How to Turbocharge Your Productivity: An Interview with Bestselling Author Charles Duhigg
Author Charles Duhigg, whose new book Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, talks with Get-It-Done Guy about how to zoom forward on your goals with mental models and a better way to innovate.
Today’s episode is an interview with New York Times Pulitzer-prize-winning, best-selling author Charles Duhigg. He’s just come out with a new book, Smarter, Faster, Better. And you may know him for his last book, The Power of Habit. The book is, well, Smarter, Faster, and Better. And as Charles points out, productivity isn’t an absolute. What’s productive at work may be different from what’s productive at home. Productivity varies from one time of day to the next, one day the week to the next, and from person to person. In his new title, Duhigg shares how to recognize what you really want to get done instead of what just makes you busy. Always remember: business is about results, not about, well, busyness. Here are a couple highlights from the interview (listen to the full audio in the top right hand player, or on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify!).
Mental models
Having and using a rich set of mental models is one of the major tools used by highly productive people.
Making a story for your day
- The most productive people are the ones who discipline their thinking and focus a little bit better. They can train their brains to switch motivation on and off.
- Building a mental model means we tell ourselves a story about what’s going on as happening, to create an expectation for our reality.
- We become practiced with what we need to focus on and what we can safely ignore through pre-rehearsing what will happen in a given situation.
- If you’re on the train, you can make up a mental story of your day hour by hour. Will you shut your email off from 11–12 am to work on a memo without distraction? How will you look when you present during that meeting?
Wanting closure
Closure is a mixed blessing. People with a high need for closure are good at following through and getting things done. But too much closure can lead to blinders, and a lack of flexibility when it’s most needed.
- The most successful people love a certain degree of closure from tasks they complete or goals they reach.
- You can gain this sense of closure from to do lists.
- Put a stretch goal at the top of the page which will push you to achieve something higher.
- List the steps to get there underneath, using a SMART goal to achieve the stretch goal.
- Ask yourself:
- Have I gotten closer to this ambition (The stretch goal)?
- Is it the right ambition?
- How am I going to start tomorrow morning?
- As you check things off, you’ll experience a feeling of closure which will drive you forward.
Cognitive tunneling
Labor saving devices save us labor, but they also lull us into a false sense of security. When we reach the limits of what we can do, we need to be able to switch into highly-functioning thinking that doesn’t depend on our devices.
- Nowadays, people rely on cell phones for what their brains used to do for them.
- In many ways, our cognitive ability to create mental models of what we’re about to do has been hurt by cell phones and other distractions.
- Where you once stood in a line and thought about the day ahead of you, now you go to check Facebook or Twitter obsessively until you reach your coffee.
- Now, we think less and react more. What we want to be doing is working less, and thinking more.
- To beat this, take moments each day to run through a mind movie of how it’s all going to go. Instead of reaching for your cell phone, make a mind movie first so you know what you’re really going to get done.
Innovation doesn’t take tortured geniuses in a conference room, however.
Innovation
Innovation is quite the buzz word, but it’s a very real thing. New problems may require new solutions. But is there a way to cheat, and be innovative on demand? It appears so…
- Increasingly, jobs demand innovation on deadline.
- Innovation doesn’t take tortured geniuses in a conference room, however.
- The most successful innovators combine old ideas to create new ones.
- To do this, find the ideas in the genre or format you’re trying to create that you like the most.
- Then pick two or three that are your favorites and start trying to combine them into the mega-version of your favorite thing.
- Now, you have a new idea that you love, and others may love too.
You can find Charles Duhigg on the web at charlesduhigg.com.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. I run webinars and other programs to help people be Extraordinarily Productive, and build extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
