Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Procrastination

Why is Task-Planning so Time-Consuming?

By Leave a Comment

Planning, which saves time, itself can take quite a bit of time. It’s an interesting quasi-paradox that I’m sure you’ve run into.

That planning is long-drawn-out is one of the main criticisms of even the supposedly solid task-management systems out there. Take David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach, for example. Achieving the system’s potential fully is simply overwhelming. Allen’s method focuses more on the capturing, reviewing, and planning of tasks than it does on the actual doing them.

The key to time management is awareness. Think realistically about your time by recognizing it is a limited resource. Always ask yourself, even when you’re planning your time out, “Is this time-effective?”

Don’t over-organize your list. Don’t spend too much time making it look nice. Don’t feel like you need to do everything on your list. Don’t put anything on your list when you’d be wiser to just do the task now and save the time it takes to put it on your list and think about it again later.

Idea for Impact: Refine your planning approach further. Remember, the benefits of any tool must exceed its costs.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. A Key to Changing Your Perfectionist Mindset
  2. In Imperfection, the True Magic of the Holidays Shines
  3. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  4. Warren Buffett’s Advice on How to Focus on Priorities and Subdue Distractions
  5. Summary of Richard Carlson’s ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’

Real Ways to Make Habits Stick

By Leave a Comment

Want to make a new habit stick? Try piggybacking or ‘stacking’ it to an existing one.

Choose something you have no problem motivating yourself to do—say, brushing your teeth—then combine it with some habit you want to acquire. The existing pattern serves as the prompt for the new habit.

Most people have robust morning and evening routines; try stacking new habits into those practices. For example, if you want to do some mindfulness meditation every day, do it after brushing your teeth in the morning. Your wake-up routine becomes the cue to build a new meditation habit.

Better yet, associate the habit you want to achieve with a ‘temptation’ (something you love doing,) like sipping your morning cuppa joe. Your habit stacking plan may look like this: “After I meditate for ten minutes, I will have my coffee.” This way, the habit will become more attractive to you, making it more likely to stick.

Idea for Impact: Good habits build automatically when you don’t have to consciously think about doing them. Look for patterns in your day and think about how to use existing habits to create new, positive ones. Stacking habits can encourage you to remember, repeat, and, therefore, maintain a series of behaviors. Set yourself up for success.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  2. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  3. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  4. How to … Make Work Less Boring
  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

By Leave a Comment

Even the more determined souls among us find that New Year’s resolutions aren’t effective.

Some of us don’t even bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore because we always break them. Mark Twain famously wrote in a letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in January 1863,

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual … New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.

When we try to change everything at once, we set ourselves up for failure

We make bold resolutions to start exercising or losing weight, for example, without taking the steps needed to set ourselves up for success. Behavioral scientists who study habit formation argue that most people try to create healthy habits in the wrong way. Starting a new routine isn’t always easy.

Stanford University researcher B. J. Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019,) notes that jumping cold turkey into new beginnings upon the turn of the calendar demands a high level of motivation that can’t be sustained over time. He recommends starting with tiny habits to help make the new habit as easy and achievable as possible in the beginning.

Small Measures, Large Results

Small, specific goals are amazingly effective. Making a New Year’s resolution to “run a marathon this summer” is an imposing aspiration to get started on, but committing to “run two miles in 30 minutes thrice a week in January” is a first operating objective.

Break any big challenge into simple steps and just focus on getting to the first step. Taking a daily short stroll could be the beginning of an exercise habit. Then, regroup and think about step two.

The truth is, if you invest time and have even a little bit of success in any endeavor, you’re both more likely to believe the changes will last and commit more. Success builds momentum.

Idea for Impact: Good habits happen when we set ourselves up for achievable success.

Bold promises and vague goals don’t work well. Neither does beating up on yourself for lapses.

Make New Year’s resolutions by establishing long-term targets and making many small resolutions all year round. If you want to lose weight, resolve to pass up nacho-and-cheese and soda for a month.

Take one baby step at a time. Expect some setbacks. The willpower necessary will be small. And you’ll get better results that’ll actually stick.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  2. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’
  3. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  4. Half-Size Your Goals
  5. Just Start with ONE THING

Change Your Perfectionist Mindset (And Be Happier!) This Holiday Season

By Leave a Comment

Perfectionism can inspire you to deliver top-quality work, but it’ll cause needless anxiety and slow you down, especially over the holiday season.

Even for the more fastidious among us, a spotless home isn’t always achievable. Everywhere you look, there’ll be something to straighten up—unfolded laundry, kids’ toys on the floor, piles of unopened mail.

Embrace the mess. Recognize that not all will get done on time. Tolerate some clutter from time to time and excuse yourself for not getting all the chores done or having a perfect home.

Don’t cling to your perfectionism even when it’s counterproductive. Put things away when you’re able to, but don’t feel like you have to dedicate many hours to tidy up, especially when that time can be better spent relaxing and rejoicing with family.

Idea for Impact: Now is a good time you cut yourself a break. There’s no need to feel less-than-great about the state of your home over the holidays.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. In Imperfection, the True Magic of the Holidays Shines
  2. A Key to Changing Your Perfectionist Mindset
  3. The Liberating Power of Embracing a Cluttered Space
  4. Thinking Straight in the Age of Overload // Book Summary of Daniel Levitin’s ‘The Organized Mind’
  5. Let a Dice Decide: Random Choices Might Be Smarter Than You Think

This Question Can Change Your Life

By Leave a Comment

The one question you should ask yourself continuously is, “What should I be doing right now that’d be the most effective use of this moment?”

The ability to know what’s essential and what’s not is the key to successful time management.

Throughout your day, ask, “What’s my priority?” This question takes many forms, but its premise is simple enough:

  • What action can you take now? What question can you ask? What opportunity or problem shall you engage in?
  • What is the one activity that could drive you the most significant results? What decision could have the most significant impact on your priorities?
  • Should you do this task, delegate it, or say ‘no’? What is the most expeditious way to do this task? Is this time-effective?

Ask these questions—and answer them honestly. Adjust your actions and seek better outcomes. Don’t get bogged down by activities that don’t contribute to your values and priorities.

Idea for Impact: Envision a better now. Be conscious about time. It’s your most valuable commodity. Don’t get unduly busy at trivial things while there are essential things you should be working on.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Get Unstuck and Take Action Now
  2. A Guaranteed Formula for Success: Identify Your #1 Priority and Finish It First
  3. How to … Make a Dreaded Chore More Fun
  4. Don’t Do the Easiest Jobs First
  5. Always Demand Deadlines: We Perform Better Under Constraints

Half-Size Your Goals

By Leave a Comment

At the start of the year, if you’re like most people, you selected a bunch of lofty, impossible goals. Now, halfway through the year, you feel disappointed and let down with yourself. In fact, the longer your goals list, the more overwhelmed and off-track you’ve got.

As part of your mid-year review, reflect on the first six months of the year and adjust your goals for the rest of the year. Revisit your goals, assess your progress, evaluate your approach, and change your timeline. Break big ambitious goals down into more manageable decisions and improve the odds of achieving the type of outcome you desire.

Try half-sized goals. If you’re struggling to attain a goal that seems to be too challenging, set a less difficult version of the goal.

If you’re not getting good results, then you go back and tweak what you’re doing. Don’t feel the need to change everything in your life at once.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
  2. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  3. A Worthwhile New Year’s Resolution
  4. Don’t Try to ‘Make Up’ for a Missed Workout, Here’s Why
  5. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

Change Must Come from Within

By Leave a Comment

If you want to become the type of person who wants to change, you must become the type of person who embodies that change repeatedly. You must deliberately weave the change into your sense of identity. Seth Godin notes in The Practice (2020,)

If you want to get in shape, it’s not difficult. Spend an hour a day running or at the gym. Do that for six months or a year. Done.

That’s not the difficult part.

The difficult part is becoming the kind of person who goes to the gym every day.

When you use your actions to drive your identity, you’ll naturally become confident in your ability to make fundamental decisions that sustain—and enhance—who you are.

Idea for Impact: Habits stick when they respond to your sense of identity. Change your identity, change how you want to be seen, and you’ll change your life.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  2. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’
  3. Real Ways to Make Habits Stick
  4. Don’t Try to ‘Make Up’ for a Missed Workout, Here’s Why
  5. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

Stop Putting Off Your Toughest Tasks

By Leave a Comment

Do those dreaded tasks first—the ones you don’t want to complete. Those are the ones that are truly core to who you are and what your ambitions are.

To be time-effective, you’ll need to use your will-power, a limited resource that it is, in the most effective way possible. Not only does this give the most time to react and correct problems that emerge from the difficult tasks, making progress on the challenging tasks is an incredible morale boost.

You procrastinate when there’s too much to do, or you dislike a task or don’t know where to start. If you figure out which of these blocks you, you can determine the next steps and get it over with.

Idea for Impact: Tasks you enjoy doing are, in fact, often hard not to do. If you tackle them first, you’ll get to the end of the day and find you’ve not achieved anything meaningful at all—just a bunch of ‘stuff’ which, however gratifying, won’t make much difference.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Do the Easiest Jobs First
  2. How to … Tame Your Calendar Before It Tames You
  3. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  4. Get Unstuck and Take Action Now
  5. Powerful Systems, Costly Upkeep

How to Embrace Multitasking

By Leave a Comment

Multitasking imposes cognitive limitations. Incessantly jumping between tasks leads to subpar performance. Not only that, when you’re skittering on the surface of yourself in many places at once, you’re denying true experience.

Evolutionary biologists have argued that the brain wasn’t designed for heavy-duty multitasking. Think of your brain as having multiple processing channels—visual, linguistic, tactile, and so on. Some channels can do only one thing at a time. Therefore, when you’re multitasking and moving attention back and forth between tasks that use different channels, there’s a cognitive penalty to reset and refocus.

In Defense of Multitasking: How to Do It the Right Way

Never double up on tasks that use different channels. Writing two reports simultaneously with a stock market ticker running along the top edge of your screen won’t work. But there’s no harm in surfing Instagram while watching yet another rerun of Seinfeld—you can afford to lose focus on either subject.

If you’re listening to music to improve your focus, avoid songs with lyrics because they’ll engage your brain’s language channel, creating a new distraction.

If something needs your full concentration, give it. Don’t listen to an audiobook when you’re trying to land an airliner in high crosswinds.

Never Multitask Under a Tight Deadline

Pair high-cortical involvement tasks (those that involve judgment) with routine, physical tasks that the cerebellum, the brain’s autopilot, can handle. Chitty-chatty on the phone with your mom is okay while folding laundry. But get off the phone when you’re behind the wheel in bumper-to-bumper city-center traffic.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Shun Multitasking. Put it to Work for Your Life Instead.

Life is a juggling act. In the complex, fast-response world we live in, focusing on one task to exclude others isn’t always an option anymore. Often, you have to address immediately whatever shouts most at you.

Some activities are so dull (driving cross-country through miles and miles of mildly interesting scenery) and aversive that if it weren’t for multitasking, they would never get done at all.

Know when and how to multitask. And when not to. Carve out time for deep thinking and doing the essential things. Learn to protect your “intense focus” times.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  2. How to … Make a Dreaded Chore More Fun
  3. Get Unstuck and Take Action Now
  4. A Guaranteed Formula for Success: Identify Your #1 Priority and Finish It First
  5. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus

Why You Should Celebrate Small Wins

By Leave a Comment

Small steps are more manageable than big, daunting ones. Small wins aren’t just a great way to make progress. They’re good for your emotional well-being too.

Peter Sims writes in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries (2013,)

Small wins are like footholds or building blocks amid the inevitable uncertainty of moving forward, or as the case may be, laterally. They serve as what Saras Sarasvathy calls landmarks, and they can either confirm that we’re heading in the right direction or they can act as pivot points, telling us how to change course.

In the acclaimed paper in which [University of Michigan psychologist Karl] Weick described small wins, published in the January 1984 issue of American Psychologist, he used the example of how helpful it is for alcoholics to focus on remaining sober one day at a time, or even one hour at a time. Stringing together successive days of sobriety helps them to see the rewards of abstinence and makes it more achievable in their minds. Elaborating on the benefits of small wins, Weick writes, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

Each time you accomplish a small step, have a little voice whisper in your ear, “You accomplished more than you had ten minutes ago!” This affirmation can help you recognize the momentum you’ve created and stimulate you to get absorbed in more of the task. By the end of the hour or the day, you’ll feel like you’ve had multiple wins on your way towards the larger goal.

A big hurdle to change is the resistance from believing that the pain of attempting major change is too rarely worth it. But researchers believe that any accomplishment, no matter how small, activates your brain’s reward circuitry, releasing dopamine, the pleasure hormone. That can evoke the motivational appeal of an outcome, which in turn can hook you toward achieving even more.

Keep sight of the small victories. Those are the ones that keep you going. If you’re a manager, celebrate even ordinary, incremental progress—that’ll improve your team’s engagement.

Idea for Impact: Celebrate your small wins—it’ll make you feel good about yourself. Attention to small wins can help people lift themselves out of fear and hopelessness—this is the crux of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT.)

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Did School Turn You Into a Procrastinator?
  2. Don’t Try to ‘Make Up’ for a Missed Workout, Here’s Why
  3. Do Things Fast
  4. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  5. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost