming). It can be done through shifting to a “meta” task that seeks first to understand the source of our difficulties (e.g., journaling, rubber duck debugging [8] or the Feynman technique [9]). It can also be done through learning and experience, which causes initially-effortful tasks to become increasingly automatic.
We can make boring tasks more engaging. We can do this by increasing standards to make a task more challenging, adding constraints and complexity, or turning them into a kind of game to increase their intrinsic rewards.
Finally we can tweak what sorts of alternative tasks we engage in. If we reduce the pull of nearby temptations and distractions, the effort needed to do the exact same task goes down. Go to the library to study instead of staying at home by the television, and be wary of tons of shallow and easy media that drains our motivation to do harder things.
2. Creating Drive: Make Tasks More Deeply Motivating
Alternatively, instead of trying to reduce the effort of the work, we can increase our motivation to do hard things by picking more inspiring projects and goals. When working on something that feels deeply meaningful and important, it becomes much easier to push through momentary effort than if it all feels pointless.
Finding more motivating projects to work on is itself a deep topic. Part of this skill comes from exposure. Some ideas are naturally good, and others are bad. So if we don’t have a good stock of ideas to work on, we’ll naturally be less motivated.
However, we all know that simply having a great idea is rarely enough for motivation. We need self-confidence that we can achieve it [10]. This kind of belief builds through positive experience. We need a worldview that values the aims we aspire to. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to be in an environment that genuinely rewards our strivings.
Building more purpose and meaning doesn’t solve the problem of effort—the most driven people in the world still work hard—but it makes overcoming apathy and stagnation much easier. Even heroic efforts are possible to persist through if the long-term motivation is apparent.
3. Fueling Energy: Make Effort Itself Easier
Finally, we can work on cultivating the baseline energy that makes effort easier to sustain and tilts us towards doing harder things.
Some of this is biological. As discussed in my essay on stress [3], short bursts of stress work to energize us, sharpening our attention and motivating us to take physical action. However, chronic stress saps our energy, because it impairs our body’s investment in repair and recovery, eventually grinding us down.
This means cultivating good lifestyle habits, like regular exercise, getting good sleep, eating well, and engaging in stress-management practices like self-reflection and building solid relationships, is important. While we only have limited control over our health—many of us are beset by illnesses or conditions that are not our fault—taking what control we do have over our health can make an enormous difference in our capacity to do hard work.
This was perhaps the biggest benefit of my recent Foundations [11] project. By fixing my sleep, diet and fitness habits, the work I need to do to sustain my business and take care of my family feels a lot easier, even though the effort required to do the tasks and my motivation to do them hasn’t changed.
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This essay is just an introduction. In reality, all three of these steps: making the work less effortful and finding flow, making it more meaningful and increasing your drive, and cultivating the baseline energy that fuels you are all huge topics with lots to discuss.
To help achieve this, I’m working on a new course, Everyday Energy, to synthesize the research into a practical roadmap for people who want to improve their energy.
In the meantime, I want to dig deeper into some of these topics as I continue this essay series. Next, I’d like to look at how the time we spend not working impacts our energy levels, and try to answer the question of whether it’s more restorative to spend free time relaxing deeply or engaging in more active pursuits.
Footnotes
- A confusion I’ve had is that, if effort is a sensation of relative rewards, how can an activity be both effortful and rewarding? My best understanding right now would be to suggest that the neural circuits that generate feelings of effort are much more sensitive to the immediate rewards as part of the activity, and only weakly responsive to longer-term rewards. This suggests that we become more sensitive to delays (more impulsive) as we’re fatigued, but also that subjectively we perceive short and long-term rewards differently.