Thought Spirals Aren’t Productive

Ben Heim
3 min readAug 2, 2021

These past few months, I have been spending a lot of time researching colleges. Visiting university websites, watching their info sessions, and everyone asking about where I want to apply has characterized my past few months.

It wasn’t so pervasive when I tried Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism challenge for a month. But when I went on vacation and gave up those tech-free habits, the college mindset came back even worse.

Just take a look at my recent search history. r/ApplyingToCollege is everywhere. I search it multiple times a day. But the worst part about all of this is that I feel incredibly productive during this process.

Searching for colleges is a rite of passage for those who choose to pursue tertiary education after high school. It is the reminder that “Hey! You’re about to leave the family you grew up with for the past 18 years and become an adult!” And, it’s societally important. Everyone and their mother is telling you how important it is to go to college.

Whether it is or isn’t important to go to college is a subject for another post. However, it is the perceived importance that makes spending so much time thinking about colleges feel productive. Want to know about student life at Vanderbilt? Check Reddit. Want to see what classes are available at UC Berkeley? Search google.

After all, I am researching colleges. This is what society wants me to do!

The ease of attaining information in this day and age and its associated negative effects is something I’ve discussed before. And its pernicious influence doesn’t end when it comes to the college search.

Multitasking: Your Enemy

If there’s anything I learned from the past year of doing school from home, it’s that multitasking feels productive but isn’t at all. It feels good to check your email every ten minutes and to start a new task when you haven’t finished the previous one. It feels like you are maximizing productivity: like you are working hard and always doing something. The truth? Multitasking sucks. You get nothing done.

Why is multitasking so ineffective? Thought spirals. Think about it for a second. Each time you start a new task, you have to orient yourself with what you’re doing, how far along you are with it, and where you heading with it. You have to restart your thinking. Then, when you move to another task, you do the same. Multitasking keeps restarting this process, creating thought spirals that don’t end.

The facilitator of these thought spirals is not writing down the things you learn. Right now, if I search for X college’s student life, I don’t take notes. I just emotionally internalize it and move on. However, since I don’t write it down, I forget it. This is an issue for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t know why or not I actually like or don’t like a college. Secondly, I end up searching for the same thing since I forget what it said.

This has been taking up way too much of my time.

How I am Addressing the Issue

To put an end to these thought spirals, I am setting a couple of simple rules for myself.

  1. You must take notes on everything you search regarding colleges (this is to cut down on searching the same thing and forgetting why I like X college and don’t like Y college)
  2. You can search on Reddit once a day (Reddit responses can be helpful but I shouldn’t mindlessly consume it — this will help me be more intentional with social media)

Conclusion

I get that it’s important to be informed about the college I choose. However, in these past few months, I have been making a lot of motion and not much progress. It’s as if I am mindlessly treading water. With these new rules, I won’t be putting any more effort it; I will just be creating intention. And instead of wasting energy treading water, I will be maximizing energy use by swimming forward.

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