366. The Science of Time Pressure (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 366 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about time pressure. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is focused on time pressure.

When I think about time pressure, I.

Always think about the first time I tried to buy concert tickets on Ticketmaster's website and encountered that ticking countdown clock. The stress is unbelievable. You can feel your whole body shift.

As you try to get through the.

Numbers on the credit card. Whether you want to pay attention to it or not, that tick, tick, tick is impacting your behavior. Time clocks and countdowns are incredibly effective in business. They create FOMO and trigger the scarcity and loss aversion in our brains.

And if you aren't careful, you might.

Actually be creating a lot of negative impacts from time pressure in other areas of your business. Consider all the extra meetings and due dates and unnecessary projects you have on your team. We are constantly in a state of time pressure at work and it isn't leading us to be our most effective.

Or creative, which you'll hear all about.

In this refreshed episode that originally aired back at the end of 2019. While I talk about Black Friday sales and holiday deals in the episode, know that this applies all year round. A prime example of that comes from this Friday's guest, who I am so beyond excited to have on the show. The Amazing Amy Porterfield will be here talking about her book two weeks Notice.

As well as the advice she gives.

About creating courses and building email lists for entrepreneurs around the world. Amy's podcast, Online Marketing Made Easy, has over 58 million downloads and is one of the best in the world. She has been an inspiration of mine since before I started the Brainy Business podcast. I'm so honored she agreed to come on the show. It's such a great episode, you don't want to miss it. So if you aren't yet subscribed to the Brainy Business podcast, now is a.

Great time to do that.

To ensure you don't miss that or any other episode, we specifically talk about time pressure in the conversation because Amy is so great at selling things that are only available at certain times of the year. She is great at leveraging loss aversion.

And scarcity in a way that is.

Inspiring and has led her to creating a multi million dollar a year business and helping others to do the same.

Don't forget there are links for everything.

Including past episodes, books, articles and your free Time Pressure worksheet all waiting for you in the show notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 366 all right, let's talk about time pressure.

Let's take a moment and think about time. If you had all the time in the world to make a decision, what would you do? How would you go about it? As we talked about in Episode on Choice Architecture and structuring complex Choices, you would ideally be able to evaluate every important feature and aspect against each other and devise a system for ranking values and what each item of consideration is worth its value, and how that compares to the other items. When looking for a new home, for example, you might be able to say that each square foot is worth $10 of value to you, but each new room adds an extra $100 of value. Each light bulb is worth $50, but natural light is worth 250 and each unlit spot is minus 25 and a noisy neighborhood subtracts another 500. You can already see how complex this is getting, and we've barely scratched the surface. Trying to consider every facet in every decision means you never choose what to eat or where to live and if it's better to drink water now or wait five minutes. Studies have found we make more than 30,000 decisions every day. That's so many choices. If we can't structure them properly and only consider what matters, we could barely make one. Remember, the subconscious brain has to make a lot of those decisions because the conscious is too slow. It can only do 40 bits per second compared to the 11 million of the subconscious. On the big decisions, we take some time to let the conscious evaluate the points that matter, set some rules for the subconscious to follow, and it may or may not take our advice. It has rules of its own, after all, and it thinks its way is best. As I talked about in that series on biases, I mean, we've made it this far on these rules, right? The problem, of course, is that the subconscious is heavily influenced by some of those rules and concepts, and they don't always lead to the best results in life or in business. And one of those that is particularly difficult for us is time pressure. You know, from the episodes on Scarcity and what is value which are both linked for you in the show notes@the brainybusiness.com 74 that limited quantities and opportunities and time are all closely tied to value in the brain. There's only one of these in the world. I better act quick so no one else snaps it up. Ooh, only one spot left on the calendar this month. I better grab it because he's probably the best around if he's in such high demand. Only two seats left at this price and eight other people are searching for flights to Chicago right now. I must buy it first These are all examples of times we let our brain's sensitivity to time pressure get the better of us, and you can see how this could be impacting your life and business. I'm sure when there's plenty of time available, we might be calmer and the conscious has some time to think, to process, to evaluate the options and make a more informed decision. But time pressure? Move over, conscious. You're too slow and I got this down. Efficient? Perhaps Effective?

Not always.

Studies have found people are less creative when they're under time constraints. They also defer making choices at all, and if forced to make a choice, they often choose more expensive options simply because they're familiar. In many ways, we do exactly the opposite of what we might do if we had more time. It likely won't surprise you to know that time pressure is a form of stress. You felt it. You know the anxiety that comes from buying concert tickets and having the little clock on the Ticketmaster website counting down second by second while you fumble to get your credit card. You feel anxious and worried and stressed. Your hands might be shaking as you try to read the card, impulsively checking the numbers four or five times before you hit buy and then muttering Come on, come on. Under your breath while the page loads. I know you know what this feels like, and I'm going to talk to you about time pressure in three sections. First, how it impacts you as a consumer. Next, some ways to think about using time pressure in your promotions and offerings. And finally, some ways to think about how it impacts your actions in life and business, and how you can take advantage of time pressure to be a positive instead of a negative influence in your life. So let's start with being a consumer. People buy more during the holidays. This can be due to the custom of buying gifts for others, which may be outside the norm of how we would act the rest of the year. But it could also be influenced by time pressure. One article which I've linked for you in the show Notes found that on average, consumers take several visits to websites before they make a purchase decision and then they get an average of 1.2 items. During the holidays, they're more likely to only spend one visit and get an average of 3.5 items. There are, as I said, multiple factors at play here, but time pressure is definitely one of them. How many daily deals and limited quantities and shopping cart clocks are influencing our decisions at this time of year? We're also impacted by general time limitations because there's so much going on, holiday parties to plan for and prepping for families to visit and gifts to buy and wrap and deliver or drop in the mail. The brain is obviously overwhelmed, which as you know from episode 32, causes the subconscious to take over and can negatively impact decisions. Time pressure is a stress just like any other and leads the brain to feel overwhelmed, which is why it impacts our decisions. What the studies show is that the things the brain focuses on when making decisions, what it thinks is important, will shift and can actually reverse when time pressure is applied. When there's plenty of time available, people tend to be risk averse. We don't want to put ourselves out there and look bad or make the wrong choice, so we look a lot at the risks of making a choice. But when time pressure is applied, we instead become very loss averse and then FOMO takes over. Time pressure can encourage people to buy an extra item or get something just in case, especially when paired with a discount or benefit of some kind. I'll talk about how to use these as a benefit within your business in just a second. But first, if you're someone who knows you overspend and have regrets on time discounted shopping. The best advice is to have a.

Plan, a list list of some sort.

So you know what you need and are looking for. 75% off of something you don't need doesn't mean you need to buy it, even if it's only for the next 10 minutes. As you think about Black Friday shopping or getting other gifts this holiday, I recommend taking the following steps. Even if you don't feel like you're impacted by these promotions and things, it's just a good idea to have a plan anyway to have less stress, which we could all use around the holidays. First, make a list of everyone you want to buy a gift for. Then list a dollar amount you want to spend on each person. Run this against your total budget for holiday spending to make sure you're in alignment and make any necessary edits. Then add a line item for unexpected gifts there's always someone at work or wherever that you forgot and then they give you a gift and you wish you had something. But plan to buy a few of these small items to have on hand. It's a great place to get your urge for the discount out as well within the parameters of a budget that you've preset. So now that you have your names and spending limits, put a couple of ideas of what you might buy for each person. Make a list of the stores to visit in store or online by priority, then by the things you can still take advantage of Great deals and opportunities, but if you have a list and something pops up that you would regret, it's easier to hold yourself accountable. Accountable to a plan and having the dollar amounts lets you change course if a great gift comes up. Say you planned on a video game, but the amazing headphones are 60% off and she would love them more and they're within the budget. Now you can use the time pressure to your advantage and buy smart. We're going to revisit this layout as we talk about overcoming time pressure throughout your life and business and working time later on in the episode. So keep this in mind and know that this flow and format is on the freebie worksheet for you. Time pressure, of course, impacts us at other times of year as well, and it's important to have a plan then too. I wanted to outline this here and do this episode now because it's very timely in talking about the plans for not completely succumbing to time pressure. But think about this in some other contexts. For example, have you ever been to a conference or another event and had the speakers make amazing offers and you wanted to take advantage of all of them? They're all great deals and an amazing opportunity to work with people you've maybe been dying to do work with. And some you just know are a good deal, so it might be worth jumping on. Depending on the conference, there may be more deals than your budget both time and money should take, but your brain doesn't always know that. So again, it's good to set up rules when you're in a cold state so you're prepared for when you get into the hot state. It's the same as doing fire drills and other disaster preparedness activities things so that your brain gets trained and isn't going to jump on these subconscious rules. You can set those up when you're in a cold state to know what to do next and have a plan and that will make it so that you're safer in a fire drill and that you're making better decisions when you're shopping as well. So you can make a list of what you're looking for and the budget in advance before you go to the conference. And I know someone who used to go to this one conference every year that had tons of these promos and she knew she was the type of person who wants to take advantage of all the deals and support the other women in business who were at the event. To keep herself in check, she gave her credit card to her roommate that she would travel with to hold on to and said she could not buy anything on the spot. She had to talk to her roommate and explain to her why it was a good investment and the best use of her money once she had removed herself from the urgency of the deal unless she got the okay, and typically once she would start to talk through what the item was, she could either talk herself in or out of why it was a benefit once she was back in that cold state again. So unless she got that okay, the roommate wouldn't hand over the card. I have a similar setup with my husband as he helps me strategize opportunities for my business. Having any check in point and taking a moment to breathe can help you determine if this thing you're interested in is truly a great deal for you in this moment or just a great deal that you should leave available for someone else. Before moving on to the next section, I want to make it clear that I support deals and discounts from retailers. They're a valid strategy and can encourage buyers to take the leap and try things. Time limits, quantity limits, and anything else that provides a little pressure can be important in helping people to make a choice where they otherwise might not be motivated to move forward. More often than not, people are happy with their purchase and that they got a good deal on it. This section was to show some of how time pressure impacts all of us in the buying process so you can plan accordingly if you've had issues in the past or just want to be a smarter shopper in the future. That being said, it is important for most businesses to have promotions and offers at some time or another. There are lots of benefits which can help consumers to stop dwelling on the risks and move forward with a product that is in their best interest. Some ways you can incorporate time pressure in your offers is to have a discount or sale or gift that's only available until a certain date or time and then the discount needs to end and you sell the items at full price. If there's always another sale and things are discounted 99% of the time. You can negate the impact that you would otherwise get from time pressure. There are of course some discounts and opportunities you want to have available all the time and that's fine. Just know that they aren't having the same time pressure impact if there's no real motivation to act now. Countdowns are very effective in showcasing a deadline and the time pressure. You can add a widget to your website, include them in email headers or on social media and there's a big difference in the brain from something saying end soon and seeing a clock slowly tick, tick, ticking the opportunity away. One study found that a task took less than 10 seconds for people to do on average when they were given 60 seconds to complete the task task. But when they were told they only had 10 seconds to complete the task, their behavior shifted. They didn't actually need the extra 50 seconds, but the perception of limited time changed their behavior and when they took an action. So making the countdown and time limit more obvious is important if you're using time pressure in your business to motivate people to buy or move forward. Another way you can look at time pressure is with a limited quantity. It doesn't necessarily impact time in the same way, but can have the same effect of I better act now before it's too late. So saying you have a discount that's only available to the first 10 people who sign up or that there are only five seats left at this price can encourage the same desire in the customer to take action. When they announced that the Concorde was going to discontinue service and their super fast flights across the Atlantic, can you guess what happened? They sold out quickly. Those who had been waiting to buy and were risk averse thinking about losing out on the money and the time away from work and whatnot suddenly had a shift in perspective and were loss averse about the opportunity going away forever. They realized now was the time so they booked a flight before they were gone. Thankfully you don't have to go out of business to get the benefits of time pressure and when used wisely, these can be really great in any type of business. There are tons of other examples I could provide here, but for the sake of time, pun intended, I'll just recommend you look around at what makes you want to act. When have you bought something you didn't think you were ready for or when did you finally stop evaluating and move forward? Think of everything from big purchases like cars or new homes to small things like cans of soup in the grocery store or gifts at the holidays. How was the offer framed? I have of course linked to episode 16 on framing in the show Notes for you look at your offers and how are they framed? Use the freebie worksheet from that episode to think through all the ways you could communicate your offer. What version is more likely to drive behavior? Let those other examples that you were influenced by help to guide the way that you might shape your own offer. This is also a great opportunity to test a few things against each other because what you think might be the most motivating often is not. I have linked to episode 63 to help you set up your own experiments so you can use that as you set up things like a B testing on email or on advertisements on Facebook or whatever it happens to be. Until you try things out, you won't know for sure what works for your business and know that just because something works for your friend Susie doesn't mean that it will work for you and what you're offering. It's always best to test with your list and your different frames and opportunities. But good to know that time pressure is something that can almost always be effective when used properly. And because it's that time of year and you might be feeling the pressure yourself, I want to take a quick moment to talk about Black Friday deals and year end offers. Don't feel like you have to do this just because everyone else does. I've linked to an article in my column on inc.com about why the holidays are actually the worst time to send gifts to clients and customers, which has some real similarities here depending on the type of business business what I will say is there are some retailers, big ones, who are expected to have giant Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. If they didn't have them, people would notice and shop elsewhere and it would have a really big negative impact on the business. Think of Target, Best Buy, Amazon and the like. However, for small businesses it might not be necessary and could get lost in the clutter and it can be a good thing and it might be a great benefit for your business, but don't let hurting get the best of you and make you feel like you have to take on extra stress. Putting together a big discount deal that's going to make you operate at a loss. If it doesn't work for your business, don't do it. And don't let that time pressure at this time of year make you feel like you have to throw something together. If you are planning to do A discount. You want to be thoughtful about it and give it the time it deserves to make sure it's best for you and your business at any time of year. And that helps lead into this last section of the episode, which is to talk about the actions you take in life and business and how they are impacted by time pressure and how to use this to your advantage instead of the way that it most often shows itself. This is very similar to the actions you take when buying things, so I'm not going to repeat examples, but I will share again that when you're under time pressure, you're likely to switch from being risk averse to being loss averse and your appetite for risk actually reverses. Essentially, the worst case and best case scenarios become the new normal and that impacts your decision. When you have lots of time to get something done, you have a status quo of all the important things to look at and do. You make a list and work through it and have risk accounted for. Due diligence is done and the cost of taking an action is weighted by the brain against doing nothing. And you can always put off an action because there's no motivation to do the thing now. Then, when there's time pressure, your brain looks at the biggest extremes and uses them to decide what's best to do the worst thing that could happen if you don't act, and the best thing that could happen if you do. And that drives your decision to act quickly, to either avoid this really extreme negative, or to achieve this really extreme positive where the actual result is probably somewhere in the middle, which you would know if you weren't under time pressure. That being said, have you ever thought or said that you work better under a deadline? Me too. But do we? Time pressure may get you to finally act and get things done, but are those things of high quality and what you would have actually wanted done? Or were you just finally motivated to move forward because there would be really extreme negative consequences if you didn't? Studies have found that time pressure causes people, as I said at the top of the show, to be less creative, less accurate. And for some people, it can actually cause them to freeze and revert to making no decision at all because the negatives become too obvious and blown out of proportion. If time pressure makes you less creative and less likely to be accurate, isn't it actually better to work when you have more time, or at least plan when you have more time? In the brainy mindset course, which we're in the midst of right now, we start off by working through clutter and then talk about brain biases and fears. All of these are important to overcome when you're looking at accomplishing your goals. Your brain is biased toward the status quo and keeping you in a place where it feels safe. Getting out of the mode of putting out fires, if that's where you've always been, would mean you might be entering into the unknown, an area where there could be rejection and lots of things to make your brain scared. Blowing those negatives out of proportion so it has clever ways it keeps you with plenty of fires to put out. In my case, I'm working on a book proposal. Of course I can't actually work on the book proposal or setting up great systems in my business or a new marketing campaign until I get my mandatory stuff. Podcast episodes and ink articles are required to be posted at a certain time. I have to do them because I made a commitment. Until I get ahead and have extra time to work on my business instead of in it, I can't do the book proposal and systems and other stuff my brain might find scary. So it finds ways to get lost in research and take a little longer than necessary on social posts and other things. Things that keep it so I never quite have enough time to get ahead. I'm always under time pressure which impacts the time I can devote to my business. Do you have anything like that in your work? The big things that are constantly moving to tomorrow or next week on the to do list that you know you want to do those big goals but you never seem to have time for them and you're constantly under stress and pressure in all these other areas. That's a mindset block we work through in the brainy Mindset course, which will be back in 2020. If you want to get on the wait list, email me melinathebrainybusiness.com and know that you don't need to be under constant pressure to get things done. If you know what your brain is doing, why it's putting those blocks out for you, and why they're actually holding you back, you can find time to alleviate that pressure. You'll then be more creative and make better decisions and move forward. If you have a team, think about the relief they will feel when you're well planned and not constantly putting out fires and putting that stress onto them as well. Constantly worried about what you're going to want tomorrow or if they're going to have what they need. There will be less things slipping through the cracks. There's enough time to get everything done and you'll be doing better work in less time with less stress. Sound good to get started with this now before you jump into the next brainy mindset course, use your free worksheet from this episode to go through similar steps to what I recommended for those in the consumer space. So instead of making a list of who you're buying for a budget for each person and then overall on those gifts, and then listing out items for each person, making a plan for stores to visit with an overflow budget, you're going to start by narrowing down your goals. There's a link to the free Master your mindset mini course in the show notes to help you work through this. Once you have your goals, you need to put in time budgets and deadlines based on what is truly in your day. Set some priorities for what comes first and when those have to be done. One great tip is to think through the next 90 days and what you want done by the end of the quarter and you only get three at the max, just like on the goals. So pick your three things that you want to get done. Then look at which days are working days and find out how many there are over that 90 day period. Account for when you'll be out of the office, at conferences or anything like that to find your specific number for this 90 day span. Let's say there are 60 working days over your 90 day span. Now you take your goals of what you're wanting to get done at the end of the 90 days and break them out to a total of 60 tasks to get done over that time span and rank them in order of when they need to happen. Then you just do one thing a day and know in advance how long they'll take. Time budgeting instead of money budgeting here. Some may be quick Items, perhaps only 20 minutes on a day. You're really busy with other tasks, but it's still important and helps you move forward towards your goal. Others might be bigger, like a four hour planning block. When you think about only getting one thing done a day, it feels unproductive, like you'd be letting yourself down. But how often are you getting hung up on extra stuff, stuck in time pressure and not making a dent on the list of things you say are your top priorities. For many of us this happens a lot if you look at it this way and I was to say you will accomplish 60 mini goals and tasks all laser focused on the path to your big goals in the next quarter. Would you be happy with that planning and breaking it down into those micro tasks or Mini goals can help you accomplish the big stuff because it gets you out of this time pressure cycle. Sometimes time pressure and deadlines can be helpful, but it's best when you're setting those time limits yourself. Say you block out 20 minutes of focused work on social media and that's all you get until the end of the day. Or that you write for 30 minutes and then move on to the next task. Thoughtful time blocking and time pressure can help you move forward and make progress. Just don't let it run you, which it will do if you aren't paying attention. And if there are any distractions you find taking up a lot of your time and thus keeping you in the cycle of time pressure, add them to the limited time list. Set rules for yourself and remember to say that you don't do the thing instead of can't do the thing. I've talked about this before on the show, but studies have found that the way you frame your self talk is really important. So if you say I can't get on social media until I get this done, it's constraining and your brain wants to rebel. If instead you say I don't check social media until my 30 minutes of writing is complete. That is a choice and it's empowering. And as with any time pressure impacts, take time to evaluate what's actually going on. Take a step back, take a breath, ask yourself some questions. Will I want this a year from now? Will I be happy tomorrow? When I look back at this decision I'm making today, is this in alignment with what I said I wanted when I planned? If the answers to those questions are yes, then you can move forward with confidence and use time pressure to your advantage instead of letting it take over.

So what got your brain buzzing as.

You learned about time pressure today?

For me, I think the way our brains flip when put under pressure is so interesting. It's one of those weird moments where you can feel everything shift.

I just love those.

Again, the Ticketmaster countdown clock is such a perfect example of this. In what your customer wants and can't.

Tell you, I talk about when AOL.

Switched to unlimited plans and legitimately broke the Internet. And a big reason is because they got rid of that ticking clock. In my second book, what your employees.

Need and can't tell you, I talk.

About how time pressure is building up in businesses in a way that makes it difficult for people to get good, solid work done and be open to important changes when they come down the pike. As I talk about in the book, research has shown that we're less creative, more rooted in the status quo, and less open to change when we are under time time pressure. And when you think about all the meetings, slack chats, quick pop ins, unnecessary projects, rework and other fires we're constantly.

Dealing with these days.

Many companies are not setting things up so their employees can do their best work. Another stat I share in what your employees need and can't tell you is that research has found that half of emails are misunderstood. Half. And this is one contributing factor in another stat in that book that that 17 hours of work per person per week is spent clarifying something that was previously said. This makes it so 62% of emails have been deemed as unimportant. What this is clearly a great candidate.

Of a place to start to reduce that time pressure.

Being more thoughtful to what you want people to do, sending clearer emails, making it easy for people to find simple answers.

This is a great place to start.

Even if you don't free up a full 17 hours per person per week. Just imagine getting back 5 or 10 hours per person per week. It adds up super fast. And of course there are lots of tips for you to do just that within my book what your Employees need.

And Can't Tell youl, which is linked.

For you in the Show Notes and of course can be found everywhere books are sold. Those show notes also include links to related past episodes, additional books, a timestamp summary of this episode, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 366. And just like that, episode 366 on time pressure is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Amy Porterfield discussing her book Two Weeks Notice. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.