Right Attitudes

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Do You Really Need More Willpower?

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Do You Really Need More Willpower?

Sure, self-discipline is an asset. Plenty of successful people evidently benefit from having truckloads of it. However, strengthening willpower may not always be easy for the rest of us.

You can increase productivity and contentment simply by altering your environment. Make it easier for you (and others in your life) to confront temptation and adopt the habits you want.

Use stimulus control to shift your behavior:

  • Want to stop taking on more debt? Freeze your credit cards.
  • Can’t stop checking your phone for likes, comments, texts, tweets, and game requests? Disable the apps.
  • Want your household to be more organized? Establish routines and make things easy to put away with clearly labeled receptacles.
  • Want to switch to healthier snacking choices? Splurge on pre-washed, pre-cut, grab-and-go vegetables.

You’re more likely to start change when you put the stimulus for action into your environment.

Idea for Impact: Don’t get bogged down by thinking that lifestyle changes are entirely about willpower. In a world so heavily baited with pervasive cues and craving-inducing stimuli, the more you can tweak your environment to better condition yourself into your desired habits, the more likely you are to meet your goals.

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  2. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  3. How to … Make Work Less Boring
  4. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  5. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’

Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

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Developing Consistency When Creating New Habits

The best way to catalyze significant change is by relying on highly specific habits and routines and making time for them amid the busyness of life.

Habit formation relies on consistency. Here’s a simple trick to prevent good intentions from slipping.

Suppose that you want to start a daily walking habit. You set a target to go for a walk for at least an hour a day. But some days, this habit might not be doable.

Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

To prevent slipping on your daily goal and beating yourself up about it, establish two targets: one for the “good” days and one for the “tough” days.

Set the bar very low for when it’s not possible to dedicate an hour to walking. On the tough days, when you’re exhausted, hungry, feeling lazy and unmotivated, or you’re simply not in the mood to walk, you can go for a quick walk. And on good days, when you have more time and energy, go for longer walks. Average out the tough days with the good days.

Habits Take a Long Time to Create Make it so easy that you can’t say no to maintaining your habit on the tough days. You’ll decrease your skipped days and sustain the habit’s consistency by lowering your expectations.

Another benefit of having easy-win targets for the tough days is that you nudge yourself into action. Let’s say you target reading an hour a day. On tough days, when you set out to read for just ten minutes, you’ll perhaps get engrossed in more of the task once you get started and find your way into the text. Action begets momentum, and you’ll find it easier to keep going at it.

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

Habits take a long time to create, but they develop faster when you do them more routinely and repeatedly. The more days you skip, the harder it is to get back into the habit. Set the bar low for the tough days and build deep-seated habits.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
  2. Real Ways to Make New Habits Stick
  3. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  4. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  5. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’

Goal-Setting for Managers: Set Tough but Achievable Challenges

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Finding the middle ground between setting the bar too low and too high can challenge managers.

Sure, aggressive goals can spark great accomplishments, but they also can induce employees to bend or break the rules in pursuit of those goals, as the Wells Fargo and Volkswagen scandals illustrate.

Set Tough but Achievable Challenges When employees get comfortable with their usual tasks, it’s time to push them outside their comfort zones. New responsibilities can propel employees to take on new challenges and learn new things.

However, before giving employees new tasks, take away some of the older responsibilities they’ve already mastered. Many people feel they have an unrealistic amount of work to do already. If you aren’t prudent enough to keep your employees’ workloads in check, giving “stretch” assignments can lead to burnout, not growth.

Idea for Impact: Goals that are too high or low can be demotivating. Set goals that are challenging and inspiring but with extra effort, realistically attainable.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  3. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  4. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  5. Don’t Push Employees to Change

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action

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Change Your Mindset by Taking Action While it is helpful to be motivated and get into the right mindset to, say, exercise, it’s far easier to just show up at the gym and get started on a small quest, even when you don’t really feel like doing it. You’re likely to habituate to new behaviors in a way that circumvents your innate resistance to change.

Minor adjustments can add up and make a big difference. As Harvard psychologist Susan David writes in Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (2016,)

Traditional self-help tends to see change in terms of lofty goals and total transformation, but research actually supports the opposite view—that small, deliberate tweaks infused with your values can make a huge difference in your life. This is especially true when we tweak the routine and habitual parts of life, which then afford tremendous leverage for change.

Idea for Impact: Waiting for the right mindset to “show up” can be a losing strategy. Taking action is often easier than controlling your mental state. Don’t overly focus on the very thing that’s harder to control. Take the next baby step forward.

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  3. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  4. Get Good At Things By Being Bad First
  5. Doing Is Everything

Don’t Over-Deliver

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Don't Over-Deliver: Decide To Be Better Many tasks in the workplace could be done with total adequacy and barely more.

Don’t get fixated on ensuring that every task is entirely done, every email edited and re-edited to get the grammar right, or every spreadsheet is flawless. This is a pointless pursuit.

Sure, you don’t want to be a careless hammerhead. But don’t waste time sweating the little stuff. There comes the point where any changes you make to whatever it is you’re working on no longer makes it better but just different. Identifying the inflection point of diminishing returns is one of the hardest skills to learn and one of the most necessary.

Don’t agonize over tiny improvements in your work and thwart yourself from achieving the actual goal of doing the work.

Idea for Impact: Most acceptable outcomes correlate with “good enough,” not “perfection.” Being consistently excellent is essentially a matter of fierce discipline—doing the essential things well.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
  2. The Costs of Perfectionism: A Case Study of A Two Michelin-Starred French Chef
  3. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’
  4. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’
  5. Do You Have an Unhealthy Obsession with Excellence?

3 Ways to … Eat Healthy

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How to Eat Healthy Mindful eating for wellbeing isn’t just about what foods to eat but also about establishing and maintaining a healthy relationship with food.

  1. Slow down and really be present while you eat. Mindful eating is best achieved when your focus is on the meal. Put your phone or book elsewhere and just focus on your food’s taste, smell, texture, and look. You’ll enjoy the food so much more when you savor it. Wolfing down your food leads to overeating because your brain doesn’t realize it’s had enough to eat.
  2. Honor your hunger and fullness—relearn what it feels like when you’re hungry and full. Don’t overeat or eat the wrong things because your environment triggers your appetite. Change your environment, so it works for you rather than against you.
  3. Use smaller plates. The larger the portion size, the more you’ll eat. Aim to eat healthy most of the time and allow some wiggle room. There’re no ‘bad’ foods, and identifying foods as ‘off-limits’ only makes you want them more. Practice portion control if you step off your diet for a special occasion.

Idea for Impact: Building wellness begins with really paying attention. Change behavior with simple nudges.

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  2. Your To-Do List Isn’t a Wish List: Add to It Selectively
  3. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  4. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  5. Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating

Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating

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Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating Many people claim to derive substantial benefits from mediation. Experiencing the present moment can help exclude the torrent of diverse thoughts and mind-wandering.

But sometimes, meditation may not be the most prudent use of your time, especially if you’re stressed.

Disruptive thoughts emerge when you sit down to meditate. Not engaging in them can be challenging if you aren’t an experienced meditator.

Unloading your mind precludes thinking and, in turn, making progress on your issues and dilemmas. Meditation increases the sense of time starvation. After your meditation session, your troubles are still there, only that now you have lesser time to solve them. And losing time is even palpable if you attend a meditation retreat for days or weeks.

Idea for Impact: Meditation is not a substitute for action. Sometimes you could benefit more from spending that time on more active approaches to deal with whatever’s stressing them out. Try journaling, thinking through what needs to be done, withdrawing to a secluded corner for focused work, chatting with friends and colleagues, or seeking counseling. As with meditation, these actions allow you to step back from your life to take a meta-view of whatever you want. That can reduce your stress and improve your approach to problems.

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  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

How to … Overcome the Tyranny of Your To-Do List

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Long before management consultants made the humble 2×2 matrix their stock-in-trade, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the format to create one of the most powerful productivity tools of the 20th century: take your itemized to-do list, and dichotomize all the items on their importance and urgency. Then, classify these on a 2×2 with urgency on the x-axis and importance on the y-axis. The items in each bucket warrant a different kind of response.

How to Overcome the Tyranny of Your To-Do List

  • The urgent-and-important tasks in the ‘Do’ quadrant need doing now (e.g., call the fire brigade if your house is burning down.)
  • The urgent-but-not-important tasks in the ‘Delegate or Automate’ quadrant are best delegated where possible (think booking a hotel or clearing low-priority emails.)
  • The important-but-not-urgent tasks (strategic planning, training) in the ‘Schedule’ quadrant should take up most of your time. Eisenhower noted that truly vital yet immediate tasks are few and far between: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” That means committing to doing the tasks you schedule. Being effective can’t happen if you keep kicking the can down the road.
  • The neither-important nor-urgent tasks in the ‘Eliminate’ quadrant are usually time-wasting activities and must be eliminated forthwith. They don’t move you towards achieving your goals.

De-prioritize Stuff You Shouldn’t Be Doing in the First Place

'First Things First' by Stephen R. Covey (ISBN 0684802031) The Eisenhower Priority Matrix isn’t entirely ground-breaking. Still, it can help you recognize you can deliver yourself by knowing it’s okay not to complete them all, so long as you get the most vital ones done. The challenge lies in being able to determine what’s essential and what isn’t, as expounded tediously in Steven Covey’s First Things First (1994):

Urgent matters are those that require immediate action. These are the visible issues that pop up and demand your attention now. Often, urgent matters come with clear consequences for not completing these tasks. Urgent tasks are unavoidadable, but spending too much time putting out fires can produce a great deal of stress and could result in burnout.

Important matters, on the other hand, are those that contribute to long-term goals and life values. These items require planning and thoughtful action. When you focus on important matters you manage your time, energy, and attention rather than mindlessly expending these resources. What is important is subjective and depends on your own values and personal goals. No one else can define what is important for you.

The key to productivity is to be very selective in what you pick and execute your most important priorities. Be ready to delegate and be quick and not-to-perfection on as many things as possible. You really don’t need to give 110% on everything.

Idea for Impact: Use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to Triage Your To-Do List

Get Your Priorities Straight The Eisenhower method can be an indispensable weapon in your efficiency arsenal. Your life will never be the same when you internalize clarity of habits. Once you’ve been using the matrix for a while, you can realize a pattern of your own behavior. With some discipline, you can change your behaviors to ensure you’re spending more time on the ‘Schedule’ and ‘Do’ quadrants, improving your ability to plan your work.

Try taking a few minutes each day and analyze your task list. Are there things on there that you can delegate or eliminate? Are you genuinely focusing on the right tasks? It’s incredible how much more productive you can be with a bit of planning and forethought.

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  3. Get Your Priorities Straight
  4. Don’t Let Interruptions Hijack Your Day
  5. Warren Buffett’s Advice on How to Focus on Priorities and Subdue Distractions

Get Good At Things By Being Bad First

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You Have to Be Bad at Something Before You are Good at it

Your first attempts are going to be bad

A technique used by many a brilliant inventor:

  • Make something. Get it functional. Get it adequate. It’s okay if it’s subpar.
  • Then, stumble around. Iterate until it’s good.

Now, that’s a better creative process than making something good on the first go.

Start, even if you’re bad at it

Case in point: Write bad first drafts quickly. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. Let it all pour out. Let it romp all over the place. No one’s going to see it. You can shape it up later. You can gradually polish the thought flow and enrich the choice of words.

If you aren’t willing to be bad initially, you’ll never get started on anything new.

The way you create something good is by launching into it and then iterating gradually rather than by going into your cave and trying to create that perfect masterpiece.

Essentially, this is agile development. The best programmers write functional code to prove some concept. Along the way, they’ll get a better understanding of the business need for the software and the workflow. Bit by bit, they rework snippets of code and improve continuously.

Idea for Impact: Just start. Do a bad first job.

The bad is the precursor to the good. Bad will get you started. It’ll move you forward. Pressing on, you’ll get illuminated, enlightened, and informed.

Momentum is everything. Don’t put off any contemplated task thinking, “This is hard. I don’t know how to do this well. I’m going to have to do it perfectly. Or I need to wait till I have enough time.” The instant you stop cold and put something off, momentum starts the other way.

Motivation is often the result of an action, not its cause. Taking action—even in small, sloppy ways—naturally produces momentum. It’s a better solution than trying to do it right the first time.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Banish Your Inner Perfectionist
  2. Doing Is Everything
  3. This New Year, Forget Resolutions, Set Intentions Instead
  4. Everything Takes Longer Than Anticipated: Hofstadter’s Law [Mental Models]
  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

A Hack to Resist Temptation: The 15-Minute Rule

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A Hack to Resist Temptation: Self-Control is Challenging When you’re faced with a temptation, e.g., when you have a sugar craving, try this 15-Minute Rule: Commit to not giving in for 15 minutes. Take yourself away from the stimulus that led to the temptation.

With any luck, the enticement will wear off. At least it’ll become more manageable to control. If at all possible, wait another 15 minutes.

Increasing your awareness of your temptations and refusing to submit to them impulsively is the key to changing behavior.

Idea for Impact: Self-control in the face of urges and cravings is tricky. Even a simple distraction can break the trance.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Are You So Afraid Of? // Summary of Susan Jeffers’s ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’
  2. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  3. Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating
  4. The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas ‘DIY Dieting’ Fails
  5. Seek Discipline, Not Motivation: Focus on the WHY