Smarter Faster BetterThe Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

By Charles Duhigg

In countless ways, incredible advances in communication technology are making our lives easier and more productive. We live in a world where just about any product we could ever want can be delivered to our doorstep within twenty-four hours, simply with the touch of a button. And while we’re waiting for that delivery, we can Skype with our relatives, deposit a check, and look-up a new recipe for dinner.

But as we all know, technology can be a double-edged sword; while it frees us up to do so much more, technology has a way of taking over our lives. It fills our days with more work, and more stress. Finding the right balance is a never ending challenge, and most of us struggle mightily with it.

There are some people, however, who have figured out how to harness the power of technology, and maximize their personal productivity, without letting iPhones and apps

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utterly take over their lives. We can learn a lot from these people. In Smarter Faster Better, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg references the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics – as well as the experiences of top CEOs, four-star generals, Hollywood producers and others – to explain how and why some people are able to be so much more prolific and productive than their peers. Their secrets, which frankly have little to do with technology, may astound you.

“Productivity,” of course, means different things to different people. One person might spend an hour exercising in the morning before heading to work and call that a success. Another might opt to use that time locked in her office, returning a few e-mails and phone calls, and feel equally accomplished. A research scientist may see productivity in failed experiments, since each mistake (they hope) gets them closer to discovery,

while an engineer’s measure of productivity might focus on making an assembly line ever faster. And the list goes on. Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect and time, as we try to obtain the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s about getting things done – be it our work or our creative pursuits – without sacrificing everything we care about along the way.

Smarter Faster Better is the result of Charles Duhigg’s investigations into how productivity works, and his effort to understand why some people and companies are so much more productive than others. As he spoke to more and more people, a handful of key insights began to emerge. He noticed that people kept mentioning the same concepts over and over. Duhigg came to believe that a small number of ideas – from learning how

to self-motivate better, to using data to make better predictions about what could happen in the future – were at the core of why some people and companies get so much done. Connecting these ideas is a powerful underlying principle: Productivity isn’t about working harder, or sweating more. It doesn’t require longer hours at your desk or endless personal sacrifices. It just requires us to follow a few simple behaviors and habits.

Getting MotivatedAccording to Duhigg, becoming smarter, faster and better at everything we do starts and stops with self-motivation. People who know how to self-motivate consistently earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and are more satisfied with their families, jobs and lives.

And knowing how to decide for ourselves how to spend our limited time and energy, and then execute on those decisions, has never been more

important than it is today. In recent decades, the economy has shifted in profound ways, and large companies that once promised lifelong employment have given way to migratory careers. Today, more than a third of working Americans are freelancers, contractors, or in otherwise transitory positions; which means more and more of us are becoming our own bosses. In order to succeed in this new economy, we must learn how to set our own goals, prioritize tasks, and make choices about which projects to pursue.

What Duhigg has learned is that motivation isn’t something that some of us are born with, and others lack. In fact, it’s a behavior that can be taught and learned. We’re all equally capable of it.

“Self-help books and leadership manuals often portray self-motivation as a static feature of our personalities … but scientists say motivation

is more complicated than that,” writes Duhigg. Motivation, he explains, is more like a skill; akin to reading or writing that can be learned and honed. It turns out that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick lies in convincing ourselves that we have real authority over our actions and surroundings.

“To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control. The need for control is a biological imperative,” explained a group of Columbia University psychologists to Duhigg. When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are more confident and overcome set-backs faster. In addition, people who feel they are in control of their lives typically live longer than peers.

One of the best ways to prove to ourselves that we’re in control of our lives is by making small decisions. “Each choice, no matter how small,

reinforces the perception of control and self-determination, thereby triggering the will to act.” he explains. The significance of this insight can be seen in a series of studies conducted in nursing homes in the 1990s. Researchers were studying why some seniors thrived inside such facilities, while others experienced rapid physical and mental declines. A critical difference between the two groups of seniors was that one made more choices than the other. The seniors who chose to rebel against the rigid schedules, the set menus, and strict roles that the nursing homes tried to force upon them were branded the “subversive” group by the researchers, because so many of their decisions manifested as mini-rebellions against the status quo. One group at a Santa Fe nursing home, for instance, started every meal by trading food items among themselves in order to construct meals of their own design rather than placidly accept what had been served to them.

One resident told a researcher that he always traded his cake away because, even though he liked cake, he “would rather eat a dessert that he himself has chosen.”

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, these small acts of defiance at the Santa Fe nursing home were, relatively minor. But they were nevertheless very psychologically powerful because the subversives saw them as evidence that they were still in control of their own lives. Amazingly, these residents had arrived at the home with just as many health problems as their peers, but once inside, they lived longer, reported higher levels of happiness, and were far more intellectually engaged.

There’s a useful lesson for anyone who struggles with motivation. When your motivation is flagging, you can simply look for a choice – almost any choice – that allows you to re-exert control. For

example, if you have a bunch of unopened emails you need to respond to, choose to reply first to one from the middle of your inbox. Or, if you need to create a presentation, start by making the graphics, or do whatever’s most interesting to you. In the grand scheme of things, these are not especially important choices; what matters is believing that you’re in control.

Managing TeamsIn recent years, most workplaces have become a lot more team-focused than ever before. The average worker today might belong to a sales team, a special team planning future products, and the team overseeing the holiday party. Similarly, a busy executive might belong to a group that oversees compensation and strategy, one for hiring and firing and approving HR policies, and one that’s tasked with figuring out how to cut costs. Within most companies these days, project

teams are now the fundamental unit of self-organization.

That’s why, if you want to be smarter, faster and better, you must truly excel at managing teams. This comes down to learning how to foster healthy team dynamics.

Saturday Night Live has often been revered as a model of great team dynamics. It’s commonly cited as an example of what groups can achieve when the right conditions are in place and a team intensely bonds. If you ask the original cast members why their show was such a success, they inevitably talk about the leadership traits of producer Lorne Michaels. There’s something about him that made everything come together. He had an ability to make everyone feel heard; to make even the most self-centered actors and writers pay attention to each other. Michaels himself, still the show’s executive producer, says the reason

why Saturday Night Live has succeeded for all these years is because he literally forced people to become a team. The secret to making that happen, he says, is giving everyone a voice and teaching people to really listen to one another.

According to those that have worked with him, Michaels is almost ostentatious in his demonstrations of social sensitivity. And he expects the cast to mirror him. This creates a profound sense of “psychological security” that allows the team to gel, leading to much greater productivity.

For psychological safety to emerge amongst a group, teammates don’t have to be friends, says Duhigg. They do, however need to be sensitive listeners, and actively ensure everyone feels heard. Leaders can do a lot to reinforce this within their teams. “It seems like fairly minor stuff, but when leaders go out of their way to make

someone feel listened to, or start a meeting by saying ‘Jim, you haven’t spoken in a while, what do you think?,’ that can make a huge difference,” he writes.

If this all sounds almost too simple, that’s because it is. As it turns out, the things that make teams succeed or fail are the same from place-to-place and from culture to culture, and none if it is especially complicated. So the next time you’re leading a team – be it a neighborhood baseball team or a group of coworkers halfway around the world – think about what message your choices send. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you modeling listening? Are you being sensitive to what people think and feel, or are you using “decisive leadership” as a poor excuse for not paying as close attention to people’s feelings as you should?

It’s amazing how much you can accomplish when your whole team is rowing in the same direction.

Staying FocusedAs we mentioned at the outset of our summary, technology has penetrated nearly every aspect of our lives these days. But as technology increases, our attention span deteriorates. Studies from Yale, UCLA, Harvard and NASA prove this to be the case. In the age of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and whatever else comes next, knowing how to manage your focus is more critical than ever before.

So what’s Duhigg’s solution? Should we all throw our smartphones in the trash and abandon our social media accounts? No, nothing quite so radical. But there will be some real effort involved.

“If you want to become genuinely productive, you must first take back control of your attention

span,” writes Duhigg. One way to do this is to spend less time staring at your phone between meetings, and more time actively thinking about and anticipating what’s coming next. This simple exercise will sharpen your mental focus and lead to higher engagement and productivity. Duhigg suggests his readers cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what they expect will occur in the next meeting, or interaction with a co-worker, or so on and so forth. Create a little narrative in your head, he suggests. Then, when the interaction actually occurs, you’ll be more prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the story you’ve created in your head. The mere act of doing this will have the effect of encoding the experiences more deeply in your brain. And the more you practice this habit, the less prone you will be to unhelpful lapses in your attention span.

Goal-setting can also be immensely helpful in

terms of sharpening one’s focus. “Some 400 laboratory and field studies show that setting specific goals for oneself leads to a higher level of performance across an incredibly wide range of tasks,” explains Duhigg. The reason, in part, is because goal-setting forces people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. Former GE chief executive Jack Welch has often said that his unwavering insistence on meaningful goal-setting was the main reason his company’s stock more than tripled in eight years of his leadership tenure.

A final aspect of strengthening our focus comes from making better use of the information we have in front of us, as opposed to simply letting it wash over us. “In the past two decades the amount of information embedded in our daily lives has skyrocketed. There are smartphones that count our steps, websites that track our spending, digital maps to plot our commutes, software that watches our Web browsing, and apps to manage

our schedules. Unfortunately, however, our ability to learn from information hasn’t necessarily kept pace with its proliferation,” writes Duhigg.

Our collective inability to take advantage of information and data as it becomes more plentiful is called Information blindness. Fundamentally, this is a problem of focus.

To address it, when we encounter new information that we want to learn from, we must force ourselves to do something with the data. It’s not enough for you to simply store it on your phone and leave it at that. If you really want to lose weight, for example, force yourself to plot your daily calorie count on graph paper and you’ll be more likely to choose a salad over a cheeseburger at lunch. Or, if you read an article that’s filled with cool new ideas, force yourself to explain the concepts to your spouse, or your hairdresser, and you’ll be more likely to apply the information

to your life. When we force ourselves to engage with information (as opposed to just storing it in a database), it has the power to change our lives. The critical step lies in performing a simple operation with the data. That moment of heightened focus can yield incredible rewards.

Making Better DecisionsWe also become much smarter, faster and better when we figure out how to see into the future with just a little more accuracy and consistency. This is critical, because many of us aren’t nearly as good at predicting the future as we think, and the decisions we make can really suffer as a result.

Fortunately, there are practical ways to overcome this.

In 2011, the federal Office of National Intelligence approached a handful of universities with grant money and invited them to participate in a project “to dramatically enhance the accuracy, precision,

and timeliness of intelligence forecasts.” The basic idea was that each school would recruit a bunch of subject-matter experts, and then ask them to make predictions about the future. Researchers would study who made the most accurate forecasts and thoroughly document how they did it. Those insights, the government hoped, would help CIA analysts and other intelligence industry workers become better at their jobs. As it turned out, the study did yield remarkable insights around how to make better predictions. But not in the way that was originally imagined.

Most of the universities that participated in the program took a standard approach (i.e. they scoured their local communities for subject matter experts in areas such as foreign policy, languages and economics). Two of the universities, however, took a different tack. A group of statisticians from the Universities of Pennsylvania and California-Berkeley, working together, decided to use the

government’s money to train regular people to become better forecasters. They called themselves “the Good Judgment Project,” and rather than recruit subject matter experts, the GJP solicited thousands of regular “Joes and Janes” – i.e., housewives, ballet dancers, retirees and the like – and enrolled them in online statistics courses that showed them different ways of thinking about the future. (They learned to think in terms of probabilities, as opposed to absolute certainties.) Then, after the training, those participants were asked to answer the same foreign affairs questions as the experts. As you may have guessed, the GJP participants outperformed the so-called experts by a wide margin in terms of the accuracy of the predictions they made.

“Most people are kind of sloppy when they think about the future,” explains Duhigg. The goal of the GJP’s probabilistic training was to show people how to turn their raw intuitions into statistical

estimates. The GJP’s training modules instructed people in various methods for calculating the odds of a potential future outcome. GJP participants came to understand, fundamentally, that the future isn’t necessarily one thing. Rather it is a multitude of possibilities that often contradict one another until one of them actually comes true. This is probabilistic thinking in a nutshell. It’s the ability to hold multiple future outcomes in your mind and estimate their relative likelihoods. “We’re not accustomed to thinking about multiple futures,” says Duhigg. “But when we learn to see the future in terms of probabilities, as opposed to certainties, we can quickly improve the accuracy of our predictions by as much as 50 percent. This, in turn, allows us to make much better decisions.”

Be More CreativeIf you want to be smarter, better and faster than your competition, the final piece of the puzzle is to

fully harness your own creative potential, and to unlock the creativity of those you lead.

As Duhigg himself would be the first to admit, creativity can’t be reduced to a formula. At its core, creativity and innovation needs novelty, spontaneity, surprise, and other elements that can’t be meticulously planned in advance. There is no five-step checklist to follow. But, we can and must create the conditions that help creativity and innovation to flourish.

We know, for example, that innovation often occurs when old ideas are mixed in new ways. We also know that, sometimes, a little shake-up or disturbance can help jolt us out of the ruts that even the most creative thinkers among us occasionally fall into. So sometimes all it takes to unleash creativity amongst ourselves and the members of our team is to deliberately cause a little shake-up.

To illustrate how this can work in practice, Duhigg uses a fairly recent example from Walt Disney Animation Studios. Disney is arguably one of the most creative places in America, but not by accident. This was certainly apparent with the making of their blockbuster animated film Frozen.

Seven months into the development of the script for Frozen, with the production clock ticking away, the team of Disney writers had utterly and completely hit a wall. They’d successfully written the first two-thirds or so of the movie, and overcame a series of hurdles along the way. They’d already figured out how to make the main characters, Anna and Elsa, likable to the audience, while simultaneously creating friction between them and slowly driving them apart to create the tension the film needed. They knew how to portray the two sisters as hopeful, yet troubled. They had even transformed Olaf – the magical snowman created by Elsa – into a lovable side-

kick. Everything was falling into place. Except they had absolutely no idea how to end the film. And so they were stuck.

“It was this huge puzzle,” explained Andrew Millstein, president of Disney Studios. They tried everything to break the logjam, but the Frozen team had become so comfortable in their vision of the sisters – and so relieved to have figured out the movie’s basic tenets – that they had lost their ability to see other paths.

This problem is likely familiar to anyone who has worked on a big creative project. You get so devoted to what you’ve already created that your willingness to keep taking risks starts to fade. You start to play it safe, and your creativity gets put on ice (pardon the pun).

But the Disney execs had seen all of this happen before, which is why they knew it was time to make a change. “We knew we had to jolt

everyone,” said Millstein, so they promoted their head writer to co-director on the film, and brought in a new head writer. It came as a big shock to the whole team, but that was exactly the point. The Disney executives hoped that by disrupting the team’s dynamics just enough, they could reignite their creative energies … and it worked. Disney had once again created the conditions that engender creativity, proving that, as a studio, they are smarter, faster and better than just about anyone else in the business.

ConclusionIn this summary, we’ve heard from Charles Duhigg about a number of tools and techniques for improving our focus, decision-making and creativity. It’s these sorts of skills and habits that can ultimately lead to greater productivity. And across all of these concepts, there’s also been a recurring theme: Real productivity emerges when

we push ourselves to think and behave differently.

If Duhigg is right, in order to become smarter, better and faster we don’t need to invest in the latest, greatest smartphone, tablet or 3D printer. More technology isn’t the answer. If we look deeper within ourselves, we can all become more productive. And now we know where to start.