Courtesy of Kara Whittaker who has skills in infographics,  some techniques and apps to get things done. Nice see how apps are coming around.  

Credit: https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2017/02/prioritize-wear-multiple-hats.html

If a single motivation technique is all you need to become successful, then you must have a very easy job. Of course, most likely your job isn’t that simple and that single technique isn’t enough. So when you hear about big hairy audacious goals, Everest goals or just plain stretch goals, let me reassure you that your job is going to require a lot more than a single motivation technique.

Goals are indeed the core of motivation. If you don’t have a goal, then your actions are essentially random. Goals give purpose and direction. If used in moderation, they point you towards the finish line and propel you on the way. And as in medicine, the dosage makes the poison, so too much goal setting can kill you, at least metaphorically.

If you are like most of us, you have heard about S.M.A.R.T. goals way too many times. It wasn’t a bad way of organizing goals based on what we knew at the time – up to 1981 when George Doran summarized the work of Locke and Drucker in an issue of Management Review. I will skip over the S.M.A.R.T. acronym, which was again great for the time before home computers, and give us something a little more today.

Here’s how goals work. Ask yourself – when do you have the most motivation? If it is just before the deadline, welcome to the human race. Even more than that, this reservoir of motivation seems to be tapped into just before something is due, and is a characteristic shared by almost everything alive, from pigeons to chimpanzees. So we know we have motivation when under the gun or in the eleventh hour. Goal setting techniques mostly reverse-engineer that moment and create artificial conditions that mimic the deadline. Goals work best when they are something we have to do, otherwise you don’t get the benefit of the short-term pressure..

Problems happen when your goal setting hammer makes everything become a nail. Your job is complex, meaning there are a whole lot of things you need to do and a bunch of unexpected tasks on top of that. When you overemphasize your goals, you’ve directed your attention to just those goals, often to the exclusion of everything else.  If your company is communicating an all important goal, maybe it is also communicating that it is alright to ignore everything else and that you should take horrendous risks to accomplish it.

In the Academy of Management Perspectives paper, “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting,” Wharton professor Maurice Schweitzer, Lisa D. Ordóñez from the Eller College of Management, Adam D. Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Max H. Bazerman from the Harvard Business School, review the problem and provide a selection of goal setting induced disasters. These include GM’s stretch goal of capturing 29 per cent of market, which they pursued even after cutting margins to the point they were losing money on a per-unit basis. Or the late Roberto Goizueta, former CEO of Coca Cola made a commitment to the board and shareholders to increase earnings by 18 per cent and volume by 7 per cent annually. Eventually, he had to resort to balance sheet maneuvers to hit these targets.

So, when our goal is to maximize sales, salespeople sell for the short term and damage long-term client relationships. When our goal is to maximize the amount of work completed, quality is sacrificed for quantity. And in your complex jobs, where it is almost impossible to specify everything in terms of goals, you can probably think of a few examples right top of your head almost immediately.

While goals are handy to create motivation specific tasks, it is not a panacea. It does not replace a broad understanding and truly caring for the organization.

So I recommend that you make that your goal, if anything,  care for your organization! How do I get people to really care about this place and to want it to do well? If you can accomplish that big hairy audacious goal, you might not ever need to set another one.

(Repost from https://haskayne.ucalgary.ca/the-executive-connection/are-you-killing-your-motivation).

Procrastination is, by definition, “Putting off despite expecting to be worse off.” When people talk about the creative benefits of procrastination, I usually rant about oxymorons, but let’s examine this a tad closer. Certainly, this is an old idea, having been put forth a few times, such as Van Eerde’s (2003) “Perhaps procrastination is functional to creativity because it may serve to incubate ideas” or Cohen and Ferrari (2010) “Prior research supported that procrastination may prolong the incubation period for creativity.” Most recently, in his book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World and, for good measure, accompanied Ted Talk and mass media campaign, Adam Grant revives the notion that procrastinators are more creative than non-procrastinators because they are given a chance to incubate their ideas. Incubation requires a delay between when you start and finish, like leaving cookies to bake in the oven. Unfortunately, the research on this isn’t exactly supportive, with lots of “maybes” and “perhaps” at it’s usually strongest. At its weakest, well here’s what I came up with when I myself wrote on the topic:

The most common excuse I hear from people who procrastinate at work is that they are more creative under pressure. I can see how it might appear this way. If all your work occurs just before a deadline, that is when all your insights will happen. Unfortunately, these insights will be relatively feeble and few compared to the insights of those who got an earlier start, since under tight timelines and high pressure people’s creativity universally crumbles. The bleary-eyed 3:00 a.m. crowd scrambling to finish a project will usually come up with routine, unremarkable solutions. Innovative ideas are typically built on the bedrock of preparation, which includes a laborious mastery of your topic area followed by a lengthy incubation period.

And the research I relied on seemed to be rock solid, coming from these two sources, the pinnacle of academic journals that publish this sort of stuff (at least when I get anything in there, I am pretty happy about it):

• Baer, M., & Oldham, G. R. (2006). The curvilinear relation between experienced creative time pressure and creativity: Moderating effects of support, support for creativity and openness to experience. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 963–970.
• Amabile, T. M., Hadley, C. N., & Kramer, S. J. (2002). Creativity under the gun. Harvard Business Review, 80(8), 52–61.

But things change. Maybe I got it wrong. Grant is an excellent researcher (he really is), so this was very possible. Thumbing to the reference section at the back of The Originals, there it was: “The Research Base.” An unpublished manuscript by Jihae Shin. Must be some study I thought. Unfortunately, I don’t know and neither do you. No one does as no one is allowed to look it. Asking Jihae for copy, especially given that they are trotting it around in the media like a prized pony, I got this polite but surprising response:

Hi Professor Steel,

Thank you for your email. The research with Professor Grant is in preparation, so we are not able to share it at this stage, but we will gladly circle back when it’s ready.

Best wishes,

Jihae

Piecing together pieces from newspaper articles, magazine spots and other flotsam, this was I could glean. Jihae did a survey showing those who procrastinate are reported as more creative by their supervisors. Though I would really like to know the exact measures she used, especially as there are dozens of good and bad ones for both creativity and procrastination, let’s assume good. And add her results to the pile. When I said this was an old idea, I was being factual. There have been a few scores of systematic reviews and meta-analyses such as Feist’s (1998) on the topic of individual differences and creativity, with a more recent one by Ma (2009) comprised of 111 other studies.

Things get a little complicated here as there are different types of creativity, especially the artistic versus problem solving split, and that procrastination is usually studied under terms like low conscientiousness, lack of persistence or impulsiveness. But altogether, they paint a coherent picture. Summarizing this jumble is Feist’s (2010) chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, “The Function of Personality in Creativity.”

If those who have a desire to produce works that leave a mark on the world are to succeed, they also need to be driven, focused and ambitious. They are not the kind of person who gives up easily in the face of hindrances and roadblocks. And that is generally what the research on drive and creativity continues to show: Creative artists, businesspeople, and scientists are driven, ambitious and persistent.

Not quite the description of a procrastinator. But still, we haven’t seen Jihae’s manuscript. Let’s further give this mystery paper the benefit of the doubt and assume this one unpublished study undid or updates that which was done before. This can happen and maybe this is one of those times. Jihae and Grant offer another follow-up study to help cement their case.

As Adam describes it in the NYT magazine article, Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate, Jihae asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some had to start right away while others had to delay five minutes by playing Minesweeper or Solitaire. The punchline: “The procrastinators’ ideas were 28 percent more creative.”  Timothy Pychyl does an excellent job dismantling the piece in his post “Procrastination As A Virtue For Creativity, Why It’s False: All procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination.” Aside from “What is this creativity scale that allows anyone to determine something is 28% more creative?”, essentially Jihae found that those who were forced to delay had more good ideas. This is a classic incubation study, among hundreds previously, but as Timothy Pychyl stresses, it isn’t a procrastination study. Procrastination requires delay, but this delay has to be voluntary and knowingly dysfunctional to be procrastination, and that five minute Solitaire break is neither. Again, for incubation to work, you start early, get really familiar with the project and then take a break. That isn’t procrastination, which starts with the break and then does the work only towards the end. Furthermore, if you want to generalize waiting five minutes playing a game to people putting off projects for months, it is much like concluding that taking a five-minute rest improves subsequent physical performance so it follows we shouldn’t exercise much at all.

Even if we let all of this go, we run in one further problem. Let’s assume, against the bulk of the body of science, that procrastination is causally related to creativity; remember, procrastination is still putting off despite expecting to be worse off. Expectations are usually borne out so procrastinators are often less happy, less healthy, less wealthy and usually just plain less.  So if you are recommending procrastination, you are also recommending all that pain and productivity loss associated with it. It is a bit like suggesting another way of increasing creativity: cultivating certain types of mental illness. Consider this nugget by Ma (2010), “The results showed that a person with a higher score on psychopathological traits had higher scores on divergent creativity than a person with a lower score on psychopathological traits.” In many ways, counseling someone to procrastinate to be more creative is like counseling someone to be have more psychopathologies so they can be more creative too.

What can we make of this? A co-author of Adam Grant is Barry Schwartz, who while recently justifying why the findings of his own famous book “The Paradox of Choice” failed to replicate, gave this reply:

It is no doubt true that scientists sometimes seek popular audiences prematurely — before their claims have been adequately tested by peers. I, myself, may have been guilty of this when I wrote “The Paradox of Choice” a decade ago. I believe that in most cases, the reason for this is that the scientist believes she has found something out that, while hardly certain, will improve the lives of at least some people.

I expect this is the case, that this is simply benevolent oversight. Adam Grant is a remarkably productive researcher, with the same organization that I am a Fellow, the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology, giving him a well deserved early career award. Furthermore, he seems like a fantastic guy, almost obsessively good, as best as I can judge from NYT Sunday Magazine article featuring him. Presently, he has far exceeded the popularity of anyone else in my profession and achieved this by popularizing the science from my field. He writes with style and a great sense of narrative, with collaborators like Sheryl Sandberg (i.e., CEO of Facebook). With his way with words, his scholarly reputation, and the media connections he now commands, he has a vast and trusting audience that will listen to him. All this doesn’t precludes he occasionally gets it wrong though, as I argue he did here, but it does mean when he messes up that it will still be widely accepted as the final word of science.

Deadline gorillas. They chase us to get that assignment done or to fill in tax returns. Unfortunately for them, we soon learn how to avoid them. In our heads, we somehow make the less urgent ones seem smaller and less significant. This mental trick is called hyperbolic discounting but the result is all too familiar; procrastination.

Hyperbolic discounting is the fancy scientific name given to the way we prefer something sooner than later even if, objectively, waiting is better. It’s because we don’t tend to value future rewards properly and instead we are in love with the “now”.

I know that hyperbolic discounting sounds like it reduces things but that’s not always the case. Think of it as dividing. In general, dividing makes things smaller. However, if the number you divide by is small enough, it actually makes things bigger. Let’s say this number you divide by represents the time you have left until the deadline. If there’s an uncomfortably short amount of time to finish the task, then that number we’re dividing by is also uncomfortably small. Wait long enough and hyperbolic discounting sees to it that deadlines get big and scary.

Procrastination expert Piers Steel in his book the Procrastination Equation tells us that impulsiveness is the main reason people procrastinate. His equation states that our motivation to perform a task is equal to thevalue we place on it adjusted by its likelihood or expectancy divided by the time that we have to wait or itsdelay and by how impulsive we are. Impulsive people are addicted to their hyperbolic discounters and use them every chance they get. For them, life can be a rollercoaster; at times they are dodging important tasks to pursue short term distractions and at other times they rush to meet deadlines when things become urgent.

Oh, and did I mention, not only do we have our deadline gorillas but we also have our distraction monkeys who pull us away from what we know we should be doing? They play video games with us, they check out social media sites, and they persuade us to hang out with our friends. They steal our time and prevent us from working on our long term goals.

THE ELEPHANT AND THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED

Ask one person why he or she procrastinates and you get one answer, ask someone else and you get another. There are so many differing theories about procrastination that it reminds me of an ancient parable originally from India but has since passed into the lore of many cultures. It goes like this. Once upon a time, some blind men are introduced to an elephant for the very first time. The first grasping the elephant’s tail declares it to be like a brush. The second putting his arms around one of its legs, claims it to be a tree. Yet another feeling the trunk, confidently announces an elephant is like a snake. The fourth holding the ears, describes the elephant as a sheet of leather. None of their opinions are entirely wrong, the men have just approached the animal from different angles. As each blind man feels his way around the whole of the elephant, they discover that there is truth in what each other had said.

Gorillas and monkeys may not be as elegant as an equation but they are a different and colourful way of understanding the how and why of procrastination. These characters form part of the My Many Me’s theory. A theory that proposes different parts of our brains have different agendas and they compete to control our behaviour. How hard they push or pull are based on thought processes optimised for an environment very different to our current one and hence our behaviour often appears irrational. Applying a more primitive mentality to a situation often gives us an insight into why we behave the way we do. Well, that’s the grey matter of the idea; this then evolved into a series of comics in glorious 24 bit colour.

The characters from My Many Me’s are used to explain our motivation to do a particular thing over everything else. At any given time we are subconsciously applying the Procrastination Equation to all the different things we could do. Each monkey or gorilla represents a motivation or de-motivation and each is working out his or her own answer to the equation. Whoever comes up with the biggest number wins and gets to decide what we do. It’s a tug of war between all our monkeys and gorillas as they pull or push us in all directions like invisible forces.

MIND CANDY

My Many Me’s and the Procrastination Equation help us identify specific causes and the most effective solutions are the ones that target the underlying causes. No one has come up with a single foolproof method to cure procrastination. No one has yet devised a diet that works for everyone either. The real world offers too much temptation so it’s not really possible in a single post to add much to what has not already been covered by many other posts giving advice and tips. The key takeaway here is that we need review the reasons for our delays. Once this is done, practical steps can be found in Piers Steel’s book or at the My Many Me’s website.

Piers Steel tells us his advice is pharmaceutical grade. And like some of the most potent medicine, you take it because you know you need it. It’s the injection, the bitter pill, the enema. However, procrastination affects almost all of us and prevention is better than a cure. In the same way, we live healthier lives by cutting down on smoking, alcohol and high fat/sugar diets. My Many Me’s is what you find at the end of the aisle or next to the checkout. It’s mind candy. It’s the patch, the sugar coated pill, the strawberry flavoured suppository. You take it, not because you have to, you take it because you like the taste.

You can find out more about My Many Me’s at www.mymanymes.website.

PS. In this case, that PS stands for both Piers Steel and Post script. This is a guest post by Adrian that puts my posts to shame. Strongly recommend you back up a few sentences and click on that link. You won’t be disappointed. 

Despite wealth and progress, life seems to constantly test us. Want to know why? I can do it in one paragraph, specifically from an upcoming book chapter, The Building Blocks of Motivation, written by myself and Justin Weinhardt:

As civilization advances and prosperity becomes widespread, we remove most of the external maladies that were once major contributors to our misery (e.g., predation, starvation, lack of shelter). By default, the source of our failures increasingly becomes ourselves. Ainslie (2005) argues, “We smoke, eat and drink to excess, and become addicted to drugs, gambling, credit card abuse, destructive emotional relationships, and simple procrastination, usually while attempting not to do so” (p. 635). Stanovich (1999) believes it is even worse; we exist in an increasingly artificial or built environment that has sporadic overlap with the environment of evolutionary adaption. Since, our motivational impulses are fine-tuned to the latter, rather than the former, we increasingly find ourselves motivationally adrift, knowing what to do but not being motivated to do it. Steel (2010) stresses that this built environment is not necessarily motivationally neutral; free market capitalism ensures it is constructed with considerable design, including features that can coax maladaptive behaviors, particularly overconsumption. Putting candy and lottery tickets by the checkout counter is an example of an insidious but common motivational praxis. Building on this line of reasoning, Heath (2014) makes an extended case that this will likely get worse, that “absent conscious guidance, cultural evolution will produce an environment that is more hostile to human rationality.” We need conscious, rational guidance, which must be based on a firm understanding of our motivational foundation.

The world we live in is motivationally toxic and this explains why procrastination and other self-control problems have been reaching stratospheric and pandemic proportions. Almost everyone, everywhere, puts off almost everything every day and, for good measure, ever more every year. And often we are blamed for these failings or blame ourselves. We didn’t exercise, eat right, get that home project or our taxes finished. Though taking responsibility starts with ourselves, it also extends to taking responsibility for the way we are building our world. The built world, the one we live in the way that fishes live in water, has a praxis or purpose to it. In the same way as hackers tame a computer’s operating system to do what they want, we are being trained, guided, shaped for consumption, regardless of whether it gibes with our own long-term best interests. All of us are trying to diet inside a candy store and being blamed for giving in and getting fat. On the other hand, consider the possibility there is really nothing wrong with us, including being the product of a 100 million years of evolution that favored those who knew a good energy source when it came around. What’s wrong is the candy store.

Think of the candy store as itself an evolving, living machine constructed to elicit buying behavior from us. It constantly refines itself until it develops into the perfect combination of product, promotion, placement and price to get us to chow down. For the rational consumer, it is a great system, ensuring we get what we want. Spock, and other creatures of pure reason, would experience a perfect symbiosis between desires and choices. However, for those with an emotionally driven limbic system (e.g., you), with at best quasi-rational components, the system starts to design itself to exploit seemingly minor flaws and hiccups in our decision making. As it learns more about us, as per Heath noted above, it hacks and the world gets worse, not better. It coaxes addiction, distraction and overconsumption, all to our detriment.

This dystopic observation has progressed through three stages. First came the warnings, such as Aldous Huxley (1958) in Brave New World Revisited. Second came the social commentaries that this is happening, such as Neil Postman (1985) in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Third came the critiques that this has happened and with a vengeance, such as Daniel Askt (2011) in We Have Met the Enemy. Grim but now we are starting to enter a fourth and possibly better stage. It isn’t quite the Age of Aquarius but we do respond effectively and systematically.

I’m not talking about self-help books, though that can be part of the solution too. There are lots of good techniques and, if you are lucky, you will find the sources that will convey effective principles, absorb them and practice them. Still, for all your efforts at self-improvement, you remain in the candy store. A momentary lapse of willpower and there you are stuffing your mouth with truffles and triple berry fudge. What really would be effective is if we could change the candy store itself.

In the same way that your software is frequently patched and you have a good antivirus programming running in the background, we need the same for our world. And as per a recent New York Times Sunday Review article, these patches are finally becoming available for your smart phone. Like an antivirus program, they filter out the temptation ahead of time, allowing you to be here now and focus on the present. For example, “Ringly does this by connecting its rings to a smartphone filter so that users can silence Gmail or Facebook notifications while preserving crucial alerts, like text messages from a babysitter, which cause the ring to light up or vibrate.” Priced at $195, it shows how eager people are to acquire breathing room from the bombardment of notifications.

Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, makes a similar observation, writing, “Having written a book on what makes technology habit-forming, I believe technology is becoming harder to resist.”   Hooked is basically a how-to-guide for product developers to make their services addictive (the byline to Hooked is “How to Build Habit-forming Products”), and it is becoming a bible in Silicon Valley. Having helped create the problem, he recommends a solution, Saent, (pronounced “saint”), as per “Saent is a step forward — helping us regain control so we can be more productive.” Saent combines software and hardware to attack the problem of a motivationally toxic world. Consider what it does:

1. Stop distractions: The Saent app locks users into apps and websites that are productive for their work (based on a predefined list), while blocking out distractions (like social networking sites or app notifications). Over time, Saent will learn users’ work patterns automatically and associate productive apps with specific tasks.
2. Optimize work rhythm: Studies show that frequent breaks keep the brain agile and creative, so Saent enables users to work in 30, 50 or 90 minute blocks with breaks in between.
3. Rewards for good work: Just as activity trackers reward users for taking steps to stay healthy, Saent awards you points for each ten-minute block of focused work you’ve completed. The Saent score provides a window into productivity over time and enables competition with colleagues and friends.
4. Create a physical connection to productivity: The Saent button is a physical reminder to stay focused. Because human memory works by forming associations between stimuli and objects and places, a physical device will be more effective at “locking in” a new behavior than an app alone. As psychology and behavioral neuroscience professor Daniel J. Levitin notes in his book, The Organized Mind, many people find physical objects effective for behavior change. “Place memory evolved to keep track of things that didn’t move,” he writes. “Use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.”

Having looked into it, I am agreeing with Nyal and particularly enamored with these technological assists. With students from my University, we will be testing how well Saent works over the next year and, being science based, the question isn’t whether it is effective but how much. Really, what we want is for good decisions to feel like natural decisions. As this and other platforms expand and refine, rationality is going to be an optional feature you can install into your life. We can all finally move out of the candy store and visit it just when we want to, as a treat.

Four basic ingredients, many different procrastination flavours. Courtesy of  graphic designer extraordinaire: