Five Ways to Increase Your Productivity

Heidi Grant Halvorson

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Heidi Grant Halvorson, first featured by HRM Today and then by her personal blog, The Science of Success. To read the complete article and check out all the other resources, please click here.

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You just have too much on you plate.  Chances are, your employees do as well.

You suspect that you could all be making better use of your time, completing more projects and achieving more goals.  You want to be more productive, and to help your team be more productive, but you aren’t sure where to start.

You are far from alone in your confusion. Even the most successful, highly accomplished people have difficulty pinpointing why they are so productive.  The intuitive answer – that you are born predisposed to having the intelligence, creativity, and willpower to get the job done – is really just one small piece of the puzzle.  In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach more of their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.   Here are five scientifically-tested strategies that successful people use, proven to help you reach your goals and make the most of your time.

[Here are the first three.]

#1   Get Specific. When setting a goal, try to be as specific as possible.  “Meet with every member of my team once a week” is a better goal than “meet more often with my team,” because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like.  Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there.  Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal.  Just promising you’ll “communicate more” is too vague – be clear and precise.  “At our meeting, I’ll ask about each project they are currently working on” leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you’ve actually done it.

#2 Seize the Moment to Act on Your Goals. Given how busy most of us are, it’s not surprising that we often miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice those opportunities.  Did you really have no time to work on that assignment today?  No chance at any point to return that phone call?  Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance.  Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., “When it’s 3pm today, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and work on that report.”) Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your productivity by roughly 300%.

#3  Know Exactly How Far You Have Left To Go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress – if no one else is looking over your shoulder, then you’ll need to monitor yourself.  If you don’t know how well you are doing, you can’t adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly.  Check your progress frequently – weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

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Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong – abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential.  People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.   And telling your employees that you expect them to make a few mistakes as they learn is, ironically, the surest way to elicit their very best performance.

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Heidi Grant Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science.   She is an Expert Blogger for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBrief’s SmartBlog on Leadership. In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. Her latest book is Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, published by Hudson Street Press (2010), a member of the Penguin Group. She earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University. You are welcome to  contact her:  heidi.grant.halvorson@gmail.com.

 

Want to Double or Triple Your Own Productivity? Here’s How.

Heidi Grant Halvorson

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Heidi Grant Halvorson, first featured by her Fast Company blog and then by her personal blog, The Science of Success. To read the complete article and check out all the other resources, please click here.

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Very few of us are as productive as we could be.

We want to be focused with laser-like precision on critical tasks and make the best, most efficient use of our time.  Instead, we get distracted by coworkers, lost in our Inboxes, and too absorbed by unimportant aspects of a single project when we’d be better off turning our attention to other things.

Wanting to be more productive isn’t enough to actually make you more productive.  You need to find a way to deal effectively with the distractions, the interruptions, and the fact that there is just way too much on your plate.   Fortunately, there is a very simple strategy that has been proven to do the trick.

If you’ve already read my book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, then know that I am a big fan of planning.  If-then planning, in particular, is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal.  Well over 100 studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific actions to reach your goal (e.g., “If it is 4pm, then I will return any phone calls I should return today”) can double or triple your chances for success.  Making if-then plans to tackle your current projects, or reach your 2011 goals, is probably the most effective single thing you can do to ensure your success.

If-then plans take the form:
If X happens, then I will do Y.

For example:

If I haven’t written the report before lunch, then I will make it my top priority when I return.
If I am getting too distracted by colleagues, then I will stick to a 5-minute chat limit and head back to work.
If it is 2pm, then I will spend an hour reading and responding to important emails.

How effective are these plans? One study looked at people who had the goal of becoming regular exercisers.  Half the participants were asked to plan where and when they would exercise each week (e.g., “If it is Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, then I will hit the gym for an hour before work.”) The results were dramatic:  months later, 91% of if-then planners were still exercising regularly, compared to only 39% of non-planners!

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Heidi Grant Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science.   She is an Expert Blogger for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBrief’s SmartBlog on Leadership. In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. Her latest book is Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, published by Hudson Street Press (2010), a member of the Penguin Group. She earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University. You are welcome to contact her:  heidi.grant.halvorson@gmail.com.

The 3 Biggest Myths About Motivation That Won’t Go Away

Heidi Grant Halvorson

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Heidi Grant Halvorson and featured at her personal blog, The Science of Success. To read the complete article and check out all the other resources, please click here.

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People can have remarkably keen insights into their own behavior.  Then again, people can also be remarkably wrong about why they, and everyone else, do the things that they do.  And some of those people turn out to be motivational speakers and authors.

No doubt their intentions are very admirable – many genuinely want to help others to reach a higher level of success.  But too often, they simply end up reinforcing false notions (albeit intuitively appealing ones) about how motivation works.   Here are three of the most firmly entrenched motivational myths:

[Here are the first two.]

Just Write Down Your Goals, and Success is Guaranteed!

There is a story that motivational speakers/authors love to tell about the Yale Class of 1953.  (Google it.  It’s everywhere.) Researchers, so the story goes, asked graduating Yale seniors if they had specific goals they wanted to achieve in the future that they had written down.  Twenty years later, the researchers found that the mere 3% of students who had specific, written goals were wealthier than the other 97% combined.  Isn’t that amazing?  It would be if it were true, which it isn’t.  (See the 1996 Fast Company article that debunked the story here.)

I wish it were that simple.  To be fair, there is evidence that getting specific about what you want to achieve is really important. (Not a guaranteed road to fabulous wealth, but still important.)  In other words, specificity is necessary, but it’s not nearly sufficient.  Writing goals down is actually neither – it can’t hurt, but there’s also no hard evidence that writing per se does anything to help.

Just Try to Do Your Best

Telling someone, or yourself, to just “do your best” is believed to be a great motivator. It isn’t. Theoretically, it encourages without putting on too much pressure.  In reality, and rather ironically, it is more-or-less permission to be mediocre.

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two renown organizational psychologists, have spent several decades studying the difference between “do your best” goals and their antithesis: specific and difficult goals.  Evidence from more than 1,000 studies conducted by researchers across the globe shows that goals that not only spell out exactly what needs to be accomplished, but that also set the bar for achievement high, result in far superior performance than simply trying to “do your best.”  That’s because more difficult goals cause you to, often unconsciously, increase your effort, focus and commitment to the goal, persist longer, and make better use of the most effective strategies.

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To read the complete article and check out all the other resources, please click here.

Heidi Grant Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science.   She is an Expert Blogger for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBrief’s SmartBlog on Leadership. In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. Her latest book is Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, published by Hudson Street Press (2010), a member of the Penguin Group. She earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University. You are welcome to  contact her:  heidi.grant.halvorson@gmail.com.