Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst

We have more options than ever in modern life, but is that really a good thing? Digital technologies that claim to make our lives easier, like restaurant ratings and dating apps, are all around us, but they usually end up making us feel even more stressed. In this episode,I speak with Emily Pabst, the founder of Remake the Rules and a decision-making coach. Emily discusses how our lives are being shaped by "choice tech" and how to regain control. We look at the mental traps that undermine our thinking, how having too many options can lead to anxiety, and how to prevent decision fatigue. Emily explains how small business owners, corporate executives, and regular people can simplify their decisions, live more clearly, and reconsider their relationship with technology. --- Listen to the podcast here: Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In today’s world, we just have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of choices to make them from. I often make the reference to doing a Google search for something like a therapist, something that a lot of people will look for at some point in their lives, and if you ever look for a therapist, you’ll see a Google search and you may see the people who do, say, the type of therapy you’re looking for, work with the type of people, whether it’s individual, couples, family, stuff like that, whether it’s specific to addiction counseling versus just kind of trying to get a leg up on life, but it’s really hard to know what you really want because you’re going to meet the therapist and you’re going to find out more about the person and whether or not you vibe, and I think that paradigm applies to a lot of other places in life, especially in our technical world where you just have so many choices and so much information and you’re like how do I sort through it all and how do I avoid getting decision fatigue? My guest today is Emily Pabst, and she is the founder of Remake the Rules, a decision-making coaching service. --- Emily, welcome to the program. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining from the other side of town here in Denver. And first, to I guess orient, tell us a little bit about Remake the Rules, because I think the idea may be a little bit new to some people out there listening about someone to coach you to make decisions other than whatever, probably the four or five family members they all have giving them advice. My background is in information science and data analysis, actually, and, throughout these last few decades, what I’ve really noticed both in my professional and then also in my personal life is that the overwhelming addition to what I call choice tech tools to our lives, so those are going to be tools that are digital information tools that impact how we think, how we feel, and, most importantly, how we make decisions. That the addition of those tools, while they promise a lot, a lot of additional knowledge, a lot of additional tools, they often do not deliver and they often do the exact opposite. They create a lot of uncertainty, a lot of frustration, a lot of overwhelm. And so I essentially help people live and thrive well within this sort of overwhelming information environment that we’ve created for ourselves. So, give us an example of a choice tech tool that did overpromise, underdeliver, and essentially make things more frustrating. Sure. I think the number one for many, many people, it’s going to be online dating. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen so many videos and essays about how 90 some percent of people involved in it are frustrated with the online dating world, that there’s like this idea that there’s maybe 5 or 10 percent of people that are really thriving in it, and then the other 95, 90 percent are just fed up. Yeah. I mean, the frustration is absolutely real, and sort of the stance that I take on these information tools, regardless of if it’s online dating, I tend to focus on sort of high stakes environments. So, in many cases, a choice tech tool like online dating has now fully taken over how folks make decisions in regards to who they choose to meet and spend time with and potentially become a partner, a life partner, so this is a very high stakes choice that we are now inviting these technology tools into to be a major part of, but it can be a lot of different things. Small business ownership involves a ton of tools very similar to this that are intended to help you thrive in your business and often are confusing and overwhelming, and same with leading large organizations. Those are sort of the three realms where I work with people most frequently because they are both so inundated with these tools while also really needing the outcomes to be positive and to work productively for them. So, you talk about online dating, of course, being high stakes because, and possibly even the highest stakes because the person you choose to spend your life with ends up being one of the most important decisions, an important part of it. What would be an example of a low stakes tool that people sometimes maybe think about too much but it’s really just not that highest stakes? Interesting. Well, so part of kind of the way that I help folks to sort of reframe the frustration and the overwhelm that they’re feeling is how pervasive these tools are, and the pervasiveness of them is actually significantly altering just how we go about our patterns of day-to-day life. So one sort of example significantly lower stakes is how you feed yourself, how you choose what restaurant you go to, how you choose how to get groceries. So there are many, many more information tools that are available to us to achieve that than there were 10, 15, 20 years ago, but because of the advent of them, it kind of disrupted those old patterns, so now we are trying to relearn what really works for us again now that we have so many different options. This reminds me of a TV show from several years back. Aziz Ansari had a show called Master of None, which I kind of think of as the millennial guide to life myself, and there’s an episode of this show where he gets online and starts researching the best taco truck, I think it is, in his neighborhood, and I don’t even remember what neighborhood, this was many years ago that I watched this, but it’s a neighborhood in New York City, he’s trying to find the best taco truck, and by the time he does all the research to find out which one is, they’re out of food or they’re closed. 100 percent. And also, I think that there’s a lot to be said for the accuracy of that information. This idea that that is something that is available to us through some means, like Google mapping or what have you, these review platforms, it can be kind of accurate for some locations, for some questions, but can be just a very poor option for information in other scenarios. And I’ve seen a lot of people do this where they’re looking at Google Maps, they’re like, “Oh, there’s a Chinese restaurant at the block and it has a 4.7,” and that’s supposed to signify that it’s good, whereas some other place may have been there that has a 3.9 and maybe it’s not as good, whereas maybe the item on the Google Map with the number of dollar signs is actually a more important indicator because that tells you how much money you’re going to spend on that meal. Certainly, and it’s conversations like this that I end up having with folks is really just recontextualizing what we’re looking at, what we’re interacting with, what we’re talking about, that sort of has become so normalized and such a strong default for folks, like you want to figure out where you want to eat, the default is to look at online reviews on one, maybe two different platforms. But then there’s ideas about who is completing that information, who is providing it, how it is coming to be, whether or not they are genuine, whether or not they are from a subculture that is going to have the same food ideas and preferences that you do. So I enjoy traveling a lot and I also really enjoy sort of looking at places through the lens of some of these very large platforms because you can really tell when only a very specific population is engaging with it, and that population, if you go abroad, is unlikely to be the population that actually lives in a place. So, there, we can really see an example of how we are just sort of entrenching into a very singular viewpoint, but because it’s on the internet and there’s so much data, it feels like it’s actually really well sourced and well informed. Yeah, it feels like ground truth, and an example, it has a 4.7, 4.8 rating that almost is taken by most people as ground truth that this is a quality restaurant. Yes, yeah. So, with this example, I know this example has nothing to do with business, it’s just kind of a normal life example, where someone looks at Google reviews, they see that number and sometimes they just look at a couple reviews or whatever and then they choose the restaurant, what is the bigger issue? Is the bigger issue the fact that this information may not be reflective of what you really want or the fact that this may not be the best use of our mental and cognitive energy of, okay, this meal might be slightly less good if we don’t do all the success of research versus all the other things that we could be thinking about in life and some of the things that may have higher stakes? Yeah, certainly the latter. We have an unlimited amount of energy and information at our disposal at any given time, so making a choice and saying, good enough, and being like, “Well, I’ve had better pizza in my life but that’s okay.”Share on X So be it versus looking at those sort of higher stakes