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

R
EINFORCING
 Y
OUR
 I
NTENTIONS
Consider taking a moment now to revisit your intentions and goals for the
day ahead. For the most important of them:
Mental contrasting.
What’s most likely to get in the way of you
achieving what you hope to do? What can you do to reduce the chance
that this obstacle derails you—ideally by making a specific “when-
then” plan?
Priming.
What cues can you use to remind yourself to stay on track
today? Are there words or phrases that will help remind you of your
intentions? How can you make your surroundings a good metaphor for
your intentions?

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Mind’s-eye rehearsal.
Take a moment to visualize the most important
part of your day going exactly as you hope. What will you be doing to
overcome the challenges in your path? How will that look and feel?
Can you recall a time in the past where you behaved just as you want to
behave today, and bring that vividly to mind?

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PART II
Productivity
Making the Hours in the Day Go Further
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
—
STEPHEN COVEY
Once you’ve set your intentions, established motivating goals, and taken
steps to reinforce those intentions, how do you best organize your time and
effort to achieve your aims? How can you fit it all into the hours you have,
so that at the end of the day you can look back with satisfaction?
Let’s start by acknowledging a basic truth: most of us have too much to
do. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, the average American added nearly
two hundred hours of work to his or her year—a whole extra month.
1
And
our working hours aren’t just longer; they’re more hectic, too. We’re
handling more informal demands on our time than before, thanks to the
steady, always-on flow of messages and alerts we now receive. Whether it’s
a witty instant message from a colleague or a “check this out” social media
recommendation, every interruption steals a moment of our attention.
So we work hard, yet never seem to end up with a to-do list that’s shorter
than the length of our day. We focus on whatever is blinking most brightly,
rather than on what’s truly important and in line with our intentions for the
day. And thanks to our long hours, we’re probably not functioning at our
best. There’s evidence to suggest that our productivity and cognitive
performance decline once our working day stretches beyond eight hours,
which means our ninth, tenth, and eleventh hours make a progressively less
satisfying dent in our workload.
2

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A couple of years ago, all this juggling and striving came to a head for
Anthony. A digital marketing expert with two small children and a serious
running habit, these days he seems full of an enthusiastic energy that makes
him look younger than his years. But back then, he was ground down by his
day-to-day life. “I was working too much, always overcommitting, and
dealing with endless emails. I tried to take control, but failed. At my
company, there was a sort of cultural ‘presenteeism’—you needed to look
like you were always present, always working. It was toxic.” He ended up
burning out. “I was completely exhausted, and I realized it wasn’t
sustainable. I decided something had to change.”
Anthony had been doing his best to cover all the bases by multitasking
and skipping breaks. But as he learned more about the science of personal
productivity and prioritization, he realized that there was a better way to
manage the demands of his professional life—one that didn’t involve
chasing his tail quite as hard, or swearing quite as loudly.
In this part of the book, I’ll share what Anthony and others have
discovered after putting this science into practice. I’ll show you how to plan
your time in ways that will make you feel less tired, more alert, and more in
control. I’ll also talk about what to do when you’re overloaded or when you
really, finally, truly want to stop procrastinating. After incorporating these
ideas into your working day, you should find that the same number of hours
will suddenly go a lot further, leaving you with a better feeling of
accomplishment and balance at the end of the day.

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FOUR
Singletasking
We tend to believe that by doing several things at once, we can fit more into the
day. So we try to have a phone conversation while we’re reading a document or
clicking our way around the Internet. We scan our messages during a meeting, or
even during dinner. We chat to passing colleagues while trying to write an
overdue report and scarfing our lunch. “Busy, busy, busy,” we think to
ourselves.
As well as making us feel that we’re working hard to stay on top of things,
this kind of multitasking can give us a secret little kick. The brain’s reward
system likes novelty and human contact, especially when it’s unexpected. So
each ping and buzz of our favorite device carries the promise of a potential
reward; every interruption brings the possibility of an interesting or amusing
tidbit. Even if it usually ends up being spam, it’s hard to resist.
And yet research unequivocally shows that multitasking damages our
productivity—which means, to put it bluntly, it lengthens our days. Trying to do
more than one thing at once not only slows us down, but causes us to make more
mistakes—with the resulting rework slowing us down even more. We 
feel
busier, but we’re doing less, and doing it less well.
The toll that multitasking takes on our work isn’t marginal, either. René
Marois, director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt
University, showed that people doing two tasks simultaneously took up to 30
percent longer and made twice as many errors as those who completed the same
tasks in sequence—findings that have been replicated time and again by other
scientists.
1
Other research has found that multitasking also hurts the quality of
our decision making. For example, one group of volunteers was asked to select
the best location for a warehouse after assessing the pros and cons of various
options. When they had to juggle a new request for information—the sort of
thing that happens to us frequently at work—the volunteers took longer to
decide, and ultimately made poorer choices.
2
Meanwhile, a study of Microsoft employees found that after they were

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interrupted by an email, it took them fifteen minutes to fully regain their train of
thought, whether they replied to the email or not.
3
Instant messages weren’t
much better; it still took more than ten minutes to get back into the groove. Just
multiply that loss of focus by the number of interruptions you get in your
average day, and you begin to see why it might not be good for your productivity
to be constantly online.
Why does multitasking cause such a loss of speed, accuracy, and wisdom? It
goes back to the limitations of our brain’s deliberate system. While we might
think we’re processing tasks in parallel, our deliberate system is actually rapidly
switching our attention between each activity. Switch on “reading email,” switch
off “listening to our colleague.” Switch on “colleague,” switch off “email.” And
each of those switches costs our brain a little time and energy.
4
To see this switching cost in action, try this basic exercise:
Say “abcdefg,” then immediately after that say “1234567.” Notice how long
it takes you to do this. Perhaps even time yourself.
Then, interleave the two: say “a1b2c3d4e5f6g7.” Notice how much longer it
takes you to do the same amount of “work” while switching back and forth
between letters and numbers—and how much more mental effort it requires
from you.
So it’s no wonder we say things like “I can’t hear myself think” when people
are talking at us and our phone is ringing. We make it harder for our brain’s
deliberate system to do its job when we ask it to juggle. And since emotional
regulation—staying cool and collected—is also part of the deliberate system’s
job, loading it more heavily tends to affect our composure, too. One study found
that while people naturally get a little anxious when asked to handle a brand-new
task, they report twice the increase in anxiety if they’re interrupted while trying
to complete it.
5
The upshot? While having a day full of variety can be energizing, you don’t
want that variety from minute to minute if you want to work fast, stay sharp, and
feel calm. Multitasking can feel like a stimulating and efficient way to deal with
having lots to do, but we’re actually far more productive if we 
singletask
—that
is, if we do one thing at a time.