CH4: Feel Good Productivity

[P1] 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝟒 𝐒𝐄𝐄𝐊 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐘 One of the strangest videos I’ve ever seen is called ‘How bad do you want it?’ It’s been viewed almost 50 million times. The video recounts the story of a young man who goes to an unspecified ‘guru’ and asks for his advice on how to become rich. The next day, they agree to meet by a beach so the guru can explain the answer. At 4 AM the following morning, the man arrives at the seashore. ‘Walk on out in the water,’ the guru tells him. The young man does. ‘Walk a little further,’ says the guru. The man does. ‘Keep walking,’ the guru says. He keeps walking, until his head is fully submerged. Suddenly, the guru is there by the young man holding his head beneath the surface. The young man struggles violently, but the old man holds him down, only releasing him when he’s on the verge of drowning. As the young man gasps for air, the old man says, ‘When you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.’ There’s a lot going on in this video. Who actually is the guru (and how precisely does one get that job title)? Why is the young man so willing to walk out into the sea at said guru’s request – haven’t they just met? Most peculiarly of all, why are there 20,000 comments underneath the video in which people say it has completely changed their life?

[P2] These days, I find the video both surreal and somewhat depressing. But the first time I watched, I was in the throes of a bout of debilitating procrastination – and I thought it might help. When I first launched my business while working as a junior doctor, it seemed like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t break free from the cycle of putting things off and scrambling to catch up. I wasn’t alone; procrastination has plagued much greater minds than mine. Take Leonardo Da Vinci. One contemporary who saw him painting The Last Supper wrote how ‘he would go for two, three or four days without touching his brush, but spending several hours a day in front of the work, his arms folded, examining and criticising the figures to himself.’ In these moments, the three energisers – play, power and people – aren’t enough. In Part 1, we explored how these three forces can help us feel good in our work and life, boosting our energy and helping us do more of what matters to us. But by themselves, they’re not the whole story. As my business grew, I realised that however much I integrated the energisers into my life, I could still come unstuck because of another P – procrastination. When procrastination has been a problem for me, I’ve often been tempted to turn to obvious ‘hacks’ just like the one in that weird video. If you’re procrastinating, the video says, it’s because you’re not motivated enough. And if you just had enough motivation, if only you wanted to succeed as badly as you wanted to breathe, it would happen. I call this solution to procrastination ‘the motivation method’. It’s very common. And it’s total nonsense. The trouble with the motivation method is very simple. There are plenty of us who genuinely do want to do the things we struggle with. We feel like we’ve got enough motivation, but there are barriers that get in our way – time and financial constraints, family responsibilities, physical and mental health issues, among countless other things. Motivation clearly isn’t enough. And telling people to simply ‘feel more motivated’ isn’t just unhelpful, it’s potentially harmful, contributing to the sense of paralysis that caused procrastination in the first place.

[P3] So when motivation fails, where do we turn? When not obsessing over whether you truly are motivated, much advice turns to another principle: discipline. Put simply, discipline is when we do stuff that we don’t feel like doing. It’s the opposite of motivation; it’s taking action despite how unmotivated you are. If you’re trying to go for a jog, a motivated response would be: ‘I feel like going for a run, because I want to win the marathon more than I want to rest today.’ A disciplined response would be: ‘I’m going for a run regardless of how I feel about it.’ This is the Nike school of getting things done – ‘Just do it.’ I’m a little more sympathetic to the discipline method than the motivation method. Discipline can be useful. Sometimes I don’t feel like going to work in the morning, but I do it anyway. Maybe that’s discipline. But this narrative is incomplete. If you’re procrastinating from writing that speech you’ve got coming up, it might not necessarily be that you just aren’t disciplined enough to prepare for it. There might be something else going on under the surface that’s holding you back, and the discipline narrative doesn’t care about what it is. It just makes you feel bad about yourself. In the words of psychology professor Joseph Ferrari, ‘to tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.’ Motivation and discipline are useful strategies, but they’re band- aids covering up deeper wounds. They might sometimes work to treat the symptoms, but they don’t change the underlying condition. So what does work in the age-old fight against procrastination? That’s where our third approach comes in. I call it the ‘unblock method’. While the motivation method advised us to make ourselves feel like doing the thing, and the discipline method advised us to ignore how we feel and do it anyway, the unblock method encourages us to understand why we’re feeling bad about work in the first place – and tackle the issue head on.

[P4] ⚙️ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙪𝙣𝙗𝙡𝙤𝙘𝙠 𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙙 𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙨 𝙪𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙬𝙝𝙮 𝙬𝙚’𝙧𝙚 𝙛𝙚𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙗𝙖𝙙 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙠 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩 𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚. Imagine you’ve got a pebble in your shoe that makes running particularly painful, but you have to run over to your friend’s house in time for dinner. You’re torn; you want to arrive on time, but you know that embarking on the journey is going to hurt. What do you do? The first solution is the easiest. Do nothing. Procrastinate until the evening has been wasted. Miss your dinner and don’t get invited next time. The next solution draws upon the motivation method. That would involve convincing yourself that the dinner is going to be exciting and ‘worth’ the pain of running. You ignore the pain as you race towards your destination, only to collapse on the side of the road halfway there. But you’re not worried, as you look down at your quickly swelling foot. When you’re sufficiently motivated, you’ll be able to overcome any obstacle, after all. The third solution is the discipline method. You’ve committed to the dinner, and you’re the sort of person who keeps their word. So you run to your friend’s house, the pebble breaking the delicate skin of your sole and – lo and behold – you make it! Unfortunately, the dinner can’t go ahead because your friend has to drive you and your bloody stump to the hospital. ‘Discipline is freedom,’ you recite to yourself as you await medical attention. I would tentatively suggest that all three solutions are off the mark. The fourth (and best) solution involves a little more critical thinking. What if you took a minute to think, ‘Why does getting to my friend’s house seem so hard?’ You’d take your shoe off, find the pebble and remove it. And then off you’d run.

[P6] 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗙𝗢𝗚 𝗢𝗙 𝗨𝗡𝗖𝗘𝗥𝗧𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗧𝗬 The first blocker to feel-good productivity is the simplest. But it’s also one of the hardest to notice. It’s so common that we don’t even realise it’s there. Picture yourself driving on a foggy evening. You’re squinting to see the road ahead. You try to make the front lights even brighter. But the fog just isn’t clearing. Eventually, you realise you need to pull over as the fog is debilitating. This is a little like the sensation of procrastinating. Often, the reason we don’t make a start is because we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing in the first place – a mystifying fog has set in around us. I call it the fog of uncertainty. This is a well-studied phenomenon; one that scientists call ‘uncertainty paralysis’. It happens when we become overwhelmed by the unknowns or the complexity of a situation, leading to an inability to act. This paralysis prevents us from making progress on tasks, projects or decisions. It gets in the way of feeling good and gets in the way of getting things done. Uncertainty makes us feel bad, and so achieve less. Humans have an innate aversion to what we don’t know. We naturally prefer predictability and stability, which is what allows us to be decisive and effective. But at the same time, some of us are better at dealing with uncertainty than others. Psychologists and psychiatrists measure this using something called the ‘intolerance of uncertainty inventory’ (IUI). Developed by Michel Dugas and his colleagues in the 1990s, the inventory consists of a series of statements that express tolerance of uncertainty. One statement reads: ‘Not knowing what will happen in advance is often unacceptable for me.’ To measure how tolerant to uncertainty you are, psychologists look at the extent to which you agree with each statement and aggregate your responses to create an overall score.

[P7] The IUI offers the first hint as to how and why uncertainty drives procrastination. People with a low tolerance of uncertainty tend to view uncertain situations as threatening and anxiety-provoking, leading them to put things off – particularly on tasks involving any ambiguity. Why? Well, according to a review on the relationship between anxiety and uncertainty, there are a handful of processes that reinforce the loop between uncertainty, anxiety and paralysis. 1. We overestimate what’s at stake. Someone who’s already anxious will think that the uncertain event is going to be worse than it already is. 2. We become hypervigilant. Sensing that something negative might happen, our safety antennae prick up to the sign of any potential danger. 3. We stop recognising safety cues. Because we’re hypervigilant to threats, we’re not able to calm down when there really is no danger. 4. We become avoidant. Our brains encourage us to adopt behavioural and cognitive avoidance strategies, to get us out of there as soon as possible.

[P8] Anyone who has ever procrastinated will recognise at least some of these factors. Consider a common source of uncertainty, like choosing a career path. Suppose you’re in a stable job but you’re contemplating quitting for a less stable but potentially more fulfilling career. The uncertainty surrounding the less stable path might set off this process as follows: 𝟭 𝙊𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣. You overestimate the negative consequences of choosing the ‘wrong’ career path, like not making enough money. 𝟮. 𝙃𝙮𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙞𝙜𝙞𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚. You become overly attentive to signs that could indicate the success or failure of a particular career choice, like statistics that suggest that lots of people regret changing jobs. 𝟯. 𝙐𝙣𝙧𝙚𝙘𝙤𝙜𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣. You stop identifying the factors that would contribute to a successful outcome, like doing research on the company you’re considering joining. 𝟰. 𝘼𝙫𝙤𝙞𝙙𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚. You decide to put off making this career decision completely – after all, it can’t be that bad sticking it out for another year in your current job. The result: you experience heightened emotional reactions, such as anxiety or fear – and that makes you procrastinate from making a career decision for even longer. You feel worse, and so you do less. Most of us have experienced struggles of this kind. But the good news is that the cycle can be broken, and the fog of uncertainty eliminated. It’s a simple matter of asking a few well-placed questions. Once they’re answered, the road ahead becomes much clearer.

[P9] 𝗔𝗦𝗞 ‘𝗪𝗛𝗬?’ The main way uncertainty drives procrastination is by creating ambiguity over our ultimate purpose. If we don’t know why we’re embarking on any given project, it’s near impossible to get on with actually doing it. This, at least, is the conclusion that the US Army came to in 1982 – the year the US Army published an updated version of their official Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations. The military’s main ‘How to Fight’ guide, the FM outlined to officials the methods most likely to bring them success on the battlefield. At its heart was a new concept: ‘commander’s intent’. Commander’s intent is rooted in the German military tradition, dating back to the Prussian Army of the late nineteenth century. German military strategists realised that no battle plan could ever predict the chaotic realities of war. ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy,’ as Field Marshal Moltke the Elder put it. (To be precise, he said, ‘No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.’ But that’s not as catchy.) So instead of obsessing over every step their soldiers might take on the battlefield, German officers embraced the concept of Auftragstaktik – mission-type tactics – a philosophy that prioritised a clear sense of why over an excessively detailed sense of how. Commander’s intent, as outlined in the Field Manual, consists of three crucial components – all built around the basic point of the mission: 1. The 𝗽𝘂𝗿𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲 behind the operation 2. The 𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 that the commander was aiming for 3. The 𝗸𝗲𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗸𝘀 that the commander felt should be taken to accomplish the objective Commander’s intent suggested that the goal of generals is to answer only the highest-level ‘why’ questions: identifying the purpose behind the operation, and, at a push, vaguely sketching out the sort of stages that might be necessary. The troops were then given the flexibility to adapt their decisions to the changing circumstances at the front. This approach transcends the battlefield. Understanding commander’s intent can help clear the fog of uncertainty by identifying the purpose behind what you’re doing. It sheds light on the ‘why’.

[P10] ⚗️ 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝟭: 𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁. How can we draw upon commander’s intent in our own lives? The first answer is illustrated by the events of 6 June 1944 in northern France, better known as D-Day. The Allied invasion of occupied France had been intricately planned. In the first push, 133,000 troops were to land at very precise locations on Normandy’s beaches. They were to be supported by parachute regiments, who were to land at specific towns and villages, liberate them from the Nazis and secure key bridges and roads. But from zero hour, quite a lot went wrong. Within minutes of the paratroopers hitting the ground, most of them discovered they’d landed in completely the wrong location. Over the next few hours, it would further become apparent that many regiments had inexplicably been mixed up overnight – men hadn’t landed alongside the units they knew and trusted, and were instead fighting alongside soldiers who they’d never spoken to before. It was, in the words of the strategy writer Chad Storlie, ‘a military disaster’. And yet miraculously, within hours, D-Day got back on track. The Allies didn’t take the villages that they expected – but they did take villages that met their strategic objectives. And the troops landing on Normandy’s beaches were able to push inland as planned. The whole saga was a victory of commander’s intent. The military generals’ detailed orders hadn’t worked. The specific plans they’d laid out went awry. But because they’d communicated their commander’s intent, everyone involved in the operation knew the purpose. The ‘why’ was clear, and that made it possible to work out an alternative ‘how’. Today, I apply this insight to my own life every day. Previously, when I embarked on a project my instinct was to immediately press ahead, planning every step – without ever really thinking about my desired end-state. But this level of obsessive planning can prove an obstacle. I would get so bogged down in ticking off specific tasks that I would lose track of what the ultimate point was. So now, before embarking on a new project, I ask myself the first commander’s intent question: ‘What is the purpose behind this?’ And I build my to- do list from there. I’ve found that asking this simple question can have a remarkable effect. For years, I’d been failing to hit my goal of ‘six-pack abs’. Every January, I’d get excited about going to the gym. And then within a few weeks, the motivation would wane and I’d be back at square one. When I applied the concept of commander’s intent, I realised it was because I was getting the purpose – the big ‘why’ – completely wrong. I didn’t actually want washboard abs. My real goal was to maintain a healthy and balanced physique and lifestyle. Yes, there was some aesthetic motivation – but it paled into insignificance compared to the desire to be healthy, fit and strong. You can apply this approach to almost any question. Take learning French. Ask yourself, what’s the purpose? Are you trying to understand complex nineteenth-century realist novels? Or are you just trying to survive your upcoming visit to Paris? Next, work through what implications that has for the process. How are you going to learn the language – are you going to use Duolingo or take language classes or just watch lots of 1950s French cinema? Similarly, let’s say you want to start a business. What’s the ultimate purpose? Are you trying to make an extra few hundred dollars a month to be able to go on holiday? Or are you aiming for a multimillion-dollar exit so you can retire early? Or are you building something you think will help people and change lives? Now think about what that means for your next steps. Do you really need to quit your job altogether, or just carve out a few hours in the evenings? Would it be best to rush headlong into creating the business, or do you need to develop your skills first?

[P11] ⚗️ 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝟮:𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗪𝗵𝘆𝘀. You need to remind yourself of this big ‘why’ every day and every hour. Every email you send, every meeting you hold, every chat over a coffee – in ways small and large, they should take you a little closer to realising that ultimate purpose. This isn’t always easy, though. Have you ever found that in the middle of a project, you get so bogged down in short-term deadlines and irritating small tasks that you lose track of your ultimate objective? As I’ve rediscovered while writing this book, you can spend months – years! – focusing on irrelevant but pressing tasks, your ultimate purpose (completing a full draft, say) being shamefully neglected. So how can we ensure that our biggest ‘why’ is at the heart of our every choice? One suggestion comes from the production lines of early-twentieth-century Japan. In the West, Sakichi Toyoda is best known for founding the company that bears his name: Toyota. But in Japan, he has an even loftier reputation: first as the man who revolutionised the country’s textiles industry in the late nineteenth century – and second as the father of the Japanese industrial revolution. Above all, Toyoda is famous for his obsessive focus on eliminating errors in his factories, by ensuring everyone is focused on the things that matter. Toyoda always hated misused time and resources: he first made his name for designing a hand loom that stopped automatically when a thread broke, preventing it wasting any further cloth. This emphasis on eliminating waste led him to develop a now-famous method called the ‘five whys’. In its original form, the five whys offered a simple method to work out why something had gone wrong. Whenever there was a mistake on the production line, Toyota’s staff would ask ‘why’ five times. Say there was a piece of broken-down machinery. Why? The first answer would lead them to the immediate cause. ‘Because there’s a piece of cloth stuck in the loom.’ The next would dig a bit deeper. Why? ‘Because everyone was a bit tired and hadn’t been paying attention.’ By the fifth time, the employees would have reached the true source of the problem. ‘Because the culture is terrible at the moment due to our boss being a total nightmare.’ My twist on Toyoda’s method is to use the five whys not only to explain mistakes, but to determine whether a task is worth doing in the first place. Whenever somebody in my team suggests we embark on a new project, I ask ‘why’ five times. The first time, the answer usually relates to completing a short-term objective. But if it is really worth doing, all that why-ing should lead you back to your ultimate purpose, as laid out in your commander’s intent. If it doesn’t, you probably shouldn’t bother. I find this method helpful in keeping me and my team’s attention on what matters. Asking ‘why’ repeatedly reminds us of what we should really be focusing on – and allows us to home in on it. Suddenly, those irrelevant pressing tasks seem less important. The greatest purpose – the big ‘why’ – comes into sharp relief.

[P12] 𝑨𝑺𝑲 ‘𝑾𝑯𝑨𝑻?’ Once you’ve identified your ‘why’, you’ll need to convert it into something slightly more concrete. After all, a nebulous sense of purpose isn’t enough to get a project off the ground; you also need a detailed action plan, lest you find yourself with no idea where to start. But identifying what, in practice, you’re supposed to be doing isn’t always straightforward. Take an example from the workplace. The professional relationship between Jim and his new boss, Charles, wasn’t going well. No matter what Jim did, Charles saw him as lazy, unserious and unprofessional. He just couldn’t seem to make a good impression. One morning, Charles asked Jim to get him a ‘rundown’ of all Jim’s clients. Unfortunately, Jim had no idea what a rundown was. For the rest of the day, Jim wandered around the office trying to somehow figure out what had been asked of him, without admitting it to Charles. At the end of the day, Jim had nothing. He walked into Charles’s office, sat right down and finally, completely resigned to however his boss would react, asked, ‘What’s a rundown?’ I’m recounting, of course, the plot of season 5 episode 23 of the US version of The Office. It’s one of the most watched of all time because it depicts the everyday horrors of the modern workplace with hilarious accuracy: micromanaging bosses, office politics, and, above all, that crushing realisation that you have absolutely no idea what the task before you involves. This is what I mean by uncertainty over the ‘what’. Imagine you’re a student struggling to make sense of an assignment, an employee puzzling over vague instructions from your boss, or perhaps you’re trying to kickstart a personal project like learning to play the guitar but don’t know where to start. In each of these scenarios, uncertainty about what exactly you’re supposed to be doing can act as a daunting barrier to even getting started – one that saps your energy and leaves you feeling exhausted before you’ve even begun. The solution? Turning your abstract purpose into a set of concrete goals and actions. Moving from the ‘why’ to the ‘what’.

[P13] ⚗️ 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝟯: 𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗘 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀 The first step in turning your purpose into a plan involves some goal- setting. You might know what your ultimate ‘why’ is; but without a clear end-goal, you’ll struggle to work out how to get there. But goal-setting can be tricky. Of course, everyone can agree that goals are important. The trouble is, nobody can agree on what form they should take. Back in 1981, George T. Doran, a consultant and former director of corporate planning for the Washington Water Power Company, introduced the concept of SMART goals in an issue of Management Review. The acronym stood for Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Relevant, Time-related – a simple and memorable formula that quickly gained traction in management and personal development circles. As the years went by, countless other acronyms joined the fray, each with its own twist on what makes a goal effective. These included FOCUSED (Flexible, Observable, Consistent, Universal, Simple, Explicit, Directed), HARD (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult), and even BANANA (Balanced, Absurd, Not Attainable, Nutty, Ambitious) to name just a few (ok, I just made up the last one). All these acronyms have something in common. First, they emphasise the importance of every goal being clear and quantifiable. Whether they’re ‘specific’ or ‘explicit’, your goals are supposed to be easily tracked and checked. Second, they’re very focused on outcomes: the function of words like ‘measurable’ and ‘observable’ is that you can tell, objectively, when you’ve reached the desired end- state. So it would be a pity if it turned out that highly trackable, outcome-oriented goal-setting was ineffective. If sometimes, goals of this kind turned out to be an obstacle to productivity, rather than the key to it. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what a new wave of research seems to indicate. Studies have found that although specific, challenging goals can increase performance for certain types of people and tasks, they can also have unintended negative consequences. I couldn’t believe it when I first encountered this argument. I had spent years setting SMART goals. Suddenly I was being told that they weren’t as useful as everyone had assured me.

[P15] My preferred method doesn’t involve fixating on an external outcome or destination, but instead emphasises the feel-good journey. It’s based on what I call NICE goals. • 𝑵𝒆𝒂𝒓-𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒎:Near-term goals ensure that we’re concentrating on the immediate steps we need to take along our journey. They help us avoid being overwhelmed by the bigger picture. I find that a daily or weekly objective is the most helpful time horizon. • 𝑰𝒏𝒑𝒖𝒕-𝒃𝒂𝒔𝒆𝒅: Input-based goals em in phasise the process, rather than some distant, abstract end-goal. Whereas an output-based goal would home in on the end result – ‘Lose 5kg by the end of the year’, ‘Hit the bestseller list with my book’ – an input-based goal would focus on what we can do in the here and now – ‘Go for a ten-minute walk everyday’, ‘Write 100 words each morning for my novel’. •𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒆: We want to focus on goals that are within our control. ‘Spend eight hours a day on my novel’ probably isn’t something you can actually do, since many external factors would have to come together for such an input to be possible. Setting a more genuinely controllable goal (like allocating twenty minutes per day to the task) is far more realistic. • 𝑬𝒏𝒆𝒓𝒈𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈: We’ve already discussed plenty of principles and strategies for making our projects, tasks and chores more energising. Is there a way to integrate play, power and people into the goals you set yourself?

[P17] ⚗️ 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝟰:𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗿𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗕𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗱 With your NICE goal in sight, you should have a clearer sense of what, specifically, you need to do – which should make it easier to get started. But before you begin your journey, you might benefit from a little troubleshooting. Envision yourself a week from now. You’ve clarified what you want to do and why you’re doing it. Yet, despite all this preparation, you haven’t even begun. What went wrong? I call this the ‘crystal ball method’, though it’s sometimes also known as a ‘pre-mortem’. It offers a way to identify the big obstacles to your goal before they have derailed your plans. The idea is simple. By running through what could go wrong in your head, you dramatically reduce the likelihood that it actually will. In fact, according to an influential study by Wharton professor Deborah Mitchell, ‘prospective hindsight’ – the process of imagining that an event has already occurred – increases our ability to identify why things will go right (or wrong) by 30 per cent. For me, the crystal ball method is most powerful when you drill into a few simple questions – ones that I’ve taken to asking my team, and which I encourage them to ask me too. 1. Imagine it’s one week later, and you haven’t actually started the task you intended to. What are the top three reasons why you didn’t get to it? 2. What can you do to help mitigate the risk of those top three reasons derailing you? 3. Who can you ask for help in sticking to this commitment? 4. What action can you take right now that will help increase the odds that you’ll actually do the task? This method works for almost any goal that we might struggle to attain. Because the one thing you can be certain of is that some plans won’t go according to plan. So you need to plan for that too. As General Eisenhower said, ‘No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.’

[P18] 𝑨𝑺𝑲 ‘𝑾𝑯𝑬𝑵?’ How often have you considered embarking on a task and thought, ‘I don’t know how I’d find the time’? Time is, in the words of the philosophy writer Oliver Burkeman, ‘always already running out’. For some of us more quickly than others. While we’re often told that we all have the same 24 hours in a day, this obviously isn’t true. There may be 24 hours in every day, but how many of those hours are within your control depends on an awful lot. A celebrity who has a chef, a driver, two full-time nannies and three personal assistants has more of their 24 hours to spend how they like. The rest of us mortals have to spend several hours each day on general life maintenance – commuting to work, being at work, commuting back, childcare, cooking, cleaning, shopping, doing the laundry. All this means that time feels like it’s in incessantly short supply. As such, questions of time management are the final step in clearing the fog of uncertainty. So far, we’ve examined how to work out our overall purpose – by asking the ‘why’ – and identifying specific end-goals and tasks – by asking the ‘what’. But there’s one more question we haven’t answered. If you don’t know when you’re doing something, chances are you won’t do it.

[P19] ⚙️ 𝙄𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙙𝙤𝙣’𝙩 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙮𝙤𝙪’𝙧𝙚 𝙙𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙤𝙣’𝙩 𝙙𝙤 𝙞𝙩. On one level, asking ‘when’ is about accepting your limitations. If you’ve only got a handful of free hours in your week, and you don’t use them to every possible advantage according to the dictates of ‘productivity’, you’re not necessarily procrastinating; maybe you’re just prioritising. But when it comes to the projects that we really do want to commit to, we need to find some hard answers to the question of ‘when’. And our first method for doing so originates in Boston University in the mid-2010s.

[P20] ⚗️ 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝟓: 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 In the autumn of 2015, flyers started appearing around Boston addressed to people who ‘did not feel like they had enough time to exercise’. The research group responsible wanted to understand the most effective ways to get people to do more exercise. People who responded were invited to take part in a study where they were set a goal to increase the number of steps they took each week. They were each given a Fitbit, a device that tracks health metrics like daily step count, and instructed to wear it for five weeks. Without the participants realising, they’d already been split into two groups. The first group was just given the Fitbit with no further instructions. The second group was given the Fitbit and a series of prompts, starting with a request to explain when they would add steps to their day. Every evening from then on, they were emailed with a request to review their schedules for the following day and identify the time slot when they could commit to the activity. The results of this tiny intervention were transformative. By the end of the five weeks, the first group (who just got the Fitbit with no instructions) saw virtually no change from their original step count. In contrast, the second group (who got the Fitbit with specific prompts) increased their steps from an average of 7,000 per day to almost 9,000. These little triggers to action are called ‘implementation intentions’. And the science of behaviour change indicates they can be revolutionary. Implementation intentions have been the research focus of Peter Gollwitzer, a psychology professor at New York University. They offer a method that builds moments for your new behaviour into your daily routine, just like the cues in that Boston study. If you decide beforehand when you’re going to do something, you’re much more likely to do it. According to Gollwitzer, the best formula for implementation intentions is a conditional statement: ‘If X happens, then I will Y.’ If you want to practise it mindfulness but aren’t sure how to fit this practice into your schedule, create a trigger: ‘When I get up for my regular midday cup of tea today, I will take five deep breaths before walking to the staff kitchen.’ If you want to turn your one-off act of eating fruit into a long-term behaviour change, create a trigger: ‘When I walk into the kitchen, I will eat an apple.’ If you want to spend more time with your family in the long term, create a trigger: ‘When I get home from work, I will call my mum.’ These little triggers can have a remarkable effect. In 2006, Gollwitzer co-wrote a meta-analysis involving more than 8,000 participants in ninety-four different studies, showing that these ‘if … then…’ prompts fundamentally alter people’s long-term behaviour. It concluded that when we intentionally set an ‘if … then…’ statement for ourselves to follow, we’re strengthening our mental representation of the situation in advance. When the trigger happens, it’s hard to overlook it. You’ve already made it part of the mental model you use to navigate a situation.

[P21] ⚙️ 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙣𝙤 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙧 𝙣𝙚𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙠 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙮𝙤𝙪’𝙡𝙡 𝙙𝙤 𝙞𝙩. 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙟𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙙𝙤 𝙞𝙩. The result is remarkable. You no longer need to think about when you’ll do it. You just do it. ⚗️ 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝟲: 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗕𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 There’s an even more obvious way to find the time to do the things you value. But it’s probably the most underused method there is: time blocking. Time was blocking is a fancy way of saying: ‘If you want to get something done, stick it in your calendar.’ But I’m not just talking about meetings; I’m talking about time for intensive work, time for admin, time to go for a run. It’s pretty obvious. And yet it’s the one simple tool that vast numbers of us fail to draw upon. I’m always dazzled by the number of people I know who are highly organised, highly motivated and have clear life goals, but have made no effort to put the things they most value into their calendars. This amazes me. I’ve learned the hard way that if you don’t put the things you want to do into your calendar, they won’t happen. I’ve often wondered why people are so resistant to making full use of a calendar. I guess people feel a little resistance to the idea of structuring your day to such an extent. Writing ‘Go to the gym’ or ‘Write my novel for an hour’ might seem too rigid and too structured for things we don’t think of as ‘work’. But the truth is, structure gives you more freedom, not less. By carving out specific chunks of time for different activities, you’re ensuring that you have time for everything that’s important to you: work, hobbies, relaxation, relationships. You’re not just reacting to whatever comes up or gets thrown at you during the day. Instead, you’re designing your life according to your priorities. Think of time blocking as a budget for your time. Just like you allocate your income to different categories like rent, groceries, entertainment and savings, you allocate your 24 hours to different activities. And just like monetary budgeting can give you financial freedom, time blocking can give you time freedom. If you’re keen to get started with time blocking, I’ve created a three-level system to help you do so. 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝟭 is to time-block specific tasks you’ve been avoiding. At this level, you start addressing those tasks that have been sitting on your to-do list for far too long. These could be anything from clearing out your email inbox, decluttering your workspace, or finally getting around to that report you’ve been avoiding. And allocate a specific chunk of time to these tasks in your calendar. You might block out 9am to 10am on Tuesday for clearing your email inbox. Treat this time block as you would any other appointment. When the allocated time arrives, focus solely on the task at hand. 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝟮 is time-blocking most of your day. After you’ve had some practice with time-blocking individual tasks, you should start your morning by creating a time-block schedule for the entire day. Imagine waking up and planning your day like this: 7–8am is for exercise, 8–9am is for breakfast and family time, 9–11am is for intense work on your most important project, 11–11:30am is for emails, and so forth. You’re essentially turning your to-do list into a schedule. By allocating specific time slots for each task, you’re creating a clear plan for when and how your day’s work will get done. Finally comes 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝟯, time-blocking your ‘ideal week’. Here, you’re not just planning a single day; you’re planning the entire seven days ahead of you. Ensure that all aspects of your life get the attention they deserve. Identify all the things that are important to you: work, family, hobbies, exercise, relaxation, personal development, etc. Then, carve out specific times in your week for each of them. For instance, you might decide that every weekday from 6–7pm is dedicated to exercise, 7–8pm is family dinner time, and 8–9pm is for personal reading. Similarly, you might block out Monday and Tuesday mornings for deep work, Wednesday afternoon for team meetings, and Friday afternoon for personal development. The key is to create a balance that works for you – your ideal week reflecting your priorities, ambitions and personal circumstances. You might never actually stick to your ideal week; that’s what I mean when I say it’s ‘ideal’. Inevitably, things will come up that blow you off track – and that’s ok. Time blocking isn’t about creating a rigid schedule that stresses you out; it’s about providing structure and ensuring there’s dedicated time for what matters most to you. Once you have that, the fog of uncertainty will be that bit clearer.