A Call For Rational Inattention

You may have heard that our attention spans are shrinking. That we now have roughly the attentional focus of a goldfish. But I’ve looked at the research underlying the news hype, and I see no evidence that this is true. Attention spans are not shrinking. And goldfish are smarter than we think.

In their Own Box, oil and cold wax on board. Anne Kearney

So why does it feel like your attention span is shrinking?

Many of us suffer from information overload and a low tolerance for being bored. The result is fuzzy thinking and distractibility. We struggle to start what needs doing. And we struggle to stay on task when what we’re doing isn’t inherently interesting.

It is tempting to diagnose our inability to focus as a permanent condition – as though we have lost some ancestral skill.

But the problem is not that our attention spans are shrinking. The problem is that they are drowning.

The number of things our brains can pay attention to at any given moment is limited and always has been. What’s more, when we deliberately decide to use this limited attention capacity to focus on some things and tune out others, we use up mental energy leaving us with less for whatever comes next.

These cognitive limitations probably weren’t big problems for our ancestors. But we now live in a world where our brains are being force fed information at every turn. And far too much of that information is both low quality and almost impossible to ignore.

We are drowning in information and our limited capacity to pay attention cannot keep up.

The good news is that once we understand that frayed attention has more to do with our environments than with ourselves, we set the stage for doing something about it. We can stop consuming every bit of information in our path. We can take on the responsibility of deciding how to spend our attention.

Rational inattention – a life preserver for a drowning brain

Rational inattention – a term I’m borrowing from economics – is a way to liberate ourselves from informational excess.

The rational inattention approach to information consumption accounts for the fact that people have limited time and attention capacity. It encourages decision makers to stop pursuing perfect information and instead to consider the costs and benefits of acquiring and processing information. They can then decide what information to focus on and what information to ignore. One can debate how this plays out in reality – decision making is rarely that rational and the value of information is hard to know before you have it. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting idea.

I suggest we borrow the concept of rational inattention and use it more broadly, as a way to embrace the idea that it is okay – a necessity really – to thoughtfully ignore information.

We cannot pay attention to everything. We cannot know everything. We cannot get to the bottom of our social media feeds. What we can do is be more thoughtful about where to spend our limited attention.

Why practice rational inattention?

The gifts of rational inattention

Economists talk about rational inattention as a strategy for increasing efficiency and productivity, but that is not all life is about. The real benefits of rational inattention, as I see it, extend far beyond efficiency.

Freedom. There is a sense of freedom to be had from abandoning the impossible ideal that we must keep up to date on everything, respond to everything, and have opinions about everything.

Creativity. When we are not constantly processing information, we make room for the mind to wander, to connect disparate thoughts, and to stumble upon insights that we would never find through a deliberate search.

Impact. By choosing where not to spend our attention, we create the conditions for deeper immersion with what remains. The conversation that is unbroken by glances at the screen builds a stronger social connection. The activist who focuses on one or two key issues is more likely to make a difference.

Resilience. By protecting ourselves from information that drains without enriching, we preserve our mental capacity to deal with unexpected challenges and to engage with what matters most.

What might rational inattention look like in practice?

Start with an attention audit

Try spending several days tracking how and where you spend your attention. Keep a journal at hand and make a note of what you are doing and what might be distracting you. You can set a timer to do this every hour or two. If that proves too disruptive, you can take a moment to reflect during natural breaks or as you switch from one task to the next.  Ask yourself the following:

• How am I spending my attention?

• What distractions are pulling my attention away from where I want it?

• What is making it difficult for me to focus or do what I’m trying to do?

• Do the mental energy costs seem unnecessarily high for the task at hand?

• Am I getting a good return on my attentional investment?

Once you have an idea of how and where you are spending your attention, you can start putting some strategies in place to help you focus on what’s actually important and ignore what is not.

Five strategies for rational inattention

Eliminate or reduce distractions. This is not rocket science. We know what we need to do. Based on my attention audit, my list includes putting my phone out of sight, dropping some chat groups, and organizing my studio.

Be more intentional. There are many situations in which we want or need to pay some attention, but we find we are paying too much. Structuring your tasks, time, environments, or workflow can help make your information consumption more intentional.

I am trying to strike a balance between staying informed and doom scrolling by limiting my newsfeed consumption to twice a day. I’m trying to be more efficient in how I do research for these blog posts in order to keep myself from going down too many rabbit holes. And I’m trying to shorten some of my zoom meetings by keeping them more focused.  

Limit task-switching. Each time we switch our attention back and forth there is a cognitive cost. Sometimes the cost is worth it – for example when we need a break or when we are losing steam and need to switch it up. But when we are task-switching because we are distracted or because we are under the illusion that we are multi-tasking, we get nothing in return for the price that we pay. One way that I’m limiting task-switching is by batching tasks like responding to email. If I do them all once at a particular time of day, I give myself permission to ignore them at other times.

Make a conscious decision to let some things go. We all have worries about which we can do nothing. We all have “should dos” that we are actually never going to do. To get these internal distractions out of the way, Konmari your mental space.

Build in periods of inattention. Maintain and restore your attention by doing things where you can relax your focus – a walk in the park is a perfect example. Allowing yourselves these periods of intentional inattention not only helps top up your mental reserves, it also gives your brain time and space to process what it has been doing and to engage in creative mind-wandering. Think about building in both longer periods of inattention and micro inattention breaks throughout the day.

How will you spend your attention?

If we don’t decide how to spend our attention, it will be decided for us. And in a world designed to capture our attention through ever more sophisticated means, perhaps the most revolutionary thing we can do is to decide, with intention and care, not to pay attention.

In doing so, we may end up discovering all that we have been missing by trying so hard to miss nothing.

Three Small Experiments in Getting Unstuck

I have been facing a creative block for months. The popular adage is that the only way to get past a creative block is to blast through it. You just have to keep showing up and writing, painting, drawing, or whatever it is you do. The work itself will eventually cut through the block and your creative juices will once again flow freely.

But what if this strategy isn’t working? That’s where I find myself. After spending several months showing up to my studio, staring at some works in progress, staring out the window, tidying up a bit, and maybe finally haltingly putting pigment to paper, I am still stuck. Giving my brain a tidying up has helped, but only incrementally.

What more can I do?

My default when I have a problem is to gather information and try and think my way out of it. But with complicated problems, thinking only gets you so far.  At some point, you have to act.

Taking action doesn’t mean that the action has to be big or even that you have to be particularly sure about it. In fact, sometimes the best actions are small experimental ones. This small experiment approach is what I’ve been using to try and get unstuck.

I’ve tried three small experiments so far, and here are the results:

Gather inspiration. Gathering inspiration – or as artists like to say, “filling the well” – is an important part of the creative process. In the long term, gathering inspiration fosters creativity by feeding our brains ideas and imagery that fuel creative exploration. In the short term, it can give you something to react to which may end up sparking an idea.

What did I do? I spent two weeks going down the Pinterest rabbit hole, leafing through my art books, and going to a few art exhibitions. I also spent some time thinking about how to convert my research into inspiration for my work.

How did it go? It was certainly less frustrating exploring other work than being blocked on my own work. Unfortunately, the ease of consuming potential inspiration did not translate to ease of creating. My block did not budge. It was time for another experiment.

Take a class. My next idea was to take an online workshop. I reasoned that this would get me out of information gathering mode – which was not working – and put me in creating mode. Once I was in the rhythm of creating, I hoped this would carry over to my own work.

What did I do? I signed up for a three-day online color exploration workshop. As a bonus, I did it with an art friend. The additional structure of having scheduled check-ins was an extra motivator.

How did it go? The workshop was successful in getting me into the studio and out of my “paint scarcity” mindset. It also gave me some different ways to think about working with color, which will undoubtedly be useful in the long run. In the short-term, however, I didn’t feel creatively energized at the end of the workshop but rather a bit let down – the way it sometimes feels to get home after a great vacation. On to the next experiment.

Explore within structure. When all else fails, go back to first principles. For me, I know that I work best when I give myself freedom to explore within some sort of structure. So, for my latest small experiment, which is still in progress, I have devised a series of semi-structured studio assignments.

What am I doing?  I am going to the studio at least twice a week and doing exercises that use limited materials and techniques. The idea is to get myself working without overthinking. Yesterday, for example, I spent a day painting abstracts in layers with translucent paint. I spent an earlier studio session playing with patterned fabric and paint. This week, I’m planning to do some loosening up exercises with charcoal. At the end of each studio session, I spend some time reflecting on whether I learned anything from my experimentation that I could bring into my work.

How is it going? I am two weeks into this small experiment and although the jury is still out, I might be slowly getting somewhere. I will re-up for another two weeks and remind myself to check in and evaluate how it’s going.

Small experiments – beyond the studio

Small experiments are not just a good way to get around creative blocks. They are also a useful approach for discovering solutions to all kinds of problems and pain points both in one’s personal and professional life.

In a way, small experiments are nothing new – we are doing them all the time. The human brain is wired for experimentation – it is continuously trying out things, making predictions, and soaking in feedback from the environment to determine how things went. This often happens so quickly that we’re not even aware of it.

What makes a small experiment different from the way the brain habitually works is intentionality. A small experiment doesn’t have to be run like a rigid scientific experiment for a set period of time, but it should be intentional and thoughtful. There should be some clarity on what the problem is, brainstorming on ways to solve it, and an assessment to understand whether a potential solution is working. It is also important to make a note of what works. It is surprisingly easy to forget you even had a problem once it is solved , putting you back to the beginning when something similar comes up.

What I like about a small experiment mindset is that it has an inherent bias towards learning through action. Small experiments are a way forward when you can’t think yourself out of a problem. They focus on learning and adapting rather than failure and success. And they are the perfect response to complex problems with many moving parts – whether that’s how to design urban spaces that meet people’s needs or how to overcome a creative block.

What small experiments could you try?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

KonMari Your Mental Space

Like everyone else, I have a lot on my mind these days. News streaming from the firehose of politics and world events, my kids, and whether we have anything in the house for dinner. Added to that, the past year that I have spent playing around and doing experiments in my art studio has filled my brain with competing half-baked ideas for where to go next with my artwork. My brain has become so overloaded that my daytime thoughts are running rampant in my dreams and are paradoxically slowing me down during the day.

I’m especially struggling with my creative work. I am spending way more time in the studio staring into space than putting paint to canvas. And while contemplation is an important part of my creative process, this feels more like paralysis.

It is time to spring clean my mental space.

The KonMari Method

The last time we did a major spring cleaning we were living in a big house in Dublin. As often happens in our age of consumerism and with growing kids, our possessions had gotten a little bit out of control. To address the problem, we turned to what so many people at the time were reading – Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Following Kondo’s KonMari method involved three key steps:

Gather. We got everything out in the open, category by category, so that we could see what we had.

Decide and let go. We held up each item and asked, “Does this spark joy?” We kept the things that did – or that we just really needed – and got rid of the things that did not.

Organize and store. We organized and stored the things we wanted to keep.

This process worked so well that I have recently been applying it to my mental space. 

 My goal for mental spring cleaning is not necessarily a tidier mind. In fact, creative minds are often messy. But there is messy good and messy bad. A brain full of interesting tidbits, memories, and imagery can provide fertile ground for creative mind-wandering and exploration. A brain full of distracting information, unfinished projects, and general worries, on the other hand, can lead to mental fatigue and inaction.

It’s the difference between Francis Bacon’s infamously messy painting studio – a seemingly unorganized space full of materials that he relied on to spark inspiration – and the basement shop where I grew up – an almost impossible to work in underground space choc-a-block full of expired materials where if anything was going to be sparked it would be a fire.

Mental clutter can trip you up

What does clutter look like in our brains? Unfinished tasks, unresolved problems, and nagging worries reside in our brains in the form of persistent cognitive activity – sometimes called cognitive loops. These cognitive loops take up space in the precious cognitive real estate of working memory. Unlike the seemingly unlimited space of long-term storage, our working memory can only hold so much activity at a time. When some of this space is taken up by open cognitive loops, there is less for doing other things that require attention and conscious thought.

Distracting cognitive loops can be ignored with effort, but they are sticky – they continually try to catch and hold our attention. And so, we must continually spend mental energy pulling our attention back to the task at hand.  As time goes on, our mental reserves are depleted, it becomes harder and harder to suppress these mental distractions and get things done, and we are left feeling anxious and mentally fatigued. My husband calls these sticky loops “mind-fields” – they are always there ready to blow up your train of thought.

Mind-fields aren’t just a problem when you are trying to work. They can also hijack mind-wandering by grabbing the attentional spotlight and stopping the loose associative type of thinking that is an essential part of the creative process. Instead of letting the ideas flow we end up getting caught in the quicksand of our problems and worries. Creative paralysis often ensues.

What can we do about these distracting open cognitive loops?

Inside the creative messiness of Francis Bacon’s studio

The life-changing magic of tidying up cognitive loops

In the language of the KonMari method, we can think about mental tidying in terms of gathering, letting go, and organizing.

Gather. The problem with open cognitive loops is that they often hide just below our conscious thought where they can run around unsupervised. We need to gather these thoughts in order to deal with them. For me, writing is the best way to do this. When I am feeling stuck or overwhelmed, I free-write on all the things I have to do, the things that are worrying me, the things that I would like to be doing, the things I want to try out in my studio, and my artwork ideas. The simple act of externalizing all the things that are on my mind can provide some immediate cognitive relief.

Decide and let go. Once you’ve identified what’s on your mind, you might realize that there are some things you can simply get rid of. Years ago, friends of ours were considering remodeling their bungalow kitchen. Their current kitchen was fine but all their friends were doing remodels and they had the nagging sense that their kitchen could be better. At some point, they realized that the open cognitive kitchen loop was siphoning off their mental energy. They brought the idea out in the open, talked about it, and made the conscious decision that they were not going to do a remodel. This decision effectively closed the loop, saving them both mental space and quite a lot of money.

When I take the time to write down all the things I feel that I could or should do, there are almost always some that I can let go of. There are worries about which I can do nothing and sometimes simply writing about them releases them. There are upcoming deadlines for exhibition calls that I can decide I am not going to meet. There are artwork ideas churning around in the back of my mind that I realize no longer interest me.

And then there are the things you decide are important. Some of these you might be able to close out with little effort. I am always amazed how little time it actually takes to respond to emails, make calls, and complete little errands that have been stressing me out. It is usually far less than the time I’ve already spent worrying about them.

Finishing a task or making a conscious decision to let it go are both excellent ways to close cognitive loops. For those things that can’t be quickly closed out, it’s time to organize and store.

Organize and store.  One way to reduce your cognitive load is to lean more heavily on your environment by storing your ideas and to-dos some place other than your brain. Transferring tasks to a to-do list provides immediate relief for an overwhelmed mind. Storing ideas in my “art techniques to try” or “future blog post” files takes the pressure off my brain to remember those things and helps me focus on one thing at a time.

Larger ventures can be organized by breaking the project down into concrete steps and then creating a plan and timeline for completing those steps. This both brings peace to a chaotic mind and ensures that the project gets done.

Why wait until Spring?

Just like in your home, you can’t solely rely on sporadic big cleanups. Regular maintenance and cleaning are also important. 

For our minds, regular maintenance means doing our best to reduce the distractions that eat up mental energy, taking breaks to let our attention rest, and topping up our mental resources through restorative activities like meditation or spending time in nature.

Regular mental tidying is something both productivity gurus and researchers recommend. For some people, this might take the form of daily morning pages or weekly reviews to reveal and help close cognitive loops. I find monthly reviews and resets helpful.

But there are times, like the present for me, where incremental maintenance and tidying are not enough. When my art studio starts veering too much towards chaos, it is time to do a physical deep clean and reset. And when my mental space gets too full of things that detract from my clarity of mind, it is time to do a mental deep clean and reset.

Whether in your physical or mental home, the ultimate goal of tidying up is not just a tidier space, but a greater sense of peace and a clearer sense of what truly matters to you.

Do you need a mental tidy up?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Jello, Cement, and Mindsets

I have a handwritten sign on my studio wall reminding me that, “It takes paint to make a painting!” I tacked it up well over a year ago in an effort to overcome my paint skimping tendencies. My default is to squeeze out and mix small dollops of paint and then run my brush through these dollops over and over again as if I can extract more pigment by the sheer force of my brush and my will. Despite the many tubes of paint stashed in my studio and the art supply store down the street, I behave as if there is a scarcity of paint.

As artists, we are warned of the perils of a scarcity mindset. Believing that the things we need to succeed in our art practice are in limited supply – whether those things are collectors, accolades, followers, or paint – can limit our creativity and blind us to opportunity. An abundance mindset, on the other hand, can free up mental energy, allow our creative juices to flow more freely, open up collaborative opportunities, and make the art world an altogether better place.  I would settle for a thicker and more vibrant coat of paint.

I have been trying to adopt an abundance mindset. I have at least been trying to behave as if I have an abundance mindset. And yet despite my best intentions, I continue to skimp.

Why is change so hard?

Like Jello and cement, once our minds are set they are hard to change

The operative word in mindset is “set.” We’re not talking about flights of fancy, isolated ideas, or transient attitudes. We are talking about the deeply embedded often unconscious beliefs through which we interpret the world and from which much of our behavior stems.    

Mindsets are a distillation of input we’ve received from our environment over our lifetime – everything we’ve learned from the family and culture into which we are born, the experiences we have, the company we keep, and the places we live. Once formed, our mindsets can be extraordinarily useful. They help us to interpret new situations, make predictions, and decide what to do.

I grew up as an avid art maker with small-town babysitter pocket money. I bought pompoms and pipe cleaners individually at Fonks, the local five and dime. I scavenged and horded all kinds of found objects and fabric scraps that might come in handy. I made my paint last. My “art supply scarcity” mindset helped me get the most out of my money and my supplies.

But mindsets that served us well in the past, or that were logical extensions of our particular culture or environment, can become outdated and end up doing more harm than good.

Someone who grew up being told they are smart (or not) and praised for their achievements (or not) may logically view their personal characteristics as something they have rather than something they develop. Yet numerous studies by Carol Dweck and others have shown that people who view ability through this “fixed mindset” are less likely to take on challenges and achieve their goals than are people with a “growth mindset” – those who view abilities like muscles that can be strengthened with effort.

Unhelpful mindsets can affect not just our behavior but our physical health. Researchers at Yale and Miami University have found that people with negative mindsets about aging live an average of seven and a half years less that their more optimistic counterparts. This difference was not related to their overall health, age, or gender.

I long ago reached a point in my life where I can afford to apply my paint more generously. And yet even though I rationally know that my paint scarcity mindset is limiting my creative output, it still drives my behavior.

What is an artist to do?

Change doesn’t always come from within

According to much of the popular advice out there, the cure for a scarcity mindset, or a fixed mindset, or an aging-is-all-downhill mindset is to simply adopt a more helpful mindset. One article I recently read encouraged artists to “choose an abundance mindset” and “train your mind to focus on abundance over scarcity.” I suspect that these vague strategies would be less effective than even the sign in my studio.

Mindsets mostly operate behind the scene. This means that although we might be able to spend mental effort consciously examining and shifting our mindset in a given moment, the old mindset is likely to return as soon as we stop paying attention.

I remember participating in a graduate seminar where we discussed a wide range of ideas related to the brain, the environment, and our behavior. At one point, we were talking about a book on practicing gratitude. One seminar member described how she had spent a week following the book’s advice and had noticed many good outcomes including a better state of mind and more positive interactions with others. “What happened after the week?” our professor asked. “Oh,” she said, “I went back to my old ways. It was just so hard to maintain.”

Change your environment and change your mind

What’s the alternative to trying to think ourselves into a new mindset? Mindsets generally develop organically through the many interactions between ourselves and our environments. It follows that if we want to change our mindsets, we should look not only inside ourselves but also outside ourselves. Indeed, the most profound changes in our perspectives often come not through our own mental effort, but by having our eyes opened by new experiences, new conversations, and new places.

This is what researchers looking for ways to encourage a growth mindset in students have found. Although some teachers have tried to change students’ mindsets by simply giving a lecture or putting up encouraging posters on growth mindset, this turns out to be about as effective as my sign. Real change requires shifting the classroom environment so that it supports a growth mindset – for instance by modifying how the teacher interacts with the students on a day-to-day basis.

When we look to the environment for support, rather than limiting ourselves to a “change come from within” perspective, it opens up opportunities. We can take some of the burden off our overloaded and sometimes unreliable brains. We can change our physical environment. We can change who we spend time with. We can change our input – what we read and what we watch. We can collaborate with professionals to help us identify unhealthy mindsets and map out a strategy for change.

What does this have to do with paint?

A mini experiment in changing my mindset

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been taking my own advice. Instead of trying to think myself into using paint more generously, I have made small changes to my studio environment. Following the advice of an artist who does not hold back on paint, I switched out my small palette for a table-sized palette and started using chunky paintbrushes instead of my usual smaller ones.

I gave myself the literal tools to change my scarcity mindset. The large palette demanded large puddles of paint. The big brushes demanded that I pick up big gobs of paint. Giving into these demands was surprisingly hard but the paint police didn’t come for me. That made it easier to do the next day. And the day after that.

The micro-environment of abundance that I have created is slowly shifting my perceptions and my behavior. It is starting to feel normal rather than wasteful to use more paint. I am painting more freely.

With all the things happening in your world, paint might seem pretty trivial. But mindsets are anything but. Our mindsets shape how we relate to the world and each other and changing those relationships often starts with changing minds. As Albert Einstein said, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

We might not be able to instantly transform mindsets, but we can work to change the environments that feed some of those mindsets.

Can you identify a mindset, big or small, that doesn’t support who you want to be or how you want to act? Could changing some aspect of your environment help shift that mindset to something more supportive?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

It’s Not Me, It’s Barcelona

Shortly after moving to Barcelona, I met an English woman at a book exchange who confessed that even after living here three years, she was still taking beginning Spanish. A woman listening in said that her goal, after living here two years, was to master one past tense. She felt that was all she could manage.

I went home and pronounced them pathetic. How lazy they were, locked away in their expat bubble! I, on the other hand, would surely be fluent within a couple of years.

Fast forward seven years and although I have managed to claw myself to a fairly high level of Spanish, I am far from fluent. It’s embarrassing. What happened to my grand plan of quickly tipping to fluency?

Barcelona, it turns out, had other plans.

Environment matters

Although I didn’t know it when we moved, Barcelona is a notoriously bad place to learn Spanish. The large expat community here means that you are as likely to hear English, Italian, or Chinese on the street as you are Spanish. Locals switch to English at your first linguistic stumble. And because Barcelona is in Catalunya, everything from billboards to the programs at the concert hall are in Catalan – a language that more closely resembles French and Italian than Spanish.

Barcelona doesn’t exactly thwart Spanish learning, it’s just that it doesn't particularly help.

Environment matters. It’s easier to get daily exercise in a city that is designed for walking than one that is designed for driving. It’s easier to eat a healthy diet if that is what’s on the menu. It’s easier to do the right thing when everyone else is doing it.

Even when we think that we are in the driver’s seat and making conscious decisions about how to behave, it is actually a complex series of largely hidden interactions between mind and environment that determines where we go. As James Clear sums up in his book Atomic Habits, “Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”

The role of the environment in influencing mind and behavior is especially easy to see when we look at babies. Babies are a bundle of ready-made cognitive systems including an innate capacity for learning language. They also come with built-in psychological drivers, including a strong desire to communicate and socially connect. But language acquisition doesn’t happen on its own. It is fueled by the environment.

Luckily, the immersive language environment into which babies are born is a match made in heaven – and the richer the better. Babies get all the information, structure, and feedback they need to learn how to communicate and connect. In the process, their brains are forever changed as a primary language — or occasionally two or three — takes hold, shaping not only their language center but also the way they perceive the world.

A supportive language-learning environment doesn't necessarily make things easy for these little humans. If you have ever watched a baby learn to do anything — including finding their own feet — you know that learning can be hard. But a rich language environment does make language learning easier.

Adult language learners rarely have such an ideal mind-environment alignment as your average baby. But for the expats I know who have become truly fluent in Spanish, there are some similarities. Most of them came to Spain alone instead of arriving with their English-speaking families. Many of them moved initially to parts of Spain where English was not widely spoken and thus had no option but to use Spanish to figure things out. Many have Spanish speaking partners, giving them entry to Spanish speaking community.

Their environment didn’t make learning Spanish easy, but it did make it easier.

Barcelona doesn’t make it easy

I know that some of my fluent friends not so secretly think that non-fluent expats are lazy. After all, they didn’t have too much trouble learning Spanish. I have also felt that I must be lazy, or that I don’t have a head for languages, or that I’m just not disciplined enough. And while there may be some truth to that, it is only part of the story.

Not only is Spanish immersion near impossible to achieve in Barcelona for reasons I’ve already mentioned, but the city offers up a wide array of ways for me to meet my needs without speaking Spanish. Navigating health care, renting an apartment, getting a haircut? I could try and stumble through those things in Spanish, but in Barcelona I can easily do them in English. Finding a school for my child who is two years away from college? It made sense to optimize academics over language acquisition by putting him in an English-speaking school. Building community? The locals speak Catalan and aren’t necessarily looking to expand their social group. The expat community, on the other hand, is welcoming and easy to access.

Choosing the easy English way out in these contexts is not lazy, it is cognitively efficient. Why risk medical miscommunication? Why feel socially out of place when community is readily available? Why not avoid the cognitive pain that comes from feeling like an idiot?

But taking the easy way out in terms of meeting one’s needs means having to go the hard road in terms of learning Spanish. Without help from our environment, we put a heavier burden on ourselves. We must make do with the artificial structure of grammar rules, vocabulary lists, and flashcards. We need to consciously and continually choose to sustain the work of language learning.

It’s no wonder our motivation flags and we end up in what my former Spanish teacher called, “intermediate hell.” It’s no surprise we find ourselves thinking that one past tense really is enough. 

Riding the environmental wave

If we understand language learning – or whatever else we are trying to do – as an integrated effort between mind and environment, it gives us another way to think about change.

And this is why, when faced with the verb conjugation app that was recently recommended to me, I find myself wondering if I could make my environment work harder for me instead of placing the learning burden entirely on my own waning willpower.

Big changes aren’t always possible. I’m not about to leave my partner in order to immerse myself for several months somewhere in non-Catalunya Spain. I’m not going to drop my English-speaking friends or quit my English-speaking work.

But there are some small tweaks that might make my environment more supportive of my efforts. For the next couple months, I’ve decided to put the flashcards aside and focus on making small decisions that open up immersive opportunities. I want to see how far I can get by consciously deciding to jump and then letting the current pull me along.

Today I began my conversation with my dentist in Spanish even though his English is excellent. Last week I started reading a new murder mystery in Spanish. Mysteries are not necessarily my favorite genre but they are inherently cognitively engaging — I want to know what happens next and so the story drags me along. I am going to try and get over my aversion to watching TV during the day and regularly schedule in some Spanish Netflix — maybe something slightly trashy that appeals to my base interests.

None of these strategies will make bumping up my Spanish easy. But I am hoping that they will make it easier.

Environment matters.

What are you trying to learn, or do, or change? How could you tweak your environment to make it easier?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Digesting Art and Other Information

Some Assembly Required. Oil, acrylic, cold wax, collage on wood. Anne Kearney

I was recently working on an abstract collage in paint and fabric and was stumped about what to do next. What else does it need? What should I add? Do I go for the glue gun or the paint brush? In a moment of inspiration I went, instead, for the utility knife. Slicing off a sizable chunk of the piece seemed dramatic but was just what was needed to create a unified whole.

Looking around at my other collages in progress lying on the studio floor, I sought further composition inspiration by thinking back to the two-hour lecture I’d taken a couple years ago from an artist of note. What were those actionable guidelines and strategies? What were those juicy bits of advice? My mind was a blank. Perhaps delusionally, I chose to believe that the absence of useful knowledge was a function not of my aging brain but of the presentation itself.

The lecture felt informative at the time. It was chock-a-block full of compositional rules and guidelines. It ran through long lists of things to keep in mind, like rhythm and balance, contrast and repetition, line and pattern. And it included image after image. Paintings marked up in grids of thirds. Paintings overlaid with the golden ratio. Paintings crisscrossed with webs of lines showing relationships.

There was so much information, in fact, that apparently none of it stuck.

As artists we communicate not just through art but also about art. We talk about our work. We write. We teach. We care about helping people understand. And yet in our excitement to share everything we know, it is all too easy to share too much. This is a tendency that I have to regularly fight against when writing these blog posts.

Just as it is easy to lose sight of the big picture when putting paint to surface, it is easy to lose sight of the big questions when putting words to paper. Am I imparting something with sticking power? Am I helping people understand?

As with painting, guidelines can be useful in the composition of information—not just for artists but for anyone engaged in the creative act of communication.

What are some of those guidelines? Read on – and I will try not to make you cross-eyed with the verbal equivalent of crisscrossed lines.

Organization Aids Digestion

Painters might not care about the neuroscience behind information processing, but effective composition in painting works because it resonates with the way the brain works.

Artists learn that paintings are often strongest if they have one main focal point. They learn to organize the painting along a visual hierarchy by using, for example, color intensity and value, so that viewers aren’t overwhelmed. They organize the elements of the painting to help lead the eye. And they ruthlessly edit, cutting away elements that distract from the whole. Often this editing involves getting rid of the artist’s favorite marks in a process that can be so wrought we call it “killing our darlings.”

There is a parallel here with communication. A good TED Talk, for example, gives the brain a focal point in the form of a central theme. It explains that theme by exploring a hierarchy of related concepts. It guides the listener by effectively leading them from point to point. And it gives enough detail and imagery to be interesting along the way.

Breaking information down into bite-sized pieces and then weaving those pieces together resonates with the brain’s natural system of organizing knowledge. This resonance makes the information easier to digest. If the lecturer on painting composition had given his talk a clearer unifying principle, and then organized his main points into bite-sized concepts with accessible examples, my brain might have something to show for the time I spent.

Don’t Overfeed Me

In my attempt to learn about composition, I would have been much better off learning three useful things rather than forgetting the twenty or so that were presented. Our brains can only handle so much at a time. And if we are asked to simultaneously take in more than we can handle, we get overloaded and often tune out as a protective response.  

How many things are we capable of thinking about at once? The magic number, based on a whole lot of research in psychology, is five plus or minus two. 

Great, you might be thinking, I can talk about seven things in my next presentation. Not so fast.  For complex things or for people who have competing demands on their attention — which is most of us, most of the time — that number is at the lower end.

As the ubiquitous “menu del dia” in Spain attests, a three-course lunch with small portions is digestible on a normal workday. Five courses might be reserved for a special dinner when you have more time. And seven courses comprise an event to which you must be committed.

It is no coincidence that painters often break the canvas into three main areas by value or pictorial space, that major concertos have three movements, and that June Cohen, former executive producer of Ted Media, says that a great talk should clearly articulate a single main idea and have no more than three supporting subpoints. Sometimes three really is the magic number.

Cheating by Chunking

While going broader with the amount of information you try and share comes with risks, you can sometimes go deeper. It is possible to effectively get around the brain’s limited capacity by grouping information into categories and subcategories — or as psychologists like to say, “chunking.” With chunking you are packaging bits of information inside conceptual containers so that they are easy to carry around. It’s a little bit like opening a bento box and finding three or four mini-trays nestled inside.

Painters chunk in a variety of ways, for example by starting with a small number of large shapes and then dividing those shapes into smaller shapes to add more detail. Writers chunk by nesting sub-themes under themes.

How many levels of chunking can you effectively include? That will depend on what you are trying to say, the timing and format you are using, and on your audience. Are you a presenter with limited time to present? Do you have an audience of beginners or people with many demands on their attention? You can probably really only cover three concepts related to your main theme before you start to overwhelm or lose people. Do you have your audience for a longer period of time? Are you sharing information via a long-form essay with people who are interested in what you’re saying? You can probably go deeper. But even then, you need good structure and compelling content.

The painting composition teacher had a group of interested artists for two hours. He could have effectively covered a fair amount of information – though not nearly as much as he tried to pack in – if it had been better organized. Concepts like dynamic symmetry, diagonals, dominance and rhythm, for example, could have been organized under a limited number of compelling themes like how to keep the eye moving or how to achieve visual balance.

Please Don’t Feed Me Bonbons

Often the importance of structure is summed up as “less is more.” And this is not a bad place to start. Keeping to one main theme is important. Sharing a limited number of concepts related to that theme is much more likely to be effective than trying to cram in too much information.

And yet I have noticed a trend toward oversimplification in much of the information that is shared these days. Important concepts are presented as lists – Stephen King’s 20 rules for writers, Diebenkorn’s 10 rules for artists. Politicians stop trying to communicate real information in their efforts to oversimplify and provoke emotion at the expense of understanding. News feeds give us sound bites that grab our attention but often fail to deliver anything of substance.

In our information diet we are increasingly being fed the equivalent of ultra-processed food. Like these foods, this kind of information is hard to resist, goes down easily, but ultimately does not nourish us. 

We are warned of waning attention spans and told to keep it simple. Yet it is the dense informational packages of stories, imagery, and examples that provide the conceptual vitamins, minerals, and flavors that make food for thought worth eating. Detail in information, as long as it sits within a structure and isn’t the equivalent of an overwhelming number of crisscrossed lines, gives us something to cognitively latch onto and explore. It sparks emotions, memories, and associated ideas making the information more likely to stick.

As communicators ourselves, let’s not add to empty informational calories and the collective sugar crash that ensues. Give me information that is easy to digest but please don’t feed me bonbons.

Beyond and Back to Rules

Good composition doesn’t necessarily ensure a good outcome. Many other ingredients go into successful communication. Many examples of communication follow all the rules but still fall flat.

Some works of art ignore compositional rules altogether yet are still captivating. Jackson Pollack’s drip paintings lack structure at first glance. Edgard Varèse’s avant-garde music compositions were sometimes written to deliberately challenge the audience. And the great Russian novels where everyone has at least three different names now need guides to help the modern reader keep everything straight.

One can argue that these works are successful not because they lack structure but because their audiences – typically people with expertise or inherent interest in the genre – are willing to put the mental effort into creating structure. For some people, the challenge of discovering or creating structure from information is immensely satisfying.

A reviewer of a book I recently read — and had trouble navigating — noted that this was a “difficult” book but that pulling out the themes was ultimately worthwhile. An artist I admire deliberately spends time with paintings that aren’t immediately engaging or likable in an attempt to understand what the artist is saying.

You can learn a lot this way. You can also get a headache.

I applaud experimentation. But with everyday kinds of communication most of us simply don’t have enough time, mental energy, or interest to put effort into extracting structure from information in order to more fully digest it.

So please, if you want to reach us, help us. Organize your thoughts. Tell us something rather than everything. Make it interesting.

Paying attention to how you communicate and not just what you communicate will help your information stick.

What do I do I hope sticks with you from this post? Three general guidelines for effective communication:

Share bite-sized ideas – they are easier to chew
Is there a clear main idea? Are the supporting concepts and themes coherent? Would cutting things out bring clarity to the whole even if you – like I have done many times while creating this post – have to kill your darlings?

Respect limited digestive capacity
Are you overwhelming your audience by asking them to think about too many things at once? What information can you cut or chunk to make it more manageable?

Make it nutritious
Is the information nutritionally dense? Are there enough interesting details to engage your audience? Are you giving them meaty things to think about?

If you can do these things, you are well on your way to making the information that you share understandable and impactful. As the French painter Pierre Bonnard said, “A well-composed painting is half done.”

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Retrospecting My Future

Last week in my dreams, I was visited by the ghost of my future self. In a mist straight out of The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, which my family and I had watched the week before, my ghost proceeded to tell me how badly I had failed to meet my 2025 art practice goals. I railed against my Ghost of Art Practice Future while scrambling through the studio debris thinking surely I could find at least one finished painting. Alas, I could not.

Digital collage from original photo and charcoal drawing. Anne Kearney

When I awoke I found myself, just like Scrooge, thinking that surely this future could be averted. But how?

Enter the premortem.

We all know what a postmortem is. The image that comes to my mind is of a wry and slightly jaded TV murder-series coroner throwing around terms like “trace evidence” and “blunt force trauma” while piecing together the probable cause of death for an unlucky victim. A postmortem is about creating a narrative – a mental model – to help explain what happened and ideally shed some light on how to keep the rest of us safer. This is good information but it doesn’t do much for the victim.

What if, in a recursive reality where time paradoxes were possible, the postmortem could be performed before the person died in order to provide timely information that would avert their death?

That is, in essence, what a premortem tries to do.

Gary Klein, who coined the term premortem in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, says that, "Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the 'patient' has died, and so asks what did go wrong.”

What’s wrong with regular planning?

Why does a premortem work better than just planning the regular way?

One of the reasons is that people tend to be charmingly optimistic. And this optimism can lead to some pretty big planning mistakes. Of course, not everyone is optimistic all the time — depressed people tend to be more pessimistic in general, for example — but being overly optimistic when thinking about the future is a common enough phenomenon that psychologists have coined the term “optimism bias” to describe this human tendency.

Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who spent decades studying human thought and decision making, sums up this tendency in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.”

This bias toward optimism appears to transcend gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, and even species — starlings, for example, have also shown a tendency toward unwarranted optimism. In fact, even if we know about the optimism bias, we have difficulty escaping its pull. Case in point: as I write these words, I am thinking that surely I am less susceptible than others to the optimism bias and thus more capable of realistic planning and eventual success. My future ghost does not agree.

On the surface, a built-in cognitive bias toward optimism seems strange. Why on earth would our brains be wired for optimism? Wouldn’t a healthy dose of fear and pessimism keep us safer?

It turns out that optimism has some distinct advantages. An optimistic outlook keeps us from the paralysis of worrying about things over which we have little or no control. It encourages forward thinking and action. And it can smooth over our interactions with other people. Not surprisingly then, optimism is associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress — all of which can adversely impact quality and quantity of life. Optimists also tend to work harder and longer which, one can imagine, leads to a range of good outcomes.

A slightly delusional optimism is what allows people to pursue a career in the arts, to say “I do,” and to decide to become parents. Perpetually believing that a painting is almost done is what enables me to keep at it for the twenty hours – or days or months – that it actually takes to finish.

Ignorance, it turns out, really can be bliss.

The problem with optimism

Given the benefits of optimism, I certainly wouldn’t wish this bias away.

And yet while optimism is important, it can be problematic if it comes at the expense of realistic forecasting and planning. One consequence of overconfidence is something psychologists call the “planning fallacy.” This phenomenon describes the very human tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks associated with a task. Even worse, studies have shown that these planning errors are not just a characteristic of the inexperienced — on the contrary, the planning fallacy is hard to shake even when we should know better.

College students reliably pull all-nighters and turn in half-baked arguments because they have underestimated — yet again — how long their term paper will actually take to complete. Managers routinely promise more than their team can realistically deliver. Building renovations famously end up taking longer and costing more than even seasoned contractors estimate. And artists are perpetually scrambling to pull together their exhibition even when past experience has told them that it will take longer and cost more than they think. This last example illustrates the recursive Hofstadter’s Law — a corollary of the planning fallacy — which states that things always take longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

If the ghost of my future self had spoken in my dream it likely would have warned me of the dangers of being overly optimistic, of falling prey to the planning fallacy, and of ignoring Hofstadter’s Law.

To make matters worse

Our problems with planning extend beyond simple optimism. It appears that the mental models that we rely on to understand the world, make decisions, and envision the future are themselves susceptible to optimism bias. Although it’s true that our brains are drawn to vividly bad things in the world — fires, accidents, and other catastrophes, for example — studies have shown that people are more likely to gloss over the abstractly bad and problematic in favor of the positive. This means that positive things are more likely to become solidified in our mental models than negative things. And this, in turn, makes those positive things both easier to remember and more likely to influence our predictions about the future.

And so we happily say, “Let’s go for a second baby! Labor wasn’t too bad and I don’t remember the infant years being all that hard, those adorable moments were many, and I’m sure we’ll be able to afford college somehow.” This is an excellent mindset for ensuring the survival of the species. But it is not so great for ensuring the success of your next project.

Re-enter the premortem.

The premortem sidesteps our problems with overoptimism and skewed mental models by asking not what might go wrong but what did go wrong. It doesn't ask us to make predictions and assess risk — things at which people are infamously bad — but deals instead with absolutes. The project has failed. You can now turn your mind to identifying all the things that led to failure. And then start thinking about what you could have done to keep those things from happening.

The prospective hindsight of a premortem helps one build a useful mental model of a failure without having to actually experience that failure. This model, in turn, can be used to anticipate and mitigate problems for next time which, in the circular world of the premortem, is actually this time.

My premortem

When I started exploring all the causes for my failure to achieve my 2025 art practice goals, I had no problem coming up with scenarios that were dramatic and arguably far-fetched. I suffered a venomous snake bite on the way to the studio — this scenario is vivid in my brain after having just read a New York Times article about the hazards of venomous snakes, albeit mostly in rural India and Africa. I was hit in the head by falling debris while walking under an apartment balcony and ended up in a coma — the getting hit in the head part actually did happen to me recently and that recency makes my brain consider it highly likely to happen again.

I had to dig deeper before I unearthed more realistic scenarios from my murky cognitive depths – things like lack of planning, absence of accountability, and simple procrastination.

Now that I have a better handle on the causes of my own future failure, I get to go back in time, to the present, and correct those things. The future is now.

Why did I fail and what could I have done to prevent it?

I failed because I had no deadlines or accountability to push me. If only I had formed an artist-in-residence relationship with reDirect to make me accountable for getting things done!

I failed because I didn’t schedule and protect studio time. If only I had blocked out studio time in my calendar and defended that time against things that seemed more pressing or interesting but that, in retrospect, were less important!

I failed because my studio space was unwelcoming and that made it hard to get into a creative mindset. If only I had spent a bit of time at the beginning of the year making my space nicer! But note: although it’s true that one’s workspace can have a tremendous impact on well-being and productivity, the promise of effortless workflow and creative bliss that the ubiquitous studio-porn dangles in front of artists is an empty one. I do want my space to be more inviting – curtains, for example, and a bit more storage would help – but I know from past experience that the siren call of design and organization can end up shipwrecking my creative voyage.

I failed because every time I picked up a paintbrush I was paralyzed by overthinking and indecision. If only I had reminded myself of the tricks I already know for encouraging creative flow! It’s not that I necessarily want to make things easy – in fact I do some of my best work when the process is hard and fraught – but I do want to keep myself moving.

I failed because for every hour I spent on my own work, I spent five hours scrolling social media and getting caught up in cute baby videos. If only I had taken my own advice on limiting these sink holes of time!

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Putting my premortem where everyone can see it is a bit daunting. It shines a public spotlight on my intentions. But as I’ve just identified, the accountability that this spotlight brings is one of the things that will increase my chances of following through on those intentions.

This year, instead of succumbing to optimistic ignorance and hoping for the best, I’m looking 2025 squarely in the eye. I reject Rizzo the Rat’s aversion to thinking about the future, manifested in his cry upon seeing the Muppet’s Ghost of Christmas Future: “Oh, this is too scary. I don't think I wanna see any more!”

Instead, I’m following the path of Ebenezer Scrooge who, according to Charles Dickens, said: “Ghost of the Future! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But, as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart.”

Anne Kearney is the 2025 ReDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Introducing reDirect’s 2025 Artist in Residence

I am delighted to be the reDirect Artist-in-Residence for 2025!

I have long been interested in both art and people. My earliest memories are of “making things” — playing with pipe cleaners, cardboard, glue, and whatever else I could get my hands on. As the years have passed the materials have changed, but the common root of what drives my art is a love of exploration and discovery. How do these materials work? What can I do with them? What can I learn?

My interest in people — particularly in human psychology and behavior — blooms from this same root of curiosity. How do people function? How can we influence them for the better? What experiments can we do to learn more? These interests eventually led to a degree in cognitive science from Stanford and a PhD in environmental psychology from the University of Michigan where I had the great fortune to meet many of the people currently on the reDirect board.

My environmental psychology career has taken me from academia to consulting to working with NASA where, as my daughter once explained to a friend, I “helped design spaceships so that people don’t go crazy.” Art was often relegated to the backseat during those years but it was always along for the ride.

When I embarked on my adventure as a full-time artist about seven years ago, I assumed that the choice to embrace art was a de facto choice to leave the world of psychology behind. But as I developed my art practice and artistic voice, I realized that my background in cognitive science and environmental psychology was the primary driver of my artwork — not only pointing me towards particular ideas and themes to explore but also helping me see how to keep working at my best. Like many epiphanies, this one seemed obvious in hindsight.

My years studying human cognition and psychology have shaped the way I look at the world. And as I create and struggle as an artist, I have become increasingly aware of the focus and insights that this particular lens brings to the creative process. When I started a blog that explores these connections and insights, it felt like coming full circle.

As a reDirect Artist-in-Residence, part of what I will be doing is continuing my written explorations of art, life, and environmental psychology as a way to help bring reDirect’s SEE Framework to life. This writing will take the form of blog posts — personal essays flavored with science — that I hope will resonate with readers not only because we are all creative (and we are) but because we are all human.

I welcome the structure that this Artist-in-Residence will bring and I look forward to the opportunity to dive deeper into the ideas embedded in SEE!

            - Anne

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer who currently lives in the vibrant city of Barcelona. Anne’s artwork is inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She is energized by the struggle of finding ways to communicate the essence of abstract ideas through simple art materials. Her writing explores what cognitive science and psychology have to tell us about creativity, making art, and functioning at our best in this complex world. Anne has a BA in Psychology/Cognitive Science from Stanford University, a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan, and has studied art throughout her life.