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forgetting follows a roughly exponential decay function. We forget nearly half of the information we’ve learned within twenty minutes. After twenty-four hours, about 70 percent of it is gone, and a month later, we’re looking at losses of approximately 80 percent.
you can be sure I’ll drop a ball (or several) every day of the week.
Reminders work far, far better when we can act on them immediately.
Hermann Ebbinghaus’s exponential forgetting curve
CUE-BASED PLANNING
implementation intention.”
making a plan for achieving a goal and linking it to a specific cue that will remind you to act.
it’s vital to link that intention with a cue, such as a specific time, place, or action. If you want to floss more regularly, a helpful tweak to your plan would be to say, “Every night after brushing my teeth, I’m going to floss.” Forming an implementation intention is as simple as filling in the blanks in the sentence “When ___ happens, I’ll do ___.”
“I’ll walk to work more” isn’t quite right, but “Anytime it’s between thirty-five and eighty degrees Fahrenheit and isn’t raining or snowing, I’ll walk to work” does the trick.
simply asking people to form cue-based plans vastly increases their likelihood of goal achievement. Further, the more easily a person can detect the cue needed to enact their plan (thanks to details and specificity), the better.
The more we engage with information, the longer it’s recalled.
The power that cues have to trigger memories means that linking a plan (such as flossing) with a cue you expect to encounter (such as your nightly tooth-brushing ritual) makes it far more likely that you’ll remember the plan.
while any cue is better than no cue, it’s best to rely on cues that are out of the ordinary.
A manuscript written in the 80s BC called Rhetorica ad Herennium
Useful mnemonic devices
The more vivid, catchy, and thus memorable the cue, the more likely it is to do its job and help us recall our plans.
First, callers would ask registered voters if they planned to vote. If the reply was yes, they would follow up with three questions: (1) “What time do you expect you’ll head to the polls?” (2) “Where do you expect you’ll be coming from?” and (3) “What do you think you’ll be doing before you head out?” These questions were selected to ensure voters had carefully considered the cues (time, location, and activity) that would remind them it was time to vote.
sleuthing
we’re psychologically wired to find it uncomfortable to say one thing and do another (cognitive dissonance), which is why pledges can help change our behavior.
thinking through the where and when of anything I want to get done is now a strategy that I rely on constantly
Angela Duckworth,
Forming cue-based plans is, of course, something you can do yourself (if, like Lloyd, you’re working on personal goals). But it’s also something a good manager, company, policy maker, or friend can prompt you to do,
Plans don’t change minds—they only help us remember to do the things we already want to do.
it’s best to be choosy about which goals you’ll focus on at a given time and plan carefully to achieve just one or two.
Another potential complication with cue-based planning is that what you need to remember to do can be so complex that a simple plan to act won’t suffice. In these cases, research shows that a formal checklist can work wonders.
Atul Gawande explained in his book The Checklist Manifesto, when surgeons rely on simple safety checklists for a procedure rather than on their memories of what steps are necessary, it saves lives, cutting complications and mortality rates by an estimated 35 to 45 percent.
canvasser
bashfully.
nudges to think carefully about the when and where of follow-through are now widespread.
remember to consider the how, when, and where: How will you do it? When will you do it? Where will you do it?
choose cues that are out of the ordinary.
posthaste.
if your cue-based plans start to get complicated, consider developing a checklist.
Flake out has many causes, including laziness, distraction, and forgetting. Forgetting may be the easiest of these obstacles to overcome.
Timely reminders, which prompt you to do something right before you’re meant to do it, can effectively combat forgetting. Reminders that aren’t as timely have far smaller benefits.
Prompting people to form cue-based plans is particularly useful when they are unlikely to have already formed plans and when forgetting is a make-or-break affair
Planning also has other benefits: It helps you break your goals into bite-size chunks, relieves you of the need to think about what you’ll do in the moment, and acts like a pledge to yourself,
If you form too many cue-based plans at once, you may be discouraged and your commitment may dwindle. So be choosy about which goals you’ll plan for at any given time.
chagrin
badgered
THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE
a barrier to change that I haven’t yet mentioned in this book: laziness.
Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper”—teach
Instead of seeing our inherent laziness as a bug, I regard it as a feature with many upsides. While it can unquestionably get in the way of behavior change, it also prevents us from wasting oodles of time and energy.
Laziness can be an asset. And not just when it comes to efficiency. When laziness is appropriately harnessed, it can actually help facilitate change.
During a routine system upgrade, an IT consultant working on the software that Penn physicians used to send prescriptions to pharmacies made a small change to the user interface: he added a new checkbox to the system. From then on, unless a physician checked that box, whatever drug they prescribed would be sent to the pharmacy as a generic. Since doctors, like the rest of us, tend to be a little lazy, they only rarely checked the box: just 2 percent of the time. As a result, Penn’s generic prescription rate shot up to 98 percent.
If defaults are set wisely, you’ll still end up making the best decision even if you don’t lift a finger—an
colossal
Mitesh was given the green light to form a new Penn Medicine “Nudge Unit” to implement more deliberate system improvements grounded in behavioral science.
Although there are many different ways to nudge behavior change, the term is often used as a synonym for setting good defaults because this type of nudge, which harnesses human laziness for good, has proven so valuable.
