The mind and brain are incredibly complex, but in this book I’m going to simplify things just a bit into a structure that is mostly true and easy to understand. Let’s ask a fundamental question: what is happening, in your mind and brain, that determines what you do at every moment? Why do people do anything?
The basal ganglia part of your brain controls action. It is your procedural memory. Think of it as storing the codes for everything you can do. This includes everything from simple physical actions like reaching for peanut butter to complex actions like break dancing, and also includes purely mental procedures, such as the steps required to do long division in your head.
Interestingly, all of the things you could do are constantly trying to happen—the basal ganglia actually works by suppressing all of these actions in the supplementary motor area, and selectively allowing just one at a time to happen by stopping the suppression.1 When you’re cognitively taxed, your habits, encoded in the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) part of your basal ganglia, can take control of your body with the habits stored there.2 Habits form because of repetition and conditioning (associating the action with something pleasant or unpleasant). In this way the basal ganglia can control what you do all by itself. This is the habit system.
Let’s review the systems involved in how your mind chooses what to do next, and come up with cute names for them. These systems compete for control of your body. If your brain is functioning properly, each of these systems will be in control at the right time.
The Habit System tries to get you to do what you’re used to doing, and isn’t particularly goal-directed. One of the marvelous things about your mind is that it can automatize things. This is how you can learn to talk to a friend while driving, or tie your shoes while thinking about what to have for lunch. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about habits in general—you can have good ones or bad ones. The important thing to understand is that in many situations, you have habits waiting in the wings to take over, and your basal ganglia will be pushing you toward engaging in those habits. If your cognitive system is otherwise distracted, you are more likely to engage in habitual action. What I casually refer to as “habits” can be genetic instincts or learned repetitive behaviors. Habits are less sensitive to reward in any particular context—that is, you might engage in habit without your mind considering very carefully whether it would be appropriate in this particular situation. The environment cues the habitual behavior, but it’s less like a deliberative decision.3
The Cognitive System uses something variously called willpower, self-control, executive control, and impulse control. It tries to get you to behave in ways that are in line with your long-term goals and “better judgments.” They involve conscious, slow thinking and, sometimes, reasoning and goals. It’s primarily located in the cortex, and it has a function to suppress subcortical drives when needed. In fact, most of the prefrontal cortex’s connections to the rest of the brain are inhibitory—there to prevent the rest of the brain from doing what it normally would.4 When you say “I ate more than I wanted to,” you are usually referring to your whole self with the first “I” and your cognitive system with second “I.” The cognitive system also triggers the basal ganglia, and with sufficient input, you can override the habits that the basal ganglia would engage in if left to its own devices. In the scientific literature, the cognitive system is often referred to as the new brain, System 2, or the rational system. Motivations originating with your cognitive system can feel less emotional. You might start engaging in a behavior because of some expected outcome, or some goal you have, but after it is repeated over and over it gets turned over to the habit system, and thereafter requires the cognitive system to step in to stop from doing it.
The Reward System tries to get you to do things that avoid bad feelings and facilitate good feelings, where “feelings” refer to any valanced (pleasant or unpleasant) mental states. When you’re trying to choose between eating raw vegetables and potato chips, you can feel your reward system making its opinion strongly! Again, eating either one involves input to the basal ganglia, but the reward system sends information from a different part of the brain than the cognitive system. The cognitive system is evolutionarily newer and in the neocortex, and the reward system is older, shared with many other species, and is from the emotional areas in the middle of the brain—the mesolimbic system.
The Mind-Wandering System goes into effect when the task you’re currently engaged is boring or not particularly cognitively demanding. Neuroscientists call this the “default mode network,” and it allows people to refocus on longer-term tasks important to their cognitive system (among other things). It is also responsible for a lot of anxious thoughts. There seems to be a trade-off between the cognitive and mind-wandering systems, such that if one is active, the other is less active.5
Let’s make these different origins of action clear with two examples. The first is when the different parts of your brain are trying to get you to do different things.
Suppose Julie is out walking her dog, and she hasn’t yet planned dinner. She tends to take the same route every day. Today is also the day when everyone has put out the recycling to be picked up. She notices a can that someone has tossed on the sidewalk. There is also a cute puppy across the street. Now we can think about all of the different parts of her brain that might have different opinions on what she should do next: keep walking, pick up the can, go pet the puppy across the street, or maybe plan dinner?
The habit system encourages her to continue walking around the block, because that’s what she does every day.
The cognitive, rational part of her brain, in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, thinks that she should pick up the can and throw it into the recycle bin. This might accompany a feeling of moral obligation, but it’s not like she’s expecting to get a rush of pleasure from it. She “knows” that she should do it, but isn’t primarily driven to by an expectation of pleasure, or to substantially decrease some negative emotion such as dread or anxiety.
The reward center of her brain thinks that she should vary from her normal route to go meet the cute puppy, which is expected to be pleasurable.
The mind-wandering system is trying to get her to think about what to have for dinner, because she forgot to shop, and now the lines at the store are going to be long. If she engages in this activity, her habit system will take over control of her body, and she will continue to walk her normal route. Only her mind will be elsewhere.
All of these (and possibly more) factors are relevant to which thing Julie actually does. All of these drives have relative strengths in her mind, and the one that ends up the strongest, in that moment, will be the one that she actually does. In Julie’s example, we can see how the basic motivational systems in her mind might be trying to get her to do different things. Some of these systems can, at any given time, be dormant—in fact, they might be literally asleep for a few moments. Different parts of our brain can display neural indicators of sleep while “you” are awake.6
In Julie’s example, we can see how the different brain functions are working toward different behaviors. In my next example, we can see how the same action might be motivated by the different motivational systems. Let’s suppose you grab a piece of chocolate, put it in your mouth, and eat it.
First, habit. The basal ganglia responds to perceptions of the environment, and can do things out of habit. If you have just eaten several chocolates, for example, your habit system might make you take one more. This is more likely to happen if the other things that can affect the basal ganglia (such as your attention and cognitive system) are otherwise occupied. You might have experienced eating a bag of chocolates or something while watching a movie, and at some point reach in to find that you’d eaten them all without even realizing it. That’s habit.
Second, conscious intention through the cognitive system. You might be about to go on a long hike, and reason that you need the sugar for energy. You decide to eat chocolate, not because you expect it to taste delicious, or because you have an urge (you might not even like chocolate), but because you believe it will help you with a longer-term goal. Your frontal cortex activates the actions in your basal ganglia, and the chocolate gets eaten.
Third, compulsion. As we’ll talk about in more detail later, the reward system has several components, two of which are liking and wanting. Compulsions are from the wanting part. You might be hooked on eating chocolate. You are not eating it with a particular expectation of pleasure, but you feel an urge to eat. There might be a small amount of tension or anxiety that is relieved by eating it. This is mesolimbic, and possibly dopaminergic.
Fourth, pleasure-seeking. The second part of reward is liking. You see chocolate, and expect to get pleasure from eating it, so you reach for it and eat it. Your cortex might have been recruited to justify this action (e.g., “I went to the gym, so I deserve it!”) but the original motivation is the seeking of pleasure. This is also mesolimbic, and more opioid.
Because wanting and liking are often felt together, I’m going to group them as reward—but they can be separated, particularly in addictions.
So far I’ve ignored learning, which is another story entirely. Conditioning and repetition can cause habits and compulsions to form, but later, when the actions are taken, conditioning and the immediate context is less relevant to whether the action is taken or not (in cases of habit or compulsion).
I just want to remind you that this is a simplification. I’m not talking about drives like hunger and the need for sleep, for example. The whole thing is really complicated. But now that we’ve got four systems with cute names, we can think about what you can do to each of them to get yourself doing more of what you want, to make your life more like you want it to be.
When you are trying to do something important, and your phone pings a notification sound, your brain has a choice to make. Do you stay on task, or do you check to see what news your phone brings? I say “your brain” and not “you” because often what you end up doing isn’t the result of a deliberate choice at all. If you pick up your phone, you might not have consciously chosen to do so. You’re reacting without even considering. It might happen so fast that your cognitive system doesn’t have time to even weigh in.
Even if you know about how damaging constant interruptions are, and wish to not give in to them, it can be hard to avoid them. You remember you have a notification that hasn’t been checked. It sits there, taking up valuable working memory in your mind, causing a mild anxiety. Eventually, the tension gets so distracting that you just have to check it. This falls under a larger problem of “weakness of will.” Cognitive science can help us look under the hood a bit and see what weakness of will actually means in the mind.
I had a friend who was doing consulting for a snack food company. He told me that when he’d go to a meeting, there would be a big pile of these snacks in the middle of the table. At the start of the meeting, everyone would avoid them. But as the meeting dragged on, everyone’s fingers would start itching toward the center, and eventually everybody was eating snacks and would go into a sugar coma. They’d all feel regret.
This is a classic example of weakness of the will. What’s curious about it is that we might describe it as doing something we didn’t want to do. But if we didn’t want to do it, how could it have happened? Philosophers call actions that are against your better judgment “akratic actions.”
Your “better judgments” are a function of your cortical brain regions, associated with reasoning, memory, and belief. The part of your brain that actually initiates action, the supplementary motor area, decides what to do based on the judgments of the cortical brain areas, but others as well, such as the reward system, the emotional system, and the habits (and related behavioral inclinations) stored in your basal ganglia. These subcortical systems do not have representations of judgments as we normally think about them. The supplementary motor area takes information for all of these areas and “decides” what to do. And sometimes the subcortical “opinions” on what to do win the day.7
These subcortical areas are much older than your cortical areas. They’re also faster. People are about a fifth of a second faster at judging the tastiness of food than judging healthfulness.8 We share versions of the emotional system, reward system, and basal ganglia with lizards, who have no “better judgments” at all.9 Rather than scratching our heads, wondering why we act against our better judgments, we should be thankful that we even have better judgments all! For millions of years, our ancestors didn’t.
These subcortical inputs are very powerful. They respond to immediate gratification, whereas your cortical areas respond relatively strongly to long-term reward.10 Even a ten-minute delay makes something feel like a long-term reward.
What we call discipline, self-control, or willpower is best described, neurally, as the relative strength of your cortical areas to suppress your subcortical areas when it comes to action selection. It is a self-initiated suppression of impulses in the service of longer-term goals.11 We need discipline because when we’re doing something hard, our mind tries to find something else that’s more rewarding.
Acting badly isn’t always caused by a weakness of will. Sometimes you can be “irresolute.” Let’s say you have an intention to avoid cake at a party. You get there, and you find yourself thinking of reasons to eat the cake: you haven’t had cake in a long time, you deserve it, you went on a run that day, it would rude to the host not to have any, the cake was baked by poor people who need the economic support, etc. Eventually you actually believe it’s okay to eat the cake. You’ve talked yourself into it! You can see how being smarter allows you to think of more justifications to eat the cake. Thanks, prefrontal cortex.
Some say that this is different from a weakness of will. Rather than giving in to temptation and doing what you know is wrong, it’s your old brain recruiting the rationalization powers of the new brain to work against itself by changing its mind about what’s right and wrong.
People with more willpower have a lot of advantages. They are better able to deal with stress, adversity, and conflict. They are happier, healthier, make more money, maintain better and longer-lasting relationships, and are more successful in their careers. Willpower is more important to grades than intelligence. Oh, and they live longer, so they can enjoy these things for a longer time.12
When you’re under stress, it takes more willpower to do what you want to do, so one way to take better advantage of the willpower you have is to reduce stress, both in the moment and in your life in general. Getting enough sleep is the easiest and most pleasurable way to do this.
Another way to increase your willpower in the moment is to forgive yourself when you slip up and give in to temptation. Just saying to yourself, “It’s okay, everybody makes mistakes, I’ll try to do better next time,” increases your chances of doing exactly that in the future. Beating up on yourself actually reduces your drive to be better.13 You’ve heard of the golden rule? Here’s my platinum rule: Do unto yourself as you would do unto the people you love.
Can You Increase Your General Willpower?
Maybe. Some evidence suggests that meditation can improve it.14 Research on meditation is difficult because it’s hard to have a placebo group (it’s hard to make someone think they’re meditating but actually not be).15 Aside from meditation, simply being mindful as you do things at least gives you the opportunity to exercise your willpower, because being mindful reduces the chance of falling back on habit (though, as we’ll see later, you can hack your habit system so that this isn’t such a bad thing).
Your willpower system is often in conflict with the other systems. Here’s a metaphor I like to use. Think of your body like a car. The habit system is a silent cab driver going where she normally goes, your willpower system is an adult in the passenger seat opining on all the places the car needs to go, and the reward system is a hungry kid whining in the back seat. When the willpower/passenger is telling the driving where to go, there’s a decent chance the driver will go that way. But if the willpower/passenger is quiet, because she’s thinking about something else, the reward/kid will make the habit/driver go where he wants it to go. If the reward/kid is quiet too, the habit/driver will go wherever she’s used to going. The more familiar the terrain is, the more power the habit/driver has—sometimes to the point of ignoring the other two people in the car altogether. In a new place, the habit/driver doesn’t know what to do, because there are no triggers for the installed habits, and more readily takes instruction from the others in the car.
This was shown in a study of students who transferred from one university to another. The new environment broke habits to some extent, and intentions were able to gain control of the student. If the student had been exercising at the old university, would she exercise at the new university? It depended on her intention, not so much habit. Students who wanted to exercise did, and those who didn’t want to stopped. The environment failed to trigger their old habits, putting the students back under more cognitive control.16
Cognitive control is also increased by doing physical exercise, and the benefits are even greater if the exercise is cognitively engaging (like tennis) versus cognitively passive (like running on a treadmill). Even doing a brief bout of exercise has beneficial effects on your cognitive control system immediately after.17
You’re already hacking your cortical system by reading this book. You are using your cognitive system’s values to hack the other sources of motivation in you. You need to want the right things, and knowing what to want means having good values, and knowing how the world works well enough to know the difference between what matters, what unmatters, and what antimatters. Using conscious intention and willpower has limited power, so you don’t want to blow it on intentions that do no good or actually hurt. Reading and getting advice from wise people you want to emulate installs values and conscious strategies that can be recruited by your willpower system.
In this section, I’ll talk about conscious strategies and mindsets that can help you get your willpower system working better.
The Six-Second Rule
It feels like there’s something magical about six seconds. Example: when you think “I should do some push-ups,” your mind will start working on an excuse not to. If you wait more than six seconds, you’ll probably come up with something. So when something like the sudden desire to do push-ups comes to mind, try to do it within six seconds of thinking about it.
I hurt the muscles in my back and hips a while back from playing squash. My physical therapist gave me a bunch of exercises to do every day. It took me about half an hour to do all of them. To help get myself to do it, I put on an audiobook, and did them one by one, as indicated by a stack of index cards. I like the stack because it’s not easy to see how many are left, and because I can only look at one at a time, I’m not as tempted to skip ahead. If it were just a list on a piece of paper, my eyes would scan past the next exercise to the ones lower in the list, hoping to find one that looked more pleasant. Anyway, some of them, like plank, were very onerous for me. I find that when I turn the card over, and see something like plank, my heart sinks, and I have to get started doing it within six seconds. If I don’t, I’m toast, because I’m smart enough to be able to rationalize a reason why I shouldn’t have to do it. Although this works for me, I have not been able to find any research on anything like this six-second rule, so this advice is anecdotal, but perhaps will help you avoid the common pitfall of talking yourself out of something you don’t feel like doing, but should.
Your Inner Voice
Have you ever been thinking of doing something, and some inner voice tells you that it’s not going to work? Or that you’re unattractive? That people will figure out that you aren’t good enough? That nobody likes you? That you’re in over your depth?
Since it’s hard to get away from, you’d hope that your inner voice was soothing and encouraging, and for some people it is. But for many people, their inner voice is a little shit, undermining their confidence, causing self-doubt or self-loathing, and on balance holding their lives back.
In general, my inner voice isn’t so bad, but I have troubles with anger. When I get angry at something, I get a mad, complaining voice in my head that crowds out other, more happy and productive thoughts.
Here is one strategy to deal with it: when my inner voice gets oppressive, I try to picture it as a one-foot-tall cartoon creature that is comically angry—I actually picture the Calcifer character from the film Howl’s Moving Castle. When he has control over my mind, I picture him on my lap. I gently pick him up (in my imagination) and place him beside me. I immediately feel a little better. When I notice the angry thoughts showing up again, I “notice” that, like a persistent two-year-old, he has started climbing onto my lap, and I gently put him back on the ground. Picturing him over there, and not on me, screaming and complaining, gives me some distance from it. Again, this is only my personal experience, and I do not know of research showing that this works for negative emotions in general. However, there is research showing that visualizing pain outside of your body helps reduce the suffering associated with it. (I review this literature in my previous book, Imagination.)
A negative inner voice can diminish your optimism. Optimistic people generally think the future will turn out well, explain their lives in a positive light, are better at coping with difficulty, and have fewer depressive and other medical symptoms.18 Although you can be more or less optimistic at different times, some people are more or less optimistic in general. Psychologists call this “dispositional optimism.”
One reason optimists have these benefits is because they have excellent ways to cope with problems in their lives. They face them rather than avoid them, focus on what they can change, and make better future plans.19
Part of optimism is your self-esteem. Everyone has good and bad aspects of themselves, and you can’t keep more than a few of them in mind at any moment. What are those things going to be, the good things or the bad things? Whether we are aware of it or not, we have stories in our heads describing our lives. Is it a heroic story, or a story of failed ambitions?
By changing the story, you can change your attitude toward yourself and foster a more optimistic explanatory style. We can see the powerful effects of narrative by looking at interventions for people who have undergone trauma. One method often used is to have people talk to a therapist as soon as possible about the traumatic event, airing their feelings about it. Unfortunately, this well-intentioned intervention antimatters. What it does is it freezes the feelings in place. The victims often relive the trauma, and this solidifies their feelings about it during therapy, permanently encoding the event as horrible in their memories. Although they report later that it helped, they’re wrong. Careful studies show that the intervention leaves them worse off.
What works better was a method pioneered by James Pennebaker. A while after the event, the victim writes their deepest thoughts and feelings about the experience for four consecutive nights (about fifteen minutes each night). It’s important that it’s a while later so that they have a little distance from the event. It’s also important that they reflect on the meaning of what happened when considering their whole lives. They need to “step back” and look at the event in a more detached way, as though they were watching themselves in a movie, and write about why the feelings that they experienced had come about, and what it means in their lives. This method is effective. They contextualize the event in a way that’s more meaningful, and it doesn’t bother them so much.20
Feeling terrible about the state of your life can be a real drag. One way that I get out of this problem is with a mindset I discovered while playing a video game called Redneck Rampage.
Let me first say that the term redneck is prejudicial, and the game is pretty offensive in terms of how it depicts lower-income people. It’s full of unkind stereotypes. This was the 1990s, when sensitivity to this issue (with respect to the poor) was only starting to percolate into public awareness. Anyway, in the game, you play a low-income farmer with a thick Southern accent who is defending his land from alien invaders. You run around your property, shooting aliens, yelling “yee ha!,” and collecting pork rinds to restore your health. I was in graduate school, struggling like hell to make sense of my research. And when I played this game, I had a minor revelation.
Here I was, playing a role. The role is of a very poor person, with a life I would never want. But am I (or is my character) wallowing in it? Am I thinking about all of the bad decisions in my life, and the strokes of bad luck that led me to this point? No, I was shooting aliens and doing the job that needed to be done, making the best of what I had, taking action. My revelation was that at any moment in your life, you might find yourself in a bad situation. But agonizing about how you got into that situation can hold you back. What you need to do is look at your situation, figure out the best thing to do, and do it, the past be damned, whether it’s looking for a better job, getting out of a bad relationship, or shooting the aliens that threaten your prize pig.
I’ve actually used this mindset at several points in my life. I imagined that instead of me being me, with all my self-doubt and regret, paralyzed and overwhelmed with my life, that I was just a video game player, dropped into this terrible situation. What would that game player do? Not agonize. Just get to work. From its humble beginnings of a ridiculous first-person shooter game, I have gotten a surprising amount of mental support from this attitude over the years. It helps keep me from being paralyzed by whatever overwhelming situation I find myself in.
Even when we know what we need to do next, it’s often hard to get ourselves to actually do it. When faced with something we should do but don’t expect we will enjoy, our minds are very good at looking for other things that are more reliably rewarding. Look at the sidebar “Non-Productivity Scenario: Elaine.” When Elaine is faced with working on her boring project, the idea of cleaning up her desk pops into her mind. Elaine is tempted by something less important but easier to make progress on. Over the next few minutes, cleaning the desk is more rewarding: She will make clear progress and see the results very soon. You might be the kind of person who never has a desk as clean as it is when you have a job to do you really don’t want to work on.
Faced with this choice, it becomes a matter of willpower. Elaine will try to use willpower to force herself to do what she should do, rather than something that will be more rewarding in the short term. This is hard. When people do tasks designed to tax their willpower, they report difficulty, fatigue, and the requirement of high levels of effort. They don’t like it.25 But it’s important, and a part of why disciplined people, people with a lot of willpower, do really well in this world. They can use their willpower in a brute-force effort and suppress impulses so that they can do the unpleasant thing that needs doing.
If you’re one of those people so blessed with excess discipline that you’re cursed with too much of it, you’re a rare bird. It means that you have to make sure you use your discipline wisely. You could use it to work 70-hour weeks, for example. But this is a terrible idea. Economic research shows that for the average person, a 35- to 40-hour workweek is ideal for productivity. When you work more than that, productivity drops. If you consistently work 60-hour weeks, for example, you don’t get any more done than if you worked 40-hour weeks.26
Can you run out of willpower? The concept that willpower was like a muscle was popular in the early 2010s. The theory was that, like a muscle, it got weaker the more you used it over the course of the day, but, also like a muscle, “exercising” it like this made it stronger in the long term. One study asked people to make a bunch of meaningless decisions, such as what kind of pen to use. They made poorer decisions on important matters later, as though using up some kind of cognitive fuel that got wasted on unimportant decisions. Trivial decisions take as much energy in your brain as important ones.27 You can’t keep it up all the time. These studies, however, which went under various monikers such as “ego depletion,” fell out of favor in the social psychology replication crisis. A large, recent study, using twenty-three laboratories, failed to find any sign that your willpower decreases over the course of the day. But the theory’s proponents have their reasons for doubting this attempted replication.28
The other aspect of willpower as a muscle, however, that training over time seems to make it stronger, has been supported by many studies. Exercise your willpower and you will gradually have more of it.29 So you can increase your willpower by exercising it, and possibly through meditation.
You don’t have to rely on your willpower—there are other things you can do. You can use mental tricks to avoid temptation, such as distracting yourself with attention-deployment.30 You focus on something else, like making eye contact with your date instead of the cheesecakes on display in the background.
Sometimes, though, you should do the opposite. Sometimes focusing on the temptation is helpful. Suppose you’re eating a bag of potato chips while watching a movie. If you’re not careful, you might eat the whole bag before you catch yourself. In cases like this, actually paying attention to eating the chips (that is, being mindful of them) can help you eat fewer of them, because otherwise you are just eating one after the other on autopilot.31 Furthermore, eating chips without paying attention to them is a real waste of calories—you’re getting all the bad parts of eating chips without even enjoying them as much as you would if you were giving them your full attention. Savoring food allows you to enjoy it more, and also makes you eat less of it.32 Some foods are just too fattening and delicious to warrant anything less than your undivided attention. If you’re going to eat garbage, you should at the very least enjoy it!
In the brain, goal-directed behavior seems to be facilitated by the dorsomedial striatum, which is part of the basal ganglia. It takes into account expected benefits and drawbacks of this or that action. It is a competing circuit with the dorsolateral striatum part of the basal ganglia, which implements habits.33
Some people have naturally high willpower, and others have lower. The people with high willpower are lucky, as willpower might be the single most important trait for predicting long-term life outcomes.34 Your willpower is like your bodyguard: a tough guy who protects you. But even people with excellent willpower should not rely too much on it, because using it requires a focused attention that you won’t always have. Exercising willpower requires conscious effort, and is difficult, unpleasant, and causes fatigue.35 And sometimes the bodyguard goes on a break.
In general you should try not to rely on your self-control if you don’t have to. It’s a last-ditch effort, difficult and generally unsustainable. I think it’s helpful to think of having to exercise your willpower as a sign that your other systems have failed. If you are someone without much self-control, someone who gives in to impulses relatively easily, it’s even more imperative that you don’t rely on it.
Luckily, there are lots of other things you can do besides relying on willpower. Let’s go over what those things are.
Sometimes people will deliberately buy small packs of candy rather than large ones, so they don’t eat as much. This makes good scientific sense, as studies show that people eat less if food is put in smaller packages.36 Why might this be? Once a package is opened, it’s easy to just keep eating. When you have to open a new package, it’s a salient cue that you’re consuming. It breaks the grab-food-and-eat-it loop that your basal ganglia is running on mindless autopilot.37 People tend to keep eating until food is gone, more or less ignoring their own hunger or satiety. One of the main theories of why French people are thinner than Americans is that they eat less due to smaller portion sizes.38
Habit is a major contributor to your behavior, more likely to take control when your conscious mind is focused on something else. You can use your cognitive system to override your habits, but this is not sustainable. Sometimes you have to consciously think about something other than what your body is doing: you might be giving a presentation about your company’s marketing plan for next year, and not thinking about how many sips of latte you’re drinking, or having a tough conversation with your daughter about her crappy boyfriend, and not focusing on driving, or wondering about why Qui-Gon Jinn didn’t vanish when he died, even though he came back as a force ghost later, and not focusing on the peanut butter sandwich you’re eating.
In moments like these, your body will act on habit.
We can see just how powerful habits are by looking at how durable they are in the face of other mental problems. People who suffer from an inability to form new memories can still learn new habits of surprising complexity. Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit describes Eugene, who was unable to create new episodic memories, and indeed could not remember anything from the past several decades. His wife was stressed because he would wander out of the house and get lost. But after taking him on the same walk every day, it became a habit for him, and when he wandered off again, he would just find himself going on the habitual route he’d taken with his wife over and over again, without knowing why, and without even consciously remembering ever going on that route before. Unless there was something different about how the route looked, like construction or something, he would just find himself back home again, much to his wife’s relief.39
Habits Ignore Reward
I had a friend who was trying to avoid eating candy. He was at a restaurant, and at the end of the meal, was deeply engaged in a conversation. Then he looked down and saw the empty candy wrapper in his hands. He’d eaten the candy without pleasure, consciousness, or memory of the event. Such is the power of your automatic, habitual behaviors. When your goal-directed, cognitive brain functions are weakened, or otherwise occupied, habits are more likely to control you.40
People simply don’t have the mental resources to behave deliberately all day long. Suppose you start craving a doughnut at 12:30 in the afternoon. You resist. Then at 1:15 you get another craving, which you also resist. Then again 45 minutes later. By now, you’re feeling pretty proud of yourself for successfully resisting eating the doughnut three times now. You almost deserve the doughnut for your efforts, right? You give in two more times before finally giving in and eating one at 3.
Forty percent of what people do is on autopilot, based on habit and what you’re used to.41 One way scientists can test to see if some action is the result of habit, rather than higher cognition or the reward system, is to see if doing the behavior is sensitive to changes in expected reward. That is, if you change how good or bad the expected outcome will be, if it is cognitively motivated, the probability of doing it will change. Not so much if it’s a habit.42 This suggests that the habit system bypasses the normal decision-making that weighs benefits and drawbacks to an action that we often engage in. When you want to drive from work to a doctor’s appointment, but you end up driving home out of habit, this is what’s happening. If you were considering the benefits and drawbacks, you would have realized that going home meant a waste of time, and that taking the route to the doctor is the best thing to do. But habit took over.
My writing of this book is a good case in point. I worked on it every morning of the week except Saturday. When it became a habit my experience was that I did not need make a decision every morning to work on the book. I just sat down and started working. My conscious mind was thinking about what to write, not whether to write. Ideas of doing anything else never even crossed my mind, freeing up my willpower for other things.
Even when you’re paying some attention to what you’re doing, your mind tends to look for reasons to engage in the habits you already have, making it harder to avoid bad habits even when you’re thinking hard about it.43
Habits Have Big Effects Over Long Periods of Time
By definition, habits are things done over and over again. Because of this repetition, small changes can build up over time. For example, buying an expensive drink once in a while is no big deal, but if you do it every day, it can cost you thousands of dollars a year. Similarly, riding your bike to work once is nice, but doing it every day increases your lifespan. Habits are hard to change, but this has a good and bad side—good habits are hard to establish, but once they are there they work for you without effort, like interest in your bank account. With just a little habit maintenance, you can focus your limited attention on other issues in your life, trusting that what you’ll do on autopilot is in line with improving your life.
This is why optimizing yourself requires curation of your habitual activities. First is to recognize the habits you already have. Then you can decide which ones to reinforce and which ones to replace. Think of them like apps on your phone, they take up memory, and some make your life better, and others make your life worse. Which habits should you uninstall?
In the moment, a habit is triggered by something perceived in your environment, and over time, habits change because of conditioning—reward and punishment from engaging in this or that behavior in this or that situation.
Changing Your Environment So the Right Habits Are Triggered
Habit cues tend to be company (I smoke when I hang out with the actors), locations (I buy a doughnut every time I’m at Dunkin’ Donuts), emotional state (I eat when I get stressed), action immediately preceding (I wash my hands after I empty the cat’s litterbox), and time (I eat lunch around noon).44 You can remember these triggers with this mnemonic I made up: HABIT. H) Humans you’re around. A) Activity. B) Bearings (your location). I) Internal state. T) Time of day.
There are two general classes of things you can do to hack your habits. The first is to alter your environment so that the habits you want are triggered more often, and the habits you don’t want are triggered more rarely. For example, if you mindlessly eat an entire bag of chips while watching movies, then don’t bring a bag of chips to the couch, or, better yet, don’t buy the bag at all. If you drink too much when you hang out at bars with Pat, then hang out with Pat only during the day, and not at bars. In the short-term they don’t actually affect your habits, they just keep them from being triggered at one particular time.
A study of trying to instill an exercise habit found that people stuck to their routines better when there was a specific cue to start, such as running as soon as they wake up, or going to the gym after work. A reward also helped (a beer, television, etc.).45 Over time, exercise can be its own reward—you might feel physically good after exercise, or enjoy a sense of accomplishment. You then might crave exercise to get these feelings.46
Just figuring out what triggers your existing habits can be challenging. If you can’t stop buying doughnuts when you are on break at work, what exactly is triggering this habit? Is it hunger? Is it boredom? Is it being tired? Is it a low mood because work doesn’t allow you to take a nap in the afternoon? Identifying and monitoring these triggers, and changing reward and punishment of the actions you take takes sustained vigilance.
If you can engineer your environment to make you act (and not act) how you want, eventually you’ll get into good habits.
Changing the Habit Itself
When you avoid a habit being triggered, you don’t remove the habit from your mind. It’s still there, lurking, ready to engage when the trigger comes back. So the other important thing to do is to try to change the habit itself. This is a longer-term strategy that takes sustained effort. You can alter your habit system by changing the punishments and rewards associated with habit behaviors. What makes this difficult is that many bad habits are kept in place because you get rewarded for behaviors that lead to immediate and visceral gratification.
To take an example in my life, I drink Vietnamese coffee every morning. It’s got caffeine and a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk in it. Drinking sugary drinks causes a pleasure you don’t have to wait for. We are conditioned much better when the reward or punishment comes immediately after the behavior. Furthermore, the pleasure is something very primal—we are wired for liking sweets. (In contrast with sugar, caffeine’s reward takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to kick in.)
Breaking this habit would be challenging to do. The reward for not having a sugary drink every morning is what—better health in the long term, and perhaps a slight difference in my weight? Avoiding Vietnamese coffee on any given day simply does not create the same kind of feeling of reward that drinking it does. These far-future rewards are so uncertain and speculative that they are trapped in the cool, emotionless belief system in the cognitive part of my mind. The habit system barely even registers them. Instead of a great taste in your mouth, you have to settle for a belief that you’re doing your future self a favor, and try to feel good from that. The satisfaction of the taste of sugar versus the satisfaction of a nice belief? You can see why changing habits is hard!
Similarly, watching television instead of exercising provides the immediate gratification of a primal urge to conserve energy, and our basic thirst for hearing good stories, where exercising is boring and strenuous in the short term, and you only feel good when it’s all over, and experience health and happiness benefits down the road. Many new habits are hard to establish because they pit short-term gratification against long-term goals.
If you try to break a habit through sheer force of will, you are relying on your cognitive system, which has a lot of other jobs, too. When it’s distracted, which it eventually will be, you will accidentally engage in the bad habit, reinforcing it again. This is why breaking habits is very hard for people.
So if you have trouble breaking bad habits, you are not alone. It’s hard. In fact, you probably cannot ever completely remove bad habits from your brain. Studies show that the old habits are still in there. It sounds like an impossible task.
But there are ways to break bad habits. Rather than thinking of getting rid of bad habits, it can be helpful instead to think of replacing them. That is, instead of having Vietnamese coffee every morning, I can try to have green tea instead. Over time the tea habit will be stronger than the coffee one, even though the coffee one is still in my head, waiting to be triggered again. I use my willpower in the short term to force myself to drink green tea for a while, until the habit takes over. Then I can let my cognitive system relax a bit, and my habits will be in line with my goals for this issue.
This is very important, so I’ll say it again: your old, bad habits will probably always be in your mind, so if you want to “break” them, you need to install better habits that are triggered by the same things, and work at those until the new habit is stronger than the old, bad one. Don’t think of eliminating habits. Think about replacing them.
When to Replace Habits
Because habits are triggered by environmental situations, making a big change to your life, like moving, getting married, or getting a new job, can disrupt your habits, for better or for worse. If you have a desire to change habits, either by removing bad ones or installing good ones, a big life change is a good time to do it. Studies show that big context changes disrupt your habit system, making them vulnerable to facts, goals, and information. So, for example, it’s easier to start riding your bike to work when you change apartments, become vegetarian when you change jobs, and finally kick that infidelity habit the next time you get married.47
Similarly, your normal habits can be disrupted by a change in context. When you travel, and you’re staying at the hotel, it is sometimes hard to keep doing the good activities you usually engage in, like exercising or taking your daily medicine. The normal cues are not there, and you’re apt to just do whatever. I struggle with this. If I’m trying to write every day, I have to use my willpower to get myself to do it on my laptop in the hotel room, because it doesn’t come as naturally as it does at home. I’m not at my desk, I don’t have my Vietnamese coffee, I’m working on a tiny laptop, etc. My mind starts looking for reasons why I don’t need to do it, considering all of the other things I could be doing instead. This never happens at home anymore, where the habit is reliably triggered, and other options and rewards are not even calculated.
You want to make sure your habits are working toward your considered interests. The interests you muse about when you’re thinking about your future. The interests that resonate with your deepest values—not the interests of immediate gratification. How can you change your habits? I like to think of my mind like a computer, and a strategy or habit as a piece of software. How can you install a habit into your system to make it more effective?
Using Willpower
You can use your willpower to get a habit into place. So, for example, if you want to get into the habit of running every morning, for the first month or so you’re going to need to use willpower (and other methods) to establish a routine before you can benefit from your habit system. But once the habit is there, the conscious decision-making step of action is skipped. This is why good habits are so powerful—your conscious mind is less likely to get in your way. You don’t question the habit as much, and you’re better for it.
Relying on intentions alone tends not to work very well in the long-term. It suffers from the New Year’s resolution problem, in that compliance is difficult as the months go on. It also leads to lowered mood, and preoccupation with your habits.48 Part of the problem is that your willpower and self-control fluctuates day-to-day, and even during a single day. When you are focused on something else, a bad habit can take control. This is why good intentions and willpower should be supported by environmental changes that encourage good habits and eliminate bad ones; they don’t tend to work all by themselves.
One easy way to try to help install habits is with implementation intentions. Think about some goal you have, and something you would need to do as a step toward achieving that goal. Then, form a policy, like, “Whenever I’m in that situation, I will do this.” For a weight-loss goal it might be, “Whenever I get tempted to eat junk food, I will chew gum.” Studies show that just setting these in your mind help make your unconscious mind work for you.49 Over time this can be turned into a bona fide habit. This has been found to be quite effective for installing new habits, and less useful for removing bad ones.50 Remember, it’s more effective to try to replace bad habits than to remove them.
Higher-level decision-making does not directly affect habits. Habits change over time, through repetition and conditioning. This is why merely learning about something does not change them. The part of your brain that learned in a book that, say, drinking too much is bad for you, is not actually affecting your habit system. If you are thinking about some fact like that, your willpower system might override the habit in the moment, but it doesn’t change the habit itself, it just overpowers the force of the habit in that one instance. When you’re not consciously thinking about the fact, it won’t have any effect at all. This is why you need to do more than learn about what to do and what not to do—you need to train your habit system to change. Good intentions tend to have much less effect when there is an opposing strong habit.51
At the same time, using your willpower is crucial because you need to care for your habits like they are your pets.
Another trick you can use to promote a new, good habit is to break it up into pieces, and gradually do more and more pieces every day. For example, suppose you would like to go to the gym every morning, but it sounds like a drag. Think about the steps you need to take to work out at the gym. For example, for the first three days you go out of your way to walk by the gym on your way to work—but don’t go in. Or, if you drive, drive to the gym and park, then go to work. That’s not too hard, is it? If it doesn’t feel like a habit yet, keep doing it until it does—it might take ten days. When that habit is established, pack your gym clothes and change into them at the gym. Then change out of them and go to work. I know it sounds stupid, but putting on gym clothes is a lot easier than exercising, and easier to make a habit out of. Then, add a very, very light workout in those gym clothes, maybe just a walk. Eventually, work your way up to a full habit of exercise every morning. If you find yourself slipping, go back to the easier versions.
In practice, you’ll probably want to work out at least a bit if you put on your gym clothes. But you shouldn’t count on this—be wary of breaking promises to yourself. If you promise yourself that you will only put on your gym clothes and then take them off, you need to let yourself do exactly that or the next time you won’t do any of it, because even though you are telling yourself that you don’t need to work out, you know that the last time you guilted yourself into working out anyway, so you say screw the whole thing. You won’t trust yourself to keep your own promises.
Doing things in groups also encourages behavior, both good and bad. You might have drinking buddies, which will make you drink more. Addiction interventions always try to keep addicts from hanging around the people they use with. But your social group can also be leveraged for better habits: you can have workout buddies, writing buddies, or art buddies. I find that when I’m part of a writing group, I write much more, because I want something to bring to the group. When I do, I get rewarded for doing so. For normally solitary activities, like reading books, writing, working out, or doing many forms of art, you can make them social to encourage the habit to form. When I was living in Kingston, Ontario, I had a friend who would call me up and say, “Want to hang out at a coffee shop? I don’t feel like being social.” We’d just sit together and read.
Imagine the difference in motivation for going for a morning run in these two situations: In the first, you try to get yourself to run alone every morning. In the second, a group of three friends knock on your door at 7:00 A.M. to get you for the group run. Which do you think would be easier to skip on a day when you’re feeling tired, or it’s a little cold?
There are two distinguishable feelings in the reward system: liking and wanting. But they are difficult to tease apart because most of the time they are activated at the same time.
The first is the liking system. This involves pleasure and pain. The reward system has a very important function, in humans and most other animals: by using pleasant and unpleasant experiences, it shapes what the organism does in the future. If something hurts, we learn to avoid it. If something feels good, we learn to approach. Pleasure and pain serve as an interface between sensations and goal-directed action.54
We also feel pleasure when we accomplish something, or expect to accomplish something. From an evolutionary perspective, this is why pleasure exists at all. But some recreational drugs are intrinsically pleasurable because they directly activate pleasure systems. They are a pleasure hack, a cheat code, giving reward when you haven’t done anything useful!
Pleasure is a gloss that gets put over a sensation or some other mental state. The sensation itself isn’t the reward.55 For example, you might like the taste of ice cream, but at some point you will have eaten enough, become satiated, and being forced to eat more would make you feel disgust. It still tastes like ice cream, you just don’t find it pleasurable anymore. So, if you like ice cream, it’s not the taste of ice cream that’s pleasurable, it’s the combination of the taste of ice cream combined with your state of hunger, how much ice cream you’ve eaten lately, how much you’ve been thinking about food or ice cream, etc. In short, pleasure emerges when the stimulus is in a particular relationship with your body and mind.
The second is the wanting system, which motivates action. There were famous experiments where rats and humans were given control over a device that directly stimulated certain parts of their own brains. They activated this device over and over again. At the time, the researchers assumed that this must be the pleasure center. (The rats preferred to activate this device over sleeping and eating, and kept at it until they died of exhaustion and starvation.)56
But now we think it’s more likely to be the motivation center, or “wanting.” It’s more like an urge, or a compulsion, but not particularly euphoric. While pleasure involves opioids and the like, the wanting system uses the neurotransmitter dopamine. Sometimes people experience irrational wanting, which is wanting something you don’t even like or expect to like.57 One example of this “wanting” is to pick your scabs, even though doing so hurts and makes you bleed. In this case, your mesolimbic “wanting” system tries to get you to pick the scab, and your cortical system (and perhaps even the liking part of your reward system) wants you to stop. These conflicting wants in your mind are generated from different brain areas, fighting for control of the behaviors stored in your basal ganglia. Addictive behaviors might be examples of this, too. Some addicts claim to want drugs, even though they don’t particularly like them.58
You might have experienced the dissociation between liking and wanting while eating lots of food. I’ve had situations where I found myself compulsively eating long after I’ve stopped experiencing pleasure at eating (high wanting, low liking). I’ve also found myself full, and not wanting to eat, but the food tastes so good that I wish I were hungrier (high liking, low wanting).59
It’s important to distinguish the “wanting” system we’re talking about here from the kind of “wanting” involved with things like conscious goal-setting (sometimes this kind of want is called a “desire”). When you “want” to graduate from college, or get a better job, it’s using the higher-level cognitive system in the neocortex, not the mesolimbic wanting system. It feels different, too: the wanting to graduate does not have the same immediate urge-like compulsion that wanting to eat more candy does.60
Now that we understand a bit about how your reward system works, how can you hack it? You do this by conditioning yourself: rewarding yourself for things your cortex wants you to do more of (avoid watching TV, attend to your friends more, work harder, and so on) and punish yourself for doing things your cortex doesn’t want to do, even though your reward system might be jonesing for it.
Punishment
Punishing yourself is difficult to maintain. Some people suggest that you can try to break bad habits by, say, putting on a jersey of a sports team you don’t like every time you indulge in the habit you’re trying to break. But having to do work to punish yourself is probably not going to last, because, well, punishing yourself is intrinsically unrewarding. This is why aversion therapy is often done by someone—or something—other than the person being punished.
There’s a bracelet you can buy called the Pavlok. You get a chrome extension that connects to it, and it delivers an electric shock to your wrist every time you spend more than some specified amount of time on social media sites. You can also shock yourself with it by pressing a button. Although this, too, might be hard to maintain, at least pressing a button requires negligible effort. There are testimonials touting its benefits, and science backing up using electric shock to reduce bad habits,61 but the Pavlok itself has not been rigorously tested.
Given that conditioning happens even in very small creatures that most scholars don’t believe to be conscious, perhaps there is an easy way out: conditioning yourself with unconscious punishment. The idea is this: you use some mechanism, perhaps like the Pavlok, but have it deliver a “punishment” too mild to be detected, such as an electric shock you can’t even feel. It might be that part of your mind processes this stimulation, and perhaps even learns from it, all outside of conscious awareness. Could this possibly work? This is currently a matter of debate in psychology, with some studies finding effects of unconscious conditioning, and others failing to find it.62
In general, it’s better to use reward than punishment to change yourself. So what is rewarding? Some rewards are intrinsic. A great example is the taste of sugar. Babies do not have to learn to like the taste of sugar. Humans generally love sweet foods without being told or trained to do so, and many other mammals also love it. Mammals seem to be wired to like it without any learning. For many people, foods with fat, sugar, protein, and salt are intrinsically rewarding.
Sex is also intrinsically pleasurable (for most animals), but the sex drive only comes online later in life—it’s still genetic, but those genes are expressed later in development. We evolved to feel pleasure from these things because eating and having sex led to more offspring. Higher-order pleasures, like music, might use the same brain mechanisms.
Similarly, some things are naturally aversive. Pain is intrinsically aversive, and serves as punishment.63 Other tastes, such as bitter things like coffee, are initially aversive to most people, and require learning to grow to like.
You have to learn to love extrinsic rewards. Money is a good example. There’s nothing intrinsically rewarding about finding a bunch of dollar bills on the ground. The positive feelings are only there because you’ve come to associate money with status and the things it can buy.
In 2007, long-distance runner Dean Karnazes generally only ate very healthful foods—grilled salmon five nights a week. But when he wasn’t training (sharpening the saw), but actually competing (cutting with the saw), he needed lots of calories. He would order an extra-large Hawaiian pizza to be delivered to a particular intersection on his route. He’d roll it up and eat it while running. Not only did it give him the calories he needed (supplemented with éclairs and cheesecake), but it gave him something to look forward to during the most grueling parts of the race.64
But rewarding yourself can be difficult if you generally never deprive yourself of anything. For example, if you eat whatever you want all the time, and get yourself a massage whenever you feel like it, and basically do whatever you feel like doing all the time, then there’s no particular reward that will feel very special. One thing I do is deprive myself of something I really like, and only let myself have it after I do something I really should do. Although you might feel you’re happier if you seek pleasure all the time, and never deny yourself anything, this puts you in a weird bind: there’s nothing you can do to really treat yourself especially well when you want to celebrate or reward yourself.
For example, a few years ago I was hooked on a video game called Hearthstone. Playing it took about ten minutes, and when I was really hooked on it I played it about two or three times a day. At that time I was concerned that I wasn’t getting enough exercise. So I made a rule: I couldn’t play Hearthstone unless I had exercised that day, like if I took the stairs at work (I work on the 22nd floor). I can’t really say that this reworked my reward system so that I found exercise fun (I eventually had to find a sport I liked to make that happen, and thus start a new habit), but I was so hooked on Hearthstone that I exercised every day for three weeks so I could play it!
What would be really great is if you could hack your reward system so that the unpleasant things you believe you should do become rewarding in themselves. A way to do this is to use classical conditioning, where you come to associate behaviors with things that happen to you. The classic experiment in classical conditioning involved salivating dogs and footsteps. Ivan Pavlov noticed that not only would dogs salivate when the food was brought in, but when they heard the footsteps of the experimenters. They had come to associate the footsteps with the behavior of salivation.
Rachel, a friend of mine, was hooked on sleeping pills. She was studying psychology at the time, so she tried to get off them using classical conditioning. At bedtime she would take her pill and then put on the first Harry Potter movie. She’d fall asleep. Over time, she’d start taking fewer pills, then a pill every other day. Eventually she was off of sleeping pills, and could not get thirty minutes into that movie without falling asleep. (Her real name isn’t Rachel; she doesn’t want everybody to know about her Harry Potter addiction.)
But can you make something unpleasant into something fun? One method that seems to work is temptation bundling, which does this by having people simultaneously doing “want” and “should” activities.65 In the experiment, they had audiobooks put on iPods. As the experimenters put it, these books are “lowbrow, page-turner audio novels.” For one group, they only allowed them to listen to these while exercising at the gym. This group went to the gym 51 percent more often than the control group. The deprivation here is key. The people wanted to hear the book, but could not do it unless they were exercising, which made them exercise more. I have a friend who does this with TV: she won’t allow herself to watch it unless she’s on her exercise bike at the same time.
It’s not a panacea, though. A second group was merely encouraged to only listen at the gym. These people went to the gym at a rate statistically indistinguishable from the controls. Also, the effect decreased over time, especially after Thanksgiving: a decrease of .07 visits per week for the nine-week length of the study. Some habits are hard to keep.
But did it make people enjoy exercising more? Not really. The differences between the iPod group and the control groups were not significantly different when asked how much they enjoyed the exercise.
Temptation bundling is a kind of precommitment device, where you commit to a policy to reward or punish yourself depending on a future action. It works better than resisting temptation in the moment because the precommitment happens when you’re relatively cool-headed. Once there is a policy in place, like I won’t watch TV unless I’m exercising, or I can’t play Hearthstone if I had Swiss cake rolls today, or the fact that you scheduled reviewing the budget for 9:30 A.M., means the decision is easier in the moment. It takes effort to vary from the plan, so you make your own laziness work for you.
It’s hard to make yourself like something, but it’s a lot easier to make yourself hate something you like. You do this by putting extrinsic punishments in place. A treatment for alcoholics is to take an Antabuse, which causes nausea and vomiting when you drink alcohol. It prevents you from drinking, and when you do drink, you quickly build negative associations with it.66 If you eat a certain food when you are sick with the flu, it can ruin that food for you for years. So if you’re addicted to eclairs, and wish you didn’t like them anymore, eat a bunch of them while you have the flu and it just might ruin them for you.
Sometimes a desire can be so strong that it can turn into a motivation without any external trigger. As I write this book, I’m struggling with a mild bubble tea obsession. A store opened half a block away from my house. But lately, I find myself thinking about bubble tea, and how I might be able to get some, even when the store isn’t so close. I recently went on vacation to Cartagena, Colombia, where there was no bubble tea, and found myself thinking about it, and looking forward to coming home so I could have some.
You have probably felt this way about something in your life, whether it’s a video game, some food or drink, or a powerful crush on somebody. But most motivations are triggered by perceived opportunities. Your desire to eat ceviche, for example, might only become a motivation when you see it on a menu (there was a lot of ceviche in Cartagena).
As such, you can manipulate your environment so that you perceive more opportunities for things you should do, and fewer opportunities for things you are tempted to do. As you engineer your environment to hack your habits, you can also engineer it to hack your reward system.
You might be using your cognitive system to try to focus on an important task, but your reward system is seeking out distractions, which, by their nature, are novel and rewarding. But when you cut yourself off from those distractions your reward system isn’t as tempted. Turning off your phone, stopping email notifications, being in a place where you can’t easily snack, and interventions like that just make it easier for your cognitive system to do what it needs to do, as you’ve removed many triggers of your reward system.
On the campus of Google, there are free food and drink stations all over the place. Being the data-obsessed company they are, they tracked snacking and tried to see what they could do to make people eat more healthful foods and less food overall. They found that simple things, like having the snack counter distant from the drink counter, reduced consumption of food considerably. Just serving M&Ms in smaller containers reduced their consumption.67 In one study, simply having a freezer door closed rather than open resulted in 5 percent rather than 16 percent of people serving themselves ice cream.68
This works, in part, because of how motivations are formed. If the candy is not in front of you, then you are less likely to turn your desire for candy into a motivation to get some. (This also works because of the reward system—adding friction to a task, making it harder to do, makes the entire project less rewarding because of the negative feelings associated with doing even a little extra work, like opening a cabinet, or having to walk down the street.)
The lesson here is that you have some control over your work and home environment, and you can engineer it so it’s harder to do tempting things. You can keep the remote control in a room distant from the TV, and keep the batteries farther still, requiring more effort to even get the TV on. You can keep brownies frozen, so you have to defrost them to eat them. I have seen no studies showing how much effort is required to keep you from indulging, but personal experiments suggest that requiring twenty seconds of work is enough to reduce indulgence considerably.69
This can also be used to encourage behaviors you want to do more of. I recently got a guitar, and my guitar friends say you should keep it in its case. Apparently it’s better for the guitar. But the case is ugly, it takes up room in my living room, and opening and closing the case is a pain. This calculus goes though my head every time I think of playing the guitar. If I only want to play for two minutes, it’s not worth the hassle. So I play the guitar less. But I’d like to practice more. It’s a good break for me, and you can’t get better without practice. So I got something for the wall where I can hang the guitar. When I’m sitting on the couch, I can pull it into my arms in about four seconds. It’s easy to take out and put away, so I end up doing so a lot more.
You want to make tempting things more expensive, in terms of time, allocation of effort, enduring of pain, monetary cost, etc., and the things you want to do more of frictionless and less expensive: easy, quick, cheap, and rewarding.
This is the situation-selection method of self-control: choosing to put yourself in situations that make the “should” activities relatively more inviting, and the “want” activities less inviting. A particularly powerful way to engineer your situation to your benefit is to surround yourself with the right people. Who are “the right people”? The people who are acting in ways your higher-level cortical processes think you should act, and, importantly, not indulging in the things your reward and pleasure systems would have you do that are counter to your goals. The power to be influenced by the people around you is so strong that scientists use the word “contagion.” Suicide, obesity, drug use, smoking, and pregnancy are all socially contagious. So is doing hard, productive work.
Situation-modification is when you manipulate your environment to help you with your goals: not keeping junk food in the house, planning time with friends to ensure enough social interaction, placing your alarm clock across the room so you have to get up to turn it off, or putting social media–blocking software on your computer. You can reduce the amount of willpower you need to use by manipulating your environment. These methods are often more effective than exercising self-control because many temptations grow over time, but changing your environment at the beginning happens when temptation is low or not yet present.70 Calling your spouse and asking them to hide the cookies is easier than resisting cookies right in front of you. You can opt to not have unhealthful foods in your house, or to put them in a place that’s hard to get to. My aunt once kept snack cakes in her house for her daughter’s lunchbox. But she found that she would eat them, so she put them in the freezer. She wasn’t tempted to eat them because they were frozen, but the ones she put in her daughter’s lunch would thaw by lunchtime. This worked until she discovered she could defrost the cakes in the microwave. Still, having to microwave the cake was a bit more friction than just pulling it off the shelf. Smokers will sometimes try to quit by depositing money with someone that they will forfeit if their urine test reveals nicotine.71
When I’m working at my desk, I get snacky. I’m not hungry, but I want to snack. I’m constantly distracted by this even when I don’t indulge. And when I do indulge, I have lots of temptations: spoonfuls of peanut butter, dark chocolate, dark chocolate covered with spoonfuls of peanut butter, spoonfuls of peanut butter with a chunk of dark chocolate in it… So I found a snack that I can eat constantly without having to worry about it: raw cabbage. I cut up some raw cabbage into Dorito-sized chips and keep it by my desk. It’s crunchy, so it feels substantial, but it’s nutritious. This actually works. Does raw cabbage taste good? No, it doesn’t. But because I’m eating compulsively (the wanting system) the pleasure doesn’t matter so much. I’m eating mindlessly, and multitasking a bit (eating while working), so I don’t notice the bitter flavor much.
These are ways you can take advantage of however lazy you might be. Make the things you really want to do easier, and make the temptations harder.
If you have your cognitive system’s high-level judgments in the right place (that is, you want the right things), and your reward system is tweaked so that you find it rewarding to do the right thing, and your habit naturally leading you to do the right thing, then all of your brain areas will be working in concert, rather than at cross-purposes, to make you act better.
Let’s get into some specifics about how can you hack your environment to make yourself more productive. How do you keep yourself from being distracted from what you need to do?
It just might be that your job requires you to do “shallow” work a lot of, or all of, the time. If you work at a call center, or as a CEO, for example, your job is mostly rapidly responding to external demands on your time, or where constant connectivity on the Internet is actually a part of the job.72 But for many jobs, some level of concentration is beneficial. But keep in mind that your job isn’t your whole life—you might have endeavors in your leisure time that would benefit from undistracted phases of productivity.
Cal Newport, in his inspiring book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, describes four different ways to structure your time so that you get more focused attention.73 This means not multitasking. At the very least, don’t let your devices distract you with notifications (see the sidebar “Remove Electronic Distractions”).
The first is the “monastic philosophy,” which is a really extreme approach. You cut yourself off from the rest of the world, making yourself unreachable by phone or email for long periods of time—maybe forever. Some people are really productive using this method, such as computer scientist Donald Knuth and novelist Neal Stephenson. But most people’s occupations don’t allow this kind of hermit lifestyle.
The “bimodal” philosophy involves having parts of your life designated for deep versus shallow work. You might do shallow work for a month, then deep work for a month. Or half your day might be deep, and the rest of it shallow.
In the “rhythmic” philosophy you have particular parts of the day dedicated to deep and shallow work. Even if you have to check email every half hour, you can alternate fifteen minutes of concentration with fifteen minutes of interactivity in each half hour of your day.
Finally, in the “journalist” philosophy, you fit in concentrated work whenever you can. You sneak in half an hour here, ten minutes there, as time allows, but during those times you are absolutely dedicated to the task.
It seems that different people prefer different kinds of structuring of their day. There are lots of methods out there. I use a version of the rhythmic philosophy I call the “half-hours method,” and since I’ve never seen it described before, I’ll tell you how it works. But perhaps the most important things to take away are these: you need some kind of strategy for concentrating and getting work done without distraction, and you might need to experiment to know which one is right for you. Even if my method doesn’t work for you, keep searching until you find a method that does.
Key to the half-hours method is to have a project list. This is a prioritized list of everything you have to do in your life that takes more than 20 minutes.
It’s important that you keep this list curated. What I mean by that is you attend to it frequently, and make sure it has all of your projects on it. Many people report that simply making this list gives them an enormous sense of relief. The reason is that all of the things you need to do are otherwise swimming around in your head, distracting you from what you’re trying to work on. This is because if you don’t “rehearse” thoughts, you are more likely to forget them.75 So if there’s something important you need to do, your mind rehearses it so you don’t forget. But if your mind is rehearsing lots of things, it’s distracting. This, I believe, is one of the reasons we get overwhelmed: we cannot work on any given thing, because we are distracted by all of the other things we know we have to do!
That said, I cannot find any scientific research on the concentration benefits associated with making a project list. One bit of research is suggestive: E. J. Masicampo ran a study where he had people begin to work on a problem, and then made them work on something else. The unfinished task interfered with the second task: they had intrusive thoughts. But when they were allowed to make a plan for how to accomplish the goal, the distracting thoughts went away.76
The project list is ordered in terms of urgency, importance, and whether it needs to be put on someone else’s desk. The thing you most need to work on is at the top. This is important because although it’s easy to prioritize your projects when you make a list, your mind isn’t very good at doing it automatically.77
Projects include work commitments, but also ambitions in your private life and hobbies. That is, reorganizing the basement is just as much of a project as writing a proposal for your boss.
There is a question as to whether or not these things should be on the same list. For me, they absolutely should be, because, as a professor, my time is extremely flexible. I have a lot to do, but not a lot of constraints on exactly when I need to do them. So I can go shopping in the middle of the day, and work all night, if I want to. If your life is like this, then I recommend having a single project list for all of your endeavors.
But if your work-work is only done during work hours, and you don’t do any non-work projects during that time, then it makes sense to have separate work and home project lists. What also might make sense is to have different lists for different physical locations. Often this means work and home, but perhaps you sometimes work from home, and sometimes work from work. At one point I had a “computer” list. All my computers are synched with Dropbox, so being on an Internet-connected computer constituted a place, as far as my project lists are concerned. I also had a “car” list for things to do when I was out and about in my car.
This list can be electronic or on paper. There are benefits to electronic lists: they can be in the cloud, and thus always with you, and the items on them are easier to reorder. I use Google Tasks, and with it I can create a task from an email—that is, from Gmail I can click a button and it becomes a task in Google Tasks that is linked to the email. This is useful because many things I have to do eventuate in sending someone an email saying it’s done. It’s nice to be able to click right to it, rather than saving the subject line of the thread or something, so I can search later for the relevant email—which is how I used to do it.
There is a benefit to having a paper list, though, because it makes it easier to keep the list from getting out of control in terms of size. If you rewrite your list every day, or even every week, you will drop unimportant things from the list simply because they aren’t important enough to even write down again and again. Having a short project list is less stressful. My electronic list is way too long.
You might be thinking “great, I already have a to-do list.” But please note that a project list is not a to-do list. A to-do list is full of next actions that you can do and cross off. Things you can get done. Projects are longer-term things that you work on. Each project has a next action, but it’s not the next action that goes on the project list. For example, I have a project to write this book, but on any given day that might mean reading a paper, processing something I’ve already read, editing, trying to sell it, or simply writing. Some projects stay on the list for years—each of my first two books took me four years to write.
Each item on the project list has some next step associated with it. Sometimes what you need to work on next for the project will be obvious, and when it is you don’t need to actually write the next step on your list. But sometimes it’s helpful. So I might have a project item called “Write book,” but if I want to remember that I need to edit the book to include what I’ve learned from an article by Jonathan Haidt, I might change the entry to “Write book: process Haidt2003.pdf.” There is always a next step, and if you don’t know what the next step is, the next step is to figure out what the next step should be.
Also, the order has to be maintained. When you add something to the project list, make sure it’s in the right place on the list, in terms of urgency, importance, and whether working on it can get it off your desk and onto someone else’s. The list needs to always be complete and ordered.
As you reflect on the things you have to do in your life, think about how you might want to engineer your life so that you are doing more things you like to do and are good for the world, and fewer things that waste time. You might want to put some thought into changing your lifestyle so that you have fewer maintenance tasks, for example. If you live in a condominium or an apartment, you pay extra money to avoid lawn mowing, gardening, shoveling snow, and so on. The bigger your house is, the more maintenance work there is to do. Would it be better for you to hire someone to do that stuff or consider downsizing?
Quantity vs. Quality
Sometimes people worry that the way we think about productivity is flawed in that it emphasizes quantity over quality. What’s the point of writing 1,000 words a day if they aren’t any good?
Let’s compare Beethoven and Haydn. If you ask “Hay-who?,” you’re not alone. Joseph Haydn was a classical composer of considerable skill who wrote over 106 symphonies, and is sometimes known as the “father of the symphony.” But he’s not nearly as famous as Ludwig van Beethoven, who only wrote nine. What a layabout! Who was more productive?
Obviously, creating even one masterpiece is better than creating a bunch of just really good things. The question is, how do you maximize your chances of doing really great things?
Evidence suggests that the best way to get quality is by generating quantity. Beethoven seems to be an exception, because studies of great scientists, inventors, and artists show that the ones who produce the best stuff, are, on average, those who produce the most stuff. Most super-successful people produce an enormous amount of content, like painter Salvador Dalí, who produced hundreds of sketches before starting a painting. That is, for the most part, the probability of a given scientific paper or work of art turning out to be an impactful masterpiece is roughly the same for famous and non-famous people alike—the difference is that the famous people tend to produce so much more that they have more famous pieces.78 This does not necessarily mean that you should try to produce quantity without any notion of quality—the causal connection is not clear, here. But it’s something to be mindful of.
Now that you know what you have to do, the question is when do you work on what? Here is where you make your “half hours.”
At the beginning of the day, take out a sheet of paper and down the left side write one half hour per line, starting with the next half hour and going all the way until you plan to go to bed. So if it’s 7:15 A.M., make the first half hour 7:30 A.M. If you’re up for sixteen hours per day, you will have around thirty half hours on the paper.
The next thing you do is to go to your calendar, and fill in all of your scheduled activities: meetings, social events, exercise classes, things like that. Be sure to include commute times. Also put in time for meals, cooking, and a nap, if you do naps.
You might then find yourself with shockingly few half hours left. What you do then is simple: go to the top of your project list, and put the first item there (the most important/urgent) into the first free half hour you have of the day. Then put the second item on the project list into the second free slot, and so on. Also put in breaks, time to exercise, and leisure activities. If you don’t want to work after five, then fine, but schedule your half hours anyway—just fill time after five with the leisure activities you plan to do.
I know this sounds insane. You are probably thinking that you can’t get any meaningful work done in a half an hour on a project. You probably think that your mind will be scattered, switching tasks so many times. And maybe it’s not right for you. But I also want to say that no matter how certain you feel this is not right for you, you really don’t know until you actually try it for about three days.
Here is why I think it works for me.
It’s long enough to make significant progress. Even though you’re only working for a half an hour on something, it’s enough of a chunk of time to make significant progress on a project, provided that you actually work on the project for a half hour. That is, no checking email, social media, and no surfing the web. (Of course you can look up something very specific for the project at hand, but that’s not “surfing.”)
I will admit that there are some projects that require more than a half an hour at a time to be productive. Sometimes, when you’re programming, you might need to leave the code in shape for someone else, and this might take more debugging time. Or if you’re painting with acrylics, the setup and cleanup take so long that you will need more than a half hour for it to be worth your time. Basically, anything with a big setup or cleanup can get several consecutive half hours. But this holds for fewer projects than you think.
Writing, for example, is something that lots of people want or have to do, and most people think that they need a big chunk of free time to make any progress. And I know where they are coming from. At the beginning of a writing project, or if you haven’t touched it for several weeks, you might spend forty-five minutes just getting your bearings in the project and figuring out what you even need to do next.
Robert Boice ran an experiment with three groups of professors who all wanted to write more. Writers wrote in two phases. In the spontaneous phase, they scheduled five writing sessions per week, but only wrote when they felt like it for ten days.
In the second phase, the first group stayed in this “when they felt like it” mode for an additional five days, and then for the twenty days after that, were asked to write daily, no matter what mood they were in. But there was no quota, no reward, and no punishment.
Another group was asked to write three pages per session in the second phase, and if they didn’t, they would have to donate $15 to a despised organization. That is, a charity that they fundamentally disagreed with. They were in this phase for thirty days.
The last group was a control no-writing group, which did no writing for fifty days, but were asked to write down any creative, new ideas they had.
The results are startling. The no-writing group wrote about .1 or .2 pages per day (that means a page every five or ten days). The spontaneous writing produced .3 or .4 pages per day. The group that wrote whether they felt like it or not wrote .9 pages a day, and the group with the threat of punishment wrote 3.2 pages per day.
Regular writing also produced a lot more creative ideas. The no-writing group produced around .08 per day, the spontaneous about .26, the regular writing group .63, and the forced writing group 1.39.
You should also know that all of the participants in this study believed that they needed lots of uninterrupted time to get any writing done.79 This study shows that when you force yourself to write, the pages (and ideas) will come. Don’t wait for inspiration. A half an hour is enough time to get something significant done.
There are a few important lessons from Boice’s study and others like it. I think the most important one is that these professors, who are basically professional writers, were absolutely wrong about what kind of time management system would work for them. They believed that they could only write productively if they had lots of time to do it, but when these same people were put in an experiment, they were shown to be wrong. The lesson I want you to take from this is that when you read advice, in this book or elsewhere, you might have an opinion, perhaps even accompanied by a feeling of great confidence, that it would or would not work for you. Don’t be so sure.
Boice’s study is legendary, but has been criticized on a few grounds: all of the participants were having trouble with their writing, and the successful ones had an enthusiastic, in-person coach—Boice himself. The author even admitted that after the study was over, the participants fell back into their bad habits. Many participants dropped out of the study because they found all of the listing and charting of their behavior onerous. Helen Sword surveyed over a hundred successful academic writers and found that only two wrote the way Boice suggested!80
Returning to the half-hours method, although the first two days of this method might feel frantic, and like you’re not getting anything done, by the third day you will realize that, when you start working on a project, you pick up right where you left off the day before. You don’t need a lot of ramping-up time, because you were working on it so recently. That ramping-up time is required for projects your mind hasn’t thought about for weeks. A half hour, when done every day, is long enough to keep it fresh enough in your mind to make progress on it without catching up.
At the same time, a half hour has the benefit of being a short amount of time. Everybody has to work on projects they dread. (See the sidebar “Non-Productivity Scenario: Erika.”) Some are boring, others difficult, others involving disturbing information, and some have all three. If you feel that you have to spend hours doing a task like that, you will be likely to procrastinate working on it, because the idea of working on a dreaded task for so long is painful. But if you commit to yourself that you only have to work on it for a half an hour, it’s much easier to do it. It’s even better if you schedule something fun, like a project you like, or a break, as a reward for doing it. I often find that dreaded tasks get done in just a few days, only working half an hour a day, without much pain. No matter how bad it is, I can do it for half an hour.
Similarly, having only a half an hour to work on something you know is so important puts the fear of God into you to actually take advantage of what little time you have given yourself. Often, when I do my half hours, I find that I don’t have enough half hours in the day to work on everything important to me. (This probably means I need to drop some projects… that’s something I’m working on.) So when the half hour for this or that task comes up, I get started on productive work immediately. I think to myself, “I only have half an hour to make progress on this important thing!”
When my beloved was finishing up her master’s degree, she’d left campus and was back at home. Away from the context of school, with its reward structure, she was finding it very difficult to get to work on her thesis. She complained about it, and I timidly asked her if she’d made her half hours. (Timidly, because giving advice in a spousal relationship should always be done with compassion and extreme care! It’s not always easy to be married to someone obsessed with optimizing.) She reluctantly made her half hours. A little while later I tried to ask her a question, and was immediately shut down: “Jim, I only have ten minutes left in this half hour to work on this so I really need to concentrate.” From a woman who hadn’t worked on the thesis in three weeks, now she had a sense of urgency that ultimately got her thesis finished.81
The other benefit of the half an hour being so short is that it allows you to work on multiple projects, and possibly all of your important projects, every day. This is important because they are all kept fresh in your mind. You will see connections to the projects you are working on every day in the things you read and the people you talk to. If you only work on one thing day after day, your other projects are far from your mind, and you might not see the opportunities that arise, like asking a geology expert you meet at the dog park a question relevant to one of your projects.
If you’ve ever been stuck with a problem, only to have the solution pop into your head while you’re taking a walk or a shower, then you have experienced the power of what creativity scientists call “incubation.” The theory behind incubation is that when you let a difficult task go, and focus the conscious part of your mind on other things, your unconscious mind continues to work on the project. A review of many studies showed that this effect is real, and is particularly useful for tasks requiring creativity. Longer incubation times are better, and doing relaxing or low-demand cognitive tasks makes it work better as well.82
But incubation cannot work on a problem that you haven’t been thinking about recently. If you think of your mind like a police station, certain tasks become “cold cases,” projects that you never think about or make progress on. With the half hours method, you’re working on all your most important projects every day, and so they are fresh in your mind and available for your unconscious mind to incubate. You don’t want your mind to turn any really important projects into cold cases.
Working on your most important projects every day has another benefit: you end up starting work on projects early. Sometimes, when you begin work on a project, you quickly realize that the scope of it was bigger than you thought. You might need help from someone. You might need to gather materials. One of my professors in graduate school, Charles Isbell, said, “It’s fine to wait until the last minute. The secret is knowing exactly when the last minute begins.” But in the real world, this is always uncertain. You don’t know how much time a project will take (and people always underestimate task completion times), and new things come up that interrupt your projects. You don’t want to start something at the last minute only to realize that you need to ask someone for something, and who knows when they will get back to you.
Because I use this method, for the most part I don’t have to worry about deadlines. Things just get done long before.
The idea of working on something different every half hour might sound very stressful to you. And I will grant you that the first two days of it will feel very frantic. But for me, it’s much less stressful. Have you ever had a million things to do, and while you’re trying to get work done, you are distracted by thoughts of all of the other things you need to do? That’s your mind rehearsing. You keep thinking of the other things you need to work on so you don’t forget them. But keeping your project list updated relieves this stress. You don’t have to think about the other projects because you have written them down, allowing extreme focus and productivity.
You also might be distracted by thoughts that maybe you should be working on something else. So you’re trying to write a proposal, but you keep wondering if maybe you should be brainstorming your next steps on some other project. I find that when I’m feeling overwhelmed, what it really means is that I have so many things to do that the very thoughts of those things keep me from making progress on any of them.
Many executives have assistants who schedule their days for them. This way, they can feel undistracted, confident that someone else has done the worrying about what should be done when.83 With the half-hours method, you are acting as your own executive assistant. Act like your assistant for a few minutes at the beginning of the day, and then trust your assistant for the rest of the day, relatively stress-free.
In the sidebar “Non-Productivity Scenario: Ted” we see one possible outcome of being overwhelmed: not doing anything, and doing something fun instead. By strictly managing your time, these ultimately non-enriching leisure activities are easier to resist.
But when you make your half hours for the day, you’ve done some important stress-relieving things: you have a plan in which you’re going to make progress on all of your most important projects, and you’re going to work on the most important ones first. This gives you a great feeling: that what is in that little slot next to your current half hour is the most important thing you should be working on right now. Freed from worry that you should be doing something else, you get things done.
Sometimes, when people first start trying to use this method, they plan half hours starting whenever—like, a half hour starting at 4:46. Once I spoke to someone who was trying to get started on something, but she kept procrastinating. She was supposed to start at 4:30, but she stalled, checked email, etc. Then at 4:40 she said, “Okay, the half hour starts now.” Then she dilly-dallied again. This is one reason I endorse using the half hours on the clock. If you schedule 4:30–5:00 for working on your proposal, and you screw around and miss it, tough luck. You’ll have to get to it tomorrow. This is a mild form of self-punishment that will help you get started working in the future. If you miss the half hour, it’s gone, and you’re on to other things.
After doing this method for over fifteen years, my internal clock is pretty good at knowing when the half hour is up. I have my computer desktop wallpaper change every half hour to remind me. If you find that you work through your half hour and fail to notice that it’s up, you can set your watch to beep, or even set a timer.
Another trap is that sometimes people make their half hours, but then start on the first project, get on a roll, and just don’t stop. They are thankful that the half hour plan got them started, but are happy to abandon it when they get on a roll.
I’m wary of this abuse of the method. Part of the power of the half hour commitment is that it’s only a half hour. This helps you get started on difficult tasks. The promise to yourself that you only have to work on it for such a short time is motivating to get started. If you start going long, your mind stops thinking of it as “just” a half hour. It becomes “a half hour and then possibly more,” which is a different commitment. So yes, even when I’m on a roll, I stop after a half hour. I’ll pick up where I left off tomorrow, when I’ll still be on that roll.
The other downside of abusing the half hour is that there are all of those other important projects you were supposed to be working on today but didn’t. That said, I’m not a complete slave to this method. I will make exceptions once in a while. But after many years of experience with it, in general things go better if I stick to the plan.
I don’t work on Saturdays or in the evenings, but I also plan my half hours for my leisure time. This might sound weird, but many people actually have trouble enjoying leisure time. It’s too unstructured, there are too many choices, and people end up just watching TV or doing something that is very easy to start doing (as opposed to coordinating to hang out with people you care about, which makes you happier but requires more effort). Believe it or not, studies show that you are happier and less stressed by scheduling leisure time.84 You can keep a list of things you know you like to do, and schedule your free time to try to get to them. Maybe calling a distant friend, reading, playing pool, going for a walk, and yes, even watching TV. You just want to be deliberate about it, so you can actually get to do the leisure activities you would like to get to, and have enough time spent with the people you care about.
Again, this is something you might want to experiment with. I have had one major exception to the half hour: writing nonfiction books like the one you’re reading now. I often give myself an hour to work on it, first thing in the morning. There are two reasons for this: first, it’s the most important thing in my life, so I want to dedicate more than a half an hour to it, and second, I enjoy it so much that I’m not tempted to procrastinate.
Sometimes I am under deadline and need to spend more than a half hour on a task in a given day. But even for this, I don’t do the time consecutively. I will work on it for, say, three half hours, spaced out over the course of the workday. This absolutely doesn’t work for some people. Some people have high task-switching costs, and it really helps for them to have longer, uninterrupted periods of concentration.
In general, I find that if I give myself more than a half hour—like, say, an hour—to work on something, I find myself more tempted to futz around, checking email and social media. After all, I have a whole hour. Then I find that fifteen minutes have passed, and I haven’t gotten started. If I only have a half hour, I get right to work.
But you might be different. Is a half an hour the right amount of time for you? Maybe not. If you are not tempted to procrastinate, maybe a longer period will work for you. An analogous “hour method” might work better for you. For lots of people, those large chunks of time are few and far between, and they end up working on the project only rarely, losing all of the benefits of keeping the projects fresh in your mind. One study suggests that the average worker is maximally productive with a fifty-two-minute work stretch, followed by a fifteen-minute break, and repeating. But this is just an average. Computer scientist Cal Newport reports that many very successful people had widely varying stretches of work vs. break time.85
Even if you want to have two-hour blocks, you can use a method similar to the one I’ve described. Suppose your schedule looks something like this:
7:00 A.M. |
wake |
7:30 A.M. |
breakfast |
8:00 A.M. |
work on project one |
10:00 A.M. |
coffee break |
10:30 A.M. |
work on project two |
12:30 P.M. |
lunch |
1:30 P.M. |
work on project three |
3:30 P.M. |
break (nap or coffee) |
4:00 P.M. |
work on project four |
5:30 P.M. |
stop working |
Here you’ve got three two-hour blocks for uninterrupted work. The downside is that you only can keep four projects fresh in your mind. If you use the half-hours method, you might have as many as twelve half hours during a day of working hours (almost everyone will have far fewer, but let’s look at the most generous example). This means that you could potentially work on twelve projects “at once.” If your working size is one hour, it’s half of that, and if you work in two-hour chunks, you only have three or four projects. If you have more projects than you have time slots, then they are not all on your plate at once, and you’re working more serially—one, or maybe four, projects at a time. So another consideration is to choose the size of your working time based on how many projects you need to have on your plate at once. If you don’t work on everything every day or two, you forget where you left off, and have a larger start-up cost when you get back to the project.
My point is that no matter what your perfect amount of time is for working on a project, you can use some version of the method described here. Experimentation will help you tweak the parameters to optimize what’s best for you.
Project List: Master Class
In addition to my project list, I also keep a list of things I need to do that take less than a half an hour. I call this list TCOB, or “Taking Care Of Business.” This has things like making a dentist appointment, sending someone a question over email, etc. The TCOB list is more like a traditional to-do list than the project list. Each day I try to schedule at least a half an hour for this list. I put “TCOB” as the task for whatever half hour, and when that time comes I just crank through the TCOB list.
I have yet another list called “Waiting On” for everything I’m waiting on from other people. Often I’ll work on a project until I can’t do anything else until someone else does something. Maybe I’m writing an article with someone and it’s their turn to do an edit. I move the entry from the project list to Waiting On. Or if I submit a poem to a poetry magazine, I’ll put an entry into Waiting On about it until I get a response. (With Google Tasks, it’s easy to move a task from one list to another.) To process this list, I go through and nag everyone on it every month.
I keep another list for things to do when I don’t have the mental energy to do what I had scheduled for myself. I call this list “Too Tired.” On it are things that are not urgent, nor particularly important, and don’t require much cognitive ability. Examples include unsubscribing from unwanted email lists, reading Star Wars comics, practicing music, and sketching.
When people think of what productivity really means, they think of getting things done. And sure, how to get things done is a big part of productivity, but what’s even more important is choosing what things should be done. Having great time and energy management, delegation abilities, and so on do you and the world no good if the goals you are working toward aren’t worth pursuing.
Sometimes you can feel productive when you’re actually not. Being busy and responding constantly to things that come your way can put you in the zone. You feel like you’re solving problems left and right, and it feels productive. But often, these responsive activities unmatter. You could respond quickly to things for a year and have little to show for it. (I respect that many have jobs that require constant responding—but you have many leisure hours to work with every week, too.)
Some goals matter. They make you happier and make the world a better place. Some goals unmatter, and have a negligible effect on you and the world. And some goals antimatter: somebody carrying out atrocities in an efficient manner certainly doesn’t help the world.
Even if you have lots of goals that are laudable, there’s the question of whether you have too much on your plate. What I mean by “on your plate” are goals that you plan to make progress on, say, a little bit every month. Here we run into real limits on your time, energy, and memory.
This means that your project list needs constant curation. The more projects you have, the longer it will take (in terms of days) to complete them. For most people, this amounts to cutting projects you’re excited about. Personally, I have many things I’d love to do, but never do, simply because other things have taken priority. Some people have an idea in their head that any stopping of work on a project qualifies as “quitting,” and is something to be avoided.
You should purge the notion immediately from your head that quitting is bad. If you finish every book you start, if you complete every project you begin, two bad things will happen. First, you’ll finish a lot of projects that unmatter, and maybe even antimatter. You can’t always know the value of a project before you begin working on it. Second, this policy will make you risk-averse. If you know that you’ll always finish what you start, you’re likely to avoid project ideas that you are not sure will be good. This means doing a lot of safe stuff, and avoiding risk. If, on the other hand, you practice “strategic quitting,” you can feel free to attempt risky projects, because you know you can just dump it in the future if it turns out to be a dead end.86
Success requires grit and working through difficult parts of a project, but giving up on a project because it unmatters or antimatters is very different from giving up out of laziness.
Many projects are collaborative. If you have the kind of collaborative project that you work on, then you pass it to someone else to work on, this project might get some extra priority on your project list in terms of what you work on soon. Getting a project off your desk and onto someone else’s is a great place for your project to be. I slightly prioritize getting the ball in someone else’s court when I choose what to work on every day.
You can make some projects collaborative, or make them not your projects at all, by delegating. Most people think that delegation is only possible if you have people working for you in your job. But don’t forget that you can often hire people, on your own dime, to do some of your work.
I’ll start with something you’re familiar with: cleaning your living space. You can do it yourself, or you can hire somebody to do it. Which should you pick? Lots of people do it themselves because they think it’s cheaper. But is it?
To know for sure, you have to think of how much your time is worth. But your time’s value is relative to the activity you’re talking about. I hate weeding, for example. So I think to myself, how much would a stranger have to pay me to do an hour of weeding in their garden? At the time of this writing, probably about $200 Canadian (on a beautiful day). So this means it makes sense to me to pay someone else to do it in my own garden if it costs me less than $200 an hour to get it done. Now, this is relative to your wealth and income as much as it is how much you enjoy it. If you have a low income, or love gardening, you might weed a stranger’s garden for less.
Take something you do in your life that isn’t fun. Think of what you would need to be paid to do it for somebody else, and if you could get someone to do it for you for less than that, and you can afford it, then you should hire someone to do it for you.
My beloved and I were taking turns cleaning the house every week, and at some point she used this logic on me. She asked how much a neighbor would have to pay me to clean their house. The amount was far higher than a cleaning person, so we hired somebody. This is one of those times when it’s good to think like an economist (it’s not always). There’s a saying in positive psychology: “If money doesn’t make you happier, you’re not spending it right.” A study by business researcher Ashley Whillans tracked happiness and what people spent money on. Turns out you can be happier spending money to have more free time. She had experimental participants spend $40 on either something time-saving or on a material purchase, and people were happier when they bought themselves more time.87
I started with the cleaning example because it’s common to hire a cleaning person. What I want you to do is to think about all of the other things in your life you don’t like doing in just this way.
I’ll give you another example from my own life. I’m an academic scientist, so part of my job (and calling) is to publish scientific papers in journals. One of the silliest, most annoying things about the process is that each journal requires its authors to format the paper according to that journal’s specifications. Some want APA citation style, some want footnotes, and on and on. So when you want to submit to journal A, you format the paper one way. If it’s rejected, you find journal B, and you might have to reformat the whole paper—not when it gets accepted, but just to submit it. Estimates suggest that formatting had a median cost of $477 U.S. per paper, which works out to $1,908 per researcher every year.88
Recently I submitted a paper and it was sent back because it wasn’t in their preferred style. I went to some effort to reformat it, only to have a “desk rejection.” It was rejected by the editor without being sent out for review, because the nature of the research didn’t fit the journal’s vision. Did I really need to change the formatting for them to make that decision? I won’t mention the name of the journal to protect the anonymity of The Journal of Creative Behavior.
Rant over. Anyway, reformatting papers is a waste of time and I don’t like doing it. So I now hire it out. I went online and posted a job advertisement for a personal and administrative assistant. I ended up hiring someone. She’s university educated, and can do a lot. I pay her by the hour. Now, when I encounter a task that I don’t want to do, or there are other things I would rather or should be doing instead, I’ll ask if she can do it. If she can, I send it to her, because her hourly rate is lower than what mine would be for the same task.
If she can’t do it, I try to find someone else. I had to have a paper reformatted in LaTeX, a complex computer science formatting system, and my assistant doesn’t know how to use it. So I went on Fiverr.com and found a LaTeX expert who will reformat my paper for $35. Fiverr.com and websites like it allow you to connect with people to do gigs, often for a very low price.
This requires a change in mindset that takes a little time to get used to. You have to practice thinking about whether the task you have can be delegated.
You can apply these delegation strategies to your non-job endeavors, like child care, lawn maintenance, your taxes, and so on. You can also apply them to art projects. I’ve written a few plays, and even had a few produced. But the process of trying to get plays produced is very tedious. You have to submit them, get rejected, put them in formats, include cover letters, etc. So I just hired my assistant to do it for me.
Chris Bailey of The Productivity Project has these tips for finding an assistant: You should pay more for a quality person, because incompetent people will take more time than they give you. Always check references. A different time zone can be a perk, because they can work on things while you sleep, and you don’t have to wait for it.89
This is great if you have more money than time.
Can you do this with your job? This is tricky, and you need to be really careful about it. You’re getting paid some amount of money to do your job, and it might be that there are parts of your job that you could hire someone else to do for you for less money. This might not be allowed by your employer, so be careful. There are matters of data privacy, and so on, but your work conditions actually might allow you to do this. It’s easier if you work freelance and can sub out personal tasks so you can take on more quality freelance work.
I have a friend who used to change jobs every few years. What he would do is negotiate his salary, and when they came to an agreement, he would basically say, “Okay, now how about this. You take 20 percent off of that salary and I don’t work on Fridays.” A surprising number of his employers over the years said yes. This was a friend with lots of other things in his life, and he wanted time for them. What actually happened, though, was even better than that. The company had projects that often needed intense work. So they’d ask him to work on Fridays, and he usually would. But after five such weeks, he’d have earned a week off of work, during which he could take a real trip, or intensely work on his other stuff for a full week.
What my friend was sacrificing was income, and what he gained was time to do many of the other things he found rewarding in life. For him, it was worth it. Whether such a situation would be good for your life is, of course, something you would need to decide for yourself. But a 20 percent salary cut might just be something you habituate to, and the time off might allow for a noticeably happier life of experiences and time nurturing social relationships. Just because our culture thinks you should work five days a week doesn’t mean that’s the optimal schedule for you.
For years I rewrote my half hours on paper every day. Then I leveled up to using a spreadsheet on Google Docs. I like it because it’s in the cloud, so I don’t have to remember to carry a piece of paper with me when I go from home, to work, and to the bubble tea place to get things done.
The first column are the day’s half hours, from 4:30 A.M. (sometimes I get up that early) until about 10:30 P.M. The second column is where I put what I’ll be doing every half hour; this column changes every day. The next seven columns are for each day of the week, and they hold my regularly scheduled events for each day. For example, I eat breakfast, walk the dog, go to bed, etc., at the same times every day. I teach classes and have regularly occurring meetings on the same days every week. So on Monday, I copy and paste the Monday default column into the “today” column, and then work from there. It saves me a bit of time.
Mine is not the only time-management advice out there. I’ll address a few others.
One method is to work only on the most important, urgent thing in your life until it’s done, and then move on to the next most important, urgent thing. This is the method recommended in the book Eat That Frog!, which explicitly states that “The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life.”90 What’s good about this advice, and why it helps some people, is it helps one focus on the most important thing and to actually get working on it. The problem with it is the advice to single-mindedly work on it until you finish it completely. In practice, this can be a disaster.
In the sidebar “Non-Productivity Scenario: Aden” we can see how this can go wrong. Suppose you have a really important project at work. Say you have to do software development to meet a looming deadline. Is that more important than submitting your travel receipts, or making an appointment with the dentist for a checkup? Sure is. But you’ll always have a looming deadline, if you’re a software developer, which means that if you’re following this method you don’t call your dentist until your teeth are in such pain that it becomes finally more important than the current software deadline. Of course you’ve left it far too long.
Let’s take writing this book as an example. Book writing is the most important project in my life. I estimate that it took me about 300 hours to write. At forty hours per week, the book would take me seven and a half weeks if I did nothing else. But this would have been seriously impractical. Most people cannot write for eight hours a day, every single day. The other problem is that nothing else would have gotten done in those seven weeks. No bills paid, no papers graded, no exercise. And at the end of it all, the most important thing would be my next book, so those other tasks would still never get done.
The half-hours method has you working on many projects every day, so the small things in your life that seem unimportant in the short term, but are important in the long term, like exercising and getting medical checkups, get done.
Further, very few people can actually work on only one thing all day, every day.
Another competing method is the “pomodoro” technique. For this, you break your day up into half hours. In each half hour, you work for twenty-five minutes (that’s one “pomodoro”) and then take a five-minute break. You use a timer to keep on track. After about four of them, you take a longer break of fifteen to twenty minutes.91
Like the half-hours method, having only twenty-five minutes to work on something gives you a valuable sense of urgency. There are a few things I don’t like about it, though. First is that sometimes you are asked to estimate how many pomodoros it will take you to complete a task. Or you are supposed to assign a completable task to one pomodoro. Because of the planning bias, I think this is a recipe for frustration. In the half-hours method, you don’t plan to finish anything in a given half hour, you just work on it.
The second thing I don’t like about it is that it deviates from the wall clock. As long as you’re doing twenty-five-minute bursts with five-minute breaks, you can stick to the natural half hours of the clock. But once you put in a fifteen- or twenty-minute break, you’re starting your next pomodoro at 11:15 or something, and that gets over when? Okay, 15 + 25 is 11:40, then a five minute break… You need to do more math to know when things happen, and you need a day planner that breaks things in five-minute granularities. Even planning when you can eat lunch becomes a bit of an onerous task. This is probably why they use a timer rather than the wall clock. But timers are loud, and annoying to set every twenty-five minutes. With the half-hours method, you just do something different every half hour, as indicated on the clock, no timer needed.
A hack on the pomodoro technique and half-hours method would be to replace the fifteen- or twenty-minute break with a full half-hour one, and try not to commit to finishing your tasks within the twenty-five-minute pomodoro. You can keep the breaks, just remember to use the last five minutes of the half hour for a microbreak. Although I don’t do this, you might want to, because breaks are very important.
I should add one caveat to my discussion of the half-hours method. Although it’s true I’ve used it consistently since about 2004, I deviated from it for the writing of the first draft of this book: I decided I wanted to write 1,000 words a day, and during the summer of 2019 I did so, and wrote it in a few months (this book is about 150,000 words). It was very demanding, and I wasn’t able to do much else that was intellectually productive during that time.
The reason I was able to pull this off was because I really loved writing this book. And when that first draft was done, I went right back to the half-hours method.
Taking Breaks
Time-management advice can sound like it is trying to put you on an endless treadmill of work. But breaks are absolutely necessary for your happiness and even your productivity. A half-hour break before a test will improve the test score, for example.95 Breaks at work result in more positive emotions, decreased burnout, and better attitudes toward your job.96
It could be that most people are so great in the morning because a night’s sleep is basically one huge break.
During the day, breaks should be short and frequent. Even a micro-break, like taking a walk around the office for two minutes, is helpful for getting back to clear thinking. Physical activity is more effective than sedentary activity—so the walk is better than sitting and playing Bejeweled.97 If, at the start of your half hour, you feel sluggish, do fifteen squats, or go up and down a flight of stairs.
Social activity is better than solo activity. Completely removing your mind from work activities is better than trying to take a break while working—for example, listening to music or eating lunch while you work isn’t as effective.98 It really needs to be a break.
Lunch turns out to be particularly good for restoration of your cognitive abilities, particularly if you choose what you do for lunch99 and are able to detach from work. Eating at your desk does your cognitive abilities no favors.
Reading is mostly sharpening the saw, but as far as saw-sharpening methods go, it’s very effective, and it’s worth spending some effort trying to optimize how you do it.
Let’s start with the problem of what to read. There is so much good stuff out there, you’ll only get to a tiny fraction of it in your lifetime. Not only that, reading is competing for your time with everything else you do in your life, including cutting with the saw. So picking what you read should not be done in the haphazard way that most of us do it.
It’s important to acknowledge that people read for many reasons. The same person might read scientific papers to get some facts about the world, instructions for better use of software at work, stories to their children to help their education and to bond with them, a book they don’t even like in their book club, a potboiler novel on the beach, and erotica to be titillated. This means that, from a time-management perspective, “reading” isn’t a category that makes a lot of sense, because it’s what you’re reading and why that determines what goal it serves, not the fact that you’re reading at all.
Reading for Knowledge
Reading is one of the best ways to learn about the world we live in. When you read, you can easily skip sections you think might be unimportant to you (thanks for not skipping a section called “how to read”). You can slow down or reread something difficult to understand. You can stop and talk about a passage or idea, perhaps even digest it over the course of the day before you return to it. You can highlight or take notes. All of these things are much harder to do with video, for example, and our brains process it differently, too.
When reading for knowledge, you want to be getting information that’s true and important. Reading a phone book from the 1980s has historically true information about people’s phone numbers, but reading the phone book is a waste of time because that information is outdated and wasn’t even particularly important to remember even in the 1980s. It unmatters. Someone’s phone number is information, or data, but knowing a phone number doesn’t give you knowledge, in the sense that you don’t better understand how the world works as a result of knowing a phone number. This is an extreme example, but there are lots of things out there you can read that have true but unimportant information. Reading useless stuff might be fun, but it doesn’t sharpen the saw.
Some information is very timely. Timely information can become quickly outdated. Getting information that will be outdated soon is less valuable, in general, than information that will continue to be true. Thus, you should limit the timely knowledge you take in to only what you really need to know. If you’re a stock broker, you might want to know about the current state of the stock market, but for most people, this information is too quickly outdated to be worth attending to. Of more importance would be the long-term trends in markets. This is more enduring information that might inform decisions down the road.
I’m going to argue for one of my more unpopular opinions here, and that is that most people should not read, watch, or listen to things about current events, or what is usually thought of as “news.” Knowing about flooding in a town across the country, or knowing that somebody far away was murdered is irrelevant to most people’s lives, and doesn’t inform any decisions they have to make. Another way to put this is that it is information that is not “actionable.” More specifically, it is less likely to be actionable than other, more promising kinds of knowledge. I’ve heard people argue that you need to consume news to know how to vote, but most people agree that they consume far more news than is required to make an informed decision about who to vote for. Wouldn’t two hours of research before an election tell you everything you need to know to make an informed vote?
What your mind is fighting against, however, is the very strong feeling, or conviction, that current events are important. It feels important to consume news, and to get up-to-the-minute updates on what’s happening. Some people describe the desire to consume news as compulsive.100 But if you think about what you’ve done with your knowledge of current events over the years, you’ll be unlikely to come up with much beyond knowing what everybody else is talking about on break at work. News unmatters. I try not to consume timely news for this reason. If the world changes in a way that isn’t enough to warrant a change to a Wikipedia page, for the vast majority of people it’s probably not worth knowing. I don’t read or watch any news, and I still get far too much of it from people constantly trying to talk about it with me.
But it gets worse: not only does news unmatter, in many cases it antimatters. The news skews your perception of the world to the negative, stimulating your amygdala with fear, and giving you a strong conviction that the world is full of evil people. Bad things are more likely to happen suddenly, and progress often happens gradually, making progress less timely or newsworthy.
Part of the problem is that our minds are wired to remember rare, unlikely events.101 The news caters to our minds, and what we find interesting. To do this it reports on unusual things, which are exactly what you don’t need to hear about if you’re trying to understand how the world works! You need to learn the rules, not the exceptions. The exceptions are misleading; your mind naturally ties exceptions together to form bogus rules.
As an example, people think that violence is increasing, when in fact it is decreasing. Violence is decreasing over time, but the progress is not smooth. This means that at any given time, violence might be going up or down, but over long time periods, the trend is down. But because the news salivates at violence, it breathlessly reports individual episodes of violence, and the minor, temporary increases in violence over time, ignoring the overall trend toward peace. As Steven Pinker notes, the public is exposed to only to the upticks, and is unaware of the larger downward trend. This leads people to think that violence is getting worse, when in fact the opposite is true.102
Although news slants strongly to the negative, studies of which stories are shared on social media reveal that people prefer to share positive stories. Perhaps people actually want their news to be a bit less scary and depressing than the news media thinks.103
Some people think that they can minimize the selectivity of news media by reading from multiple sources. This ignores the fact that for the most part all news outlets have similar ideas of newsworthiness. They might give different political slants on things, or differ in their focus on certain groups or geographical areas, but they all suffer from many of the same problems: priority for individual events and not trends, negative stories over positive ones, and recent changes to the world. Since these are baked into the very idea of what “news” is, you can’t avoid these problems by reading different “news” sources. Thinking you can understand the world by reading multiple news sources is like saying you can get a nutritious diet if you eat several varieties of wood. To me, arguing about the relative quality of news sources is like arguing about which children’s breakfast cereals are the most nutritious. Some might be better than others, but in general they are all bad for you.104
So what should you do if you want to optimize your reading for what matters, and thereby improve your understanding of the world? Put very roughly, “scholarly” stuff. That is, you want to read books and articles by people who have looked at a situation very closely, and analyzed it carefully, and are expressing this informed opinion in writing. Good scholarship tends to be or cite peer-reviewed journal articles. Good scholarship talks about the research that contradicts the thesis as well as research that support it. If a book is described as a “polemic,” even in praise, avoid it. News sources with a particular agenda tend not to report on findings that do not support their ideology. A pro-choice website is very unlikely to report on how traumatic an abortion can be, and a pro-life website is just as unlikely to report on how devastating it can be to have a baby you don’t want or were not prepared to have. Don’t read either of them.
The good news is that finding scholarly stuff has never been easier. Anyone with an Internet connection can go to scholar.google.com and for the most part only get search results that are peer-reviewed scholarly works, as opposed to the opinion pieces, news, and blog entries that contaminate vanilla web search results. Any time you hear a “fact” that seems important to you, type it into Google Scholar and see what the science says.
It’s actually much easier to know if a journal article is peer-reviewed than even a book. Although books are quite prestigious in the eyes of the public, most publishers will publish any book they think they can make money on, and the truthfulness of the content is of lesser importance. You might be surprised to hear that almost all nonfiction books written for the general public are not peer-reviewed. This includes the book you’re currently reading. When a big publisher publishes a “science” book, there is an excellent chance that no experts in the field read the book to check its accuracy. I have my colleagues read my manuscripts before publication to check the facts and reasoning, but that’s something I do because it’s important to me. My book publishers don’t require it, because I write popular science.
You might pick up a book by a journalist on the science of sleep. It’s very hard to know how much to trust such a book. The journalist isn’t trained as a scientist, and it’s likely no scientist read the book before it was published. Can you trust it? I would only do so if respected scientists endorsed the book in the cover blurbs. It’s not that journalists can’t write good stuff, but they’re not subject matter experts.
The situation is different for academic publishers. If a scientist sends a book to MIT Press’s academic publishing unit, they will send it out for anonymous review. If the reviewers think it’s garbage, MIT Press will not publish it. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple as this, because often academic publishers also have an arm of trade publishing (trade books are books for the general public).
So what can you do? There’s no quick way to know if a book is legitimate or not, but here are some clues: It’s written by an acknowledged expert in the field, a scholar of some kind who would have a reputation to lose by publishing a sloppy or inaccurate book. It’s published by an academic press. It has lots of citations in the back. The last one is important because if you’re skeptical of something, you can track down where the information came from and see if it actually supports what’s in the book. Failing that, the next best thing is that the author vaguely refers to “studies” that have been done, even if they are not cited. The worst books just make claims without even a perfunctory reference to any evidence.
These criteria don’t narrow it down enough, of course. There are still thousands of books to read that are well-written. How should you choose which of those to read?
One bit of good advice I got from Tim Ferriss is to try to read books “just in time” and not “just in case.” This means that you should target the books you read to your current projects, and focus less on reading for knowledge that maybe you might use someday. For example, as I’m writing this book, I’m reading a lot about the science of productivity, happiness, and morality. I have books on my shelf that I’ll need to read for my next book, but, interesting as they look to me right now, I’m waiting until I’m done writing this book to read them.
There’s a balance, here, of course. It’s good to read broadly; a little “just in case” exploratory reading can have unexpected benefits. And sometimes this “just in case” reading also has benefits of being pleasure reading, which I’ll talk more about below. I just want to emphasize that your choice of books should be deliberate. Books require a lot of time, and you should have the balance of “just in time” and “just in case” that is right for your life.
Reading for Wisdom
By “wisdom” I mean applying knowledge and reasoning to make better choices in your life: knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put tomatoes in the fruit salad.
Wisdom books are self-help and how-to books. They contain knowledge, but also advice on how to apply it in life. Advice, like knowledge, is subject to evidence, and you should use the same criteria for determining good and bad books as you do for knowledge books.
Reading for Pleasure
Sometimes reading is just plain fun, and reading for pleasure is a legitimate activity, even without any other benefits. This might sound obvious, but this knowledge is not always applied.
Decades ago, I didn’t really appreciate this. I would find myself in a situation where I had something really unpleasant to read, such as literature written by dead people for an English class. I would read for maybe a half an hour, and then my mind would rebel. I’d consider reading the fun novel I had on the side. But then I’d talk myself out of it: “If I’m going to be reading, I might as well read this hard thing I have to read.” Then I’d pick up the English literature, but I’d be stuck again, bored and out of energy. So I’d end up doing something completely different, like watching television. See the sidebar “Non-Productivity Scenario: Erika.” If I’d had an appreciation that reading for pleasure is a fundamentally different activity than reading for, say, school or work, I would not have had this problem.
Reading for Mind-Expansion
Some books just give your mind a good stretch. I find science fiction quite good or this. Reading Rainbows End gives you a better idea of how society might be transformed by augmented reality than scientific papers on the subject; Ready Player One does this well for virtual reality and The Diamond Age does this for nanotechnology. Some novels and nonfiction books give you a fundamentally different way to look at the world that doesn’t neatly fit into the previously mentioned knowledge and wisdom categories.
Reading fiction might very well improve prosocial behavior and empathy. In one study, white children read stories with African American characters, and this improved their attitudes toward the race—even more than children who shared a task with real African American children!105
When to Stop Reading
A vitally important part of reading is knowing when to abandon a book. There is an ethic that people should finish what they start, and that abandoning a project means you’re a quitter. This ethic needs to be jettisoned in general, but I’ll just talk about reading books for now. If you finish every book you start, there are two bad things that will happen.
First, you’ll read far fewer books. What happens is this: you will start reading a book, and it won’t be good. A book can be bad for several reasons, corresponding to the different types of reading mentioned above. If you require yourself to finish it, you’ll spend a lot of time with a bad book. This is unjustifiable. But further, everyone has a limit to how many books they will be simultaneously reading. If you’re “reading” a bad book, chances are you’ll spend less time reading anything at all, and over the course of your lifetime you’ll read far fewer books.
The second reason is that it will make you overly risk-averse when it comes to choosing which books to start. If you have it in your head that you will have to finish any book you start, then when you pick up a big, thick, dense book, you might not give it a chance at all, in anticipation of a real slog. As such, you’ll only dip your feet into books you’re quite sure will be good.
If, however, you change your mindset, then you can freely take risks with books, and find some real gems. Rather than being proud of always finishing books, make it a point of pride that you give up on lots of books that aren’t working for you. For me, I abandon about two thirds of the novels I start, and probably a quarter of the nonfiction books I start.
Active Reading
Although reading is an important part of life, keep in mind that reading is basically only sharpening the saw. Knowledge isn’t an ultimate good, it’s instrumental. This means that knowledge is only good when it’s used for some greater purpose. Knowledge can be useless. For example, knowing whether there was an odd or even number of dogs named “Riley” in Boston on December 12, 1972, is useless information. With this in mind, we can strategize about what we can do to make reading as productive as possible, to read with the goal of using that information for something productive. You read so you can do something with the knowledge you’re getting. I call this “active reading.”
The first step is to optimize what you actually do while you are in the process of working through a book. You can discuss what you’re reading with other people. This helps you make sense of it, and it also helps you remember it, because it is more deeply processed. Sometimes you can actually read a book too fast. Talking, thinking, and even sleeping helps your mind contextualize and remember things, so whipping through a book at lightning speed can be counterproductive.
It is very important that you make notes while you read nonfiction. These notes might be mostly highlighting passages, but the idea is to mark which parts of the book you found interesting, or useful, and tag them so that you can more easily find and review them later.
Before the e-book revolution, I kept little stickies all over the house, and in my car. The paper ones don’t last as long, so I used plastic ones. When I found a passage that was important, I would mark it with a pen, and then put a plastic flag on the upper right part of the right page of the two-page spread. This way, I could quickly flip to all the spreads that had any notes or highlights in them. I did this for years, but eventually dropped the flags, because I found that it was easy enough to flip through the book and see my pen marks. I’ll still sometimes put in flags when there are only one or two things in the book I need to find in the future, or for things I need to refer to again and again.
After a book is read, and your notes are taken, it’s time to process the book. This means going through your notes and highlights and somehow dealing with each one. What does it mean to “deal” with them?
You want to make it less likely that you’ll have to read that book again in the future. So you go through each of your notes and highlights and think about each one. Why did you mark it for future attention? For me, it’s often because it’s relevant to some project that I want to work on someday.
I have a series of Google Docs, one for each subject area I’m interested in. I have one for imagination, one for feminism, and one for every book I’m writing. I call these literature reviews “litrevs,” so I might have docs called “creativity litrev” or “productivity litrev,” and each one holds references to everything I’ve ever read on that subject. So, for example, as I’m processing Eric Barker’s Barking Up the Wrong Tree, I will put interesting things from that book in several different litrev documents, depending on their subject. This way, if I ever want to see everything I’ve ever read on the subject of, say, analogy, I can go to the analogy litrev and it’s all there.
Each litrev consists of a series of entries that include what I found interesting and the book title and page number.
Because they are all in Google Docs, I can search for keywords across all documents (or just all litrevs, which are in their own folder).
You might not be in the business of writing books, but you still might want to reference these things in the future for writing opinion articles to the newspaper, or maybe even just to settle some argument you get into with somebody. It’s very frustrating to know you’ve read something, but are unable to recall the details or even where you read it. For the most part, I don’t have this problem anymore.106
In addition to adding to litrevs, I often also make a whole doc just for that book. I put in page numbers and what I found interesting. Often I copy and paste entries from here into the individual litrevs. With Kindle, it’s joyfully easy! I just go to “my notes and highlights” on the web, then copy and paste the whole thing into the Google Doc.
By processing a book after you’ve read it, you increase your chances of being able to use the information contained in it for some future action. And isn’t the ability to use what you’ve learned in books the reason reading is good?
One of the most important parts of any creative endeavor, including all of the arts and sciences, is not letting the good ideas you have be forgotten. And believe me, no matter how good your ideas are, and how much they captivate you when you think of them, only a small portion of them will come back to you at a time when you can effectively use them. I know this because when I look over the ideas I’ve written down over the years, I often don’t recognize them. They are completely unfamiliar, and I know they’re mine because they’re on my files or written in my handwriting. And some of them are good.
Sometimes you can simply remember the things you think of, but this has a cost. These ideas crowd your working memory, interrupting your train of thought so they can be rehearsed, and interfering with whatever you’re doing. Writing down things as they come to mind allows you to forget them and get back to the task at hand, confident that you will read about them later.
You might talk yourself into thinking that what you need to remember isn’t important enough to justify not writing it down. This is bad, so try to write it down within six seconds of thinking of it, and trust that you’ll process that note later. When that time comes, it’s harder to dismiss because it’s written down as opposed to an easy-to-ignore idea in your head.
Preventing forgetting requires systems that capture ideas so that you can exploit them later. I’m going to talk about the many ways I use idea capture, for you to utilize as a starting point to develop your own systems.
The most important aspect of any idea capture method is that it is easy to do. Think of all the steps that you have to undertake to write down an idea as friction. You want to have a frictionless way to get ideas recorded.
When most people “try” to remember something, they mentally focus on it, or perhaps repeat the idea in their minds over and over again. Then they get on with their business and hope that later they’ll be able to 1) remember that they needed to remember something and 2) actually remember what they were supposed to remember. If either one of these fails, and at least one often does, then the idea is lost.
Given that our memories are so bad, it’s shocking how much we trust them. Often people are told about a good book, or something that they should do, and they don’t write it down. Although a reminder to see a particular movie might not be that important, if you’re trying to do things that are productive, you really should have a method for idea capture.
Memory Palaces
The first strategy I recommend is to create for yourself what is called a “memory palace.” A memory palace is a kind of mnemonic device: a cognitive strategy that functions as a memory aid. The basic idea of a memory palace is this: you choose a physical location, usually a building, that you know very well. You decide on a specific way to walk through it, and you specify locations in the building along the route. So every time you (virtually) walk through the house, you do it in the same order, attending to the specified locations in the same order every time.
For example, I have a memory palace of my childhood home. I start in my bedroom. I look at the turntable (location 1), then on top of my desk (location 2), then I look out the window and see what’s under the tree (location 3). Eventually I work my way through all the rooms in the house, and around the yard. I have over seventy distinct locations in there.
This is something you mentally practice: using your imagination to walk through your memory palace, taking note of the locations, in the same order every time.
It should be fairly easy to memorize, because it is a location you know well, and you try to specify a route through it that makes some kind of sense. For example, in mine I follow the left wall to go from room to room. In a given room, the floor of the room is always first, then the next locations are around the perimeter of the room, from left to right.
When you have a memory palace in place (even one with only ten locations is incredibly useful), you can start using it to remember things. The way you do this is to create vivid images at the locations that represent what you want to remember.
Let’s say I wanted to remember to call the dentist. I might imagine my dentist, spinning on my turntable (location 1). I might want to also remember to buy my sister a birthday present. So I’d imagine my sister sitting on my desk (location 2), happy to be getting a birthday present. Images of concrete objects are easier to remember than abstract concepts (buckets are easier than “justice” for example), and emotional, sexual, and violent images also stick in memory better. (For a great book on what kinds of images are most memorable, I recommend reading Moonwalking with Einstein.)
Later, when you have an opportunity to write down your ideas, you simply virtually walk through your memory palace and look at each location. Then you interpret the picture and write down the idea you had: call my dentist and buy a present for my sister.
In practice, I use this several times a week. When is it most useful? When you can’t write anything down. I use it when driving or riding my bike, when I’m in a movie theater, having an intense conversation with someone, and any time when it’s difficult (or rude) to pull out some paper and write something down. When I get home I just go through my palace and write down all the ideas. Then I “clean out” the palace by imagining removing those images from their locations and imagining them empty again. This actually works.107
As well as memory palaces work, you can’t keep all of your ideas there and you need to get them into some nonbiological medium. Pen and paper is a great way to do this.
Index Cards
Personally, I use index cards. I keep a stack of them in my back pocket and replenish them frequently. I keep a pen in my front pocket, so I can always jot something down. I’ve used little pads in the past, but I’ll explain why I now prefer the cards.
Index cards are the right size: large enough to get a complex idea onto, but small enough for your pocket. Carrying around a big notebook is nice, but there are times when you can’t or just don’t want to haul a big notebook around.
Often I’ll write down book or movie recommendations on an index card, and I can immediately hand it to someone. When I’m ordering a bunch of food at a restaurant, I write everything down on an index card and simply hand it to the server, rather than trying to remember everything.
You can quickly file away your index cards into physical folders. If you use a folder system for your projects, you can just put each card into its appropriate folder, to be retrieved later when needed. I have a box for “writing fragments.” When come up with some clever idea for fiction, I put it on an index card, and when I get home I throw it in a box. When need writing ideas, I have a box full of them.
Important cards can be placed somewhere special. Suppose you think of something very important. Do you want to be carrying that note on your person everywhere you go? What if you lose your notebook? With index cards, I can place that card in my desk drawer or inbox for processing, and don’t have to worry about losing it as I run around town waiting for the notebook to fill up before I take it permanently out of my pocket.
You can also throw away cards when you don’t need them. If you wrote down a reminder to call the dentist, and you called her, you can discard the index card afterward, rather than taking up space in your notebook.
Some of these are only possible because the cards have the benefit of being unattached to each other. That is, I can do something with an index card without having to rip it out of a notebook. I find that if I have a notebook, there is something in me that wants to preserve the integrity of the notebook, making me not want to rip out pages. But ripping out pages is necessary for discarding pages, filing them, leaving them in your suitcase so you’ll see them the next time you pack, putting them in your work bag so you’ll pull them out at work, or giving them to someone else. A notebook with half the pages ripped out of it is not aesthetically pleasing. You want to like the tools you work with, and I don’t like mangled pads.
One thing that’s nice about a notebook is that you have an automatic chronological record of the notes you’ve taken. You’ll often have a lot of crossed-out things, but those are sometimes useful, too.
In my culture, many pieces of clothing designed for women lack pockets—or, even more baffling, have false pockets. The things men carry in their pockets women often carry in purses. If you don’t always have pockets, you can keep index cards in a purse, perhaps fastened together with a rubber band or with a small binder clip.
Another thing I do with index cards is that I will write at the top of a card some problem I need to think about. I might need to create a backstory for a character in a novel I’m writing, or come up with interview questions, or brainstorm reviewers for an article. I keep these with the blank ones in my pocket. I can pull out my index cards at any time and see some small task that can be accomplished by thinking and writing solution ideas on the card itself. It’s an easy reminder of some things I can do in my downtime. For example, the other day I had about five free minutes while waiting outside a restaurant for my guest. I pulled out my stack of index cards to see what I needed to do. At the top of one of them was written “interview questions about Imagination.” So I used those few minutes to write down some interview questions I could think of just then, and processed that card later when I got home. Time that might have been spent in annoyed waiting was harnessed for problem-solving.
Idea Capture with Your Phone
Why not just use your phone? Well, you should also use your phone. Sometimes I do, too. But for me this only supplements, not replaces, a pen and index cards. As my calligraphy teachers taught me, keep your pens close. And your penemies closer.
The phone does have some drawbacks that index cards do not. It’s not as easy to make diagrams. It’s harder to give someone information with your phone. If you wanted to recommend a book to someone at a party, you’d have to get their email address or phone number (which they might not want to give you) and then email or message them the recommendation. The index card feels a lot more homey and less intrusive. You just write it down and hand it to them.
It’s also socially awkward to pull out your phone in many situations: in the theater, at a dinner party, during conversations, even watching TV with a friend or lover. Pulling out your phone sends a message to everyone that you’re bored. If you pull out your phone to take notes at a talk, people assume you’re texting your friends or on Twitter or something. Taking notes on an index card is more socially acceptable in many situations.
That said, there are times when the phone is great, particularly when you’re alone and won’t break social taboos. There are several ways to use the phone for idea capture.
First, you can use a “notes” feature. This is only useful if you remember to process these notes later. Also, make sure your notes application is backed up in the cloud. It’s easy to remember to process your index cards, because they fill up your pocket, and you see them every time you change clothing, or take a note. Another quick way to record an idea, if you’re home, is to use a voice-activated device, like Google Home or Amazon Echo. Create a list called “ideas” and say something like “Alexa, add clipping your nails before you vacuum to the ideas list.”108 A weekly reminder in your calendar to process your phone notes and online ideas lists can keep you on top of them.
Second, you can use a cloud service, such as Evernote or Google Docs. You just open the right file, and put your idea in the right place. This is great, and sometimes I do this, but there is a cost associated with it that is so great that I can’t rely on it. Opening the application, navigating to the right file, and finally typing takes a long time, and if you’re say, walking with someone on the street, it might be too much time, and you might find yourself thinking “maybe this idea is not that important. Maybe I don’t need to write it down.” That’s too much friction. If you find yourself having such conversations with yourself, you need to get easier modes of idea capture available to you.
What I prefer is using an app called zipnote, which admittedly sounds like a ridiculous application when you first hear about it, because all it does is send an email to yourself. You can just use your mail program to do that, right? Well, yeah, but zipnote takes away several button presses.
I have to click 1) the zipnote app icon, then 2) into the body of the email message. Then I start typing. That’s two clicks.
If I use my email program, I have to 1) Click the email program app icon, 2) Click compose message (hopefully without getting distracted by items in my inbox!), 3) Type the first letter of my name, 4) Click my name, 5) Click in the body of the email. Then I can start typing.
It only saves you a couple of seconds, but it’s shocking how the friction caused by a few seconds of time will make you say to yourself “nah, I don’t need to record that idea.” It gets too close to the six seconds you have to get an idea down before you start coming up with excuses not to.
Furthermore, sometimes when I send myself a message from my phone’s mail application, it ends up only in my “sent mail” Gmail folder, not my inbox, so I don’t even see it. Infuriating.
And when I say “start typing” I mean typing or using voice recognition. I am using voice recognition more and more, and it saves me a lot of time.
Anyway, the next time I sit at my desk to process email, I have a bunch of ideas, from me, in my inbox. Thanks, universe!
While I’m on the subject, the location of the zipnote icon (or whatever icon you use for idea capture) should be in the very lower-right corner of your home screen (lower-left if you’re a lefty). The point is that you need to make it as easy as possible to capture an idea.
Zipnote, index cards, and little pads are great for when you’re on the go. But when you know that you’ll be taking notes, like if you are at a meeting or a talk, you’ll often have a full-sized notebook with you to use. Notebooks have the benefit of being chronologically organized. I recommend putting the date before any set of notes you take on a given day. I put my email address on the first page, along with a “please return” plea, in case I lose it. On the first page I also put the date of the first note, so I can chronologically organize my notebooks by starting dates on my shelf for easy retrieval.
Notebooks are great, but one thing people forget to do is to process them later. If you write in your notebook a note to yourself to go to the dentist, if you just bury it in later pages of notes and never go back to it, you might as well have never written it down at all.
What I do is this: when I’ve filled a notebook, I put an item on my project list to “process” that notebook. I’ll go over what that means in the next section.
For the last several years I’ve become enamored with the Livescribe pen and paper system. It’s an electronic pen, and special notebooks with minute dot patterns on them. When you write with the pen on the paper, a little camera in the pen records your pen strokes. Then you can upload all of your notes onto your computer. So I have several notebooks full on my shelf, and on my computer—and with optical character recognition (OCR) I can search my notebooks to see, for example, all my meetings with “Sterling.” You can keyword search your handwritten notes! Very handy.
But it gets better. You can also record sound with the pen, and then, later, click some text you’ve written and hear what was being said when that text was put to paper. So if somebody’s talking a mile a minute, and you can’t write everything down in time, or you can’t understand your notes later and need to hear what the context was to understand it, or you need to remember something said for which you didn’t take a note, it’s awesome. I think all students should have this for their classes (ask your instructor if it’s okay to record the lectures, though). I’ve filled over seventeen notebooks with this method at the time of this writing, so it’s not some new tech that I’m still in the honeymoon phase about. It’s worked for me for years.
Processing Ideas
Once your ideas are out of your head and into some physical (or electronic) medium, then you need to make sure you put it in a place where it can be useful to you later. I call this step “processing” your ideas, and it’s similar to how you process books, as I described above.
Whether it’s emails from zipnote in your inbox, entries in your notebooks, or items on index cards, you need to do something with them. Processing is a pretty broad concept, so I’ll just give some examples.
If it’s a fragment of poetry, I will put it in a Google Doc called “poetry fragments.” I will return to this doc when I need inspiration for poetry.
If it’s a reminder to call the dentist, I will either immediately call the dentist, or put a note in my project list to do so.
If it’s something I wanted to put in a book I’m writing, I might open the document for that book and write it in then and there, or I might make a project list entry for it. Things that take two minutes to do should be done immediately, things that take between two and fifteen minutes go on the Taking Care Of Business (TCOB) list, and longer things go on the project list.
If it’s a phone number, I put it in my contacts.
If it’s an idea for a future project, I put it in a list of “Someday/Maybe” projects.
And so on.
When I write down something I have to do in a notebook, I put a little square before it. When I do the thing, I put a checkmark in the box. This way, after I take a lot of notes, I can scan the left margin for empty boxes and quickly do all of the things I marked.
After an idea has been processed, then I cross it off (if it’s in a notebook), archive the message (if it was an email), or discard (if it’s on an index card).
With an idea capture system using some combination of index cards, emails, notebooks, voice-assisted technology, memory palaces, and a solid processing routine, you can ensure that good ideas don’t get lost.
You’d think people would not need pointers on how to sleep, but the modern age has many pitfalls that interfere with sleep and its many benefits. Nearly one out of five people in the world today are sleep deprived, and people often don’t even know it when they are.111 So yes, most people need pointers.
Before we get into good sleep practice, let’s look at what science says about sleep’s importance. Cognitively, sleep is terribly important because that’s when your brain clears out all of the waste material112 and turns short-term memories into long-term memories. Getting enough sleep contributes to mental and physical health and happiness.
Most people need between seven and eight hours of sleep at night. For the average person, getting fewer than six hours of sleep a night increases your chance of dying.113 Of course, health and mortality are related to productivity, because you are less productive when you’re feeling sick and are decidedly unproductive during every year that you’re dead.
How much sleep do you need? One quick way to tell if you are sleep-deprived is whether your alarm actually wakes you up. If this happens every morning, you probably aren’t going to bed early enough. Try going to bed earlier and earlier, in half hour increments, until you find yourself waking naturally before your alarm goes off. Other signs of sleep deprivation are feeling that you could fall back asleep around 10:00 or 11:00 A.M., or if you feel you can’t function before noon without coffee. When you’ve been on vacation for a few days, and have caught up with sleep, how long do you sleep? Whatever the answer is, that’s what you should be aiming for in your everyday life.114
Sleep Hygiene
The things you can do to make your sleep better or worse is called your “sleep hygiene.” The research can be summarized pretty succinctly: don’t have caffeine after 2:00 P.M., don’t nap after 3:00 P.M., don’t look at screens within an hour of bedtime (e-paper screens are fine; it’s the blue light that’s bad for sleep), try to stick to the same sleep schedule each night, don’t drink alcohol at night, and turn off notifications on your devices.115
This is very important for people over forty, as sleep quality decreases with age. Older adults need as much sleep as younger people, they are just less and less able to get it.116 If you have trouble sleeping, or are not getting enough sleep for some other reason, you should not blow it off. It’s important, and you should do some reading about how to fix it. I recommend Matthew Walker’s excellent book Why We Sleep. If you have serious problems, talk to your doctor.
Napping
Sleeping doesn’t have to happen at night. Humans naturally have a biphasic sleep pattern of a long night sleep and a shorter afternoon sleep.117 Although napping doesn’t work for everybody, naps make you more alert, have a faster reaction time, learn better, and improve performance on just about everything. It also increases your health—one study found that the health increase caused by naps was equivalent to exercising every day. It can reduce your blood pressure and strengthen your immune system.118 A ten-minute nap can help as much as an extra hour and a half of sleep at night.119
But naps need to be done right. Five minutes is too little, ten to twenty minutes is ideal, and more than that and you’ll feel the costs: the sluggish, mentally foggy “sleep inertia.” Naps of more than an hour can really impair you after waking.120
Some people claim that coffee puts them to sleep. What I suspect is happening for many of these people is that they are really tired, drink a cup of coffee, and fall asleep. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that caffeine takes about twenty-five minutes to have its physiological effects. Coffee isn’t putting them to sleep, they’re sleeping because they’re tired, and the coffee just hasn’t taken effect yet.
This can be put to use with the coffee nap, or the nappuccino. When you’re sleepy and want a quick nap, rapidly drink a cup of coffee and fall asleep (this often takes about seven minutes). Just as you should be waking up, around the ideal time of twenty minutes, the coffee will kick in.121 You’ll wake up with the combined benefit of the coffee and having napped. A study showed that this coffee-nap combination was better for performance than drinking coffee alone.122
Some people I talk to say they can’t nap, because when they do they sleep for an hour or two. The usefulness of naps actually varies a lot from person to person, but I caution against thinking they don’t work for you prematurely, because you might just not be doing it right.123 It could be that many of these people would actually nap for the right amount of time if they were getting enough sleep at night. But if you’re one of those people who get enough sleep at night, but also nap too long, set an alarm for twenty-five minutes (five to get to sleep, twenty for sleep). If you’re not using this alarm, put your phone in airplane mode.124
In recognition of the importance of naps on productivity, some workplaces and universities have set up nap pods. They used to have napping rooms, but stopped that because people were using them to have sex.125
When should you take your nap? The best time to take a nap is usually seven hours after waking. Unless you’re a night owl, this will mean between 2:00 and 3:00 P.M. In my default half hours spreadsheet, I have a nap as a regularly occurring event.
Your Chronotype
You’ve probably heard that some people are night owls and others are morning people. This is true, and you can use your “chronotype” to optimize your day. Science puts people into three categories: morning people, night people, and “third birds,” who are somewhere in the middle.126
You can calculate what your chronotype is by finding your sleep midpoint—on days when you don’t have much scheduled (weekends for most people). When do you typically go to bed and when do you typically wake up? Find the halfway point.
If your midpoint is before 3:00 A.M., you’re a morning person. If your midpoint is after 6:00 A.M., you’re a night person. If it’s between 3:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M., you’re like most people, and are somewhere in the middle. These categories are sometimes called morning larks, third birds, and night owls. I tend to go to sleep around 9:00 P.M. and wake up around 5:00 A.M. So my midpoint is about 12:30 A.M. This makes me a somewhat extreme morning person.
For the most part, your chronotype seems to be genetic. Your chronotype is also likely to change as you age. Kids are morning people, become night people as teenagers, then start to become morning people again after age twenty. This continues for the rest of their lives. People over sixty tend to be even more extreme morning people than kids.127
Your chronotype determines at what points in the day you are better and worse at certain kinds of activities. There are three stages of waking hours: vigilance, the slump, and recovery.128 This is the order for morning people and third birds. For night people, it’s recovery, slump, and vigilance.
The vigilance period happens in the morning for morning people, ending at about noon. For night people, it’s late afternoon and early evening. During vigilance, people are better at thinking logically, and even act more morally. A study by economist Nolan Pope found that students’ test scores were so much higher in the morning that he recommended that one simple way to raise student test scores is to simply test them in the morning.129
For morning people, the slump happens in the early afternoon, or about seven hours after waking. For night people it’s the middle of the day. During the slump, people are less happy, phone calls during the slump are more negative, people resort to stereotypes more often, and have less alertness and energy levels. Doctors and nurses make more mistakes.130 This is why people try to nap or drink caffeine around 2:00 P.M.
Recovery is around 5:00 P.M. for morning larks, and it’s in the morning for night people. During recovery, people are better at solving problems that require a flash of insight than they are in the afternoon, possibly due to lowered inhibition.
If you can plan your day according to your chronotype, you are likely to enjoy greater job satisfaction and productivity and have less stress. This is what happened when a company rearranged its work schedule according to people’s chronotypes.131
Don’t be a slave to what I’ve said about what is supposed to be your chronotype. It’s important to be mindful of yourself, and figure out which hours during the day are your vigilance, slump, and recovery. When are you most alert? When does your brain feel like it’s in a fog? Write down the half hours where these mind states tend to happen.
So how can you use your chronotype to schedule your day better? This is easier to do the more control you have over your schedule, but to the extent you can, you should try to break up your tasks into categories according to how much creativity and concentration they require.
Tasks that require concentration, logical thinking, and the catching of errors should be done during the vigilance phase. Tasks that require insight, creativity, and thinking outside the box should be done during recovery. And what should you do during the slump? Tasks that don’t require either of these things—running errands, doing administrative tasks, filling out travel forms, updating your project list, chores, phone calls to friends, napping, or taking a break.
I’ve estimated that my peak vigilance is between 5:00 A.M. and 10:30 A.M. I have this part of my spreadsheet colored in bright blue, a color I associate with vigilance. My slump feels like it’s between 12:30 P.M. and 3:00 P.M., so I have that colored in a dull orange. My recovery seems to be between 3:30 and 6:30, so I color that green. My main goal in filling my half-hours with tasks is to make sure I get the more important things done first, but I temper that with the phase of the day. If I have a boring journal article to review, I just cannot do it during the slump. Luckily for me, the most important thing in my career requires vigilance, so I always do my writing in the morning, when I’m most vigilant.
So when optimizing your life, where does helping others fit in? It might be obvious, to many people, anyway, that if you want to optimize your life, then you should focus all of your energy on getting good things for yourself. When it comes to helping others, people can be categorized according to different “reciprocity styles.” Broadly speaking, there are givers, matchers, and takers. Takers are always looking out for themselves, and when they do things for others, they do it strategically so that helping others helps themselves. Matchers are always using a sense of fairness. They are good to people who are good to them, and expect kindness returned in proportion to kindness given. Givers seem genuinely interested in others’ welfare, and they do nice things for people to help them, without needing motivation from expected side benefits to themselves. Most people help those they are in close relationships with, without particular concern for whether their kindness is reciprocated to the same amount. People who are givers are like this with many strangers, too.132
So how do these different people turn out? Givers, in general, earn 14 percent less money, are twice as likely to be victims of crime, and are viewed as being 22 percent less dominant and powerful.133
However, there’s a great deal of research to suggest that, in the long run, helping the people around you is one of the best ways to improve your lot in life. When a giver gives everything, with no thought to their own welfare, they burn out, have more health concerns, and get walked on.134 But the givers who also care about themselves rise to the top.135 Givers of different types are at the top and bottom of success rankings.
This is because we live in a world where your success in life is often dependent on cooperation with and endorsement by other people. If people think you’re great, kind, and generous, or if they feel indebted to you, they are likely to help you out—introduce you to important people, notify you of opportunities, write you good recommendations, and so on. In our world, this kind of social capital is important for finances, happiness, and health.
If people think you’re someone who’s always looking out for only themselves, then they won’t help you out. In fact, they are likely to try to thwart your efforts at success by sabotaging you. They might warn a potential employer about you. Needless to say, this can be really bad for your career.136
These categories hide nuance. Most people are a bit of a giver, a bit of a matcher, and a bit of a taker. There’s an online survey that will show what you are.137 Additionally, a person’s reciprocity style might change over time. Sometimes givers act like matchers or takers in certain situations. For example, most people act like givers in their very close relationships.138
It seems that the optimal behavior is to help people by default, giving them the benefit of the doubt, but when you identify someone as a “taker,” you stop going out of your way to help them, and take care that they don’t take advantage of you.
Adam Grant pioneered this research, and describes it in his superb book Give and Take.139 One of the reasons it feels so good to learn about this work is that it dovetails nicely what seems to be moral behavior with self-interested behavior. That is, the thesis of Grant’s book is that being good to the people around you serves your own interests as well as theirs. You can help others to get ahead.
Volunteering
This is evidenced by a study of thousands of people over many years, which found that volunteering causes happiness. Volunteering is a way to get an interesting experience on the cheap that makes you happier,140 but only if the work is meaningful or enjoyable. Doing it out of a sense of duty doesn’t seem to provide a happiness boost.141 The ideal amount of volunteering a person should do to maximize their own happiness seems to be 100–800 yearly hours.
And the more socially isolated a person is, the more the volunteering helps.142 Being a good person seems to make you happier. It also makes you live longer.143 Even if you feel that you are a matcher or a taker, striving to be more of a giver makes everybody’s life better, including yours.
Just as your productivity in general benefits from deep, focused work, it turns out that your giving behavior also should be concentrated. Doing about 100 hours every year seems to be the sweet spot for the amount of time spent specifically giving to others (for example, volunteering), but studies also show that doing these activities in chunks is more rewarding them sprinkling them throughout your week. That is, it’s better to volunteer for two hours per week all at once than it is to do a little bit all over the place.144
Giving is also contagious. When you perceive those around you as being generous, it makes you more generous, too. This giving contagion spreads three people out before effects stop.145