I'm on a quest to find the most useful mental filters out there, to be more efficient.

Hey pal, this post is about productivity. There’s tons of self-help stuff out there, so I try to avoid general BS everybody has already heard. More specifically I’m very keen on the idea of mental filters / mental categories / conceptual lenses that drive our behavior.

Some questions I have:

• What drives me to use my time the way I do?

• Many much younger people seem to “hit the right targets”, and be much more financially succesful than I am. Why am I not hitting the right targets?

• How can I influence my subconscious behavior, so days just don’t pass by?

I feel like my focus is on the wrong things. Why am I not finding better things?

So for context: I develop websites, do online marketing and all sorts of digital projects for small businesses. It’s fun, creative and I help people. Love it. However, it’s not that great money, and it can be hard labor at times. I’m on pretty small-scale environment… Why don’t I sit down, write good goals and go for better targets?

Every day, it comes up to my behavior of just grabbing what’s available near me, and just waving my hands around in whims of the moment. I try to get as much done as possible in a day, which is good, but figuratively I might be on the wrong hill to climb. Why am I not in a better hill?

Days seem to just pass by, and my yesterday-self did not really move us towards bigger things. Why? Estimates suggest that subconscious mind might be responsible for around 95-99% of our thoughts and actions. That seems like a thing that holds responsibility for most of my hours in a day.

..OK, some subconscious force is driving me to do the things I do. Need to find out what is it exactly, and what can I do about it.

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I thought to myself: What is it exactly that drives me to use my time the way I do?

By reading Douglas Hofstadter’s books and other articles on the topic, I started getting good leads. The concept that caught my attention was the idea of mental filters - the cognitive lenses through which we perceive and interpret the world around us:

Categories that are activated in one’s mind are always on the lookout for instances of themselves in one’s life. The more highly activated they are, the fewer cases they miss, and the more fluid and creative they are in spotting instantiations of themselves in all sorts of guises.

- Douglas Hofstadter

Hofstadter further illustrates this concept with examples:

One Thing Changes and Everything Changes

A pregnant woman sees pregnant women everywhere around her, and after giving birth she runs into newborn babies everywhere she goes. If one starts going down the pathway of divorce, all at once divorce stories start cropping up whoever one talks to. If one indulges oneself in a new car, one is shocked to see exactly the same model turning up on every street corner. If one starts noticing a tiny gesture or microscopic verbal tic in a friend, all of a sudden it becomes the dominant feature of the friend’s face or speech, even though one had never noticed it before. After the death of a loved one, the themes of death and sadness are bound to pervade a person’s perceptions. Virtually every object and situation is tinged with the loss.

- Douglas Hofstadter

In my daily life, these mental filters could influence me like this: I’m surrounded by articles on web development and design. I might find interesting stuff on improving conversions. My obsession is on the tasks in the working-level. I might be driven to apply the knowledge and tackle the tasks around me.

I might keep finding different mental filters related to the craft over days and months, all focusing on slightly different aspect. Maybe I want to do the job more quickly, maybe I want to experiment with the visuals of website bit more.

Whatever it is, the mental filters are focused on the craft, zoomed in. Not on tuning or finding more ambitious goals.

What do you think would happen, if I stumbled upon very convincing Youtube video, of high-authority person giving anecdote on how he changed his business by shifting his focus on big goals? Maybe he talks about some resonating examples and how he was able to execute this big leap from zoomed-in craft, to focusing on bigger endeavors.

I bet my mental filter would be just that, and I would hop on to tuning my goals… For a moment atleast…

Lot of mental filters are just momentary

When I was more and more sold on the mental filter thinking, I actually started developing my “toolbox” of useful mental categories. I figured, there are so many useful ones that are competing with each other. I over and over again forget some very useful filters.

The problem is, there’s only so many mental filters you can have active at once. And what happens to be active seems to be just coincidental. I might see the world through lens X, even if lens Y would drive my behavior much more productively. I wanted to be more deliberate about it.

But, by using the notes on my most useful mental filters, I found over time it was difficult to pick one consciously and apply it to the specific situation I was in. It requires also lot of brain power too to switch your whole mental frame like that, from say design thinking to more strategic big picture thinking mindset. I think I just need to find really good ones that I naturally find myself using, by just gathering good instances and inspiration.

Mental filters that stuck, the reusable golden nuggets

I found that for mental filter to be sustainable, it really needs to provide big value and keep providing it. Most of them are valuable as one-off things but I’m really keen onto finding sustainable big mental filters to see the world through that provide big value. Here are some examples I already find that keep providing me tons:

• In weightlifting: Putting emphasis on negative reps when reaching failure.

  Some old lad mentioned that we can lower lot more weight than we can lift. If you can lift 100kg, your eccentric strenght can handle atleast 110kg or so. I thought it was interesting “so we are much stronger lowering the weight”, OK and I put it into practice.
  
  So after my normal lifting, reaching the last reps and failure of concentric part of the lift, I started assisting myself to get the weight up (by cheating or with assistance of a partner), and to my surprise I could do atleast few more negative repetitions very slowly. I kept doing this and what in the past felt like I was sort of half-assing my lifts, now I am really getting out of breath and pushing myself in every lift with this technique.
  
  Result: I have grown more muscle than ever with a single mental filter of focusing on eccentric part of the lift. For months, this single focus has been providing me tons of value.

• In programming and coming up with ideas: I saw Youtube video of some ML expert mentioning “In our company, we don’t just apply machine learning to everything. We first do the task manually with a person over and over again, and see when there are patterns that are useful to automate.” I found it fascinating, and figured a mental framework: “Instead of thinking of a software I want to develop in abstraction, I could think of it as a personal assistant, physical human being that is helping me with some task. What would I want him to do?”
  
  This mindset has been really helping me to not get too keen into abstract functionality, but get more concrete and practical to capture the essence of what I want the program to accomplish. It haven’t yet provided as tremondous value as the weightlifting one, but I find myself using this mindset a lot.

There is of course lot more, and we all have such filters, it just seems coincidental on what our valuation networks build. Some of them are more useful, some are less.

So what’s the big deal? You’re just going to learn more and build better mindsets, or what?

No, we do naturally build better perceptions and views of the world as we learn more, but here’s my point:

If I recognize a pain point, say lack in my ability to think big picture in my craft, can I take on a goal to find better mental filters, to see things in different light, in order to drive my behavior to build better goals?

So I have mental filter of finding better mental filters. Very meta.

That is to say, after learning all of this information, I have BIG valuation on mental filters and how they affect our behavior.

And how it differs from just learning about a topic (like bigger picture thinking)? Learning doesn’t necessarily alter your behavior, unless met with a golden nugget or voluminously learning about a topic and letting your valuation systems adjust.

Applying a mindset does change your behavior. How often you have seen very inspirational Youtube video or a movie, and notice instant change in your behavior afterwards? Me, countless times. But the drive fades away often in a day or two.

I’m on a quest to find sustainable valuable mental filters, and it’s a mindset shift to get more applicable on learning new stuff.

How do I plan to do that?

I start applying different mindsets by opening notepad, writing a mental filter for example: “Focus on the financial numbers of your project.” Like an accountant mentality, numbers mentality. Maybe that mindset will give me more big picture insights.

I will do it for couple days, see if I found any use of it, write down the outcome. And if there is not good concrete outcomes, I will wipe it and move to the next good mindset. I will actively keep searching for some mindsets I can apply to my pain points. Hopefully find some golden nuggets.

Just a framing thing in hopes of driving my subconscious behavior for the better.

Niko