Nir Eyal's Blog, page 30

Human + A.I. = Your Digital Future

In the new film Ex Machina, a reclusive billionaire invents a robotic artificial intelligence. To test whether his invention is indistinguishable from a human being, he helicopters-in a young engineer to see if he falls in love with the robot. Today, making machines and humans indistinguishable from each other is no longer science fiction, it’s […]

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Why ‘Assistant-As-App’ Might Be the Next Big Tech Trend

Whenever I feel uncomfortable writing about a topic, that’s when I know I should write about it. So here goes. This article is about how a new way of designing apps changed my life. But to explain the power of this trend, I need to tell you about poop. That’s the uncomfortable part.

For the past five years or so, I’ve struggled with intestinal discomfort. (I’ll spare you the gory details.) I spent countless hours crawling the web searching for a possible diagnosis and tried dozens of different remedies and diets. Nothing seemed to help.

Finally, I saw a gastroenterologist. He listened for all of five minutes while I described my symptoms and quickly jotted down a prescription for antibiotics. They worked for a while but soon the symptoms returned. I went back to the doc. A few tests were done and more antibiotics were dolled out. But the problems came back. Then again. And again.

After a few cycles, I could see he was running me through a gambit of various gut bug killers until my symptoms stopped or he was out of drugs. I decided I’d rather live with the problem (whatever it was) and hope for the best.

Recently however, a chance encounter with a total stranger led me to start using a new kind of app that does things my physician and the specialist never could.

This app helped me get to the bottom of my problem. I’ll explain how later but what makes the design of this app important has implications in all sorts of industries, including outside health care. At its core, the app facilitates a conversation to solve a complex problem with greater ease than ever before.

Over the next few years, smart entrepreneurs and savvy designers will use similar techniques to dramatically improve the way they connect and serve their customers.

Going Native

App makers are returning to the roots of what our phones are for. They are after all communications devices. So called “invisible apps” engaging in “conversational commerce” are popping-up in all sorts of unrelated industries.

For example, a few weeks ago, my friend Stephen and I chatted at the park while we watched our kids play. As Silicon Valley tech geeks do, we got to talking apps. “Have you started using any good apps lately?” he asked. “Actually, yes.” I said. “Have you heard of Native?” I don’t usually recommend apps, but Native is special.

What is Native? It’s a virtual travel agent. If you’re not impressed, neither was I the first time I heard the idea. But when I started using the service, I realized they were onto something.

Here’s how Native works: every time I need to do anything related to travel, I just ask Tim to handle it. Tim lives inside Native and while he appears to be a human, I’m not 100% sure he is. For all I know he may be a bot, artificial intelligence, or any number of people working behind the scenes under the persona of the fresh-faced Tim. To be honest, I don’t much care. Every time I need him he’s there, ready to assist me.

For example, I recently had to book a gnarly itinerary in and out of two countries using various airline loyalty points. Normally, booking this sort of trip would have taken me hours of comparing prices, flight times, connection difficulty, and frequent flyer point requirements. Instead, I just opened the app and told Tim what I needed in plain English — like sending a text message. Then, I went about my day and an hour later I received a notification from Tim telling me he found the best two options. Would I like itinerary A or itinerary B? I picked one and he booked the flight. Done!

I didn’t have to use any dropdown menus, sift through hundreds of options, or spend half an hour attempting to pay for my ticket only to learn that the price I wanted was suddenly not available. Nope! I left it up to Tim to handle everything.

Native’s interface looks like a messaging app.

Native charges $25 per month. Considering that Tim can complete any and all travel-related requests — from booking me on another flight if I miss a connector to calling the airline to request a seat change — it is well worth the money. Of course, whether Native can actually make money with this business model is an open question.

As I described Native to my friend Stephen, a woman pushing her child on the swing next to us interjected. “Excuse me,” she asked, “What app are you talking about?” I showed her Native on my phone. “Funny,” she said “my company does the exact same thing but for health.”

The woman, I would come to learn, was Stephanie Tilenius, CEO of Vida Health. As she explained her app, Stephanie told me “Vida is great for irritable bowel syndrome if you happen to know anyone with that.”

Did I ever!

I told her I’d be interested in giving her app a try. “We’ll connect you with a coach to help you figure out what’s going on,” she said, and by the time I left the park I had received an invitation to use the service.

Meeting Mindy

Diagnosing a digestive problem is fiendishly difficult. It requires looking back through a detailed log to find what might be causing symptoms that don’t manifest until the food has time to work it’s way through the body a day or so later. Finding a solution involves not only understanding what I ate that might be causing the symptoms, but also what I did not eat that I should have. I had done this sort of detailed record keeping before on my own but it was incredibly time consuming and I always gave up after a few days.

I started using Vida. Over the next several weeks, I shared what I ate and how I was feeling with my coach Mindy who, like Tim from Native, was a helpful face on the other side of the app. Like Native, there was no complicated interface to learn. The app felt more like messaging with a friend than diagnosing a health problem.

Along with helpful suggestions, Mindy sent me regular reminders to send her snapshots of what I was eating. She also requested I text a number from 1 to 10 to quantify my symptoms — my “poo score,” we called it.

Soon, something interesting happened.

My assistant Mindy on the Vida Health app.

Mindy started analyzing my diet in ways neither my doctor nor I ever could. She looked at the nutritional content of what I was eating and searched for correlations with how I felt. Like a detective, she was on the hunt for the intestinal who-done-it. She started eliminating suspects from the food line-up and narrowing in on what might be triggering my symptoms by looking for clues in my diet. She told me what I should eat instead and after changing my diet, I’m feeling better.

Just the Beginning

Mindy’s ability to diagnose the source of my problem was something my physician just didn’t have the time or ability to address. Without a way to carefully monitor and analyze what was going in and coming out of my body, how could he? Conversational apps like Vida however are designed to always be accessible; allowing users to send the kind of information a professional can use to provide more insights in less time.

Similarly, Native’s highly trained travel agent on the other side of the conversation allows the app to provide just the right itinerary, eliminating all the hours spent sorting and culling travel options I previously had to do myself.

This trend is bigger than travel and diet apps. The fact that these two very different services both use what I call an “assistant-as-app” to help users accomplish complex tasks, makes me think there’s more to this trend.

How About You?

Do you use any assistant-as-app services? Do you have any favorites? Can you think of other products or services that should use the conversational interface but don’t yet? Where would you like to see an assistant-as-app service?

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People Don’t Want Something Truly New, They Want the Familiar Done Differently.

If your new product or service isn’t gaining traction, ask yourself “What’s my California Roll?”

I’ll admit, the bento box is an unlikely place to learn an important business lesson. But consider the California Roll — understanding the impact of this icon of Japanese dining can make all the difference between the success or failure of your product.

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of customers not biting, then you can sympathize with Japanese restaurant owners in America during the 1970s. Sushi consumption was all but non-existent. By all accounts, Americans were scared of the stuff. Eating raw fish was an aberration and to most, tofu and seaweed were punch lines, not food.

Then came the California Roll. While the origin of the famous maki is still contested, its impact is undeniable. The California Roll was made in the USA by combining familiar ingredients in a new way. Rice, avocado, cucumber, sesame seeds, and crab meat — the only ingredient unfamiliar to the average American palate was the barely visible sliver of nori seaweed holding it all together.

Familiar Done Differently

The California Roll provided a gateway to discover Japanese cuisine and demand exploded. Over the next few decades sushi restaurants, which were once confined to large coastal cities and almost exclusively served Japanese clientele, suddenly went mainstream. Today, sushi is served in small rural towns, airports, strip malls, and stocked in the deli section of local supermarkets. Americans now consume $2.25 billion of sushi annually.

The California Roll was sushi’s gateway into millions of American mouths.

The lesson of the California Roll is simple — people don’t want something truly new, they want the familiar done differently. Interestingly, this lesson applies just as much to the spread of innovation as it does to tastes in food.

For example, the graphical user interface, a milestone in the popularization of the personal computer, used familiar visual metaphors like folders, notepads, windows, and trash cans to appeal to mainstream users terrified by the command-line interface (perhaps even more than the thought of eating raw fish). The computer underneath was the same, however the familiar veneer suddenly made it accessible.

Apple’s early skeuomorphic design was the California Roll of the personal computer.

Quaint but unnecessary representations of the familiar became a hallmark of Apple products. As Claire Evans wrote for Motherboard, “While under the direction of the late Steve Jobs, Apple’s design aesthetic tended heavily towards the skeuomorphic. The Apple desktop calendar, famously, is rendered with accents of rich Corinthian leather; its bookshelves gleam with wood veneers, its chrome always brushed, its pages stitched and torn, its tabletop felt green.”

Now that Apple serves a generation familiar with how its products work, it can shepherd them from California Rolls to sashimi, so to speak. “We understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass,” explained Apple’s Jony Ive. “They didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits.”

Mini credit cards are Apple’s California Roll for mobile payment.

However, Apple still uses its tried and true methods whenever the company wants users to adopt a new behavior. For example, the rebranded Apple Wallet helps users feel comfortable with the technology by making payment options look just like mini credit cards. Even though there’s no technical reason to do so, Apple understands the power of the familiar.

(Un)Familiarity Breeds Contempt

As I wrote about in my book, Hooked, unfamiliar products and interfaces are more difficult to use and can impede adoption. Several psychological phenomenon conspire to make us resist the atypical.

According to BJ Fogg of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, “non-routine” is one of six “Elements of Simplicity” — the factors that affect the likelihood of any particular human action occurring. Fogg wrote, “When people face a behavior that is not routine, then they may not find it simple. In seeking simplicity, people will often stick to their routine, like buying gas at the same station, even if it costs more money or time than other options.”

Of course, we also have a love for “new and improved” but in relatively modest proportions. “New and improved” is great for things we are already familiar with — like cereal and dish soap — but not for products where we lack a frame of reference.

Unfortunately, our aversion to things that are outside the norm is particularly hard on companies producing radical innovation — no matter how beneficial they may be. If using a new product does not feel familiar, it faces severe challenges. According Fogg, “People are generally resistant to teaching and training because it requires effort. This clashes with the natural wiring of human adults: We are fundamentally lazy. As a result, products that require people to learn new things routinely fail.”

What’s Your California Roll?

When describing the Apple Watch, Jony Ive said his goal was to build “the strangely familiar.” The smart watch is exactly the kind of innovation that is still too new for all but the most early of early adopters. And yet Ive obsessed over the details of the Digital Crown, an esthetic adopted from traditional watchmaking. Clearly, Ive knows what he’s doing — industry analysts expect the company to sell 19 million units this year.

As the pace of innovation accelerates, human behavior, not technological restraints, will be the deciding factor of whether products are adopted or discarded. If new products and services are to positively impact our lives, they must find a gateway into our daily routines. The familiar done differently is the way to users’ minds and hearts — and sometimes their stomachs.

Here’s the gist:

The California Roll introduced Americans to sushi by using familiar ingredients arranged in a new way.
The California Roll Rule: People don’t want something truly new, they want the familiar done differently.
Things that are truly new need to use familiar mental models to gain user adoptions (i.e., Apple’s use of skeuomorphs.)
Unfamiliar interfaces are more difficult to use and impede adoption.
If your new product or service is not engaging users, ask “What’s my California Roll?”

What do you think?

What was your familiar gateway into a new technology or product? Can you think of other companies who have used the “California Roll Rule” to introduce new products in a familiar way? Tell me what you think in the comment section below.

Image credits: Wikipedia, jason saul, Steven Depolo

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Un-Hooked: Increasing Focus in the Age of Distraction

I recently presented a new talk about how to manage digital distraction using the Hook Model. I hope you enjoy the brief video below.

Also, I’ve been thinking of writing more on this topic. Let me know what you think.

Is this an interesting topic? Do you struggle with digital distractions?

Tell me more about what might help or what questions you’d like me to tackle so I know what direction to take my research and writing.

Thank you!

– Nir

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Would You Take A Bet That Would Change Your Life? Probably Not. Here’s Why

Changing habits is hard. But what if there was a way to dramatically improve your odds of quitting even your worst habits? What if this method was shown to be over 8 times more effective than traditional methods at helping people quit a stubborn addiction like smoking? Would you try it?

As I discussed in part 1 and part 2 of this 3-part series, the technique involves a wager. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that when people put money down, they were much more likely to accomplish their goals. In this case, people who risked $150 of their own money to win a $650 bonus prize were dramatically more likely to quit smoking than those who used traditional smoking cessation methods. Surprisingly, this group also beat out those who were offered an $800 reward with no deposit for staying smoke-free.

Less Attractive but More Effective

This technique clearly isn’t for everyone. In fact, when I think about how I could apply this method to my own life, I cringe. There is irony in the fact that I’m scared to use a method I know to be so effective.

At least I know I’m not alone. Very few people in the smoking cessation study mentioned above agreed to put down the $150 deposit. As Nudge author Cass Sunstein wrote, “Only 13.7% of the participants assigned to the deposit program chose to enroll in it, whereas 90.0% of those assigned to the reward program chose to enroll.”

The deposit option, according to Sunstein, “was much less attractive but much more effective.” Just how effective? “52.3% of those enrolled in the deposit program had sustained abstinence for 6 months, as compared with just 17.1% of those enrolled in the reward program.”

There’s clearly a lost opportunity here, but why did so few people take the bet?

The study authors theorize that $150 might have been too much money for people to risk, but another possibility is that people were overly confident in their ability to win the bet. Since the value of the reward condition (getting the $800 prize) had a larger net worth ($650 minus $150 of their own money), perhaps people thought they’d go for the bigger prize if they believed they were just as likely to quit.

You would expect the larger reward to have provided more motivation — clearly, it didn’t. Chalk it up as another demonstration of one of the many quirks of the human psyche.

Alternatively, people might have chosen the reward over the deposit not because they were over confident but because they lacked confidence in their ability to kick their habit. Perhaps people motivated to quit smoking were scared to put down the deposit because they somehow knew they would have to do the hard work of quitting? My intuition tells me this is more likely the case but further research needs to be done.

When it Doesn’t Work

While this technique can prove effective, there are also many faults to this method. First, the most obvious weakness is that so few people are actually willing to take such a wager.

My guess is that the biggest barrier to people not taking the bet is the imposition on their freedom. Previously I’ve written about the psychological phenomenon of reactance — our tendency to reject threats to our autonomy. People generally don’t like being told what to do and taking the bet can feel restrictive.

However, giving people the freedom to choose has been shown to increase compliance. Perhaps offering a limited number of “cheat passes” may disarm reactance by reminding participants that quitting is still their choice.

Second, I doubt this technique would prove effective at stopping behaviors with constant triggers. For example, nail biting is a devilishly hard habit to break because biters are constantly tempted whenever they become aware of their hands. These body-focused repetitive behaviors are not good candidates for using this technique.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, this technique does not accommodate failure. Even in the smoking cessation study, some 48% of the participants in the most successful group did not achieve their goal. Behavior change is hard and people will inevitably fail. Therefore, any long-term behavior modification program must accommodate those who, for one reason or another, can’t stick with the program.

While the wager method is more effective at stopping certain behaviors for certain people, it is not a perfect program. This technique is yet another tool for healthful behavior modification that works under the right circumstances.

Here’s the gist:

– The wager technique provides a consequence for doing or not doing a particular behavior.

– The threat of losing money can encourage certain behaviors while deterring others.

– While effective at changing certain behaviors, the wager technique has several limitations, including:

Few people are willing to take the bet.
The technique is not appropriate for changing behaviors with triggers that cannot be avoided. For example, nail biting would not be a good behavior to attempt to change using this technique.
The program does not accommodate failure.

What do you think?

Did I miss any other benefits or deficiencies to this method? What ideas do you have for how to increase participation or accommodate for failure? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

Photo Credit: Flazingo Photos

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The Behavioral Economics Diet: The Science of Killing a Bad Habit

Diets don’t work. Studies show that temporary fixes to old habits actually make people gain weight. Essentially, the dieter’s brain is trained to gorge when off the diet and inevitably the weight returns.

In my previous essay, I shared the story of my father’s struggle with bad eating habits. He had put on weight over the last few decades and despite several attempts, he had trouble taking it off. In his late 60s he faces pre-diabetes and a daily ritual of taking a handful of pills.

But over the last five months, something has changed. He’s found a new way to resist the temptation of the food he’s been trying to stop eating for years.

We Took a Bet

In my last article, I shared that my father and I shook on a $25,000 wager that binds him to never eat refined carbohydrates again — no processed sugars, no processed grains. Many people are shocked by the dollar amount of the bet but that’s missing the point. My objective is to never win the money. The bet just has to create a moment of consequence to disrupt the current habit with an amount large enough to be meaningful.

So far it’s working. My father has lost about 2 pounds per week and his improved blood work convinced his doctor to take him off some of the meds.

Why it Works

Admittedly, my father is just one person.  His story provides little more than anecdotal evidence. However, a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine provides some supporting evidence that putting some skin in the game makes people more likely to accomplish their goal of stopping a bad habit.

The study followed three groups of people trying to quit smoking. The control group was offered information and traditional methods for smoking cessation like free nicotine patches. After 6 months, 6% of the people in this group stopped smoking. The next group, called the “reward” group, was offered $800 if they were smoke-free at 6 months. Of those, 17% quit. From just these two groups, we see paying people does indeed provide an incentive to stop a bad habit, at least short term.

However, the third group provided the most interesting results. In this group, called the “deposit” group, participants were asked to put down $150 of their own money, which they would receive back if they successfully quit in 6 months. In addition, they were given a $650 bonus prize from their employer if they quit. Of those who accepted the deposit challenge 52% succeeded.

On the surface, this makes no sense. Why would winning $800 be less effective than winning only $650 plus $150 of your own money back?

Perhaps people in the deposit group were more motivated to quit smoking in the first place? The researchers admitted that over 85% of people who were offered the deposit deal refused to take it. However, the study authors took efforts to scrub the effect of extra motivation by only using data from smokers willing to be in either group.

Loss Aversion, Commitment, and a Social Out

So what else might explain the results? For one, the study authors write, “people are typically more motivated to avoid losses than to seek gains.” This irrational tendency, known as “loss aversion,” is a cornerstone of behavioral economics. As Nudge author Cass Sunstein, wrote, “a 5-cent tax on the use of a grocery bag is likely to have a much greater effect than a 5-cent bonus for bringing one’s own bag.”

There are other factors at work as well. Commitment contracts — like putting money down or taking a bet — have proven to be effective at changing behavior because they make us accountable to our future selves. People are notoriously bad at predicting their behavior due to a phenomenon called “time inconsistency.” Essentially, we punt difficult to do behaviors saying, we’ll “eat better tomorrow” or we’ll “clean the garage” next weekend.

Tim Urban, author of the Wait But Why blog, explains his struggle with procrastination writing, “I banked on Future Tim’s real-world existence for my most important plans, but every time I’d finally arrive at a time when I thought I would find Future Tim, he was nowhere to be found — the only person there would be stupid Present Tim. That’s the thing that really sucks about Future You — whenever time finally gets to him, he’s not Future You anymore, he’s Present You, and Present You can’t do the tasks you assigned to Future You … So you do what you always do — you re-delegate them to Future You, hoping that next time time catches up with Future You, he actually exists.”

By creating a binding commitment — like the $25,000 bet my father took with me — we make sure our future selves behave in line with our present goals. A website called stickK.com uses commitment contracts to help its’ users accomplish their goals. People sign legally binding agreements where they have to pay a third party if they don’t meet their obligations to stop smoking, exercise, or finish their novel, for example. The site, founded by two Yale professors, has proven effective for those brave enough to take the bet.

There’s one more important and often overlooked reason these types of commitments work — they change the language we use. When I asked my father how he manages the temptation to not cheat with just a bite of cake now and then, he told me, “I just don’t.  It’s actually not a big deal any more.” Frankly, I was surprised he is having such an easy time with it. Here’s a man who has struggled with his weight for over 30 years but who suddenly finds giving up some of his favorite foods to be, well, a piece of cake. What gives?

It turns out that the way we describe our behaviors can have a dramatic impact on what we will and won’t do. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people who were prompted to use the words “I don’t” versus “I can’t” were nearly twice as likely to resist the temptation of choosing unhealthy foods. The researchers believe using “I don’t” rather than “I can’t” gave people greater “psychological empowerment” by removing the need to make a decision. “I don’t” is outside our control while “I can’t” is self-imposed.

Now when my father goes out to lunch with his friends and dessert is brought to the table, he has a story to tell. “When they offer me a bite, I let them know it would be a very expensive mouthful,” he said. “I explain I just don’t eat that stuff anymore because the bet I made is for life.” He explains, “When I tried to lose weight before, I had to explain to people that I was on a diet. Eventually, I would get tired of saying ‘I can’t’ and I’d cave-in and tell myself, ‘just this once.’ But now with this bet,” my father joked, “I can just blame you!”

Up Next

In a future essay, I’ll explore the limitations of this technique and explain when using it is likely to fail.

Until then, let me know if you’ve tried using a commitment in your life to change your behaviors. Did anything work particularly well or did you ultimately go back to your old habits?

TL:DR

– Creating a commitment to stop a bad habit can increase the odds of quitting certain behaviors.

–  Though not appropriate for all behaviors (I’ll discuss the limitations in my next essay), the technique works because it uses loss aversion, a commitment contract, and provides a social out for not doing the behavior by changing the language we use to describe our actions.

Photo credit: nerissa's ring

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The Mind-Hack I Used to Help My Father Lose Weight

Dad and me soon after coming to America.

When my family immigrated to the United States in 1981, my father weighed 185 pounds. He came chasing the American dream but got more than he expected. Along with a new, more prosperous life for his family, he also acquired some bad habits.

For one, he took up smoking because, as he sheepishly admits, “that’s what business people here did back then.” And to ward off the boredom of long car rides between sales calls, he began eating American-made junk food.

Eventually, he stopped smoking. However, the junk food habit got the best of him. His weight ballooned by over 50 pounds and in his late 50s his doctor told him he was pre-diabetic. If he didn’t change soon, his doctor warned, he’d be at risk for serious health problems.

His doctor prescribed a cocktail of pills to help him control his cholesterol and blood pressure but provided little practical advice regarding what to do about his weight. “Eat better, get more exercise,” the doctor advised after an annual physical. “You can get dressed now,” he said before sending my father on his way.

Today in his late 60s, my father still struggles to control his weight with no success — that is, until recently.

For the past five months, my father has nearly returned to his slender 1981 weight — losing about 2 pounds per week — and finally breaking his bad eating habits. He’s not taking any diet pills nor is he drinking any miracle shakes. He’s not enrolled in any groups like Weight Watchers that can charge hundreds of dollars. In fact, the solution he’s using isn’t costing him a dime.

The Bet

It was New Year’s Eve 2014.  My father and I sat in the living room talking about resolutions. I’m generally not a fan of this sort of arbitrary annual goal-setting but my father mentioned, “I wish I could finally get rid of these extra pounds.”

As he said this, his hand went to his belly, squeezing a roll of fat through his shirt as his face grimaced regretfully. I could see he was disappointed in himself.

“How did you quit smoking?” I asked.

“I took a bet,” he said. I was intrigued.

He continued, “A friend said there was no way I could give up smoking for a year. He put $100 on the line and we shook on it. That was it. I never picked it up again.”

This gave me an idea. “What if we did the same for your diet?”

“I know you love sweets,” I said. “I know you also love carbs. But do you agree there’s nothing good about eating sugar and all those processed carbohydrates other than how good they taste?”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I wish I’d never eat them again.”

“Great!” I said. “How would you like to free yourself from the pull of fattening food just like you cut the desire to smoke?”

“OK,” he confirmed, but this time his response was more hesitant, anticipating what I would say next.

“I bet you $25,000 to never eat refined carbohydrates again.” Of course, I didn’t want his money. What I wanted was to get his attention and I needed a dollar amount that would hurt.

His face turned pale as I stuck out my hand to seal the deal.

“Never?” he asked.

“You know sugar and refined carbs are hurting your body, right?” I asked and he agreed. “Well then let’s kill this bad habit for good.”

“If you successfully give up these things you say you want to stop eating, you win and keep your money. This bet will help you do something you’ve wanted to do for years.”

“But no sweets ever again?” he wondered.

“OK, you get to eat whatever you want one day a year — on your birthday.”

He was speechless. Then, my father rose from the easy chair, steadied himself, and shook my hand. The deal was done.

What Happened Next?

A few weeks ago, five months after we shook hands, my father called me with good news. “My doctor says I can take my pills every other day!” He’s stayed true to the bet and swears that resisting the temptation to eat things he knows he shouldn’t is much easier than he expected.

In a future essay, I’ll dive deeper into the psychology of behavior change to explain why this technique can be an effective way of stopping certain bad habits. In a future post, I’ll also take a look at when this technique works and when it doesn’t. I’ll explain the surprising reason this method seems to make resisting temptation easier and reveal a way I’ve used a similar method to change my own daily behaviors.

Have you ever taken a bet to change your behavior? Did it work? If not, why did it fail? Share your story in the comments section below.

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4 Ways to Win Your Competitor’s Customer Habits (Slides)

After the slide presentation I posted about “The Secret Psychology of Snapchat” received such a warm response from readers, I decided to create another set of slides. This presentation is about how to win over your competition’s customer habits. I hope you enjoy it.

For a deeper analysis, see this previous article I wrote on the topic: http://www.nirandfar.com/2015/01/competitions-customers.html

4 Ways to Win Your Competitor’s Customer Habits from Nir Eyal

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4 Cures for Feeling Overwhelmed: A Book Review

Nir’s Note: This book review is by Sam McNerney. Sam writes about cognitive psychology, business, and philosophy.

Many of us feel we’re drowning in the rising tide of emails, updates, and digital distractions. According to a survey by the Families and Work Institute, the majority of American workers report feeling overwhelmed or overworked. In her new book, Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time, Brigid Schulte acknowledges that although the deluge of to do’s is inevitable, there are ways to regain our sanity.

Schulte writes about cognitive overload, work life balance, and gender bias in the workplace. She mixes personal anecdote with psychological science to discuss the stress of day-to-day life. Primarily, she discusses how our perception of work influences how we work. Schulte insists that being overwhelmed and feeling overwhelmed are two different things.

We need to change how we perceive our workload, she says, and not just the amount of work.

1. You Might Be Less Busy Than You Think.

The sociologist John Robinson has collected detailed time diaries, tracking what typical Americans do every day, for decades. He is interested in how much free time we have and what we do with it. The answer is not nearly as obvious as it might seem and Robinson has found our intuitions can be misleading. Robinson has concluded that our perception of how busy we are generally does not match reality.

Robinson has scrutinized thousands of time diaries and found that the amount of hours Americans work has held steady for the last forty years. What’s different, Robinson says, is the gap between what the data indicate and what people actually report. People feel busier, more exhausted, and more hurried, even if they aren’t.

When Schulte, the author of Overwhelmed, kept a time diary for one week, Robinson calculated she had about 30 hours of free time. To Schulte, a reporter for the Washington Post and mother of two, the finding sounded completely absurd. She felt overwhelmed. And yet, she had 30 hours of leisure time every week. How?

Robinson argues that much of what we consider work time is actually leisure time. Exercise, reading, listening to the news, talking with a friend on the phone, or spending time on social media – when Schulte reported her time diary to Robinson, he insisted these activities were leisure hours, even though they might not feel very leisurely. Robinson suggests the problem is not necessarily having less time to do more things – after all, the average number of hours Americans work per week has held relatively steady for the last decade – but spending more time worrying about the things we need to do.

Tip: The effects of feeling overwhelmed are determined not only by how much you work but also by how much time you spend thinking about work. Select a few hours each day to unplug the modem and set your phone on airplane mode. It’s easier to stop worrying about work when you’re unable to do it.

2. Work Less To Get More Done

Schulte recommends chunking time. Don’t work continuously and without breaks. The longer we work, the more tired the mind becomes. After a certain point, we’re lured into watching a pointless video or reading an irrelevant blog post. A sting of guilt lures us back to work, but it’s too late. The mind has checked out.

Chunking works by blocking out uninterrupted time. No email, no phone. Schulte quotes Terry Monaghan, an executive coach, who says that, “your brain can stay focused on anything, even an unpleasant task, if it knows it will last only thirty minutes.” Schulte says that she wrote most of Overwhelmed in 90-minute bursts.

Tip: Don’t attempt to work for long periods of time without a break. Instead, chunk work into short bursts but schedule time on your calendar to focus. It’s just as important to manage cognitive bandwidth as it is to manage hours.

3. Pretend You Don’t Have That Much Time Left.

Laura Carstensen is a professor of psychology and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. She studies how we perceive time, exploring the difference between how the elderly and terminally ill perceive time compared to everyone else.

Carstensen’s research reveled that while most of us think about how much time we have; those nearing the end of life think about how much time they have left. When our “time horizon” is short, it’s more obvious what we should value and what we should ignore. Young people have a long time horizon, so they’re more easily distracted by trivial concerns and unimportant tasks.

The trick is “collapsing one’s time horizon,” according to Carstensen. When we think we have less time to waste, we make better use of it.

Tip: We work better when we know that we don’t have unlimited time. Work against a timer or for the brave, try a “ dead battery sprint. ” The technique involves leaving your power cable at home, going to a coffee shop or somewhere else where you don’t have access to your power cable, and working until your battery dies. The time pressure will boost your productivity.

4. It’s Not the Hours That Kill You—It’s the Lack of Control

As I read Overwhelmed, I thought about Kevin Roose’s Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits. Roose writes about recent college graduates working in finance where one hundred hour workweeks are the norm. These young recruits do not actively work during every second of these grueling stretches. They idled for hours, waiting for a senior employee to assign work, which typically arrives late in the day. As one first-year analyst put it, “It’s not the hours that kill you—it’s the lack of control of the hours… my life doesn’t belong to me anymore.”

Schulte cites research from Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter, two researchers from Harvard Business School who conducted an experiment involving a group of employees at Boston Consulting Group. The employees were allowed to coordinate time off and after-hours on-call time so they could control their workflow while still meeting the demands of their clients. Compared to a control group that remained constantly available and had less control over when they worked, employees in the experimental group produced better work, reported higher job satisfaction, and took full vacations. Perlow and Porter stress that it is, “perfectly possible for consultants and other professionals to meet the highest standards of service and still have planned, uninterrupted time off.”

The experiment was so successful that leaders at BCG created PTO (Predictability, Teaming, and Open Communication), a company-wide program directly based on Perlow and Porter’s research. PTO gives employees the freedom to control when they work so their work hours are more predictable. On their website, BCG emphasizes that “BCGers report exceptional improvements in both personal satisfaction and project performance after adopting PTO, including an average 35 percent increase in teamwork and collaboration, a 35 percent increase in value delivered to clients, and a 100 percent increase in team effectiveness.”

Tip: 8 hours of work will feel different depending how on much control you have over those hours. If you work for somebody, ask for more control of your hours. If you’re a manager, don’t blindly delegate.  

Conclusion

In Overwhelmed, Schulte emphasizes the power of perception. Her most insightful passages explore the gap between how much time we spend working and how much time we feel like we spend working, suggesting that even though we might not be able to magically reduce our responsibilities at home and at work, we can change how we experience and perceive our work. We have more free time than we think, but given our hurried lives, we would never guess it.

TL;DR

 

Brigid Schulte is an award-winning journalist. Her latest book is titled Overwhelmed.
We have more free time than we think.
It helps to work in short bursts. Try “productivity hours,” where distractions like emails and texts are put aside.
Recalibrate your “time horizon.” We’re more productive when when time feels limited.
Taking control of your hours is better than simply reducing the amount of hours you work.

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