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Lucas had been deliberate in deciding what he wanted to see, what he wanted to accomplish, and how he wanted to feel. But I’d let the morning kind of happen to me.
Choosing Your Filters
This type of selective attention is what scientists call inattentional blindness—that is, we see what we’ve decided merits our attention, and we’re remarkably blind to the rest. So the priorities we set for ourselves really matter.
We’re each living through our own private reality, a reality shaped by our hardworking automatic system’s attempts to allocate our attention to the right things.
The author Theodore Sturgeon once wrote, “Nothing is always absolutely so,” and he was right—very little in life is truly completely good or bad.7 So the use of absolute language is a flashing neon sign that you’re probably seeing only part of the picture.
STARTING YOUR DAY THE NIGHT BEFORE
CHOOSING YOUR FILTERS
Take a moment to think about the day ahead, or an important conversation you have coming up. Ask yourself these intention-setting questions:
Aim: What matters most in making this a success, and what does that mean your real priority should be?
Attitude: What concerns are dominating your thoughts or your mood? Do they help you with your priorities—and if not, can you choose to set them aside for now?
Assumptions: What negative expectations do you have going into this? How might you challenge those expectations? What counterevidence might you seek out?
Attention: Given your real aim and your assumptions, where do you most want to direct your attention? What do you want to make particularly sure you notice?
Setting Great Goals
Four decades of research by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham (psychologists at the University of Maryland and Rotman School of Management, respectively) suggest that people who bother to articulate a specific goal boost their performance significantly, typically by 15 percent on tasks where it can be quantified.
FIND A WINNING ARTICULATION OF YOUR GOALS
Approach goal: “If we go off track, I’m going to remind myself what really matters; I’m going to remember to smile; I’m going to ask great questions, to make sure he feels heard.”
Bite-Sized Chunks
Implementation Intentions, aka “When-Then” Plans
CREATE A BRAIN-FRIENDLY TO-DO LIST
Write it down as soon as it comes to mind.
Only keep today’s tasks in view.
Make it satisfying to check off.
Be realistic about what you can do in a day.
Include mind-body maintenance.
SETTING GREAT GOALS
Take a moment now to think about your priorities for today.
Set some behavioral goals. Personally, what behavior of yours will support your intentions for the day? Specifically, what tangible actions can you plan to take? Put these on your to-do list along with your regular tasks.
Articulate your goals for the win. Phrase them so that they’re positive, meaningful, feasible, and situation-specific.
Create “approach” goals. Make sure your goals are about doing desirable things, or doing more of them, rather than avoiding bad things happening.
Find a personal why. Can you articulate why the goal matters to you or how it will benefit something you care about?
Break off bite-sized chunks.
Make a “when-then” plan. Define clear situational prompts (“when X happens, then I will do Y”) to increase the chances that you’ll get your most important goals met today.
Create a brain-friendly to-do list. Whichever approach you take to task management, make sure you don’t overload your brain’s working memory and that you feed your reward system.
Reinforcing Your Intentions
The three tools are mental contrasting, priming, and mind’s-eye rehearsal.
MENTAL CONTRASTING
thinking honestly about what’s likely to get in the way of achieving your goals, so you can address those obstacles head-on.
Russell says his highly intentional approach to life has made his career far more enjoyable and successful over the years.
REINFORCING YOUR INTENTIONS
Mental contrasting. What’s most likely to get in the way of you achieving what you hope to do? What can you do to reduce the chance that this obstacle derails you—ideally by making a specific “when-then” plan?
Priming. What cues can you use to remind yourself to stay on track today? Are there words or phrases that will help remind you of your intentions? How can you make your surroundings a good metaphor for your intentions?
Mind’s-eye rehearsal. Take a moment to visualize the most important part of your day going exactly as you hope. What will you be doing to overcome the challenges in your path? How will that look and feel? Can you recall a time in the past where you behaved just as you want to behave today, and bring that vividly to mind?
Productivity Making the Hours in the Day Go Further The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. —STEPHEN COVEY
Singletasking
research unequivocally shows that multitasking damages our productivity—which means, to put it bluntly, it lengthens our days.
René Marois, director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, showed that people doing two tasks simultaneously took up to 30 percent longer and made twice as many errors as those who completed the same tasks in sequence—findings that have been replicated time and again by other scientists.
BATCH YOUR TASKS, ZONE YOUR DAY
SINGLETASKING
Batch your tasks.
Zone your day. Decide on the best time of day to tackle each batch of tasks, including one or two “email zones.”
