Case Study 1 — Chapter 13: Self-Regulation

Jordan: The Eleven-Minute Problem

Background

Jordan has made progress. Over the past several weeks, working through the Part 2 material with Dev, he has mapped his Big Five profile, named his identity foreclosure, recognized his impostor attribution pattern, clarified his core values, and submitted a proposal draft that his manager received warmly. He is, by most measures, in a better place than he was two months ago.

And yet. The proposal revision — now expanded into something resembling a full strategic initiative — sits largely unfinished. Jordan knows what he wants to say. He has notes. He has a rough structure. He has carved out the time. The problem is not clarity or motivation or even confidence. It is focus.

The eleven-minute problem is back.

The Pattern

Jordan's work schedule has what looks like protected time: 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. most days, before the meetings begin. He arrives at his desk with coffee and the best of intentions. He opens the proposal document. Then — gradually, without quite deciding to — he is elsewhere.

He checks Slack. He refreshes his inbox. He reads an article about a marketing conference he may or may not attend. He scrolls back through old notes to find a reference he doesn't strictly need yet. He composes a reply to an email that could wait until afternoon.

If he were tracking — he is not — the proposal itself would receive perhaps eleven minutes of actual writing in a ninety-minute window.

Jordan notices this happening, and his response to noticing is familiar: self-criticism. I can't focus. I'm not built for deep work. I'm wasting the best hours of the day. The self-criticism does not help him refocus. It adds emotional weight — mild shame, mild anxiety — which makes the proposal feel worse to return to than the emails did.

He mentions this to Dev during their next conversation. "I have the time," he says. "I just don't use it."

Dev's response: "What does the proposal feel like when you sit down to work on it?"

Jordan pauses. "Like something could go wrong," he says finally. "Like whatever I write isn't going to be good enough."

Dev nods. "So the avoidance isn't because you don't care. It's because you care too much and the task feels uncertain. Your brain is running a risk calculation every time you open that document — and deciding that email is safer."

The Dual-Process Analysis

Dev walks Jordan through the chapter's dual-process framework. System 1 — fast, automatic, pattern-matching — has learned that the proposal is anxiety-associated. Every time Jordan opens the document and feels a pulse of uncertainty, System 1 files a record: this stimulus produces discomfort. Over time, the avoidance becomes the automatic response. Opening the email tab feels like relief. The escape is not a failure of motivation; it is System 1 doing exactly what it is designed to do — minimizing aversive states.

System 2 — deliberate, effortful — knows perfectly well that Jordan should be working on the proposal. But System 2 is slow, expensive, and easily overridden when System 1 has a strong incumbent pattern. The knowledge that he should focus does not override the automatic pull toward easier tasks. Knowing is not enough.

"The problem," Dev says, "is not that you need more willpower. The problem is that you're relying on System 2 to override a System 1 pattern that regenerates every morning. You're draining your executive function before lunch."

This reframe matters to Jordan. He had been treating the eleven-minute problem as a character flaw — evidence of insufficient discipline. Seeing it as a System 1 avoidance pattern — learned, predictable, and responsive to design — opens different solutions.

Implementation Intentions

Jordan identifies the specific moment where the pattern breaks down: the transition between opening his laptop and opening the proposal document. That gap — perhaps thirty seconds — is where the avoidance begins. His hand moves to Slack before he has consciously decided to.

He writes two implementation intentions:

Intention 1 (Action): "When I sit down at my desk at 9:00 a.m. and open my laptop, I will open the proposal document as the first tab — before Slack, before email, before anything else."

Intention 2 (Defensive): "When I feel the urge to check email or Slack during the first forty-five minutes of desk time, I will write one more sentence in the proposal first."

He tests both for a week. The first one works reliably. The physical act of opening the document before anything else changes the sequence — instead of arriving at the proposal after twenty minutes of Slack, he arrives at it fresh. The second intention works about half the time. The other half, the urge is strong enough that he checks Slack anyway, and then writes a sentence, and then checks again.

Jordan notes this in his tracking: the defensive intention needs a smaller minimum. He revises: "I will write one more word before checking Slack." One word is low enough to always do. And one word usually becomes a sentence. And a sentence usually becomes a paragraph.

Environment Design

Dev suggests a structural change: close the Slack desktop app during the morning block. Not mute — close. The distinction matters. Muted notifications can be unmuted. A closed application requires a deliberate re-opening — a small friction that is often sufficient to interrupt the automatic impulse.

Jordan is resistant at first. "What if something urgent comes in?"

Dev asks: "In the last three months, how many 9 a.m. Slack messages were actually urgent?"

Jordan thinks. "Maybe two. Both of which the person followed up with a phone call."

"So you're keeping Slack open to catch two events in three months — and it's costing you focused work every morning."

Jordan closes the app during his morning block for one week. The result is notable: he does not miss anything urgent. He does produce substantially more writing. The environment change removes the stimulus (unread notification badge), which removes the automatic pull. System 1 is not being overridden; it simply does not have a cue to respond to.

He adds a second change: he puts his phone in his jacket pocket across the room. Again, not eliminated — accessible in thirty seconds — but the small friction is enough to interrupt the automatic reach.

The Attention Cooling Piece

What the implementation intentions and environment changes do not address is the underlying source of avoidance: the proposal feels anxiety-laden. Jordan can sit in front of it for the full forty-five minutes and still spend much of it staring, writing two sentences, deleting them, and writing them again.

He revisits Mischel's attention cooling concept. The marshmallow study finding — that success came from mentally stepping back from the temptation's immediate pull — applies here in an inverted form. The temptation is not the marshmallow; it is the email. But the principle translates: what makes the alternative (avoidance) more attractive is that Jordan is "heating" the proposal — attending to it as a high-stakes, high-uncertainty, possibly-inadequate-at-every-turn object.

What if he cooled it instead?

He tries a reframe that Dev suggests: instead of thinking about the proposal as "a document that represents my strategic thinking and will influence whether this initiative gets funded," he thinks about it as "a draft. A working document. A rough version for a Friday conversation."

This is not denial. The real stakes are the same. But the attentional frame changes: from performing expertise to thinking on paper. From product to process. The anxiety does not vanish, but it attenuates enough that the task becomes returnable.

He also begins treating the first fifteen minutes of each session as "notes-only" — no pressure to write in finished sentences, just rough thinking. The notes become the material from which sentences emerge. The revision feels less precious because the draft itself is acknowledged as imperfect from the start.

The Pause

One afternoon, Jordan is mid-sentence in the proposal when his phone buzzes with a message from Priya, a colleague, about a minor scheduling question. He feels the familiar pull — the urge to pick up the phone and respond.

He pauses. Notices the impulse. Asks himself: Is this what I actually want to do right now?

He puts the phone face-down and finishes the paragraph.

The response to Priya takes ninety seconds when he gets to it at 11:00 a.m. The paragraph he wrote would have been lost. The exchange took twelve seconds to interrupt.

Jordan notes this in his journal later: "The pause doesn't feel heroic. It just feels like noticing what I'm about to do and checking if I mean it." This is what Dr. Reyes calls the "response gap" — the space between impulse and action. Jordan is beginning to reliably find it.

The Shape of Progress

Four weeks after beginning the implementation intentions and environment changes, Jordan's morning proposal sessions look meaningfully different. He is producing, on average, 500–800 focused words per session — not always good words, not always the right words, but working material. The eleven minutes has expanded to something closer to thirty-five.

He has not solved the underlying anxiety about the proposal's quality. He still deletes paragraphs. He still experiences the fear that the initiative will be judged as naive or undercooked. But he has decoupled the anxiety from the avoidance — he can feel uncertain and still return to the page, which is precisely what effective self-regulation makes possible.

The proposal is, according to his manager, "the most substantive strategic thinking you've given me in three years."

Jordan files this compliment alongside the old impostor instinct to discount it. He lets it land for a moment before moving on.

Analysis Questions

Jordan's eleven-minute problem is attributed to System 1 avoidance rather than insufficient willpower. What evidence in the case study supports this diagnosis? What would a pure "willpower deficit" explanation predict, and how does the evidence contradict it?
Jordan's first implementation intention works reliably; his second works only about half the time. He revises the threshold downward ("one word" instead of "one sentence"). What principle from the chapter's discussion of implementation intentions does this revision reflect?
The environment changes (closing Slack, removing phone) work by removing cues rather than by building resistance to those cues. What does this suggest about where self-regulation effort is best invested — in strengthening resistance or in restructuring the environment?
Jordan uses an attention "cooling" strategy to reduce the proposal's emotional weight. Is this the same as lowering his standards or deceiving himself about the stakes? How does the chapter distinguish effective reframing from denial?
Jordan describes the pause as "noticing what I'm about to do and checking if I mean it." How does this connect to the concept of the response gap? What conditions made developing this pause possible in this context?