“Big Rocks” and Intentionality
In which Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits meets psychologists’ anti-procrastination advice.
In the era of smartphones, ubiquitous corporate Outlook installations, and David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it becomes easier over time to overlook Stephen Covey’s work. With its vintage 1989 consultant-speak (“Synergize” and “Paradigms,” anyone?) and folksy metaphors (“Sharpening the Saw”), The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and FranklinCovey time-management sometimes seems quaint even to me, a FranklinCovey planner user.But science may now be backing some of Covey’s concepts. Consider a hallmark of Stephen Covey’s time-management system (and the paper-and-pen planners sold by FranklinCovey): the notion of “Big Rocks.” The idea behind the big rocks, as described in First Things First, is a simple metaphor. Think of one week of your life as a jar, the most important things you have to do as big rocks, and all of the minutia and distractions that fill our lives as sand and gravel. If you start with a jar full of sand and gravel, cramming in the big rocks is hard work and you ultimately (so the story goes) can’t fit them all in; if you put the big rocks in first, they all fit--and the sand and gravel fills in easily around them.
In practical terms, Covey and his First Things First co-authors, Roger and Rebecca Merrill, take this metaphor and apply it to weekly planning. They recommend identifying your “big rock” goals for the week in each area of your life; then, before the week begins, schedule them. Some are best left as reminders to work on cultivating a certain behavior or to look for an open opportunity; others can be tasks you commit to complete on a certain day. Crucially, though, one of Covey’s strategies for “putting the big rocks in first” is to schedule them--to literally block out time on the calendar, and to protect that time as if it were any other meeting, date, or appointment.
Mr. Covey and the Merrills would not be surprised to see psychologists offering very similar advice in a December, 2008, Scientific American Mind article [warning: gated]:
Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer of New York University and the University of Konstanz in Germany advises creating “implementation intentions,” which specify where and when you will perform a specific behavior. So rather than setting a vague goal such as “I will get healthy,” set one with its implementation, including timing, built in--say, “I will go to the health club at 7:30 a.m. tomorrow.”I originally read this article on a train trip to visit a friend and see Malcolm Gladwell speak [1] at a Harvard Bookstore event in Boston; at the time, I was considering starting this blog, but (of course), I put it off for another 9 months. Hat tip to Erin Doland at Unclutterer, who blogged the SciAm article in a more timely fashion, and then reminded us about it in a recent “A Year Ago on Unclutterer” post.
Setting such specific prescriptions does appear to inhibit the tendency to procrastinate. In 2008 psychologist Shane Owens and his colleagues at Hofstra University demonstrated that procrastinators who formed implementation intentions were nearly eight times as likely to follow through on a commitment than were those who did not create them. “You have to make a specific commitment to a time and place at which to act beforehand,” Owens says.
As 2010 began, I started an evaluation of my own planning system and how I manage my time, work, and goals. In support of this evaluation, I also reviewed several FranklinCovey publications (part of this review inspired Monday’s post on falsified sources). In the course of this evaluation, it occurred to me that this is an area where I am consistently weak--I’m good at planning my week, but mediocre on following through. And, in fact, I almost always identify my weekly goals as tasks to be checked off, rather than appointments with myself to work on something. I am a habitual list-maker, and enjoy checking things off and seeing finished lists; this habit serves me well, but it may have inadvertently enabled procrastination. Some tasks would be better served appearing as appointments with myself--as implementation intentions, as the psychologists would have it.
If you find yourself habitually neglecting something important, set a specific time and place to get it done; if you keep any kind of calendar or planner, note it there. Since I’m using a tool that is ostensibly designed to be used this way, I will also give it a shot myself. I’ll start next week, in fact--and for once, that’s not the obligatory procrastination joke. No, this time, I am setting an implementation intention--to set implementation intentions.
1 - The final audience question at the Gladwell talk--about applications of his ideas--is actually from me, which won’t surprise readers of this blog. Or anyone who’s known me for more than 10 minutes. [back]
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Friday, January 29, 2010
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Tall Tales in High Achievement
If the advice is so good, why make up research to support it?
I was initially impressed by FranklinCovey’s free "Achieve Your Highest Priorities This Year” webcast in 2008. While consultant Dave Green never missed an opportunity to flog his company’s (not free) training courses, the content of the webcast was inspiring and useful by itself. Green also described the data on which his talk was based, a move I admired--at least, at first:I was teaching in a public course in San Francisco, and a person put their hand up and just asked me an interesting question. We'd been talking about all the challenges to manage your time, and this person said, "Is there really anybody who is really good at time-management?" And I kind of went away from that class thinking about that. Who are the people who are good at time-management, and in particular, what do they do different than the average or the regular person? Over the holidays here, I took a little time, and I called up some people I knew to be good at time-management, some people who are graduates of FranklinCovey work and some people who just do this well, and I just kind of collected the things that they said, and I want to share this with you. Because it turned out there were six things--very clear, identifiable areas where these people, who were just superb at time-management . . . they did these six things better than the average individual.Green’s “six things” align with FranklinCovey's existing teachings and products: using planning tools, knowing the difference between urgent and important, linking values and goals to short-term plans, etc. While slightly suspect, I find nothing particularly wrong with this. It is entirely plausible that Green and his company understand something about time-management, and so we might expect his impromptu study to produce results aligned with FranklinCovey’s offerings.
[edited for length]
But I do have one teensy problem with Green’s study: I doubt that it ever happened. The principal clue is a second “Achieve Your Highest Priorities” webcast, offered in January 2009 (one year after the original), in which Green repeats his description of the alleged study:
I was conducting a seminar about two months ago, down in Silicon Valley, and somebody asked me the question, "Is anyone really good at time-management?" . . . You know, the question kind of rang in my head, and over the holiday here, in the last couple of weeks we had, I took it upon myself to talk to about twenty-five people. Now these are people that I know professionally, some of them I know personally, and the thing about all twenty-five people, is they are great about managing their time. . . . I talked to all of them over the holiday in one way or another; just brief conversations, some of them, others it went on for quite a while. And what I was trying to do was to put together a profile: what do people who are good at time-management do differently, maybe than the rest of us? I'm going to share that with you here as we go through this webcast today, because we found, basically, that there were six things that they do different than the rest of us.Note that Green refers both times to the study taking place over the just-passed holiday season. He refers to the timeframe more than once in each talk, making it seem unlikely to be a slip of the tongue. Maybe he (or someone) did conduct this study in 2007 (or some time). Maybe he even conducted it twice and really came up with the same findings both times. But I doubt it.
[edited for length]
The story, intended to lend credibility to what follows, instead strains credibility to when misused this way. Little canards like this are so common to management consulting--and so transparent--that Fast Company magazine ran a monthly Consultant Debunking Unit column for years, deconstructing the metaphors, sayings, models, and fake statistics employed by management gurus. Even if the study is real, its methodology sound, and its results exactly as described, this lapse makes it sounds like just one more consultant’s tall tale--one more made-up statistic or anecdote.
I actually happened to like the webcasts (including the third, more-revised 2010 version), and wish I could recommend the contents to readers. Instead, I find myself (typically) engaging in hand-waving about the need for scientific support for this kind of material.
When one peddles advice, it should arise organically out of existing research or be supported by data on those who have already tried it. Pretending to have that sort of support is worse than not having it in the first place. It distorts the public understanding of what works, and gives self-improvement and management consulting a bad name when the truth emerges.
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Monday, January 25, 2010
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The Circle of Procrastination
Fighting intransitive preference loops with awareness.
Why do procrastinators always want to delay a task in favor of almost any other activity, yet regret the delay so profoundly when they ultimately face a crushing deadline or fail to achieve another goal? Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D., drawing on the work of Chrisoula Andreou, suggests that intransitive preference structures are at work. He begins explaining the difference between transitive and intransitive preferences:
Transitive preferences we understand best. For example, if among three things, A, B & C, I prefer B over A and C over B, the preferences are transitive if I also prefer C over A. In the case of intransitive preferences, this last condition is not satisfied.Clear enough? If not, consider a more concrete and topical example:
"Acting on Monday would be less preferable to acting on Tuesday ("I'll feel more like it tomorrow"), which would be less preferable to acting on Wednesday which would be less preferable to acting on Thursday, which would be less preferable to acting on the previous Monday" (because we're now too late to get the report done!). This is a common feeling among procrastinators as they make that last-minute effort in the wee hours of Thursday morning.Does that sound familiar? I recognize this pattern in my life.
In this intransitive preference structure, rationality breaks down, but we do not see it because we do not (usually) model our entire week’s preferences at once. Bound to the present, we compare our desire to act on Monday to our desire to act on Tuesday; we fail to compare our desire to act on Monday to our desire to act the day the report is due. Each choice along the way appears to be rational--in many ways, acting on Tuesday can be better than acting on Monday--but we fail to take into account the fact that our preference in the moment forms part of a recursive chain that will loop back around to bite us in the rear.
Andreou recommends taking away moment-by-moment decisions when possible to minimize this pattern--automatic withdrawals from checking to savings accounts to encourage saving, for instance. One challenge Pychyl raises is fittingly recursive: one who will “feel more like saving next month” could just as easily fall into a parallel intransitive loop: “I’ll feel more like setting up the automatic withdrawals next month.”
The core problem, they both seem to agree, has to do with the pressures of dealing with the freedom to choose and to act (a Paradox of Choice approach). Pychyl also suggests that the perpetuation of intransitive preference loops requires self-deception, which suggests a possible cure: self-awareness. In a more recent post, Pychyl calls this a key, simple first step to end procrastination. He suggests empirically testing whether we really do “feel more like doing it tomorrow”:
[W]e can easily test this hypothesis and in doing so potentially challenge one of our irrational thoughts and build some self-awareness of how irrational our task delay is.Of course, one could enter an intransitive preference loop about tackling this act of self-monitoring, but it doesn’t seem to be terribly aversive in and of itself. Do you have a specific goal or area of your life in which you habitually put things off until some later time when you will “feel more like it” or “have more time”? Do you also frequently wish you had started earlier? Then track it, as Dr. Pychyl suggests. If you keep a day planner or journal, you have an ideal place to record your decisions and findings. You could also pencil-in a reminder to do so; if you make and keep to-do lists, the next time you deliberately move something forward, use that as a trigger to check in with yourself about why you’re putting it off and/or whether the new “today” really is any better.
It's simple, isn't it? The next time you put off a task until tomorrow, telling yourself tomorrow (later) is better, then simply note the next day whether you now believe that tomorrow is better. Chances are, it's not. If anything you may feel more guilt and pressure related to the task at hand and yet not have any more motivation to do the task.
This self-observant approach is elegant in terms of its simplicity. You're monitoring your thoughts, feelings and actions so you can "connect the dots." Doing this will build self-awareness and this is the first step in making change in our lives.
By tracking our decisions to delay, we can chart our own intransitive loops and see the irrationality of procrastination for what it is. Awareness may not always be curative, but it’s a good first step.
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Friday, January 22, 2010
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A (clear) mind is a terrible thing to waste
Why tough problems are easier to solve after a break
“Back from a vacation?” asks David Rock at the Psychology Today blog. “Don't waste a precious clear mind.”Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, describes non-linear problem-solving--finding answers in “aha” moments, or flashes of insight. Rock writes, “Research in the lab by Mark Beeman, one of the fathers of neuroscience research into insight, shows that we tend to solve about 60% of problems with the 'aha' phenomenon.” Rock writes about why this pervasive form of problem-solving comes more easily after a break. The ideal break? One in which you haven’t thought about your work for a while--such as a vacation.
The original piece includes further details on research by Beeman, as well as others such as Stellan Ohlsson; here I have excepted some of Rock’s writing on three main themes:
A rested mind isn't stuck in the wrong answersSome Validating (if Anecdotal) Personal Experience
[I]t turns out that the ability to stop oneself from thinking something is central to creativity. For example, if you are trying to solve the 6 letter anagram 'Bmusic' you would have to stop thinking about the word 'music' to get the correct word (which is 'cubism'.) . . . What this means at work is that new answers to tough problems are more likely to emerge into mind when you haven't thought about a problem for a while.
A quiet mind notices subtle signals
Another discovery about insight is that just before the moment when an 'aha' occurs, there tends to be alpha waves in various regions of the brain, connoting the audiory and visual cortices shutting down.
. . .
Beeman says that '...variables that improve the ability to detect weak associations may improve insight solving'. So if we want to solve tough problems, it's useful to tackle things where our mind is quieter, with less overall activation. Like after a vacation.
A happy mind is an open mind
Another study by Subramniam et al in 2009 explored the mechanics involved in how positive mood increases the likelihood of insight, a fact that has been established in other studies since 1987. The findings are that positive emotions open up a broader awareness of internal information, allowing us to access those more subtle signals I mentioned above. This has been recently fleshed in research that shows that our field of vision literally opens up with a positive mood.
One December, I worked on a project that involved recording and editing several macros in Microsoft Excel. I had managed to complete other parts of the project, but was completely stuck on the macros--no amount of re-recording or manually editing the macros yielded the result I needed. No amount of Google magic seemed to produce an answer, either. I could accomplish 70% of what I needed, but there were three failure points--three puzzles that seemed insoluble.
At Christmas, I took an 11-day vacation. The first day back from vacation, I realized how I could accomplish the three nagging, outstanding tasks. And, in fact, all three involved commands and options I already knew how to use. In under an hour (after a long break), I completed what two full days’ of work couldn’t do (before the break).
Can you recall any similar experiences--problems resistant to your best efforts to think through, but that yielded quickly and easily after time away? What you needed was an insight, and you were able to experience one . . . after a break.
Personal Productivity Implications
These findings provide some validation of the work of some of the giants in the field of time-management.
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First , Stephen Covey admonishes readers to take time for rest, rejuvenation, maintenance, and growth (summarized under the folksy phrase, “Take time to sharpen the saw”). This idea is enshrined in the day planners and time-management training of FranklinCovey, the company he cofounded.
Rock’s article also suggests benefits that might accrue to practitioners of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. Allen repeatedly stresses the importance of maintaining a clear mind and clear physical spaces; much of his system is geared around externalizing to-do’s and unmade decisions by writing things down and organizing them appropriately. Allen often claims that this creates clear mental space, which leads to better in-the-moment decisions about what to do. Indeed, if Beeman, Ohlsson, and Subramniam’s work is correct, Allen may be on to something.
While a vacation may be the best way to gain an insight advantage, on a day-to-day basis keeping your mental house in order might yield similar if smaller benefits. Externalize notes and reminders into appropriate files, lists, or calendars to keep your head clear; take regular time to rest and to engage with non-work-related matters. Clear your mind to make room for insight.
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Monday, January 18, 2010
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Time flies (especially when we don’t act).
There is never enough time to do what you don’t do.
From Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain (hat tip: Deric Bownds’ MindBlog):That most alarming New Year’s morning question--“Uh-oh, what did I do last night?”--can seem benign compared with those that may come later, like “Uh, what exactly did I do with the last year?”In addition to the usual observations--time spent in boredom passes slowly, while time spent in engaging work passes more quickly--Carey recounts research findings about interesting distortions that plague our sense of time's passage. Emotional or otherwise significant events seem more recent than they were, for instance. But such events seem more distant with the recollection of later, related developments. So, to use an example from Carey's article, people will underestimate how long ago Ben Bernanke was appointed Federal Reserve chairman, unless they recall details of his economic interventions in the months since.
Or, “Hold on--did a decade just go by?”
It did. Somewhere between trigonometry and colonoscopy, someone must have hit the fast-forward button. Time may march, or ebb, or sift, or creep, but in early January it feels as if it has bolted like an angry dinner guest, leaving conversations unfinished, relationships still stuck, bad habits unbroken, goals unachieved.
“I think for many people, we think about our goals, and if nothing much has happened with those then suddenly it seems like it was just yesterday that we set them,” said Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business.
Yet the sensation of passing time can be very different, Dr. Zauberman said, “depending on what you think about, and how.”
What are the practical implications of this?
[T]he research suggests that the brain has more control over its own perception of passing time than people may know. For example, many people have the defeated sense that it was just yesterday that they made last year’s resolutions; the year snapped shut, and they didn’t start writing that novel or attend even one Pilates class. But it is precisely because they didn’t act on their plan that the time seemed to have flown away.In other words, the common feelings that time is getting away from us is a relative perception. As Carlin Flora wrote in a December Psychology Today article (previously blogged here), “One of time's paradoxical qualities is that packing more into your schedule can make you perceive that it's expanding, not closing in on you.” To avoid the feeling that you have no time for your goals, you need to make time to work on them.
Of course, this strategy begs an obvious question: Aren’t we talking about perceptions of our time, not actual time? “I don’t need to feel like I have time to work on my resolutions,” you might protest, “I need more time to work on them.”
I would argue that perception is a key piece of the motivational puzzle. If you look back at a year and see that the time flew by and you accomplished little, what attitude will you carry forward into the new year? Will you set lots of challenging, meaningful goals? Will you pursue then with vigor, fully believing in your ability to attain them? Or will you feel overwhelmed and, viewing time as your enemy, reduce your expectations and avoid setting out towards new goals? I suspect the latter--and, moreover, that you may become one of those cynical hipsters who doesn’t see the point of goals or resolutions or any of that self-improvement crap. While you may actually need more time, it is also possible that the feeling of needing more time may be a red herring, brought on by the fact that you haven’t made any progress in the goal’s domain.
What do you do if you just had one of those years--the year just “snapped shut” and you made no progress? In that case, look back with a mind towards what you did do:
By contrast, the new research suggests, focusing instead on goals or challenges that were in fact engaged during the year--whether or not they were labeled as “resolutions”--gives the brain the opportunity to fill out the past year with memories, and perceived time.It seems that you can retroactively create the sense of a full year. As Gal Zauberman points out, above, “what you think about, and how” affects your perception of the passage of time. If you want to feel better about the year just passed, focus on what you did accomplish. If you feel like you don’t have time to tackle a goal or make an important change, start acting on it anyway. Doing the thing you’re sure you don’t have time for may be the secret to feeling like (and realizing that) you do.
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Friday, January 15, 2010
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Lines Down the Highway
Barry Schwartz on the Freedom of Constraint
Some high-profile blogs have recently addressed how the Paradox of Choice may not be so paradoxical after all, or (more significantly) how it might not be as robust an effect as Schwartz argues. I haven't had a chance to deeply assess their arguments or re-read the book itself, but I did want to share the following essay, written for an earlier iteration of Higher Process. I still find the basic premises of Paradox compelling, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise.Ignore for the moment the Orwellian overtones of the subtitle, and ponder this: do unlimited options truly make us free? Or do options--a dozen choices of cancer treatments, or a thousand song options on your iPhone--actually carry hidden penalties? Could wrestling with the limitless options within trivial choices ("Easy fit, relaxed fit, or baggy jeans?", "Chocolate or vanilla?", “Justin Timberlake, or the Spice Girls?”) drain time and attention needed for truly important choices?
[Not that the choices involving the Spice Girls are ever trivial.]
“We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them,” argues psychologist Barry Schwartz. In The Paradox of Choice, he explores our modern abundance of options, and suggests that the explosion of choices we “get” to make has negative as well as positive consequences. Our default ways of dealing with decisions are tuned to an earlier era’s more limited palette. The increasing number and complexity of decisions causes anxiety, drains satisfaction, and subtly influences our preferences. According to Schwartz, the opportunities afforded by limitless choice demand new thinking about choice itself.
That new thinking challenges us, habituated as we are to see options as inherently good. Thus, Schwartz chooses his words carefully: certain voluntary constraints. If he advocates only “certain” constraints, it follows that not all constraints are good. Nor are all effects of added choices bad--Paradox is not a paean to tyranny and limitation. “Voluntary” is even more important. Rather than returning to a world in which authorities and environments dictate our jobs, marriage partners, menus, dress, and pastimes, Schwartz actually encourages a further exercise of freedom: the freedom to choose, at least sometimes, not to choose. To decide when good enough is good enough, in other words, in order to free up the time and attention needed to get the big things right. Constraints, in short, aren't shackles. (Except when they are.)
He also points out that constraints already serve us well:
As the number of choices we face increases, freedom of choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice. Routine decisions take so much time and attention that it becomes difficult to get through the day. In circumstances like this, we should learn to view limits on the possibilities we face as liberating not constraining. Society provides rules, standards, and norms for making choices, and individual experience creates habits. By deciding to follow a rule . . . we avoid having to make a deliberate decision again and again. This kind of rule-following frees up time and attention that can be devoted to thinking about choices and decisions to which rules don’t apply.
Other experts on time and attention affirm constraint’s value. In Ready For Anything, personal productivity guru David Allen writes:
We don't feel constrained by the limitations that really work for us. We're grateful for the lines down the middle of the road--they give us the freedom to get places fast with a minimum of stress and risk. Effective forms don't take space--they create it.
The lines down the highway, and related "traffic constraints" make a great examples, even though they are compulsory (more or less). As a society, this is one area in which we decided--unlike the cuts of jeans, the colors of house paint, and the number of programs of study offered in our universities--to strictly limit options. In exchange, we earn the freedom to travel wherever our resources will take us, in relative safety, with fewer nagging decisions to make along the way. Time and attention are freed from driving up to focus on more important matters, such as checking e-mail on an iPhone, or singing along with the Spice Girls' Greatest Hits at the top of one's lungs.
And--all kidding aside--that freed time and attention, I believe, is better than the complete "freedom" afforded by roads with no rules, or other situations with unlimited options.
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Monday, January 11, 2010
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Taking advice is easy (when the problem is hard)
Advice is cheap, but we still often undervalue it.
Ben Casnocha (hat tip: himself and Tyler Cowen) summarized a Harvard Business Review article by Francesca Gino thusly:The HBR article describes, in part, research that Gino published in The Journal of Behavioral Decision Making in 2007. From the introduction:
- People tend to overvalue advice when the problem they’re addressing is hard.
- People tend to undervalue it when the problem is easy.
- People to overvalue advice that they pay for.
Previous research has generally found that people underweight advice (Yaniv & Kleinberger, 2000; Yaniv, 2004a). When people’s own guesses are equally informative as is the advice they receive (and so should each be weighed 50%), research shows that advice commonly weighs around 20% and 30% in the final judgment (Harvey & Fischer, 1997).The studies conducted for the paper involved a weight-guessing task; subjects were asked to judge the weight of people based on a photograph. Some photos were clear (an “easy” condition), while others were blurred (a “difficult” condition). Each subject was asked to independently guess each target’s weight and to rate their confidence in the guess; next, they received advice (in the form of another participant’s guess) and were allowed to make a second guess.
These laboratory findings appear to be at odds with other evidence suggesting that, at least in some situations, people listen to advice too much. For instance, when it comes to selecting investments, the evidence shows that people pay too much attention and too many fees to money managers who recommend investments (Bogle, 1999). In truth, it is difficult to predict movements in the stock market (Malkiel, 2003). Investors who pay for the advice of money managers by investing in actively managed mutual funds have consistently underperformed investors who simply purchase broad stock indexes that track the overall market (Bazerman, 2001). Corporations, for their part, spend substantial amounts of money hiring management consultants to provide advice on their complex business problems, despite a shortage of evidence that consultants’ advice has value (Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1996).
The study found that subjects were less apt to use the advice in the easy condition, and consequently subjects moved further from an equally-weighted “averaging” strategy. In the difficult condition, subjects gave the advice significantly more weight, coming up with guessed that were slightly more weighted towards the advice than towards their own original guess. According to Gino, straight averaging would have helped: “They would have done better if they’d considered the advice equally, and to a moderate degree, on both hard and easy tasks.”
The results illustrate a bias for ignoring advice on the easy task, but I question the conclusion that subjects overvalued advice in the difficult task. Gino notes in the paper that in the initial study, the difference between the ideal weighting of advice (a 50/50 split with one’s initial guess) and the actual weighting was not statistically significant. In a second study (in which subjects chose whether to receive advice), the difference between ideal and the actual weighting of advice was only statistically significant at the 10% level (a 5% level is a more common delineation in social and behavioral sciences). Gino found a difference of 52% versus 50% in the first study, and 54% versus 50% in the second study. Such measured differences will often have practical significance in the real world, but it’s also easy to imagine that these differences could be due to chance. In other words, it appears that we cannot necessarily support the conclusion that, “People tend to overvalue advice when the problem they’re addressing is hard”--they appear to overvalue the advice, but only slightly, and not always by a statistically significant amount.
That said, there is evidence for a bias against taking advice on easy problems--which itself may pose a problem. As Gino writes in HBR, “You may know a lot about the problem, but that doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from the opinions of others who know a lot, too.” Depending on one’s life experience, many problems might appear so easy that seeking or taking advice seems unnecessary; still, some thoughtful and well-placed advice might make an “easy” problem even easier. That said, there is so much advice available on time, money, relationships, work, fitness, and health that not all of it could merit equal weight. So how do we tell when we actually need advice, and how much weight should we give it? Gino makes some suggestions for intelligently weighing it. I blogged last month about some cues for assessing, without scientific training, the potential value of advice. I am still looking for smarter heuristics that make it easy to tell the difference.
Of course, if it’s easy to tell the difference, you will be less likely to accept my advice about how to do so, even if I’m right.
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Friday, January 8, 2010
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Time Management versus Time Orientation
How you manage time may be secondary to how you experience time.
Philip Zimbardo, more famously known for his Standford Prison Experiment and PBS series, Discovering Psychology, also studies the human experience of time. However, according to Carlin Flora in the Psychology Today article Timely Makeover, Zimbardo is not a fan of time-management per se:The proliferation of time-management books makes Zimbardo cringe, and not just because it’s emblematic of a cultural push for future-thinking. He suspects that the only people who buy them are highly future-oriented people--who should be out increasing their present-hedonistic tendencies instead.As one might imagine, I am very interested in what the eminent Dr. Zimbardo has to say about time-management (though, as one might also imagine, I am not inclined to toss out my suite of time-management books). For readers not familiar with Dr. Zimbardo’s work, let’s take a step back and define “future-oriented people” and “present-hedonistic tendencies.”
Zimbardo describes several time-orientations or time-perspectives in his book, The Time Paradox (the basis for the PT article quoted above). People in the western world generally have some combination of the following six. Using my summaries on Zimbardo’s titles, they are:
- Past-Negative: Focused on the past, characterized by regret and rumination.
- Past-Positive: Focused on the past, characterized by nostalgia and fondness.
- Present-Hedonistic: Focused on the present and its immediate pleasures and opportunities.
- Present-Fatalistic: Focused on the present, but with a passive acceptance; believes little can be done to impact well-being or circumstances.
- Future: Focused on the future--planning, expecting, imagining, and acting in the present to serve that future.
- Transcendental-Future: Focused on a future beyond death that includes a spiritual afterlife.
That said, there is a particular balance among them that Zimbardo has found to be the healthiest. Flora described this ideal balance:
People who are high in past-positive orientation, moderately high in future, moderately high in present-hedonistic, low in past-negative, and low in present-fatalistic time perspective are happier, healthier, and more successful than people with other time perspectives.So, assuming that’s true, how do we know if we have the right mix, and how do we get there if we do not?
. . .
Those with a winning blend of perspectives have hope for the future, feel securely rooted in the past, and are energetic and joyful about being alive in the present.
Figure Out Where You Are
Zimbardo developed a psychological instrument to measure an individual’s time perspectives; the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory is available for free at the official Time Paradox website (and is included in the book). This 60-item questionnaire will provide a reading on where you stand on the various time orientations.
Get Where You Want to Go
The second page of the Timely Makeover article quoted above offers three tips for cultivating each of the three time perspectives that make up the ideal mix. Some strike me as slightly dubious; to cultivate present-hedonistic orientation, Flora suggests, ”Don’t wear a watch.” In the age of ubiquitous mobile phones, I believe watches are becoming an anachronism. Still, most of the tips seem solid and should serve as a good starting point for creating other ways to shift your perspective.
Further Exploration
Of course, if the article, the ZPTI questionnaire, or this blog post leave you wanting to know more, then I recommend The Time Paradox itself. I read it with great interest last year before starting this blog. While I don’t wholly agree with Zimbardo’s distaste for time-management, I do find it interesting that elements of his “ideal mix” show up in many of my favorite books in the genre. Stephen Covey and the Merrills write extensively in First Things First on the topic of enjoying the precious present moments that won’t come again. David Allen waxes poetic in Ready for Anything about how his lists, organization, and careful planning (hallmarks of a strongly future-oriented perspective) allow him to be more present and to spontaneously walk away from his work to do something inspired and pleasurable, like work on his garden.
So if you find you have time-management more or less under control but aren’t feeling the satisfaction you expected to, then Zimbardo may be right; think about nurturing warm recollections or unleashing your inner hedonist.
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Monday, January 4, 2010
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Resolve to Make Fewer Resolutions
Why when it comes to goals, the fewer you make the better your odds
Leo Babauta’s 6 Changes website recommends that we pick a half-dozen or fewer goals for 2010 and work on them one at a time (rather than starting them all at the stroke of midnight on January 1). You can resolve to quit smoking, lose weight, and save more money in one year; however, Babauta recommends doing each individually for a solid two months so that the habit has time to form.This sounds reasonable, but is there psychological research backing Babauta’s strategy?
The Science Behind Failed Resolutions
Blame It on the Brain, writes Jonah Lehr for the Wall Street Journal (hat tip: Marginal Revolution):
Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it's an extremely limited mental resource.How limited is the will when it comes to multiple goals? Lehr mentions a pair of studies that found that relatively trivial cognitive strains caused participants to give in to temptation more readily. These tasks included such things as memorizing a 7-digit sequence of numbers or walking down a busy street. If such small cognitive loads have this effect, surely stacking multiple behavior-change goals will short-circuit the brain.
Given its limitations, New Year's resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the entire year. Human routines are stubborn things, which helps explain why 88% of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. Bad habits are hard to break—and they're impossible to break if we try to break them all at once.
. . .
The brain area largely responsible for willpower, the prefrontal cortex, is located just behind the forehead. While this bit of tissue has greatly expanded during human evolution, it probably hasn't expanded enough. That's because the prefrontal cortex has many other things to worry about besides New Year's resolutions. For instance, scientists have discovered that this chunk of cortex is also in charge of keeping us focused, handling short-term memory and solving abstract problems. Asking it to lose weight is often asking it to do one thing too many.
What about people who set and achieve many goals?
Do you know anyone who seems to set and achieve a large number of goals each year, or who cleaned up multiple areas of their life at once? In 2008, PsychCentral blogged about research that acknowledges such individuals. Does the evidence suggest that we should emulate their goal-promiscuity?
[Researchers Mukhopadhyay and Johar] found that people who believe that self-control is something dynamic, changing and unlimited (e.g., “I can stop smoking, all I have to do is put my mind to it. I can also change my eating and be a better person, it just takes willpower.”) tend to set more resolutions.This claim inserts a causal link into a correlation (if not into a spurious correlation). Those with high self-efficacy both set more goals and achieve more goals; this does not suggest that setting more goals raises self-efficacy and/or increases the odds of achievement. Self-efficacy itself (or being good at achieving goals) may be the cause of the large number of goals these individuals set; trying to reverse such a causal chain by setting too many goals may strain limited time and cognitive resources, leading to failure.
. . .
As the researchers summarized, individuals with high self-efficacy attribute failure to insufficient effort, while individuals with low self-efficacy attribute failure to deficient ability. Higher self-efficacy generally is correlated with a greater likelihood of achieving one’s goals.
The investigators also found that if you are made to believe that self-control is a fixed or limited resource that you can’t change, you will also set fewer goals and will give up on them sooner, regardless of your level of self-efficacy.
. . . [I]t also seems to help to set more goals, because you will be more likely to succeed at them if you do (people who set fewer goals seem to often go into the exercise with the self-fulfilling expectation of failing).
If you do set several goals or resolutions each year and succeed in most or all of them, keep doing what you are doing. If you struggle to hold resolutions longer than your New Year’s Day hangover, try taking them one at a time. You have nothing to lose; 100% success on one resolution is better than failing at five, three, or even two.
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Friday, January 1, 2010
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