Busy, p.23
Busy, page 23
The challenge with busy is not a one off-change either; it’s a long-term struggle. It takes work, persistence and, at times, defying those around you. To walk, or run your own path, to move beyond busy is most certainly not the easy route. You could settle for less, you could accept busy; I just encourage you not to.
Most Change Attempts Fail
The truth is that, each and every day, we mess our lives up a little bit by not making the changes we know will make a difference to us, our businesses and our loved ones. We have good intentions, but, somehow, we fail to follow through on them. Think about your own life for a second: How many times have you “decided” to do something different? How many New Year’s Resolutions have you broken? Kerry Patterson claims that 98 percent of us fail to break bad habits despite wanting to, and 95 percent of our attempts to diet are unsuccessful.2 What I find curious is not that we don’t follow through on our intentions, it’s that we don’t learn. We still seem to believe that if we know something, and decide something, and are sufficiently motivated, we will change.
We are wrong.
It is certainly possible to modify behavior; it just takes more than good intentions. Fortunately, we now know a lot about how people respond to change. This chapter is devoted to one thing and one thing only: helping you to be happier by doing what you want to do. You may have enjoyed this book; it may even have inspired you to make changes and move beyond busy. All that means little, unless you actually change something as a result.
So the question is…
What Are You Going to Change?
I suggest you focus on changing only one thing. This isn’t just because of the challenges of making changes and because you are so busy. It’s because of the value of keystone habits. In researching his book The Power of Habit, journalist Charles Duhigg came across Lisa Allen, a women who had gone from obese to fit and toned, had stopped smoking and drinking, escaped from chronic debts and transformed her career. It all started when she gave up smoking. She changed that one behavior, and in doing so, understood how to change other habits in her life. All the examples of significant change he came across had all started with a single habit; this habit became the keystone to transforming their lives.3
If you want to transform your busyness, focus totally on one habit you want to change. Once you succeed in establishing a single habit you will find it much easier to change others.
So, STOP! Pause your reading.
Get out of the role of the person being stimulated with ideas—and into a more active state, of someone who will make things happen. Get a pen and paper and spend a few minutes reflecting on what you really want to change. Is your priority to regain a sense of mastery over your life again? Do you want to differentiate yourself at work? Or do you want to engage in your work, your relationships and your life?
Whatever you want to focus on, you will find this chapter infinitely more useful if you read it with a clear idea of the specific habit you want to change.
Seven Strategies
Making personal change is a subject that I’m passionate about. However, I won’t even try to do it full justice here. What I will do is suggest seven specific strategies that have been shown to help people make personal change, and that I have found useful. The central point behind all these strategies is that our intentions need some help if we want them to deliver a lasting change in our behavior or habits. All of these strategies are simple, and none of them replace the need for motivation. They act like Glenn Cunningham’s picket fence. They will support your efforts; they will help you convert your intentions into action.
Make Your Goals Clear
One way to avoid the inertia that follows good intentions is to make your goals for change as clear as possible. The benefits of doing this were demonstrated by Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill Reger, professors at West Virginia University, when they were thinking of an effective way to persuade people to eat more healthily. They looked at how they might simplify the message. They identified that if the average American switched from whole milk to 1 percent milk, their diet would immediately attain the USDA recommended levels for saturated fats. So they focused on creating a single, specific behavioral shift in a specific context: they told people that when they were in the grocery store, they should buy 1 percent milk rather than whole milk. The clarity of this message worked like magic: market share for 1 percent milk doubled and, as a result, people dramatically changed their saturated fat consumption.4
The principle of clarity works on ourselves too. Saying we want to have more impact at work is like saying we want to eat more healthily. It’s a broad and relatively ill-defined goal. To move forward you have to get to the clarity of 1 percent milk. What is the specific behavior that you feel, if adopted regularly, will drive this change? What is the context in which that behavior will happen? Is it switching off your email notifier all morning at work, is it persistently practicing Plan B thinking on all projects, or is it “thin-slicing” the big stuff at work first thing each day? Getting clear about the specific behavior, and the context required, to achieve your goal makes it a lot more likely you’ll be successful.
Keep It Really Small
Sometimes it can help, to start with at least, to not set your sights too high. Robert Cialdini, the leading expert in the psychology of influence, had his researchers go door to door to collect money for the American Cancer Society. One group of researchers asked, “Would you be willing to help by making a donation?” The other researchers asked the same question, but followed their request with “Even a penny will help.” Of those asked by the first group of researchers, 29 percent donated money. Of the latter group, 50 percent donated. The extra “Even a penny…” almost doubled the likelihood of donating, but made no change to the average size of the donation as compared to those who donated without the “Even a penny…” addition. It simply increased the likelihood of triggering action.5
To build momentum, start very small.
Plan Your Next Step
In a classic example of the importance of clarifying the next step is Howard Leventhal’s seminal study into the power of fear to mobilize action. Leventhal and his colleagues wanted to persuade more students to get vaccinated for tetanus. They showed graphic pictures and lectured students on the consequences of tetanus and how easily it could be contracted. Their efforts had a powerful effect on the beliefs of the students: most were totally sold on the danger of tetanus and the value of getting a vaccination, but only 3 percent actually got that vaccination.
In a follow-up, Leventhal added something to the persuasion tactics: he included a simple map of the campus, with the health clinic and its opening hours highlighted, and the recommendation that they make an appointment.6 The lectures and pictures were the same. However, the addition of this simple map, explaining the next step, increased the number of students getting vaccinated by more than nine times, to 28 percent. This was despite the fact that all the students knew very well where the clinic was!
The fact is that, especially when we’re busy, if we have to do more than one thing at a time, we can get distracted away from our intention. In this case, those without the map had to decide if they wanted to go, and what to do next. Those with the map had only to decide if they wanted the vaccination; the next step was super clear. David Allen suggests that a goal isn’t enough for any project, or, in this case, change intention: what we need to do is identify the very next step. Mostly these next steps will be incredibly small and easy, but cumulatively they can add up to a huge change.
Use Social Influence
At Newcastle University, employees were expected to pay for their drinks, and so an honesty box was left with recommended prices listed. For ten weeks, researchers placed images above the prices, giving no explanation. Every week the image changed. The images were either of eyes, which appeared to be looking at the person making their drink, or of flowers. No one commented on the images; no one asked about their significance. When the money in the honesty box was counted at the end of each week, the difference was dramatic. In the weeks when flowers were shown, the average contribution made per liter of milk was 15 pence. In the weeks that the eyes were displayed, that figure more than quadrupled to 70 pence.7
Many studies have shown that we are more likely to act in a desirable manner when we are being watched, and we can harness this fact to help us make changes. I unwittingly walked into this type of support myself. My sister-in-law Shiv and I had both been talking about writing, and “working” on our books for ages. At a certain point I started challenging Shiv’s excuses for a lack of progress. I thought she was letting herself off too lightly for not progressing with something that was important. Anyway, she finished soon afterward, and made a reciprocal offer to me: to hold me to account for my own writing progress. She asked me to draw up a timetable for chapter completion and if I slipped from my schedule, which I did often, she came down on me like a ton of bricks. I can’t pretend I wasn’t irked by some of her chasing, even though I knew it was what we agreed and that she was going out of her way to help me. However, there is no doubt I made a lot more progress as a direct result of trying not to let Shiv down, trying to deliver on my commitments. Shiv, thanks for nagging; it made all of the difference. (And I look forward to getting my own back when you start your next book!)
Slipstream Habits
If you’ve ever cycled long distances with a group of people, you’ll realize the massive benefit of tucking into the slipstream of the cyclist in front. We can apply the same principle to establishing new habits. It’s much, much easier to build a healthy new habit on the back of an old one. In doing this, the new behavior seems to get swept along more easily by the automatic motion of the established habit.
This is one of the reasons I think Brian Tracy’s simple idea of “Eat that frog”—which I discussed in Chapter 8—works so powerfully. In eating frogs, we build on the established rituals that we perform at the start of our day—often some of the strongest in a working day. The early morning rituals have more than strength; they are pure, unbattered by the flak of daily office life. It is much easier to retain choice before formally opening up the inbox. So, if you make it part of your morning ritual that—along with unpacking your laptop, grabbing a coffee and chatting with Maria—you will spend thirty minutes on big stuff, you can benefit from the morning routine’s slipstream.
The slipstream effect works for most new behaviors. If you want to have better conversations with your son, why not build a post–football match routine, or a pre-bedtime chat? If you want to create more time for your default network to be active, don’t just think, “I’ll create more task-free, stimulation-free time”; rather decide, for example, to do your commute device-free.
Think of the behavior you want to change; which of your current habits or routines could you slipstream?
Reward Good Behavior
Another way to help you move beyond busy is to use simple behaviorism: our choices are significantly influenced by the rewards we get immediately. When it comes to busyness, even though our long-term rewards are a life of focus and engagement, the immediate rewards of this goal may seem less compelling than the relief of an empty inbox. One client dealt with this head-on. He wanted to bring real focus to a project he was passionate about—one he thought could make a big impact on the business—but which no one was shouting for. Persistently he would get lured into reactivity. He decided to fight fire with fire. Around the corner from his office was his favorite coffee shop, which had a lovely vibe and served a vanilla latte he loved. Instead of going straight to the office, he “treated” himself to forty-five minutes every morning in this coffee shop on the condition that he was working on his project. He also never signed up for their Wi-Fi, so he was “dark” during his time in the coffee shop. After a while he didn’t stick to doing this first thing every day; he went there at other points in the day, but he always saw it as his project place—a place which rewarded him into change.
“What the Hell!”
Participants in a study were asked to turn up to a laboratory hungry. On arrival, some people were given nothing; others were given two very large milkshakes, enough to make a person feel very full. They were then taken to the experiment, which they were told was a taste test. They were put in private rooms in front of big plates of cookies and crackers, and asked to rate the flavors. Those who were still hungry ate quite a lot; those who had been filled with the milkshakes nibbled a bit, assessed the taste and left. This is what everyone did—apart from those on diets. They did the opposite! Those who had drunk the giant milkshakes actually ate more cookies and crackers than those who hadn’t eaten for many hours!8
Why? This pattern showed up in repeated experiments, and Peter Herman and his colleagues eventually called it “counterregulatory eating.” I, however, prefer Roy Baumeister’s term—the “what the hell” effect. The dieters, once they’d already blown their diet for the day with the massive milkshakes, lost any willpower. They thought, “What the hell; I’ve ruined the diet today, so I may as well have fun and start again tomorrow.” The risk is that, tomorrow, the “what the hell” feeling may be extended a little longer, and a little longer… and then the diet is over.
“What the hell” is a dangerous moment for any change effort. Any change involves resisting some form of temptation. We will almost always slip at times, or be “forced” to act counter to our change plans, like the dieters who were asked to drink the milkshakes. There will always be that urgent call that derails your best intentions, or the project crisis that has you jabbing away at your keyboard through the night. The issue that will determine your long-term success is not whether or not you were 100 percent true to your change plan, but how quickly and persistently you got back onto the horse after you fell off.
So, don’t just choose the change you want to make; come up with a plan for how you will get back on the horse immediately after you fall off.
Imagine you are committed to switching your smartphone off at night, so you can be more present with your family. Accept, right from the start, that you may not be able to follow through on this every night, and prevent the odd slip from killing your momentum by any, or all of the following:
• Every time you do use your phone, send yourself an email, which reminds you to recommit to your goal, to read in the cold light of the morning.
• Ask your partner to challenge you when they see you using your phone at night. In particular, their job is to ask you this question: “Okay, so you are letting your goal slip tonight. Will you restart your commitment to phone-free nights tomorrow?”
• Give yourself phone “jokers.” The idea is to acknowledge in advance that, a few evenings a month, you will want to use the phone. For each of those nights you can play the “joker” as your permit for a phone night. This tactic builds exceptions into your change effort: the odd night doesn’t break momentum—it’s part of the pattern.
Deep Change
There are times when, despite our best efforts, certain aspects of our behavior stubbornly resist change. I think a lot of us, when it comes to the way we live our lives, might be there right now: we’ve tried loads of tips and techniques, but remain hopelessly distracted, stretched and disconnected. If you recognize this situation, if the techniques and the reminders aren’t working but you remain keen to change, you will have to go deeper. To succeed, it will not be enough to make a change; you will have to change.
Technical and Adaptive Problems
There are two fundamentally different kinds of problems we might face. Some of those problems require information, practice and skill development. Ronald Heifetz, a leadership expert, calls these types of changes technical problems.9 These are not necessarily simple, or unimportant, but there are recognized ways to address them. Examples of technical problems might range from completing the Rubik’s Cube in under a minute to landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier. They might be tough, but with enough learning and practice, you could succeed.
Adaptive problems are a different matter. A problem is considered adaptive if there isn’t a correct way to solve it or a proven solution; there isn’t an instruction manual. A problem is adaptive if the only way to resolve it is through changing the person with the problem: their mind-set, beliefs and assumptions. Time and again, I see people endlessly seeking “the solution” to problems they have had for years. They misdiagnose their problem as being a technical one, seek technical solutions, come up with a plan, and fail—repeatedly. They don’t need to solve the problem; they need to change themselves in order to progress. A classic example of this is losing weight. On one level it appears to be a straightforward technical problem: just eat less food and exercise more. However, anyone who has persistently grappled with this problem knows the repeated cycle of excitement and despair as they go from diet to diet. The technical solutions seldom work sustainably. What is normally needed is a more adaptive response: a fundamental change to their relationships with food and exercise.
If you think your change is an adaptive challenge (and there is a very good chance it will be) the following section is for you.
