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

by Charles Duhigg

Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle. It’s about getting things done without sacrificing everything we care about along the way.

I came to believe a small number of ideas were at the core of why some people and companies get so much done. This book, then, explores the eight ideas that seem most important in expanding productivity.

importance of making decisions by envisioning the future as multiple possibilities rather than fixating on what you hope will happen, and how a woman used that technique to win a national poker championship. They describe how some Silicon Valley companies became giants by building “commitment cultures” that supported employees even when such commitment gets hard.

The workers who have succeeded in this new economy are those who know how to decide for themselves how to spend their time and allocate their energy. They understand how to set goals, prioritize tasks, and make choices about which projects to pursue. People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and say they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.

Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.

Locus of control has been a major topic of study within psychology since the 1950s. Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.

“Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who helped conduct that study, told me. “Most of us learn it early in life. But some people’s sense of self-determination gets suppressed by how they grow up, or experiences they’ve had, and they forget how much influence they can have on their own lives.

This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.

Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values. We start to recognize how small chores can have outsized emotional rewards, because they prove to ourselves that we are making meaningful choices, that we are genuinely in control of our own lives. That’s when self-motivation flourishes: when we realize that replying to an email or helping a coworker, on its own, might be relatively unimportant. But it is part of a bigger project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do. Self-motivation, in other words, is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.

some norms, the data indicated, consistently correlated with high team effectiveness. One engineer, for instance, told the researchers that his team leader “is direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks….She also takes the time to ask how we are, figure out how she can help you and support you.” That was one of the most effective groups inside Google.

Both enthusiasm and loyalty are admirable norms. It wasn’t clear to managers that they would have such different impacts on people’s behaviors. And yet they did. In that setting, enthusiastic norms made teams better. Loyalty norms made them less effective. “Managers never intend to create unhealthy norms,” Edmondson said. “Sometimes, though, they make choices that seem logical, like encouraging people to flesh out their ideas before presenting them, that ultimately undermine a team’s ability to work together.”

“As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined. The conversations didn’t need to be equal every minute, but in aggregate, they had to balance out.” Second, the good teams tested as having “high average social sensitivity”—a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.

One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask them to describe what that person is thinking or feeling—the empathy test described previously. This is a “test of how well the participant can put themselves into the mind of the other person, and ‘tune in’ to their mental state,” wrote the creator of the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge. While men, on average, correctly guess the emotion of the person in the photo only 52 percent of the time, women typically guess right 61 percent.

Team B is messier. People speak over one another, they go on tangents, they socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. Everyone speaks as much as they need to, though. They feel equally heard and are attuned to one another’s body language and expressions. They try to anticipate how one another will react. Team B may not contain as many individual stars, but when that group unites, the sum is much greater than any of its parts.

Michaels is almost ostentatious in his demonstrations of social sensitivity—and he expects the cast and writers to mimic him. During the early years of the show, he was the one who appeared with a soothing word when an exhausted writer was crying in his office. He has been known to interrupt a rehearsal or table read and quietly take an actor aside to ask if they need to talk about something going on in their personal life.

For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don’t have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard. “The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader,” as Amy Edmondson, who is now a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. “It seems like fairly minor stuff, but when the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel listened to, or starts a meeting by saying ‘I might miss something, so I need all of you to watch for my mistakes,’ or says ‘Jim, you haven’t spoken in a while, what do you think?,’ that makes a huge difference.”

Teams need to believe that their work is important. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. Teams need clear goals and defined roles. Team members need to know they can depend on one another. But, most important, teams need psychological safety. To create psychological safety, Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. There were Google-designed checklists they could use: Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.

Over the last two decades, the American workplace has become much more team focused. The average worker today might belong to a sales team, as well as a group of unit managers, a special team planning future products, and the team overseeing the holiday party. Executives belong to groups that oversee compensation and strategy and hiring and firing and approving HR policies and figuring out how to cut costs. These teams might meet every day in person or correspond via email or telecommute from all over the world. Teams are important. Within companies and conglomerates, government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of self-organization.

Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.

People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they’re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do.

If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head. Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you’re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.”

Narrate your life as it’s occurring, and then when your boss suddenly asks a question or an urgent note arrives and you have only minutes to reply, the spotlight inside your head will be ready to shine the right way. To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next. If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table. Then you’ll notice what goes unmentioned or if there’s a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign.

there are risks associated with a high need for closure. When people begin craving the emotional satisfaction that comes from making a decision—when they require a sensation of being productive in order to stay calm—they are more likely to make hasty decisions and less likely to reconsider an unwise choice. The “need for closure introduces a bias into the judgmental process,” a team of researchers wrote in Political Psychology in 2003. A high need for closure has been shown to trigger close-mindedness, authoritarian impulses, and a preference for conflict over cooperation. Individuals with a high need for closure “may display considerable cognitive impatience or impulsivity: They may ‘leap’ to judgment on the basis of inconclusive evidence and exhibit rigidity of thought and reluctance to entertain views different from their own,” the authors of the need for closure scale, Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster, wrote in 1996.

The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. It’s often not clear how to start on a stretch goal. And so, for a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of realistic short-term aims. People who know how to build SMART goals have often been habituated into cultures where big objectives can be broken into manageable parts, and so when they encounter seemingly outsized ambitions, they know what to do. Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.

One of the reasons commitment cultures were successful, it seemed, was because a sense of trust emerged among workers, managers, and customers that enticed everyone to work harder and stick together through the setbacks that are inevitable in any industry. Most commitment companies avoided layoffs unless there was no other alternative. They invested heavily in training. There were higher levels of teamwork and psychological safety. Commitment companies might not have had lavish cafeterias, but they offered generous maternity leaves, daycare programs, and work-from-home options. These initiatives were not immediately cost-effective, but commitment firms valued making employees happy over quick profits—and as a result, workers tended to turn down higher-paying jobs at rival firms. And customers stayed loyal because they had relationships that stretched over years. Commitment firms dodged one of the business world’s biggest hidden costs: the profits that are lost when an employee takes clients or insights to a competitor.

important lessons of places such as NUMMI and the lean and agile philosophies: Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.

Some researchers call this ability to intuit patterns “Bayesian cognition” or “Bayesian psychology,” because for a computer to make those kinds of predictions, it must use a variation of Bayes’ rule, a mathematical formula that generally requires running thousands of models simultaneously and comparing millions of results.*2 At the core of Bayes’ rule is a principle: Even if we have very little data, we can still forecast the future by making assumptions and then skewing them based on what we observe about the world. For instance, suppose your brother said he’s meeting a friend for dinner. You might forecast there’s a 60 percent chance he’s going to meet a man, since most of your brother’s friends are male. Now, suppose your brother mentioned his dinner companion was a friend from work. You might want to change your forecast, since you know that most of his coworkers are female. Bayes’ rule can calculate the precise odds that your brother’s dinner date is female or male based on just one or two pieces of data and your assumptions. As more information comes in—his companion’s name is Pat, he or she loves adventure movies and fashion magazines—Bayes’ rule will refine the probabilities even more.

We all have a natural proclivity to be optimistic, to ignore our mistakes and forget others’ tiny errors. But making good predictions relies on realistic assumptions, and those are based on our experiences. If we pay attention only to good news, we’re handicapping ourselves. “The best entrepreneurs are acutely conscious of the risks that come from only talking to people who have succeeded,” said Don Moore, the Berkeley professor who participated in the GJP and who also studies the psychology of entrepreneurship. “They are obsessed with spending time around people who complain about their failures, the kinds of people the rest of us usually try to avoid.”

How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true.

This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel.

It seemed as if nature’s creative capacities depended on some kind of periodic disturbance—like a tree fall or an occasional storm—that temporarily upset the natural environment. But the disturbance couldn’t be too small or too big. It had to be just the right size. “Intermediate disturbances are critical,” Connell told me. Within biology, this has become known as the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, which holds that “local species diversity is maximized when ecological disturbance is neither too rare nor too frequent.” There are other theories that explain diversification in different ways, but the intermediate disturbance hypothesis has become a staple of biology.

When strong ideas take root, they can sometimes crowd out competitors so thoroughly that alternatives can’t prosper. So sometimes the best way to spark creativity is by disturbing things just enough to let some light through.