Yesterday was a massively productive day for me. Many of us experience that mid-afternoon lull, the one so often portrayed in commercials for candy bars, energy supplements, and the like. Yesterday I powered right through. I looked up and it was 5:30, and I felt great. Throughout the day I also feel like I was just more efficient overall. Why? Now, before I launch into a tired old philosophical Mac vs. PC blog post, the scientist in me wants to consider what else was different about my day and the way I felt.

1) No commute. I spend about an hour and fifteen minutes a day just getting to the office via a commuter train and then the subway, most of which is spent sucking down coffee while huddled over my iPhone banging out one-fingered emails. I suspect this has an impact on my fatigue level later in the day. I can’t really change much about this, other than perhaps putting down the iPhone and maybe doing some light reading on the Kindle instead. Something to consider.

2) No co-workers around. Just kidding, I love my co-workers. But seriously, there were far fewer distractions in my work environment at home and it would be wrong to eliminate this factor off-hand.

3) PC vs Mac. When I first started using the Mac, my frustration level was pretty high. I regularly flubbed the keyboard commands, had trouble switching between windows (programs? am I allowed to call them windows?), you know all that stuff. But I made the adjustment. Yesterday when I approached the PC, I encountered the opposite problem: My fingers are now used to the Mac keyboard shortcuts! Nonetheless, I was able to get things rolling, which brings me to what I think is the crux of the issue.

4) Desktop vs Laptop. While these other factors played a roll, my gut tells me that this was the most important. Instead of hunched over my laptop, constantly squirming around for a comfortable viewing and typing angle, I sat comfortably at my desk, placing the wireless keyboard and optical mouse at the best place for me, while effortlessly sliding things around the big flat screen monitor that occupies half my desk. It felt good. It felt comfortable. And I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that I was using a PC instead of a Mac. Again, that’s my gut, but when it comes to self-experimentation (and business), sometimes you have to trust your gut and see what happens.

So here’s what I’m going to do next. First of all, I’m going to use a peripheral mouse with my laptop. I did this at the beginning and then I stopped, I think because of something foolish like a dead battery. Definitely switching back. Second, I want to bring a real monitor to the office. I think this will make a huge difference. Finally, I’m going to consider how I spend the time during my commute and whether I can afford to change that part of my routine.

I could get real philosophical here and talk about the proliferation of laptops, the further implications of iPads, and how the Mayans saw this all coming, but I’m not looking for broader conclusions for humanity. We’re all built differently, and we have to know ourselves. My objective is just to maximize my own efficiency, and I think step one may be losing the laptop.

Is there anything in your work environment or daily routine that negatively affects your productivity?

As I joined the ranks of the miserable, I grappled with the fact that I had moved clear across the country and spent 4 years of my life, hours upon hours, pursuing this topic. I was good at it. How could I now hate it? Clearly, I had too much personally invested to just quit! Surely things would get better when I finished the PhD, or got that first Post Doc position, or the first real academic job, or finally earned tenure some 6 years after that. This pattern of thinking is extremely dangerous and irrational, yet all too common in life and in business. And it took me months to get a grip on it before I packed up and left.

Behavioral economists call this tendency the Sunk Cost or “Concorde” Fallacy (Concorde after the exorbitantly expensive sonic Jet project undertaken by the French and English governments). When making a decision we ought to be concerned with how best to allocate our current and future resources—be they money, time, or effort. However, as is often the case in Economics, oughts and is’s are not the same. Instead of behaving optimally, we tend to focus on decisions we’ve already made, money already spent, time already elapsed. And we make poor decisions.

This concept itself is far from a new one, but I hope my story will resonate for some of you. When you know in your gut that your current course is doomed, gather the courage to combat this fallacy. In my case it was about changing careers, and as our own Gary V writes in Crush It!, there are options aplenty for anyone who can identify their passion. But I think there is also a broader message for entrepreneurs and businesses. If your website doesn’t convert even though you paid some hotshot a lot of money to make it look snazzy, it’s time to fix it. If you are marketing a product that doesn’t make sense for consumers, move on. If your business model is broken, you know deep down that the little tweaks are not the answer. Re-think it or start anew.

What are you invested in that you ought to abandon?