Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

I needed to write out my goals—but in a way that forced me to identify my stretch objectives and my SMART aims.

TO STAY FOCUSED: • Envision what will happen. What will occur first? What are potential obstacles? How will you preempt them? Telling yourself a story about what you expect to occur makes it easier to decide where your focus should go when your plan encounters real life.

Envision multiple futures, and then force myself to figure out which ones are most likely—and why.

TO MAKE TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE: • Manage the how, not the who of teams. Psychological safety emerges when everyone feels like they can speak in roughly equal measure and when teammates show they are sensitive to how each other feel. • If you are leading a team, think about the message your choices reveal. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you showing you are listening by repeating what people say and replying to questions and thoughts? Are you demonstrating sensitivity by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered? Are you showcasing that sensitivity, so other people will follow your lead?

TO MANAGE OTHERS PRODUCTIVELY: • Lean and agile management techniques tell us employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. • By pushing decision making to whoever is closest to a problem, managers take advantage of everyone’s expertise and unlock innovation. • A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and solutions, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored and that their mistakes won’t be held against them. TO ENCOURAGE INNOVATION: • Creativity often emerges by combining old ideas in new ways—and “innovation brokers” are key. To become a broker yourself and encourage brokerage within your organization: • Be sensitive to your own experiences. Paying attention to how things make you think and feel is how we distinguish clichés from real insights. Study your own emotional reactions. • Recognize that the stress that emerges amid the creative process isn’t a sign everything is falling apart. Rather, creative desperation is often critical: Anxiety can be what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways. • Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to alternatives. By forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from different perspectives, by giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before, we retain cl...