Finding Your Science Flow: Yoga Lessons to Increase Productivity

Productivity

I love my job running a research lab. I love the problem-solving, the creativity, the autonomy. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have that “hair’s on fire” feeling most days. We’ve now added the stress of living and working through a pandemic to the equation. So how do I trade frantic and stressed for focused and serene?

About five years ago I decided to try a prenatal yoga class. I lucked into an awesome studio (Half Moon Yoga Studio in Franklin, TN) where I started learning the true point of yoga. It’s not about whether you can touch your toes or do lotus pose. It’s about slowly, deliberately moving your mind and body forward to increase what you’re capable of. It’s the self-discovery of realizing the strategies that resonate with you and calmly pushing aside those that don’t align with your personal or professional vision.

It was through yoga that I learned how to drop in and achieve focus to increase my productivity with less wasted energy. Here are the lessons I’ve learned after years of practice that I apply to my job and to my life:

You control your happiness and self-esteem. My yoga teacher asked us to reflect on the following questions:

    1. Who has the power to ruin your day? (Reviewer #2?)
    2. When did you give them that power?

I’m not sure about you, but that second question really landed with me. Don’t give that power away. It is yours to wield. Not Reviewer #2’s.

Change your drishti (focus) as needed to make progress. Indulge me and try the following:

    1. Try to balance on one leg (“tree pose”) while scanning quickly across the room with your eyes. Did you feel wobbly?
    2. Now try it as you focus on one fixed point on the wall (drishti). Did you wobble less?
    3. Now try the pose while focusing on a point on the floor. Did it feel different?

Continuing with the Reviewer #2 theme, think back to a manuscript/grant review that caused you to reach for a glass (bottle?) of wine. Push the discouragement aside to mentally pivot and find the actionable lesson. What can you learn that will guide productive strategies for the revision? My yoga teacher said, “Rejection is just redirection.” Just sit with that idea for a bit.

Be present in each moment. You can fast-forward through the whole movie if you want, but it really is more enjoyable to watch it one scene at a time. You miss a lot if you’re in a hurry. Pay attention to what is working and what isn’t working. Take time to have conversations with your peers and your team to spark creative ideas.

Eliminate counter-productive mental chatter. Focusing on physical movement and breathing is surprisingly calming once you get the hang of it. You don’t have to be a Zen master to do a few sun salutations. I even do a few in my office sometimes to quickly achieve a more focused state. Maybe listening to a quick guided meditation or nature sounds helps you. Experiment and find what speaks to you. Even a few minutes of grounding activities can help.

Balance and restoration is key. I don’t mean tree pose balance. I mean the balance provided by a counter-pose. Knees to chest is a good counter to a backbend. Child’s pose is a good counter to a strenuous pose. What is my counter pose to back to back grant deadlines? I plan something fun or relaxing. At the very least, I give myself permission to switch gears to pick up slack in other areas for a bit (manuscripts? teaching?). You don’t get very far when there’s no more gas in the tank. You lose your creative fire when burning the candle at both ends. It’s fine for short bursts, but you have to refuel.

Respect your limits. Is it wise to attempt something tough like a head stand right now? Maybe not. Learn what you are capable of and respect it. Say no to that teaching ask or whatever it is that will stretch you beyond your limits. Delegate or seek the help you need to meet your goals on time. Tune in to what you and your team have available to give right now and recognize that expecting more than 100% effort is demotivating.

Mindfulness and meditation is work. The point isn’t perfection. The key is that you regularly practice to find what works and what doesn’t. Spend the time doing the self-study and hard thinking to clear away the thoughts and activities that don’t serve your personal and professional goals. Namaste!

 

More Resources

Building Resiliency with Hypnosis and Mindfulness

Balancing on the Edge

Feeling Powerless in the Age of COVID (Part II)

“Zoom In” to Keep Group Review and Critique on Track

Doing Research / Productivity

Work-in-Progress sessions (WIPs) are at risk of getting bogged down at the wrong level of feedback, most often focusing on specific edits or details that may not be the top priority, with the focus often driven by those who speak up first.

Several steps can help deploy the group’s time well and find the right level of discussion:

  • Appoint a moderator to monitor the time and ensure all who have input are heard.
  • Ask the individual whose materials are being reviewed to give a brief (2-3 minutes max) overview of who the audience is for the work and where they feel they most need input.
  • Then use a zoom-in format for finding the right level for review and critique.

Most WIPs will not reach all levels of zooming in. This approach works because it ensures larger concerns are discussed first. Word and sentence edits are not crucial if the whole product is poorly organized or unclear.

To guide discussion at each level, use framing questions and topics like these:

30,000 feet

  • Is content appropriate for the audience?
  • Can the audience/reader summarize the gist accurately?
  • Are materials engaging (i.e., clarity, title, rationale, implications of findings)?
  • Are materials properly formatted?
  • Is speaking volume, intonation, and pace optimal?
  • Is use of space in poster or written material well-allocated?

10,000 feet 

  • Is the information well-organized?
  • Does it unfold in a logical fashion?
  • Was time/space allocation well-distributed?
  • Are methods clear and results flow from methods?
  • Does discussion overreach the results?
  • Are challenges and considerations addressed?

Forest 

  • Are materials attractive and within conventional expectations for style and clarity?
  • Is logic tight connecting rationale, objective, methods and results?
  • Is word choice crisp and consistent?

Trees

Is word choice consistent?

For presentations:

  • Quick slide-by-slide feedback

For written materials:

  • Section-by-section or
  • Paragraph-by-paragraph feedback
  • Include tables and figures

For posters:

Section-by-section feedback

Leaves

  • Font size, readability
  • Table and figure legends
  • Typos

Chlorophyll

  • Choice of stronger words
  • Use of symbols
  • Micro-edits
  • References

Additional Tips

  • Prohibit use of laptops and ask the group to silence devices.
  • Print materials for review in order to allow participants to provide edits and comments that may not fit in the discussion time.
  • Encourage return for additional rounds after revisions.

Save time for participants who have had review and critique in prior sessions to report on progress and to celebrate successes like publications and successful presentations.

Related Posts:

How to start a near-peer work-in-progress group
Avoiding Barriers Between Your Work and Your Reviewer
One-Minute Writing Roundup

Paper-Writing Checklists To Prevent Headaches Down the Road

Productivity / Writing & Publishing

Avoid authorship headaches and streamline the path from data to paper with these checklists.

CRediT Taxonomy

Developed by a group of librarians, information scientists, and the director of the MIT Press, the CRediT Taxonomy allows authors to define precisely the contributions every author makes to the paper. Potential contributions that can be attributed to individual authors include conceptualization, methodology, data curation, visualization, funding acquisition, project management, and writing (broken into original draft and reviewing/editing), along with several others. Use it at the beginning of a project to assign tasks or simply keep it in front of you as you and colleagues develop a paper, checking off items as contributed.

Several journals, including those published by Cell Press, now encourage or require use of this taxonomy.  The Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (better known as CASRAI) collaborated with the NIH to link CRediT to ORCID and include contributor roles in publication metadata.

Get the checklist.

Authorship Grids

Two early career researchers and a journal editor recently put together a series of detailed authorship grids for quantitative, qualitative, and literature synthesis manuscripts as part of an article on grids’ use and effectiveness. The grids lay out responsibilities associated with the roles of first author, middle authors, and senior author in each type of manuscript, from who writes the IRB application to who coordinates manuscript revision.

Grids are meant to inspire discussion rather than regulate who does what, and so are completely customizable to your team, the project you’re doing, and how you prefer to split up the work.  They can also be submitted to journals for attribution of author contributions.

PubMed citation

Read the article and get the grids.

CONSORT Checklists

The Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Group provides many resources and best practices for turning your trial into a paper to be proud of.  The most well known is the CONSORT 2010 checklist for reporting a randomized controlled trial, but they also provide checklists for reporting pragmatic trials, N-of-1 trials, harms, patient reported outcomes, and more.

The checklists provide both an explanation of what each of 25 elements of the paper should contain or look like for each kind of trial and examples of correctly written elements.  Using the checklist will ensure you include everything necessary for a complete and transparent report of your trial’s findings, from eligibility criteria to outcomes, randomization and blinding to losses and exclusions, and more.

CONSORT also provides a flow diagram for patient enrollment and progression through a trial. Not only can this be a useful figure in a paper, but it can help you plan your trial from the very beginning.

View the checklists. (Link defaults to CONSORT 2010 checklist; use dropdown at top right to explore other checklists.)

Get the flow diagram.

STROBE Checklists

STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) has produced several checklists, similar to those from CONSORT, of what to include in each section of a paper on observational studies. The group has developed checklists for cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies.

Get the checklists.

SRQR Checklists

As above, developers of the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research have created a checklist for papers in the qualitative research world.

Get the checklist.

If the checklists above don’t fit your type of research, never fear: The EQUATOR Network (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research) has Get the checklist. to suit all kinds of research. Whether you do animal studies, case reports, systematic reviews or economic evaluations, there’s a list to help you showcase your data in the clearest, most effective and complete way.

Additional Resources

Vexing Issues for New PIs: Picking Corresponding Author, Potential Reviewers, Blacklisting and Other Angst

A Big Step Forward in Standardizing Rules for Authorship

Author, Author, Who’s Got the Author?

Not that Kind of Investment: Tales of Time Commitment

Productivity

One of the biggest adjustments in being a principal investigator (PI) running a research lab has been the near constant, usually urgent, demands on my time. Some of these demands are enjoyable (new data!) some less so (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee protocols, blah!). Gone are the days when my two main occupations were writing and experiments. Now it is meetings, protocols, training, and putting out whatever fires have arisen from smoldering tasks ignored. My bench is lonely, my inbox is full, and trainees keep reminding me about things I have apparently forgotten. In an attempt to reclaim my time and sanity, I have started protecting my time like never before. As always these days, n=me, and these are my emerging strategies for time management.

Identify strategies that work for you: Above all else, identify time management strategies that work for you. For me, my most productive time is in the morning, so that is when I sit and write. I have tried to sub-divide my morning time with Pomodoro, but the forced break times interrupt my focused time. I have also tried timeboxing, committing a certain amount of time to a task and no more. Although better than Pomodoro, I still underestimate writing time and have found my writing time is best left as a block. If I finish early, I can move on to other tasks. Otherwise, I keep working until I am done or until I cannot write anymore. Where I do find timeboxing useful is for small tasks, like responding to emails, booking conference travel, social media, and smaller service tasks that should have finite time requirements.

Limit distractions: This is easier to say than to implement. Keeping off social media during the day is easier than not checking email. On big writing days or close to grant deadlines, I do not log into email until my brain is fried from writing and I need a break. This seems to work pretty well and if people really need something, they follow-up with a phone call. I also limit the number of impromptu meetings. Unless it is urgent, I ask most people who stop by the office to schedule an in office/coffee/lunch meeting.

Use your calendar for everything: I have a full year’s worth of events on my office calendar, always in sight. This includes immovable occurrences like grant deadlines, conferences, and life events like vacations or weddings. At any moment, I can tell you whether I can commit to a date for a seminar or conference. As soon as I commit, the date goes on the board. Electronic and paper calendars work equally well, but I prefer dry erase, since this gives me the option to include a full twelve months and not just the calendar year.

Track your activities: Any activities that are not part of my research program, I document. This includes time spent in meetings, seminars, committees, etc. Part of this has to do with annual documentation on my faculty activities form, but it is also important for me to identify how much time I am spending on activities and whether they are worth the time investment. Unfortunately there are tasks from which you cannot opt out, like the departmental seminar, but that does not mean they do not count towards your percent time. Having data documenting your hours of service or teaching can be really powerful when you are “saying no” to requests.

Learn to say no: You cannot attend every conference, every seminar, and every event to which you are invited. You can also not write every grant for which you are eligible or collaborate on every project. You cannot agree to review every paper and take on every student who knocks on your door, looking for a lab opportunity. Identify the opportunities for which you have time and agree to those. If you are not sure you have time, you do not. Also, share the wealth. If you cannot do a review, speak at a conference, or participate in a committee, suggest one of your new colleagues (with their permission, of course!) who might still be trying to break into these spaces.

Travel with purpose: Travel is one of the biggest disruptors, but also the best opportunity to network and share your research group’s work.  The costs of these great opportunities are time out of the office (with tasks continuing to smolder) and a return to a growing to-do list coupled with lost sleep and disruption of home life. Identifying specific goals for work travel can help you decide whether a trip is worth the time, money, and effort. I will cover how I pick which talks and conferences to attend in my next blog post.

Do not steal time: There are only so many hours in the day. If you keep taking hours from your personal time and giving them to work time, you are stealing time. Be firm on the amount of time you are working versus not working. I am not here to tell you how many hours you should be working (Twitter has that covered), only that working too many keeps you from doing the life things that need to get done and/or are enjoyable. Of course there will be times when you work more than others. But, there are only so many weeks you can tell yourself “I just have to get through this week” or “I just have to get through this month” before it becomes a problem. This has been a recurring problem for me, and part of the motivation of implementing some of these strategies.

Invest time in yourself: This should go without saying, and I hope you are better about it than I am, but you have invested a lot of time, money, and effort into your career, so make sure you are investing some of that into yourself. It does not matter what this looks like: gym time, hobbies, travel, kid-centered activities, reading great literature or the newest young adult novel, etc. Be attentive to your health and your relationships. Building a life outside of the lab can help you weather the inevitable rejections and failures in your research program. Without this balance, a bad week in lab can feel like a bad week in life. Try to build in good things to buffer the bad work times.

I admitted on Twitter that I have been working on this post for two months. Part of this has been trying out Pomodoro and timeboxing. The other part has been overcommitting to work tasks not directly related to my science. But, these time management strategies seem to be paying off, and I am actually ahead of schedule on my next two grant submissions. Now, I just need to take my own advice and commit some time to health and wellness. Stay tuned for more tales!

Did I miss an important point? Do you have questions or concerns about the post? Or perhaps a time management strategy to contribute! Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

More Resources

How to REALLY Manage Your Time

Tune Your When, How Much, and What in Your Days

Acting on the Essential

How to Protect Your Protected Time

Doing Research / Faculty Life / Productivity

You’ve just gotten your K award—awesome!  75% of your professional effort is now protected to focus on your research and career development.  But wait.  What about that class you teach, or those days your department expects you to be in clinic, or the students whose dissertation committee you’re on, or…

Keeping 75% of your time protected can quickly get complicated.  Compliance experts Tesha Garcia-Taylor, MBA, and Robert Dow, MBA, recently presented to a group of Vanderbilt career development awardees their top tips for keeping on the straight and narrow.

First, consider the pie.  Pizza, if you like.  The pie is all of the effort you give to your work in an average year, across research, clinical, teaching, and any other activities you probably wouldn’t do unless your institution was paying you.  It includes everything from being in the OR to reading cell cultures to preparing a class syllabus to checking your work email.  Of this entire pie, 75% (six slices of your standard eight-slice pizza) should be a.) your research, or b.) your career development, which can include writing grants, presenting your work at meetings, and other things that might not be specifically sitting at a bench/interviewing research subjects/analyzing data that we’ll get to in a moment.

“But I’m in clinic 15 hours a week.  Isn’t that more than 25% of a week?”  Well, what’s a normal work-week for you?  More importantly, what’s a normative week for your profession?  Specifically, for your specialty—surgeons are more likely to work 80-hour weeks on a standard basis than PhD scientists, for example.  At Vanderbilt, a typical work-week for most, not all, of our faculty is right around 60 hours.  So 15 hours a week of clinic would actually be exactly 25% of a week in that scenario.  (This ignores the fact that you might also want/need to do things like go to grand rounds or complete compliance training, teach clinical trainees, etc., so best not to assume that 15 hours is all you’d be doing that isn’t research or career development.)

“Okay, but half the faculty in our tiny department just went on maternity leave, and I have to teach this and cover for that and all these other things.  I can’t just say nope, sorry.  What do I do?”

Option 1: Explode your workweek to 100 hours.  Fit in 25 hours of teaching/clinic/other and focus on your career development for 75.  We at Edge for Scholars (also anyone sane) do not recommend this option.

Option 2: Let the class/clinic/whatever take up 40% of your time this month or quarter, but devote 90% to your K work for the next month/quarter.  Effort should average out over the year, not the day or even the month.  That said, keeping effort balanced each quarter is preferable, because it’s easy to let things slide until there’s not enough time left in the year to get the right average.

Option 3: Say to your leadership, “I’m coming up on my annual progress report/I’m six months into my award/I’m [fill in appropriate time marker here], and I’m concerned that things aren’t squaring up with my effort on this K award.”  It’s not an urban legend that institutions around the country have had to give back money to the feds because they didn’t let a K awardee have his or her protected time.  Your department doesn’t want to give back grant money or be scrutinized by the compliance office or NIH, we promise.

However, the best time to discuss your effort with your boss is before you submit the grant proposal.  Mutually decide what activities you will put down if you get the award, and get that agreement in writing in the letter of institutional support.  When thinking about what you would drop to focus on your K award, consider a few things:

What can you really not miss?  If everyone in your department including Professor Multimillion Dollar Lab goes to the department seminar, you’re going to the seminar.  But that likely means you can miss journal club.  Go to the things that are most relevant to you, not to every event.

As well, what national things should you keep attending?  If you’re going to a meeting to network with potential collaborators and disseminate your research, of course keep going; this falls under your K effort.  But if, for example, the society for your specialty has an annual meeting that’s mostly attended by clinicians in private practice, you don’t necessarily need to be the one who takes the residents there to present.  Consider attending some meetings every other or every few years.

Does it overlap? Many activities that look like service may ultimately end up feeding into your research.  Say you need to learn how to read a particular kind of PET scan or a how to perform a new microscopy technique, so you visit a colleague and learn it from them.  In learning the new thing, you work on scans or samples from your colleague’s work that need to be read/analyzed.  Does this help them get through a number of scans or samples?  Sure, but it also helps you master these skills, so as far as the feds are concerned, that effort fits with your K.  Similarly, teaching a student who’s working on your research may pay dividends for them in the form of a degree, but it also helps your research get done.

Get to know your financial officers.  They want to help you understand and comply with regulations around effort.  If you don’t already receive a monthly budget and effort report, ask for regular updates to make sure they line up with reality.  This will become even more important as you move on to larger grants and run a bigger research team.

Protecting 75% of your time requires you to be proactive.  Check in regularly with yourself to make sure you’re spending the right amount of effort on your K work, and follow the advice above if things start looking unbalanced.

More Resources

Designing Your Career

Not that Kind of Grant Application: Tales of Career Development Awards 

More Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My K

Productivity Tip #7: Reclaim Your Meeting

Productivity

Productivity Tip #7

How often do you hear a colleague say, “I’m so excited to attend today’s group meeting,” or a student remark, “How is it possible that my group meetings are so stimulating and engaging?”

What’s that? You’ve never heard anyone say those things? Me neither. I dread meetings for the same reason that everyone does: They’re usually a waste of time…..So I decided to intervene. But instead of telling everyone what I, as principal investigator, thought the new format should be, I decided to have it originate from the group itself. I wanted our meetings crisis to be resolved from within, collectively, with a dash of Obama 2008—in other words, “We are the meeting we have been waiting for.”

These are the questions I posed: Why weren’t people contributing during our meetings? Why did they take their phones out? What did they think would make the meeting experience better?

At first only a few people raised their hands to offer suggestions. Then more. And more. And then the room filled with a robust discussion. Every single person in the room participated. Everyone. It was the liveliest and most collaborative meeting we’d ever had. We discussed, we argued, we complained, we made fun of ourselves. We got it all out and then some. We reclaimed the importance of our time together as a group. And then we voted on the completely new structure that we had come up with.

I’ll tell you the particulars of that structure, but not before offering a warning: Our approach to meetings might not be the right one for every group. The format should depend on the people and the type of research involved. The key is that, whatever the format, it has to have come from the members themselves.

During our intervention, an idea that became extremely important was that of the meeting as an “opportunity.” That word kept being repeated. We talked about how badly we had been squandering the opportunity, how valuable it could be, and how much we all wanted to maintain it. (Yes, not having group meetings at all was on the table, but nobody wanted that. Really.) In fact, what came out of our group catharsis was a realization that this opportunity was the only one in which all of us—with different ways of thinking, different backgrounds, and different interests working on different problems—could come together to talk about research.

 

Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: Regrouping the Group Meeting by Jeffrey C. Grossman

Recapture Your Free Time with How to Write a Lot

Book Reviews / Productivity / Writing & Publishing

Do you find your grant-writing intruding on time you’d rather spend with your family?  Did revisions to that last journal article ruin your vacation?  Then this book might be just the thing you need.

Author Paul Silvia wanted to call How to Write a Lot  “How to Write More Productively During the Normal Work Week With Less Anxiety and Guilt, but no one would buy that book.”  As the brevity of the volume indicates, his secret is simple: Create a schedule and stick to it.  Of course, simple in theory and simple in practice are different things, so Silva spends the rest of the book on methods to make keeping a writing schedule easier, and includes sections on how to write more clearly, better organize a manuscript, and submit your best work to journals and publishers, all of which will help you become a more productive writer.  Although Silva is an Associate Professor of Psychology, his tips and tricks hold true for academics in almost any field.

“If you allot 4 hours a week for writing,” Silva says, “you will be surprised at how much you will write.  By surprised, I mean astonished; and by astonished, I mean dumbfounded and incoherent.  You’ll find yourself committing unthinkable perversions, like finishing grant proposals early….You’ll be afraid to talk with friends in your department about writing out of the fear that they’ll think, ‘You’re not one of us anymore’—and they’ll be right.”  Though four hours is a good starting point, your own schedule and needs will dictate how much time you allot.  The key is the regularity rather than sheer number of hours.

Still unconvinced?  Silva breaks down several “specious barriers” to keeping a writing schedule in the second chapter.  If you need to do more reading, your allotted writing time can be used for anything related to writing, including reviewing page proofs, crunching statistics, or reading articles.  Can’t write without a better computer/desk/printer?  Check out page 21 for Silva’s Spartan setup, including a plastic chair and a laptop with no internet connection (it keeps distractions to a minimum).  Waiting for inspiration?  That’s the most specious barrier of all, because as a chart on page 25 shows, in an experiment where some people were asked to write on a schedule and others only when they were inspired, those who write on a schedule wrote three times as much as the “spontaneous” writers, and had twice as many creative ideas.  Silva backs up all his recommendations with evidence from behavioral studies and personal experience that is often as witty as it is insightful.

“Writing is a grim business,” Silva writes, but if you follow the advice in this book, you can find ways to release its stranglehold on your free time, leaving you much less grim.

How to Write a Lot, Revised Edition
Paul J. Silvia
Washington, D.C.: APA Life Tools, 2018

Productivity Tip #6: I’m Not Telling You to Lie

Productivity

Productivity Tip #6

You don’t have to say you are away to use your “out of office” feature. You just have to be bold. My favorite flavor of bold is the Texan Dean who declares in an email bouceback that the eight people and email addresses listed serve as portals for specific types of emails, including the category “everything else”—and none of the addresses are hers.

Since most of us won’t get to use that version, others with appeal include:

  • “I monitor my email several times a day. For urgent needs reach me at: [CELL PHONE/PAGER].”
  • “Research finds the brain is less efficient when multi-tasking. As an exercise in sequential tasking and concentration, I am checking in on email once mid-morning and once mid-afternoon. Thanks for awaiting my most accurate and focused response.”

Or when you need extra focus:

  • “I will not be in email until 1pm today. If you need to contact me before then please call or text [cell number].”
  • “Our team is completing a grant this week; we will handle admissions emails once early in the day and once in the afternoons. Don’t hesitate to call [KEY PERSON] for more urgent needs.”

The current Edge for Scholars poll considers whether “setting an email away message to have time to focus”

  • Gets me too far behind on email
  • Nags at my conscience about what I might miss
  • Is a secret weapon for concentrating

Looks like 77% of us can’t shut it down because of fear of drowning or guilt for not babysitting our in-box with sufficient attention (the first two responses). Maybe more of us should be bold and publically timebox our email, assuring real time to concentrate. We miss real opportunities to be in the creative flow of our work when we respond to every email chime.

I hope we can agree that very little in our work lives is actually on fire. There should be no need for guilt if we prefer to exit and enter the stream of messages when it best fits in our plans for navigating the day.

Katherine Hartmann, MD, PhD
Associate Dean, Clinical and Translational Scientist Development
Vanderbilt University

Productivity Tip #4: Do You Put the PRO in Procrastination?

productivity-tip4

Do You Put the PRO in Procrastination?

Procrastination is closely related to impatience. Their kinship is based on our bias toward the present over the future. Both are examples of the human tendency to overdiscount future events. In both impatience and procrastination, we overweight the immediate. The main difference between the two is whether the immediate thing we are overweighting is a benefit or a cost. When what is immediate is a benefit, we are impatient gluttons, overindulging and consuming more than we should. But when what is immediate is a cost, we are procrastinators, putting off activities we should get done today.

From Fast Company: The Procrastination-Killing Tactic to Try Now (Or in 10 Minutes)

Frank Partnoy describes himself as an inveterate procrastinator–and the banker/lawyer/author is not convinced that’s a bad thing. His book Wait: The Art and Science of Delay is an investigation into his own habits of prolonged decision-making and the shortsightedness that pervaded crisis-era finance. Fast Company talked with Partnoy about when to make decisions, how to manage time, and why better-paid people are less happy.

From Fast Company: Lessons in Productive Procrastination

Haste makes waste: Consider the new Apple Maps app. The drift toward speed at all costs is becoming one of the most prevalent blind spots in leadership today–here’s how to force yourself to put on the brakes.

From Fast Company: The Need for Speed Is Killing Your Company

Why You Should Read Drive

Book Reviews / Productivity

This is not the book for anyone wanting a quick hit of external motivation to reach a short-term goal. Daniel H. Pink disdains the easy ways out of carrots and sticks, grades and monetary incentives. Instead, Drive details the theory and implementation of what he calls “Motivation 3.0,” where the reward is the task itself—as long as we can turn the work into play by doing it how, when, and with whom we want, as well as work toward mastery of a skill while we do. Oh, and don’t forget: The work better be meaningful, too.

Sound like a tall order? Compared to the traditional motivators like bonuses and certificates, it is, but as Pink argues, it may be the only way to keep ourselves and the people around us engaged in our increasingly creative and self-directed work lives. For Pink, the three great motivators are autonomy, mastery, and purpose, all of which must come from inside us rather than be imposed by others. In this slim volume, he gives the reader lucid explanations of what he means by each term, evidence for why it matters drawn from psychological and case studies, and examples of its implementation in the real world. These include “20 percent time” at companies like Google and 3M, which gives employees greater autonomy over their tasks and time, or hospital cleaning staff who seek out new areas of mastery like chatting with patients to make their hospital stay less frightening.

Pink’s tips for turning your “Type X” (extrinsically motivated) self or workplace into a “Type I” (intrinsically motivated) one run the gamut from simple to complex. At one end, there’s asking yourself each day if you came closer to mastery of a skill than the day before. At the other, it’s implementing something like Netflix’s vacation non-policy, where the only rule is that employees get their work done, and otherwise can take whatever time off they want.

Pink also explains, again with extensive reference to clinical studies, how mixing external rewards/punishments and internal motivation frequently backfires, as with a Swedish study that showed fewer people donated blood when they were paid to do so. On the other hand, he acknowledges that for routine tasks that don’t involve altruism or require much creative thinking, where people must only “race down an obvious path, the carrot waiting for them at the finish line encourage[s] them to gallop faster.” While he urges readers to follow his methods, Pink has a refreshing lack of myopia about his subject material.drive

While it isn’t a quick fix, this is the book for anyone wanting to learn—or remind themselves—what really drives us all, so that with even a few tweaks, work can become more fulfilling, successful, and even fun.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Daniel H. Pink
New York: Riverhead Books, 2009