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

P
LANNING
 D
ELIBERATE
 D
OWNTIME
Look at your schedule for today and tomorrow, and plan for the following:
Take smart breaks.
How can you make sure you take regular breaks,
at least every ninety minutes and between each “zone” of tasks in your
day?
Make decisions at peaks (not troughs).
Which tasks will require you
to make a lot of choices? How can you make them when your brain is
freshest?
Schedule breathing room.
Can you schedule meetings or offer your
time in blocks of twenty-five or forty-five minutes (instead of thirty or
sixty minutes), to create micro-breaks between commitments? For
commitments that are already scheduled, can you aim to wrap up a little
early?
Allow reflection time.
At the end of each task or meeting, take thirty
seconds to capture your biggest insights. Try an end-of-day reflection
practice such as DATE (discovered, achieved, thankful for,
experienced).

---

SIX
Overcoming Overload
Although Anthony has become pretty expert at designing his day to make the
most of his time and effort, his workload is heavy. His digital marketing
company is growing fast, and he says, “I hit pinch points in every week. I often
end up with a Monday that’s totally packed, which leaves me starting the week
feeling exhausted. It’s bad pacing for the rest of the week.” Anthony says that
feeling overloaded is a sure way of putting his brain on the defensive.
“Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air and saying, ‘
Enough!
’ I
immediately feel my brain seizing up when I do that. Then, instead of being
smart in handling the workload, it’s easy to make bad decisions,” he says. “You
can end up catastrophizing, worrying about worst-case scenarios like missing
deadlines and even losing your job. None of which helps you think any more
clearly.” It’s a good description of how stressful it feels when our brain’s
deliberate system gets swamped with demands, and how the resulting tumble
into defensive mode makes it hard to be our most sensible selves.
Some of this pressure is part and parcel of modern working life. But another
reason so many of us often feel overloaded is because of something called the
planning fallacy
.
1
This describes the fact that we typically expect tasks to take
less time than they actually do, because we base our estimates on one standout
memory—our 
best
past experience—rather than the 
average
time it’s taken us to
do similar tasks in the past. (That’s one of the brain’s common automatic
shortcuts, to rely on a single example rather than bothering to calculate an
average across multiple data points.) As a result, we tend to set excessively
optimistic expectations for ourselves. If we’re already busy, that means it
doesn’t take much to unbalance us: a colleague who’s on vacation, a looming
deadline, an unanticipated problem, or simply saying yes to something we really
should have dodged.
There’s some obvious advice that flows from acknowledging the existence of
the planning fallacy: when you’re estimating the amount of time a task is going
to take, balance your brain’s natural optimism by imagining a scenario where
things don’t go entirely your way. Then plan for something close to 
that
. The

---

fallacy exerts such a strong pull on our brains that this will probably leave you
with an estimate that’s fairly accurate. (And imagine how great you’ll feel if you
finish it sooner.)
But for situations when you’re already too overloaded to be able to plan your
way out, I want to show you some techniques for rediscovering a sense of Zen-
like control—without hurling your smartphone to the ground.