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Abstract

ut then, suddenly and out of nowhere someone takes out a box of Oreos and now it’s all you can think of. You want just one, maybe two. It consumes your conscious and sub-conscious brain and now you need it. But you can’t, you told yourself that you’d eat healthy for a month. You can’t give up! That state of mind is exhausting and unproductive. An easy fix is to simply not have any junk food at home. Remove the option and your brain has an easy time accepting it. Sure, you might still crave it but because the carrot is being dangled over your face, you’re more likely to just forget about it.<figure id="dba5"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*evKVqceEQAec0Pdrn43m3A.jpeg"><figcaption><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/toddle_email_newsletters/17233999165">Carrot And Stick Incentives Lead Manage</a> by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/toddle_email_newsletters/">Alan O’Rourke</a></figcaption></figure>This may seem like a fairly obvious solution but it’s somehow profound. We completely remove the need for willpower and our success is now guaranteed.We can use the same concept for our work environment too.<ul><li>Remove everything from your office that would be otherwise distracting. Your phone is your biggest distraction, either give it to someone you trust and ask them to notify you if something important pops up or turn it off completely and set a very specific time that allows you to check it.</li><li>Another possible vector for distraction is entertainment websites like YouTube. Try using a chrome extension like StayFocused to prevent you from going on any unnecessary websites.</li><li>Have any items you commonly use at your desk or work environment, so you can avoid looking for things unnecessarily. I like to keep a couple of water bottles nearby, so I don’t have to get up for water.</li></ul><h1 id="0164">Structure your day</h1>Flexibility is a good thing, but too much of it leads us to have some really good days and some mostly unproductive days. A good strategy is to carve out blocks of time, to do different things. For example, I can set 9 AM to 11 AM to be a block where I get work done, and then from 2 PM to 4 PM I can practice the piano. By adhering to the same structure day in and day out you form a habit where it no longer requires you to think to get work started.<figure id="12ad"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/0*n9H-0Z359ueigrD3"><figcaption>Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@nate_dumlao?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral">Nathan Dumlao</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral">Unsplash</a></figcaption></figure>But, you have to go a little further. Don’t just have an arbitrary time slot available for work. The night before plan out, what items you will tackle during those blocks of time. Have them written down so your goals are concrete and actionable. Here are some tips for making a useful checklist.<ul><li>Make sure that each item is attainable, and is the smallest unit of a task. Let’s say I need to get some programming done. Instead of writing down something like “Finish implementing feature 2” try to be more specific, like “Implement getTransactions() method”, “Create unit test for getTransactions()”, “Send Sally sales report email”, etc…</li><li>Write down your goals the night before, so that when you wake up you know what you need to do.</li><li>Have your checklist be somewhere visible in your office, like a whiteboard or on a notebook next to you.</li><li>Only itemize important work, there isn’t a reason to itemize “Watch Netflix with GF”</li></ul>An important side note is to take breaks. Burnout is real and while you want to be productive, you want to be able to be productive over months and years, not days. During working

Options

time slots you have two options. Make a specific time where you decide to take a break, say at the end or middle of your session. Or take a break of say, 15 minutes, whenever you feel that you need it during the session. I find that taking a break at specific times is worse for me because I’m sometimes consumed in the work and would rather complete my train of thought. So I usually opt for taking a break once I feel I need it. But this is a personal choice so experiment with it and see what works for you.<h1 id="18fb">Get someone to help you be accountable</h1>Accountability provides pressure for us to complete our work in a positive way. If your a boss or manager having your team be accountable for your work is a great way to make sure you stay on top of things and provide progress updates for your team. Have them provide constant feedback on your work and progress.Whenever we make ourselves accountable for our actions we fall into the trap of giving ourselves excuses. We need to instead avoid that by having others hold us accountable for the work we’re supposed to deliver. This provides us with the drive we need to get work done.<figure id="dbb1"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/0*X_T-byMuc5OGbUM_"><figcaption>Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@josealjovin?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral">jose aljovin</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral">Unsplash</a></figcaption></figure>But what about in an at-home environment? Here we can employ the help of our family members or significant others. A good example is me and my girlfriend. She’ll come by the office at home and scan through the work I did, comparing it to what I planned. If I didn’t get anything done, or she saw me opening up a game of CS:GO instead of working then I have to the dishes for a week. But as long as I put in the effort and do some good work, I’m good, even if I didn’t complete all the things I intended to do. That’s because things don’t always go as planned and our estimates of how much work something might take can be off.The hardest situation is when you have no one to help you be accountable. In this case, you’ll need to create strict and reasonable deadlines. The point of failure here is the deadline, however. On the one hand, if there aren’t any consequences it’s extremely easy for you to think that not making the deadline isn’t a big deal. On the other hand, there will be times when even given your best efforts, you won’t make the deadline. This is a hard situation and there isn’t a silver bullet for holding yourself accountable. From my personal experience, the best strategy is to withhold rewarding yourself if you don’t get something done. What I would do is after completing the work I needed to do for a week, I would go out with friends on Friday and if I didn’t I would have to cancel. What would happen is if I was behind on work, my buddies would call me up and be like “Yo, you coming out with us tonight?” and I would reply with “I’ll try but I got a ton of work to complete”. I would use not letting my friends down for an unrelated event to drive me to complete my work. This obviously is not ideal and you’ll want to set up your own version of this but it did work with varying degrees of success.Willpower should be used for actually completing work and by minimizing the amount of effort we spend on other things, we can have more of it allocated to more important work. I find makes it much easier to get a lot the work I need to do done this way and I end up feeling a lot less tired. Willpower, it seems, can be sidestepped with a little strategy. You still may have days of being unproductive and this isn’t always a full-proof system. But when it does work, it works astonishingly well.</article></body>

You don’t need willpower, you need a strategy

Be more productive and less exhausted

When I first started training my dog, I ran these small experiments to see how what kind of reaction my dog would have to different situations. Some days I would grab the bag of doggy treats from the cupboard’s and I’d see him frantically racing towards me. He looked at me with those cute (but mischievous) eyes and you could see him begging for a treat. But I would instead place it on the floor and say “Ace, stay!”. Now Ace was a good boi and so he dutifully waits for my next command.

I decided to run the training exercise again but this time, after telling him not to eat it, I calmly stood up and walked away from him, only turning back for a moment to remind him to wait. But of course once out of sight, Ace went straight for it, and honestly, I couldn’t blame him, I would have probably done the same.

But it illustrates an important lesson. Having someone there to make you accountable makes it much easier to complete a task. But why? Why can’t we exert our own willpower to resist the treat? The answer is simple, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to exert willpower and resist something. Our minds prefer not to spend the effort and we end up failing. This is the same as well for when you don’t want to do something that you know you should.

Think back, to when you were in school. Somehow in 6 hours, you could do English, French, Gym, Math, and Science class while being relatively focused (ok, maybe not for all of it but the point still stands). But all of sudden, when you’re stuck at home with all the free time to spare you can’t get a project done, you’re constantly distracted, and you have nowhere near the amount of energy you think you should. What the hell is going on?

The answer is willpower. When I would go to school, it took all my might to wake up so damn early in the morning and get ready. But once I was there, there was no thinking involved. I went from point A to point B, did assignment x in y amount of time. Took a break for 15 or 30 minutes between classes. My brain didn’t have to think as much and so, therefore, I didn’t need to exert any willpower figuring out what I needed to do. Teachers held us accountable in the form of grades and guided us on how to complete our work. There was a system that handled all the administrative tasks for the students and so we could use all our energy to learn and be “productive” (okay, maybe not always but the point still stands).

Now jump back to now, when you try to do your own thing. By the time you actually start doing it, you’re already feeling tired and unmotivated. You get distracted by YouTube or Reddit, you think about how you should clean your desk or text a friend. Somehow you can’t perform as seamlessly as you normally could when you’re at school or work.

All the decisions are no longer made by other people. They’re made by YOU. And that takes willpower. And willpower takes energy.

Alright, so now for the fun part! Fixing the problem with willpower. We want to try and reserve as much willpower as we can to do actual work and so we need to set up an environment that handles our goals for us.

Remove The Unnecessary

Think about it like this. Ever try a really strict diet? You’re doing super well eating homemade meals that taste great for a couple of days! But then, suddenly and out of nowhere someone takes out a box of Oreos and now it’s all you can think of. You want just one, maybe two. It consumes your conscious and sub-conscious brain and now you need it. But you can’t, you told yourself that you’d eat healthy for a month. You can’t give up! That state of mind is exhausting and unproductive. An easy fix is to simply not have any junk food at home. Remove the option and your brain has an easy time accepting it. Sure, you might still crave it but because the carrot is being dangled over your face, you’re more likely to just forget about it.

Carrot And Stick Incentives Lead Manage by Alan O’Rourke

This may seem like a fairly obvious solution but it’s somehow profound. We completely remove the need for willpower and our success is now guaranteed.

We can use the same concept for our work environment too.

Remove everything from your office that would be otherwise distracting. Your phone is your biggest distraction, either give it to someone you trust and ask them to notify you if something important pops up or turn it off completely and set a very specific time that allows you to check it.
Another possible vector for distraction is entertainment websites like YouTube. Try using a chrome extension like StayFocused to prevent you from going on any unnecessary websites.
Have any items you commonly use at your desk or work environment, so you can avoid looking for things unnecessarily. I like to keep a couple of water bottles nearby, so I don’t have to get up for water.

Structure your day

Flexibility is a good thing, but too much of it leads us to have some really good days and some mostly unproductive days. A good strategy is to carve out blocks of time, to do different things. For example, I can set 9 AM to 11 AM to be a block where I get work done, and then from 2 PM to 4 PM I can practice the piano. By adhering to the same structure day in and day out you form a habit where it no longer requires you to think to get work started.

But, you have to go a little further. Don’t just have an arbitrary time slot available for work. The night before plan out, what items you will tackle during those blocks of time. Have them written down so your goals are concrete and actionable. Here are some tips for making a useful checklist.

Make sure that each item is attainable, and is the smallest unit of a task. Let’s say I need to get some programming done. Instead of writing down something like “Finish implementing feature 2” try to be more specific, like “Implement getTransactions() method”, “Create unit test for getTransactions()”, “Send Sally sales report email”, etc…
Write down your goals the night before, so that when you wake up you know what you need to do.
Have your checklist be somewhere visible in your office, like a whiteboard or on a notebook next to you.
Only itemize important work, there isn’t a reason to itemize “Watch Netflix with GF”

An important side note is to take breaks. Burnout is real and while you want to be productive, you want to be able to be productive over months and years, not days. During working time slots you have two options. Make a specific time where you decide to take a break, say at the end or middle of your session. Or take a break of say, 15 minutes, whenever you feel that you need it during the session. I find that taking a break at specific times is worse for me because I’m sometimes consumed in the work and would rather complete my train of thought. So I usually opt for taking a break once I feel I need it. But this is a personal choice so experiment with it and see what works for you.

Get someone to help you be accountable

Accountability provides pressure for us to complete our work in a positive way. If your a boss or manager having your team be accountable for your work is a great way to make sure you stay on top of things and provide progress updates for your team. Have them provide constant feedback on your work and progress.

Whenever we make ourselves accountable for our actions we fall into the trap of giving ourselves excuses. We need to instead avoid that by having others hold us accountable for the work we’re supposed to deliver. This provides us with the drive we need to get work done.

But what about in an at-home environment? Here we can employ the help of our family members or significant others. A good example is me and my girlfriend. She’ll come by the office at home and scan through the work I did, comparing it to what I planned. If I didn’t get anything done, or she saw me opening up a game of CS:GO instead of working then I have to the dishes for a week. But as long as I put in the effort and do some good work, I’m good, even if I didn’t complete all the things I intended to do. That’s because things don’t always go as planned and our estimates of how much work something might take can be off.

The hardest situation is when you have no one to help you be accountable. In this case, you’ll need to create strict and reasonable deadlines. The point of failure here is the deadline, however. On the one hand, if there aren’t any consequences it’s extremely easy for you to think that not making the deadline isn’t a big deal. On the other hand, there will be times when even given your best efforts, you won’t make the deadline. This is a hard situation and there isn’t a silver bullet for holding yourself accountable. From my personal experience, the best strategy is to withhold rewarding yourself if you don’t get something done. What I would do is after completing the work I needed to do for a week, I would go out with friends on Friday and if I didn’t I would have to cancel. What would happen is if I was behind on work, my buddies would call me up and be like “Yo, you coming out with us tonight?” and I would reply with “I’ll try but I got a ton of work to complete”. I would use not letting my friends down for an unrelated event to drive me to complete my work. This obviously is not ideal and you’ll want to set up your own version of this but it did work with varying degrees of success.

Willpower should be used for actually completing work and by minimizing the amount of effort we spend on other things, we can have more of it allocated to more important work. I find makes it much easier to get a lot the work I need to do done this way and I end up feeling a lot less tired. Willpower, it seems, can be sidestepped with a little strategy. You still may have days of being unproductive and this isn’t always a full-proof system. But when it does work, it works astonishingly well.