Barack Obama is a life hacker. When interviewed by Michael Lewis a few years ago,
Obama explained that he wears only gray or blue suits so as to cut down the choices he
has to make each day, and then he cited research showing that you need to focus your
decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. The studies that Obama was
referring to suggest that if you exhaust your decision-making capacity with unnecessary
choices, youll end up making mistakes when it really matters.
Like many of us, Obama is influenced by the literature that draws upon psychology,
neuroscience and behavioral economics to tell us how to be happier and more
successful. The New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg has already contributed to
this genre with his first book, The Power of Habit, which was an engagingly deep dive
into the psychology of how routines are formed and modified.
His newest book is broader in scope. It has eight main chapters, each focusing on a
single idea about how to increase productivity in business or in life, each telling a story
of how the idea works in practice. Many of the stories are terrific; my favorites were
about the early seasons of Saturday Night Live, F.B.I. agents racing to rescue a
kidnapping victim, and a poker player competing in a $2 million winner-take-all
tournament. And Duhigg is a pleasure to read. Unlike a lot of contributors to this genre,
hes a journalist, not a professor, and it shows in his prose, as when he casually
describes someone as having a passion for long skirts and Hooters chicken wings.
But its not clear that his book lives up to its subtitle, The Secrets of Being Productive
in Life and Business. Many of Duhiggs conclusions seem less like secrets and more
like common sense. He reminds us that its important to set goals, both specific and
long-term. We learn that its good for an organization to allow people to participate and
express their views. I enjoyed reading about Annie Duke, cognitive scientist turned
poker player, but the upshot of this chapter was: When you plan for the future, try to
reason in terms of probability, not certainty. Are there really many people who need
reminding that we live in an uncertain world?
Other suggestions are less obvious, but they might not be that reliable as practical
advice. Duhigg tells of a pilot who landed an Airbus during a huge system failure by
thinking about the plane in a different way, as if it were a single-engine Cessna. Get
into the habit of telling yourself stories, Duhigg writes these stories will tell us what
to focus on and what to ignore. But one can easily find cases in which stories make us
stupid indeed, one of the main themes of Maria Konnikovas recent book, The
Confidence Game, is that our appetite for narrative can blind us to reality and make us
easy prey to con men.
Or consider choices. Duhigg talks about how the act of making choices invigorates and
motivates us, and suggests that we add opportunities for decision-making into our
lives. This really is interesting and unintuitive research. But, as Obama realized,
choices can also exhaust us, so its not clear whether the advantages of additional
choices exceed the costs.
Certainly, Duhigg is sensitive to these sorts of nuances. He tells us about a kidnapping
case that was solved in part because an F.B.I. agent acted on his own initiative, and he
argues that organizations work better if employees have more autonomy. But he then
concedes that there are good reasons companies dont decentralize authority, and he
notes that the agent might have wasted time by following the wrong hunch. As he puts
it elsewhere, an instinct for decisiveness is great until its not.
Duhigg ends his book with A Readers Guide to Using These Ideas, and while some of
his proposals are clever there are some good tips about handling email overload
most have a fortune-cookie flavor, such as Envision multiple futures.
Why cant a writer as astute as Duhigg come up with less ambiguous advice? One
concern is his method. While his book contains an occasional failure story, the main
focus of each chapter is on a person or organization that did well. This makes intuitive
sense. If you want to be good at tennis, watch a champion tennis player; if you want to
learn the secrets of a successful marriage, look at happy couples. Few of us approach
people who do poorly and ask them the secrets of their failure.
But we should. As Duhigg himself puts it, many successful people ... spend an
enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures. He should have done
more of that in his book. He talks about the great seasons of Saturday Night Live and
notes that while there was tension and infighting, the cast members still felt safe
enough to criticize one another without fear of punishment. This is plainly a good
thing, but if the same attitude was present for the lousy seasons of the show, then
receptivity to criticism cant be the secret sauce. Annie Duke uses probabilistic
reasoning to win at poker, but if the players she beats also calculate the odds, then that
isnt what makes someone a poker champion.
Also, stories can tell us only so much. Ive never read a book from this genre that wasnt
filled with stories stories are memorable and appealing and persuasive and
Duhiggs skill as a storyteller makes his book so engaging to read. But individual cases,
whether of success or failure, tell you little about general principles, because you cant
distinguish factors that really made a difference from accidental features of the
examples youve chosen. My favorite musician might take LSD, but I cant know that
its the acid that makes her so good maybe shed be better without it. One needs to do
large-scale studies or, ideally, experiments. Take 200 musicians, randomly choose 100
of them to take acid, and force 100 to abstain; if the first group makes better music,
well, now youve found a secret of productivity.
If Duhigg used such methods, what would he find? Perhaps very little. Plainly, there are
things worth knowing about how to live ones life and run an organization. You can
learn to become a better poker player, a better pilot or a better manager, and M.B.A.
programs arent entirely a waste of time. But reading Duhiggs book makes one wonder
whether there really are any secrets here any surprising generalizations of broad
applicability. Readers looking for quick and dirty life hacks are going to be
disappointed. Better to ignore the how-to subtitle and just enjoy the excellent stories.
Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale. He is writing a book about the problems with
empathy.
A version of this review appears in print on March 27, 2016, on page BR19 of the Sunday Book
Review with the headline: More and Better. Today's Paper|Subscribe
1. Productivity is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our
energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the
1. To motivate yourself, you must believe you have autonomy over your actions and
surroundings.
2. People who are particularly good at managing their attention are in the habit of
3. Experiments have shown that people with SMART goals are more likely to seize
on the easiest tasks, to become obsessed with finishing projects, and to freeze on
next.
5. Innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways.
Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best
uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards
Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and
honed.
When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push
themselves more.
The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that
This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because
it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any
are in control. The specific choice we make matters less than the assertion of
control.
Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise
People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more
friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.
Studies show that someones locus of control can be influenced through training
and feedback.
The students who had been praised for their intelligencewho had been primed to
think in terms of things they could not influencewere much more likely to focus on
the easier puzzles during the second round of play, even though they had been
complimented for being smart. They were less motivated to push themselves. They
later said the experiment wasnt much fun. In contrast, students who had been praised
for their hard workwho were encouraged to frame the experience in terms of self-
determinationwent to the hard puzzles. They worked longer and scored better.
If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier.
making choices, they can learn to exert willpower. Once people know how to make
our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values
and goals.
The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are
decisions that do two things: They convince us were in control and they endow our
transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority
Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation
of meaningful projects, goals, and values. We start to recognize how small chores can
have outsized emotional rewards, because they prove to ourselves that we are making
project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do.
Self-motivation is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more
Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members
Once in a cognitive tunnel, we lose our ability to direct our focus. Instead, we latch
on to the easiest and most obvious stimulus, often at the cost of common sense.
Reactive thinking is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many
Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and its why to-do lists and calendar
alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take
sense, outsources the choices and control that, in other settings, create motivation.
The downside of reactive thinking is that habits and reactions can become so
People who are particuarly good at managing their attention share certain characteristics:
4. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple
responses
5. They say when they daydream, theyre often imagining future conversations
6. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do
Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: creating mental
models.
All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about
how the world works, whether we realize were doing it or not. But some of us build
more robust models than others. We envision the conversations were going to have
with more specificity, and imagine what we are going to do later that day in greater
detail. As a result, were better at choosing where to focus and what to ignore.
People who are particularly good at managing their attention are in the habit of
telling themselves stories all the time. They engage in constant forecasting. They
daydream about the future and then, when life clashes with their imagination, their
Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go
from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories
and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. Its always jumping
around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world,
By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about whats going on around us,
If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work,
cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and
do when you get to your desk. Then youll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which
Narrate your life, as you are living it, and youll encode those experiences deeper
in your brain.
It is easier to know whats ahead when theres a well-rounded script inside your
head.
Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that
constantly surrounds us. Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we
Experiments have shown that people with SMART goals are more likely to seize
on the easiest tasks, to become obsessed with finishing projects, and to freeze on
For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the
SMART system.
The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that
audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. Its often not clear how to start on a
stretch goal. And so, for a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we
need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of
Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a
The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-
term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of
satisfaction that each task will deliver. We are encouraging our need for closure and
our tendency to freeze on a goal without asking if its the right aim. The result is that
Come up with a menu of your biggest ambitions. Dream big and stretch. Describe
the goals that, at first glance, seem impossible, such as starting a company or running
a marathon. Then choose one aim and start breaking it into short-term, concrete steps.
Ask yourself: What realistic progress can you make in the next day, week, month?
How many miles can you realistically run tomorrow and over the next three weeks?
What are the specific, short-term steps along the path to bigger success? What
timeline makes sense? Will you open your store in six months or a year? How will
you measure your progress? Within psychology, these smaller ambitions are known
as proximal goals, and repeated studies have shown that breaking a big ambition
into proximal goals makes the large objective more likely to occur.
When Pychyl writes a to-do list, for instance, he starts by putting a stretch goal
such as conduct research that explains goal/neurology interfaceat the top of the
page. Underneath comes the nitty gritty: the small tasks that tell him precisely what
Many of our most important decisions are, in fact, attempts to forecast the future.
next.
Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires
probabilistically.
as looking at our past choices and asking ourselves: Why was I so certain things
Innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways.
If you want to become an innovation broker and increase the productivity of your own
1. First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you
think and feel. Look to your own life as creative fodder, and broker your own
2. Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isnt a
sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, its the condition that helps make us
flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety
is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways. The path out of that turmoil is
to look at what you know, to reinspect conventions youve seen work and try to apply
distance from what we create. Without self-criticism, one idea can quickly crowd out
competitors. But we can regain that critical distance by forcing ourselves to critique
what weve already done, by making ourselves look at it from a completely different
perspective.
Bayes rule. The probability of an event, based on conditions that might be related
to the event.
focused on instrumentation, task at hand, internal thought, etc. and not on the present
environment.
This is part II of our two part series on goal setting, inspired by the book,Smarter Faster Better by
In part I, we talked about why its important to think big and develop stretch goals if we want to
But if all we do is dream big and write down a long list of audacious aspirations, its unlikely that
well take any action on them. Why? Because most of the time, its unclear what, specifically, we
need to do in order to make those dreams a reality. So, in this article/episode were going to focus
Stretch goals inspire us to think big and remind us to focus on the big picture.
SMART goals goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and
Timebound help us form a concrete plan of action in order to make the stretch goal a
reality.
In the book, Duhigg tells us that the best way to do this is to put together a specific type of to-do
list one that forces you to first figure out your stretch goal, and then to figure out your SMART-
goal (aka: a specific action plan to help you achieve your big, giant stretch goal.
So the solution is writing to-do lists that pair stretch goals and SMART goals:
Come up with a menu of your biggest ambitions. Dream big and stretch. Describe the goals that, at
first glance, seem impossible, such as starting a company or running a marathon. Then choose one
aim and start breaking it into short-term, concrete steps. Ask yourself: What realistic progress can
you make in the next day, week, month? How many miles can you realistically run tomorrow and
over the next three weeks? What are the specific, short-term steps along the path to bigger success?
What timeline makes sense? Will you open your store in six months or a year? How will you
measure your progress? Within psychology, these smaller ambitions are known as proximal goals,
and repeated studies have shown that breaking a big ambition into proximal goals makes the large
Lets go over the steps to put one of these Stretch + SMART Goal to-do lists together:
STEP 1: Start with a blank page, and write your long-term stretch goal at the top of that page.
STEP 2: Below that stretch goal, write your SMART goals related to your long-term stretch goal
Another way to think about this stretch + SMART goal combination is to think of stretch goals as
projects and SMART goals as all the actions you need to take in order to complete the project.
Stretch goal: Conduct research on how to start an online business. (Remember: write this
at the top of the page. Then, underneath your stretch goal, write down the nitty-gritty: the
small tasks that tell you precisely what you need to do.)
Timeline: By tomorrow.
Side note: Its not even always important that you add every component of the SMART goal
system, its just important that youre constantly aware of what to do next while youre also
always reminding yourself of your larger ambition so you dont get stuck in the weeds of doing
Specific: Come up with at least 3 examples of pairing stretch goals with SMART goals to
help explain the concept; and then draft/outline/record article and episode.
Measurable: Reference the book, [Smarter Faster Better] by Charles Duhigg and brainstorm
ideas until I settle on three great examples I can utilize to clearly explain this concept.
Achievable?: As long as I continue to stick with my usual schedule and block time to work
on my most important goals + projects this podcast being one of them then I should
Realistic?: Yep. Shouldnt take more than 8 hours, split between two days, to do this from
start to finish.
Timeline:
writing and/or outlining both the article version as well as the podcast version of
this project.
Tuesday (time block: 8am12pm) Focus on reviewing and tweaking the final
draft, recording the podcast, and then scheduling it for release on Monday morning.
BOOM.
In short, we need stretch and SMART goals. It doesnt matter if you call them by those names. Its
not important if your proximal goals fulfill every SMART criterion. What matters is having a large
ambition and a system for figuring out how to make it into a concrete and realistic plan. Then, as
you check the little things off your to-do list, youll move ever closer to what really matters. Youll
The difference between a person who sets big goals and fails to achieve them, and a person who sets
big goals and makes them a reality, is a PLAN Heres how you can start putting one of your own
together:
Next, pair that stretch goal with all of the SMART components related to
completing it (Remember: first choose a big giant stretch goal that gets you inspired and
excitedand then attach a SMART goal plan-of-attack to help you achieve it.)
Step back every now and then to see the big picture. As Duhigg tells us in Smarter
Faster Better, In addition to having audacious ambitions and plans that are thorough, we
still need, occasionally, to step outside the day-to-day and consider if were moving toward
When youre feeling down, and need inspirationthink about WHY you want to
When youre feeling lost, and dont know what you need to doit means you havent
broken your stretch goal down into something actionable enough yet; so go back to step 2.
Finally, stop reading this right now and take action. You can do it. Go!
Smarter Faster Better
Charles Duhigg
When I requested a copy of this upcoming book (released March 8,
2016) from Random House*, I was really hoping for a repeat of
Duhiggs 2012 The Power of Habit. Unfortunately, there was
something missing from this one. I cant quite figure out what it is,
but I think it has to do with the first book being much easier to apply
and this one overall being more theoretical.
That being said, this was incredibly readable and had a lot of great
case studies that Ive encountered in numerous settings and other
books Ive read recently about work productivity and managing up.
Duhiggs writing style is incredibly easy to read and he seamlessly
ties together disparate examples to elucidate his points. Off the top of
my head a few are: the development of Disneys Frozen, General
Electric (I feel like Im an expert after Badowskis excellent Managing
Up), aviation near-crashes, the writing and staging of West Side Story,
Google, Cincinnati school reform, debt collection and many others!
Needless to say you will easily find at least one example that you
really identify with.
Duhigg and the many example he provides, drill down to the essence
of team work and the importance of communication, going up AND
coming down. When I think about the times Ive felt lost or
inconsequential at my jobs its been when Ive had all decision-
making abilities removed from either a change in management or
lack of flexibility. Using Duhiggs suggestions of finding ANYTHING you
can make a decision about will be incredibly useful going forward. Im
aware that allowing workers the freedom to make choices and being a
worker who is able to make choices is a perk of seniority and
longevity, but it was interesting to read that at ALL levels this ability
is just as important as the ability to feel as if you are being heard,
regardless of the outcome.
The other big thing that stood out to me is how productive I must
already be (and I know I am), because Duhigg has now given me the
vocabulary to describe what it is I do. I try to explain things to
supervisors about why Im able to produce the amount of work I do
and still have the time for the creative impulses to strike, but Ive
never had the vocabulary. Now that I know Im constantly creating
mental models and desperately need clear delineated psychological
safety (aka team standards), Im (if possible) even more confident in
my abilities.
As a last note, I really enjoyed this line about real life siblings and how
they Frozenultimately adopted it as the conflict for the stories
sisters.
Siblings dont grow apart because one is good and one is bad. They
grow apart because theyre both messes and then they come
together when they realize they need each other. Thats what I want
to know. (Ch.7, Innovation, Jennifer Lee Screenwriter/Director,
Disneys Frozen)
It really struck true and reminds me of how many siblings while living
together through high school are ready to murder each other or
want nothing to do with each other, but the second there is some
independence and/or maturity from living alone, they start to bond a
lot better. I know it was true for my sister and I. The older we get and
the more sorted our lives become the better we are at communication
and feeling like were not the crazies in the family
The only thing that bothered me about this book was the citation
scheme. Similar to Dr. Mtters Marvels, there was no line, footnote or
end note citation (minimal but only for immediate clarification). The
citations were all listed by chapter and with a brief snippet of
whatever text the citation referred to to guide you. If anyone knows
what system this is please let me know so I can read more
about it and find ways to break through its seeming lack of
clarity.
* I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher in return for
my honest opinion. No goods or services were exchanged.
Opening Line: My introduction to the science of productivity began
in the summer of 2011, when I asked a friend of a friend for a favor.
As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well, said
Woolley. But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time,
the collective intelligence declined. The conversations didnt need to
be equal every minute, but in aggregate, they had to balance out.
(Ch. 2, Teams)
Its not enough for your bathroom scale to send daily updates to an
app on your phone. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to plot
those measurements on graph paper and youll be more likely to
choose a salad over a hamburger at lunch. If you read a book filled
with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts
to someone sitting next to you and youll be more likely to apply them
in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself
to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend
and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the
core of learning. (Ch. 8, Absorbing Data)