Over the holiday period, Freakonomics Radio was rebroadcasting old episodes. One of which was how to be more productive. I had already listened to the episode once, but it felt like the kind of topic you could always use a refresher on.
On the episode, Dubner interviews Charles Duhigg (great surname, right?), author of The Power of Habit. In the book, Duhigg tries to boil down what are the universal aspects of people who are successful in achieving their goals.
Interesting, he starts by dismissing an idea many of us may consider important: having one goal and solely focusing on that. Duhigg explains that he only wanted things that everyone agreed on. A single goal was not one of them. Many people would say “you have to focus on one goal: it’s essential.” But others would say “you have to be flexible, you cannot commit yourself to one goal.”
So what does make the list?
- Self-motivation: making a decision to do something helps trigger this
- Focus: training yourself to focus on the right things and ignore everything else
- Goal-setting: you need a big stretch goal which is your ultimate objective, and then a short-term goal that you can action tomorrow morning
- Decision-making: think probabilistically, considering the outcomes and weighing how likely they are to occur
- Innovation: take cliches and mix them together in new ways; being interdisaplinary can help with this
- Absorbing data:
- Managing others: give the problem to the person closest to it
- Teams: who is on a team matters more than what the team does
Those are the eight characteristics Duhigg finds consistent across successful people.
As for how many projects you should be working on, the answer seems to be enough to make things interesting, but not so many that you cannot devote enough time to each. The people who are most productive work on 4-5 projects. Critically, these should all be different so that it teaches you new skills.
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Tags: freakonomics, productivity, self improvement
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2017 at 11:01 am and is filed under Success & Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.