I recently finished reading Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg, which I enjoyed (but not as much as his other book, The Power of Habit) and I want to put it down here, short and sweet, for anyone who wants to be better at being productive but not read. It talks about how we can improve at the everyday things that we do, focusing on how some people or companies can get so much done while others can’t. The central idea behind this is that most productive people don’t just act different but they approach the world with profoundly different views and choices. Duhigg boils it down to eight key concepts, divided in chapters. Here are the main lessons of each chapter:
1 — Motivation: Motivation is a skill that can be learned by training. According to researchers, the trick to gaining motivation is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing that we have authority over our actions and our surroundings. By giving ourself a sense of control and by practicing in making choices, we can learn to exert willpower. For example, if you’re having trouble getting yourself to go out for a run, start by choosing what you’re going to wear; or if you’re having trouble writing an essay, start with the conclusion first. Motivation is triggered when we make choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. So in that sense, the specific choice we make matters less than the actual assertion of control.
The choices that are strongest in generating motivation are those that 1) convince us that we are in control and 2) endow our actions with a larger meaning.
Our capacity for self-motivation, like an skill, can fade and thus we need to train ourselves to make it a habit.
2 — Teams: (e.g. businesses, group projects, etc.) The best teams concern the ‘how’ and not the ‘who’. There isn’t a mandatory set of norms that a team needs in order to be successful; every one has a varying number and combination of different norms. However, good norms seem to share a common attribute of promoting “psychological safety” which consists of two things: 1) it creates a sense of togetherness and 2) it encourages people to feel safe enough to take chances in sharing ideas.
There are two behaviours that seem common in successful teams: 1) members spoke in roughly the same proportion and 2), they had a high average social sensitivity, i.e. the members were generally skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.
Laszlo Bock , head of the People Operations department at Google identifies five key norms that good teams have:
- Teams need to believe that their work is important.
- Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.
- Teams need clear goals and defined roles.
- Team members need to know they can depend on one another.
- Most importantly, teams need psychological safety which is created when team leaders model the right behaviours.
3 — Focus: Automation has been embedded in the modern daily life and as it continues to increase, it allows our attention span to fail further and further. There are two main ways that our attention spans fail. The first kind of failure is through “cognitive functioning”, which causes people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks. We see this when a driver slams on his brakes when he sees a red light or when a mother stays glued to her phone as her baby cries. When this happens, we lose our ability to direct our focus and we respond to the most obvious stimuli available. The second kind of failure is through “reactive thinking”, which is a reaction or habit that we automatically use when presented with a certain situation. Sometimes this is useful; for example, for quarterbacks, who practice their sequences over and over again so they can execute plays faster than their opponents. But the downside of reactive thinking is that sometimes reactions and habits can become so automatic that they overpower clear judgement.
People who are particularly good at managing their focus tend to share certain characteristics. Among the most important is the propensity to create mental models, pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. In other words, they imagine situations before they actually occur, imagining future conversations, progression of events, etc. and when the situations do not materialize to the one they expect, their attention gets snagged. This kind of thinking helps us to work around the two main ways our attention gets snagged.
In business settings, sociologists and economists have studied how the most productive workers created mental models. They shared a number of traits, among them were taking on a smaller number of projects, those of which forced them to use new skills and meet new people; they also made lots and lots of theories in meetings about all kinds of topics.
4 — Goal Setting: The most accomplished people tend to have a strong need for “cognitive closure”, which psychologists define as “the desire for a confident judgement on an issue, any confident judgement, as compared to confusion and ambiguity”. They have a preference for personal organization, decisiveness and predictability. Having a high preference for cognitive closure has accompanying risks. These people are more likely to make hasty decisions and not rethink an unwise choice. Additionally they have cognitive impatience or impulsivity where they may leap to a judgement on the basis of inconclusive evidence and exhibit rigidity of thought and reluctance to entertain differing views from their own.
Certain ways of organizing goals can trigger our need for closure in counterproductive ways. For example, when we organize our goals and tasks into lists, we, in effect, allow our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that completing each task will deliver. We become obsessed with productivity and crossing things off a list instead of asking ourselves if it’s the right aim and looking at the big picture. When we’re overly focused on feeling productive, we become blind to details.
To help ourselves achieve goals, we need to be conscious of the type of goals we are making. If we make too audacious of a goal or too many goals, we are more likely to get discouraged and turn away from them. One solution to this is to pair long-term, bigger ambitious goals with short-term, realistic concrete goals. Studies have shown that by doing this, we are more likely to complete large objectives.
5 — Managing Others: Similar to the chapter on teams, we need to consider that it is the company culture that makes a company successful and not the product they sell. The most successful companies have a strong culture of commitment and trust between all employees, from lower-ranking to higher-ranking ones.
Having such a culture doesn’t guarantee success or the sale of a product but it ensures that the conditions are right when a right idea comes along.
6 — Decision Making: The best way to make decisions and predict the future is through “probabilistic thinking”, which is to think of it at a series of possibilities. This is not to be confused with what someone hope will happen; we have to focus on what is more and less likely to occur. Being good at making decisions generally involves holding contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously.
Humans are astoundingly good at Bayesian thinking; we have an intuitive ability to predict patterns even though we may not have any specific, concrete data to refer to. We are able to have this sort of understanding based on simply living our lives and learning from past experiences even though it may be subconscious. We can further forecast the future by making assumptions and then adjusting them based on what we observe about the world. To become better at this, we need to make sure we are exposed to a full spectrum of experiences. The problem is that our experiences are often drawn on biased samples and more particularly, we are more likely to pay attention to and or remember successes. Newspapers tend to devote more coverage on start-ups and less on the hundreds of businesses that become bankrupt. We are more likely to discuss among friends about the new hot restaurant that is opening up rather than those that have closed down. However, successful people spend a lot of time processing information on failures, creating a dialogue in their mind on why something didn’t go the way there were meant to. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.
7 — Innovation: Creativity cannot be reduced to a formula but we can create certain conditions to help creativity flourish. To start, we can’t think of creativity too narrowly. Most original ideas grow out of old concepts and “the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge”. This method is at the centrepiece in theories of creativity, whether in arts, the sciences or commercial innovation. By combining existing knowledge and materials, we tap into some of the greatest innovations.
There are three specific things that can increase the productivity of our creative process. The first is by being sensitive to our own experiences. Steve Jobs says the best designers are those who “have thought more about their experiences than other people”. By looking at our life as creative fodder we can broker these experiences into the wider world.
Another condition which helps us become innovative is through “creative desperation”. When we’re caught in an emergency or a stressful situation, we are more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in our own experiences because necessity pushes us to. Emotions like panic and frustration are not always obstacles to our plans; they may be a boost, by being the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. “Effective brokers aren’t cool and collected. They’re often worried and afraid”.
It is generally a good thing to be enthusiastic about an idea but sometimes when a strong idea takes root, it can blind us from seeing alternatives. Thus, we should maintain distance from what we create; we require self-criticism, tension to gain other perspectives.
8 — Absorbing Data: In the past two decades, the amount of information that has become part of our lives has blown up and our ability to learn from it hasn’t necessarily kept pace with its proliferation. We are in a constant state of “information blindness”, an inability to take advantage of the abundant and available data. To overcome this, we need to understand that humans are exceptionally good at absorbing information so long as we can break data into a series of smaller and smaller pieces. This is otherwise known as “winnowing” or “scaffolding”. One way of doing this is manipulating information by transforming it into a sequence of questions to be answered or choices to be made, and thus making it easier to digest. Our brains are much more efficient at handling things that are reduced to two or three options.
Another way to better absorb data is to become very involved with the data we are dealing with. When information is made disfluent, we learn more. This means taking the time to use new words in sentences, writing notes down with a pencil and paper over using a computer, or even summarizing a non-fic on a blog! 😉 The best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information.
Something we need to be aware of is that once we have an initial frame for making a decision, we will usually a struggle to adopt an opposing viewpoint. The example used was a study where people were asked to list reasons to buy a VCR, they had trouble listing reasons not to buy a VCR when as to do so afterwards and the other way around. Once a frame is established, it seems that the context is hard to dislodge. What we need to do then, is force ourselves to seek new vantage points. One of the ways we can do this is to provide ourself a formal-making system such as flowcharts, a prescribed series of question to better see alternatives and thus, better absorb data.