This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

Each week, I grill thought-leaders and results-getters to discover specific, actionable insights that boost work performance.

Jul 24
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884: How to Beat Distraction and Make Every Moment More Fulfilling with Dr. Cassie Holmes

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Cassie Holmes shares powerful strategies for finding more meaning and fulfillment from your hours.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why more time doesn’t make us more happy
  2. Two tricks to make drudgery feel more enjoyable
  3. How to keep distractions from hijacking your attention

About Cassie

Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, an award-winning teacher and researcher on time and happiness, and author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

Happier Hour was selected as a Forbes Must-Read and a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read for 2022, as well as an Amazon Best Business Book of 2022. It’s also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Today Show, CBS Mornings, and much other media.

Holmes’s academic research has been widely published in lead academic journals and featured in such outlets as The Economist, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. The course that she developed and now teaches, Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, is among UCLA’s most popular for MBAs. Prior to joining UCLA, Cassie was a tenured faculty member at Wharton, and she has a Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and a B.A. from Columbia.

Resources Mentioned

Cassie Holmes Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Cassie, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Cassie Holmes
Hi, Pete. Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, I’m excited to talk about the wisdom in your latest work here, Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. I understand you had some happy hours, hopefully, recently on vacation. What’s the story here?

Cassie Holmes
Well, getting back from the fourth of July weekend, we had a great time up in Carmel Valley with good friends back from our business school days and their kids and our kids. And we picked up our kids from sleepaway camp. This is their first time away, and they were dirty but happy, and it was just fun to be outside in the sunshine with live music and yummy food and friends. What better than that?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that does sound great. I was just going to ask, what are some themes associated with your happiest hours? And maybe you’ve already listed a few. Any other key ingredients?

Cassie Holmes
Yeah, we’ll pick up on some of these, probably many times during our conversation because they’re sort of goes back to those simple things of those relationships with the people that we love, noticing those simple moments and making the most of them. And so, yeah, it’s people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Makes sense, people. I hear you. So, tell us, as you’re putting together and researching Happier Hour, any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you made on the journey?

Cassie Holmes
Yes. So, I think that what Happier Hour is, it’s sort of me pulling together my entire career of research on how we think about and spend our time for greater happiness and joy in our lives. And what’s interesting about that is that my relationship with time actually started off as not very happy at all. In fact, I felt, for me, for my own personal happiness, time proved to be this single biggest barrier.

And I share a story that I used to open the book which I think many can relate to and very much motivated my research agenda since, as well as writing the book to help others by applying what I found in my research to their lives, is that it was this day earlier in my career when I was still an assistant professor living in Philly. I was at Wharton at the time, and I traveled up to New York to give a talk that day.

And I was sandwiched between back-to-back meetings and then I’m rushing from those meetings, then to this networking dinner, and then rushing to catch the very last train that would get me home to my four-month-old and my husband asleep in Philly. And I made the train that night, but I remember it so vividly, I was absolutely exhausted.

And I was like, “I don’t know if I can keep up between the pressures of work, wanting to be a good partner, wanting to be a good parent, wanting to be a good friend, the never-ending piles of chores.” There simply were not enough hours in the day to get that all done, let alone to do any of it, while, let alone to enjoy any of it along the way.

And that feeling, which now in my research what we’ve been sort of unpacking, is what we referred to as time poverty. It’s this acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. And it’s a really bad feeling in my experience of that on the train that night. I actually considered quitting. I considered quitting my entire sort of career that I worked so hard for, thinking that, “If only I had a whole lot more time, then I would be happier.”

But before I sort of marched into my boss’ office, and like, “I quit.” And before telling my husband, “We need to pack up our house. We’re moving to the beach,” where this relaxing existence that I was daydreaming about would occur, I was like, “Is it true? Is it true that people who have a whole lot more time are, in fact, happier?” And I recognize this is an empirical question and, one, as a social psychologist, that I could test and should test.

And so, I did, and I recruited a couple of my favorite collaborators, Hal Hershfield and Marissa Sharif, and we looked at, “What’s the relationship between the amount of discretionary time people have and their happiness?” And what we found across our studies, including our analyses of the American Time Use Survey data that looks at, for tens of thousands of working as well as non-working Americans, how they spent a regular day, and we could calculate how much time they spent on discretionary activities and relate that to their happiness.

And what we found was, to answer your question, a surprising finding, was this surprising pattern of results, which was basically an upside-down U shape. And this is interesting because…

Cassie Holmes
What it means is that happiness goes down on both ends of the spectrum. So, yes, people with too little time are less happy, those time poor amongst us. But what was also interesting was that other side, and that surprising side was that there is such a thing as having too much time, that we found that those with a whole lot of discretionary time were also less happy.

And, then digging into the data, they’re unhappy for different reasons, and we can talk about that, but I think it’s absolutely surprising and an important finding for us to keep in mind, in those sorts of hurried days where we do feel time poor, it sort of cautions us away from quitting, and tells us that, in fact, for greater happiness, it’s not about necessarily having a whole lot more time available to spend however you want. In fact, it’s actually how you invest the time that you have available.

And that’s actually then what propelled my research agenda since, it’s, “How do we invest hours of our days so that we feel more satisfied in our days, so that we feel joy along the way, so that, looking back at the end of the week, even if we’re busy, we feel fulfilled as opposed to just having an overly full schedule?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Cassie, there’s so much good stuff in here. Oh, we’re going to have fun digging into this.

Cassie Holmes
Where do we start?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Cassie, I don’t know if this surprises you but I’ve actually been on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use survey numerous times.

Cassie Holmes
Oh, great.

Pete Mockaitis
For my own fun. That’s right. I’ve researched things for fun. And so, first, let’s just confirm that this is legit, if I may, because you’ll know this so much better than I. Because when I’m up in there, I am surprised at certain numbers, like, “How is that even possible?” Like, the average amount, hours per day for civilian population, spent on housework is 0.57 hours.
So, can you maybe, first of all, for the sliver of the audience who has nerdly crawled all over the American Time Use Survey, can you confirm that it is more or less valid and legit and share why I see some numbers that I find hard to believe?

Cassie Holmes
Yeah, it’s a great question, and when you do dig into the data, and I actually would say, even before you dig in, if you’re not digging in, if you’re just looking sort of at that first glance at averages and some of the maxes and means of the various variables, that’s where you’re like, “Well, what the heck? How is it possible?” For instance, in some of our analyses of the amount of discretionary time people have that they are spending 20 hours of discretionary time, which discretionary time are spending on activities that people want to do.

And so, I’m like, “Well, when do they sleep? They only have four hours of sleep and there are chores.” And for many of us, it’s more than 0.5 hours. So, what I would say is that this is based off of data averaging across a whole bunch of people, and it’s sort of capturing a particular day. And what you need to do is look at, “What are the patterns?” like, the overall patterns so that you’re not relying on one weirdo who has literally, I don’t know, watched TV for 20 hours in a row, discretionary activity, and slept only four hours and not done anything else.

It’s you’re looking at, “All right, what are some actual interactions and moderations? And who is feeling these particular ways? And how are they spending their time?” Now, what we wanted to make sure is that, so that we’re not sort of relying on any one idiosyncratic person and/or relying so heavily on just averages, looking at, “Okay, if we cut up the data in different ways, how does this pattern play out?”

But what’s so interesting is this pattern, this such thing, or this finding that there’s too little or too much that is bad and that is associated with less happiness, is quite telling.

And going to how we even calculate, “What does it mean to spend time on discretionary activities?” We didn’t want to rely on our own idiosyncrasies of, “What are activities that people want to do?” versus obligatory activities, activities that folks have to do. And so, what we did is that we took all activities from the American Time Use Survey, so it’s like 139 activities, and we presented them to a sample of 500 individuals, and we asked them, “Is this a discretionary activity? Is it something that you want to do?” and we said that we would count any activity that more than 90% agreed was discretionary.

And those activities that more than 90% identified as discretionary included passive leisure, so this is watching TV, relaxing. It is also, though, includes active leisure, like playing sports, engaging in a hobby, exercise. It also includes spending time with family and friends. So, this is what we calculate for each individual. Now we’re getting into the weeds. You have me start talking about data which people never ask about.

But actually, interestingly, this pattern emerges, this negative quadratic relationship, also when we use the sort of 75% of people agree, so it is robust. This having too little time is bad, and digging into the data for why with additional studies, the answer is that, for those who are time poor this is no surprise, it is heightened feelings of stress. How could it be that other side of the spectrum, how could having a whole lot of hours in the day to spend exactly how you want it be associated with less happiness?

And what we found is that we are driven to be somewhat productive. We are averse to being idle. And so, when we spend all the hours of our days, day in and day out, this isn’t vacation, with nothing to show for, it undermines our sense of purpose. And from that, we feel less productive. And without that sense of purpose, we feel less satisfied.

And what’s interesting is that we saw, as additional sort of evidence to this role of purpose and wanting to be somewhat productive with the time that we spend, we found that those who actually engage in discretionary activities that they are “productive and worthwhile” like exercise, like engaging in an enriching hobby, actually, like investing in relationships, spending time with family and friends. You don’t see the too-much-time effect. It’s actually the too-much-time effect is driven by spending a whole lot of those hours in the day in ways that are discretionary, things that you want to do, but it’s more of that passive leisure.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting. So, folks who are spending tons of discretionary time can break the rules of the upside-down U if that discretionary time is high quality, family, friends, hobbies instead of Netflix binging.

Cassie Holmes
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And then, also a quick data clarification, how are we measuring “happy”?

Cassie Holmes
Yes. So, with the American Time Use Survey, it’s people reporting their…I think, it was on a five-point scale of how satisfied they are with life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, lay it on us then, on the upside-down U, what is the magic sweet spot that puts us in the top happy spot we want to be? How much discretionary activity time?

Cassie Holmes
Well, we find that, and I don’t want to sort of hang my hat on these exact numbers, but in the American Time Use Survey data, we found that between two and five hours of discretionary time is that sweet spot, that is those with less than approximately two hours of discretionary time in the day, they were less happy because of those heightened feelings of stress. Those with more than approximately five hours of discretionary time in the day were also less happy because of a lacking sense of purpose.

But I would say that what is more, I think, the bigger takeaway here is that it is not so much about how much available time you have or how much discretionary time you have, it’s really when you’re engaging in activities that feel worthwhile. And they can feel worthwhile from different sources. They can feel worthwhile because they bring you joy. They can feel worthwhile because they give you that sense that you are being productive and contributing. They can feel worthwhile when rightly placed because they are rejuvenating and relaxing.

So, it’s about identifying for yourself what are those worthwhile ways of spending, but also when you’re spending that time, how you are engaged? What is your mindset? And that very high level is the answer here. And then I would love to talk about some of the strategies for folks to identify for themselves, “Okay, what are those worthwhile activities?” for you so we’re not relying on averages across people, or even averages across a particular example of any type of activity, but also some strategies that, when you’re spending that time, how do you make the most of it, how do you make it so that those hours that you’re spending are, in fact, heavier.

And yet another sort of answer for you. You asked me, whether it’s some surprising findings, perhaps even the most surprising. I think one was that too much time is a thing, and that having a whole lot more time isn’t necessarily better. But another is that there is incredible amount of happiness available to us in the time that we’re already spending but so often we’re missing and not noticing it.

And so, the extraordinary happiness that can come from ordinary moments, if you’re paying attention, if we are engaged in the activity in that time in such a way to make the most of it, can be so, so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, that’s beautiful. Let’s do exactly that. First, let’s talk about worthwhile. How do we get really clear on what is worthwhile and not worthwhile for us individually?

Cassie Holmes
Yeah. So, the research tracks people’s time, so how you’re spending your time over the course of the day, and whether you’re feeling across the day, so researchers can pull out, on average, whether those activities that tend to be associated with the most positive emotion, what are those activities that tend to be associated with the most negative emotion.

That research points to our happiest activities being social connection. So, whether intimately or physically, as well as spending time with family and friends. Our least happy activities tend to be commuting, work, and housework, which is a bummer because those three activities together comprise a bulk of our work week. But, again, as I said before, those are based off of averages.

So, the average person as well as the average example of any one of those activities, but, of course, within your work hours, there are some activities that are going to be more fulfilling and worthwhile, and others that are aren’t. So, what I encourage folks to do is to track your own time over the course of a week, writing down in those super simple PDF sheet that you can download from my website, if helpful.

Basically, for every half hour, writing down, “What are you doing? What’s the activity?” and being more specific than just working or socializing. If you’re working, what is the work task? If you’re socializing, whom are you with and what are you doing? And, as importantly, rating, as you’re coming out of that half hour, coming out of that activity, on a ten-point scale, how happy are you? And not the sort of, “Oh, it was just enjoyable.”

When people are rating their happiness, it is picking up on how satisfied you feel, how worthwhile was it. And so, while, admittedly, it is tedious to track your time over the course of the week, it’s totally worth it because you have this fantastic personalized dataset that you can look for yourself, looking across your activities or your rating sheet, your time tracker, you can see what are those activities that got your highest ratings.

And what’s as helpful is not just looking at the particular activities that are sort of your highest ratings versus your lowest ratings, but what are some commonalities among them? So, you might find, for instance, like when I did this, I found for myself it wasn’t socializing per se that was necessarily fun. For me, it was one-on-one time whether with a friend, whether with a family member, as opposed to the whole group going out.

Also, I found in my work hours, actually going on a coffee walk with a colleague as we’re talking about research, that is super fun time versus the group lunches at work, or the group dinners at home, or cocktail parties. And so, I found that, for me, actually, one-on-one time was very worthwhile. And by tracking your time, you can identify, “Okay, what are the sources of fulfillment and joy in the way you spend your time?”

You can also see just how much time you’re spending on your various activities so you can pull out, “Holy cow, I had no idea that I was spending X amount of time on said activity that is not fun, and, in many cases, not necessary.” And this is, for those of us who are time poor, it’s very helpful to, like, “Okay, this is time that I can reclaim and reallocate.”

Can I share an analogy to highlight just how important this is?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Cassie Holmes
Okay. Because our time is limited, and there’s an analogy that I love and I continue to touch back on in my own time spending decisions as well as I actually teach a course to our MBAs and executive MBAs at UCLA that is pulling the research together, Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design is what the course is called.

And in the first day of the course, I share this short film which shows this analogy so well. And in the film, a professor walks into his classroom, and on the desk in front of the class, he puts a large jar. And then into the jar, he pours golf balls, and then he asked his students, “Is the jar full?” The students nod their head because it looks full, but nope. Then he pours pebbles into the jar, and the pebbles fill the spaces between the golf balls up to the top. He asked his students again, “Is the jar full?” the students nod their head, “Yes, it looks full.” But nope.

Then he pours sand into the jar, and the sand fills all the spaces between the golf balls, between the pebbles up to the top, “Is the jar full?” By this point, the students were like laughing, and, “Yes, the jar looks full.” But, no, there was one more step. He pulls out two bottles of beer, he opens one, pours it into the jar, he opens the other, and then he goes and sort of perches himself on the front of the desk, and he explains, and he takes a sip of the beer.

And he explains, “This jar represents the time of your life. The golf balls are those things that really matter to you, your relationships with your family, your friendships, the work that you do that is so in line with your purpose and your goals that feels really worthwhile. The pebbles are the other important things in your life, like your job, your house. The sand is everything else. The sand is all of that stuff that fills your time without you even thinking about, like, unintentionally, without you even choosing it.”

And what’s really important to know is that, had he poured the sand into the jar first, all of the golf balls would not have fit. That’s to say that if we let our time get filled, it absolutely will get filled but not necessarily with the stuff that matters to you. And so, what you need to do is put your golf balls into your time jar first, into your schedule of the week. Put those activities that are so worthwhile, those activities that do connect you with these people that are so important to you.

The work hours, like the work project or tasks that is so important to you and as fulfilling and will sort of propel you forward in what matters to you, put those into your schedule first because sand will absolutely fill everything else, but at least this way, at the end of the week, even if you were busy, you can look back and feel fulfilled because you’ve invested in those things that matter to you.

So, what the time tracking exercise does is it allows you to identify what are your golf balls, what are those things that you can put and should and must from a sense of satisfaction and offsetting burnout and a sense of fulfillment and happiness, is you have to put those into your schedule and protect time for them. Others won’t do that for you. You need to take the responsibility for that. And then, yes, this other stuff will fill in.

My sand is email. Others, when I have my students do this, their sand is whether it’s social media or meetings that are not all that necessary, but it’s so important that our weeks don’t just get filled with sand and keeping us busy but not necessarily spending our time on those things that matter. And then one of the students was like, “Professor, what’s the deal with the beer?” And I was like, “I’m so glad you asked.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I wanted to ask. Glad you went here.

Cassie Holmes
Yup. And the beer goes to show that no matter how busy you feel, how full your schedule is, you always have time for a drink with a friend. So, whether it’s beer or soda, it’s just to make this point that, absolutely, amidst the busyness of our lives, it’s those people that we do and can and must sort of make time for.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, I also have to hear about, when you talked about how we engage with things in our mindset can improve anything and everything, maybe even…

Cassie Holmes
No, overstatement but not, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, even the commuting and the work and the housework, even if you’re only spending 0.57 hours on that housework, like the “average American.”

Cassie Holmes
I agree with you. Who is that lucky person?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m putting my hat on those lots of zeroes from folks who are traveling, like, “Hey, I don’t have to clean my hotel room.

Cassie Holmes
It’s also averaging. Yes, there’s a lot of zeroes because this is picking up the American Time Use Survey data. It’s picking up on a day, and you might be catching people, whether they’re on a holiday or on the day that they’re not doing housework.

But, that aside, there are, of course, ideally, sure we would spend all of our days and our entire schedule on golf balls, but that’s not the reality, right? We do have work to do. And there are strategies to make these times that are less fun more fun.

Bundling is a super easy one. So, this is taking from some of the motivation research by Katy Milkman and her colleagues, and it’s such a simple idea that is so effective is taking an activity you don’t want to do, like commuting, and bundle it with an activity that you do want to do so that that time itself feels more fun.

Like, commuting. Instead of sitting in the car and, like, mindlessly flipping through radio stations, if instead you turn on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
There we go, Cassie. Well-played. Thank you.

Cassie Holmes
Yup. Then, all of a sudden, that time in the car feels more worthwhile. Or, one of my readers, she reached out, she’s like, the bundling strategy was so awesome because her husband, all of a sudden, ironing was his favorite activity of the week because, what he did, Saturday afternoon, he would set up the ironing board in front of the TV, and that was when he watched sports. So, it was bundling the chore of ironing with watching sports. And then, all of a sudden, that time was his sort of delectable time that he got to watch sports and nobody got to bother him about it.

There’s also bundling during our work hours. So, I talked about social connection is so important for happiness. For many Americans, a lot of their hours spent working are not particularly happy. And figuring out, “Okay, how can we bundle social connection into our work days?” And this is so important. Gallup has a funny question in their poll, which asks, “Do you have a best friend at work?” And I say it’s funny because it sounds like something my fourth grader would ask, like, “Do you have a best friend?”

But it is so predictive. And I’m sure the numbers aren’t too far off, but pre-pandemic, only two out of 10 Americans said that they had a best friend at work. Those who did were more than twice more engaged in their jobs. They’re better performers on their jobs. They’re more satisfied at work. And job satisfaction is a very big predictor of overall life satisfaction.

If we can infuse friendship into our work hours, then that is, like, I’m framing it as bundling, but then that work itself becomes more fun, you look forward to the work day because you get to see your friend. When you are sort of confronted with challenges in work, which, of course, we all are, you have that person that you can rely on and sort of find that social support. So, it’s like wins are more fun and losses are less painful when you have friendship in the workplace. So, that’s one way.

Another is identifying your purpose. So, I know it sounds so lofty but, actually, in the book. So, Happier Hour, as I mentioned, I teach this course Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, and each week I give my students an experiential assignment so that they can apply these empirical findings to their own lives and feel the benefits of it. And every time I’ve taught the course, I see significant boosts in the sense of meaning, happiness, a sense of connection, a sense of accomplishment.

And in Happier Hours, since not everyone can take my course at UCLA, is I share those assignments as exercises in the book so that readers can apply them. So, the time tracking exercise is one. There’s another exercise that helps you identify your purpose, and it’s called the Five Whys Exercise. And so, what it is it’s you asking yourself, like, “Okay, what do you do for your job? Why do you do that?” And then your answer for that, you ask yourself, “But why is that important?”

And once you ask yourself why, five layers into really why you do the work that you do, what it uncovers for you as an individual is what really motivates you, “What is your purpose? Like, what is your why?” And the reason that this is so helpful is because it makes even those un-fun parts of your job more fun because you feel better because they feel more worthwhile, you know why you’re doing it.

So, when I did this exercise, I found it so helpful because it helped me identify my own purpose. So, what is my job? I’m a business school professor. Why does one do that? Well, to create knowledge through research and disseminate knowledge through teaching. And then I ask myself, “But why is that important?” And then my answer to that, why is that, and what I uncovered is that, for me, the purpose of my work is to create knowledge about what makes people happy, and to disseminate knowledge about what makes people happy.

This is helpful for a couple of reasons with respect to time, is that it helps me filter out what are those activities, work activities, that I should be saying yes to or should be saying no to if it’s something that is in line with helping me create knowledge about what makes people happy or disseminate knowledge about what makes people happy, then I will do it. Like, joining you and our time today, this is about disseminating knowledge about what makes people happy.

But not only does it help me decide what activities to spend my time on, it makes even un-fun work activities more palatable and more fun because I know the why of it. So, email, I do not like. That feels like sand. It can absorb my entire work day, work week, and I feel like I got nothing accomplished. But when I’m like, “Okay, actually, email with a research collaborator, that’s about creating knowledge about what makes people happy. Emails with my students, oh, that’s about disseminating knowledge about what makes people happy.”

So, all of a sudden, that particular activity of email feels better because I know the why of it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, with the five whys, so you lay it on your purposes to discover and disseminate knowledge about what makes people happy. And I don’t know if we landed there from the third or the fourth why.

Cassie Holmes
That’s the fifth one.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess, if I may, what happens if I say why again to that? Why does that matter?

Cassie Holmes
Because I want to spread happiness. And, for me, that’s really important. And what’s really helpful about this exercise is that what you identify for your purpose, it is unique to you. It doesn’t have to align with other people’s notions of what is the sort of ultimate worthwhile metric of success, which is so helpful because this idea of what success means, there are so many dimensions that go into it, and there will always be individuals who are doing better than you on one of those dimensions, but those are things that might not actually even matter to you.

So, what this, by identifying your own purpose, that’s what you should use when you see a gap between what you’re doing and what you aspire towards, that should be the motivator. When you actually see that you’re making progress, it’s so much more fulfilling compared to what we generally do is rely on social comparison, and like, “How am I doing in life?” or, “How am I doing in my job?” By looking at how you’re doing compared to others, which through social comparison, it’s one of the cognitive biases, or, in this case, our cognitive tendencies, our psychological tendencies that can really serve to undermine our happiness.

Now, if your question of like, “Well, why is spreading happiness important?” then I can tell you my seventh why of pointing to research that shows that happiness, while some might think as sort of this frivolous or even selfish pursuit, research shows that when you feel happier, when you take care of your emotional wellbeing, it allows you to show up better for those around you in the work that you do.

Being happier has positive consequences across our domains of life. Study shows that it makes us perform better in the office. So, when we are made to feel happier, it makes us more creative, we become more adaptive in our problem-solving, we’re more collaborative. Happy employees are more engaged, they’re more likely to show up at work, they’re less likely to call in sick. And so, it helps in not only you in your work but organizations.

It also helps us in our interpersonal relationships. When we feel happier, we like others more, we are liked by others, it makes us nicer, and there’s even work that shows that when we feel happier, it has positive health benefits, too, that we’re more likely to stick to our treatment routines, we have higher thresholds for pain, we react better to physiological stressors. Happier people live longer.

And so, by helping people be happier, based off of the research not just by opinion, based off of the research, then it allows them to not only feel happier, which is such a wonderful outcome, but also it allows them to show up better within their organizations and within their family, so it’s sort of spreading this goodness. So, that’s, like, my eighth why.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. Well, I guess what I’m driving at with the whys is that all sounds super awesome. But just to illustrate the technique, I will say, and why do all those things matter, Cassie?

Cassie Holmes
I felt very satisfied with my fifth layer. But, yes, it’s really helpful because when individuals do this, it uncovers for them what drives them in their work. And, oftentimes, that first layer of why is your job description, or it can be some people are like, “Well, it’s to make money.” It’s like, “Well, why is that particular job the way that you’re looking to make money?” Or, it can even help uncover what’s really driving you in wanting financial security. If it’s like ultimately to make it so that your kids are less stressed, or if you’re going in the job description route, like, “Well, why does that matter to you?”

So often, in just two layers more of whys, folks identify for themselves, like, “Oh, the thing that actually matters to me is this.” And in recognizing that, that can help you figure out, all right, what are those work projects that you want to take on because they are going to help propel you in your particular direction that is “success” for you and are in line with your goals and values.

One of the most painful ways, actually, in the time tracking exercise when people are looking across those least happy activities of theirs, what the dimensions, the sources of the unhappiness, a common one is a waste of time. That is, like, you spent your time on something that just felt meaningless and unnecessary. Those are the same things but they show up.

And so, in the workplace, for example, those meetings that are like, “Oh, my gosh, that was such a waste of an hour,” those are the work hours that bring those averages way down because it’s like, “Ugh, my time is precious.” All of our time is precious. The hours of our days sum up to the years of our lives, so how we spend our hours is how we spend our lives. And when those hours are wasted, that’s the thing that’s sort of a soul sucking.

And so, whether during the work day or even outside of work, the social media often gets picked up as the sort of like people reflect back, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, that felt such a waste and it felt not good.” And this isn’t someone else being like, “You shouldn’t be on social media, or you shouldn’t spend 10 hours a night watching TV.” This is in their own ratings.

And what’s interesting is also in the time tracking, like one student in the reflection piece afterwards, they’re like, “I thought an activity that would be really fun was actually less fun than it was.” So, they thought that TV was their happy time, but they realized that after that first hour, all subsequent hours were actually quite unhappy.

And then there were these activities that they dreaded, that in their ratings, they actually got nines and tens, like socializing. This person dreaded socializing. This person dreaded exercising. But then, in coming out of these activities, they’re actually, apparently, according to their own ratings, actually made them feel really great and fulfilled and is worth the time even when we feel like they don’t have a lot of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, that is powerful when we have those surprises come up. And I’m thinking about Dr. David Burns’ Feeling Good. There’s a lot of exercises along those lines which, “Hey, surprise, this thing you were procrastinating wasn’t that horrible, was it? Hmm, how about that?” Or, “Surprise, exercise and socializing is amazing.”

Cassie Holmes
What I think that would be yet another helpful strategy in terms of where, as I mentioned, so like we want to not only identify and spend our time on those activities that are worthwhile, but also how when we are engaging in those activities make them worthwhile because a whole lot of the time we’re distracted.

So, research shows that we are distracted, not thinking about what we are currently doing, almost 47% of the time, that is almost half of the time. And so, in this research, what they did was they would ping people over the course of their day, and ask, “What are you doing?” as well as “What are you thinking about? Are you thinking about what you’re currently doing? Or are you thinking about something else? And how happy are you?”

And, as I mentioned, people are not thinking about what they’re doing a whole lot of the time. More than half of the time, or almost half of the time, they are not thinking about what they’re currently doing. And also, what was interesting is that people are less happy when their mind is wandering than when they are engaged in their activity.

And so, if you’re thinking about, like, “Oh, my gosh, we’re just at this so much of the time.” And if you’re spending time on the golf ball, on something that matters to you, but you’re missing it because your mind is somewhere else, like planning for what’s next or stressing about what’s next, then you’re missing that moment and the time that you’re spending.

One of the big sources, a huge source of distractions are our cellphones. These are these very handy devices that allow us to get so much done, and by being able to constantly do other things and be aware of what other people are doing on social media, because you’re like, “Oh, my gosh,” at every moment, there are other things that you could and maybe should be doing, it draws us out of the moment.

And so, something that is very effective is actually carving out time as no-phone zones, as in putting the phone away, out of sight, which makes it more out of mind so that you can be more engaged in what you’re doing. This helps during the work day, like for that important work that you’re doing, that needs your deep thinking.

Put your phone on silent away. Close out of emails so that you don’t get those interruptions that are pulling you out of the moment, that are keeping you from getting into flow, that flow state where you’re so engaged in what you’re doing you lose sense of time, and that’s when you’re most creative, that’s when you’re at your best. But it’s not just during the work day, it’s like on in the evenings when you’re with your family, or weekends, us carving out, putting your phones away, making them no-phone zones so that when you’re spending that time, your mind isn’t somewhere else.

So often, something I mentioned earlier is another really important and perhaps surprising finding is that a lot of our happiest moments are in very ordinary activities. So, even if you forget time tracking, just reflecting, thinking back over the last two weeks, when did you feel the most joy? So often when I ask people to reflect, their joyful activities are so mundane. One of my most joyful activities is my weekly coffee date with my seven-year-old daughter.

And this started when she was really little, borne out of a very functional routine on my way of dropping her at her preschool, before going into the office, I wanted caffeine. And so, we would stop at the local coffee shop, and it was just 30 minutes that was time for the two of us. She got her hot chocolate, I have my flat white, we munch on croissants, and we’re chatting. It’s like the two of us together.

And this routine, we turned into this treasured ritual. And we actually went, today is Thursday, we went this morning. Four years later, we still do this. And it’s just 30 minutes but it’s so powerful in affecting how satisfied I am and how happy I feel in my days. And what’s interesting is often though happiness comes out of these ordinary moments, so often we miss them because we’re distracted or because we’re subject to hedonic adaptation, that is our tendency to get used to things over time.

When we do the same thing again and again, we are with the same person over and over, we stop noticing them so much. They don’t have as strong of an emotional impact on us. Now, it’s good that we adapt in the face of negative experiences and activities because it makes us more resilient, but it’s bad when we adapt to the good stuff because we stop noticing, because it leads us to miss out on the joy that’s right there in the time we’re spending.

And I share a couple in Happier Hour a couple of exercises or strategies to help offset hedonic adaptations so that we do continue to find joy in our joys in life, and one of them is counting times left. Because, so often, because these are everyday experiences, we assume they will continue to happen every day just in the way that they are, but that’s not true. Time passes and our circumstances change.

And so, in counting times left, first identify this activity that brings you joy, then calculate, “How many times have you done this in your life thus far?” So, for my coffee days with my daughter, Lita, we’ve done it for over a bunch of years now. And then counting that as well as during my maternity leave where every day I would bundle it up and go to the coffee shop for sanity. I calculated we’ve gone on about 400 coffee days together so far.

Then the next step is, calculate, “How many times do you have left in your life to do this, accounting for factors that will change in your circumstances?” And if your joyful activity involves someone else, accounting for factors that will change in their circumstances. And so, I calculate it, so Lita is now seven. When she’s 12, I suspect she’ll probably rather go to the coffee shop with her friends instead of me. And then she’s going to go off to college, and then she’s going to go live in New York, wherever it is. I calculate we have about 230 coffee dates together left.

And then the last step in this exercise is calculate, of your total times, what percentage do you have left. I realize that Lita and I have 36% of our coffee dates together left. That’s way less than half and she’s only seven years old. Now, what’s the effect of this? It is, at first, you’re like, “Meh, sad.” But the positive effect far outweighs any initial sadness because what it does is it motivates me to make the time. This is a golf ball, I put it in my schedule. I am not taking meetings before 9:00 o’clock on Thursday mornings. Actually, it’s summer so we could do it on Thursday now that she’s not in preschool anymore and school starts earlier. It’s moved to Saturday mornings, in general.

But it makes me make the time. No matter how busy the week seems, that we spend this half hour together. We prioritize it. Also, it affects how I engage during that time because, knowing that this time is precious, knowing that these dates, these minutes that we have together are, in fact, limited in this sort of lovely connecting way, I’m like my phone is away. So, this is a no-phone zone.

And, also, that sort of constant to-do list that runs in my mind, always thinking about planning for what’s next gets quieted because I’m like, “This is the time that matters, not what’s happening next.” I draw my attention back to the here and now so that I don’t miss it.

And, as I said, from the outset, it is those connections, those relationships that are so crucial to our happiness, whether it’s having a best friend at work, or having those people in our lives whom we love and who we feel loved by, that it absolutely makes it feel worthwhile.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Cassie Holmes
I love the quote by Abraham Lincoln, or he’s said to have quoted, “People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be,” because what I think that shows is that happiness is a choice, and if we’re intentional with how we spend our time, we can choose to be happier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Cassie Holmes
Well, my own book, Happier Hour but also, I love reading fiction. And there’s a book called The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which references the life and work of Virginia Woolf, but it’s actually I love the novel because it picks up on sort of what I said today where there’s so much life that is lived in those moments, lived within the hours of our days that color our sense of satisfaction and purpose and the story of our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to contact you or get in touch, where would you point them?

Cassie Holmes
I would point them to my website, CassieMHolmes.com, and there is where my research is, you can find more information about my book Happier Hour. And then I am on LinkedIn, so you can connect with me and follow me on LinkedIn. I’m not on other social media because, in my time tracking, I found that wasn’t fun time for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Cassie Holmes
I would say identify those hours or those activities within your day that bring you that sense of purpose and joy, and invest in those times wholly and protect time for those times.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cassie, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you many happier hours.

Cassie Holmes
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. This was fun.

Jul 20
0

883: How to Thrive in Uncertainty and Chaos with Dan Thurmon

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Dan Thurmon shares powerful tools to make chaos your ally.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to reframe the stresses of uncertainty
  2. How to break the patterns of negative self-talk
  3. The tiny language shifts that make a huge difference

About Dan

Dan Thurmon is the founder and President of Motivation Works, Inc, a company that helps leaders and their organizations move confidently through change and transformation, so they become, achieve, and contribute MORE. His clients include Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Honeywell, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Marriott, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Prudential, State Farm, and Walmart.

He’s delivered thousands of presentations across six continents for audiences including world leaders, Fortune 500 companies, entrepreneurs, educators, and even troops on the front lines of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2011, he was inducted into the prestigious Speaker Hall of Fame — and is one of fewer than 200 living speakers to have received this honor.

Dan is also a writer and content producer. He’s authored three books: Success in Action, Off Balance On Purpose, and most recently, Positive Chaos.

Along with his speeches and books, Dan produces an ongoing, weekly video-coaching series and podcast in which he shares leadership principles and life-enhancement strategies in under three minutes.

Resources Mentioned

Dan Thurmon Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Dan Thurmon
I am delighted to be here. Thanks, Pete, and great to be with your awesome audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, I’m excited to be chatting. And I think we first need to hear about some of your amazing physical feats that you do when you’re speaking, handstands, etc. What’s the story here?

Dan Thurmon
Well, I was a hyperactive kid who was getting in trouble constantly in school and at home. And, fortunately, I found a channel for that energy that was very positive in my life. I learned to juggle. I learned acrobatics when I was 11, 12 years old. And someone I always admired told me, “Never let this out of your life. Like, I see what this means to you. And as long as you do it, you’ll always be able to do it.”

So, I’ll be 55 this year, and, yeah, I’m still tumbling across stages and doing handstand pushups on the lecterns at my speeches, but not just because I can, but really to illustrate principles about balance and taking action in big bold ways, and the fact that balance is not what you get ever, it’s what you do, and we need to become better balancers, and learn to adapt to the uncertainty and actually use it to our advantage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you said you started early, and you said if you kept doing it, you’d never lose it. So, if I am approaching 40, and I haven’t done handstand pushups before, is it still possible for me to learn?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, I think so. It all kind of comes into that whole, “What is your level of willingness? How much does it matter to you?” And then you can map the course to the ability, which handstand pushups is really about strength, it’s about flexibility and confidence, and it’s a road to get there. But if you’ve had some kind of measure in your past of physical activity, your body knows how to respond to exercise then you can likely get there, I would say, with the right coach. But how much time do you have? And how serious are you about the goal?

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.

Dan Thurmon
That’s kind of the deal.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was randomly on YouTube and I encountered this fellow Chris Heria who’s doing these just fantastic feats, and he did something I’ve never seen before, and it blew my mind, and I was just like, “I want to do that.” It was a, I hadn’t even heard of it, a full planche pushup.

Dan Thurmon
Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
You probably know what that is, whereas, I didn’t. And for those listening, this is a pushup but your feet are not on the ground. They are hovering in the air. You’re basically flying by using your arms. I thought it was so cool and I just wanted to do that. But it sounds like it’s going to be a long road, Dan. Is that fair to say?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, you gotta start somewhere, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, we’re talking about Positive Chaos. Tell us, what is the scoop here with your latest book?

Dan Thurmon
Well, I was really excited about this book because the idea is that chaos is ever increasing, it’s all around us, it’s the word we hear coming up constantly, generally used to disrupt people, to make them dispirited or to feel like they have no control over their life, when, in fact, it’s true in some sense. There is greater uncertainty and greater opportunities.

And the divergent possibilities of how the future will unfold are exponentially increasing as a result of the openness of our systems and our technology, but you can use that to your advantage. It could be a great thing and it really is a chance, not only for you to be more awesome at your job, but also to help others because, let me tell you, we did some research about how chaos is hitting people right now, and it’s not good.

People are really struggling in many ways, and one out of four American workers think about quitting at least once a day. And that’s just their job. That doesn’t even get into anxiety and depression, and concern for loved ones, and even suicidal ideation. So, people need a tool to change their mindset and their skills around uncertainty, and that’s what this book is all about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, go ahead, paint a picture. We can hear the darkness, Dan. What is the state of play here in terms of chaos and how we are dealing?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah. So, anxiety is off the charts, depression. You could sense this all around you, and disengagement, perhaps not with this audience who understands self-improvement and motivation and determination, but in the people around you perhaps, that comes down to the economy, fear. Financial concern is the number one type of chaos people are thinking about. And concern for others, concern for the people they really care about. Six percent of working Americans think about suicide at least once every day, which is just crazy when you think for every 100 people in the workforce, six of them are having these thoughts.

And so, I think the opportunity and the obligation for all of us is to recognize we need to be better encouragers of one another and help each other through this time because you never exactly know who those people may be. And so, don’t underestimate your own influence and the impact that you can make on those around you.

Because chaos is nothing more than that determined effort where it intersects uncertainty and randomness. But if you look at the future not as uncertain, but as unfolding in just new and interesting ways, you can be really curious about that and very much in control. And so, what I do in the book is also go into what chaos really is, chaos theory.

I don’t know if you know, but in 1962, Edward Norton Lorenz was trying to predict the weather, and he realized he couldn’t because little variable that he could not measure would amplify over time in enormous ways, and that’s mathematical chaos. He called it the Butterfly Effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings could, theoretically, start a hurricane hundreds of miles away. And this became a very catchy phenomenon, this idea that little things change everything in big ways.

And so, the idea of going on offense and with positive chaos is that your inputs, your words, your actions, your intentional efforts, your interactions with others, will also amplify in enormous ways that you can’t even predict. So, we have an intention and a determination but the ripple effects of what you do and say is going to amplify probably more than it ever has before. So, owning that is a big, big part of this book, and I think of what’s really critical right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then we’ve seen the dark side of our relationship with uncertainty and the positive pictures that it’s unfolding. That’s sort of interesting and we’re curious about that, okay. Well, tell us, how can we get there?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, so when you think about chaos and the word itself, I break it into an acronym that people can kind of think about. A couple more quick statistics for you. Seventy-six percent of working Americans think chaos shortens people’s lives, 79% think it leads to mental health challenges, 81% of working Americans believe that being able to handle chaos well should be a requirement for all their leaders, and they really value that.

Even though money is such a big concern for everyone in their financial picture, especially in this economy, it’s like they would rather make less. Seventy percent of working Americans would rather make 10% less but work for someone who could handle chaos well. And so, how do you do that? In the book, I break it into three sections.

The first is to recognize things in a different way to be able to see the patterns that are at work in your life, in your business, in the world around you a little bit differently. And then you can learn to respond in a new way. And then you can realize different results over time in huge ways. But the response is critical, and it goes to that acronym for the word chaos. The negative aspect is challenging, hectic, anxious, overwhelming, stress.

Now, this is where most people are living right now, things are hard, things are moving too fast, they feel hecticness, an anxiety, which is the negative projection about the future. They’re fearful about what’s happening and they feel overwhelmed because it’s just too much, and it’s all on them, and they’re pulled apart by this stress that they live with, makes it hard to sleep, makes it hard to work, and hard to be awesome.

But when we take control over those, over our response system, and we can see things in new ways, and recognize patterns, then we could change that. And so, the acronym, or the five transformations that I suggest and teach in the center section of the book take you to a different version, which is challenging, healthy, aspiring, ongoing, synergy.

So, it is hard, it’s going to be hard, but we self-prescribe intentional challenges. We ask for a course of learning. We learn things that are more difficult, and recognize, even though we can’t understand how everything will play out, we can create more certainty by determining we’re going to get better in specific ways.

And so, that intentional challenge is the first part. The second part is we move from hectic, which is just racing against life and pace and trying to fill every second, to a more healthy way to look at things, which is to understand we, first of all, need to prioritize health – mental health, physical health, and also find the space between the throws and catches.

I’m a juggler, okay? And so, just like Michael Gelb, who’s one of your recent guests, I learned to juggle and I found a huge amazing resource in my life for channeling my energy, for starting a business, paying my way through college, getting a business degree, and, ultimately, personal improvement, self-help, and really how do you develop a skill, what is learning, what is practice, all these things.

And, for me, juggling was also a great way to understand this concept of patterns, of how everything fits together, different challenges require new patterns, and complexity when you add something new, you really create an exponential version of something more difficult. But what you learn is, like, even if there’s five or seven objects in the air at once, there’s space between the throws and catches.

And part of moving from hectic to healthy is understanding you can’t race life, you can’t ever outrun the pace of change because it will always accelerate, but what we can do is create that space between what you were doing, what you’re doing next, what you hear and how you choose to respond. And it’s in that space that you become a greater instrument for self-intended direction and responsiveness. So, that’s hectic to healthy.

Aspiring is really a positive version of the future. So, rather than anxiety and being fixated on the potential negative aspects, which may or may not play out, we look at what’s getting better, what we want to improve in our life, the things, again, not just you’re choosing to develop in terms of skills, but what you stand for and what you value.

And when you focus on that, you’ll see it all around you in new ways, and it becomes an intentional focus. And the key is both things can be true at the same time. It’s like when I teach my whole audience how to balance peacock feathers. This is an exercise I do in my keynotes. I first have them do it while trying to look at their hand, which is nearly impossible. You can try this at home right now or in your car if you’re stopped. I know you don’t have a peacock feather but any long large object will do.

If you’re looking down, you can’t have any sense of prediction or control, but if you look at the top, immediately you know what’s going on. And so, it’s that change of perspective, both things can be true, we choose to see what’s aspiring. And then overwhelming to ongoing, it’s really important, Pete, because it recognizes that life is a series of repetitive patterns.

What you’re dealing with now, even though we may think of it as an unprecedented challenge, or a new role at work, or a new job task, it’s probably just another version of something you’ve dealt with in the past in some way. Finding those commonalities and those connections will help you to leverage into a measure of competence, like before you even try it.

And, also, this has to do with negative patterns or the things that we postpone learning or addressing in our own lives, relative to behaviors, or situations, relationship conflict, etc. If you just hit the snooze button on those things, they’ll just keep coming back in bigger and bigger ways. And so, we need to change that by moving into an ongoing approach to improvement.

And then you begin to see how it all fits together, and that’s where stress becomes synergy, and you see the connectedness of how, really, kind of everything affects everything all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool in that, yes, indeed, the same uncertainty we can internalize and experience completely differently. And I’ve been doing some of my own reflection in terms of when it comes to fear and excitement, physiologically it can be quite similar in terms of how like you’re breathing, what your palms are doing, like going up for a speech. It’s like, “Ooh,” some people say, “Oh, I’m so excited.” Some people say, “I’m so scared,” even though, physiologically, what’s going on in their bodies can be pretty darn similar but they’ve interpreted it differently.

Or, some folks would say, “Oh, I’m so bored. There’s nothing to do,” versus others might say, “Oh, I’m so content and peaceful here. I don’t have to do anything. It’s awesome.” So, what fascinates me is that sometimes the same stimulus on a different day, I will experience totally differently. Like, “Oh, I’m going to be interviewing four people today. That’s so awesome. I’m going to do so much learning and discovery and adventure,” versus, like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve got too much work. I’ve got all this stuff back-to-back, and now I’ve got four people I’m interviewing today.”

So, it’s just fascinating that we humans are such enigmatic creatures that this could be the case. What’s up with this, Dan? Solve it for us.

Dan Thurmon
Well, we can always find something to complain about, and it’s really one of the prerequisites for this positive mindset. It seems like passé these days to say, “I’m a positive person,” or, “I default toward looking on the bright side of things.” That almost seems cliché in, like, an embarrassing way because sarcasm and negativity has become such a part of acceptable culture, and it’s almost like when people get together, that’s how they relate, is we talk about what we can both agree is crappy.

And to say what’s wonderful in the world, you come off as kind of like a freak of nature sometimes. But this whole idea of being a victim is one of those aspects you need to let go. Talk about the price of positive, like if you really want to engage this mindset and change life and change others for the better, you have to let go of negative people, you have to choose not to take the bait when people try to pull you into those negative conversations.

And sometimes that means, like, relationships, you need to kind of distance yourself and be the model for a different way, and that means sometimes others will draw away from you. And then this whole notion of victimhood because, yeah, things can be horribly awful and tragic, and yet in the middle of that, you can find amazing joy and discovery and knowledge and growth. And you might not see it right away, but if you open yourself to that possibility, you’ll get through it so much more quickly. So, yeah, that is our nature, is to look down.

It’s also part of our physiology. It’s part of that protective instinct to guard against potential threats in our world, which could cause us physical harm, or take away our source of food, or our source of intimacy and relationships. So, we do have that natural tendency. That’s part of our physiology, not just our personalities.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d also love to get your take in terms of just day-to-day, what are the practices, either immediately in the heat of the moment, or just sort of ongoing each day that we can conduct so that we are more frequently engaging the chaos in a pleasant positive way as oppose to, “Ugh, I’m freaking out” kind of a way?

Dan Thurmon
Freaking out, right? Well, what you should be thinking about is complexity and stability. And so, a more stable system will be able to endure some change and some threats and some flexibility. So, wherever you get stability in your life, double down on that. So, that could be physical health, it could be a spiritual practice, great relationships with family and friends, the people you surround yourself with. Really lock down your source of, like, the go-to place to get centered and stable and connected in your life.

Then you also need to look at the complexities of life in a few different ways. Simplify where you can. Like, wherever you can remove unnecessary complexity, like that’s probably a good thing. So, if there are some commitments you can let go of, now is probably a good time and create some space in your life to say no to some things that, as a default, you typically would accept. Do it in a loving way, do it in a kind way, etc. but create some space and some simplicity, and find better ways.

Always look at your systems of how you operate or the things that we do, and say, “Is there an easier way? Is there an easier way to make this happen?” With technology, there typically is. There’s a lot of ways we can remove complexity. But then some of the complexity is necessary because our lives are complex, problems are complex, and so necessary complexity is really important because you can create more chaos by trying to oversimplify something that’s not that simple.

And so, if you’re going into a business venture, or you’re starting a new job, or you’re trying to solve a really complex problem, but your only options are this or that, and you think it’s going to be simple, yeah, you’re going to learn really quickly that that’s not the right answer. And that’s what people do with really big issues.

In the book, I have a case study, for example, about violence in schools, gun violence, school shootings, which people will typically, in conversation, just break it down to one issue or another issue, and the reality is it’s incredibly complex. And one of my clients, Navigate360, the CEO is actually really addressing this problem and making incredible strides, but it’s very complex because it involves, like, how do you approach, yes, a smart conversation around gun policy.

But also, like, early intervention and identifying the possibility of people in your school that might be at risk in de-stigmatizing mental illness and creating a sense of stability through acceptance and a sense of what’s important in kids’ lives, and really going after this in a holistic way. It’s a big deal, right? But there’s a lot of unnecessary complexity that we might choose.

So, complexity we choose are things, like, we say, “I could go this easy way through this process, but I want to make it better, or I want to make it uniquely my own, and so I’m intentionally adding some complexity, and I’m choosing that.” And we choose complexity when we have kids, and when we get married.

I dedicated the book to my wife, I said, “To Shay, my wife, my stability in chaos, and the complexity I choose,” because, hey, marriage is a very complex way to go through life. It creates stability in some sense, but other ways that things are just going to always be more interesting because you involve someone else.

And then the third piece of complexity is the malevolence that really is out there. People who are intentionally trying to disrupt you, to either compete with you in a business sense or in a job sense, but also there are malevolent forces at work who are hacking into our computer systems and destabilizing governments, and trying to steal your money. That’s all out there, too. And so, there’s just a lot to think through but it’s helpful to compartmentalize that complexity.

And then, also, look for the patterns because you might not realize you’ve been going through the same thing over and over in your life, whether it’s a relationship issue, or a job challenge, or professional challenge, or money, how you handle money. And those things will come back bigger each time if you don’t address them the right way, or if you don’t address them a new way.

And so, interrupting those patterns is really, really important. If something happens once in your life, it may be an anomaly. If it happens twice, it should get your attention. And if it happens three times, it’s definitely a pattern. And so, it’s either going to keep happening in bigger ways or you have to change it up. You’ve got to say or do something different.

But the key is really to recognize, again, you don’t have to make big, bold, enormous shifts to create a huge difference. Just like with the Butterfly Effect, little things change everything. So, the big question to ask yourself is, “What is the one thing that could possibly change everything?” Relative to your job, if there was one skill you could learn that would change everything about how you contribute, or how you respond, or how you show up, what would that one thing be?

Because we have a tendency to, like, say, “I want to take in everything, the totality of the big picture,” but when we drill it down to the one thing, then we can find something we can really start to do. And for most of us, it’s language, it’s how we use our words, how we talk in our thoughts to ourselves, how we speak to others. Begin to change those little things and you’ll see some big results.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Wow, there’s so much to follow up here. Okay. So, stability and simplification, I’m thinking one piece of resistance folks might have to some of these pursuits is just simply, “Dan, those things are boring. It doesn’t sound fun or entertaining to do that.” How do you respond?

Dan Thurmon
I think you can make it incredibly interesting. So, stability is not predictability, right? It’s not trying to keep change at bay. Again, we’re inviting the chaos, we’re creating positive chaos, but we’re finding a sense of self. And you could find stability just by knowing yourself to a greater degree. What do you love? What do you value? What are your principles, your life mission?” That’s a part of the process of the book is leading you to really get clear on your intentions because those are the things, once you know what that is, those become your inputs, and they amplify in huge ways, and you begin to get so much more opportunity in your life.

So, stability is not, again, it’s not predictability. It is a sense of grounded-ness. Like, physical health, yeah, you’re going to have a more stable life if you can show up to any situation with a bit more energy and with a bit more mental wellbeing, and you’ll also be able to be there for others. So, your stability becomes the tool you can use to help the people around you.

Pete Mockaitis
When you talk about simplifying, can you share some examples of some specific areas of life or work and/or interventions that are just fantastic for simplifying and a lot of us would get a lot of bang for our buck by just going ahead and doing that simplification process?

Dan Thurmon
Sure. So, the idea is less is more, right? And I think we were all kind of forced through a simplification process during COVID, during the pandemic, where our lives were stripped down to the basics. And a lot of what we did, just by default because we’d accumulated all of these habits and routines and extraneous activity in our life, was sort of stripped away to the basics.

And many of us were able to recognize in that moment, if you go back to it, what really worked well and what wasn’t working. And for some of us, that was really painful. It’s like relationships were broken, things were in trouble, and we couldn’t do some of the things we really loved to do. And so, if you think about that, you had a sense of clarity of what really mattered in your life.

And I think a lot of this is happening naturally, Pete, like, people have simplified their lives, and said, “I don’t need to reengage with everything I was doing before. Less is more. And maybe I’m just going to keep it a little bit more basic.” I would also say that when we think about, like, how we work and how we contribute, getting back to the theme of the podcast and how to be awesome, it’s about really showing up and doing your job.

It’s wonderful to understand the synergy and the complexity of what’s all around you, but there’s something, there’s one thing probably you’re really responsible for. And if you take care of that and just nail it, like your value to the entire organization, company, team, to the world maybe, who knows, it just escalates. So, just think about that.

Simplifying is really about prioritizing. And so, if it’s everything, “I want a little bit of everything,” you’re going to always be spread too thin. But if you had to prioritize, what would you put at the top of the list?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then when it comes to, you said many of us can get a big return on checking our language, including what we say to ourselves, can you provide some perspective there in terms of what are some problematic self-talk patterns that you’ve encountered? And what are some ways to approach them?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, it really bothers me when people say things like, “I’m so stupid,” or, “I could never handle this,” “I’m always this way. I always make this mistake.” It’s like, in a way, you’re doubling down and reinforcing that pattern as opposed to interrupting it by creating some possibility, like, “I’m still learning this,” or, “I’m working on this,” or, “I’m getting better in this regard.”

If you were to find a way to frame your process and even your struggles as a journey that’s moving forward, then you create that sense of trajectory. Improvement, goals are really important. I’m a big fan and believer in goals, but, really, it’s about momentum. We got to have a sense of forward motion, a trajectory, which is a feeling that things are getting better over time, not every day, but over time my trajectory is going upwards.

And then alignment, that I feel like I’m more and more in alignment with the set of values and principles that, if you’re serious about personal growth and lifelong learning, will continue to come into greater clarity over the course of your life. So, you’re never really done with this. We’re just working toward that goal.

So, I would just be very careful about your language. The other things, just very simply, is people say, “I have to. I have the sense of obligation. I would love to do that but I have to do this.” It seems very innocuous. But saying you have to is a sense of obligation that deprives you from the value of intentionally getting it done.

If you were to say, “I need to,” just that one change from “have to” to “need to,” “Yeah, I need to do this first.” Well, now you’ve recognized “This is important, this is really important. Yes, maybe it’s an obligation of my job but my job is important to me.” “It’s an obligation of my relationship. I have to see my parents.” But, no, “I need to see my parents because I value them and I love them.” So, you get credit for doing the right thing as opposed to an obligation, “I have to” where you’re just kind of like at the mercy of your life, and at the mercy of your calendar.

And then the next level even above that is “get to.” So, if you were to say “I get to go to work today,” even higher than “I have to…” “I need to…” Hey, a lot of people don’t have a job, a lot of people don’t have a sense of purpose, a lot of people don’t have loved ones they get to visit, or people they get to provide for, or sacrifices they get to make to demonstrate what’s important to them in their life.

And so, these are small subtle ways that you can change your language and your internal thoughts and also change your perspective of your external world which changes everything.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And I think “need to” is a nice little bridge because sometimes “get to,” I’ve tried that and sometimes it’s like, “Pete, I’m just not buying it. I know what you’re trying to do here, brain, but I’m still not looking forward to that thing.” But “need to” is like, “Okay, yeah, we acknowledge this a value, this is important, and, thus, need to feels fair.”

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, and also it might be a commitment, “So, I need to do this because I said I would. And I’m the type of person that follows through on commitments.” And so, all of that just builds reinforcement of your values, your principles, and helps you to move through life in that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, if you do catch yourself in a thought, just like, “Oh, this is such bull crap. I can’t believe they’re doing this to me. They should appreciate my efforts, blah, blah, blah,” or, “Oh, man, I’ve screwed it up again. I’m never going to be able to…” so, whatever. You’re in the stuff, you’re thinking it. What’s the best approach? Do you want to play police officer to your brain, like, “Halt! No, no, no”? Or, how do you talk yourself through those moments?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, that would be a great example of where you recognize a pattern. So, is that something that happens frequently or is it an occasional thing? And if you see yourself going down that road, you’re probably not in a good state of mind to make a decision. So, you have to interrupt the pattern, and you could do that in a number of different ways. You can’t just disengage from the situation. Go for a walk. You can find things that will uplift you.

And the best way to know what will help you become more resourceful through those moments is to not find them when you’re frustrated or when you’re struggling, but to basically acknowledge them when you’re doing well. So, when you’re not in that state, when things are rocking, and you’re feeling strong and life seems easy to you, that’s when you go, “Okay, what am I doing here? Like, what am I thinking? Who am I around at this moment? What did I just do to prepare for this physically, mentally, whatever?”

And then those become your go-to’s when you’re back in that unresourceful state, and you’re like, “Okay, crap. This is not good. This is stinking thinking. I need to get out of this.” Or, you can indulge it because that feels good for a while, if that serves you, but just recognize, like, the longer you stay there, the longer you’re preventing yourself from getting out of it, and that you’re also reinforcing that pattern.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Dan, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, so in this whole world of how you can become a better influencer and the little things that really can change things in big ways, one of those I really wanted to mention is how you can activate the people around you. When you see others, again, understand a lot of people are really struggling right now, and we can help them only by naming their strengths, by basically telling them what we admire about them, or what they’ve done well.

And just think about that as almost like a superpower that you have to flip a switch inside someone that makes them want to do that more. I remember all the great mentors in my life, all the great leadership opportunities in my life, from my earliest days when I started performing to leadership positions within the National Speakers Association, or bigger opportunities with new clients, etc. Other people generally saw those things in me before I saw them in myself, and they named them. They were like, “Dan, I could see you in this role.” I was like, “Really? You think I could do that?”

And so, right now you might be thinking about people who did that for you. Understand this is a power that you have. So, just by going through your day with a little bit more awareness of the people around you, in saying, “Pete, you’re an awesome listener. You’re a great podcast host. I really have enjoyed listening to the episodes. Amazing.”

Or, Stephanie, who’s in the studio with us, “Stephanie is an incredible teammate of mine. She keeps me on schedule. Incredibly focused.” Like, those little things activate those qualities at a much higher level, and you help people kind of spiral up and get to the next level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dan Thurmon
Sure. Okay, I’m sticking with the theme here. From Mother Teresa, she said, “We cannot all do great things but we can all do small things with great love.” That’s one of my wife’s favorites. So, in her honor, I thought I’d share that one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Dan Thurmon
Well, the research, if you’ll indulge me, I would mention the impact of chaos study on the American workforce, which is DanThurmon.com/research. And that is something I’m going to quote quite a bit because it’s not just about the things that are wrong, but it’s, like, 10 insights that we can use both as individuals and as leaders, and here’s how to help make that work for you. So, go to that study.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, I have so many favorite books but the one that I decided to share is Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. This is something I keep going back to and listening to. It has an audiobook in his own voice. And one of my favorite things to do is ride my mountain unicycle through the woods, listening to Eckhart Tolle.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, that’s my own weirdness but it’s one of those skills I’ve kept alive. And so, unicycling for me is like the ultimate meditation, especially when you’re in the woods.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Dan Thurmon
Right here, man, the Thera Cane. Do you know the Thera Cane?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve seen one before but I didn’t know what it’s for.

Dan Thurmon
So, if you’re listening to the podcast, it’s a big hook. It’s a cane with handles on it at the bottom and knobs on the top, and it’s for self-massage. So, as an aging acrobat and gymnast who’s always getting ready for shows, what it helps you do is to really get into those deep cracks and the tensed muscles in your neck and back and hips, and loosen them up without a lot of extra effort. I have one of these in every one of my cases, in my office, at my house, in my car. I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I feel like I can talk 20 minutes about the Thera Cane alone. Maybe I need them to send me a product, as a podcast. So, the idea is you sort of like put pressure on a stiff tight sore point on your shoulder or body, and then it makes it better?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, exactly. If you’ve ever had, like, a stiff shoulder, and you try to work it out but you’re working it out with your other hand, so you’re rubbing on it, it takes a lot of effort and energy.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s a little hard to reach.

Dan Thurmon
You’re working on the other one, this gives you leverage. So, it’s like a crowbar for your back and it flexes a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you could use it with two hands instead of one.

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, exactly. And you just kind of work it into that muscle. You could do the hips. You use these knobs on the side for the legs. Yeah, it’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I love it.

Dan Thurmon
I make no money on this, by the way, the Thera Cane.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I appreciate. Well, sometimes I ask a favorite tool, folks would be like, “Oh, my iPhone,” or, “Google Sheets.” I was like, “Okay, yeah, those are pretty good tools.” Like, Thera Cane, first time ever, Dan. I appreciate it.

Dan Thurmon
I had to be different.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Dan Thurmon
Sure. So, for me, exercise and practice is every day. I do a thousand catches with juggling every single day, which sounds like a lot but it takes like five minutes with five balls if I don’t drop. But if I do drop, I have to start over. I also do hot yoga, other things for exercise, but I would say the biggest habit for me that’s been very productive is every week I do a weekly coaching video.

They’re short, they’re like two and a half minutes, really well-written and produced from wherever I am in the world, and I just give it away for free on my blog and my LinkedIn channel and everywhere else we do social media. But it’s like this creative commitment to keep me on the hook to creating new content.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget that you share, maybe in one of these publications, that really connects and resonates with folks?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, sure. So, I try to get something of a nugget in every week that’s meaningful but the biggest ones from my keynote, I’ll give you two. One is, “If you limit yourself to what’s comfortable, you deny yourself what’s possible.” And the second one is, “If you think what you’re doing now is difficult, it’s time to try something harder.”

And that goes back to a story of learning to juggle, going to four, learning a whole new pattern with four, and then struggling with four. As I was doing that, struggling with four balls, my three-ball juggling was getting really easy, and I never got the hang of four until I tried five. So, if you think what you’re doing now is difficult, try something harder.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Dan Thurmon
DanThurmon.com, Thurmon with an O, so it’s T-H-U-R-M-O-N.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Dan Thurmon
Yeah, I think I’ll go back to kind of where we started, is don’t ever assume that someone else is okay, or that they understand their own strength or what makes them unique. Go out of your way and tell them and acknowledge that, and you’re going to change their life in a big way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dan, this has been a treat. Thanks, and keep on rocking.

Jul 17
0

882: Setting your Future Self up for Success with Dr. Hal Hershfield

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Hal Hershfield discusses how to make–and stick with–better decisions to enrich your future self.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you should build a relationship with your future self
  2. How to motivate yourself to do the hard things now
  3. The key to creating lasting habits

About Hal

Hal Hershfield is a Professor of Marketing, Behavioral Decision Making, and Psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and holds the UCLA Anderson Board of Advisors Term Chair in Management.

His research, which sits at the intersection of psychology and economics, examines the ways we can improve our long-term decisions. He earned his PhD in psychology from Stanford University.

Hershfield publishes in top academic journals and also contributes op-eds to the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. He consults with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, many financial services firms such as Fidelity, First Republic, Prudential, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Avantis, and marketing agencies such as Droga5. The recipient of numerous teaching awards, Hershfield was named one of “The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” by business education website Poets & Quants. His book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today, will be published in June.

Resources Mentioned

Hal Hershfield Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Hal, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Hal Hershfield
Hey, thanks so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into some of the wisdom in your book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. But, first, I wanted to hear from you, could you share one of the best and one of the worst decisions that you’ve personally made on behalf of your future self?

Hal Hershfield
That’s a good one, ooh. Okay, the easy answer there is marrying my wife. That’s got to be the obvious one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, she’s listening. It’s the obvious one, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, so I don’t know. Should I come up with another answer?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll count it.

Hal Hershfield
Worst decision, oh, man, it’s like there’s so many to choose from there. Okay, worst decision is more of a sort of perpetual thing and not one specific decision. But I tend to be really bad at taking care of small tasks. I procrastinate on them and it is regularly bad for my various future selves.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a category of task that gets procrastinated all the time?

Hal Hershfield
Oh, yeah, anything with regards to administrative, filling out receipts, or like submitting a claim for insurance, or putting in my car registration. There are sorts of things that requires some amount of work, I don’t know why. I know why. I know why. I don’t like doing them. I always find them, sort of I’m worried that I’m not going to fill it in right, and then I just keep pushing it off.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And then sometimes, I don’t know what this says about me, I’m frustrated that the system isn’t easy. In a world of apps, and iteration, and cost and improvement, and our technology and processes, and web forms, and apps and stuff, it’s like, “Wait, seriously, I got to mail you a check? I’m going to print something out or…really?”

Hal Hershfield
Game over. As soon as it says, “Print this out,” it’s like game over because the chances that the printer at my office or the printer at home will work is considerably low.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, do you have the paper? Do you have the ink? And what I love is that Amazon is super customer focused. I now notice when I try to print a return label, it said one of the options was, “We’ll print it for you and mail it to you in four business days for 50 cents.” I don’t remember, the price was pretty good. It’s like they know. They know that printing a label is too much for me.

Hal Hershfield
It’s such a sad comment but it’s so true. And I love it, remove the friction. Make it easier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so I’d love to hear, while putting together and researching the book Your Future Self, any really surprising or extra-fascinating and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made in the research?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, I actually think one of the more counterintuitive parts that I came across in researching the book was the idea that we can experience what’s known as hyperopia. And what that means is, well, in my research, I focus on what’s called myopia, when we’re too sort of tunnel-focused, we have tunnel vision on the present. Hyperopia is when we reverse that. We focus so much on the future that we miss the present. And the irony there is that, in doing that, we end up making things worse for ourselves in the future as well. And that was a bit of work that really surprised me. I hadn’t really thought about that possibility before.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example?

Hal Hershfield
Have you ever had a gift certificate for a restaurant and you’re just waiting for the perfect opportunity to use it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
And you’re doing it because you’re thinking, “I really want to maximize this, and I want this to be good for…so that future version of me that gets to go there,” and you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and it closes. That is hyperopic. But there’s obviously more serious versions of that. There are versions of that, in fact, with our professional lives where we tell ourselves that we’re taking care of tasks, we’re doing things because that’s good for the future. And we somehow end up prioritizing the urgent over the important.

It’s like a version of this because we’re telling ourselves that we’re doing something, we’re doing something good for the long run, but, in reality, we maybe sort of shortchanging ourselves and actually making things less good for ourselves in the long term because we’re not focused on the big, important things that will actually move the ball down the field for ourselves. And that’s true both professionally and personally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, it sounds like maybe we’ve already touched on it, but, zooming out a bit, how would you put forward the main big idea or core thesis of the book Your Future Self?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, sure. So, I think the core thesis of the book is that there are different versions of ourselves that exist over time, and, in some ways, we think about our future selves as if they are other people. And that’s okay so long as we focus on the relationship that we have with that other person. And so, the book is really aimed at understanding the relationships that we have with our future selves, and then figuring out how to improve them so that we can do things that benefit us both in the future and now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we talk about relationships. Are there some categories or archetypes? Does anybody hate their future self, like, “My relationship with my future self is my future self is my nemesis”? Or, what’s the palette or menu of choices for how that relationship can be?

Hal Hershfield
Right. That’s a fantastic question. Empirically, I’ve never asked people, “Do you hate them?” That said…

Pete Mockaitis
That’d be sad.

Hal Hershfield
It would be really sad if somebody said that. In my research and the research that others have done, we sort of treat the relationship with a future self the same way that you would treat our relationships with spouses, partners, close friends, which is to say that there’s varying degrees of distance. I can have a friend who I know, maybe they’re in my group of friends that I see but I’m not really that close to them. They exist but I don’t really connect to them.

All the way down to I can have that best friend, the person who I spend…want to spend all my time with, or my spouse, or my kids, or my aging parents. I would say that the spectrum of relationships goes from a stranger who’s sort of you see them, you know they exist but you don’t really connect to them, and don’t really know them, all the way to a person with whom you feel a great degree of emotional connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, this is all intriguing from a thought experiment kind of a world. But could you lay it on us in terms of what’s at stake, what are the implications of getting this relationship right versus not so right?

Hal Hershfield
Sure. We’ve looked at a variety of different things, so one thing we know the people who are more connected to their future selves, they’ve accumulated more assets over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Financially.

Hal Hershfield
Financially-speaking, exactly. We know that people feel more connected, they report greater subjective health. We found that they’re less likely to endorse unethical business practices. In other words, this is another sort of tradeoff. If I feel a lack of connection to my future selves, doing something that might financially benefit me right now but I could suffer some consequences later, well, maybe that’s okay. I’m not really thinking about later.

Other researchers have found that people that are connected to their future selves, they do better in school, higher grades, and even experience greater amounts of life satisfaction and meaning in life. I should say there’s always other factors and variables that play across these different studies. We’ve tried hard, and others have tried hard, too, to sort of isolate, and say, “Well, even in the face of things like age or education, do these relationships bear out?” And, sure enough, they seem to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when you talk about this connection, what does that maybe look, sound, feel like in terms of our internal dialogues when we have a good rich connection to our future selves versus the non-desired alternative?

Hal Hershfield
It’s a really fascinating question that you raised because it’s not, I should say, we don’t ask people, “What does that conversation look like?” Most likely, they’re so much more idiosyncratic behavior and answers that could be given. I don’t really know what the answer would be but here’s my suspicion. I suspect that a conversation with a future self who I care deeply about is going to look more like the way that I think about and treat the people in my life who I really want to care for and take responsibility for.

The same way that you might feel about your spouse if you’re really connected to them, or the same way that you might feel about your kid, or, even I could think about the workplace, a co-worker that you really appreciate, or even an employee that they’re sort of under you but you still take an interest in their wellbeing. That’s the type of connection or relationship that we might see when we see a high degree of overlap between current and future selves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And now I’m thinking about how, recently, this isn’t an earth shattering story, but I felt the implications. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, my desk is not the tidiest, and so I’ve accumulated LaCroix cans and more, and papers and all over the place. And so, it was a Friday, I took some time, like, “I’m really going to clean this up really well,” and so I did.

And then, Monday, I came in and I was surprised. I had forgotten my office desk had been cleaned by me in the past, and I said, “Oh, how delightful.” It’s like I was surprised. And the word relationship really does ring true here, I was like, “Well, thank you, past me. I really appreciate you cleaning up that desk because it’s just actually a joy to come into the office and behold this clean desk. I’m in a good mood and I appreciate me for having made that happen.”

Hal Hershfield
It’s a little gift from past you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it was cool.

Hal Hershfield
I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, most of the time, though, I don’t have that relationship in terms of, like good or bad, I don’t know. Like, you step on the scale, you look at the mirror, and go, “Ugh, past self, you really should’ve been watching the calories a little more, or hitting the gym a little more, or watch the diet when you get a check-in with the doctor.” It doesn’t even occur to me to think about past self in that relationship kind of a way.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I can relate to that. There are so many of those times where we’re sort of not thinking about all the different actions that we have and how they add up. The annual physical is a great example of that, when you say, “Oh, your cholesterol is a little high.” It’s like, I cannot recall the number of times that I ate in a way that probably wasn’t good for my cholesterol, but, in those moments, I’m not thinking about how each one of those kinds of sums up to the sort of worst whole.

But then, on the flipside, the gift from past self, it’s like I had this experience pang. I think I must’ve paid for a rental car going to a friend’s wedding, completely had forgotten, I go up to pay for it, and they’re like, “You already paid for it.” I’m like, “Well, who paid for it? Like, that guy, the past me? Like, what a sucker, but I’m glad he did it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Or, just sort of like accounts that accrue. I’m thinking about back when I was consulting, there was a benefit where you could use pre-tax dollars to fund your mass transit cards. Invariably, these things just accrued to large sums because I completely forgot, like they’re sort of taken out of a paycheck.

And when people go off to business school, they’d say, “Hey, well, I’m going to Harvard. I’m not going to be in Chicago anymore. I’ve got a card with $300 of mass transit value, and I’m going to sell it at a discount.” So many of those emails, actually, in my time there. And so, yeah, you just autopilot, forget, and sometimes that works in your favor.

Hal Hershfield
Yup, 100%. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear do you have any cool success stories or inspiring case studies associated with folks who were able to upgrade their relationship to their future self and then see cool things emerge as a result?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, actually, one of my favorite success stories, it was really funny. This was, oh, gosh, pretty deep in COVID, and I got this random email, and it’s from a high school kid, Enmal was his name. And he basically reaches out and says, “I’ve got to tell you, I went pretty dark during COVID.” I think he was like a high school junior, and when it started, he was having all of his classes at home and he’s not seeing his friends. And he says, “My diet basically consisted of ice cream and Chick-fil-A and Fruit Loops.” I forget which cereal it was but nothing super healthy. No offense to any of those companies, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
The Fruit Loops marketing brand manager is listening and enraged at you, Hal.

Hal Hershfield
Let me walk that back. Generic fast-food restaurants. And he ends up gaining 30 pounds, and he said, “I came across some of your research, and I decided to try to put it into practice.” And he said, “I went online and I printed out like an ideal-looking picture of myself, skinnier.” He used some sort of, I don’t know which technology he used to make himself look a little skinnier and healthier. He said, “I printed that, I put it in the bathroom, and I put it on the fridge.”

And he said, “Looking at that, basically, like wherever I was in the house, kept reminding me of the version of me I wanted to get back to and the version of me I wanted to become.” And it wasn’t that he just cut back on those foods. He also started exercising, etc. And he said in the span of several months, he ended up losing that weight. I forget the exact amount of time. He’s a high school kid so I think he’s probably able to gain and lose weight a little bit easier than the rest of us.

But I was really inspired by him because he was trying to consider a version of his future self who he wanted to become, and I think that sort of forced him, or prompted him, or kept him, held his hand along the way to do the things that he needed to do to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
That is excellent. Well, my key takeaway from that is to find a website that lets me visualize buffed Pete and take a look at that image, see what that does for me. And so, that’s cool in that it made it very real, concrete, visualizable, like, “Oh, okay,” as opposed to amorphous, like, “Oh, the future me is something off in space or in my imagination as opposed to something I could potentially behold with eyes visually.” That’s cool.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, and I think that’s right because, to some degree, if I say, “Think of a future Pete,” there’s probably a lot of different images that could arise there. And you might be able to create sort of an average of them, sort of an amalgamation of them, but this specific image is vivid, and that can be a pretty strong motivator for behavior, “Now, I’ve got like an actual version of me, I’m thinking about looking at.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you lay it on us, are there some other actionable approaches we can take to do a better job at making prudent decisions and actions in the present that benefit our future selves?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, absolutely. So, I’ll mention a couple. The marketing professor in me, of course, is saying, “You have to buy the book to find out all of them,” but I’ll mention a couple. So, there’s a category of strategies that involve trying to bring the future self closer to the present. One of those things, of course, is vividly visualizing the future self.

That doesn’t have to be just through apps. There are these apps that do age progression pretty well. But we can also try to get people to write a letter to their future self, and then write one back from that future self. It’s a really cool activity because it forces you to not only think about the future, but then to sort of go into the future and look back to now, which is, ultimately, putting yourself in the shoes of your future self, seeing the world through their eyes. That’s a vividness-enhancing exercise.

There are other strategies, though, that don’t involve necessarily trying to bring the future self closer but rather involve making the present, or rather making present-day sacrifices easier. So, what I mean by that is that every time I talk about these sorts of optimal behaviors, sometimes it’s hard to do them because it feels like all that you’re doing is sacrificing. It’s like, you right now that’s got to experience the pain for future use gain, which is it’s not a great situation to be.

And if you think about the relationship analogy that we talked about before, it’s like now you’re always the one sacrificing, future you is always the one benefitting. That’s not great. So, we’ve explored different ways that we can make present day sacrifices feel easier. One of my favorites is something that we call temporal reframing. I think there’s probably other terms for this, but the general idea is that I chunk something down into smaller and smaller parts.

I’ll give you an example of this. My collaborators and I, we worked with a fintech bank, a fintech company, this is an app designed to get people to save, and we asked people if they wanted to sign up for an automatic savings account, and some people got the message that they could sign up for $150 a month account, and other people got a message saying they could sign up for a $5 a day account. Now, it’s the same amount of money, of course, five bucks a day is 150 bucks a month. Four times as many people signed up when it was framed as $5 a day. I think it’s just an easier sacrifice to make.

Other researchers have found that that same sort of temporal reframing can get people to volunteer more, to do more volunteer hours. Rather than 200 hours total, how about four hours a week or whatever it is? We can sort of break it down in different parts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Now, one of the other strategies that falls under this sort of bucket of making the present easier is, I don’t know what the right term is, I like to call it sort of like attack the side, not the core. Janet Schwartz, she’s a friend of mine, she’s a behavioral scientist, and she had this, I think, such a clever idea. She was going to Coney Island one summer with her friends, and it was right after New York started doing the calorie labeling on menus.

She goes there and she goes to get the hotdog and a side of fries. Like, what else are you going to do when you go to Coney Island, of course? And she sees that the fries are about 1100 calories, which is I think quite high.

Pete Mockaitis
And doesn’t even fill you up.

Hal Hershfield
That’s right. And no one goes there for the…I mean, you don’t go there for the fries. You go there for the hotdog. So, she and her friends said, “Wow, that’s a lot. How about we split the fries and we each got a hotdog?” And she starts thinking, “Wait, there’s something to this.” If you have a goal of, I don’t know, in this case, cutting down on your calories, you could do it in a painful way of cutting back on the thing that you love, or you could achieve the exact same thing by cutting back on something that’s much more peripheral.

It would be ridiculous if she got the fries and a third of a hotdog. And so, she actually worked with a restaurant where they put something like this in their plates, where the cashiers offered the restaurant patrons the option to get a half of the scoop of fried rice. They can get their full order of orange chicken or whatever it is that they’re getting but you want to take a half of the side. You pay the same amount, which is crazy.

And about a third of people say, “Yeah, I’ll do that,” which is so interesting because it suggests that that’s a strategy that people, I think, might warm to. So, again, that’s all about making the present day sacrifices easier. And then there’s a third sort of category of practical strategies, Pete, that I call staying on course.

This is where you, essentially, say, “Okay, you know what, there’s this version of me right now, there’s a version in the future who’s going to want to look back, and say, ‘Hey, I did the thing, I ate healthy, I was productive at work, I saved money,’” and then there’s the guy in the middle who is going to screw it up, the guy who, “I say I’m going to get up tomorrow and go for a run,” and that guy tomorrow morning who’s going to say, “I can’t do it. I got to sleep in.”

And so, this third category of strategies basically says recognizing that there’s all those tensions there, let’s figure out what we call commitment devices, strategies where we can put sort of guardrails on our behavior so that we don’t screw things up. So, one website called stickK.com, that’s with two Ks. Do you know this one?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been there but I don’t think listeners do, so lay it on us.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, and it’s basically this website where I can put in my goal. Let’s say I want to work out three days a week, 30 minutes at a time, and then I’ll say, “Who’s going to follow up with me? It’s going to be you, Pete. And, oh, I’ll give you my credit card, and I’ll give it the name of an anti-charity.” Well, we don’t have to get political but an organization I don’t want to donate to. How does that sound?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just for example, we might say guns. Some people might be pro-gun, some people might be anti-gun. And so, you can imagine your dollars flowing in the direction you don’t want it to go, just to make it clear for folks, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
There you go. That’s really good. Or, you could say Trump versus Biden, right? Some are on either side. Now, you’re going to call me at the end of the week, and you’re going to say, “Hal, did you do it? Did you work out three times?” And I’ll say, “Pete, this week was tough. I only worked out twice.” And you’ll say, “Okay, good to know.” You’re going to click no on my account, and instantly 200 bucks is going to go toward that charity, that organization, that I don’t want to donate to. That’s a pretty strong motivator.

Now, I’m not saying I won’t mess up but it might make it a lot harder for me to stay in bed a little bit longer if I know doing so was going to cost me possibly hundreds of dollars and not towards some charity that I wanted to donate to but toward one I don’t want to donate to. And there’s other versions of this. There are all sorts of levels of commitment devices which I get into the book. But the key here is picking something that is a strong enough punishment to deter the behavior that we don’t want to do but not so strong that I don’t sign up for this to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And to that point about it not being too strong, it’s funny, I’ve chatted with folks about stickK.com, and they said, “You know, I think that’s a really effective motivator but the anti-charity is so evil to me. Like, I don’t even feel morally okay with setting that structure up in my life.” And so, my wife and I, we were joking, and we were saying, “Well, huh, as a thought experiment, what is something that would hurt to give money to and yet doesn’t feel morally problematic?”

And I think we found some, like, super ritzy country club. So, it’s like, “They don’t need our money. They don’t need it. Like, who knows what it’s going to go to, like polishing golf balls? I don’t even know what they would do with extra money. They don’t need it. But it wouldn’t be evil for them to get it.”

Hal Hershfield
It’s so good because it’s not morally reprehensible. That’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
It just feels really bad for them to get it.

Hal Hershfield
There’s another version of this that doesn’t involve a financial punishment. It’s a product called the Pavlok.

Pete Mockaitis
We interviewed that guy, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Oh, did you? That’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Maneesh Sethi, back in the day.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
I tried one. It’s not comfortable.

Hal Hershfield
Oh, did you? Yeah, I had a student who told me he just has the hardest time getting out of bed. And putting this on, basically, the more you snooze, I forget what his setting was, but it’s like if he snoozed more than a couple times, he’d start getting shocked by this thing to get him out of bed.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like a rubber band around your wrist but more unpleasant. But, again, that same principle holds, it’s like, “If the shock is so unpleasant, and you have to push a button to administer it to yourself, then you may not do it.” So, I like the automaticity and I like the third-party bits, but, in a way, that’s part of the fun. It sounds like you have a lot of examples in the book.

It’s to think about, “Well, what works for you based on is it so repugnant you can’t even countenance doing it? Okay, well. then maybe something else. But is it so minor, you don’t even care? Like, okay, well, you got to crank it up.”

Hal Hershfield
Right, exactly. It’s funny, I have this thing now, in writing the book, I ended up talking with this guy, Dave Krippendorf, who founded this company. It was originally called Kitchen Safe, and basically a little box you put in the kitchen. There’s a little electronically timed lock on top of the box. He designed it for people to put away their snack food. You can time it anywhere from a minute to 10 days.

So, my kids’ Halloween candy, whatever it is, I pop it in there, I’ll set it for 12 hours so I don’t touch it tonight. Well, he found that so many people were using it for so many things other than snacks, that he renamed it the kSafe, from Kitchen Safe to kSafe. He sent me one, and Pete, I use it for my phone, I have to admit, it’s not like we have dinner with our kids every night.

But a couple nights a week or whenever the schedules work out, it’s such a bad distraction when I have it at the table, “Oh, I just need it to change the music,” or, “I just need it to…” whatever. It’s just there. And then before I know it, I am checking Twitter, or my email, or something that is like totally meaningless. I think this is probably relatable, I assume. Tell me this isn’t just me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Hal Hershfield
So, I throw my phone in there, I’ll set the timer for two hours. Let’s say we have dinner at 5:30, it’s put in there for 7:30 or whatever. I know that sounds like a very early dinner but our kids are little. And it’s amazing because it completely removes the temptation, like it’s not even when I get up, I’m like, “Oh, I see my phone. I should check it.” It’s like it’s just not there so I don’t even worry about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s cool. That’s really cool. And maybe it’s a video game controller or any number of things: snacks, phones.

Hal Hershfield
Video game controllers is a great example. I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, the commitment device, so it takes a bit of you out of it, and that’s really handy. I wanted to get your take. I love it when you drop these numbers in terms of with the temporal reframing, with the five bucks a day versus 150 a month. We have a 4X lift in intake. And then a third of the people opted to go for half of the fried rice.

To the fried rice point, I’ve just got to mention, once when I was looking at my calories pretty closely, I was at a Cheddar’s and so I made my order, and then just randomly they brought out this honey biscuit thing, and I said, “Oh, what’s this?” And they said, “Oh, yeah, it’s a honey biscuit. It has this and this and this, and it’s on the house. It’s just a thank you for being here.” I said, “Oh, wow.”

Hal Hershfield
On the house. On the house means the calories don’t count, right?

Pete Mockaitis
So, I said, “Oh, wow, that’s great. Thank you. Could you take it away?” He was like puzzled, I was like, “Yeah, I’m just concerned I might eat it.” And so, he did, and that was cool. And then BJ Fogg, he talks about tiny habits. He was on the show. And he, was it chips or Noah’s bread, he would just fill up on bread if he was at the table, and so he just rehearsed his line with a smile, “Oh, no bread for me. Thanks.” It’s like, “Don’t put this on the table. I will eat it.”

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, it’s so good. The bread one is so good. One of the things I talk about in the book is, about five years ago, I got diagnosed with celiac, and it’s been so interesting because I was also one of those people, especially in social situations where my social anxiety was dialed up just a little bit, I would find myself just eating all of the things that were out that I wasn’t even hungry for, but just eating. And it’s often the sliders, the bread, the whatever.

So, all of that stuff is now off the table for me. And it’s really interesting because it’s almost like there’s this giant kSafe walking around with me when it comes to carbs like that. And so, when I’m at a restaurant, I’m not even tempted by the basket of bread because it’s like I know I just can’t eat it. But it’s like psychologically, “What are the shifts that we can make to make that happen?”

And I love the BJ Fogg example of, like, “None for me, please.” It just makes it automatic. It’s a habit. That’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, so we talked about a number of commitment devices. And, ah, yes, I wanted to ask, when you dropped these numbers, 4X on the temporal reframing, a third people opting for half of the fried rice amount, any other sort of eye popping numbers in terms of, “Huh, this little intervention makes a world of difference”?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, I get cautious with eye popping numbers in social science because they always say, “Was that real?” So, I’ll say, “Look, the temporal reframing, the 4x difference, I thought that was 30% versus 7%. That’s pretty big.” We have another study that’s coming out, or should be out any day now, where we worked with the Bank of Mexico, 50,000 customers, half of them get access to these aged images of themselves, and half don’t, and they’re all getting these messages that they should save.

And the folks who do, they’re 16% more likely to make a contribution to their account. So, when you say, “Was that eye popping?” I don’t know if that’s eye popping per se, but what I find exciting about this is that if I can get 16% more people to do anything when it comes to behavior, then that can really add up and compound over time.

You think about that for voting, or taking care of your teeth or your health, or, in this case, making a contribution to your retirement account. That really can add up and compound in ways that are really beneficial over time.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m also thinking about sort of general decision-making. When it’s not a matter of discipline, but rather just considering options, is there a way you recommend taking into account our future selves in the decision-making process?

Hal Hershfield
I think that is such a good question. It’s funny, because so much of my research has been focused on “How do we relate to our future selves? How do we connect to them?” and so on. But I don’t think the answer here is you should talk to them and think about them all the time. I think that, well, first off, we’re going to start ignoring them. Secondly, I just don’t think it’s sustainable.

So, I think that there’s probably some sort of balancing act here, and I wish I could say to you, “The research says this is the amount of time you should talk to your future self, and this is the amount of time that you shouldn’t.” We don’t know that. And, in all honesty, if I were to do that study, I’m sure there would be so many sorts of individual differences there. For some people, it makes sense to talk more, and some people less.

Here’s what I will say, though, my suspicion is that when it comes to big decisions and things that, once you decide, there’s some sort of automaticity that will carry out over time. So, like signing up for a savings account, signing up to work with a nutritionist or a career coach or whatnot. For those sorts of decisions, I think it may make a lot of sense to really try to step into the shoes of your future self, and think about how this action will impact that person.

For the everyday ones, things like my credit card, my eating habits, whether I get up and exercise or not, for those types of decisions, that’s where I think the world of habit formation becomes much more relevant, but I want to say that we should start, before we can even start going down the path of habit formation, it makes sense to have that conversation with our future selves and strengthen that bond with them so that, “Now, I can, essentially, get the ball rolling, and get the process started to do those things that will, ultimately, benefit me later, but also now.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I’m curious, is there an overwhelming category of activities, or domains, or responsibility where people undercount their future self?

Hal Hershfield
Wow, that’s great. So, not that I know of, I can’t say, “Oh, there’s this one thing.” It’s easy to point to the different domains that sort of we know pop up all the time. So, under-saving and overspending, overeating, not exercising enough, those are the ones that sort of come up. And, in fact, if you look at the goals that people put forth on stickK.com, a lot of them have to do with exercising and eating behaviors.

I think there’s another one that maybe doesn’t come up as explicitly but it’s still relevant is time expenditures, “So, how I divvy up my time for the things that feel good right now in the moment versus the things that will last and give me benefits and wellbeing and positivity and joy over time?” And, as an example, to get concrete, I don’t know if you have this, but I have the thing that come up a lot for me is know I should call one my buddies, a friend I haven’t seen in a while just to catch up for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or even set aside a night to go out and get drinks or dinner or whatever.

But in the moment, it almost feels better to just not do it. I can go do the thing I was doing, or be on Instagram, watch an episode of Succession, or whatever it is that I’m watching. And there’s like a little present moment bump from just kind of being lazy and ignoring that phone call or the plan-making. But the reality is, over and over and over again, those decisions will be bad for my relationships. Those expenditures of time will take away from the time that I get to spend with people that I might genuinely care about.

And here’s the real irony, if I sort of get over that initial little discomfort, and reach out and call my buddy, or set up a plan to have dinner with them, and that’s true, by the way, for our spouses and our other family members, too, those things are good for the long run but they’re also good for now, too. Like, I haven’t once felt one of those phone calls with an old friend, and said, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that.” Normally, a good use of time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. All right. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Hal Hershfield
Oh, no, I think you asked so many good questions. This is great.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Hal Hershfield
I’m not sure if it’s actually like a famous quote or not, but it’s something that one of my mentors told me, “You can’t get what you don’t ask for.” And I love that in the sort of negotiation context.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Hal Hershfield
Favorite experiment or bit of research is probably work on what’s known as the End-of-History Illusion. I talked about it in the book but it’s the basic idea that I can recognize that I’ve changed from the past to the present, but I somehow think that my rate of change, or my rate of progress, will slow from now unto the future, that I’ve somehow arrived at who I am. This is work by Jordi Quoidbach, and Dan Gilbert, and Tim Wilson. And I think it sheds some really interesting light on how we sometimes do a disservice to our future selves by not recognizing the ways in which we will change moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Hal Hershfield
I love the book A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. And it is all about different sort of friends but some of whom are connected, and some of whom aren’t, and the sort of these various little interconnections that exist both within a certain group in New York City, but then also over time. This is from, like, 10, 12 years ago. And it’s just sort of a fascinating examination of the web of connections that exist between the people we know now as well as from the past and to the future.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Hal Hershfield
Evernote. I don’t know if that’s the type of tool that you’re looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Hal Hershfield
But being able to have sort of my notes everywhere, wherever I am, is super useful for me because there’s always things that are popping up, and then anytime I’ve told myself, “I’ll remember that thing later,” I pretty much never do. And so, being able to jot it down quickly and have it, assume everything else is super important for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Hal Hershfield
My wife and I started to plan out the meals that we’re going to have, whatever it is, on Friday or Saturday, more or less for the rest of the week. And it has drastically decreased the tension involved around what should we have for dinner every night, and drastically increased my efficiency and productivity the rest of the week because I don’t have to spend that time thinking about, “What are we doing for dinner?” I just look at the little sheets, say, “Oh, that’s what we planned out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. So, one of the key nuggets that I think people sort of quote back to me often is it’s really more just the big idea that there can be this future self, this salient future self that can exist in the future. I’ve heard a lot of people say to me, “I haven’t thought about things that way, and it gives me sort of a person to consider, and then also an optimistic take on where I’m going through time.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, you can go to my website HalHershfield.com. Everything about my research and my book and whatnot is there. You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, I would say one final challenge for folks who are looking to be awesome at their jobs is to consider not the tradeoff between now and later, but to think about the harmony between now and later. So, think about the things that you are doing at work and at your jobs that will benefit you now, and may not benefit you in the future, but then also switch the focus. Think about the things that you can do right now that will provide benefits both now and later. And then consider how you’re spending your time in those different pursuits.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hal, this has been a treat. I wish you and your future self much luck.

Hal Hershfield
Hey, thanks, Pete. I appreciate it.

Jul 13
0

881: How to Find Focus, Fight Distraction, and Boost Your Attention Span with Dr. Gloria Mark

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Dr. Gloria Mark shares her science-based solutions for overcoming distractions and finding more flow. 

You’ll Learn:

  1. The biggest hurdle for your attention span
  2. What drains your attention span tank–and how to refuel it
  3. How to design your day to maximize productivity

About Gloria

Dr. Gloria Mark has published over 150 papers in the top journals and conferences in the fields of human-computer interactions (HCI) and Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and is author of the book Multitasking in the Digital Age. Her work on multitasking has appeared in outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, the BBC, and many others. Her newest book, Attention Span: Find Focus and Fight Distraction, is out now.

She is the Chancellor Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. Her primary research interest is in understanding the impact of digital media on people’s lives and she is best known for her work in studying people’s multitasking, mood and behavior while using digital media in real world environments.

Resources Mentioned

Gloria Mark Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Gloria, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Gloria Mark
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about your book Attention Span: Find Focus and Fight Distraction. But, first, I want to hear a little bit about how you did not start your career in the science research professor world but rather in the art world. What’s the story here and how did you make the switch?

Gloria Mark
That’s right. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, I studied art, never thought I would be doing anything except art. Graduated from art school and then I discovered the hard reality of making a living as an artist. Now, it turns out that I was also good at math and science, and I also found those topics interesting. So, I made the switch into a science field but there is a story there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, do tell.

Gloria Mark
Yeah, I was originally just going to do a terminal master’s degree in biostatistics because you could get really good jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds like a good job field.

Gloria Mark
So, I thought that’s a relatively easy thing for me to do. But while I was at the University of Michigan, I applied for a job as a research assistant because I needed a job, and I walked into the office of Dr. Manfred Kochen. And he asked me, can I code? No. Do I know network theory? No. Do I know Fuzzy Set Theory? Nope. And I started to walk out, and he said, “Wait a minute. Stop. What can you do?” And I said, “I can paint.” And he said, “Well, come back in.” And he said before he got his Ph.D. in math at MIT, he studied art at The Art Student League in New York. And we talked about art for the next two hours.

And then he said, “Do you think you could do research on the discovery process of artists?” And I was very young and naïve and bold, and I said, “Of course, I could.” And that’s how I began to study cognitive psychology, and before I knew it, I ended up getting a Ph.D. in psychology, and that’s what I’ve been working on since.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. That’s really cool. And I’m excited to hear your insights and wisdom gained from a career spent in this domain, particularly in the zone of attention, and us humans and how we pay attention, and can do that better, and distraction and that stuff. Could you share any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about attention over the course of your career?

Gloria Mark
Oh, I’ve made a number of surprising discoveries. Maybe one of the most surprising things was actually how short our attention spans are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lay it on us. I’ve heard about goldfish. Let’s get this straight, the straight info from the source.

Gloria Mark
Yeah, the goldfish result is not exactly correct, so that shouldn’t be our starting point. So, when I first started tracking attention, and I’ve been studying this empirically, so using methods like computer logging techniques. We actually started studying this using stopwatches where we would shadow people and click the stopwatch every time they switch their attention. When we first started doing this 20 years ago, attention averaged about two and a half minutes on any screen. I was astounded at the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Too big, too small.

Gloria Mark
Yeah, I couldn’t believe it was that short. We continued tracking attention. Around 2012, we found it to average 75 seconds, and in the last few years, it’s averaged 47 seconds. And also, others have replicated the result. And so, again, these are all done with objective measures. We’re not asking people to self-report how short their attention span is or how long it is, but we’re actually measuring the length of time people’s attention is on any screen, computer or phone.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m intrigued here, look, I’m the sort of guy who, though not a researcher, will frequently want to read the full text of the scientific journal article and be frustrated I can’t get it for free online.

Anyway, all that’s to say I’m actually very interested in the details of how you conduct this research. What are you observing on the screen? And what are we seeing was two and half minutes, and now is 47 seconds?

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, let me back up a little bit and say that most psychologists tend to bring people into a laboratory to study them. So, they create this simulated environment, this model of the world inside of a laboratory, and then they perform tests. But I thought that if we’re studying attention on our devices, it’s so much important to study what people do in the course of their everyday lives. Like, why should we pull people out of their environment? So, let’s go to where people are.

So, I created what I call living laboratories, where I used a variety of different kinds of sensors. So, these are measures that are not obtrusive. They don’t interfere with how you do work, such as computer logging techniques that will log the length of time a screen is in the foreground, and it’ll log that in the background.

We have people use wearable devices. We’ve had people wear heart rate monitors. We have had people use wrist wearables to get measures of stress. And we’ve had people wear these cameras that are called SenseCams, very lightweight cameras, you wear around your neck that can record photos. They take continuous photos so that you can then detect who people are speaking to. Are they having a face-to-face conversation? Or, are they rather online?

We sync together all these measures in real time so that we create a fairly comprehensive picture of what people are doing on their devices when they’re at work or if they’re at home. Most of the time, we’ve done this in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, that’s intriguing. So, we’re putting together a picture based on logging in the background what’s happening on the machines, as well as the photos. And so, I’m thinking, we had Dr. Amishi Jha on the show earlier, and she talked about the SART, the sustained attention response test. It sounds like maybe that’s the main difference in terms of constructing a laboratory in which you come on in.

And so, what I’ve heard is like those results are actually somewhat stable over time. Like, hey, by that measure of attention span, it looks like it’s about the same. However, you’re telling me – was it in vivo, what’s the right word, science-y?

Gloria Mark
In vivo, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
In vivo, yeah, got it. Feeling good. In vivo, we see a substantial decline from 2.5 minutes to 47 seconds. Is that a fair state of play under the two different ways of looking at things?

Gloria Mark
Yes, that’s right, because, don’t forget, when people are using their devices, think of everything that’s happening in their environment. So, they’re trying to stay focused on their tasks, they’re dealing with email, they have this urge to check social media, they have people interrupting their office, they’re experiencing stress, some of it might be chronic stress.

You’ve got career trajectories that people are worried about. Someone might’ve had a conflict in the workplace. So many things are going on and it’s just not possible to simulate all of that inside of a laboratory. And laboratory research is great if there’s a particular thing you want to test in an ideal kind of environment. So, something where you won’t have variables that can affect the thing that you’re trying to study, then it’s great for that. But if we’re talking about what really happens with attention in the real world when people are at work, this is what we see.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the human capacity to pay attention is relatively the same as it’s been for decades but the real-life experience of how we pay attention has declined dramatically. Like, the vast majority of attention span has been decimated. It sounds like two-thirds reduction there. And so, when did we have two and a half minutes? And when did we have 47 seconds? What’s the rough timeline history for us?

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, we started doing the research in 2003. It was first published in 2004. That was two and a half minutes. The 47 seconds, this is not just my work. Again, it’s been replicated by others through the pandemic. So, the last study that was done actually was published in 2020, and we find the estimates ranging from 44 seconds to 50 seconds, and 47 seconds is the average of those studies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, Gloria, this seems like a big deal for our species, can you contextualize this for us? What does this mean? What is the implication of living lives this way?

Gloria Mark
Yeah, there are a lot of implications. First of all, this kind of fast attention shifting, it’s associated with stress, and we know that, and that’s been documented. We know in laboratory settings, when people are performing, when they’re multitasking, we know that their blood pressure rises, both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. There’s a physiological marker in the body that indicates that people are stressed.

In my research, when we measure stress in vivo in the real world, we see a very strong correlation between fast shifting of attention and stress going up, and that’s measured by heart rate monitors. We’ve also used wearables to measure heart rate.

Pete Mockaitis
And, if I may, is the physiological marker something like cortisol or heart rate variability, or what are we looking at?

Gloria Mark
It’s a more complicated marker, and it’s probably not something that listeners have heard of.

Pete Mockaitis
Gloria, I might very well get my blood tested for it. So, lay it on us.

Gloria Mark
So, we know that fast shifting of attention leads to the decreased secretion of immunoglobulin A reactivity, and that’s known as a marker of stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the fast attention shifting is associated with increased stress. Well, then this kind of makes me think of maybe a little bit of a reinforcing loop. Might the increased stress also impact the way we can pay attention?

Gloria Mark
Absolutely. When we’re stressed, we’re not making the best use of our attentional resources. Absolutely. And it’s harder to focus. Another impact of this fast attention switching is that it leads to what’s called a switch cost. And a switch cost is the extra amount of time that it takes for you to reorient to a new task when you switch. So, it’s not like you can immediately switch to a new task, dive in and get focused right away, but it takes some time for you to get into this new task.

And the best way that I can explain it is by using a metaphor. Imagine that you’ve got a whiteboard inside of your mind, and every time you’re switching tasks, you’re erasing the mental model of the task that you just did, and you’re rewriting a new mental model for the new task. And just like in the real world, when you erase a whiteboard, sometimes you can’t erase it completely and it leaves a residue. And that can also happen in our mind.

And so, imagine you’re reading the news, and you read about some horrific catastrophe, and then you try to go back to work, and that stays with you. Or, you’ve just had an email and discovered that the deadline is a lot sooner than you thought it would be. That stays with you and it affects your ability to focus on the next task, leaves a residue.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, the task switching, leave a residue, we increase stress. What are some of the other implications?

Gloria Mark
Well, another really bad implication is that switching attention so fast leads to errors. So, we know, again, from laboratory research, decades of laboratory research, people make more errors when they’re switching their attention between different tasks. There was a study done with physicians not too long ago, where they observed physicians when they multitask.

So, they shifted their attentions, they’re continually being interrupted by nurses, by other physicians, patient queries, and they made, out of over 200 different prescriptions that they wrote, they made roughly like 80% to 90% errors in the prescribing. And some of those were very serious errors in terms of writing the wrong drug or the wrong dosage.

Pete Mockaitis
So, 80% of the prescriptions were wrong?

Gloria Mark
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
In a highly distracted, interrupted condition.

Gloria Mark
Do you want me to tell you the exact number?

Pete Mockaitis
Please.

Gloria Mark
So, in 2018, there was a study done of physicians, looking at the effects of them multitasking, which is shifting their attention rapidly. And physicians, of course, are distracted pretty often. They’re distracted by nurses, by other doctors, patients. And in this study, it was found that out of 239 prescriptions that the physicians wrote, 208 of them showed errors.

And most of these errors were just incomplete prescriptions but 12 of those were really severe in the sense of writing the wrong drug or the wrong dosage. So, there can be very serious consequences to multitasking. Let me also point out that people think multitasking can lead us to perform better. The idea of multitasking, of doing two things at the same time, is a myth. Humans cannot perform two things at the same time. What we are doing is shifting our attention rapidly between different tasks. And that’s what we picked up when we studied people’s attention on screens.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, with these prescriptions in the interrupted condition, the good majority of them were errors, most of those inconsequential, so I guess that’s nice. And then in the uninterrupted condition, do physicians get it right, I mean, 99 plus percent of the time?

Gloria Mark
So, this study was done in situ, which means in the real world, and so they didn’t have a condition where physicians were not interrupted.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re never not distracted.

Gloria Mark
Right. So, they couldn’t really compare what physicians do if they’re in a perfectly peaceful environment without distractions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, increased stress, switching costs, residue. And then maybe can you show us the light on the other side? Maybe is there a cool story of someone who improved their attention span and saw cool results?

Gloria Mark
Well, there are cases. So, there are ways that we can regain agency over our attention. And people very often will tell me that some of the techniques that we’ve discovered do work for people, and they’ve been able to focus better. It’s really important to consider that when you’re shifting your attention so fast, it affects our wellbeing. It leads to higher stress. And as you pointed out, we get into this cycle where, if we get more stressed, it becomes even harder to focus.

And so, people have reported the benefits, for example, of being able to take, really, significant breaks. Also, the benefits of becoming aware of when you’re starting to feel immensely tired, and taking a break, pulling back to replenish. Because by doing less, by pulling back, we can actually do more and we can be more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say significant break, what does that mean in terms of length or approach, like what you’re doing?

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, first of all, let me talk about when is a good time to take a break. So, it turns out that people are not able to have extensive nonstop focus. And if you search the internet, you’ll see a lot of sayings that advertise, “Use this technique and you’ll have nonstop focus,” “Ten hours of nonstop focus,” “Hours of nonstop focus.” It’s just not humanly possible. Why? Because people have a limited capacity of attentional resources. You can think of it as a tank.

We start our day with a tank of attentional resources, things we do over the day drain our resources. Focusing drains our resources. Shifting our attention very rapidly, that also drains our resources because of the switch costs that we talked about and because of the stress. And so, we have this limited capacity for attention.

What can we do to optimize our attention? Well, we can take breaks. Now, first of all, starting your day with really good quality sleep gives you a jumpstart on your attention, and you can start your day with a full tank of resources, or nearly full tank. So, you would be in really good shape to start your day off with a good night’s sleep.

Now, people tend to have a peak of focus around mid-morning. Most people, for them, it’s 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning but it depends on your chrono type. So, if you’re an early type, your peak focus will be much earlier. If you’re a late type, your peak focus will be later. People tend to have a second peak in the afternoon, usually mid-afternoon between 2:00 and 3:00. Again, it depends on your chrono type, if you’re an early type or late type.

Now, it’s important to understand when your peak focus time is, and you plan your breaks around that peak focus time. So, you want to make sure that you’re really well-rested and that you’re alert before it’s time for you to really dive into doing that hard work. And after working for a while, it’s really important to probe yourself and understand whether you’re starting to become mentally exhausted. And if you are, it’s time for a break.

Now, you can take quick breaks, 10-minute breaks. Those would be very useful. The best break of all that we know from research is to walk outside for 20 minutes in nature, and that’s the best replenishment that we can have for our attentional resources. I realize that not everyone can do it. If it’s the middle of winter and you’re living in the northeast, you may not be able to simply walk outside in nature.

I live in California, so, of course, it’s a lot easier for me to do that year-round. So, if you can’t go outside, you can at least move around. Take a walk, move around, make sure you’re focusing on things at a distance. You don’t want to be walking around using your smartphone, checking your email. Really detach, pull away, and make sure you have really one, two, or three significant breaks a day like that. And make sure that you plan those breaks around the time that you’re really starting to feel that your mental resources are getting exhausted.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There we go. So, pay attention to chrono types when you’re feeling alert and when you’re not, and then take those significant breaks. We don’t have unlimited attention. To the sleep point, can you tell me, does it matter a lot or a little if, let’s say, an ideal amount of sleep for a person is seven and a half hours but, on a given night, shucks, they only got 6.2 hours? Is that a little deal or a big deal?

Gloria Mark
So, one night of poor sleep is not going to make that much of a difference. What will make a difference, if you consecutively acquire what’s called sleep debt. And sleep debt, it’s like if you keep removing money from your bank account and you’ve got more expenses that you have to pay than you have money for, that’s debt. And same thing happens with sleep debt.

And we’ve done in our research, we found that as sleep debt accumulates, people have a harder and harder time paying attention. So, if you’re looking at sleep debt accumulating over a week, you see people’s attention spans getting lower and lower over the course of the week. So, it’s really important not to let sleep debt accumulate.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’d also like to get your view in terms of the amount of attention resources we have. We can’t do for 10 hours straight, like this is not possible even with whatever miracle supplement is being sold. Roughly, what is reasonable? If we are well-rested and we’re going to attend to something for as long as is reasonably humanly possible, what kind of time ranges are we talking about here?

Gloria Mark
So, I think two hours. If you can get two hours of focus at a stretch, that’s pretty good. That’s really good. It depends on a number of things. It depends how intrinsically motivated you are. If you’re really motivated in what you’re doing, you’ll be able to spend longer time. Time will seem like it’s flying by. If you’re less intrinsically motivated, it’s going to be more work for you to try to stay focused.

But think about two hours, but don’t despair. If you can only get 30 minutes of focus, that’s fine as long as you make sure you take a break, get yourself replenished, and then you can go back and try it in 30-minute segments. And so much of it depends on the nature of the work as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then by focusing, if there were an exercise, so we talked about the rest portion of this, sleep well, take breaks, watch when you’re sharpest in terms of attention based on your chrono type, are there any sort of exercises or practices we could do to bring us? If we’re on the 47-second world, what could bring us back to a two-and-a-half-minute world?

Gloria Mark
So, I practice what I call meta-awareness as an exercise. And this actually comes from mindfulness, which you’ve probably heard of, many of your listeners have heard of. During the pandemic, my university offered a course in mindfulness, and I find it very, very helpful for helping me relax, helping me fall asleep.

But I also realized that when I’m on my devices, I can also use a similar kind of technique. I’ve adapted it for the way we use our devices, which is learning to become aware of the present because that’s what mindfulness is about. It teaches you how to focus on the present.

So many of things we do when we’re on our devices are unconscious. So, I look at my phone and I have an urge to grab it, or I have this unconscious desire to switch to social media, or to switch to news. I’m a news junkie. I read a lot of news. Meta-awareness is probing yourself to become aware of these urges and to recognize them.

And so, I’ve learned to be able to recognize when I have this urge to switch screens, and I can reflect on it, and I can ask myself, “Why do I have this urge to go to social media?” It’s usually because I’m bored or because I’m procrastinating. And once I become aware of this urge, I can make this unconscious action conscious. I can bring it to my conscious attention. I can come up with a plan.

And my plan is usually of the form, “Gloria, spend 30 more minutes on this task and then you can be rewarded and go and check the news.” And so, learning to probe yourself is so valuable, and it’s really a way to gain mastery over your attention, and to be able to be intentional and to make decisions about where you want to be able to focus and for how long.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, then we become aware of the urge and the causes and make a plan. That’s great. Any other key interventions that are great for improving our attention span and abilities?

Gloria Mark
Yeah, another very valuable technique is to practice what’s called forethought. And forethought is imagining how your current actions will affect your future self. And what makes the most sense for me is to imagine how my current actions are going to affect myself later in the day, say, at 7:00 p.m. And if you’re a person who can easily spend 30 minutes to an hour on social media, or surfing the web, first, visualize your end of the day and where you want to be.

And I’m betting you want to feel rewarded and you want to feel peaceful, you want to feel fulfilled. And imagine yourself sitting on the couch, reading your favorite book, watching your favorite show, drinking a glass of wine. And the more concrete that visualization is, the more powerful of a tool it is to get you to stay on track in the present.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, if I may on the forethought. So, the approach there is to visualize ourselves in a future moment wherein we have successfully completed the things that we wanted to attend to. And so, it sounds like this isn’t so much your dramatic final victory, you’re being hoisted, or Gatorades being doused on you, but rather, “Hey, I finished this day and I accomplished the things I wanted to in this day, and I can feel a quiet pride satisfaction, kind of whatever flavor of goodness,” is there for you at the other end of the effort.

Gloria Mark
That’s right. And we shouldn’t undermine this experience at the end of the day because that’s pretty valuable. Having a day where you feel fulfilled and having the luxury of being able to relax at the end of the day, that’s quite powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. And you have another.

Gloria Mark
Yes. So, attention is goal-directed, and that’s something that a lot of people don’t realize. We pay attention according to what our goals are. So, if my goal is I want to finish writing an article, I’m going to be writing that article. That’s where my attention is. If my goal is I want to relieve boredom, then I’m probably going to be playing a game or going on social media. And so, it’s so important to stay aware of what our goals are.

I did research with colleagues at Microsoft Research, and they developed a very simple chatbot that asks people two very simple questions at the beginning of each day. The first question is, “What is your task-goal for the day? What do you want to accomplish today?” The second question was, “How do you want to feel by the end of the day?” So, that’s an emotional goal.

So, at the beginning of each day, people were reminded of their task-goal and their emotional goal. And the result was that people stayed on track more effectively after being asked those questions. But what we also discovered was that these effects don’t last very long. It might last one hour or a few hours. And the reason they don’t last so long is goals slip from our minds. They can slip so easily.

And so, what I’ve learned is that it’s really important to keep reinforcing our goals. So, whatever it takes, if you have to write goals on a Post-it Note and make sure it’s in your field of view, or put it on your phone where you can see that goal. So, don’t let our goals slip from our minds, is the message.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, you mentioned Microsoft and research, so I’ve got to ask you, the attention expert. I had read a study, I think it was done with Microsoft folks, and it said when they were distracted, they shifted their attention from one thing. It took them an average of 24 minutes to return to the thing they were doing. I’d love it if you could share. Is that true or accurate? Is there nuance to it? And is that just the way all of us have to be or can we shorten that?

Gloria Mark
So, first of all, there is something that’s not accurate. The study was not done at Microsoft Research, but the study was my study.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. We’re setting the record straight. Here we are, Gloria.

Gloria Mark
Yes, but you’d be surprised how factoids can change.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it.

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, this was a study that I did, and this was with a graduate student of mine, Victor Gonzales, and this was done at various tech companies, so financial analysis companies, software companies. And it turns out that if you look at people’s attention spent on a task, not just on a screen, like you can switch screens very rapidly, every 47 seconds from email, to Word doc, to Excel, to Google Search.

But if you look at the level of a task, how long do people spend on any task? And granted, they might be switching their attention within that task. For example, I write papers for a living, and I might have my attention on a Word doc, and then I’m switching to read an article, and then I’m switching to look up something on the web, and I’m switching, switching, switching, but it’s all the same task.

So, we might ask, “Maybe it’s not so bad to be interrupted if your attention stays within the same framework of a single task.” Well, it turns out that if you’re interrupted from any particular task, there’s a pattern that we find in the data. And what happens is that people’s attention is then switched to another task.

They work on that, and then another, and then another. And then they start to work on a fourth task, and then go back and pick up the original interrupted task. That’s a 25 and a half-minute gap on average. People spend, on average, 10 and a half minutes on a task before switching to something else. That’s a big switch, to really switch to a completely different task.

Now, what happens? I was describing, they switch, and switch again, and switch again, and switch again. These are cognitive shifts in our minds. We’re not just shifting doing one single thing for 25 and a half minutes, and then coming back, but our attention keeps getting diverted. And so, let’s go back and think about that tank of mental resources, our limited precious mental resources.

They’re just draining because it requires effort to have to keep reorienting to these new tasks and trying to understand, “Okay, what am I doing now? Where did I leave off?” and so on. So, it’s a lot of effort that’s involved but it’s 25 and a half minutes on average to go back to an interrupted task.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, during those 25 and a half minutes, they’re not just fiddling around on Facebook. They’re doing other tasks in the interim, yet there is a cost of that attention switching. And so, Gloria, can you share with us what is misrepresented when this research is shared in factoid format in popular media?

Gloria Mark
So, a lot of people, first of all, they’re not aware that we’re talking at the level of a task, so they tend to think of, I mean, we’re interrupted all the time. If I’m doing email, I can get interrupted, or I can get interrupted from Facebook, for that matter. But they tend to think that there’s just some single thing that’s going on but in between, and people are coming back to that original task, so there’s a lot of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. When, really, it’s a multi-step journey. Okay. And it sounds like that is what we observe but it certainly doesn’t have to be the norm. If I’m, say, working in a home office, I get a knock on the door from my wife, she says, “Can you take care of the spider or this very heavy thing?” it is entirely possible for me to do the thing, return within two minutes, and return to my task in far less than 25 and a half minutes, but I have utilized some of my attention resource tank in executing those switches.

Gloria Mark
That’s right, yeah. And, of course, if it’s a minor interruption, like taking care of a spider, assuming you’re not afraid of spiders, then you should be able to come right back and pick up your task without too much of an effort.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, as I’m thinking about that scenario, I’ll tell you, this is a quirk of me. I don’t know, I think I’m also easily hypnotized. I remember the stage hypnotist in college picked me out probably for a reason. And sometimes I’ll get really kind of mesmerized in the work I’m doing, and it’s really fun. It’s a groove and a flow, and I’m thinking about, “The implication of this, but what about that? But then what about this?” like several layers of implication, cause and effect.

And, Gloria, do you know if this, in the attention research literature, is this a personality domain that people can vary on? And does it mean anything? Or, is this just some whole another thing I got going on?

Gloria Mark
There are individual differences in people’s ability to be engaged in something. And, yes, some people can be…it’s more easy for them to get deeply absorbed in something than others. There’s actually a test you can do.
So, there is a scale that you can use, it’s called the Tellegen Absorption Scale. And this has been shown to measure traits of absorption. And some people have this uncanny ability to be very deeply absorbed in things. For example, when people read mystery, some people can become so absorbed in reading the mystery that they actually hear the footsteps on the stairs. They can visualize the imagery a lot better than others. So, you might be one of these individuals who scores at the extremes on the Tellegen Absorption Scale.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Gloria, tell us, are there any other key tools, tactics, interventions, things people who want to be awesome at their job should know or do to improve their ability to pay attention?

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, it’s about how you plan your day. So, most of us, we’ve been brought up with the idea that you create a schedule for your day, and most people will write down the tasks that they have to do, and they’ll assign a time to doing it. That’s the way most of us, it’s how we’ve been brought up. It’s what we do. But I’d like to turn that around and talk about designing your day.

So, rather than scheduling tasks with a time, think back to when I was talking about that people have natural rhythms of attention. There are certain times of the day when people are at their peak focus, and other times when they’re in valleys, their focus is not great. Think about your unique times of peak focus and design your day so that you’d leverage those times to do tasks that are the hardest, that require the most creativity because you will do your best.

So, rather than creating these artificial schedules that ignore our attentional capacities, think instead of your personal rhythm and when you function best. And so, if I have, say, to work on a paper, I might plan the times to work on the paper for mid-morning for me, mid-afternoon for me, and then, of course, I have other things to do. I have to write emails, do what I call subordinate work, filling out forms, things like that. I will do those when I have these valleys of attention because it doesn’t require that much effort.

So, design your day, and also design your day with what I call empty space. There is a Japanese expression that’s called “yohaku no bi” which refers to the beauty of empty space. And I came up with this idea from when I was an artist. Because when I was an artist, I learned about the concept of negative space. It’s this space that surrounds a figure, and it’s as important as the figure itself. It’s what makes the figure shine. It’s what makes it vibrant and gives it energy.

And when you design your day, make sure you design empty space into your day, time that you can use for contemplation, meditation, for going for a walk, doing rote activity. And rote activity could be things like knitting. Some person talked about how he loves to just throw a ball against the screen. That serves to relax him and helps him de-stress. There’s a lot of things you can do during that time of empty space.

And think about what helps you the most. What I like to do is I do exercise, and I love to go outside and do exercise during that time. It really helps replenish me. So, yeah, don’t pack your day but give your work a chance to breathe so that you can really come back and do your best.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Gloria, now I’d love to hear about your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote with us?

Gloria Mark
Well, I actually have two favorite quotes, and it’s really hard for me to decide which one I like better, so I’ll share both. The first one is by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And I love that quote. It’s something that’s just benefited me in my whole life. If you have radar for opportunities, and an opportunity comes along, you can pounce on it and grab it.

The second quote comes from an art teacher of mine, and it’s “To have the courage to fail.” And I love this quote because so much of the time we do things that are safe, and we know that they’ll be successful because they’re safe. We’re not taking risks. But if you can have the courage to take that risk, knowing that it’s likely that you will fail, you have the chance to make a great discovery. So, that’s why I like those.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study?

Gloria Mark
Yeah, there is a study done by French scientists, where they had people do hard tasks over a six-hour period. And most of the times when people go into laboratory studies, they’ll do a task for an hour, and they’ll do a hard task and then they’ll take some measurement of how stressed they are or how many hours they made. This was done over six hours.

And what these researchers found was that as people got more exhausted, they became more easily distracted. And so, they were asked questions periodically, “Would you rather have a monetary reward now or would you rather wait, and then you can get even a higher reward? So, take $10 now, if you wait 30 minutes, we’ll give you $15.”

Over the course of the day doing hard tasks for a six-hour period, people became less and less likely to delay gratification and more likely to just grab that money at the time. So, they lost the ability of self-control. And when you lose the ability of self-control, that’s when we become more distracted.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Gloria Mark
I always go back to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s such a powerful book, and it just shows how, if people have purpose, if people have goals, that can really help us perform best in our lives. And it’s just a very powerful message.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Gloria Mark
Well, the idea of probing myself is a tool that I’ve learned to constantly probe myself, to ask myself, “Do I feel exhausted? Is it time for a break? Why do I have an urge to switch my attention?” And it’s become second nature, it’s like a muscle that I’ve developed. And I find it to be a very important tool, and it’s very powerful, and it’s very effective for keeping me on task.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Gloria Mark
It’s the idea that we have limited attentional resources, and people don’t realize that. People realize that our attention is infinite, we can do so many things, and not worry about consequences. We do have limited mental attentional resources, and we have to pick and choose what we pay attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Gloria Mark
Well, you could go to my website www.GloriaMark.com. Everything that I spoke about today in the episode, you can find in my book. It’s called Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. And this describes my 20-plus years of research into studying attention with our devices. You can also find me on Twitter @GloriaMark_PhD and also on LinkedIn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Gloria Mark
Final call to action is to gain agency over your attention. So, be a master of your tools, your computers, phones, tablets. Don’t let your tools be the master over you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Gloria, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and pleasant attention.

Gloria Mark
Thank you so much for having me.

Jul 10
0

880: How to Thrive and Succeed as a Middle Manager with Bill Schaninger

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Bill Schaninger explains why middle managers are critical to an organization’s success—and shares powerful principles for better leading.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why middle managers are often underappreciated
  2. The number one thing middle managers should be doing
  3. The simple secret to retaining top talent

About Bill

Bill Schaninger is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Philadelphia office. He advises CEOs, government ministers, and senior executives on organizational health and improvement. He is McKinsey’s expert on the power of culture, values, and leadership in improving business outcomes. He holds an MS and PhD in management from Auburn University and an MBA and Bachelor of Business Administration from Moravian College. He is a coauthor of Beyond Performance 2.0. 

 

Resources Mentioned

Bill Schaninger Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Bill, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Bill Schaninger

Hey, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m super excited to dig into your wisdom of your latest book here, Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work. But, first, I got to hear, you’re freshly retired, how is that going for you?

Bill Schaninger

You know, one, it’s pretty awesome. That’s for sure. I do definitely have more degrees of flexibility in my daily calendar than I’ve had ever. It’s still a little strange. If I count all the way back to when I was working at KidsPeace, which is a residential psychiatric treatment center, through to my time in grad school, then joining McKinsey in 2000, it’s been a long run since I’ve had this much flexibility. So, that part is wonderful and awesome.

But now, because, I guess like most things happen when you’re not expecting, I’ve had a run of really interesting things pop up and opportunities, and I just thought maybe I was going to retire, form an LLC, and set up a website, a media kit, and just do some speeches and tour the book, I’m still going to do that, but I’ve had some really interesting opportunities present themselves to me that I’m working through right now. And so, maybe they’ll be an additional chapter that I didn’t quite count on.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, now I’d love to hear a bit about your latest, Power to the Middle. Any particularly fascinating insights that you found in your research there?

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, for sure. Look, everybody who writes a book always wants to come out with why does the book now matter.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, absolutely. It’s like the first third of every business book.

Bill Schaninger

Exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s like, “Dude, I already bought your book. We could just get to the goods.”

Bill Schaninger

“Yeah, now more than ever.” Like, we used to joke, particularly in the dotcom era, right when I joined McKinsey, it seemed like, particularly against the Y2K stuff and then the war for talent stuff, it was like everything literally led with, “Now more than ever.” And I don’t think that’s the case but what I do think that’s interesting is we’ve had this pretty amazing confluence of things that maybe would’ve been difficult to predict.

Who would’ve guessed a global pandemic was coming? Maybe Dr. Fauci and his colleagues who do infectious diseases said, “Yeah, that was likely, dummy.” But I certainly didn’t know it was going to impact us to that scale. But just prior to that, we’d had that massive run around what was being called future work, which was the impact of automation. Now, we’re seeing the next tranche of that in generative AI. And, at the same time, underneath that, we had a group of people who, when they said, “You can’t come to work because it’s unsafe,” and then we’re working from home, a few months into it, said, “And you know what, I might not come back to work.”

And so, that, the big shifts that we saw in the work, the nature of the work, how it was done, where it was done, when it was done, the workforce, the composition of it, the skillsets required in it, and the workplace, what’s the point of having a workplace, do we need an office, all those things have come around and come right to the fore here in the last 18 months.

And then the good news is we know the answer to a lot of it is the role of the middle manager. That is the good news. Who knows how the work is changing? And what’s going to go back to how it was? And what’s always going to be different going forward? Probably the manager responsible for the work getting done. Who’s going to know what workers can do, and what kind of flexibility we have, and where they need to be redeployed or upskilled? Probably the manager who those people work for.

Who creates an environment that people actually want to come back to, actually want to feel part of that’s really attractive? Again, probably the people leaders who are there. So, that’s the good news. We know the answer. The bad news? We have systemically beaten these roles up, made them the source of derision and mockery, and signal to them that their job is actually administrivia and bureaucracy and meetings, and not the very thing we desperately need them to do, which is be good leaders.

And so, that’s the conundrum. We know the answer but we also know the is the problem. And so, a good portion of this book is saying, “How do we really dig back into the nature of these roles, the people in these roles, and how we give them a fighting chance to be successful?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, understood. Well, so I’d love to get a sense for the mockery. Tell us, paint a picture there.

Bill Schaninger

Well, look, I’m 53, and so I’m clearly Gen X. In my lifetime, we had “Wall Street” come out, and Gordon Gekko was supposed to be an antihero, he’s supposed to be a villain.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, greed is good, that guy.

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, greed is good, “Wake up, bud. It’s time to make real money.” That guy was beloved, not reviled. And so, for many of us in the ‘80s, our parents, who believed that they would have cradled the great employment, were fired. Fired from Bethlehem Steel, fired from Mack Trucks, fired from Fuller Company, fired from Lucent. Just to name a few. US Steel, whatever, pick large institution we would’ve all known and loved. GM for certain, Ford, Chrysler.

Well, I’m belaboring that because for the people of the Gen X era, we saw this massive transition of it’s no longer esteemed to be a middle manager at fill-in-the-blank big company because, in many cases, a lot of those jobs went away.

And then you ran that through the ‘90s where it was the run up of, “Oh, now it’s going to be Y2K and the dotcom era, and the fixation on A-talents,” and the people in the middle were treated almost as a disembodied member of the machine. You had office space, you had your TPS reports, “Who moved my stapler?” you had Dilbert as the cartoon. There’s cartoons or cartoons, you know, animation, it was making a mockery of the mindless dolt that was in the middle manager job, someone to be avoided, mocked, endured, and not someone who teaches you the ropes, someone who helps you understand how to get work done, someone who makes sure that you know that you have people around you who care about you.

That, to me, is the kind of the mark where it was no longer viewed as being part of an institution, was something to be respected. And instead, these roles started being viewed as negative. And so, for those who did have talent, then it becomes like, “Well, how quickly can I get in and out of these roles?” So, that would be one, for sure, which is just, at some point, we decided these weren’t respected roles anymore.

The second around the same time, certainly in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, we started getting re-engineering, restructuring, rightsizing, downsizing.

Pete Mockaitis

Rationalizing.

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, right. Exactly. All those are code for, “We’re going to give you more people than you can possibly lead. Maybe you can keep an eye on them. And, really, you’re just there to keep a lid on it and pay attention to the bad actors.” And so, in that case, we’ve given them spans that they can’t possibly lead. And the idea of like six by six, and with apologies to my former competitors, I’m sorry, it is absurd to think that every leadership job can magically have these many numbers of direct reports, and some kind of axiom. It doesn’t work that way.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, a six by six means each manager would have six direct reports, and there are six layers between the CEO and the front, frontliners.

Bill Schaninger

Right. And that’s just absurd. Nothing in life is that simple. Nothing in life is that axiomatic. If you’re a general counsel and you happen to be wonderful at IP law, you’re probably still going to want to really manhandle some of those IP cases but you might grow a few assistant GCs who are good at contracts, who are good at labor, who are good at comp. And then you’ll figure out somebody who’s good at saying what we’re going to send to outside counsel, that kind of stuff.

But, in that case, because there’s a bunch of different disciplines and you’re still carrying a little bit of your own work, you might have a relatively small span of control. If you’re running a call center or an outside salesforce, where the work that everyone does is the same, and you have relatively similar levels of skills, well, okay, in that case, maybe you can have a bigger span because you’re getting an economy of scale and scope.

It’s just saying that the nature of the work, the nature of the unit, the nature of what the leader does themselves should drive span. If you go to a place where you really have real variability in your workforce, and some of those workers are really going to need coaching and development and help, you cannot have a span where you can’t possibly give them the help that they need. So, that, to me, is setting the manager up for failure. It’s not just that you’re setting the manager up for failure, you’re setting the unit up for failure. And you will likely have cultural implications, almost like a negative contagion.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, let’s zoom right in and say you are, in fact, a manager in the middle, and you are facing some of these challenges, what the heck do you do? Are there any top best practices that are really transformative?

Bill Schaninger

We think so. For sure, we spent a lot of time looking and seeing what people were asked to do. The vast majority of time, they were being asked to attend meetings, feed the beast, if you will with administrivia, where they were spending time on planning of some form.

Pete Mockaitis

Meeting about the meeting about the meeting.

Bill Schaninger

That’s right, “We’re going to plan for a process to think about doing some work.” When, really, I’d say job one here is look at the role itself, “What are the jobs to be done?” If the jobs to be done aren’t starting with leading the organization that you’re responsible for, it’s wrong. Job one should be lead the people you’re responsible for, and then all the other stuff comes on.

And, actually, God forbid, you allow some slack. As a bit of a side point here, I think we’ve taken our approach to working capital from a financial working capital standpoint, where we try to really lean it out. We certainly apply that to supply chains, and I think we’ve applied it to people, human capital as well. Like, if a unit sends someone to training, everybody else is going to pick up slack. God forbid someone gets sick, or has a baby, or has something that was unexpected happen in their life, the unit runs down complement.

We’ve just gone through COVID where, in many cases, people were used to running at 65%, 70%, 75% complement, not the full stack. That means it’s been a long time since we actually had a full complement of employees that allowed people to do things like get trained, not be as productive as they might be because they’re brand new.

And so, it ends up creating a situation where managers are like, “I can only have people who are experienced, who can hit the ground running, and magically are perfectly performing from day one.” That never happens, it disappoints everyone, and everyone is under stress from the get because they’re struggling just to keep their nose above water.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is so true, and, in a way, kind of tragic for, not to globalize too much, but I’ll just say it, humanity in terms of what we, as a species, are capable of is severely diminished if there’s an attitude of, “I don’t want to do any investing in the people to make them better and capable. I want them fully formed and ready to go.” One, yeah, good luck. There’s very limited supply of such people. And, two, it’s the aggregate learning, growth, development for workers as a whole is severely diminished, and that’s just a bummer.

Bill Schaninger

Oh, 100%. Just think about the human condition at work where you’re supposed to know everything immediately. No, that’s just not how it works. So much of our time has been to become aware of something, you learn about it, it’s broken up into constituent pieces, you had to practice it a little bit, like the actual idea of developing a skill. What happened to that?

What happened to somebody who was decent standing behind you, hand on the shoulders, saying, “Hey, okay, we’re going to push it here a little bit but we’re not going to let you run off the cliff, all right? Yeah, we’re going to challenge you but we’re going to make sure you’re okay.” That sort of stuff requires time and attention, and should be job one. So, you see the first thing we do, “Job one. Do your job. Lead.”

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I want to dig deep. So, that’s job one and it’s often not done, some folks may not actually have a clear picture of what constitutes leading the people. So, lay it on us, Bill, what is that kind of stuff?

Bill Schaninger

Well, the next one then, for sure, is look at the work that everyone’s doing that’s in your charge. If you were to take the job and break it down into its activity level, automation eliminates very few jobs in their entirety. Automation does, however, eliminate, or could eliminate, a lot of tasks. So, if you were doing old-school cost-cutting, what’s the first thing you’d look at? Demand reduction. Could we look at all the work and say, well, let’s just turn down the volume?” Maybe.

“Could we look at some of the activities and just stop doing it?” Maybe. “Could we tech automate it? Maybe. “Could we reduce variability by not allowing everyone to have their own forms and their own time of the month, get to more of a standard?” Maybe. Okay, so when you do all those maybes, you find out what still needs to be done, and then you give what you should be done to technology, or you give what should be done to automation, or maybe even some out to a vendor who can just offshore it or nearshore it, and do it for you. You will still have something left.

The ability to pull a job apart into its activity pieces, its task components, automate, reduce variability, reduce volume. You have what’s left. Put that back together. Now you look at it, and say, “Okay, is that enough? Is that enough to be a meaningful job? Could people see the purpose of that job, how it fits in with the overall purpose? Can we bolt some things onto it and make a new and more interesting and exciting job that also often happens to line up with what our employees want to do?” That idea of, instead of just being a job eliminator but a job re-imaginer, huge idea and a huge skill. And the person best suited to do it is the manager.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right because you’ve got to be pretty up close to see what is happening.

Bill Schaninger
Yeah, in the weeds. You’ve got to be in the mud with them, you know what I mean?

Pete Mockaitis

That’s true. And I think about, hey, I’ve got a team supporting my podcast, and they’re great. Thank you, team. And there are times, we go into it, it’s like, “All right, straight up, there’s a paper shuffle there on minute 8-and-20 seconds in. What are the options do we have available to eliminate that?” And then, sure enough, that sparks some things, like, “Oh, I guess there’s a thousand-dollar piece of software that can make that easier, but when we do it hundreds of thousands of times, that becomes well worth it in terms of the time that we’re saving.” Great.

And so, it’d be quite possible to be completely unaware of that forever, like no one is going to probably mention it, and yet that makes a world of difference. So, I’d love it, Bill, if you could give us an example of, okay, here’s an example of a job, a manager, and a deconstruction, and then a reconstruction, and how that can look, sound, and feel in practice?

Bill Schaninger

Well, just look at someone who, let’s say, produces reports, like classic FP&A, financial performance analysis.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, like budgeting and how do we do on the budget.

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, and particularly the end of the month, we’re going to close the month. Say, okay, first one is, “Are we asking people to go out and get 10 different streams of data coming in or can that be hardwired, it just comes in, you don’t need to pull it, it’s pushed in?” That would be one. You can say, “Okay, the format, are we going to go to a consistent format and/or have it setup with a data scientist and transforms you need to get a common format?” That would be two.

“Then the forms and reports that are put out, are we going to have one version or multiple versions? Are we going to allow people to call for a mid-month data?” “No, I’d like mine on the 21st,” “I like mine on the 15th,” “Or will we go to a common model? What about the analyses on variance that we’re going to run on it? Are we going to control for the same factors, control for just the business?” Just basic things like that, all of it which is like, “How often does it happen? To what standard? How many people have to be involved? How much can be automated and made pushed? And how much is it just actually also become a little bit of self-serve?

So, that answers all the reporting questions. And we have that happen time and again, particularly when you’re looking at the effectiveness and efficiency of a finance unit. But what if you were to say, “Well, what about actual analysis? What explains variability across units? What explains variability across customer segments or product groups?” Well, now that’s pretty cool, that’s actual setting out a question, “Why do we make more in one region than another?”

I was doing some really neat work with a burger fast-food joint that that we all know, and they had all these interesting pulls of data, and we’re sitting around with managers and store managers who are going, “Well, we think that GM matters.” “Okay, we have 50 stores here that’s signed up to be guinea pigs, let’s look. Hey, look at that. Actually, after about 18 months, it seems to tail off on the impact. Okay, so what have we learned? We learned that it’s really an important environment to have those managers learning for the first 18 months, two years after that, kind of flat.”

What about hiring? Vacancies are a real problem. Got it. What about hiring part two? Stars, but you know what, you need at least one star in every shift. You don’t load them up for certain shifts and leave other shifts exposed. Length of shift. Actually, we used to think that we were doing people a solid by having them work eight ten-hour shifts so they could avoid the trips in on the bus, but we’re seeing here, anytime somebody works for more than four hours, they start making some mistakes. And after six hours, they make a huge number of mistakes.

Now, why am I belaboring that? That was a group of managers who ran stores, sitting there, and instead of just being, like, protectors of the status quo or guardians of the data that nobody get access to, first, they started with, “How can we routinized and get rid of all the nonsense and bureaucracy around reporting so we could spend our time exploring and understanding variability in performance because who would know it better than us?”

And that, to me, was a big shift, where you get managers, they didn’t have to be data scientists, they didn’t have to be data engineers, but they needed to know enough about the system of production, of performance, of activity, and say, “Well, how could we understand the differences there?”

Pete Mockaitis

You know, Bill, you’re really bringing me some flashbacks here. I’m thinking of that little 25-year-old Pete Mockaitis, senior associate consultant at Bain, and much of our job was, “Let’s just get all the data to finally start making some sense,” as opposed to, “Oh, you can’t trust that because of this, you can’t trust that because of this. Oh, you got to clean it, make it a flat file. Oh, we got to cross reference that, we got to exclude that.” So, it’s like all this stuff, all this stuff.

Bill Schaninger

The storage and the flat file. I remember once saying to someone, “If you just let us run org lab, here’s what you’re going to get. We’re going to tell you exactly the size, shape, and cost of your organization. And the good news is the flat file you get back will be better than the one you gave because we would’ve fixed it.”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right. And for those not in the know, I’ll just tell you, a flat file is a spreadsheet that has all the columns and all rows and no gaps such that nothing silly breaks when you’re jumping around it, and you can pivot table, etc.

Bill Schaninger

In a world of dismay, it’s like, “Just know that somewhere in that, the nesting and the hierarchy of roles are articulated in columns and/or the cost of the person in that job is articulated in another column.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yes. So, I remember there was all that work, and it wasn’t really fun. I actually made a rap song, “Mo Data, Mo Problems” and performed it. But I remember, for me, it was extremely exciting. My heart started thumping, it’s like, “Okay, finally, we’ve got the pristine real true data, and I’m about to push the button that makes the chart that shows us a thing. Is our hypothesis…?”

Bill Schaninger

Just being able to move to understanding, right, Pete? Listen, if you accept that there’s a little bit of, “We have to clean it,” now think about this because the modern data people are going, “No, Bill, you don’t need to clean it anymore. We can automate all of that,” because then you go from a common poll, common source, so you’re creating a common lake. And then the way in which, whether it’s through an API or something else, there’s just a push. It actually fits.

So, there’s a little bit of work can mean, “We don’t need people doing that manually anymore.” All the people are like, “Oh, I’ve got to run the reports,” which often meant they were doing stupid bridge documents for somebody wouldn’t give up their architecture to something else. All that’s saying is there’s a lot of work we ask people to do, it’s dumb and a pain in the ass. Often, it’s completely untransparent how much it costs and it’s there for the whim for a leader.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, and then once that’s done, things get really fun and interesting.

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, because then you can actually answer questions, like, “Gee, why do some engineering teams do better than others?” “Well, I don’t know. That one’s trying to go across seven times zones.” That doesn’t work.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. So, I like that notion in that it’s not just about quantity of work, hours, dollars, but finding what is suitable for a person to do, and what is meaningful, rich, has some purpose, and fits together. And then, all told, is that a full job in terms of…

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, because you may want to add some things that make it a full job. The idea of disaggregating and then reaggregating, it is really like a job architect. And then taking into account the person in front of you, not the FTE, not the widget maker, not the disembodied robot – the person. And so then, you think about second, just in my list but maybe not importance, is know enough about your employee, the person, to know what matters to them, to understand what role work has in their life’s purpose.

Naina Dhingra and I wrote an article a couple of years ago, saying, “Help your employees find purpose—or watch them leave” that did incredibly well in terms of really resonating and people downloading it. But a good portion of it was just you have three circles here on the purpose front. The biggest circle, the outside one, is the person’s life purpose. The middle circle, which will vary in size, is the purpose that vocation serves, and the inside circle, the smallest, is what you, the company, are providing in terms of vocation.

It’s so arrogant for companies to think that they are the entirety of that person’s purpose but this is what COVID did. COVID said to people, “Well, we’re not going to drive two hours to work anymore, or 90 minutes, and we’re not going to all magically turn up by 9:00.” When that was taken out, now you had people at home, particularly moms, let’s just stick with moms for a second. You’re a mom, you’re a teacher, you’re a caregiver, you’re an employee, you’re a partner or a spouse, maybe you’re looking after a sick mom or a sick dad or aunt or uncle, whoever. That role-stacking forced a bit of a reckoning on everyone, to say, “What actually freaking matters to me? What do I really want to do with my life?”

And now it’s no wonder that we continue to have people saying, about on any given time, like 40% are thinking of leaving, many of them have already left one or two jobs, a fair number of them said, “Hey, by the way, I’ll leave even if I don’t have no job on hand.” And then there was always this group that thought that that was going to go away. It’s not going away because we’ve had a reckoning force to say, “Is where I’m spending my time worth it? Because now, actually, I’m seeing at the end of the day, I could be around my kids. I can feed my kids breakfast. I could see them when they come home from school.”

The rise of the nonlinear work day, in many cases, is people recognizing that life matters a lot, a lot, and we have to come to grips with that. Now, who is best to facilitate that? The boss. The manager. People don’t leave companies; they leave bosses. When people are saying, “I don’t feel supported,” it’s because they don’t feel supported by the boss. The environment is crappy because of the boss. “I don’t have flexibility,” usually because of the boss. Not always. Sometimes there are some strange policy stuff going on. Mostly it’s because of the boss.

So, this, to me, is like this is not just kumbaya, or go fix your spans, or, “Oh, gee, woe is me,” you’re being contrarian by saying don’t fire your middle managers. No, we’re saying this is actually essential to creating a healthy organization that people want to be part of and stay at, and it’s no longer a nice to have. You literally cannot get the work done that delivers your plan if you don’t invest in the people who are running the joint.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, let’s continue this lead the people. We’ve deconstructed jobs, we figured out what really belongs for a human to do that is a job and then is the right size for a person, so that’s one big chunk of the management.

Bill Schaninger

The purpose part, I think, will be second, you know what I mean.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yeah, I was going to go there next. So, how does one help people find their purpose?

Bill Schaninger

Well, you’d probably start by asking…

Pete Mockaitis

“So, what’s your purpose, Bill?”

Bill Schaninger

If you say to people, like, we wrote an instrument, which is kind of like a purpose finder, and here’s the interesting thing. In general, the younger you are and the less people that you’re responsible for taking care of the harder time you have in giving specifics about what your purpose is. Now, you might be able to say, “I just need to make a difference in the world.” Okay. Maybe it has to do with healthcare or social justice or education. Okay. “Well, what might that look like if you were doing it?” “Oh, I don’t know, I’m kind of counting on you to help me figure that out. You’re the employer.”

So, there is something here around you can have a nebulous idea that’s incredibly high beta, “I need to believe that the place I’m joining is consistent with having purpose in the world.” That’s pretty high for the youngsters. As employees get a little older or, in particular, have a mouth to feed, whether that’s through a baby, an adoption, someone they care for, whatever, it starts needing to get super specific because time now is not fungible.

Time is, “I’ve got a certain amount of time for my family, a certain amount of time for me, a certain amount of time for work. Now I can start getting incredibly going, yes, it’s not just about healthcare. I’m passionate about making a difference in cold chain for vaccines.” “Okay, got it.” “I’m passionate about making sure that housing is available to students so that they don’t have to be so transient.” “Got it.” So, workers are at different places about their ability to express what their purpose is and the extent to which vocation hits that.

The conduit from the company, which doesn’t have corpus to the boss which does, that’s the big deal. Does the boss understand enough, buy into, or are they a good representation of why the company exists, how it’s going to have impact or make money, and how they’re going to run the place? And can they translate that into what it means for the person in a particular role?

And that’s a skill, that’s a real skill. It also means that the bosses that are disenfranchised don’t feel engaged themselves, feel hard done by, etc. or really, they were just a good individual contributor who really never wanted to be bosses anyway. All those people are real risk points for the organization.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, that’s good stuff.

Bill Schaninger

That makes sense?

Pete Mockaitis

I got you, yeah. And I’m curious, are there any particular practices that you endorse with regard to one-on-ones, check ins, etc.?

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, no, 100%. Look, I think a lot of bosses have been raised, and I think COVID really gave us some real practice in, let’s say, agita about this. At a point at which you saw more and more employees raising their hands, saying, “I’m depressed,” “I’m anxious,” “I’m struggling with alcohol or drug use,” “I’m just really lonely,” some leaders naturally were more about the human condition, “I’m just going to look out after this person. I worry about them because I care about the person.”

Others are like, “Ooh, I can’t talk about that. I’m the boss. HR has told me I shouldn’t ask about mental health.” There was something here saying not playing like you’re a psychiatrist, not offering psychiatric advice, but just caring for one human to a next. I think that came much higher on the list of job one, two, or three.

Show the employee that they matter as a person first, an employee second. If you do that, if the person standing in front of you knows that you care about them, then the question, “Hey, what really matters to you about this? Everybody has choice, everybody decides where they’re going to go to work, what matters to you? What are you trying to get done here?”

For some people, it’s as simple as, “I love my family. I want to be interested in what I’m doing but this is I’m paying bills here. Job one for me is being a provider.” “Got it.” Other people might be, “It’s not just enough to make a check. I need to make a difference in the community I live in. I’m from here, I grew up here,” whatever. You just ask. Ask and prime the pump a little bit, and, more often than not, you will get way more than you can work with.

But once you know it, the mere act of asking gets you credit, and then being thoughtful to work with the person, and say, “You can reframe what we asked you to do, and you could see how that’s really pretty consistent with what matters to you. See if that helps.” It requires time. You know who can’t do that? People who are on the phone and on Zooms 12 hours a day.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s true. That’s true. All right, Bill, so much good stuff. I wanted to also get your take on sort of office politics sorts of things. This is unpleasant for many people in the middle and, yet, it seems that it’s pretty necessary to do well in order to flourish in many environments. How do we think about this?

Bill Schaninger

Oh, it sucks. That’s the technical term. No, listen, politics or the nature of politics exist anytime there’s more than one human doing something. Two people, one is trying to influence the other. Three people, there’s a power dynamic that’s shifting between the three. You get any groups of people, there will be a political environment just by the mere nature of classic psychosocial behavior. So, that’s going to happen.

As soon as you can accept that, “Oh, it should be eradicated,” that’s absurd. That’s not how it works. There’s always influencing, particularly non-power-based influencing. Okay, given that though, what people are really saying is, “I’m trying to figure out how it works around here, and this political stuff is often untransparent. It feels like a black box. I don’t feel like I’m plugged into or someone else is plugged into.”

One way to do it is be really thoughtful about things like, “What are we collectively trying to do? What does that mean for us individually?” Good role clarity goes a long way towards leading this. What am I asking to do? What good looks like? By when? With whom? What can you decide on your own? What do you have to bring back to me? Good, good, good role clarity for any task reduces a lot of the need that people are trying to figure out what the hell is going on, where politics take root. So, a boss that’s really good at role clarity, really good at showing how it fits in with the overall picture, really helpful.

Second, transparency. Don’t force junior people to solve the disputes of more senior people always. If two bosses or two or three more senior people are giving someone trying to do work very different messages, then all you have to teach the junior person to do is send an email or call or have a meeting with the three people, and say, “You have told me A. You’ve told me J. You’ve told me Z. I need some help on figuring out how those things either relate together or which one we’re picking.” Don’t force junior people to solve the disagreements of senior people.

And the last one, transparency, particularly around performance. If you don’t want people guessing, trying to read the tea leaves, don’t force them to read the tea leaves. Check in with them regularly, not in a formal, “Oh, we’re going to fill out a form.” Good coaching. Could you imagine sending your child to piano lessons, and the piano instructor never actually provided any feedback to how your child was playing? Okay, well, that’s the nonsense that people get at work. The boss literally doesn’t tell them how they’re doing, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. I’m thinking we had Kim Scott, talking about radical candor, and just those notions of it’s not kind to withhold information about how people are performing, and then they get fired and they had no idea. And then we had an employment lawyer who said that for wrongful termination suits, it is always the plaintiffs, those who had been terminated, who introduce the evidence of the performance reviews in the courtroom, or the negotiation. It is never on the other side. It’s sort of like, “Well, according to all these official reports, it says I met expectations every six months, time after time after time.”

Bill Schaninger

Imagine, if you just said to people…Long, long, long ago when I was at the residential psychiatric treatment center, and I had a team, I don’t know, of six, seven, or eight, I would keep little 3×5 cards for each employee, and I would jot things down, pros and cons, then I want to make sure I turn to one each week, we chat, I go, “Hey, that was great, that was great, that was great. This is coming. Can we work on this? How are you doing on X?” whatever.

So, that then when the evaluation was due, a semi-annual, it was a summation and a synthesis with a heavier emphasis on go-forward planning, and no one was surprised ever. The essence of performance management is the management part, it’s the coaching part, it’s the feedback part. So, where politics breed is when the person doesn’t know where they stand, and they’re desperately trying to figure that out and get a hook into something they can trust. You can fight back the influence of a politics just by creating an environment that people can trust where they stand and know how they’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that makes sense, that a clear role and it doesn’t mean if someone is doing something it doesn’t mean, “I’ve lost standing,” or, “I’ve gained standing.” It’s like, “No, that’s just what they do, and that’s what I do.”

Bill Schaninger

Exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis

“Okay. And then I know how well I’m doing, and so there we go. No need to worry. I will just keep on trucking.”

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, you got it.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Bill, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Bill Schaninger

I just think maybe one of the most important things to remember always, particularly out of the tech sector but other places, you see these other things, “Oh, no one needs managers. Let’s fire all the managers.” What a load of crap. Give me a break. If you put 15 really well-intended people in a room, but you didn’t let them know what the other 15 people were doing, and you say, “Hey, yeah, we’d like to get from New York to L.A. Go,” you’re not getting the same answers from those 15 people. You’re not.

Why would you think that in an exercise that requires cohesion, collaboration, coordination, maybe some consistency, why would you think that they didn’t need to be led? This idea of, “Oh, people are smart, they’re well-intended,” no. You know who says that? People who really want to be their own boss. Great. Go be a vendor. If you’re going to join an organization, then suborn your own needs to something of a greater good. The greater good has to take primacy. That’s the whole point of joining something. You’re intentionally doing it and that needs to be led or you don’t deliver on it.

So, honestly, I’m pretty aggressive in my rebuke of that because I think that sounds like people who really want the freedom of the gig economy, particularly that we saw in tech, and someone else’s capital to play with, and I don’t think you get both.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Bill Schaninger

Yes, it’s from the song “Freewill,” “If you choose not to decide, you still made a choice.” Geddy Lee, he is a poet. But the idea is so much of work is everyone knows everything, everyone knows who’s struggling, everyone knows who’s a bad boss, everyone knows clients that really aren’t worth serving, and so many people just kick the can down the road. They’ll speak about it in hush tones but they won’t actually raise it.

And I’m not sure about the rhetoric around radical candor but I do think candor, that helps. Calling it like you see it, that helps. So much of our risks and our approaches to risk is counsel the first line of defense, which is people. You know when that’s not working? When no one actually bothers to tell you what’s going on. And the decision to not tell someone is a choice, and I think those things come back and bite us all the time. So, for me, if you choose not to decide, you still made a choice. Holding back information ought to be treated as anything else. It’s still a choice, and it ought to have consequences, I might add.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Bill Schaninger

I was just thinking of the prison experiments the other day, and even in times where they’ve tried to replicate it, and they’ve had varying degrees of success or whatever, people taking on role identity, people assuming role identity, the importance of the cultural contagion, many, many people, they really just want to be part of something bigger. They want to be part of a group. They want to belong. They want to have affinity.

But once they’re in that group, if not managed well, the normative influence of that group, the culture, may take you into places not great. And so, I think, for leaders, the most important thing you can do is help shape, not just by talking about it, but by behaving that way, by reinforcing it, by looking at who you pick to be leaders themselves. What does it mean to be us? What really matters?

And I think there, you can count on the fact that the powerful nature of a group and the need to belong can be an incredible force for good or a force for bad. I would say, when you see things like bullying, septic workplaces, that kind of stuff. It cuts both ways but it can be managed truly for the good. And, again, who best to help manage that but the middle managers, the workplace leaders.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Bill Schaninger

Well, this one, of course. Obviously, I’m proud of this one. I, for a long time, a lot just because of where I’ve grown up here in Lehigh Valley, that people who worked their whole lives and really invested in a company and wanted just to do a good job of leading people, and leading from the middle, I feel like they’ve been given a short trip. But if you look at things like principals, people who run medical centers, doctors, there are these roles that just matters so much in our daily lives. People who run the DMV center. These are middle managers by definition.

Everywhere we look, if someone who neither makes a strategic choice or is actually doing the work but is critical to a service being delivered, a person being connected to, touched, etc. I really do think it’s the most important thing we can do right now as institutions by acknowledging who gets the joy and the responsibility of leading people. And I think we should take it seriously as such.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Bill Schaninger

This format, podcast, I love it. I’ve been doing it a couple years here at McKinsey quite a bit, and I certainly, in my retired life, I’m pretty sure I’m going to start my own. And I want a format just to be able to go a little bit deeper on some topics. I think one thing that’s really hurt us, I’m about to riff, but one thing I think that really hurt us is the lack of depth to talk about the structure of a problem, the nuance of a problem, the fact that there’s usually multiple facets to it. Very few things in the human condition are simple. Most of the time there’s a couple things going on. I think podcasts really lend themselves to a little bit deeper exploration.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite habit?

Bill Schaninger

I like taking calls in cars. I think, at some point, we spend so much time on Zooms or calls or whatever. Zooms, in particular, not Zoom the product, it’s video conferencing, whatever. It’s a little emotionally taxing, and sometimes, for me, I was a doodler as a kid and so I’ll build Lego now to help focus. Sometimes I just need to get out of the space, get my head out of the space and think differently. And driving while taking calls, I love doing it and I will most certainly continue doing it. I think it actually brings a little bit more of me to the call.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, the two most important questions you can say is, “How are we going to make money? And how are we going to run the place?” And anybody who’s in any kind of positional leadership should be able to answer that on a dime, not in a trite manner, but in the manner that makes it clear to the person in front of them what that means for them.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Bill Schaninger

Bill.Schaninger@gmail.com and Bill Schaninger, PhD on LinkedIn. And then I have a website being setup, and it’ll be up, I don’t know, two, three weeks so I’ll be able to, soon, have a link there on LinkedIn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Bill Schaninger

Yeah, just remember that if you’ve been given the charge to lead people, it is an awesome responsibility and really, really what a gift to actually be able to influence more than just yourself. Long ago, when I was first given a unit to be responsible for at the residential psychiatric treatment center, the person who hired me walked me out, and said, “Do you see that building up there? It’s yours. All the kids in there, it’s yours. All the employees, yours. Everything that happens there, whether you’re here or not, yours. Do you understand? It’s yours.”

And that so resonated with me, and I wasn’t the seniormost person, not even close. But it was this idea of it only ever works when people really internalize what it’s really about, and their own personal obligation beyond their own success. And then you have a chance of actually doing something special. Otherwise, you’re probably just surviving it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Bill, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun and power to the middle.

Bill Schaninger

Thank you. Really appreciate it.