Think Less, Act More: Boost Your Productivity as a Scientist

Think less, act more is a recipe for success in the world of science. Action is valued more than thought. If you pause and consider it, this is incredibly obvious. No one was ever promoted, published, or otherwise rewarded for simply thinking. Rather, they had to experiment, write, meet, present, or take some other kind of action. Yet, as scientists, we too often become mired in thought and analysis—trying to design the perfect experiment or to formulate the cleverest interpretation of some results. You can greatly improve your productivity, impact, and ultimately career prospects by thinking less and acting more. This article will show you how to implement this mantra as a scientist.

What is the “Think Less, Act More” Philosophy

“Think less, act more” is a simple mantra that means exactly what it says. It encourages a bias towards action. It does not say that there is no place for thought; nor does it say to act rashly without analysis. Rather, it is a reminder that thought without action is for philosophers. Scientists like you who want to create a real impact in the world, who want to cure diseases, and who want to understand our place in the universe must act. So repeat the mantra often and push yourself to experiment, write, communicate, and lead more. You will be rewarded, because the world values action over thought.

A bias towards action ironically applies even more to those of us who make a living thinking. As a scientist, you are undoubtedly, highly intellectual and analytical. Many years of higher education and scientific training have reinforced this component of your identity. It may even feel like thought is cheap in our resource-constrained world. However, you can waste an enormous amount of time and incur gigantic opportunity costs by getting lost in thought for too long. (In industry, this is often referred to by non-scientists as paralysis by analysis.)

In fact, your education and training make your time quite valuable and expensive. It should be noted that the value of your time is not just a cost to your advisor or employer. Your time is your most valuable resource. You must choose how to allocate your time into a portfolio of activities that will help you achieve your personal career goals. Recognizing the value of your time will force you to think more honestly and evaluate the optimal balance between thought and action.

An “act more, think less” mindset will benefit your science and your career

Self-correction

The scientific method itself is a very iterative process that depends upon action not just thought. Few of us will ever conduct a thought experiment that leads to a Nobel prize like Albert Einstein. Instead, we’ll think things through, perform an experiment or submit a paper, and be forced to iterate, updating our beliefs in accordance with new evidence and criticism. In science, we stand upon the shoulders of all the scientists that came before us. We contribute our incremental discoveries to the collective scientific knowledge so that the next generation of scientists can start a little further along.

One of the beautiful outcomes of this system is that science almost never moves backwards. Incorrect assumptions and theories are quickly corrected. This self-correcting, self-regulating property of science is based on action. An incorrect thought stuck in one individual’s mind may never correct itself. Yet, when exposed by action—disclosure at a meeting, submission of a paper for peer review, or further experiment—ideas are quickly corrected.

Allocation of valuable time and resources

Iterative action can also help us minimize wasted time and resources in our personal and professional lives. You would never commit to a thesis project or receive grant funding without preliminary evidence. These systems were designed to ensure that our thoughts are grounded in reality and stand a reasonable chance of succeeding before we allocate significant resources. The systems minimize the number of students who find themselves 10 years into a PhD with nothing to show and maximize the scientific return on taxpayer investments. Yet, we are much worse at governing our own thoughts before committing our own precious resources.

As discussed previously, your time is very valuable. Extensive planning can use up significant amounts of time and has no guarantee of a significant return on investment. However, even small actions will always generate some data (e.g., an experimental result that does not seem to support your hypothesis or an offhand comment in casual conversation that nullifies one of your critical assumptions). These data points can be big or small, positive or negative, but they will always provide a self-correcting mechanism to ensure that you’re not way off track. Over time this strategy will provide us with the greatest possible return on investment, increasing the likelihood that we will achieve our goals.

Serendipity

Action increases the likelihood of serendipitous discovery. Fleming would have never discovered penicillin in a thought experiment. Despite their best efforts, Watson and Crick would have never discovered the structure of DNA without “networking” with Rosalind Franklin. On a more personal note, I could have never conceived of my career trajectory in an isolated thought exercise. Impossible things happen every single day. If only you can put yourself in the position to be a recipient, serendipity will happen to you. Its frequency will be proportional to your frequency of action. So think less and act more: perform more experiments, have more conversations, and take more chances.

The benefits of data generated by iterative action can be scientific, professional, or even personal. The mantra of think less and act more is applicable to every part of our lives. However, it requires us to let go of absolute control, and make ourselves vulnerable to the unknown.

Fear of failure causes us to think instead of act

Fail frequently

This statement probably makes you feel uncomfortable. You’ve gotten where you are in your education and career by succeeding—at least that’s the story we often tell ourselves. If, like most of us, you’ve ever felt the sting of rejection from a school or job application, you have probably tried to quarantine that perceived failure, isolating it from the narrative you present to the outside world. In part, we do this for good reason. Presenting ourselves as successful can create a clean, compelling package to sell to the rest of the world. Yet, as we repeat that story over and over again, we begin to believe it, forgetting about those quarantined failures. So ask yourself again: how often do I fail? 

Take risks

If you aren’t failing often, you aren’t taking enough risks. If you have never felt the sting of rejection from a job application, a university admissions office, or a prestigious journal, there are two possibilities. The first is that you are the rock star of all rock stars. You were admitted into Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and on, and on. Similarly, all of your many papers have been published in Science and Nature. And every experiment you’ve ever performed worked out exactly the way you had planned, producing exactly the world shattering result you expected. If this sounds like you, good for you. You’ve got it all figured out.

This post is for the rest of us who are being honest about our failures. Somewhat confusingly, these failures are often a good thing. They ensure that we are maximizing our potential. If you immediately submit every manuscript to your preferred lower level journal, you may be missing out on publication in more prestigious, higher impact journals. You have to risk rejection to find your potential-maximizing level. Similarly, if you only perform the safest experiments with certain outcomes, you’re unlikely to discover a breakthrough. 

Confront the reasons you fear failing

Given the benefits of failure, why do we still fear it? The most common reason is the intrinsic human fear of inadequacy. We aspire to succeed and desire membership among the highest echelons of our pursued fields. As discussed previously, people inherently project an image of success not failure, and these projections are even more impressive for those in the groups we are pursuing. When we compare ourselves to our aspirational groups, we inevitably fall short, and our perceived failures sting even more. As if the internal feelings of inadequacy weren’t bad enough, we feel that the desired group will see us as adequate or less than. Even though you are an intelligent, mature adult, human nature is a great leveler, and we can quickly be reduced to the psyche of an awkward teenager on social media.

Strategies to think less and act more

Set small, actionable goals and move directionally

Intuitively, we all know that the best way to tackle a big problem is to decompose it into a series of smaller, actionable steps. (Note that this decomposition exercise is a great example of the importance of thinking before acting.) With most of the thinking done upfront, these smaller goals can be accomplished without the need for context switching. It is well-established that the mental exertion associated with context switching, slows our progress and hinders our ability to complete tasks. Furthermore, you will receive a neurochemical hit of satisfaction, pride and pleasure as you check tasks off of your list. You will be moving directionally towards your ultimate goal, realizing tangible evidence of your progress with each task completed. Finally, your mistakes will be limited in magnitude, minimizing their detrimental, psychological burden.

Focus on shorter time horizons

Setting more discrete, actionable goals will necessarily focus your mind to shorter time horizons. While you should never lose track of the big picture and your ultimate goal, you should spend the vast majority of your time focused on the smaller component goals. The time spent thinking about a certain time horizon should decrease exponentially as that time horizon extends further into the future. 

Think like a scientific investor

If you spend an extra year in your PhD or your postdoc, you will undoubtedly produce additional results and improve the strength of your work. But will that investment of your valuable time have been worth it? Think like an investor, assessing whether the expected return on your investment is positive or if your time would be more productively invested in a different venture. (We have a scientist career investment calculator to help you!) You will have to make this assessment based on imperfect information. You’ll never know exactly how things are going to turn out or how long something will take, so you’ll have to make educated guesses. No one else can look after your precious resources, so you will have to take risks and act in an effort to maximize your returns on your investments.

Push yourself beyond your level of planning discomfort

It’s human nature to avoid discomfort. As already discussed, you are likely uncomfortable with taking action before completely planning and analyzing. Everything in this post is about leaning into that discomfort. It will be uncomfortable. The challenge is to push yourself past the point at which you start feeling this discomfort. If it was easy, everyone would do it. On your journey to greater productivity and satisfaction, you will need to embrace this discomfort.

Apply time boxing techniques

Time boxing is the disciplined respect of time budgets. It’s very easy to overrun the amount of time allocated to a certain task for a variety of reasons. Perhaps an unanticipated corner case arises in your analysis and you’d like to reformulate your plan to account for this minor situation. Or maybe your perfectionism drives you to focus on details that were not comprehended in your initial plan. You might even be trying to incorporate last-minute feedback. Whatever the reason, it’s very easy to let time creep ruin your plan for time allocation.

The rigorous application of time boxing will avoid this slippery slope through two mechanisms. First, at the end of the allotted time, you will force yourself to move on, accepting the slight imperfections remaining in your work product. Like the Pareto Principle, you’ll accept that the vast majority of utility has been realized, and additional time spent on the task produces increasingly smaller returns. This is essentially the microeconomic law of diminishing returns. Second, knowing that you will not get extra time added to your time budget, you will be forced to tackle the highest value aspects of your task first. You will avoid the nice-to-have ancillary components that might otherwise sidetrack you.

Becoming a master of time boxing will take time and practice. However, you’ll have to start somewhere. You must be honest and rigorous in your assessment and application of these principles. This investment is a change which will be well worth it and will enlarge gains in personal productivity.

Don’t compare yourself to others

In general, comparing yourself to others is unproductive. Measure your success against your goals–not relative to others. Everyone starts from a different place, has different circumstances, and projects themselves to the outside world differently. It’s unfair to assess your success relative to someone who started out in an advantaged position, received enormous benefits from an advocate or mentor, and projected a glowing but biased image of their success to the outside world. There are so many unknowns that you must judge yourself only on objective, internally inspired goals. run your own race and be proud of setting your personal record, rather than lamenting at placing second.

Talk to people.

Getting out into the world and talking to people is the best way to increase your surface area. It will give you the most opportunities to stumble upon an unknown unknown and expose you to potential mentors and friends who can help you along your career journey. With better information and broader perspectives, you’ll be able to adjust your short-term plans, course correcting before you waste too much time. Finally, talking to people can help you maintain your psychological balance by escaping from the sometimes all-consuming drive to generate results.

Summary

Embracing the “Think Less, Act More” philosophy can boost your productivity and impact as a scientist. By shifting your focus from extensive planning to taking more decisive actions, you’ll generate valuable data, foster serendipitous discoveries, and continuously refine your approach based on real-world feedback. Remember, action is the catalyst for progress in science. It propels you forward, provides opportunities for learning, and ultimately leads to greater achievements. So challenge yourself to set actionable goals, embrace failure as a stepping stone, and cultivate a bias towards action. By doing so, you’ll not only enhance your scientific career but also contribute more effectively to the broader scientific community. Act now, and watch as your efforts translate into meaningful success and advancements in your field.

If you need any help boosting your productivity and acting more, we can help. Schedule an introductory coaching session.