CH6: Feel Good Productivity

[P1] 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝟔 : 𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐃 In 1684, Isaac Newton embarked upon his most ambitious work yet. Over the next eighteen months, he would work through the night, often foregoing sleep and food, to complete his magnum opus: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. When the Principia was published in July 1687, it represented the first scientific attempt to explain how objects move through space. At its heart was a simple observation, pithily summarised in Newton’s First Law of Motion, often called the law of inertia: ‘An object at rest stays at rest, while an object in motion stays in motion, unless acted on by an external imbalanced force.’ In other words, if an object is still, it will remain still; if an object is moving, it will continue moving, unless another force (like gravity, or air resistance) prevents it from doing so. By the time Newton died four decades later, many of his contemporaries realised that the Principia was a masterpiece, the greatest ever attempt to describe the physical properties of the natural universe. But what they probably didn’t realise is that Newton’s First Law describes one of the core curiosities of human behaviour too. Because here’s the thing: the law of inertia applies just as much to productivity as to physics. So far, we’ve encountered two major blockers that make us feel worse and procrastinate more: uncertainty, which makes us confused about what we need to do to get started; and fear, which makes us so anxious that we don’t feel we can begin. But our third and final blocker is perhaps the trickiest of all: inertia. As Newton recognised, it takes way more energy to get started than it does to keep going. When you’re doing nothing, it’s easy to carry on doing nothing. And when you’re working, it’s much easier to carry on working. When you feel like you’ve tried everything to properly motivate yourself but you’re still procrastinating, you need one final boost to get started. Inertia flattens our emotional landscape; it makes us feel helpless and stuck, and saps our feel-good emotions. But it can be overcome. I like to think of the principle of inertia as a literal hump on a road. Imagine you’re about to cycle down a hill. You’ve got your helmet on, your gears are well oiled, and you’re itching to get started. There’s just one problem. You need to cycle uphill a little before you get to the long slope down. It’s going to take a burst of energy to get over the hump, and exerting that energy might not be the most pleasant thing in the world.

[P3] 𝗥𝗘𝗗𝗨𝗖𝗘 𝗙𝗥𝗜𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 So how can we get over this hump? The first method involves looking at the world around us and trying to work out what’s making it so difficult to get started. You might find that some little tweaks to your environment make all the difference. To see what I mean we can turn to the work of Marlijn Huitink, a researcher who led a Dutch study into the psychology of vegetable shopping. Huitink and her team had been tasked by a supermarket chain and several public organisations to come up with cheap ways to improve population health. To do so, they developed a simple method to explore how our environment affects our shopping decisions. On some days of the week (treatment days), the researchers added a green inlay in the shopping trolleys that covered half of the bottom of a trolley. The green inlay indicated a space where shoppers would place their vegetables. The inlay also had a message printed on it, informing them about what other people in the supermarket do when it comes to buying vegetables. One message read: ‘The three most popular vegetables in this supermarket are cucumber, avocado and bell pepper.’ Another read: ‘Most customers pick at least seven vegetables.’ On other days of the week (control days), the researchers removed the green inlays. The researchers wanted to test whether these subtle – and crucially, cheap – tweaks in our environment (like the green inlay and the message in the shopping trolley) would change shoppers’ behaviour. And indeed they did. On the days with the green inlays, shoppers on average included over 50 per cent more vegetables than those without. We can think of these changes as reducing the amount of energy it takes to get started on a task. They eliminate the friction that stands between us and the goal we seek. If you’re constantly being reminded to buy veg, it takes much less energy to remember to do so. And if you’ve been told which are the most popular vegetables in your community, it takes much less energy to decide which ones to choose.

[P4] ⚗️ 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝟏: 𝐑𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐞 𝐄𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐅𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 The first way these frictions slow us down is in our physical environment. Even when we know we really should do something, we often find ourselves in places that make it needlessly difficult to get started. Back in 2018, when working full-time as a doctor, I struggled to make practising the guitar in the evenings a habit. I’d occasionally think, ‘I should probably do some guitar practice.’ But I’d always end up procrastinating instead. I’d sit in the living room on the couch scrolling social media on my phone or watching TV. My guitar was hidden away behind my bookshelf in the corner of the room to the point that I almost never saw it. It was only when I read James Clear’s book Atomic Habits that I realised the obvious solution: put the guitar in the middle of the living room. Suddenly, picking up the guitar became dramatically easier. We can think of actions like this one – or of the Dutch shopping study – as engineering our environment. The objective: reducing the friction – and so making it easier to get started. In particular, this involves focusing on what behavioural scientists call our default choices. This is the automatic outcome if you don’t make a choice actively. In the case of those Dutch shoppers, the green inlay dedicated to fresh produce made vegetables the default: it required no real thought to load up a cart with fresh produce. What does this look like in practice? Well, the trick is to tweak your environment to make the thing you want to make a start on the most obvious, default decision. And, in turn, to make the things you don’t want to do the more difficult decision. Consider some examples: • 𝑷𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒈𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒓 : Moving your guitar stand into your living room makes it the default choice. Now the obvious decision is to pick up the instrument without thinking, whenever you need a ten-minute break. • 𝑺𝒕𝒓𝒖𝒈𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒆: Keeping your study or work materials organised and visible – by, for example, having a notebook right next to your laptop – makes studying the default choice. Now the obvious decision is to start revising whenever you’re at your desk. • 𝑹𝒆𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒑𝒉𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒖𝒔𝒂𝒈𝒆: Turning off notifications stops picking up your phone being the default choice. Now the obvious decision is no longer checking your phone. Adjusting your environment helps tilt your actions towards the right decision, the one you actually want. Not the bad decision you take without thinking.

[P5] 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝟐: 𝐑𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐞 𝐄𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐅𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 It’s not just your environment that makes it difficult to begin a task, of course. It is also your mood. So far in this book we’ve talked a lot about the large, often stressful emotional obstacles that prevent us getting started: ambiguity about what we’re doing, anxiety about what a task entails. But there’s an altogether more prosaic obstacle. In my home country, Britain, this is usually referred to as CBA, or ‘can’t be arsed’. There is, to my knowledge, no equivalent phrase in American- English that captures this idea quite so pithily. Which is a pity, because it’s a very widespread sensation. I CBA to write that essay. I CBA to learn guitar. And I really, really CBA to work on my book. CBA is the most common – and most paralysing – obstacle to getting started. But it can be easily tackled, using one of the wisest, most ancient of productivity hacks: the ‘five-minute rule’. The five-minute rule is a simple but powerful technique that encourages you to commit to working on a task for just five minutes. The idea behind this rule is that taking the first step is often the most challenging part of any task. During those five minutes, you focus solely on the thing you’re avoiding, giving it your full attention. Once the five minutes are up, you can decide whether to continue working or to take a break. In my experience, the five-minute rule is weirdly effective. Usually, imagining yourself doing the thing that you’re procrastinating from for only five minutes isn’t as horrible as really committing to it. Especially when, in our heads, that commitment feels like ‘doing that thing for the rest of my life’. Around 80 per cent of the time, after those five minutes are up I keep going. Once I’ve started filling in the paperwork, nodding my head to a string quartet cover of ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, I find that I’m starting to enjoy myself – or at least realising it’s not as bad as I’d built it up to be. It’s crucial, however, that you don’t force yourself to carry on working, otherwise the five-minute rule would become a misnomer. So the remaining 20 per cent of the time, I genuinely do allow myself to stop after five minutes. Yes, it might mean I put off completing my tax return until another day. But hey, at least I’ve made five minutes of progress on it. And the fact that I do allow myself to stop means that I’m not outright lying to myself. If I told myself I was only going to do something for five minutes and then felt obliged to continue, the five- minute rule would lose its magic.

[P6] 𝑻𝑨𝑲𝑬 𝑨𝑪𝑻𝑰𝑶𝑵 Matt Mochary’s client roster reads like a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley. Managing partners at investment firm Y Combinator and CEOs of industry giants like OpenAI flock to him for advice on how to realise their potential. The CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, credits Mochary with adding a billion dollars to the value of his company. Even though I’ve had my own business coaches for a few years now, I’ve always wondered what a (I suspect ridiculously expensive) coaching session with Mochary would be like. How do you add a billion dollars to a company’s value in just a few sessions? What miraculous, transformative tips does he offer in these meetings? The answer, I assumed, was some massive, revelatory secret. So when I listened to his candid interview with my favourite podcaster Tim Ferriss, I was a bit underwhelmed. ‘A lot of people ask me, “Matt, what’s unique about you?”’ he says. ‘And I have a hard time answering the question because I think what I do is very simplistic … We’re not going to leave a conversation without you having at least one, two or three actions to take.’ ‘Is that it?’ I thought. Is coming up with ‘one, two or three actions’ really enough to turn around a business? And then I reflected on my own life. All too often, my difficulty making things happen is that I don’t have a set of clear, simple steps to follow right now. Hence inertia. And hence procrastination. Mochary calls his principle the ‘bias to action’. He recognises that the time spent together with clients is precious (for both him and them), and merely contemplating deep thoughts without turning them into actionable steps would be a waste. We need clear, concrete steps to take, rather than distant, abstract goals. Otherwise we might do nothing at all. This bias to action is the second way to overcome inertia. We’ve talked about reducing the energy it takes to get started, but now you need to take an actual first step. And to identify that, we can turn to the research of Dr Tim Pychyl.

[P7] ⚗️ 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝟑: 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐩 Tim Pychyl knows procrastination better than anyone. Over the course of two decades, he has published over twenty- five papers on the subject, and his Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Canada is arguably the world’s most influential source of scientific insight into why we put things off. It has rubbed off on him. ‘I don’t almost ever procrastinate,’ he told me, ‘I’m a poster child for saying that once you learn some things about procrastination, you can reduce it if you want to.’ ‘So what’s the trick?’ I asked him. What’s the one piece of advice you give to people to help them overcome procrastination? His response was surprising. Pychyl told me that whenever he finds himself procrastinating from anything, he simply asks himself, ‘What’s the next action step?’ For instance, when he knows he’s procrastinating from doing yoga, his next action step is to roll out his yoga mat and stand on it. That’s it. This approach sounds suspiciously simple, but it works. Pychyl’s method is a way of turning the abstract bias to action into a concrete next step. Think of what this might look like in a few different situations: • If you’re procrastinating from studying for an exam, your next action step is to get your textbook out and open it to the page you’re going to start from. • If you’re procrastinating from going to the gym, your next action step is to change into your gym kit. • And if you’re procrastinating from writing a book, your next action step is to turn on your laptop and open Google Docs. In every case, this method takes our eye off the intimidatingly huge long-term goal (writing a book) and focuses our minds on the more achievable one (writing the next few words). It helps calm our nerves by allowing for, as Pychyl describes, a ‘layer of self- deception’. Eventually you’ll still have to take the exam, get on the running machine, write the book. But you don’t have to worry about that now.

[P8] ⚗️ 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝟒: 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 As one of the world’s highest selling fantasy novelists, Brandon Sanderson doesn’t seem like somebody who suffers from writer’s block. An avid reader in childhood, by the time he was in middle school he had started writing his own fantasy stories. He never really stopped. By 2003, Sanderson had written twelve novels (mostly while working the night shift at a hotel reception) before landing his first publishing deal. Since then, he’s published over sixteen novels, ten short stories, and three graphic novels. So I was somewhat surprised to learn that Sanderson actually does suffer from writer’s block – and frequently. ‘Writer’s block for me is where I’m a few chapters in and the story’s not flowing, or I’m in the middle of the book somewhere and a chapter is just not working,’ he reflected. In these moments, the urge to stop writing becomes irrepressible. What does he do? Well, he knows that the worst thing to do would be to stop writing and wait until he starts to feel it again – a recipe for never writing anything again. Instead, he tracks his progress. Writer’s block or not, Sanderson tracks his word count and doesn’t stop writing until he’s reached 2,000 words every day. And he keeps an eye on the word count as it creeps up from 2,000, to 4,000, to 6,000 and beyond. A Brandon Sanderson fantasy novel can be as long as 400,000 words. And yet, by focusing on his constant progress towards his goal, Sanderson makes the journey feel easy. The result: he always releases his novels exactly when he says he will, to a loyal audience of millions of fans all around the world. This progress-tracking can have a profound effect. In 2016, researchers combined 138 studies consisting of almost 20,000 participants to conduct a meta-analysis of its effects. They found that tracking progress, whether through writing down progress goals (like whether you completed the training sessions you aimed to do) or writing down output goals (like your 5km time), dramatically increases your chances of actually attaining that goal. Why? First, because tracking your progress helps you identify any areas where you may be falling behind, or where you need to make adjustments. By monitoring your progress, you can identify patterns, habits or obstacles that may be hindering your progress. In the course of writing this book, I gradually realised that I needed to adjust my deadlines: for some chapters, it was easy to hit my word- count goals, for others, much less so. Second, progress-tracking can help you celebrate your wins, large and small. For example, whenever I’ve hit another 8,000 words, I’ve allowed myself a reward: a trip to Dishoom, my favourite Indian restaurant in London. Above all, tracking your progress provides you with tangible evidence that you’re moving towards your goals. I see my word count creeping up word by word, and know that I’m ever closer to having a finished manuscript. This sense of progress has helped me keep my momentum up and made me more committed to keeping going. It’s a motivation boost like none other.

[P9] ⚙️ 𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒈𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒗𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒊𝒃𝒍𝒆 𝒆𝒗𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖’𝒓𝒆 𝒎𝒐𝒗𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒈𝒐𝒂𝒍𝒔. And you don’t need to be writing a book for progress-tracking to work. In fact, we can track progress in every part of our lives. If your goal is to get healthier, you can keep a workout log. Write down the type of exercise you did, how long you did it for, and any other notes about how you felt during the workout. It’ll help you see how your strength and endurance are improving over time. If you’re learning a new skill, you can track your progress by keeping a learning journal to write down what you’re learning, any questions you have, and any breakthroughs or ‘aha’ moments you experience. This will not only boost your motivation, but also help you get better insight into what you still need to learn. And if you’re revising for an exam, you can track your progress by colouring in a bar chart of how many modules you’ve studied, showing you how far you are on your way to finishing your revision. It offers a little reminder that however daunting the task seems, you’re always moving in the right direction.

[P10] 𝗦𝗨𝗣𝗣𝗢𝗥𝗧 𝗬𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗦𝗘𝗟𝗙 At this point in the book, you might have noticed that lots of my advice about inertia is front-loaded. There are plenty of insights into how to fend off procrastination as you’re getting started, whether by taking the first action step or reducing friction. But I’ve given you far fewer insights into how to fend off procrastination in the longer term. I get it. I’ve spent large chunks of my life making a good start on a project, and thinking that I’ve overcome the inertia issue, only to lose momentum very rapidly. Exhibit A: this book. In my first two months of writing, I churned out 30,000 words. In the next twelve months, I produced only 10,000. That’s why the final way to overcome inertia relates not to getting started, but to the procrastination that sets in later on: those moments where your good progress turns into a thick quagmire of doing nothing much. In these situations, you need a different way to stay motivated. The solution is learning to support yourself. That might sound like a vague notion. But in the context of tackling procrastination, it has a very specific meaning. Your objective is to find ways to encourage yourself as you work towards your goals. And above all, to hold yourself accountable as you go. Let’s start with a simple yet remarkably effective tool: finding an accountability buddy.

[P11] ⚗️ 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝟓: 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐁𝐮𝐝𝐝𝐲 The Reddit forum r/Get MotivatedBuddies has over 179,000 members, all looking to ‘Find accountability partners for health and fitness, studying, work, and healthy habit building.’ It connects partners to encourage one another to go to the gym and learn guitar, revise for exams and learn to code, go to bed on time and remember to call their mothers. All these people have noticed an intriguing feature of human motivation: that starting something alone is infinitely more difficult than starting it together. When we find a partner to hold us accountable, we’re much more likely to overcome inertia. This is, on one level, because of the energising effects of people (which we encountered in Chapter 3). People boost our feel-good emotions and make us want to get started. Life is better with friends around. But accountability partners have a second, even more powerful effect. They weaponise our sense of duty. Humans are social creatures, and we’re desperate not to let one another down. If you might skip a gym session when you’re the only person involved, it’s much harder to skip when your friend is outside your apartment early in the morning looking irately at their watch. An accountability partnership is just a mechanism that turns this basic social fact into a formal system. You and another person mutually agree to hold each other accountable at an agreed time for an agreed task. That might involve that gym buddy knocking on your window at 6am. It might mean a friend giving you a ring at a set time to check that you genuinely are revising. Or it might entail someone coming to your house to check that you’ve learned that guitar piece you promised you definitely were going to spend all week practising. In every case, you’re drawing on your sense of social obligation to overcome inertia. What’s the best way of setting up such an accountability partnership? I often divide the process into three stages. First, find your buddy. Ideally, this would be someone with a shared outlook – which means your friends are a good starting point. Often, though, the best buddies are strangers who share the same goal you do. When you pair up with an individual who shares your ambition to go to the gym three times a week or learn to play guitar, you won’t just get someone who holds you to account – you’ll get someone who understands your woes and appreciates your successes. And you might even make a new friend in the process. Buddy duly found, next agree on what accountability culture you want to create. There’s a very fine line between a helpfully persistent buddy and an enragingly annoying one. So you need to agree on some ground rules. What would a positive approach to accountability look like? What amount of contact are you looking for? How can they best help you? I find that the best accountability buddies meet five criteria: being disciplined (they must stick to what you’ve agreed to), challenging (they know what it means to help you move on to the next level), patient (they don’t jump to conclusions or rush you into making decisions), supportive (they’re there with words of encouragement) and constructive (they must know how to give you honest feedback and constructive criticism). Finally, discuss the accountability process in a little more detail. How’s your buddy going to hold you accountable, and vice versa? What specifically are they going to do, and when? For some, accountability might mean meeting each other once or twice a week for a check in. Or it might be a daily text check-in or video message to see how you’re doing on your project. Or it might just be a monthly meeting over a coffee to see what’s going well and what isn’t. It matters less what they actually do – and more that they agree to do it consistently and in the agreed slots. But done right, an accountability buddy exploits some gentle peer pressure to powerful effect. You now have somebody to share your triumphs and mourn your woes. And so you’ll actually get out of bed when you said you would.

[P12] 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝟔: 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 In 2010, Carleton University psychologist Michael Wohl noticed something unsurprising about his first-year students: they loved to procrastinate. Despite Ottawa’s (probably unfair) reputation as a punishingly dull city, Wohl’s undergraduates found millions of things to do in the city other than study: go to bars, join societies, post on an up-and- coming app called Twitter. For all they didn’t know about psychology, they knew everything about putting off psychology. But the procrastination itself wasn’t the problem, Wohl thought. It was the self-flagellation. Wohl realised that his students’ damaging cycle of productivity was caused by them beating themselves up. Whenever they failed to study, they would spend days telling themselves they were bad students. And this shame made them even less likely to study in the future. Wohl decided to test a hypothesis: that beating yourself up is a bigger issue than procrastination ever could be. Immediately before the students’ midterm examinations, he asked them to rate the extent to which they forgave themselves for not studying. Might the students with high levels of self-forgiveness perform better than those who constantly dwelled on their failings? The results were clear. Just as Wohl had guessed, students who said they were able to forgive themselves for not studying were much more productive. Self-forgiveness allowed students to let go of post-procrastination guilt and shame. They could ‘move past their maladaptive behaviour and focus on the upcoming examination without the burden of past acts’. Wohl’s article was called ‘I forgive myself, now I can study’. Wohl had chanced upon the final way inertia derails us. When we’re failing to maintain momentum on a task, we tend to beat ourselves up. But this helps nobody. If anything, it makes things worse. The inertia drives a sense of self-loathing. And that sense of self-loathing makes us even less likely to do anything fruitful. Is there a way to break this doom-loop? As Wohl and his colleagues found, forgiving ourselves is the escape hatch. But how? Perhaps my favourite way is a method I call Find the Win. It involves celebrating something, however small, and however unrelated to your work. I like to use the format: ‘I didn’t do X, but I did do Y.’ For example: • ‘I didn’t go for that early-morning workout session today. But I did get an extra hour in bed and I’m feeling more refreshed than usual.’ • ‘I didn’t finish the last part of that report. But it was for a good reason. I chatted with a colleague in the staff kitchen and we had a lovely catch-up.’ • ‘I didn’t finish that job application today. But I got to spend time with my grandma instead, so that’s a win for today.’

[P13] ⚙️ 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒄𝒂𝒏 𝒇𝒐𝒄𝒖𝒔 𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒔. 𝑶𝒓 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒄𝒂𝒏 𝒄𝒆𝒍𝒆𝒃𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒘𝒊𝒏𝒔 Procrastination isn’t something we can always control. Forgiving ourselves is something we can. You can focus on the small losses. Or you can celebrate the small wins. By accepting and forgiving our inevitable tendency to procrastinate – and celebrating the little victories instead – we can begin to conquer its hold over us.