iTunes said that I had 82.8 days of music. That’s 1,987 hours. If I listened to an hour a day, it would take me more than five years just to hear everything once.
This was crippling.
The year was 2006, I had decided to become a professional musician, and I knew that I needed to study great recordings to make progress. iPods and music sharing had opened up a world of possibility that no musician had ever experienced before. We could all study everywhere we went, and study more broadly than ever.
So how could I possibly choose what to listen to? I was wasting a ton of time deciding, then I would always feel like I was listening to the wrong thing, and I knew that I was disproportionately spending time with Aaron Goldberg, Aaron Parks, and Ahmad Jamal.
Thankfully, there was the shuffle button. Shuffle eased my anxiety by removing the burden of choice. I could just leave the decision making to fate and keep on listening.
And this worked like a charm. Since I always knew what to do next, I wasted no time in decision making and spent way more time listening.
But I still had to make choices throughout the rest of my day.
Where should we go for lunch?
What should we make for dinner?
What book should I read?
What TV show should I watch?
What podcast should I listen to?
What exercises should I do in my workout?
What song should I practice next?
Which skatepark should I go to?
Each one of these decisions met the same criteria as music listening.
I know I want to do something in this category.
There are a lot of choices available.
I’m not passionate about any one particular choice at the moment.
I could easily waste a lot of time deciding.
So I started experimenting with putting more of my life on shuffle. I would keep a numbered list of options, then use a random number generator to pick which thing to do next. Just like with music, I found that this accomplished a bunch of things at once.
• I had less anxiety about the things I wasn’t doing.
• I spent much less time deciding what to do.
• I could make sure I was getting both repetition and variety.
And it turned out that I wasn’t alone in this anxiety. I found the work of Barry Schwartz, as well as behavioral economists like Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman, and saw that, paradoxically, we all want variety, but choice often makes us less happy.
Yet many folks I speak to about this have only heard the “choice often makes us less happy” part, so they end up removing both choice and variety (see Steve Jobs’s turtlenecks). The systems that I’ve been developing remove choice, but still deliver a variety of experiences.
It was this thinking that led me to build Why Choose. A dead simple app that lets you store options, then put those options on shuffle when it comes time to make a decision. I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me. And if you do use it, I would love to hear about it.
Up next: How I built it