How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

O
VERCOMING
 O
VERLOAD
Next time you’re feeling overloaded, try these strategies—in fact, why not
try them right now?
Mindful pause.
Give your brain’s deliberate system a chance to fully
engage, by pausing to focus on your breath (or scanning your body, or
counting back from one hundred) for five minutes.
Get it out of your head.
Write down everything that’s swirling around
your mind, even the tiniest to-dos.
Most important thing.
What really matters most right now, either
because it has to happen today or because it has the biggest impact?
Smallest first step.
What’s the very first step you can take toward
doing that most important thing—something small enough to do today?
Comparative advantage.
What are you 
uniquely
well placed to do—
and what could others do, even if not as well as you? Focus on tasks
where the gap between your capabilities and other people’s is biggest.
Positive no.
For a commitment that you need to delegate or decline:
start with warmth; say what you’re saying “yes” to; say your “no”; end
with warmth.

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Setting boundaries.
If you could set one boundary in the way you
organize your time, what would it be? What’s the clearest, cleanest way
to communicate this preference to others?
Automate small daily decisions.
Consider whether you can do
something at the same time or in the same way each day, to spend more
of your mental energy on the things that matter.
And finally: remember that you’ll lessen your feeling of being
overloaded if you also take the 
singletasking
advice from 
Chapter 4
and the 
downtime
advice from 
Chapter 5
, since both will boost your
mental performance and productivity.

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SEVEN
Beating Procrastination
Doesn’t it feel fantastic when we reach the end of the day and can look back
with satisfaction on the things we’ve achieved? It feels great to get things done;
it makes our brain’s reward system very happy indeed.
Yet most of us have a list of important tasks that we’re avoiding—emails
unwritten, projects not started, things we’re putting off despite the fact that they
aren’t going to be any easier to do tomorrow (or the day after tomorrow). Even a
Nobel Prize–winning economist like George Akerlof procrastinates. When
Akerlof was living in India years ago, he was bemused that it took him a full
eight months to mail some clothes to a friend in the United States. Like most of
us would have done, Akerlof beat himself up for sitting on the task for so long—
but that didn’t make him do it any sooner.
Akerlof was so struck by his inability to go to the post office that he wrote an
important research paper on procrastination, helpfully unpacking the reasons that
it exerts such a grip on most of us.
1
 I’ll draw on his insights, and those of other
behavioral scientists, to show you a number of strategies for overcoming the
allure of 
mañana
.
Elta is someone who’s thought a lot about how to beat procrastination. A soft-
spoken Texan, she’s a senior manager at a global research company, where her
work focuses on food policy—not the kind that’s about deciding what to have
for lunch, but the kind that’s about the steps governments can take to protect the
food chain. She’s good at her job. But there’s a core part of her work that she
dislikes, which is giving presentations. Elta often found herself leaving the
preparation until the very last minute. “It’s hard for me to agree to speak in
public,” she says. “And then, once I’m on the hook, I’ll spend endless time
avoiding thinking about what I’m actually going to say.” Now, though, she’s
learned some techniques to make sure she doesn’t find herself speechless in front
of a room of people. These tricks all stem from the same central idea:
rebalancing the way her brain compares short-term costs with long-term
benefits. Let’s look at why that’s so important for overcoming procrastination.

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