Higher Process

Memory versus Willpower

2010-03-08T10:41:00.001-06:00

Strong intentions are no match for appropriately-placed reminders

Strong willpower can be undone by weaker memory, according to counselor and author Meg Selig. She recounts how these two forces clashed when she recently thought of an important task while driving home:

But I had to hold that thought in my head for 20 minutes. I can't always remember why I went into the kitchen. What chance did this thought have? Without my to-do list at hand, I was virtually helpless. If I weren't en route, I could call and leave a message for myself--a favorite tactic--but after those statistics comparing cell phone use to drunk driving, no more cell calls from my car. Was I doomed to forget what I wanted to remember?

I decided to use a favorite tool from my mental toolkit--behavior rehearsal. I imagined myself arriving at home, throwing down my purse and pack, walking into the kitchen, and picking up the phone to call Linda.

It didn’t exactly work out that way; the radio and the drive overwhelmed Selig’s rehearsals. Upon arriving home, she fell into her routine and forgot the call for several hours.

Even though her technique failed her in this case, other experts also recommend it. Her description reminds me of the implementation intentions described by Selig’s fellow Psychology Today blogger, Timothy Pychyl, in a January post:

An implementation intention supports this goal intention by setting out in advance when/where and how I will achieve this goal. In this case, it might be "When I put the toothpaste on my toothbrush in the evening (something which is a habit for me), I will then stop and get out the floss first." Essentially what I've done in making this implementation intention is to put the cue for behavior (putting the paste on my toothbrush) into the environment, so it serves as a stimulus for my behavior. I don't have to think about or remind myself about my goal. The moment I put the paste on my brush, my behavior is cued. In time, this should become as automatic as my teeth brushing is already.

So why did Selig’s intentions fail her that day in the car? And why, generally, are we bad at following through on our ideas of what we should, could, or might want to do? Selig says that the problem is limited memory and attention:

As I define it in my book, Changepower, pure willpower is "using only the thought of your motivators to guide your behavior." In this case, my motivator--friendship--was a strong one. My goal was clear--set up a lunch date. No latent or unconscious motivators were involved. I used as many mental tricks as I could to emblazon the intended task into my brain. Both the spirit and the flesh were willing, but the memory was weak.

Psychologist Walter Mischel, he of the famous marshmallow experiments, believes that the crucial skill in developing strong self-control (willpower) is the "strategic allocation of attention." In this view, willpower is like a spotlight. To increase your willpower, deliberately focus the spotlight of your attention on whatever will help you reach your goal.

Attention is the key to willpower, but attention is limited. Memory can bring attention back to the goal--Selig eventually remembered to call her friend--but it is fallible. It doesn’t matter how badly you need or want to do something if you don’t remember it when and where you can do something about it.

All of which strikes me as a good argument in favor of solid time-management tools. For instance, FranklinCovey’s time-management trainers recommend carrying you day planner (or at least a mobile component of your planning system) nearly everywhere; reminders of your “highest priorities” are always at hand, and you can capture incoming information and organize it so that it can be found when it’s needed again. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, repeatedly emphasizes that the mind is for having ideas, not holding them. Allen says the mind does a terrible job of reminding you of what you need to do precisely when and where you need that information. Like FranklinCovey, Allen recommends having what he calls a “ubiquitous capture” tool at hand to collect new ideas and tasks wherever they occur, and that time-management tools must allow you to review lists of reminders when and where you can actually act on them.

Similar to Selig and Mischel, David Allen and FranklinCovey understand that the key human failure isn’t always the will. When choosing a new time-management tool or evaluating a new technique, remember that the best are built to compensate not for the failings of willpower, but of memory and attention.

Zero-Tolerance For Multitasking

2010-03-05T10:26:00.002-06:00

Why we multitask, why it’s a bad idea, and how far one man will go to stop it.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a David Glenn article entitled Divided Attention (hat tip: Freakonomics blog). Glenn recounts findings that chronic multitaskers--those who believe they are a good at multitasking--actually perform worse than habitual singletaskers when dividing their attention. I had heard this from various news outlets last year, but I was still surprised to learn how seriously some of the researchers have taken their findings.

Extreme Singletasking

Whatever you think of the research by University of Michigan psychologist David E. Meyer, you have to admire his commitment:

"I don't want to see students with their computers out, because you know they're surfing the Web. I don't want to see them taking notes. I want to see them paying attention to me."

Wait a minute. No notes? Does that include pen-and-paper note-taking?

"Yes, I don't want that going on either," Meyer says. "I think with the media that are now available, it makes more sense for the professor to distribute the material that seems absolutely crucial either after the fact or before the fact. Or you can record the lecture and make that available for the students to review.”

Other researchers quoted in the article, including Stanford psychology professor Clifford I. Nass, still permit laptops. But why, if they are so clearly distracting?

Technological progress?

Many sources of the worries of these researchers arise from technology. A cellular phone in an automobile may draw a driver’s attention from the road. Facebook, computer games, and web-surfing may draw a laptop-toting student's attention away from the lecture.

And yet, technology also empowers us to use our attention more judiciously. For touch-typists, properly-used laptops might yield more complete notes than pen and paper, while diverting less attention away from the lecturer. Meyer also mentions recording lectures and making them available for students to review. I’ve only had a single professor record and podcast his lectures, but it made a world of difference when test time arrived (and allowed me to be more relaxed in my note-taking).

Technology is not an attention-management problem, per se. Even Meyer admits that when he mentions recording lectures. And yet, he banishes students’ electronics from the classroom. Why is Meyer so opposed to multitasking that he bans even note-taking, its most venerable academic form?

Switching Time

In Glenn’s article, Meyer offers an example of the problem, albeit on a small scale:

He might, for example, ask students to recite the letters A through J as fast as possible, and then the numbers 1 through 10. Each of those tasks typically takes around two seconds. Then he asks them to interweave the two recitations as fast as they can: "A, 1, B, 2," and so on. Does that take four seconds? No, it typically requires 15 to 20 seconds, and even then many students make mistakes.

"This is because there is a switching time cost whenever the subject shifts from the letter-recitation task to the number-recitation task, or vice versa," Meyer says.

Two tasks that each take 2 seconds when done alone take 15 to 20 seconds when done in tandem. That’s about four to five times as long as it would take to do them serially. I couldn’t find a ready reference about whether or not these numbers scale, but they are quite damning if they do. If you could plan a vacation or write a report in an hour, then you could do both--each in turn--in a couple of hours. If, out of boredom or lack of focus you start switching frequently between the two, it could mean a whole afternoon spent on what could have been done by 2:00 PM.

So why do we do it?

With all this evidence arrayed against multitasking, why do we do it? Why do we let distracting second and third tasks crowd our strained attention?

Near the end of David Glenn’s article, Nass supplies a compelling explanation:

"I don't think that law students in classrooms are sitting there thinking, Boy, I'd rather play Freecell than learn the law," Nass says. "I don't think that's the case. What happens is that there's a moment that comes when you say, Boy, I can do something really easy, or I can do something really hard."

Much like what Timothy Pychyl says about procrastinators, when faced with odious tasks, multitaskers “give in to feel good.” The solution might be to change the context--as Merlin Mann says, make sure the right thing to do is the easy thing to do. Meyer’s solution--to take away all student distractions--might not be so extreme, after all.

Extreme Visualization

2010-03-01T10:55:00.001-06:00

How both proponents and detractors of visualization go too far

In the continuum of pop psychology advice, somewhere between goal-setting and meditation lies the technique known as visualization, the practice of vividly imagining a goal or behavior. Authors from Jack Canfield to Stephen Covey to Rhonda Byrne encourage us to employ our imagination and focus our thoughts on what we want to create in the world.

This process is sometimes described as harnessing seemingly supernatural powers (witness Byrne’s characterization of it in The Secret), which may lead skeptics to discount the entire practice. However, there is some evidence that visualization--at least in some forms--holds real value. Such is the basis for Matthew Hutson’s Mind Your Body: Going Through the Motions, an article on PsychologyToday.com:

In one study at Texas A and M, medical students learning venipuncture received 30 minutes of guided physical practice followed by either 30 more minutes of practice, 30 minutes of guided mental imagery, or no more training. When tested, the first two groups performed better than the third, and just as well as each other. The same effect was seen in students learning to suture.

Mental rehearsal can be even better than physical practice because it activates more abstract neural representations of physical skills (with less specific detail about the muscles used), reports Erica Wohldmann, a psychologist at California State University Northridge. If you physically practice your tennis backhand with a coach, and then practice it incorrectly on your own, rehearsing the wrong movements could hinder relearning the right technique later.

Mentally practicing a clumsy backhand is not muscularly detailed enough to hurt your swing. It is detailed enough to prevent forgetting what you've already learned, though.

Hutson never mentions the v-word, but this mental rehearsal is very much of a piece with the kind of visualization discussed by Stephen Covey in The The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, in which he encourages readers to relax and vividly imagine a scenario and how they would respond to it, and to replay it in their minds over and over again until it becomes their natural response. It bears mentioning that this is not the same as the “thoughts become things” visualization taught by The Secret. In Byrne’s film, footage of astronauts and athletes appears with a voiceover describing exactly the sort of mental practice Hutson discussed. However, The Secret prescribes this technique not only (or even primarily) to become better at something, but as a way to get anything one desires; prominent examples include visualizing dream homes and new cars. The process of visualization, according to the “teachers” in The Secret, activates the “Law of Attraction” and automatically draws desired things to us.

Purveyors of the “Law of Attraction” blur the lines between visualization as a mundane mental process and visualization as a supernatural force, but they are not alone. Bob Waldrep makes this very leap in an Apologetics.org essay entitled The Shifting Paradigms of Stephen Covey. Waldrep doesn’t come right out and say “visualization is witchcraft!” but I am struck by how little his argument would change if he did. Waldrep seems to feel that the inclusion of visualization in The 7 Habits, given the fact that visualization appears in a variety of New Age and occult teachings, automatically puts The 7 Habits on a dangerous occult footing. To be fair, Waldrep cites a number of other ties between Covey’s material and the New Age movement. Still, the examples I remember most vividly from Covey’s book involve visualizing reacting with patience and love to a child’s misbehavior, or helping his son visualize plays before college football games. In other words, Covey encourages behavioral rehearsals, exactly the sort of visualization supported--at least tentatively--by research. Focusing self-centered or materialistic goals may be un-Christian, but I would be shocked to learn that this sort of mental rehearsal conflicts with mainstream (or even most fringe) Christian doctrine.

Assuming that you are open to the possibility that mental imagery works, and pretty sure (as I am) that it is not the work of The Devil, how can you put this process to work for you? Hutson advises making the mental practice as vivid and detailed as possible. He also recommends slowing a process down in your mind if you are a novice at a given task. I expect visualization works better when rehearsing things that you have done at least a few times before, rather than practicing entirely new pursuits. As Hutson notes, mental practice “is detailed enough to prevent forgetting what you've already learned.” If you haven’t learned enough to even rehearse, then you may be using visualization in the mode of The Secret--not as useful mental practice, but as a form of magical thinking.

Clarity creates completion.

2010-02-26T09:07:00.001-06:00

Reduce uncertainty to curb procrastination.

Do you procrastinate some tasks despite the fact that they appear on a tidy to-do list (possibly several lists) somewhere in your life? It happens to me with all kinds of things: small, innocuous, easy actions; major, onerous tasks that beg procrastination; and even things I ostensibly like or want to do.

As I said in my previous post on Stale Tasks, the way I record a task matters. “Talk to John,” is only meaningful as long as I remember what I want to talk to John about. If one issue is so contentious and dominant that John will instantly know what it’s about when I phone him up, he can remind me. Otherwise, I need to write something more akin to “Talk to John about ________.”

Based on my own deep catalog of ancient to-do lists filled with now-obscure tasks, the purely mechanical problem of memory offered good reason to eschew vaguely-written tasks. Still, I thought that there was something more at work; vague tasks just seem to have an icky-ness (to use a technical term).

Turns out there’s something to this intuition. As procrastination researcher Timothy Pychyl wrote in 2008, on the subject of uncertainty:

We often don't know exactly what to do next. That's part of life, both our personal and professional lives. Uncertainty can be a wonderful challenge in life that sparks our creativity and makes life interesting. It can also be seen as a threat, potentially undermining our well-being.

If uncertainty is threatening, like any threat, it will evoke negative emotions. . . .

What does this mean? Usually in this situation the mood regulation involves leaving the task, or procrastinating. We escape the negative emotions by escaping the uncertainty which means walking away from the task . . . at least for the moment we say as we rationalize our choice.

Of course this focus on mood regulation undermines our volitional skills related to the task. Instead of using our volitional skills to self-regulate our behavior to stay on task, perhaps mustering our creativity to make a plan of action, we self-regulate our emotions. Mood takes precedence, and we pay the cost in terms of task delay.

This brings to mind two conflicting feelings about my lists: the sense of clarity and manageability that comes with making a list of things I need to do, and a feeling of uncertainty about what to do next or how to do it that sometimes appears even as I review that same list.

There is a tension between these two feelings, but it can be resolved by minimizing uncertainty when we make the list.

First, even when a given to-do item seems crystal clear now, take an extra second and write a good task: use a clear verb (“write,” “call,” “e-mail,” “cook,” “buy,” “pack,” “tell,” etc.) and, as appropriate, a subject or object. “Christopher” = bad task. “Call Christopher re: Anderson project report” = better task.

Second, check in with yourself to make sure that you know what to do next about the task. If you don’t even know where to begin with the aforementioned hypothetical “Anderson project report,” unless you are calling Christopher to find out where to begin, you might need to do something else first. If you need to know or do something before calling Christopher, don’t take for granted that you’ll know what that is in the moment. If, on reflection, you realize you really don’t know what to do next, then capture a to-do item to find out. Write down “Research Anderson project report in project files” or “Brainstorm anticipated questions Christopher will ask re: Anderson report.”

Third, consider the context. I found the piece mentioned above through a more recent Pychyl post on the subject of implementation intentions. An implementation intention is a plan in advance of when, where and how you would take action towards a goal. As Dr. Pychyl explains, such an intention puts the cue for the behavior into the environment, and also reduces some of the uncertainty. This how/when/where format reminds me of David Allen’s next action lists in Getting Things Done. Rather than a catch-all to-do list, Allen recommends making lists by context: at work, at home, at computer, errands, things to talk to my spouse about, etc. This creates a clearer implantation intention (by making "when" and "where" a part of the task list). It also helps the list-maker avoid having to think through, “What can I actually do right here, right now?” each time they scan the list.

If you find yourself procrastinating, consider whether your list is clear enough. Do you know exactly what each item means and what you need to do about it--and where, when, and with (or to) whom? If not, get clear on your tasks so you can clear the path to completion.

Hello, my name is Max, and I'm a basket case.

2010-02-22T09:58:00.002-06:00

Reflections on why I do this "Higher Process" thing.

I have been reflecting lately on why I created this site and where I think (hope) it is going. To that end, I have revisited the essay below, recovered from the digital drawer after nearly two years. What follows is a throat-clearing introductory post from an earlier, virtually stillborn incarnation of this blog. My focus and my goals have shifted since then, so what follows has been slightly edited to reflect that shift.

In his excellent "Living With Data" talk at MacWorld 2008 Merlin Mann called himself "the perceived basket case in charge of productivity on the internet," with all of the humble self-effacement for which the Mann is known and loved. In his other talks, he to have started 43 Folders, "Because I'm a basket case," and because he wanted to share his own struggles and triumphs in organization and productivity.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in the originator of GTD (the subject of some of Merlin's posts on 43 Folders). In a sadly out-of-print recording of his seminar, Getting Things Done author David Allen claims, "I am not a naturally organized person," directing the audience to ask his wife if they don't believe him. It looks like he is, he admits--with his lists and super-tight organizational practice, one would be tempted to think he's the most anal-retentive person in the world.

The same personal-productivity redemption saga plays out even outside of GTD. I once worked for FranklinCovey; at the time, one of the top facilitators of their Focus seminar was Randy Nelson, a consultant with an immaculate planner who also claimed not to be naturally organized (that, said Randy, was his wife's strong suit). It's the planner and the system that made him so organized, he claimed.

Similarly, in Organizing From the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern (the David Allen of the Oprah set) writes:

Organizing is a skill. In fact, it's a remarkably simple skill that anyone can learn. How do I know? Because I was once a notoriously disorganized person myself. In fact, everyone who "knew me when" is amazed at the irony of how I make my living today. A few summers ago, I went to my twenty-fifth summer camp reunion. Naturally, as we all got caught up on what everyone was doing with their lives. I spoke with pride about my work. Since professional organizing is such an unusual field, all of my old friends found the concept absolutely fascinating. One brave soul--dear, sweet Martin G.--put his arm around me, discreetly pulled me off to the side, and whispered politely, "Uh, Julie . . . I don't remember you ever being particularly organized."

Of course, the salient detail for me was the revelation that such a thing as a "twenty-firth summer camp reunion" actually exists in the world; still, I think Mrs. Morgenstern's point is well taken.

So what's going on here? Why are "the perceived basket cases in charge of productivity" all so quick to tell us how organized they're not?

One possible hypothesis--and one I'm not at all yet ready to dismiss--is that there is, in fact, a stigma attached to being too "anal," too neat. Adrian Monk notwithstanding, you can only get so OCD about the details of your life before coming under suspicion and judgment.

Still, I suspect (and hope) that the real reason is something more innocent and inspiring. Says Merlin Mann (again in the MacWorld talk):

Now my question to you is, have you ever been really fat? It's okay, I understand if you wouldn't want to say you were. If you've ever been really fat and you've lost a lot of weight, you never want to go back. . . . One reason idiots like me stand up here and bark at you about this stuff, the reason that people who've been on these squirrelly diets and lose weight stand up here and tell you about it is because their life has changed a little bit in a way that's been really important to them.

Which is pretty much how I feel about this stuff. I'm writing Higher Process--a blog about time and attention, organization and personal productivity, decision-making and happiness, among other things--not because I'm an expert or genius, but because I'm a basket case, and some of these things have been helpful to me. In the days since I first conceived of this blog I realized I care about something else, too: how we measure how useful time-management techniques and technologies are (if at all). I am not just interested in life hacks and planners and goal-setting; I'm interested in psychology and social science and how we know, when we claim to know, what works.

I have experienced substantial results from a series of modest changes, and I am interested in exploring what we know about how these things work. I'm here to talk about that and a set of related topics that excite me.

Hello. I'm Max, and I'm a basket case.

Simplicity is Magic!

2010-02-19T09:55:00.002-06:00

Thoughts on spreading concepts so thin they become useless.

One of my greatest pet peeves among organizing and self-improvement blogs is the elevation of an extremely ill-defined conception of “simplicity” to the ultimate Swiss Army Knife of self-help strategies.

Sherri Kruger of Zen Family Habits recently posted 43 Simple Ways to Simplify Your Life, which included many ideas that had varying levels of relationship to actual simplicity:

12. Make your lunch for the next day the night before.
13. Make time to catch up with an old friend.
14. Just say no.
15. Ask for experiences not things for your birthday and Christmas this year.
16. Tell the truth.
17. Keep your list of addresses and phone numbers up to date.
18. Consolidate debt.
19. Create an organizing system that works for you.
20. Keep a bag for garbage in your car.
21. Cary a notebook and pen with you where ever you go.

Merlin Mann, the godfather of helpful webpages that start with the number 43, responded with his own, somewhat fresher list of 43 ways to simplify your life, including these:

Remove your doors
Eat half of each pet
Sit on a big, thick book
Something something keyring holder
Paint clocks cheery pink
Wear discarded food
Makebelieve girlfriend chair
Sleep in liquor cabinet
Embrace hug love hug meow meow
Small room to plan crimes

Despite my great love of clutter-free spaces and simple, clean designs, I’m not a “simplicity” blogger. I don’t consider myself a participant in the “voluntary simplicity” movement (as Barry Schwartz called it in The Paradox of Choice). Mann’s absurdist send-up of Kruger’s list made me giggle primarily because it’s funny, but also because it speaks to the eye-rolling frustration I feel when I encounter bloggers hawking simplicity as a miracle drug.

It also reminded me of“Over-Simplifying Simplification”, a SimpleProductivityBlog.com post that makes the case for a subjective, context-dependent concept of simplification, but goes on to cite an example I consider beyond the pale:

Simplification is not a standard that fits everyone. My idea of simplification would actually complicate someone else’s life. My mother felt a bread machine was unnecessary; she prefers to buy bread because it is easier for her. I prefer to make my own bread so that it can be more nutritious, so a bread machine is a simplification of that process.

Some articles I have read have said you can immensely simplify your life by giving up your car. That is probably true for people who live in urban areas. My area, though, has almost no public transportation. So giving up my car would be immensely complicating.

I agree that what would simplify my life and what would simplify LJ’s life are probably two entirely different things, but I am mystified by how “making my own bread” equates to simplicity. LJ’s goals may have been better served by buying a bread machine. However, I believe life is in no meaningful sense “simpler” because LJ is buying ingredients and making bread, rather than buying bread. I suppose some conceive simplicity narrowly as the quality of some rustic, “simpler time,” but that way lies lower standards of living. I might go further than LJ and say raising my own chickens and cows is simpler than buying eggs or milk. Perhaps using an outhouse would be simpler than building and using modern plumbing (at least when the costs of sewer maintenance and the environmental toll of sewage is considered). To whatever extent these solutions “simplify” life, I believe they illustrate that simplicity is not universally good and won’t solve every problem.

After reading the myriad blogs on the subject, one might conclude that simplicity is whatever we may want or need in the moment. That perspective reflects the schizoid nature of #10 on Kruger’s list, “Get a label maker or write labels out by hand.” Getting a label maker simplifies your life, but so does writing labels by hand? Does that mean that, when it comes to making labels, EVERY option is the simple option? The publisher’s note for the 1997 edition of The Circle of Simplicity goes further, saying, “In the end, simplicity is whatever you want it to be.”¹ I disagree. Flexible categories may prevent us from overlooking creative solutions, but defining “simplicity” so broadly that it applies to every possible improved situation renders the term meaningless.

When you read about simplifying your life, check if words like “change,” “improvement,” or “solution” could replace “simplicity” or “simplified” without any net loss of meaning. If so, then I suspect that because of the author’s values (green, anti-clutter, anti-consumption, infatuated with some past state of civilization, etc.), he or she is making an identity claim by calling their idea “simplicity.” Don’t be fooled. Simplicity is not “whatever you want it to be,” and it is not magic.

1 – Source: eBay listing, retrieved February 18, 2010. (back)

Surviving Leslie Perlow’s “Time Famine”

2010-02-15T09:16:00.001-06:00

Culture, interdependency, and a "sociology of work time."

As an “embedded sociologist,” Leslie Perlow conducted ethnography as a participant-observer at “Ditto” (a pseudonymous company I assume to be Xerox). Her results became The time famine: Toward a sociology of work time. Perlow shadowed, observed, surveyed, and interviewed a group of software engineers in a troubled division; during the course of the study, the division was developing a major new product with a target ship date that allowed a quarter of their usual development time.

Through time-tracking logs and shadowing, Perlow collected data on how Ditto engineers and their managers used their time. She encountered rampant interruptions--75% of periods of uninterrupted time were an hour or less in length; 60% were a half-hour or less. She discovered a culture driven by crises and shifting priorities, obsessed with individual heroics and long hours, and dismissive of collaboration.

During the study, Perlow conducted an intervention to improve the engineers’ use of time and improve her understanding of their time-related challenges. She introduced “quiet time,” a regularly-scheduled time when the engineers focused on individual work for several hours; during quiet time, interruptions were forbidden. Productivity jumped during the quiet-time portion of the study, leading Perlow to conclude that synchronization of work rhythms may be more important than individual time-management.

Perlow’s findings have several implications for how we think about time-management; I briefly consider two below.

Even serious training effects can be short-lived.

A majority of engineers said they were more productive during two weeks of the “quiet time” study than before (during the other week and for a month after, over 40% reported higher productivity). The division’s vice-president credited Perlow’s study with the on-time launch of their product (the second on-time launch in division history).

However, six months after the launch, quiet time had vanished. One year launch, after a failed reimplementation, Perlow reports that old patterns were in full force. That the effects were short-lived may illustrate why some studies find that time-management training is ineffective. For example, in Time-management: Test of a process model, Therese Hoff Macan concluded that time-management had no effect on performance scores. Few of Macan’s participants who had received time-management training did so immediately before the survey; like the Ditto engineers at the six-month and one-year mark, the effect of the time-management training may have dissipated over time.

It might be pointed out that Perlow’s quiet-time scheduling is not the same as attending a time-management workshop or seminar. Although true, this fact only makes the results more damning. Time-management training often involves changing several habits at once; Perlow’s quiet hours represented a relatively simple change. Moreover, tradition time-management training is often a one-day, one-time affair. Perlow’s study went for three weeks (the mythical 21 days to form a habit), and Perlow was also on-site the entire time to enforce the change. If anything, I would have expected quiet time to enjoy a better chance of standing the test of time than traditional time-management training.

Why do such changes fail to take hold?

There is no “We” in time-management (but there are “I” and “Me”).

The underlying culture at Ditto was management-by-crisis, and personal heroics on high-visibility projects were celebrated. These pressures drove the engineers back into old habits. From this, Perlow concludes that viable solutions must address work culture. She points out that traditional time-management strategies are individualistic; further, what helps an individual with their own short-term deliverables might also drive disruptive interruptions and discourage well-coordinated collaborations. This has a sort of “paradox of thrift” flavor--even if time-management is good for an individual, Perlow suggests that if we all practice traditional time-management, we might all be worse off in the long run. Perlow concludes that time-management must be a collective, not an individual, intervention, so that it can engage the culture and prevent cycles of crises from recurring.

These conclusions remind me of the work of Merlin Mann. The “first world problems” of interruptions, poorly-managed e-mail, and dysfunctional company culture appear in Mann’s podcasts and videos of his various talks on productivity. Mann suggests that solutions need to address expectations and shared standards of communication as much as individual “productivity” tricks. He has even recommended strategies reminiscent of Perlow’s quiet time to boost knowledge worker productivity.

Closing Thoughts: Context and Collective Solutions

Perlow’s work adds to our understanding of how people actually use their time on the job and highlights some of the key challenges to improving productivity. I bristle slightly whenever I’m told that only “collective” solutions can solve a given problem, but I find Perlow’s interpretation of the data convincing. I also believe in the power of context. None of us work in a vacuum; a productivity gimmick that ignores the people, culture, and systems around us is only as valuable as what you can do between now and your next interruption.

On Units of Measure

2010-02-12T10:05:00.001-06:00

Further thoughts on measuring the effectiveness of time-management.

If we assume that a time-management system only truly works if it makes you more productive, how do we measure “productivity”?

In routine jobs, units of measure are simple: number of widgets cranked in a factory, number of forms processed in an office, etc. At higher levels in the value chain--knowledge work, creative endeavor, and management--output may be harder to define, but productivity-oriented bloggers have devised some novel measures.

For measuring academic productivity, James Keirstead assembled a “general model of productivity,” following the standard “outputs per unit of input” formula. His units of measure suit academia; “output” is the prestige attached to a given task’s successful completion, and the “inputs” are attention and time.

For knowledge workers of a more general stripe, Francis Wade suggested a clever metric: the number of people who are waiting for you to get back to them. Depending on your specific job, “people awaiting responses” may be the best measure of your backlog (especially as “work” becomes more networked and collaborative).

If these don’t suit your particular situation, how could you create a useful measure of productive output?

Use meaningful units of measure.

In my previous post on measurement, I mentioned a post on the Herding Cats blog by Glen B. Alleman in which he pushes units of measure that are “meaningful to the buyer.” Alleman raised these questions in relation to a hypothetical product or project’s business value, but I believe they also aply to a system or process:

When anyone makes a statement about a beneficial outcome, my first question is "what are the units of measure?"
Our tool saves you time - how much time? Can this time actually be returned to the business in terms of bookable hours that I can see in the time keeping system?
Our process significantly increases the quality of your product - can I see the before and after measures of quantitative quality measures?
Scrum is a risk reduction method - how much risk is reduced? Is this risk reduction reflected in saved cost and time for risk mitigation or risk retirement
Our Enterprise 2.0 solution is "easy to use" - what are the units of measure of easy?

Note that many seemingly intangible qualities can be measured; the “units of measure of easy,” for instance, might be number of errors per period of time, or amount of training time required for a given tool or task.

Having said that, if you truly feel that your work is too weird and too creative to be measured, then it may be time to start think of metrics in terms of lead and lag measures.

Differentiate lead measures versus lag measures.

This idea comes from the revised version of FranklinCovey’s 4 Disciplines of Execution training. The 2nd Discipline is “Focus on the Lead Measures,” and it defines two kinds of metrics:

Lag measure: The direct measure of the outcome of a project or process.
Lead measure: A factor that is both predictive of the lag measure and influenceable by the individual.

The 4 Disciplines audio program offers a classic example: If your goal is to lose weight, then the lag measure is your weight; the lead measures would be food intake and exercise.

If your productive output is creative, you may feel that numbers and metrics wouldn't actually capture an increase (or decrease) in productivity. “It’s not the number of paintings/photos/pages I churn out,” you might protest, “it’s about the good paintings/photos/pages I create.” That may be true, but even ephemeral bouts of inspired creativity have precursors we can get our hands around. One potential lead measure is how hard you work between projects: the lead measure for the quality of your painting might be the amount of sketchbook work done; the lead measure of the quality of your prose might be how many pages of writing (any writing) you do per day. Another direction--one that also lends itself to quantifying the value of your time-management setup--would be to measure how few uncreative or low-value things are hanging around, interrupting or distracting you from your creative work. Effective time-management would--in theory--decrease, manage, or handle these.

Why measure at all?

After all of this heady talk on measurement, one might ask, “Why bother?” Measuring time-management’s effectiveness matters to me, since I’m interested in the study of time-management; but what about the average user? If you enjoy your life and accomplish your work with reasonable amounts of effort, then this may be superfluous. However, I think the exercise may prove valuable; even if you don’t increase your output, you will at least become more aware of the nature of your work and be able to demonstrate the value you produce in the world.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Time-Management

2010-02-08T10:55:00.002-06:00

Is “feeling better” enough?

To determine how well a given time-management system actually works we need to know what “works” means. What is the minimum effect (both in degree and kind) that we would recognize as meaning the system is “working”?

Modern time-management practices are often referred to as “personal productivity”. Wikipedia defines productivity (for the moment, anyhow) as, “[A] measure of output from a production process, per unit of input.” The classical claim of time-management--that it allows one to do more in less time--aligns well with this definition.

If one’s job involves metrics, tracking time and resources consumed against the metrics of success will surely show any gains or losses in productivity. Certain kinds of knowledge work are resistant to such measures, but quantifying the value one provides to one’s employer or clients is important for more than simply measuring the effectiveness of a new time-management technique. (As project-management blog Herding Cats so often points out, value should be always expressed in units of measure that are meaningful to the buyer). So, assuming that a given person, department, or firm’s work output can be measured, assessing the effectiveness of a time-management training or technique should be relatively straightforward: measure output per unit of time before the intervention, then measure it again afterwards. Larger populations, randomized or pseudo-randomized conditions of who does or does not receive the training, and other steps could increase the validity of this productivity-based measure of effectiveness, but even on a micro scale and without such controls, it provides a starting point for assessing the effectiveness of time-management.

But what if the actual productivity--the widgets cranked, the dollars made or saved, whatever--didn’t budge? What if you attended the Focus seminar and bought and diligently used your FranklinCovey planner, but a year later your numbers were flat? What if you read Getting Things Done cover-to-cover, got your files labeled and in order, got into the habit of emptying your inbox and reviewing your lists every week, but a year later you sat in more or less the same place in the ranking?

It seems that the purveyors of these methodologies think about this, too, and hedge their bets. Early in the recorded version of Focus, FranklinCovey consultant Steve Jones spends leads participants in a discussion of how they would feel if the system worked for them--coming up with feelings such as relaxed, in-control, and less stressed. Focus also emphasizes deciding the right things to do; while it doesn’t jettison the laudable goal of getting more done, the FranklinCovey system is clearly aimed choosing which things need to be done first, not on doing dramatically more work. David Allen’s Getting Things Done goes further--it actually sports The Art of Stress-Free Productivity as its subtitle. Allen claims you will get more done, but he emphasizes at every turn that his system will help in other ways--the eponymous mention of stress levels, not to mention several passages promising that using GTD can help one make better in-the-moment decisions about what to do.

Are these improvements be enough? It isn’t a purely academic question--the academic literature about time-management often concludes that a given system has some value (such as lowering stress) but does not provide any improvement in work outcomes, per se. I am currently reading Rudolph R. Ritz’s dissertation on this topic; Ritz found no improvement in time-management as such, but in subjects improved on some subscales of job stress and job satisfaction inventories. In Wendelien Van Eerde’s research (previously blogged here), he saw improvements in work-related stress and in self-assessed procrastination behaviors. As I mentioned at the time, the self-assessed measure isn’t sufficient to prove that the subjects were actually procrastinating less; still, is a less-stressed worker inherently valuable enough to justify time-management training?

This question holds personal relevance at the moment. I took some time on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day to review, set, and plan goals for the coming year. My then-girlfriend/now-fiance remarked, “Are you going to get all sad again like you did last year?” I hadn’t really remembered being sad at the time, but thinking back I realized I was rather frustrated. In the year since, a lot has changed. Many of my primary goals and areas of concern have moved very little, but I have been using my day planner more regularly and working on my goals with more focus. I made some progress, but even more profound is the change in my attitude and my feelings about my life and work.

So, has the system worked? As I said before, it all depends on what you mean by “worked.”

The Broken Record of Self-Help

2010-02-05T09:51:00.002-06:00

Why some ideas--good and bad--keep coming back around.

Why do so many self-help books sound the same? David Rock asked that in his Your Brain at Work blog at Psychology Today. I find his answer compelling:

It's not that authors are plagiarists, it's that there are a small set of quirks about the brain that require a lot of attention, if you want to succeed in the modern world. The reason these quirks require attention is that they are not insights we might learn automatically, like how to breathe: they require learning, like a language. And these quirks are often hard to remember because in many cases they go against what seems logical.

. . .

One reason there's so many books on these themes is that we need constant reminders, in different forms, of these ideas.

Rock’s article is good reading; he includes a great list of some such “quirks of the brain” (with links), plus some more historical and cognitive reasons why the same ideas should continue to surface in new guises.

Having read an unhealthy amount of the genre’s offerings, I am familiar with the repetition Rock describes. But I see two other, less-flattering explanations for rampant self-help redundancy.

1. Nothing exceeds like success.

As of this writing, the “self-help” category at Amazon.com includes 101,186 volumes. Fewer self-help books appear at my local Barnes & Noble, but on a recent visit I noticed that they allocated more shelf space for self-help than for science and mathematics.

Something so popular should also be highly profitable; and, indeed, I’ve occasionally heard it said that the easiest way to become rich is to write a book telling others how to become rich. For expert testimony to this effect, consider John T. Reed’s expansive takedown of Robert “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” Kiyosaki. Reed, an experienced real-estate investor, concludes that Kiyosaki’s personal fortune is derived from sales of his questionable books and seminars, not (as Kiyosaki alleges) from following his own advice.

In addition to popularity and profitability, self-help requires no credentials. As noted in passing in a previous post, the self-help industry is largely unregulated. Anyone can join and start selling advice--no formal experience or training required. (This may explain why there are even self-help books about how to write self-help books, as Merlin Mann wryly observed.)

These factors set the stage for something closer to plagiarism. An industry of authors hoping to strike it rich, who may or may not have any real expertise, will be more than happy to pilfer and repackage “wisdom” from a best-seller. I would be curious to see how many “Law of Attraction” books were published in the two years following the release of The Secret versus in the preceding two years.

2. Evidence is a Scarce Resource.

Arguably even more valuable than a good idea is good evidence. As I wrote last year,

A motivational speaker or author trying to validate a technique faces a challenge: the literature of the social sciences is vast, dense, and not focused on personal achievement. Far from providing pat advice for success, the results of most research (in my experience) are complex, probabilistic, and heavily qualified.

That was written in response to a Fast Company article about an alleged study of graduates of Yale that purported to show that the 3% of the population with written goals achieve more than the other 97%. The study--cited by Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, among others--never actually happened. Authors wishing to “prove” the effectiveness of their goal-setting techniques latched onto the idea and spread it further.

As I said above, I suspect this happens because evidence is hard to come by and rarely so cut-and-dried. When (apparently) concrete evidence appears, copying is inevitable. To Rock’s point, I suspect this copying occurs for “true” evidence, as well.

But of course, I’m not talking about your favorite book.

I don’t think every self-help book is endlessly-circulated rubbish. I would not be writing this blog if I believed that; “crusading muckraker of self-help publishing” is not among my aspirations. Despite the cynics’ worst fears and strongest wishes, at least some ideas appear again and again because they are good ideas. It is my goal present more of those in Higher Process than the other kind. But just as good ideas propagate for the reasons Rock lists in his article, bad and good ideas alike take on a life of their own. Being oft-repeated, in other words, is not a mark of a timeless truth.

“I need this done yesterday!”

2010-02-01T09:51:00.001-06:00

Optimism, Prediction, and Open versus Closed Tasks

Human beings are habitually bad at guessing how long things will take. Writings on project management are filled with adages that capture this seeming fact of life, such as, “A badly-planned project will take three times longer than expected; a well-planned project only twice as long as expected.” This genre also supplies one of my favorite aphorisms, the recursive truism known as Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” While pat sayings--even clever ones--aren’t data, check your own experience: are you and your coworkers really great time-estimators?

Unfortunately, our tasks don’t occur in a vacuum--deadlines and dependencies mean that we must continue to estimate completion dates. Luckily, even though we consistently overestimate how quickly we can accomplish things, there seems to be a side benefit to doing so. Art Markum recently blogged about a study that examined whether optimistic predictions lead people to complete tasks more quickly:

This question was addressed in an interesting paper by Roger Buehler, Johanna Peetz, and Dale Griffin in the January, 2010 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

They found that whether a prediction affects when you will complete a task depends on whether that task is "closed" or "open." A closed task is one that is generally completed in a single setting. An open task is one that requires a number of steps that generally can't be done at once. Often open tasks are more complex than closed ones, but they don't have to be. For example, framing a photo you took on your digital camera is fairly easy. First you print the picture, then you buy a frame that fits it, then you put the picture in the frame. All told, it may take an hour of your time to complete the task. Chances are, though, you will print the picture at one time, buy the picture frame at another time, and put it in the frame at yet a third time.

The results of their studies demonstrated that people's predictions about deadlines affected when they started on the first of the tasks they had to perform. People would begin the task earlier when they made an earlier prediction of when they would finish than when they made a later prediction. So, for closed tasks that required just one sitting to complete, they would also finish them faster.
For open tasks, they would start the task faster if they made an earlier prediction than if they made a later prediction, but because the task involved multiple steps, they would not actually complete the task faster.

According to Markum’s summary, subjects were asked to take home a writing assignment. To manipulate whether the task was “closed” or “open,” some subjects could e-mail their written assignment (thus making the whole process a one-sitting affair); others were asked to print them out and mail them (involving more steps and more time in printing, packing, and mailing). Subjects were then asked to predict how soon they would complete the task. The researchers manipulated the optimism of predictions to fit into an “early” or “late” condition using an anchoring heuristic--subjects were asked either to predict how long it would take relative to the starting time, or relative to the deadline.

As Markum recounted above, for “open” tasks, subjects who made optimistic predictions finished sooner than those with later predictions. No difference was observed for “closed” tasks.

While an estimate that is too optimistic to be kept might still speed up a closed task, life is full of “open” tasks. How can we get the same benefits for underestimating “open” tasks that we get on “closed” ones?

One possible solution appears in David Allen’s GTD methodology. In Getting Things Done, Allen stresses the need to distinguish a project from an action. A project is any result you care about that will take more than one action to complete; an action is a task that will advance a project.

One of Buehler, Peetz, and Griffin’s “open” tasks would be a “project” in Allen’s terms, which can be broken down into discrete “closed” tasks--or “actions.” As each action is completed, GTD stresses the need to define a new next action (until the project is complete). Define the “closed” next action that will move your “open” project forward and predict its completion date; then, repeat for the next “closed” action, and so on. This might promote the speedier completion that over-optimistic estimating allows.

In other words, the commonsensical advice to break down large tasks into smaller ones appears to hold. Since we’re so optimistic when predicting how fast we’ll finish them, though, I imagine we are likely to assume we don’t need to do so and continue to deal with them as monolithic “open” tasks.

“Big Rocks” and Intentionality

2010-01-29T09:55:00.003-06:00

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.”

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.

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.

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]

Tall Tales in High Achievement

2010-01-25T10:16:00.002-06:00

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.
[edited for length]

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.

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.
[edited for length]

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.

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.

The Circle of Procrastination

2010-01-22T09:21:00.000-06:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

A (clear) mind is a terrible thing to waste

2010-01-18T09:23:00.000-06:00

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 answers

[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.

Some Validating (if Anecdotal) Personal Experience

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.

Time flies (especially when we don’t act).

2010-01-15T10:01:00.001-06:00

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?”

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.”

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.

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.

Lines Down the Highway

2010-01-11T10:47:00.003-06:00

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.

Taking advice is easy (when the problem is hard)

2010-01-08T10:57:00.003-06:00

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:

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.

The HBR article describes, in part, research that Gino published in The Journal of Behavioral Decision Making in 2007. From the introduction:

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).

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 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.

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.

Time Management versus Time Orientation

2010-01-04T09:52:00.003-06:00

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.

These aren’t necessarily good or bad in and of themselves. Present-fatalistic sounds pretty terrible, but then it might be healthy to maintain some degree of realistic expectations about our ability to affect our well-being--not every circumstance will respond to our actions. And, as Flora points out of past-positive, “Don’t let ‘positive’ mislead: Being trapped in beautiful memories still means you’re trapped.”

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.

. . .

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.

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?

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.

Resolve to Make Fewer Resolutions

2010-01-01T10:03:00.002-06:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

. . .

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).

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.

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.

Multitasking, Confounds, and the Yeti

2009-12-28T09:21:00.003-06:00

How overdoing self-improvement makes success harder to achieve and harder still to explain.

Merlin Mann once said of multitasking, “This is not only a stupid idea, this is a non-existent idea. I have more faith in the idea of the Yeti, and a Dukakis presidency, than I do in the concept of multitasking.” He is not alone-- the media and psychology blogs frequently report on studies about multitasking’s shortcomings.

In The 4 Disciplines of Execution audio program, FranklinCovey consultant Jennifer Colosimo said, “Human beings are wired to do one thing at a time with excellence.” But 4 Disciplines isn’t urging one task at a time--they mean pursuing one goal at a time in your entire work life (or two or three, at most).

In his oddly-named (but compelling) Zen To Done, Leo Babauta espouses a similar one-thing-at-a-time philosophy:

One of the main problems people have with other productivity systems, probably without knowing it, is that they are a series of habit changes that people attempt to undertake all at once.

. . . [Habit change] can be successful, but it takes a lot of energy and focus and motivation, and it’s hard to do that with a bunch of habits all at once.

Two of those “other productivity systems,” GTD and FranklinCovey’s personal planning methodology, each encompass several habit changes. Getting started with either of these methods takes several hours of focus; however, once the system is in place, the habits involved tend to be mutually reinforcing. The same goes for programs in other domains, including Julie Morgenstern’s organizing methodologies, Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace program, or Paul McKenna’s weight-loss program, I Can Make You Thin.

But Babauta’s point is well taken; changing multiple habits simultaneously can be challenging, even when the habits are part of an internally-consistent and mutually-reinforcing system. What about working on several systems of habit change--to put several programs into practice at once, and hope for the best? Or, for that matter, to try many simultaneous approaches to change a single habit or achieve a single goal?

In my days as a self-improvement junkie, I read everything I could find about time-management or career development. Your poison may be different: weight loss, money management, relationships, goal-setting, etc. Trying everything you can think of to reach a goal holds a certain appeal. However, when we do not fully implement and evaluate one program before moving on, it becomes hard to tell what works. In other words, trying to install multiple new habits at once creates confounds.

According to Wikipedia, a confounding factor or confounding variable is “an extraneous variable in a statistical model that correlates (positively or negatively) with both the dependent variable and the independent variable.” The University of New England’s WebStat offers a definition that I like even better:

[Confounds] are nuisance variables that interfere with our attempts to explain a relationship between our variables of interest. A confounding variable is one that provides an alternative explanation for the thing we are trying to explain with our independent variable.

Both of the definitions linked above list good social-science examples, but consider a mundane and micro-level example. The facial cleanser I use changed recently: new package, new name, slightly different ingredients. After three days of use, my skin was noticeably drier. I mentioned this to my fiancé; she pointed out that the week I switched, the weather took a sharp turn for the wintery: dry air, freezing temperatures, and bitter winds. Everybody’s skin is dry. I initially attributed dry skin to my cleanser, but the weather is a competing explanation--a confound. To know for sure that my cleanser is the cause, I would need to take it on vacation in a milder climate.

The same goes for habit changes. If you read six books and apply advice from all towards one goal, even if you succeed, you don’t know which methods, if any, helped. Similarly, if you are using two or more programs and fail, how do you know which was truly defective?

If you start exercising to lose weight the same day that you start using a new day planner, and you find that you suddenly begin accomplishing more each day, can you credit the day planner? Or do you simply have more energy and self-esteem because of the exercise? Or are you simply more strategic with your time because exercise steals hours from your week?

In other words, if you want to see real results in your life--and understand how you achieved them so you can repeat them in the future--learn to be patient and not multitask on your goals. Try FranklinCovey’s advice and tackle fewer goals at once. Try Babauta’s advice and avoid trying to reinvent all of your habits at once. Without such focus, the story you tell about how you achieved success may be no less a fantasy than the yeti.

Resolve and Begin Again

2009-12-18T10:00:00.003-06:00

How to achieve meaningful New Year’s Resolutions (assuming you aren’t too cool to be seen setting them).

As we approach another new year, articles on setting and achieving New Year’s Resolutions appear across the media landscape. These are inevitably followed in close succession by articles by authors who are soooo over resolutions.

I am struck by something Christopher Peterson, Ph.D., recently said of some of the naysayers of positive psychology:

[T]hose in and out of psychology who mount a relentless attack on positive psychology and more generally on anything positive (e.g., happiness, optimism). Even when their criticisms are correct, I am always confused about what they are urging on the rest of us.

I often wonder the same about those who are decry New Year’s Resolutions.

Certainly, drinking to excess on December 31 while promising to never again [insert bad habit] and to always [insert good habit] is a formula for failure. We may set unrealistic goals, overestimate the boost in motivation that comes with a new year, underestimate the inevitable obstacles and setbacks (often, starting with a January 1 hangover). And it’s worth remembering that we can set goals and start over any time of year. But I see a certain baby-with-the-bathwater problem in throwing out our only holiday that explicitly includes goal setting in its rituals. I see nothing wrong with reflecting on the year just past and setting mindful, inspiring goals in areas of our lives that we care about.

If you, as I do, assume that some resolutions are worth making and keeping, how do you ensure that they are worth your while and improve your odds of success?

One list I found helpful comes from, of all places, a coupon. In late 2005, FranklinCovey distributed a coupon in blue and black on cardstock. Attached by a perforated line was an index-card-sized insert cut to fit inside most binder-based organizers. The masthead (and matching in-store displays) read, Resolutions Begin with the End in Mind. The front of this card offered this advice:

RESOLUTIONS TIPS

#1: DON'T BEGIN BY WRITING RESOLUTIONS
Begin by writing (or reviewing) your Personal Mission Statement, your most deeply held values and core beliefs. This provides the foundation for meaningful resolutions.

#2: WORK WITHIN YOUR CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE
Never set a resolution that is based on factors beyond your control. "Get a new job"--wrong. "Send out 15 resumes by March 30"--right.

#3: BE ACCOUNTABLE
Share your resolutions with someone you trust. Set specific times or dates that you will report your progress.

#4: RESOLUTIONS HASTILY CREATED ARE EASILY ABANDONED
Take time to really consider what would be most important for you to accomplish in the coming year. Don't make an impulsive list on New Year's Day.

#5: BELIEVE IN YOUR ABILITY TO CHANGE
Envision yourself living your resolution. Use your imagination to picture yourself overcoming challenges and sticking to your goal.

One the back were several lines to write out one's resolution or resolutions. I wrote four that year--two of which (returning to college as a full-time student and reading 50 non-fiction books in 2006) I completed. A 50% hit rate is, depending on who you ask, either slightly above or way above the national average, but it’s certainly over my personal average.

If you are looking from some more psychologically-grounded advice (which is ostensibly what this blog is about), procrastination researcher Timothy Pychyl wrote a great article on the subject last January. Here are some highlights from his New Year's Resolutions: One day down, 364 to go!:

Successful projects need to be personally meaningful to motivate us to proceed, yet manageable enough to know what it is we need to actually do to proceed successfully.
Expect to feel lousy when you begin and suck it up. If you can move past this initial discomfort and get started, your attitude will follow your behavior. . . . What we do know from a variety of research is that once we make progress on a goal (even a little), we feel better and more motivated. So, don't wait until you feel like it, just get started.
Finally, expect setbacks. In fact, expect to feel like a failure at times. Change is not easy, and New Year's resolutions seem to be around some of the most negative and difficult goals in our lives. Be kind with yourself, yet also be relentlessly mindful , firmly bringing your attention back to your goal and your focus to the schedulable act at hand.

What do you value that doesn’t receive the time and attention it deserves? What do you want to be different this time next year? And what are you willing to do to get it? Call me naïve, but I am not yet ready to let go of goal-setting, or personal growth, or (yes) even the idea that a new calendar year marks off a fine time to start moving towards new dreams.

Counterintuition Revisited

2009-12-14T08:32:00.004-06:00

The counter-intuitive has, counter-intuitively, become the conventional wisdom.

“For pundits, Freakonomists, and Malcolm Gladwell, following the crowd meant going against the grain,” writes New York Magazine’s Alex Pareene in the Encyclopedia of Counter-Intuitive Thought (hat tip: Marginal Revolution). He describes dozens of examples from the past decade, including these gems:

Amateurs are better than experts.
Boys are the biggest victims of sex discrimination.
Being smart doesn’t help you get ahead.
Consumption isn’t just good for the economy, it’s good for the soul.
Critically acclaimed authors are terrible.
Exercise is bad for you.
Giving your product away is better business than selling it.
Government transparency is bad.
Plagiarism isn’t a big deal.
Radiohead isn’t a good band.

“In the aughts, the shocking hidden side of everything became the only side of anything worthy of magazine covers and book deals,” says Pareene. Unconventional wisdom possesses such salience that one of his prime examples of counterintuitive thought is

Conventional wisdom is right.
2001, Magazine.
While you may have read (hundreds of times in the very magazine this piece was being written in) that the conventional wisdom is wrong, it is actually usually right. It is “a broad agreement of elite opinion” and “a time-tested means of filtering out the bunk.” Attacks on the C.W. are vestiges of the New Left’s distrust of authority, and the consensus of wise, mainstream figures is reliable.
FRANKLIN FOER, “IN DEFENSE OF THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: WHY WHAT EVERYONE THINKS IS USUALLY RIGHT,” THE NEW REPUBLIC, MARCH 19.

I previously explored the psychological processes that make counterintuition so appealing, relative to the intuitive and mundane. New, novel, and challenging information catches our attention and sticks in our memory. We seem to be wired to pay attention to what surprises us, and to seek out and remember novel information to prevent further surprises.

Of course, what that essay implied was that this can be used against us. Last week, I blogged about an article in which Jason Hanna recounts self-help warning signs from psychology professor John C. Norcross, which include, “People who reject conventional knowledge and instead imply a revolutionary secret. ‘It's marketing, essentially,’ says Norcross.” Indeed, when talking about “secrets,” The Secret exemplifies this trend. As some commentators (and even some of the “teachers” featured in The Secret) point out, there was nothing new (or particularly secret) about The Secret. By packaging it as a great revelation of hidden wisdom, author/producer Rhonda Byrne helped sell her get-rich-quick scheme to the masses.

But while I agree for the most part with Norcross, I don’t know that we can simply dismiss those who dismiss the conventional wisdom. Even if this is just marketing, it may be necessary in order to get important ideas into the marketplace. Alex Pareene’s “Encyclopedia” implies that being counterintuitive isn’t a nice plus--it may now be the cost of entry into the debate. Ezra Klein recently observed this, as well:

Speaking of bizarrely counterintuitive articles, and with the ostentatious contrarianism of Super Freakonomics still on everybody's mind, it's worth saying that there's nothing contrarian about being contrarian in elite intellectual circles. Indeed, the really contrarian move would be to try to make your way as a thinker without taking aim at somebody's sacred cows, or at least making it seem like you're taking aim at somebody's sacred cows. There's a reason the book "Everything You Know Is Wrong" is not titled "Most of The Things You Know Are Right."

. . .

The conceit behind counterintuitive articles is that the author is taking an intellectual risk. But that ceases to be true when counterintuitive articles become the norm. At that point, the author is just trying to be relevant.

In my first piece about the appeal of counterintuition, I mentioned Dan and Chip Heath’s idea (taken from Made to Stick) about common sense: “When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn't they? If I already intuitively 'get' what you're trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it?” To Klein’s point, in order to be relevant, one must present the appearance of new, novel, challenging, or risky positions.

Counterintuition carries more weight, psychologically, than the material may merit. Counterintuitive, anti-conventional-wisdom appeals may be marketing gimmicks. Some highly dubious material will be dressed up as a great secret in order to boost sales. At the same time, having a counterintuitive appeal may be a necessary precondition to getting noticed at all in a competitive marketplace of ideas. Which means some rather conventional wisdom still prevails: Buyer beware. The onus is still on all of us to judge new ideas, new advice, and new information not on counter-cultural appeal, but on their merit.

Quack Psychology, The Secret, and You

2009-12-11T10:11:00.004-06:00

Evaluating (and avoiding) dubious self-help

Psychology and time-management fascinate me. These twin obsessions drive one of Higher Process’s main themes: exploring the research support, such as it is, for the effectiveness of time-management strategies. But interest in psychology is not all that drives me to this particular topic. I want to avoid being part of a particular crowd that sprang up in the wake of 43folders.com’s success, identified by Merlin Mann last year:

Over the years, “productivity blogs” of unbelievably varying quality shot up like hothouse kudzu--many baldly hoping to capitalize on the low-cost, high-return business of theoretically useful self-help publishing--mostly without affecting even the vaguest patina of wanting to help another human being solve a real-world problem. Some of these folks continue to make a living (and draw a considerable crowd) by producing material that I personally find transparently dumb and useless.

And, for that matter, I don’t want to fall in with self-help quack psychologists of the early 20th century (hat tip: Mind Hacks):

PSEUDO-PSYCHOLOGISTS, who promise, like fairy godmothers, to turn every-day human beings into fascinating personalities or into great financial successes, are creating large groups of discontented individuals, according to Dr. E. A. Shaw and George E. Gardner, of the Harvard University Psycho-Educational Clinic.

. . .

The psychological quack, half informed concerning scientific psychological principles, undertakes in a conference or by lectures, and for no small fee, to advise men and women about their mental and vocational ills. The two Harvard psychologists explain that "these men, we maintain--and their numbers are growing day by day--are a detriment to the mental health of the community. In their doctrines and platitudes there is just enough of truth and of falsity to make them dangerous."

I feel a sense of responsibility to any reader who stumbles upon my site; I want Higher Process to offer help in the shape of research-backed possibilities, not empty promises from compelling-sounding (but ultimately empty) nonsense.

Given that, I admired and enjoyed Jason Hanna’s Good, bad and ugly self-help: How can you tell? Hanna recounts the recent troubles of James Arthur Ray, one of the “teachers” featured in The Secret. He explores whether three deaths during a recent Ray seminar should raise doubts about the validity of The Secret. I think the connection is tenuous, but then The Secret doesn’t exactly need help debunking itself.

Perhaps more valuable is Hanna’s discussion of the larger (and, he notes, unregulated) self-help industry. Three of the experts quoted neatly sum up its shortcomings, and offer tips for spotting self-help shenanigans:

Gerald Rosen, a clinical psychologist in Seattle, Washington, says he believes more self-help books should undergo pre-publication testing--especially those written by psychologists, who he says should be held to a high professional standard.

"When you look at a book for depression, there probably isn't a blurb on the back that says this book has been shown in studies to help 65 percent of those who have been diagnosed with this. There's just a claim that this can happen for you," said Rosen, a former chairman of the American Psychological Association's task force on self-help therapies.

[John C. Norcross, professor of psychology at the University of Scranton] says that a lack of scientific evidence isn't the only thing to look out for. Other characteristics that should make consumers wary, he says:
Authors or speakers who don't have formal training in the featured topic. "They should look for someone with rigorous training at an accredited university and who has spent years investigating and conducting these treatments," Norcross said.
Programs that don't screen consumers for problems. For example, Norcross says, certain programs might be harmful for a person with bipolar disorder.
People who reject conventional knowledge and instead imply a revolutionary secret. "It's marketing, essentially," Norcross said.
People who propose solutions for all problems instead of particular problems.
Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society, said consumers should be wary of programs that cost a lot of money but teach no hands-on skills.

Indeed; I believe that learning, growing, and improving require an open mind, but an open mind and an open wallet are two different things.

I also like that these tests require no scientific background to apply. Many (maybe all) of the most execrable examples of self-help I’ve encountered would fail at least one of these measures.

I created this site, in part, to explore and validate good ideas in time- and life-management. The flip side of that is a desire to be forthright and candid when promising strategies are not supported by the available evidence. I believe good advice is harder to find (and to trust) when bad advice proliferates. But staying alert--and using heuristics like the ones described above--make that part of my job that much easier.

Change in Context = Change in Results

2009-12-07T09:39:00.001-06:00

The environment is more powerful than the will.

Witness the rate of failure for diets, New Year’s Resolutions, or any other attempted habit change in the lives of people around you. Are these failures of the will? Do people simple lack the character and drive to succeed? Perhaps. But there is ample evidence that the x-factor is not willpower. It seems changing the external environment sometimes works better than relying on raw will. Wray Herbert recently wrote about this in The Perils of Willpower:

[Northwestern University psychologist Loran Nordgren and colleagues] contacted about 50 smokers who were trying to quit through a smoking cessation program. All had gone without a smoke for at least three weeks, which means that their physical withdrawal cravings were past. The researchers began by giving the smokers a questionnaire to gauge their beliefs about their ability to control their impulses and withstand temptation. Then they asked them a series of questions about the steps they took to avoid being around cigarettes: Do you avoid people who smoke? Ask people not to smoke? Sneak an occasional drag? And so forth.

Four months later, they contacted the recovering smokers again to see how they were doing with their effort to quit. They expected that their beliefs would shape their risky behavior, which would in turn influence success or failure. And that’s precisely what they found. As reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, quitters who were confident in their powers of self-restraint were more apt to hang around smokers and keep cigarettes around--and were also more likely to relapse. Those who felt weak and vulnerable had a higher rate of success.

Those who did not believe as strongly in their willpower changed their environment; that change, in turn, supported their change in behavior.

They are not alone. In many circumstances, changing the context of a decision improves the decision. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell offers several examples, including maestros of American orchestras. Gladwell says they began making less biased and more meritocratic hiring decisions when screens were introduced in audition halls. The screens removed the temptation (or tendency) to stereotype musicians based on gender, posture, or dress; audition evaluations became more accurate and pure.

In the “life hacks” movement, Merlin Mann and Danny O’Brien have used the term “useful landmines”--something you put in your path that makes it easier to succeed (or harder to give in) when trying to change a behavior. In 2005, Mann wrote about several such tricks suggested by Dr. Stephanie Burns:

You want to start carrying a bit of cash and not using your credit card.
Make it hard to do. Freeze your credit card in a block of ice.

You want to move more, your [sic] annoyed at your inactivity.
Make it easier to do. Take your TV remote to work and leave it there.

You want the habit of waking up 20 minutes earlier but keep pushing the alarm snooze.
Make it hard to stay in bed. Move the alarm, set the lights on a timer, set the TV on a timer.

In Ready For Anything producitivity guru David Allen refers to these kinds of modest environmental changes as the “a fundamental productivity gimmick,” which he refers to with the shorthand of “Put it in front of the door.” If you have something that you must take to work the next morning, the best place to put it the night before is right in front of the door. You can’t possibly miss it on your way out the next morning. He says the principle generalizes to other areas of life--putting goals, aspirations, and possible actions in front of the “door” of our awareness on a regular basis leads to accomplishment.

You may believe in willpower and self-reliance, but ask yourself how well you are doing in changing whatever habit you want to change or achieving whatever long-term goals you hold. If you struggle with these things--or simply want to make it easier--leverage your environment. Ask what you can add (or subtract) from your surroundings that might make it easier (or harder) to do what you should or shouldn’t. Who you are hanging out with who isn’t helping? Who should you pal around with that might help? Look for changes you can make to your context that turn the right thing to do into the easy thing to do.

And if you feel defensive about your willpower and ability to change--or feel uncomfortable being at the mercy of your environment--then remind yourself that you are the one who is taking control of that environment to reinforce your positive changes in a moment of weakness.