Inside the Psychology of Productivity
Burned out? Can't get it all done? The problem might
be in your head.
You wake up with it in the morning
and go to bed thinking about it at night: an ever-crushing load of emails,
meetings, conference calls, and tasks that needed to get done yesterday. Family
time means reading sales reports in the room where your kids are playing video
games. For entrepreneurs, there's soooo much to get done--85 percent of
fast-growth-company CEOs work 10 or more hours a day, according to a recent
survey of the Inc. 500. Under such circumstances, personal productivity
isn't just a metric. It's also a mandate.
Recently, a glut of tools and
systems has emerged to help you measure, manage, and maximize what you
accomplish. But not all impediments to productivity result from poor
organization. Many are psychological. Behavioral economics reveals the wacky
ways people think about financial costs and rewards. Similarly, psychologists,
business researchers, and even philosophers are illuminating people's
idiosyncratic approaches to getting stuff done.
Productivity, or at least how
productive you consider yourself, is surprisingly subjective. As a leader, your
most important work--mulling strategy, blue-skying for innovation, imagining
the future--may not feel all that productive because it is open-ended and the
outcome is uncertain. At the same time, more (subjectively) unimportant work,
like clearing out your inbox, can leave you quite satisfied.
Often, there's an irrational
component to whether you think you've gotten much done. "If I have 10
things I want to finish in a day and I finish five, I get frustrated because I
am not productive," says Gregory J. Redington, president of Redcom, an
engineering and construction company in Westfield, New Jersey. "If I have
five tasks and I finish all of them, I feel productive, even if it's the exact
same five. My instinct as an entrepreneur is to plan to do all these things.
But I want to believe I've won at the end of the day, so I try to put fewer things
down."
Clayton Mobley, co-founder and CEO
of Spartan Value Investors, a real-estate investment business in Birmingham,
Alabama, admits that the state of his desk has a lot to do with whether he
thinks he has accomplished enough on a given day. "There are two piles on
the sides of my desk," he says. "If one of those piles is gone by the
end of the day, I feel productive. Even if I just put it in a drawer."
No matter how you try to trick
yourself into feeling more productive, there are just 24 hours in a day, and
you almost certainly are not making the most of them. Here's what you can do
about that.
Get
to the Root of Your Procrastination
Procrastination is a particular
problem for entrepreneurs, who often must tackle work in which they have no
experience and no familiar starting point. And of course, when you are
responsible for everything, there's always something else you could be doing.
Many consider procrastination a moral failing, a weakness of will. But Timothy
Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario,
calls procrastination an "emotion-centered coping strategy." He
suggests that if you understand what's motivating (or--more
accurately--demotivating) you, you can begin to address it. "Many of these
emotions are not conscious," says Pychyl. "So the first step is to
have some awareness of how you are feeling. 'Why do I keep not wanting to do
this?' "
The reasons people shrink from
particular tasks typically vary with the stage of a project, Pychyl explains.
In the inception and planning stages, you procrastinate because you don't find
the work interesting or meaningful. In the action stage, you procrastinate
because the project isn't well structured, which creates uncertainty about how
to proceed. Fear of making a poor decision can also be immobilizing. "With
uncertainty comes fearfulness," says Pychyl. "You have to acknowledge
that fear."
Another culprit is perfectionism:
People envision outcomes so outstanding that their expectations become more
intimidating than inspirational. "It's like you're practicing the high
jump, and when you set the bar too high, you look at it, and you walk
away," says John Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford.
"Perfectionists aren't people who do something perfectly. Perfectionists
are people who fantasize about doing something perfectly."
At its core, procrastination
represents shoddy treatment of the one person who should matter most to you:
the future you. Hal Hershfield, a marketing professor at UCLA's Anderson School
of Management, used MRIs to demonstrate that people view their future selves
much as they view a stranger. (This is why we smoke, fail to save, and order
the red velvet cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory.) Resolving not to do some
odious task today makes procrastinators feel good, says Pychyl. Then they
predict they'll feel just as good tomorrow, which will make the task easier. Of
course, the next day they feel worse, which makes the task harder and the
stress greater. Homer Simpson summed it up neatly: "That's a problem for
future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy."
That same disregard for their future
selves often leads people to cram their calendars with appointments. This
allows them to take the neurochemical hit of pleasure that comes from
scheduling something today--and to suffer the consequences of five back-to-back
meetings next month.
Counterintuitively, even work can be
a form of procrastination. Scientists in the Netherlands coined the phrase
bedtime procrastination to describe the tendency to keep doing things,
including work, long after you intended to go to sleep. Entrepreneurs may
succumb to this sort of procrastination when it comes to reading to the kids or
taking vacations--activities you know are good for you but that, on some
subconscious level, seem self-indulgent when compared with work. Here too the
present self cheats the future self, as insufficient sleep and leisure affects
performance.
Despite its bad rep, procrastination
has its apologists. Two years ago, Stanford's Perry published The Art of
Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing,
which posits that procrastination--like cholesterol--is not all bad. He coined
the phrase structured procrastination to describe the act of doing things
that--while not top priorities--still have value. "I think that's a
pattern of work a lot of very creative people have," says Perry. "If
you went through history and eliminated all the plays that have been written
and inventions that have been created by people who were supposed to be doing
something else, you might not have much left of your civilization."
Focus on Progress, Not on To-Dos
To-do lists
are daily reminders that you're not cutting it. Just half of all to-do-list
items are completed within a day, and 41 percent are never completed at all,
according to data compiled by one productivity-tracking company. That's a
problem, because energized, motivated people are more productive than depressed
ones. And what is more demotivating than seeing uncompleted tasks hanging on
and on and on like outdated inventory?
To-do lists are problematic for
other reasons. For one, they can be mentally gamed. When it comes to the
pleasure of getting things done, people are like rats repeatedly pressing a bar
because it stimulates their reward centers. Many people who have finished tasks
not already on their to-do lists will add those tasks retroactively for the satisfaction
of crossing them off. They may even slot previously unscheduled events--after
they've happened--into their calendars. There's also a temptation to mentally
redefine everything you do as valuable and credit yourself accordingly.
Stanford's Perry describes his own to-do list: "It says: Wake up. That's
worth a check. Get out of bed. That's worth a check. Make the coffee. That's a
check. Drink the coffee. That's a check. By the time I've had my coffee I've
done four things and I feel like a real effective human being."
More practically, the rigid,
reductive format of to-do lists is not optimal for the kinds of work done by
leaders, says Teresa Amabile, a professor and director of research at Harvard
Business School. "The really important things that don't generally have a
specific deadline may be what you should be spending most of your time
on," she says. "I think many of us who have a strong work ethic feel
like we are indulging ourselves when we do that more exploratory work, that
deep-level learning that may not have an immediate application but, in the
grand scheme of things, may be more important than anything else."
In her book The Progress Principle,
Amabile emphasizes progress (moving forward with one's work) over productivity
(getting things done well and efficiently, irrespective of their importance). A
sense of making meaningful progress, she found, has much greater positive
impact on engagement and motivation. Her latest research--not yet
complete--suggests that the simple act of looking back on progress also
positively affects your sense of accomplishment and how competent and effective
you feel at work. For the new study, Amabile signed up people to work for two
weeks. Some kept diaries in which they recorded at least three sentences a day about
how much they had done. Those subjects who were able to review their entries
were more satisfied with the progress they had made and in their own abilities.
The positive feelings derived from
reflecting on accomplishments, in turn, improve productivity. Francesca Gino,
also an HBS professor, asked some employees at an Indian company to spend 15
minutes at the end of each day writing about what had gone well. The group that
took time to reflect had a performance level 23 percent higher than that of employees
who spent those last 15 minutes simply working. If reviewing incomplete to-do
lists brings us down, it appears compiling have-done lists bestows a sense of
satisfaction and enhances performance.
The power of reflection is the
premise behind iDoneThis, a startup that inspires people to accomplish more
every day by providing a mechanism to report what they have done. (Zappos,
Uber, Reddit, and other companies have used the product, chiefly to improve the
performance of teams.) "If you are working on one thing all day, it is
very easy to remember what you did and give yourself credit for it," says
CEO and co-founder Walter Chen. "But if you did 20 things and one is have
a conversation with your kid and one is put out a fire, it's often hard to
remember those things." Pausing to reflect is an opportunity to remember
those accomplishments and to recognize their value. "Giving yourself
credit helps you feel productive," says Chen, affirming, "That
actually makes you more productive."
Bottom line: To-do lists are useful
for organizing and prioritizing work. But you should also maintain a "have
done" list--or at least reflect on your accomplishments for a few minutes
at the end of each day--to keep yourself motivated.
Beware
of Time Thieves
Ownership is a management buzzword
that, sadly, is rarely applied to people's time. Workplace culture often
requires that you sacrifice time for others, whether that means acting as a
mentor or maintaining an open-door policy. The benefit to others' productivity
often comes at a cost to your own.
Most people have just two really
productive hours a day, says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and
behavioral economics at Duke and co-founder of Timeful, a time management app.
(See "Four Great Productivity Apps," page 45.) Those two hours might
be sufficient if they belonged entirely to you. But even the boss can't
schedule every meeting so that it falls outside his or her optimal
nose-to-grindstone stretch. And in flatter organizations, more people have
roughly the same claims on the company's collective time resource. "The
biggest change in the calendar from paper days to computer days is that,
because we now have shared calendars, people can kidnap our time," says
Ariely. "It's really kind of a shocking idea."
Still, most people would rather work
alongside others than not, because humans are social creatures. When others ask
for your time, saying yes feels good and is easy. Saying no feels bad and is
hard. "All of us want to be nice, and all of us want to be team players,"
says Kory Kogon, global productivity practice leader at Franklin Covey and
co-author of The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity. At one
typical company that Kogon advised, "the COO said to me, 'We are a nice
organization, so nobody knows how to say no,' " she recalls. "Of
course he does say no. But he doesn't feel like he is saying no enough."
Greg McKeown, author of
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, recommends extreme selectivity
as a check on your desire to always be accommodating. McKeown likes to ask
people to imagine they have no to-do list, no inbox, no schedule of
appointments. "If you didn't have any of that, and you could do one thing
right now that would help get you to the next level of contribution, what would
you do?" he asks. "Maybe all the stuff you're doing should be
questioned. Start from zero every day. What would be essential?" People
require space and clarity to identify what matters, McKeown explains, and what
matters should dictate what you say yes to. "You can say, 'I would love to
do that, but I am already doing this,' " he says. "And that is
completely true and understandable, because you are."
On the face of it, McKeown's advice
seems at odds with that of Adam Grant, the Wharton professor whose best-selling
book Give and Take has made generosity a hot topic in corporate corridors.
Grant argues that helping others with no expectation of return can increase energy and well-being
and, consequently, productivity. But, like McKeown, Grant advocates
selectivity: saying yes only in instances when distraction is minimal and the
benefit to others outweighs the cost to self. McKeown calls this practice
disciplined generosity.
Bottom line: Although it feels good
to say yes, be disciplined about the time you give to others. Employees and
partners need your help, but mostly they need you to concentrate on what
matters.
Be
In-the-Moment With Everything You Do
Every businessperson knows that you
have to distinguish, in the words of Dwight Eisenhower, between the
"important" and the "urgent." But demands on your time
don't come with labels indicating their level of priority. The important, the
urgent, and the trivial rush past in a blur. When Franklin Covey recently
surveyed 350,000 people worldwide, respondents confessed to spending 40 percent
of their time on things that are unimportant or downright irrelevant. But many
don't know exactly how they are wasting their time, says Franklin Covey's
Kogon.
Perhaps it's not surprising people
are so confused. McKeown observes that when the word priority entered the
English language in the 1400s, there was no plural form. Today, you moan about
being distracted by everything you could be doing. But there are also more
things you arguably should be doing, such as developing your talent pipeline or
studying the competition. Those things cry out to you, like voracious baby
birds. Your mind is not quiet. The noise hurts.
Mindfulness--which sounds new age-y
but doesn't have to be--is increasingly held up as a way to improve both
performance and decision making. Scott Eblin, author of Overworked and
Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative, defines mindfulness as awareness plus
intention. "If you are aware of what you are thinking and feeling and what
is going on around you, then you can manage the gap between that and your
actions," he says. Mindful people don't ignore noise and
distractions--that's impossible. But they exert discipline to control what Buddhists
call their restless and unsettled "monkey minds." "You have to
be aware of all the mental chatter," says Eblin. "That's the first
step toward quieting it."
Mindfulness is particularly
effective at thwarting that bane of productivity, the fallacy of sunk costs.
The more time, thought, and energy you expend going down a road, the harder it
is to change course when the destination looks dicey. New research from Insead
and the Wharton School shows that subjects who meditated were much more likely
to abandon a lost-cause project than those who did not. Cutting bait fast is
critical, because lost causes waste time and, Eblin says, "because regret
kills productivity." He recommends avoiding regret by having individuals
and teams subject their failures to after-action reviews, like those conducted
by the military. "That way it becomes, what did I learn from this?"
says Eblin. "You reframe it as retraining. And retraining, of course, is
productive."
Another advantage of mindfulness is
that it concentrates attention on the qualitative, rather than quantitative,
aspects of work--why am I doing this? instead of how much of this am I doing?
"To me, productivity is the wrong focus," says Wharton's Grant. What
you want is to be maximizing quality or usefulness. "I think a lot of
people accept the goal of being productive," says Grant. "And that's
counterproductive.
By Leigh Buchanan
Editor-at-large,
Inc. magazine
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201503/leigh-buchanan/the-psychology-of-productivity.html?cid=em01014week08d
