Artificial Working Memory (How to Make Better Decisions)

I’m going to show you a problem with your brain that you probably didn’t realize is an issue. You also probably didn’t realize this issue is holding you back from making good decisions in business, career, and life in general.

To demonstrate what’s wrong, let me give you a simple math problem:

3842 * 9482 = ?

Can you solve it?

Obviously, if you passed middle school math class, this will be pretty easy for you. Multiplication is a relatively simple task. When the numbers get bigger, it gets a little more challenging, though, right? This 4 digit multiplication problem will obviously take you more time than solving 3 * 12. Luckily, the process remains the same, and the steps are quite easy. You just write the two numbers above each other like so, and…

Hang on. I never said you could use a piece of paper. Do it in your head.

Oh.

Your Memory Sucks.

Here’s the issue with the human brain. Our memory sucks. It sucks in both the short term and the long term. Short term memory in particular, more specifically working memory, is abysmally small. Many studies have concluded that for the human mind, the number of thoughts that can be held in working memory at any one moment is just 7 +- 2. If I gave you 60 seconds to memorize a list of 30 random single digit numbers, you’d be lucky to even remember 10 or 15.

This is a problem. This is why the multiplication problem from earlier, without a sheet of paper to write on, is impossible to do for 99% of the population. Working memory is small. While the individual steps of multiplying large numbers together is actually mind numbingly easy, the problem as a whole becomes mind numbingly difficult when you are not allowed to keep the results of each step saved externally. If you are not specifically trained in multiplying large numbers in your head, you will probably deliberate on that problem for minutes or hours before eventually giving up, dismissing this failure as a pointless endeavor, and moving on with your life.

But everything changes with a simple sheet of paper. With a sheet of paper, almost everyone in the country with a high school level of education is capable of solving that problem.

Artificial Working Memory, Decision Making, and You

What is paper? Well, it’s a tool that expands your practical working memory. As you solve the steps of multiplication, you write down the parts of the problem you’ve already solved, allowing you to move on to the next part of the problem without worry and with the full capacity of your working memory.

I call this Artificial Working Memory. No, it has nothing to do with AI or machine learning. It is simply any tool that expands your practical working memory and in effect allows you to solve more complex problems. Very commonly, it is a sheet of paper, like in the example of our math problem. However, a note taking app also falls under this category, depending on how it’s used. If we consider it further, we could also imagine that calendar apps, to do lists, even excel spreadsheets might serve the same purpose of freeing up working memory for us to focus on larger problems.

Thus, overriding the limit of our biological working memory with artificial working memory is the key to making better decisions.

Decision making is a hard and complex endeavor with sometimes grave consequences. The wrong decisions in business can bankrupt your company. The wrong marketing tactic can result in massive publish backlash. The wrong marriage can mean decades of unhappiness. The wrong engineering decision can mean the end of lives.

Good decision making in life is ironically not a choice, it’s a necessity. But it’s difficult. Think back to a time in your life when you made a decision and immediately regretted it, thinking, “how could I have forgotten to consider THAT? It was SO obvious.” Well, no. It wasn’t obvious. What happened to you was probably that you had too much information to consider at once, possibly because of distractions, possibly because of the size of the problem, your working memory became overburdened, that one important detail momentarily slipped your mind, and you ended up failing to consider it when it came to actually making said choice.

If you are solving a hard problem, whether that is in life or in math, why would you not use a sheet of paper? Why would you not write down the steps? Why would you not break the problem down into manageable chunks, find the answers to those sub problems, and then combine the answer to get the final result?

To make better decisions, you must leverage artificial working memory. In simple terms, you must write things down. You must treat decision making problems like they are math problems.

How to Leverage Artificial Working Memory for Decision Making

There are just three simple steps to solving decision making problems like math problems:

1. Write down the problem and everything that relates to the problem. Every fact, opinion, and consideration.

2. Break the problem down into manageable sub problems, and solve those problems.

3. Use the answers to the sub problems to finally solve the main problem

Solving your problem on paper in this fashion has four important benefits:

1. You do not lose sight of the objective. When the problem is written down, you can always see what the overarching goal of this decision is.

2. You do not forget important details. When you have dozens, or even hundreds of different factors that may influence the outcome of a decision, it is extremely easy for something important to slip your mind. I’m sure you have experienced this before. When it’s written down in front of you, you are much less likely to miss it.

3. You can solve the problem in parts. Big decisions are big for a reason. They are composed of many categories of factors. When you can distinguish what the parts are and reach a conclusion about an entire category of factors going into the decision, you can make the final decision based on multiple smaller decisions, which all fit into working memory, rather than seeing the problem as a problem involving 100 different variables that can overwhelm you.

4. The result of your decision and your thought process behind it is recorded for you to reference later. Do you ever wonder why you made a particular decision? Why your past self was so stupid in this relationship problem, in this planning situation, or in this engineering decision? If you write down your problems and how you decide to solve them, you leave behind a record to later reference. You can bring up your notes, see what the factors were, and recall what your thought process looked like at the time. Sometimes, you forget that you were actually being smart.

A Real World Example — Which House Should I Buy?

Let’s say you’re deciding to buy a house.

You have hundreds, maybe thousands, of bits of information. Price, number of rooms, number of baths, house vs townhouse vs condo, square footage, year built, which rooms require remodeling, aesthetic, access to important roads and highways, school district, noise level of the surroundings, neighborhood appeal, neighborhood safety, size of the yard, the type of brick on the patio, whether the sun shines too brightly into the master bedroom at 8PM on Summer Solstice, plumbing issues, HVAC issues, mold issues, foundation stability, your realtor’s opinion, etc.

At first, it’s extremely overwhelming. Your search results give you 1000 potential houses on sale in your general vicinity. How do you make choices? Do you just look at them until you eventually decide, “that one’s the best?”

Obviously not. You should write down what your choices are, what your priorities are, and what is unnegotiable. It does not necessarily have to be done on paper; it could be on a spreadsheet, a google doc, or even using the favorite feature on a realty website. It could even be using the knowledge management app I am currently developing (wink wink). Do you have a size requirement? Write that down. Do you have a budget? Write that down. Do you have kids? Research the school districts and decide which districts are fine, and which you want to avoid. You do this for every consideration that is important to you, and eventually, you will have a list of priorities that you can filter by and can automatically eliminate 90–95% of houses on the market.

When your choices are narrowed down to just a few houses that match all of your most important criteria, you can start looking at details. Estimate what the remodeling cost would be for every house you are considering. Write down what the final price would be. Write down what you really like and what you really hate about each house. Give the location a rating based on how comfortable you believe it would be to live there. Write down what your realtor’s opinion about each house is.

Finally, after you have all this information written down for the houses you think are the best candidates, you can start comparing them to make a final choice. Since you made many sub decisions about which house has the best price, which houses are in the best school district, which house is the most attractive, which house will take the longest to remodel, etc., it should be easy to see what the clear winners are, or if there is no winner at all at this time in the market. At some point, if you are happy with the choice, you can go ahead and bid, or decide to revisit your original criteria.

Ten years later, when you feel the need to move again, you can look back on what you prioritized and what you didn’t in your house buying experience, and reflect on the mistakes you made during the process. For example, if you didn’t prioritize the neighborhood atmosphere and ended up feeling uncomfortable during evening walks with the dog, you know now to prioritize that more for your next move.

You can apply this same process to a business decision, engineering decision, or relationship problem.

Aster, The Product of My Decision Making

https://aster.page

I use this process for important decisions on features, tasks, and the business direction for my software startup, Aster. It’s a knowledge management web app that I’m striving to make into the best app on the market for atomic note taking and knowledge management. While making such a complicated software product, I frequently run into situations where I need to make hard technical, design, and business decisions. When I do, you bet that I’m going to be writing that problem down.

I personally use Aster for everything from journaling, philosophy, writing content, planning features, and managing tasks for the future development of the product itself. If you are interested, check it out and return some feedback. While it’s still early in development, improvements and new features are released weekly.

Tune in next time for more tech, productivity, and layman’s philosophy.

Note: This is an article/script I wrote for Medium/YouTube. I just thought it would also be useful for founders that aren't using tools to aide their decision making. In my personal experience, starting to write down my decision making process was probably the single biggest factor that allowed me to finally decide on a real feature set and direction for my app. Since then, my life has been on a significant upward trend as well. It's really important. Thanks for reading!