Goals

How Can a Manager Get Important Things Done?

January 13, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Distinguish the Variances That Require a Manager’s Attention

When critical care facilities in hospitals monitor patients’ vital signs, staff nurses are notified only when vital signs go beyond each patient’s pre-programmed range. Unless the monitoring devices sound an alarm, nurses take for granted that the patient’s condition is stable enough and will receive only routine medical attention.

Management by Exception: How Can a Manager Get Important Things Done The “Management by Exception (MBE)” method is the notion that a manager’s attention must be focused only on those areas in absolute need of his/her engagement.

As a rule, lower-level managers should handle recurring decisions. Only problems concerning extraordinary matters should be referred to higher-level managers.

This “exception principle” emphasizes that executives at the upper levels of an organization have serious restrictions on their time, capacity, and willpower. They should refrain from being caught up in minutiae that can be handled just as effectively by their junior managers.

A case in point: many companies establish protocols that designate the level of authorization required for purchases. Companies delegate authority carefully, prescribing spending limits for each level. For instance, a team leader’s approval is necessary for purchases of over $1,000. A department manager must approve purchases of over $5,000, the divisional leader for purchases of over $10,000, and the CEO for purchases over $50,000.

Managers Just Can’t Do Everything

The exception principle helps managers focus their attention on more worthy matters that justify their attention. Most managers hesitate to manage by exception because of the very human predisposition to focus on the immediate, tangible, and well-defined problems as against the distant, high-priority, challenging, and abstract problems.

In other words, mangers must distinguish programmed decisions from non-programmed decisions. Programmed decisions are routine activities that are well-defined and can be dealt with by using an established protocol. Non-programmed decisions are exceptional or significant endeavors that involve unfamiliar, one-time, and unstructured problems needing higher-level decision-making.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Get Lost in the Thicket of Trivia

As a manager, there are only a few things that you must do. Focus on those and delegate the rest. But keep an eye on how things are going; you are still accountable for any work you delegate.

Decentralize as much decision-making as possible. Establish protocols and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that empower your staff and enable your organization virtually to run itself.

Identify what deviations constitute as an exception and intervene only to solve significant problems.

How to Develop a Vision for Year 2020

January 2, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Four Rules for Priority-Setting

As you think about what you want to achieve in the New Year, consider these four rules for priority-setting laid down by the original management guru Peter Drucker in his seminal The Effective Executive (1966; my summary):

Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities:

Pick the future as against the past;

Focus on opportunity rather than on problems;

Choose your own direction—rather than climb on the bandwagon; and

Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do.

How to Develop a Vision for 2020?

Four Rules for Priority-Setting The first thing to do before thinking too far ahead in the future is to identify what success really means to you. Ask yourself, “It’s 31-Dec-2020 and the year 2020 is almost over. I am getting ready to celebrate the turn of the year with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. What have I achieved?”

Visualize a year 2020 wherein everything has turned out the way you’ve wanted. You have given it your best, worked your hardest, and achieved all your goals. Now write down what you imagine.

Take the time to think through and develop a clear picture of where you want yourself and your work- and personal lives to be in three months, six months, and one year.

This exercise is generally effective at helping folks differentiate between tasks that simply feel urgent or top-of-mind from those that are truly important.

Idea for Impact: Getting clear on your vision will help you create a path that feels the most meaningful, stimulating, and fulfilling to you.

Do You Have an Unhealthy Obsession with Excellence?

September 10, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Yes, you must develop the habit of excellence, even in little matters. However, the price of perfection can be prohibitive. A maniacal emphasis on excellence can lead to a blind obsession that can drain productivity.

If you’re a manager, insisting on perfection everywhere can hurt workplace morale, reduce employee engagement, and decrease opportunities for innovation and change.

Managers too often call for excellence in the small things because they’re unable to prioritize what matters most. These managers tend to be the ones who also struggle with delegation—given their exacting standards, it makes sense that they would have difficulty letting others do their job. And because monitoring people’s efforts is often time-consuming and difficult, perfectionist managers tend to just decide that it’s easier and quicker to do the job themselves.

Smart Managers Have the Self-Discipline to Turn Excellence On and Off

Do You Have an Unhealthy Obsession with Excellence and Perfectionism? The smart managers I know of accomplish great things because they often have a “sixth sense” that reminds them that some activities matter more than others do and therefore merit more attention.

They give themselves permission to produce second-rate work on the road to doing a first-rate job.

They are very selective about when they push their teams to the max—only when the stakes are big enough and when it’s entirely justified.

Idea for Impact: Be Excellent Occasionally

Expecting excellence in every detail uses up a lot of bandwidth.

Get comfortable with a little bit of lower quality now and then. Less-than-excellent is a satisfactory outcome. As the British novelist W. Somerset Maugham once warned, “only a mediocre person is always at his best.”

Making a conscious decision about where excellence matters and where it doesn’t is particularly pertinent to managerial success.

In the real world of limited resources, perfection is hard to achieve. The quest for excellence sucks up time, energy, and money that could generate better results elsewhere.

Managers, step back and look at the whole picture. You don’t have enough resources to do everything, so commit them where they’ll bring the greatest overall improvement (use the lens of opportunity costs.)

Have exacting standards, but don’t demand excellence in every idea.

The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg Mckeown’s Essentialism

August 21, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of the great struggles of modern life is the intense complexity, chaos, and exhaustion of activity and reactivity. We have a tendency to take on too much, become accountable to too many people, and say ‘yes’ to too many demands on our time and our energy.

As I mentioned in my world’s shortest course on time management, the merits of ignoring the trivial many and focusing on the vital few is often overlooked. The need for essentialism—less responsibility, less fame, less money, fewer possessions, less mess—is something that’s easy to identify with, but requires abundant self-discipline to put into consistent action.

Business consultant Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (2014) is an excellent reminder that a rich, meaningful life entails the elimination of the non-essential:

Essentialism is more than a time-management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter.

McKeown’s wide-ranging discussion covers insightful get-a-hold-of-your-life principles—frugality, sufficiency, moderation, restraint, minimalism, and mindfulness—reframed in the essential-avoidable dichotomy. Here are prominent insights from Essentialism:

Get to grips with selectivity—whenever you can, judiciously select which priorities, tasks, meetings, customers, ideas or steps to undertake and which to let go. “The basic value proposition of Essentialism [is,] only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.”
Most top performers have one thing in common: they accept fewer tasks and then fixate on getting them right. “Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
If you don’t arrange your life, someone else will. “When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices-or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose. That is the path of the Nonessentialist. … The Essentialist doesn’t just recognize the power of choice, he celebrates it. The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us.”
Pop out at least once a year to reflect and ask questions about what you’re doing and why. “The faster and busier things get, the more we need to build thinking time into our schedule. And the noisier things get, the more we need to build quiet reflection spaces in which we can truly focus.”
Pursue a well-lived, joyful, meaningful life. “The life of an Essentialist is a life lived without regret. If you have correctly identified what really matters, if you invest your time and energy in it, then it is difficult to regret the choices you make. You become proud of the life you have chosen to live.”

Recommendation: Speedread Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. It will remind you of the wisdom to think through—and act upon—what really matters. Essentialism is chockfull of useful instructions on how to say ‘no’ gracefully, exercise your freedom to set boundaries, discover the power of small wins, and harness the power of routines to evade the pull of nonessential distractions that can subsume you easily.

How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

August 1, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance,” assert Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr in The Power of Full Engagement. They advocate practicing energy management in addition to time management and prescribe “pulsing,” or interspersing periods of intense work with breaks to renew your energy levels.

This idea of energy management comports with the much-debated “muscle metaphor” of willpower. Mental stamina and personal energy are reservoirs. They get depleted as you go about your day, and need to be filled up every so often.

How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

Idea for Impact: Match your tasks to your energy levels throughout the day

If you know yourself sufficiently well, you can make deliberate, proactive choices that can help you sustain your drive and feel more energetic all through the day.

First, identify the kinds of tasks that deplete or sustain your energy.

Once you discover your working pattern, match your tasks to your energy levels throughout the day. If you are at your best first thing in the morning, work on something complex and challenging as soon as you get to the office.

Relegate routine task tasks and administrative chores—processing emails, scheduling appointments, filing reports—for the afternoon.

Create a “Procrastination To-Do List”

Consider preparing a special “to-do” list with low-energy, low-brainpower, low-priority, but got-to-do tasks for when you don’t feel like doing anything else. (See this list of 10 smart things you can do in 10 minutes.)

In other words, whenever your brain needs time to rest, you can idle productively by getting something else done. You can tackle this list whenever you find yourself with time on hand, but without the energy, focus, or excitement that you need to deal with something important. Some folks call this the “procrastination to-do list.”

Be warned, though, that doing mindless-but-productive tasks during procrastinating is the thin end of the wedge—it can simply feed your propensity to procrastinate. Under the illusion of not procrastinating and “getting something done,” you will want to do all the less-important things that you can do instead of building momentum and switching to the few high-priority things that you must do.

Leadership Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Founding Father

June 24, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Almost all leaders take office with an ambitious vision for their country or their organization, but only a few ever succeed in transforming that vision into reality. Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015,) the architect of modern Singapore, was one of them.

Leadership Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's Founding Father

Lee was one of the most competent leaders the world has ever seen. An incorruptible Cambridge-educated lawyer, he was an autocratic pragmatist—a strong-willed, visionary leader who “got it done.” Under his leadership, Singapore metamorphosed itself from a tropical backwater with few natural resources to a first-world metropolis in just one generation. Today, Singapore’s per-capita GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity is the third highest in the world.

There is also a darker side to the Singapore story, however. The island-nation’s prosperity came at the cost of a rather authoritarian style of government that sometimes infringed on civil liberties. In a 1986 National Day Rally, Lee defended,

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters—who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

Singapore is not quite a dictatorship, but neither is it a full democracy. Its political system is skewed to let Lee’s party dominate the country’s polity. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Lee asserted, “It is not the business of the government to enable the opposition party to overturn us.”

A vast majority of Singaporeans today will overlook these civil-liberty concerns in the context of the country’s socio-political stability, public security, world-leading and affordable healthcare, free education, good housing for all, and high employment.

Singapore’s spectacular success is accepted as evidence, sometimes lamentably as justification, as with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, that a vibrant economy and sustained prosperity could blossom only under a totalitarian government. Singapore’s achievement is not likely replicable in its entirety elsewhere.

Over the last several months, I’ve read a few biographies and evaluations of Lee and his political leadership, including the memoirs The Singapore Story: From Third World to First (1998) and One Man’s View of the World (2013.) Here are a few key leadership lessons that Lee had to teach.

Vision, structure, and determination are paramount to efficacious leadership. Lee was a brilliant, clear-eyed, far-sighted statesman. Singapore’s political stability, rapid economic growth, and its raising affluence between 1959 and 1990 were not accidental, but the result of his dynamic leadership and disciplined social engineering. In The Singapore Story (1998,) he writes, “The task of the leaders must be to provide or create for them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly. And this is not easy to achieve.”

Leadership entails tough, unpopular decisions. Lee was not afraid of being out of favor. “I have never been overconcerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a leader who is, is a weak leader. If you are concerned with whether your rating will go up or down, then you are not a leader. You are just catching the wind … you will go where the wind is blowing. And that’s not what I am in this for.” He famously forbade the sale of chewing gum to keep Singapore’s streets clean. He maintained capital punishment and caning. Singapore’s vandalism rules drew worldwide attention in 1994 when American teenager Michael Fay was caned for damaging cars and public property, in spite of appeals for clemency from the US media and government, including then-President Bill Clinton.

The litmus test of great leadership is results that matter. Many take issue with Lee’s methods, but few dispute the results he achieved. He was a pragmatist with devotion to no particular ideology. He once contemplated, “I was never a prisoner of any [socio-political] theory. What guided me were reason and reality. The acid test I applied to every theory or scheme was: Would it work?” and “The acid test is in performance, not promises.”

Nurture a meritocracy. Lee’s commitment to meritocracy is a hallmark of Singapore’s national identity—social mobility is rooted in hard work and contribution regardless of ethnic differences. He devoted resources to cultivate an excellent education and health system, and developed a high-quality teacher workforce—all to maximize people’s potential. According to Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998,) he wrote, “It is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person’s contribution to that society. In other words, society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country. This is the way to progress.” In recent years, though, the debate over rising social inequality has led to some reproach of Singapore’s meritocracy.

Attract and retain superior talent; pay them well. A key contributor to the wealth, stability, efficiency, and cleanliness of Singapore is its civil service—it’s one of the most proficient and least corrupt bureaucracies in the world. The government’s transparent policies have been a powerful enticement for people, businesses, and investments. Singapore has some of the highest paid civil servants in the world. The country is not content to let its top graduates all go straight to the private sector, so it pays what it takes to get them. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, Lee’s immediate successor, told Singapore’s parliament on 3-Dec-1993, “If we do not pay ministers adequately, we will get inadequate ministers. If you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys for your ministers. The people will suffer, not the monkeys.”

One’s accomplishments become one’s legacy. Having a broad picture of the effect you want to have on the world will help you pinpoint the actions necessary to achieve it. Explaining his legacy, Lee wrote in Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going (2011,) “I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There’s nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.”

To judge leaders by their methods alone is to underrate their successes. While considering Lee’s legacy, one needs to acknowledge his achievements while refusing to close one’s eyes to certain lapses. Lee’s many critics considered him authoritarian—he imposed media restrictions and used detention without trial and defamation suits to quash critics of his government. Discussing a political opponent in Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998,) Lee justified, “If you are a troublemaker, it’s our job to politically destroy you. … Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That’s the way I had to survive in the past.” Lee was unapologetic about his heavy-handed style of governing, seeing it as necessitous to get Singapore to where it got.

Small Steps, Big Revolutions // Summary of Robert Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

June 18, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most intentions for change seek a transformative change—something significant to be achieved once and for all, in a short period. “Big, bold steps” is the mantra of many a self-help book or motivational guru du jour.

Real change, however, takes time and is difficult. You become overwhelmed with the magnitude of the effort and persistence required to lose twenty pounds, save up for retirement, change jobs, or stabilize a sinking relationship.

As with most New Year resolutions, you’ll meet with success temporarily, only to find yourself slipping back into our old ways as soon as the initial burst of enthusiasm fades out.

Gradual Improvement, Not Radical Change

UCLA clinical psychologist Dr. Robert Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way (2004) conceives transformative change as an endless, continuous process of gradual improvements.

By breaking daunting tasks into absurdly little steps, you feel little resistance to change.

To initiate a worthwhile exercise regimen, for example, Maurer suggests that you start exercising by marching in front of the television for one minute for a day or two. Then, little by little, ask, “How could I incorporate a few more minutes of exercise into my daily routine?” Such modest questions help you seek the next proverbial baby step and “allow the brain to focus on problem-solving and action.”

To tidy up your home, pick an area of your home, set a timer for five minutes, and tidy up. Stop when the timer goes off. [This is similar to my ’10-Minute Dash’ technique to overcome procrastination.]

One small step leads to the next, which leads to one more, and so on—finally leading you to your goal of transformative change.

“Little Steps Add Up to Brilliant Acceleration”

Maurer relates this approach to Kaizen, the famed Japanese system of obsessive tinkering and continuous, incremental improvement. This idea is actually American in origin—it was brought over by American efficiency and quality experts such as W. Edwards Deming who were helping Japan rebuild its industrial strength after World War II.

Kaizen, the famed Japanese system of obsessive tinkering and continuous, incremental improvement Kaizen involves making continual, small adjustments to production techniques to not only improve speed and quality, but also save resources. That is to say, it is a relentless pursuit of perfection by breaking it down into incremental improvements.

At companies that have embraced Kaizen and other Total Quality Management (TQM) approaches, employees come to work every day determined to become a little better at whatever it is they are doing than they were the day before. Katsuaki Watanabe of Toyota, the poster-boy of TQM, has acknowledged,

There is no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little bit and piece. But when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.

Small Kaizen questions help you determine the next baby step and allow the brain to focus on problem-solving and action

“Little and often” empowers you to “tiptoe past fear”—your brain stops putting up resistance because it is tricked into thinking that you’re embarking only on something minuscule.

All changes are scary, even positive ones. Attempts to reach goals through radical or revolutionary means often fail because they heighten fear. But the small steps of Kaizen disarm the brain’s fear response, stimulating rational thought and creative play.

You can thus triumph over fear and the subsequent inaction that fear causes.

Small steps rewire your nervous system, create new connections between neurons so that the brain enthusiastically takes over the process of change and you progress rapidly toward your goal.

Small Steps: Big Revolutions - Robert Maurer's One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

Minimalist, steady, incremental change helps your brain overcome the fear that impedes success and creativity

To avoid failure at keeping your resolutions despite your best intentions, don’t push yourself to somehow become different rapidly. Instead, pledge to achieve positive, enduring life changes one powerful baby step at a time.

Other prominent insights in Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life:

“Small actions satisfy your brain’s need to do something and soothe its distress.”
“If you are trying to reach a specific goal, ask yourself every day: What is one small step I could take toward reaching my goal?”
“Small actions are at the heart of Kaizen. By taking steps so tiny that they seem trivial or even laughable, you’ll sail calmly past obstacles that have defeated you before. Slowly—but painlessly!—you’ll cultivate an appetite for continued success and lay down a permanent new route to change.”
If you hit a wall of resistance, “don’t give up! Instead, try scaling back the size of your steps. Remember that your goal is to bypass fear—and to make the steps so small that you can barely notice an effort.”
When we face crises, “the only concrete steps available are small ones. When our lives are in great distress, even while we are feeling out of control or in emotional pain we can try to locate the smaller problems within the larger disaster … to help move us slowly in the direction of a solution. But if we are blind to the small, manageable problems, we are more likely to slip into despair.”

Recommendation: Speed-read One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. It will help if you or a loved one is stuck in the rut of goal failure.

Take really small steps towards every significant change you want to make. The cumulative benefits of small improvements do have the power to produce large, transformative change. Let Kaizen be a routine that is never done.

We’re All Trying to Control Others

June 19, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

We're All Trying to Control Others

One of the realities of the human condition is that we’re all operating our lives by trying to make the settings around us—the environments in which we live, work, and play—to be just the way we want them to be.

However, we share these settings with other people, who themselves are trying to make their settings just the way they want them to be.

And herein is the source of a great many conflicts: as we control our worlds and our lives with the purpose of making them transpire as we’d like them to, we intercede with the controlling of others.

Conflict is not necessarily bad. It is a normal, fundamental, and pervasive facet of life. It is a natural outcome of what happens when our expectations, interests, viewpoints, inclinations, and opinions are at variance with those of others.

Every relationship is a minefield of conflict, and each instance of contradictory viewpoints brings new challenges.

The key to getting along amicably and resolving the problems of the world is working out how we can wisely facilitate our control of what is important to us without interfering with other people’s efforts at doing the same thing.

Idea for Impact: Life is negotiation. Getting what you want out of life is all about getting what you want from—and with—other people. Learning how to engage in conflict to get what you want without inflicting damage on the opportunities and the relationships is one of life’s essential and practical skills.

Rewards and Incentives Can Backfire

November 15, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Rewards and Incentives Can Backfire

Rewards and Incentives are Gateways to Behavior-Change

One of the great struggles of life is to get others to do the things they should, but don’t want to—getting your daughter to cleanup her bedroom or do homework in her least favorite subject, convincing your employee to do a task in the manner that your company expects, and so forth.

One tried-and-true technique to get reluctant people to do what they should is to hold back an incentive. For example, parents who want children to eat vegetables at dinner could stipulate that they eat their vegetables (the non-preferred behavior) before they can eat their desserts (the preferred behavior.)

Preferred Behaviors Can Be Used to Reinforce Unpreferred Behaviors

This motivational rule was formally studied by the American psychologist David Premack. The Premack Principle, or the “relativity theory of reinforcement,” makes it easier to do an unpleasant activity by putting a pleasant activity right after it. In this manner, a reinforcer could observe what an individual chooses to do voluntarily and offer that favored task as an incentive to gain compliance or to increase the likelihood of another less-favored behavior occurring.

Grandma's Rule or Premack Principle: Relativity Theory of Reinforcement As expected, although an academic, Premack enjoyed a very successful vocation as a highly paid “productivity expert” dispensing age-old techniques. He traveled around the country and advised thousands of corporate executives to manipulate themselves into becoming more motivated and more productive by organizing their day such that they schedule first anything that’s unpleasant and important and then reward themselves with something they really like doing.

Grandma’s Rule: “Johny, Finish Your Homework Before You Watch TV”

That a high probability behavior could be used to reinforce participation in a low probability behavior is the unassuming “Grandma’s Rule”—arguably the most universally recognized principle in the field of behavior change. Workplaces use the grandma’s rule by offering future “plum” assignments for employees who “pay their dues” by doing “dull and dirty” work in the present.

The grandma’s rule anchors in the fact that people, including children, are willing to do something they don’t really want to do if that’s the only way they can do something that they really want to do. Absent this established reinforcement, people left to their own devices tend to do what they like doing instead of doing things they don’t like doing even though latter are more beneficial.

Preferred Behaviors Can Be Used to Reinforce Unpreferred Behaviors

The Hidden Costs of Rewards and Incentives

Rewards and incentives can guide and modify behavior. The goal of offering rewards for positive reinforcement is to have the unpleasant tasks become less and less unpleasant. Therefore, the true measure of the effectiveness of any reward is how well the preferred behaviors become internalized. For example, offering rewards to children for reading books is not merely to get them to read books inside the classroom, but to internalize the reading behavior with the goal that they read even during the summer when they don’t have to read for school.

Offering rewards for motivating people to do unlikable tasks could sometimes become counterproductive. In what psychologists call “the overjustification effect,” a reward, instead of motivating, could fortify a person’s revulsion for the task. In other words, the reward could reinforce the belief that the task can’t be worth doing for itself.

Rewards Can Backfire

Overjustification effect is controversial because it disputes the general principles of motivational psychology and behavioral reinforcement—especially in the contexts of parenting, education, and the workplace.

Idea for Impact: Locating the pleasure in the future, when the reward will be imparted, could turn the present-moment doing of an unpleasant task into tedium. For example, insisting that your child eat broccoli for being rewarded with dessert could make her hate broccoli even more.

Think in Terms of Habits & Systems Rather Than Goals

September 18, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize

Most folks fail to understand how goals work: goals don’t stipulate behaviors.

Goals relate only to the outcomes and results of specific behaviors—they are not about the actions and behaviors that can bring about those results.

In other words, goals can only provide direction and can even impel you onward in the short-term, but ultimately, a well-designed system—when put into habitual practice—will always prevail.

Developing a system is what matters to discipline and self-control. Committing to the process is what makes the difference. As New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg wrote in his bestselling The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (2012,) only a systematic approach works:

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

An example of a goal: “I want to lose 10 pounds before my sister’s wedding.” A habit/system would be, “What dieting and exercising changes can I make with the aim of looking better at my sister’s wedding?”

Another example of a goal: “How do I amass $1 million before I turn 35?” A habit/system would be, “How do I develop financial disciplines and investment methods to get richer over time and achieve a net worth of $1 million by the time I’m 35?”

Idea for Impact: Only by creating habits and systems to achieve goals can you live more of the life you aspire to. As a creature of habit, when you are doing something that is routine, you don’t need to be deliberately engaged in the task in the same way as if you were doing something that is not habitual.

Goals

Distinguish the Variances That Require a Manager’s Attention

Managers Just Can’t Do Everything

Idea for Impact: Don’t Get Lost in the Thicket of Trivia

Wondering what to read next?

Four Rules for Priority-Setting

How to Develop a Vision for 2020?

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Smart Managers Have the Self-Discipline to Turn Excellence On and Off

Idea for Impact: Be Excellent Occasionally

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Match your tasks to your energy levels throughout the day

Create a “Procrastination To-Do List”

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Gradual Improvement, Not Radical Change

“Little Steps Add Up to Brilliant Acceleration”

Small Kaizen questions help you determine the next baby step and allow the brain to focus on problem-solving and action

Minimalist, steady, incremental change helps your brain overcome the fear that impedes success and creativity

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Rewards and Incentives are Gateways to Behavior-Change

Preferred Behaviors Can Be Used to Reinforce Unpreferred Behaviors

Grandma’s Rule: “Johny, Finish Your Homework Before You Watch TV”

The Hidden Costs of Rewards and Incentives

Rewards Can Backfire

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?