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The Surprising Science of Motivation

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A friend emailed me the link to this talk and said that it was definitely worth the 18 minute investment of time. He was right.

I highly recommend this TED talk by Dan Pink. Here’s the key point: “There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does” when it comes to human motivation.

And it is very interesting that, as he touches on at the end, the science of motivation naturally demonstrates the value of some of the more significant emerging workplace practices, such as a results-only-work-environment and 20% time.

(Although I acknowledge that 20% time isn’t necessarily new — it was practiced at 3M more than 50 years ago. Come to think of it, ROWE was also the basic operation of many people before the rise of the modern organization and the concept of an employee — a relatively recent occurrence. It is interesting how what is “new” is often actually “old.”)

(Final note: By pointing out the relatively recent occurrence of the concept of an employee, I am not implying that I think it is a bad concept. I do, however, think that many of the primary early practices for managing employees, which focused on control, were wrong-headed and we are still seeing their effects today. Employees deserve autonomy, not tight controls, and this leads to better results for organizations as well. This will be an interesting course of discussion for future blog posts.)

Thoughts on How to Schedule Your Week

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I’ve advocated in previous posts that, when planning your week, you should proactively choose several “big rocks” to accomplish that week. These are the most important tasks that you can do that week, and they should stem from your values, goals, roles, and/or major projects.

Here’s what I haven’t said before: I think it may work best to keep the number of big rocks down to about 5. If you can accomplish one big rock per day, you will be making huge progress.

But if you try to put much more than that on your agenda for the week, one of two things will likely happen. First, might not feel the freedom or time to address situations that come up — many of which are important, even though they could not have been foreseen. Or, second, if you do give yourself the freedom to turn your attention to them, you will feel frustrated by the inability to accomplish your plans. And so you will feel behind.

I’m writing this because that’s how I feel right now! I tried to schedule too many priorities into my week. If I had scheduled less, maybe I’d even feel about done right now, with everything else I do for the week being gravy. That would be nice — and maybe would result in more getting done, not less. Or, it would result in the ability to say “finished for now,” which I think is something that is extra hard these days but which we all need more of.

The concept of big rocks is from Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He advocates about 2-3 big rocks per role, which would end up giving you around 15 or so per week. He doesn’t give that as any hard and fast rule, but it does set up your expectations. Sticking down at 5 is a bit counter-intuitive, but I think it may be about right.

But we’ll see. That’s why I’ve called this post “thoughts on how to schedule your week.” In many ways, effectiveness is an ongoing experiment. You create hypotheses, test them, adapt, and repeat.

John Piper on Spiritual Leadership

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John Piper has a very helpful but often overlooked article from 1995 called The Marks of a Spiritual Leader. I highly recommend it. Here are three things that stand out from the article.

First, Piper gives a very helpful definition of spiritual leadership, which differs in some ways from leadership in general:

I define spiritual leadership as knowing where God wants people to be and taking the initiative to use God’s methods to get them there in reliance on God’s power. The answer to where God wants people to be is in a spiritual condition and in a lifestyle that display his glory and honor his name. Therefore, the goal of spiritual leadership is that people come to know God and to glorify him in all that they do. Spiritual leadership is aimed not so much at directing people as it is at changing people. If we would be the kind of leaders we ought to be, we must make it our aim to develop persons rather than dictate plans. You can get people to do what you want, but if they don’t change in their heart you have not led them spiritually. You have not taken them to where God wants them to be.

Second, Piper spends the rest of the paper outlining the characteristics a person must have in order to be a spiritual leader “who excels both in the quality of his direction and the numbers of people who follow him.” He divides these characteristics into an inner circle and an outer circle:

The inner circle of spiritual leadership is that sequence of events in the human soul that must happen if anyone is to get to first base in spiritual leadership. These are the absolute bare essentials. They are things that all Christians must attain in some degree, and when they are attained with high fervor and deep conviction they very often lead one into strong leadership. In the outer circle are qualities that characterize both spiritual and non-spiritual leaders.

Third, and among other things, Piper has a great discussion of the outer circle characteristics. Below is the list of characteristics he discusses. I especially love the emphasis on optimism, energy, hard thinking, dreaming, and decisiveness.

  1. Restless
  2. Optimistic
  3. Intense
  4. Self-controlled
  5. Thick-skinned
  6. Energetic
  7. A hard thinker
  8. Articulate
  9. Able to teach
  10. A good judge of character
  11. Tactful
  12. Theologically oriented
  13. A dreamer
  14. Organized and efficient
  15. Decisive
  16. Perseverant
  17. A lover
  18. Restful

How GTD Can Help Keep Your Basement From Flooding

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Last Thursday or so, we had about four inches of rain. I was in my basement Friday morning and didn’t notice anything. On Saturday morning, however, I went down there to get something, only to find that the carpet was saturated with water. It turns out that our sump pump had failed, creating a big mess.

Could GTD have helped keep this from happening? Well, it provides a critical tool I’m going to use to help keep this from happening again.

Before this happened, I never gave much thought to the life expectancy of a sump pump. And our sump pump gave out earlier than would have been expected, anyway. But the reality is, every sump pump will eventually fail. The thing is, you don’t want to wait for it to fail to find out, because that means a basement full of water.

So it makes sense to replace your sump pump on a regular basis. For me, there’s a big insight right there: If you have a sump pump, you need to have it on your agenda to replace that sump pump when it starts to get old. That’s a simple concept, but it had simply never occurred to me before.

But how do you remember to do that? That’s the challenge. You could just trust your brain to somehow randomly bring it to mind every few years or so that it’s time to change your sump pump.

But I don’t really want my sump pump to take up even that much thought. I don’t want to have to program it into my head to pause every few years and say to myself, “is my sump pump getting to old?” I’d rather automate everything I can. It’s also less likely that I’ll totally blank it out since, after all, 7 years is a long time. And the consequences of forgetting can be large.

Enter the tickler file (or “action calendar,” which I call it because I keep it electronically). An action calendar is simply a list of repeating tasks that you keep in your task management software (whether Outlook, OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk, or whatever). You set each task to repeat at whatever interval you need. Every day or week (depending on how many tasks you have in there), you review it to see what needs to be taken care of.

In my action calendar I’m just going to create a repeating task for every 7 years to replace my sump pump. That way, before the pump gets to the point of failure (unless it breaks before it’s time — which is entirely possible!), it will be replaced. And I don’t have to think about it otherwise, because the reminder will come up automatically when it’s time.

Here’s the interesting thing: There are all sorts of things like this you need to keep track of as an adult, and they occur on both short-term and very long-term intervals. Things like: refill the salt in the water softener, change the furnace filter, change smoke detector batteries, keep up with the kids’ immunizations, renew your tetanus shot (every 10 years), renew your passport (every 10 years), and so forth.

I used to think that there was some big mystery to remembering these things. That you just had to trust that they would come to mind at the right time. But there is no mystery to it. If you have a tickler file (action calendar), remembering when you need to change the furnace filter or update your tetanus shot or change your sump pump simply becomes a matter of creating a repeating task. That gets it off your mind, and you can trust that you’ll see it when you need to.

And it could save you a lot of hassle, also.

Filed Under: GTD