Distraction

You cannot fully unleash your genius in the three-minute increments you have between distractions. Unfortunately, for many of us distraction has become a habit — one that has been so often and routinely reinforced that it is extremely difficult to break. Persuasive technology — technology that uses sophisticated techniques from behavioral psychology to “persuade” us to keep engaging with it — exacerbates the problem. So, over time, as our habit gains strength, we go looking for distraction. When things get quiet, or a task gets boring or frustrating, we reach for our phones. 

Maura Thomas writing in the Harvard Business Review

Deadlines & Productivity

People like to say if it wasn’t for the last minute, nothing would get done. But research shows people’s productivity is not linear. When people sit down to do a task, they’ll put in a lot of effort initially. At some point there’s going to be diminishing returns on extra effort. To optimise productivity, you need to maximise benefits and minimise costs and find that inflection point, which is where you should start to wrap up. 

Elizabeth Tenney, University of Utah’s Eccles School of Business quoted in a BBC article

Productivity struggles

E.B. White once wrote: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” But in my research, I’ve found that productive people don’t agonize about which desire to pursue. They go after both simultaneously, gravitating toward projects that are personally interesting and socially meaningful.

Often our productivity struggles are caused not by a lack of efficiency, but a lack of motivation. Productivity isn’t a virtue. It’s a means to an end. It’s only virtuous if the end is worthy. If productivity is your goal, you have to rely on willpower to push yourself to get a task done. If you pay attention to why you’re excited about the project and who will benefit from it, you’ll be naturally pulled into it by intrinsic motivation.

Adam Grant, writing in the New York Times

The Benefits of letting your mind wander

Allowing our minds to wander can also give us opportunities to process emotions, Elisabeth Netherton, a psychiatrist and regional medical director with Houston-based Mindpath Health, said. Some of her patients keep their brains busy to avoid certain feelings, which then come flooding out when their minds slow down. Providing some time for introspection during the day can help manage those emotions and reduce anxiety. Although mind-wandering has been linked to increased anxiety and depression, the results of a 2019 study suggest that intentional mind-wandering can mitigate anxiety, depression and stress.

Counterintuitively, mind-wandering may also help us get more done. Although we’d never expect our bodies to run all day long, Olga Mecking, author of “Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing,” said, “we somehow expect our brains to be on 24/7.”  The high value society places on productivity means we often keep working, even when we notice ourselves slowing down or making mistakes. But by preventing such issues, taking breaks might make us more productive. Meanwhile, Dane points out that, if our minds never strayed from the current task, we wouldn’t remember the other tasks we need to complete. Research shows a link between mind-wandering and the fulfillment of goals.

Pam Moore writing in the Washington Post

Productivity struggles

E.B. White once wrote: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” But in my research, I’ve found that productive people don’t agonize about which desire to pursue. They go after both simultaneously, gravitating toward projects that are personally interesting and socially meaningful.

Often our productivity struggles are caused not by a lack of efficiency, but a lack of motivation. Productivity isn’t a virtue. It’s a means to an end. It’s only virtuous if the end is worthy. If productivity is your goal, you have to rely on willpower to push yourself to get a task done. If you pay attention to why you’re excited about the project and who will benefit from it, you’ll be naturally pulled into it by intrinsic motivation.

Adam Grant, writing in the New York Times

We’re doing Time management wrong

Time management strategies work in the sense that you’ll process more incoming inputs, but we’re living in a world with effectively infinite inputs—emails you could receive, demands that could be made of you, or ambitions that you could have. Getting better at moving through them is not going to get you to the end of them, so the promise of reaching a point at which you feel on top of everything is flawed on a math basis from the beginning.  

We are finite, limited creatures living in a world of constraints and stubborn reality. Once you’re no longer kidding yourself that one day you’re going to become capable of doing everything that’s thrown at you, you get to make better decisions about which things you are going to focus on and which you’re going to neglect.

Oliver Burkeman quoted in The Atlantic

"Keeping a “have done" list

"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.

Leigh Buchanan writing in Inc.

Do people work better when they are stressed?

It’s a dangerous fallacy to say that people perform better when they’re stressed, over-extended, or unhappy. We found just the opposite. People are more likely to come up with a creative idea or solve a tricky problem on a day when they are in a better mood than usual. In fact, they are more likely to be creative the next day, too, regardless of that next day’s mood. There’s a kind of “creativity carry-over” effect from feeling good at work. 

Teresa Amabile talking about her book Do people work better when they are stressed?

The False Loops of Social Media

“We crave some sense of closure, some sense of being done,” says Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and author of The Attention Merchants. “Much of social media tries to prevent you from ever having that feeling.”

Social media sites, in particular, are designed to create what he calls “false loops,” where you never reach the end of what you can do on the platform. He thinks that goes against our way of making sense of the world: Humans have a natural predilection toward creating experiences and narratives that start and end, like the social ritual of eating dinner with a friend, or attending a concert, or even reading an article. But social media tends to disrupt these things–unlike a well-planned story or meal, Wu compares experiencing social media to a buffet, where nothing really goes together. Coincidentally, you also end up stuffing yourself and feeling ill.

“Our brains like to close things out,” Wu says. “I think that a lot of design now is trying to turn all of us into obsessive-compulsives by making it so the loops are never closed.” Film and TV offer a compelling parallel. “How do you feel after going to see a really great movie, as opposed to channel surfing for three hours?” he says. “It’s a complete difference. One has a beginning, middle, and an end, versus you saw half of 10 shows and kind of got into something that didn’t develop all the way through.”

Katharine Schwab writing in Fast Company

The “Uh Oh” Effect

Resist the “uh oh” effect. Midpoints—of work projects and training regiments can either discourage (the oh no” effect) or motivate (“oh no, time's running out”). UCLA researchers studying teamwork found that the majority of groups did almost no work until halfway to the deadline then suddenly buckled down. Set interim goals and adopt the “chain” technique: Pick a task and mark a calendar with an X every day you do it—the string of X’s serves as an incentive.

Aaron Fernandez writing in Wired Magazine

10,000 hours of deliberate practice is not enough

In a study of violin students at a conservatory in Berlin in the 1980s.. there was something.. that almost everyone has subsequently overlooked. “Deliberate practice,” they observed, “is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day.” Practice too little and you never become world-class. Practice too much, though, and you increase the odds of being struck down by injury, draining yourself mentally, or burning out. To succeed, students must “avoid exhaustion” and “limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”

Everybody speed-reads through the discussion of sleep and leisure and argues about the 10,000 hours (necessary to become world-class in anything).

This illustrates a blind spot that scientists, scholars, and almost all of us share: a tendency to focus on focused work, to assume that the road to greater creativity is paved by life hacks, propped up by eccentric habits, or smoothed by Adderall or LSD. Those who research world-class performance focus only on what students do in the gym or track or practice room. Everybody focuses on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make those more effective and more productive. They don’t ask whether there are other ways to improve performance, and improve your life.

This is how we’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writing in Nautilus