I always love reading on the topic of productivity. Who doesn’t hope or imagine they have superpowers within if only they could figure out how to unleash them. My favorites remain Covey’s 7 habits and Allen’s Getting things Done. Both are useful guides to what to do to manage self for effectiveness. But there is always the question of how to actually implement those principles day to day and execute.
Charles Duhigg draws on recent research and reporting in Smarter, Better, Faster to provide guidance on that topic. (I hear Cal Newport is another author that focuses on this, but I have yet to read his stuff). Duhigg argues that “productivity is about making choices that other people overlook.” The key lies in motivating ourselves, setting the right goals, and executing with creativity and focus. Making sense of all the data available around us and using it to make good decision helps do all of these things better. A productive individual can then turn to managing others more effectively.
My notes on each of these topics below.
The central idea behind motivation locus of control. The locus of control basically sounds like Stephen Covey’s proactivity to me. The idea being that to the extent that you think you are an agent that can influence your life versus a victim that is at the mercy of external circumstances you will have motivation to do things and effect changes. this is the classic difference between mom and me , end this is the piece that felt most missing for me at Bridgewater , I felt like I become a victim.
Luckily, one can learn to develop a locus of self-control. Duhigg gives examples of the army rather than Marines teaching people how to develop it to develop an internal locus of control by praising people and positively reinforcing basically actions that are difficult for them but imply a person taking control of something end the idea is to get that person to be hooked to the feeling of exerting influence. Dweck’s work is noted here of a growth mindset. A person can then also influence their own feeling of control with a bias towards action. Just the act of making choices and taking action can give somebody a sense of control that motivates motivates them to act further. Action begets action.
Also scary: this locus of self-control can also be lost. He gives a lengthy example of a man who suffer some sort of minor brain injury from altitude, and loses his motivation entirely. But, after some time when his wife begins to ask him series of questions I continuously , and it somehow triggers is the ability to make decisions and feel sense of control. This feeling of self-control then kicks his motivation back into gear.
A third element of motivation is connection to meaning: the why. Not surprisingly people can get through a lot of smaller mundane tasks that they don’t feel motivation for my reminding themselves of the connection of the smaller things to things that have much more meaning for them. For example an army or Marine Grant Grant finishing a little exercise thinks of his family for whom he is earning income that motivates him to keep going finishes obstacle course.
Finally , there is the role of emotion. Even if you are able to make a number of decisions and feel a sense of control but that feeling is not one that you are plugged into then the chain is broken. You basically need to to be motivated to act, feel a sense of control , and be motivated to act further. Emotion, then, is at the center of that virtuous circle.
Setting goals
There are two types of goals: stretch goals to think of the big picture and what big things are worth achieving. Think of the moonshot. Then the idea is to break down those stretch goals into achievable smart goals. The S stands for specific, the M stands for measurable , the A stands for achievable, R stands for realistic, the T stands for time bound. I’ve read elsewhere that A is better though of as actionable (think through the how) and R stands for relevant (consider how this goal fits with your other goals. Is this part of the 20% of effort that will get you 80% of the results?)
Focus
The idea there is that one needs to have mental models for how things should work and visualize ahead of time how things will go in order to be able to direct her focus in real time. This allows people to avoid cognitive time languages what happens when in pressure you just look at the thing right in front of you the big squeaky wheel with a red flashing light.
This really emphasizes the idea that all times you really want to have thoughts along to two levels (see Bridgewater Principles), one on the conceptual framework for mental model level of how things should go , and the other on how they are actually going , for the case at hand . Then there is immense productivity in defeating the short versus actual models.
Creativity
The essence of creativity it seems is connecting unrelated mundane things into new things. And the folks that do that are in fact information brokers. Those that have the ability to draw connections between different fields or see the application of mundane things from one field to another are in fact the sources of creativity. Creativity is also helped along by disruption : a change in management of forest fire and so on. It can’t be too big but that disturbance is also essential. As is some amount of anxiety. know that your own experiences can be an immense source of creativity so it pays to be authentic and sensitive to your own experiences. warning to that spark some creativity can also be blinding so it pays to be aware of that and seek out feedback.
Decision-making
The essence is that you need to give up the idea that there is one future and imagine several futures each associated with a probability. You’ll never know for certain so you make decisions based on probabilities. Your brain is actually good at placing odds on probable outcomes so long as your priors are right.
Which means you can also learn to make better decisions over time by testing your priors from successful and failed decisions. What you need is to have a mental model/explicit priors with which to compare what’s happening in the world something. And that mental model comes from taking the time to visualize ahead of time what you expect to happen. Then, as life goes on you can compare what actually happens to you expected to happen and that difference if there is one is a source of tremendous learning and better decisions over time.
Absorbing information.
This chapter argues that engage with the facts or data or performing some sort of operation on them – the idea of disfluency — forces more absorption than if the data is presented presented in a nice synthesized way such as a dashboard. So counter intuitively is actually easier to absorb data if it’s actually a bit harder to pull it in than not.
Information is also easier to understand if you have some sort of mental model for problem-solving within which to deploy the information towards making decisions (eg. Bridgewater Principles, 5 step for problem solving). The mental model for problem-solving that is presented here is the engineering systems:
The process asked students to define precisely the dilemma they wanted to solve, then to conduct research and come up with multiple solutions, and then conduct tests, measure results, and repeat the procedure until an answer is found.
Managing others
This chapter focuses on agile management and democratizing decision-making within an organization or a team because the people on the front line have the most information and insight on how to solve problems. There isn’t much detail there and the story is of the Toyota management system where an auto plant in California gets dramatically more productive when front-line workers are empowered to make decisions, stop the line for errors and so on.
Teams
There are examples from Google and Saturday Night Live that show that the essence of successful teams is psychological safety. How do you create that? What does it look like? When everybody has the same talking time, and people on the team have high emotional intelligence and empathy especially team leaders. This allows for healthy conflict and idea generation.
It’s worthwhile talking about for a minute on what good teams are not. Conventional wisdom goes things Good teams are born of complementary skills and personalities or tremendous leaders and smart people. To be sure the right skills are important but they are insufficient without psychological safety to achieve effectiveness.
Notice that the motivation and psychological safety stress opposite things. What makes individuals effective is a sense of control which leads to motivation and action. What makes teams effective is leaders that give up control to the team environment where they can productively engage in equal time to generate ideas end have productive conflict.
Ar Lekha 