Smarter Faster Better

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times. He has authored a number of books, including The Power of Habit, which is about the science of habit formation in our lives, companies, and society. And we're going to talk about today. His latest book, Smarter, Faster, Better, which is about the science of productivity. Charles is a native of New Mexico, studied history at Yale, and received an MBA from Harvard. Charles, thank you so much for making the time.

Charles Duhigg: Great book. Thank you for asking. I really appreciate it.

Anita Brick: I'd like to start with a question that came from a weekend student, and he said, I really like the idea of being able to achieve more with less wasted effort and struggle. I understand intellectually that it's possible, but I'm not sure where to start. Where would you begin if you were approaching my dilemma today?

Charles Duhigg: The easiest way to answer that is take a big step back and say what exactly is productivity? We know that productivity differs from person to person and time of day. Productive Wednesday, for some people, might be getting your kids to school as fast as possible and getting to your desk and clearing out your inbox. But a productive Friday morning might be having enough time that you can walk your kids to school and talk to them about their week and not feel rushed.

And I think that this is important because what it points to is the fact that productivity is often about knowing what your goals are, and then having the peace of mind and the space in your life to think about how to get towards those. The most productive people tend to do two things. They tend to spend time thinking about what productivity is for them, asking themselves, what does it mean to be productive today?

What does it mean to be successful this week? What's my biggest goal for this month? And then, in addition to thinking about productivity, because the most productive people tend to think more about what productivity means, they also have habits in their lives that allow them to have time and space to think, and to actually think about what they want to get done.

They have habits, what psychologists refer to as contemplative devices that push them to think a little bit more about their goals and their priorities, and how they're spending their time and developing those habits, developing those contemplative routines. That's what makes it possible to get more done.

Anita Brick: That's a really great point. In fact, I have a friend who blocks out two hours every week to think and to think about things strategically. She is in the C-suite of a global company. In her culture, it is welcome. But in some cultures it's not. So how do you find the time to think about what's important to you, what your goals are? How do you squeeze that time in if you're already stretched between family and work, and in some cases with the students, with.

Charles Duhigg: School, anyone can do it right. It's just about being committed to it. So I guarantee you, for anyone who's listening to this or anyone in this world, there's, you know, at least two hours a week where they're watching TV or they're doing something or they're surfing the web or they're checking Facebook. We all have these moments that we need a kind of downtime in our lives.

And I'm not saying that we shouldn't have downtime, but what I am saying is that if you structure in a certain way that allows you to think a little bit more deeply, that it actually opens up more free time in your life. So let's say you're someone who's job is just sort of go, go, go, and you get to your desk and you sit down, you know, you've got all these emails that are competing for your attention and you've got people stopping in your office.

What you can do is you can say, look, for the next half hour, I need to figure out what my biggest goal is for today, and I need to figure out how to get it done. So I'm going to close the door, I'm going to turn off my email, and I'm just going to do that. Now that might mean that you miss some emails, right?

That you don't reply to some emails. Great. Because the whole point of spending time is thinking about what your priorities are, is that you actually need to make choices about what you ought to be spending time on, and what you can ignore. One of the things there was a big study that was done of, fortune 500 executives looked at their email habits, and they found the most successful people tended to delete their emails much quicker and much more frequently than their peers.

Within 1.3 seconds, they tended to hit delete on 70% of the emails that were in their inbox. These are people who already have spam filters. Many of them have assistants who are going through their emails and already screening out the unimportant ones. So what that means is that they're just going through and they're saying ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore.

I don't have to respond to this, and so I won't. And the point there is that by doing that, that gives you the time to kind of think about what I actually want to get done. So it is true that we are all busy. Everyone listening to this is successful and productive, but the key is that the difference between the people who are most productive and most successful and everyone else is that they tend to paradoxically work slightly less.

They are less busy, they create more space in their life to think about what are the right goals that I ought to be focusing on today and this week? In this month, how do I stay prioritized on those? How do I create enough space and time to learn about new things so I can be innovative? How do I manage my team?

I need to sit and think about the team dynamics and how to influence them in a way that's actually productive. Throughout history, thinking has always been the killer app, and the people who are give themselves the time and space to think just half an inch deeper. That's all that it takes in order to be more successful and more productive.

Anita Brick: Well, and I would agree with you, sometimes it is easier said than done though. One of the exec MBA students, he said, Charles, you talk about how motivation is a skill that can be learned and expanded. I must be practicing it the wrong way as I'm not seeing my motivation muscle expand. Charles, how would you recommend that I build that motivation muscle so that I actually can get things done that I want to get done?

Charles Duhigg: I love this question about motivation, right? Because this is at the core of how many people either feel like they are in control of their lives, or they feel like things are running amok. And to talk a little bit about what we know about the sense of motivation, one of my favorite examples is this story about the U.S. Marine Corps.

So about 15 years ago, the Marine Corps faced a fundamental problem, which was that they had a bunch of recruits that were coming in who seemed unprepared to motivate. We think of the Marine Corps boot camp as a place where people go to learn obedience and discipline. But what the Marines were finding was that the recruits they were getting, they were graded obedience.

You told them to do something, they would go do it. The problem is that they weren't great at self-motivation. They weren't the types of folks that you could say, look, go take that hill without giving them step by step instructions. And so the guy who ran the U.S. Marines, this guy named Charles Kerouac, decided to remake boot camp entirely.

And what he did is he looked into the research of motivation, and he found this concept called an internal locus of control. People who are very good at self motivating. They are people who believe that they are in control of their own lives, who believe that the choices that they make have an influence over what happens. People at the other end of that spectrum, people with an external locus of control.

Those are people who believe that it's just luck or fate that determines what happens to us. And what we know is that you can teach people an internal locus of control by teaching them to crave making choices, to crave feeling in control. One of the best examples of this is, you know, when you're going down the freeway and you're, like, stuck in a traffic jam and you see that exit and you know that if you take the exit, you're not going to get home any faster.

But there's some part of your brain that is stuck in traffic, just wants to take control and wants to say, look, get out of the traffic jam. Go take that exit. Even though it's going to take longer. That's this internal locus of control making itself felt. It's this urge to make a choice, make a decision, put yourself in charge.

And that, neurologically, is what feeds self-motivation. So what the Marines found is that the way to train recruits to have better self-motivation is to force them to make a choice after choice after choice, because the simple act of making choices, of making decisions, of allowing yourself to feel like you're in control of your own life, it wakes up that part of our brain where self-motivation resides.

One of the first things that happens when you get to a bootcamp is in the first couple of weeks. Your drill sergeant after lunch will tell you to clean up the mess hall, but they won't tell you like where the cleaning supplies are. They won't tell you whether to put the leftover hamburgers in the fridge or throw them away.

They won't tell you how to, like, work the industrial sized dishwasher. Instead, they just make you make decisions on your own. Figure it out for yourself. And as we all know, having been in a situation like that, it's a lot more fun to figure things out for yourself. It's a lot more fun to feel like we're in control and to make choices, than it is to just follow someone else's commands.

So what this means for all of us, if we feel like our self motivation is flagging, we need to figure out how to make a chore into a choice. Look for some decision, almost any decision that makes you feel in control. They say, do you have time for a meeting tomorrow? Say yes, but the meeting has to start at 1105 and I have to be out of there by 1120. Even if the choice isn't a big deal, even if it doesn't make that much sense, simply making a decision reawakens your self motivation.

But then there's a second part of that, which is that's what works for short term things to sort of kick start your self motivation. But how do we stay motivated? And what studies tell us is that the way we stay motivated is by linking what we're doing to our deepest aspirations, by basically asking ourselves, why? Why am I doing this thing?

One of my favorite examples is when I was talking to this neurologist or this oncologist who told me that it was a university. He says that he hates grading students papers, and so the first thing he does whenever he sits down to grade students papers is he asks himself, why am I doing that? So he says, the reason I'm doing this is because if I grade students' papers, then we can collect tuition dollars.

If we can collect tuition dollars, then they can pay for my lab. And if they can pay for my lab, then I can do research on cancer. If I do research on cancer, I'm going to save people's lives. So by grading students' papers, I'm going to save people's lives, which is ridiculous, right? That's not that kind of stretching of logic there.

But the point is that he does it because it works, because the way that we maintain our motivation, we keep it renewed, is by reminding ourselves why we're doing things. And sometimes we have to actually force ourselves to ask why in order to remember what it is.

Anita Brick: The whole why question is really an important one, because it anchors us in a way where there are days when things don't go the way we want them to, or we're doing something that's tedious and it drives us back to that. But this was a question from an alum, what is the why of your company doesn't link with your personal why? And the salon said, what is your advice for someone whose company has set the why? And I didn't realize this before I joined the company. I know there is a better fit where I share their why with the values, etc., but I can't afford to leave and find another job, not at least for a year.

Charles Duhigg: Let's assume that you can't leave. What's interesting is that researchers have looked at the why for most people in workplaces, what they found is that oftentimes it's not about what the company does. It's about the relationships that provide for their coworkers or what they're doing for their family. What they tend to do is they tend to focus on the values that they do provide.

So for someone who's a I actually know a guy who's a corporate lawyer for this big industrial cleaning supply company. And when I asked him what he loves about his job, what he said is that he works with wonderful people. He helps them do work that provides for their families. The why doesn't have to be what the company is doing. It can be about what you're doing, the value and service that you're providing to your colleagues.

Anita Brick: That's an ongoing I don't want to say battle. I'll say battle day to day because there are days when things align with how we want them to be, and other days that don't. One of the old ones, she said. You talk about psychological safety being an important factor in productivity. How could I create that for my direct reports and myself, even if we don't have that more broadly in the company? So it sounds like not a lot of opportunity to fail. How do you create psychological safety in a smaller group within a larger group?

Charles Duhigg: So it's a great question. And psychological safety is actually something that usually emerges among small groups. So what is psychological safety? Well, psychological safety is a very specific definition. It is a culture among colleagues that allows people to speak up and feel that there will not be consequences if they say something that is risky, or if they voice an idea that is perhaps a little bit half baked, that, in other words, that you can take risks among your colleagues and that they won't hold it against you.

So how do we create psychological safety? If you're running a team and you want your direct reports to feel safe, how do you do that? What we know is that you don't even have to like each other. But what you do have to do is you have to have these two ingredients. Study after study has found, are at the core of psychological safety.

The first is that you have to have what's known as a quality and conversational turn. Taking. Everybody who's in a meeting needs to speak up in roughly equal proportion. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone has to speak the same amount of minutes during every single meeting, but it means that over, you know, a week or a month that everyone on that team has not only had an opportunity to speak up, but has been asked for their opinion and their participation.

That's important, right? To have this equality and conversational turn taking on its own. It's not enough. The second thing that you need to create psychological safety is you also need what's known as ostentatious listening behaviors. You need people in that room. When someone does speak up to show them that they're listening. And that means not only listening to what they said, but also listening to nonverbal cues.

So it means that that team leader needs to do things like repeat back what he just heard and say. Jim, what I hear you saying is X and y and Z to show that he really heard it, or it means that picking up on nonverbal cues and saying, hey, Susie, I noticed that you haven't said anything a little while in your arms across.

It looks like you're not that into this conversation. Tell me why. Tell me what's going on inside your head that you don't think this is a great idea if you have these two behaviors, if you have an environment or a culture that encourages people to speak up, and then you have this behavior where people show each other that they're listening, study after study, a show that leads to psychological safety.

And what that means is, if you have psychological safety teams tend to be much, much more effective, much, much more productive. That doesn't mean that everyone likes each other. It doesn't mean that everyone's best friends. But think about the last time you were on a team where everyone was talking up, where everyone showed each other that they were listening.

You could bring up ideas or make suggestions, and if they were kind of half baked, or if they didn't work out, or if they weren't right, that it wasn't held against you, that's an environment where people can bring their best selves to work. That's how you end up getting a team to get things done.

Anita Brick: I would agree, I think it takes courage to do it at the front end. If it's a cultural shift, everyone has to trust that that is actually going to be the case.

Charles Duhigg: Yes, I absolutely agree. And you have to reward people for taking the small risk. You have to reward someone for bringing up some idea that might be happy. Do you have to say, Jim, that's a great beginning of an idea. Let's work on that together. Thank you so much.

Anita Brick: Got it. I agree, and it made me think of I mean, I love the example. The previous night was a nightmare. It was an auto plant. There wasn't that psychological safety. So people's behavior was just horrible. You don't go into the details. That was really horrible. And then shifting it over. And I know it was more than just psychological safety, but people had control. People were listened to and productivity went through the roof. I mean, it was amazing.

Charles Duhigg: This is the new me plant in Fremont, the first Toyota factory in the United States, and kind of the birth of the Toyota Production System and of lean manufacturing and what later became agile methodologies. What is lean? What it really is, is it's about pushing decision making down to the person who's closest to the problem. So it's saying to the guy on the factory floor who's working that assembly line, there's a problem and you see it.

You are the one who's going to see it first, and you're going to have some of the best ideas about how to solve it for you, the person who's closest to that new product that the startup is developing. You're the one who's going to figure out what we should be doing, how we should be designing this thing, and that's really, really important because what it does is it takes advantage of people's expertise.

Everyone's an expert in something, and most of the time, if you just plug people into a system, into a factory, you don't really take advantage of their expertise. The best companies know how to squeeze people for what they're experts in, to take advantage of the fact that we all have this ability to think.

Anita Brick: Well, I agree, it's kind of fascinating to watch organizations that do that really well because they come up with truly innovative, useful, profitable products. Another example in the book, I was terrified and also encouraged by the two examples in the cockpit. This next question comes from an MBA student, and I don't know if this is what he's referring to, but here goes. How can a person prepare in advance for challenging situations and not get caught up in what's failing and focus on what's working? What would you advise this person to do?

Charles Duhigg: This is the difference between Air France Flight 447, which is a plane that basically has nothing wrong with it and ends up crashing into the ocean, killing everyone on board. And Qantas Flight 47. Sorry. What is flight 32, which is one of the worst mid-air mechanical disasters in modern aviation? Literally has almost every single major system go off line, and a wing that's falling apart in mid-air, and the pilot manages to land that plane without one injury on board.

And this is what we know about how people can shape their own focus. The people who are best at focusing, who are best at sort of sharpening their attention and deciding in split second, I should pay attention to this email, but I can ignore those ones where someone has asked me to take a meeting and like, no, no, no, I'm going to put that off until tomorrow.

Those are people who tend to tell themselves stories about what's going on. As it goes on. They do what's known in psychology as building mental models. And a mental model is essentially this narrative about what we expect to occur that allows our brain to quickly compare what's actually happening to what we expect to be happening, and make split second decisions.

One of the best examples of this is there's these studies about firefighters, the best firefighters, when they walk into burning buildings, what they tend to do is they tend to start telling themselves stories right away about what they expect to see. So they walk into a burning room and they say to themselves, okay, I'm walking into a burning room.

I expect to see the corners on fire more than the middle of the room, and there's a staircase over there. I expect to see that staircase burning hotter than anything else and bigger flames. And then that way when they look over and the staircase doesn't have as many flames as they expected, then they know, oh, wait, we pay attention to that. There's something wrong with that staircase. I shouldn't say that there's something that doesn't match up with the story that's in my mind. Or in a study that was done of executives who work in large companies. What they found is the ones who were most productive tended to be people who visualized with just a slightly more specificity, what they expected to happen each day.

So most of us would say, oh, I have a meeting at 10:00. That's great. I'm going to go to that meeting and we will stop there. But people who are really productive tend to say, oh, I have a meeting at 10:00. And, you know, I'm sure Josh is going to bring up that stupid idea he always brings up.

Susan is going to disagree with him because Susan kind of hates Josh, and that's when I'm going to leap in with my brilliant idea, and I'm going to look like a genius by comparison. Now, it doesn't take much effort to engage in this slight visualization activity, this practice, but it tends to make a huge difference in why some people are able to focus better than others by visualizing just a little bit of what they expect to have happened that day.

It helps prime our brain to pay attention to the things that matter and ignore the things that don't. That's the key difference between Air France Flight 447 and Qantas Flight 32 is that Air France flight. They weren't telling themselves a story about anything. They were just sitting there reacting to alarms and reacting to autopilot. Whereas in Qantas Flight 32, the captain of that plane, a guy named Richard Terrebonne, he actually forced his Co pilots to tell him stories about what they expected to occur before they were even in the plane, when they were taking the shuttle from the airport hotel to the plane itself, he would ask them questions like, tell me what

you're going to do if engine two goes out, where's the first place your eyes are going to go? What are you going to do with your hands? What are the first words you're going to come out of your mouth? That's how you get ready to deal with an emergency.

Anita Brick: And it was a really good thing that they did because they saved everyone's life. It was quite amazing. There is something that goes along with this. An evening student asked this question: being able to perform at a reliably productive level most of the time is difficult because I find myself thinking about the past and also thinking about what hasn't happened yet. But I never achieved the level of productivity toward my current goal. Most of the time I feel like I get a lot of stuff done, but I don't necessarily feel that I've accomplished what I want.

Charles Duhigg: So without knowing the specifics, it's a little hard to diagnose this. But I guess what I would start by saying is what kind of goals is this person setting? Here's what we know about the science of goal setting. It's really important that people have two kinds of goals. The first is that they need to know what their stretch goal is. What is the biggest thing, the most important thing that you want to get done today, this month and this year? Tell me your biggest ambition for many people, the problem isn't that they're not getting anything done at work, it's that they're getting the wrong things done at work that what they're doing at work doesn't line up with the things that they actually care about.

And the only way that you can figure out what you actually care about is by sitting down and saying, what are my biggest goals? What are my stretch ambitions? Now? The problem is, though, that if you just come up with a list of your biggest goals, it's really hard to know where to start. If I say that I want to run a marathon and right now I can't run two miles, simply saying I want to run a marathon by the end of this year.

That doesn't do much for me. So once you know what your stretch goals are, once you know what the most important thing to get done this month or this year, this week is, then you need to break that down into a specific plan. And there's a lot of systems out there to help us break those down. One of my favorites is this thing called Smart goals.

And the reason it's called smart is just because it's smart. What they say is, look, if you want to get something done this week, figure out specifically what you want to get done and how are you going to measure success. Ask yourself, is it achievable? Is it something you can actually get done? How do you make it realistic?

Do you need to, you know, block off two hours on your schedule every morning? Do you need to close your door so your colleagues don't bother you? Do you need to turn off your email? And then what's the timeline for getting this thing done now? It only takes like, you know, 30s to figure out if my goal is to run a marathon for this week.

Smarty, how many miles do I want to run this week? How am I going to measure that? Is it achievable? Is it realistic? What's the timeline? You know, do I do it in the mornings or the evenings? Now I actually have a plan to go after the goal, and I know that the goal is something that's really important to me.

So it sounds like for this individual that what they're doing is that they maybe aren't figuring out what their real stretch goals are, and then maybe they're not breaking that down into a plan to actually make progress against them. Well, it could be.

Anita Brick: I think sometimes people's standard is so much higher than what's possible that they always come in below the mark.

Charles Duhigg: Oh, sure. So sometimes people have totally unrealistic expectations of themselves and of others. That's the other important part of this, is that we pay attention to our experiences and we learn from them. One of the things that we know about experts is that experts tend to squeeze feedback from systems much better than everyone else. That's how they become an expert.

And there's some things that give us immediate feedback. If you're trying to improve your free throws, as soon as you throw that ball into the air, you can tell whether it goes in the basket or not. But most things in the workplace, they don't offer really obvious feedback, right? You have a meeting and you don't know if people felt psychologically safe during that meeting.

You don't know if people are enthusiastic or unenthusiastic about what you're doing unless you ask, right? People who become experts tend to find ways to squeeze feedback from systems. What that really means is that they look at many of their choices as experiments, and then they pay attention to the data that comes out. So if you're someone who goes into a situation and you might be holding yourself to too high a standard, then you need to run some experiments to figure out what the standard you're holding yourself to is. Is it too high or is it? Is it appropriate? And you ask other people, how much did you get done today? You ask people about their successes and failures, most importantly about their failures, and you learn from them.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right. Sometimes people who are high achievers, they're high achievers because they push really hard. But without having at least some positive feedback that is self-generated or and or confirmed by others, it's hard to keep going. Speaking of keeping going, do you have time for two more questions?

Charles Duhigg: Sure. Absolutely.

Anita Brick: Okay, great. So this is interesting when it came from an exact MBA student, she said, what are some of the factors that drive increased productivity? Even if someone has been in a particular role for a prolonged period, how can one keep the old looking new? I talked to people where they've been in a role, they like the role, but they need to find new ways to view it differently. So that they find new ways to increase productivity.

Charles Duhigg: That's right. I think that one of the important things is that we always shake up our perceptions of the job that we're doing, so as to be able to look at it with slightly fresh eyes. There's this concept known as framing and psychology, which is that oftentimes people get stuck into decision making frames and as a result, they are self-limiting.

So the question is how do we reframe things? And there's actually a series of really interesting experiments that shows that the best way to reframe things, to force yourself to reframe things, is to ask yourself to see something from someone else's perspective. So, for instance, if you're in a job and you had to explain your job to someone who had never seen it before, how would you explain that?

And then if you had to explain the opposite of your job, how would you explain the opposite of your job? Now, that's a tough question, but there's something about forcing ourselves just to see things a little bit differently that seems to disrupt the frame that we're in. And as a result, it gives us the opportunity to re-experience what we're doing to go through and have a new focus on how things unfold.

And that's really, really useful because it gives us a chance to rethink what we're doing now. The other thing that's important, though, is that one of the things that we know about innovation is that people who tend to be best at generating new ideas within a company are what are known as innovation brokers. They're people who get exposed to lots of different kinds of ideas, and then use that exposure to find connections that might not be obvious to everyone else, and that's dependent on actually going out and having new experiences.

That's dependent on going to the finance department and saying, hey, I'm in marketing, but can you explain to me what you guys are doing? Can I work on a project with you? Can I learn about finance? Because in doing so, not only do we get a new perspective on our own job, but we get exposed to ideas that can be incredibly valuable.

Anita Brick: No question. When I was reading the section that you are referencing for that, you had spoken to Robert Ryan about that a lot. If you take something that you learn in one context, maybe it's old hat, it's the norm for them and you bring it to a different context. It's brand new and you're an incredible genius in this new environment.

Charles Duhigg: It's really, really powerful.

Anita Brick: Good. I know we've talked about a lot of things and thank you for that very informative conversation. If there were three things that a person could begin doing today to be more productive and take those baby steps toward achieving an important goal, what would those three things be?

Charles Duhigg: So I think the first thing is take 20 minutes, sit down and ask yourself, what are your biggest goals for this week and this month and this year? Figure out what your stretch goals are, right? What are the most important things that you want to get done? Not the things that are going to keep you busy, but the things that if you can only do 1 or 2 things you want them to do because that's going to help you figure out what your priorities are.

Number two is, once you know that, spend a little bit more time visualizing when you're on the subway, on your way in to work, or when you're driving in your car during your commute, instead of turning on the radio and listening to NPR or playing along some song, just sit there and just say to yourself, okay, so what is going to happen between 9:00 and noon?

What's the number one thing that I want to get done? How do I visualize that day's going to unfold? Because we know that visualizing what you want to accomplish makes it more likely, because it helps your brain decide what to focus on and what to ignore. And number three, and this is actually the most important thing, is to find some time each week to think.

Maybe that means that you're taking a slightly longer shower every morning, so you can just kind of let your mind wander. Maybe it means that you're writing a letter to yourself on Monday so that you can say, this is what I expect this week to be. Maybe it means that you set aside 30 minutes each night to have a conversation with your spouse and say, this is how the day went, and this is what went well.

This is what went poorly, and this is what I hope to get done tomorrow. Build some type of routine into your life that lets you think about what you want to get done and the best way to do it, and that's going to end up driving more success.

Anita Brick: That's so well said. Thank you. And clear concrete, specific. Great book. Again. Thank you for writing about it. Thank you for sharing your insights around it and can't wait till the next one comes out. We'll have another conversation.

Charles Duhigg: Thanks so much, I appreciate it.

Anita Brick: Thanks, Charles. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.