To my knowledge, at least six Nobel Prize winners attribute their success to play. James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA in the 1950s, described the generative process they used to come up with the structure as ‘constructing a set of molecular models and beginning to play’. Alexander Fleming, the scientist who discovered the antibiotic penicillin, once described his job as ‘playing with microbes’. Donna Strickland, the 2018 Nobel laureate in Physics, described her career as ‘getting to play with high-intensity lasers’. Konstantin Novoselov, who shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping discover graphene, put it most simply: ‘If you try to win the Nobel, you won’t,’ he reflected. ‘The way we were working really was quite playful.’ — *location: 238* ^ref-64718 --- In one 2020 experiment from New York University and the University of Miami, scientists attempted to quantify the effects of approaching the world with a sense of adventure. They enlisted over 130 participants and got their consent to track their location using the GPS in their phones. Over the next several months, the researchers sent the participants text messages asking them about their emotions: how happy, excited or relaxed did they feel? The results were eye-opening. As the GPS data and responses to the text messages rolled in, it became clear that those who had more adventurous experiences – those who took themselves off to a wider and more random assortment of places, whether taking a new route to work or trying a different coffee shop rather than sticking to their regular one – felt happier, more excited and more relaxed. Their conclusion: an adventurous life holds the key to unlocking positive emotions. — *location: 260* ^ref-27717 --- After painstakingly researching the biographies of some of history’s most pioneering minds, from Leonardo da Vinci to Steve Jobs, the writer Walter Isaacson summarised his findings thus: ‘Being curious about everything not only makes you more creative. It enriches your life.’ — *location: 335* ^ref-14503 --- By adding a side quest to your day, you create space for curiosity, exploration and playfulness – and could discover something amazing and totally unexpected along the way. — *location: 348* ^ref-65445 --- In a late-night burst of inspiration, I grabbed a Sharpie and a Post-it note and wrote nine simple words: What would this look like if it were fun? — *location: 385* ^ref-38667 --- In one famous lecture, ‘The Individual and the World’, Watts outlined a key mistake we make in understanding the world. He quotes the early-twentieth-century English writer G. K. Chesterton: ‘In frivolity there is a lightness which can rise. But in seriousness is a gravity that falls, like a stone.’ This, he said, was true of people who understood Zen. He summarised it thus: ‘There is a difference between being serious and being sincere.’ — *location: 510* ^ref-36931 --- The trick is simple: when you feel like your work is draining or overwhelming, try asking yourself, ‘How can I approach this with a little less seriousness, and a little more sincerity?’ — *location: 526* ^ref-53751 --- Seriousness is overrated. If you want to achieve more without ruining your life, the first step is to approach your work with a sense of play. — *location: 544* ^ref-53409 --- There are three ways you can incorporate the spirit of play into your life. First, approach things with a sense of adventure. When you step into the right ‘play personality’, every day abounds with opportunities to see life as a game, filled with surprises and side quests. Second, find the fun. Remember Mary Poppins: there’s an element of fun in every task, even if it isn’t always obvious. Try asking yourself what this would look like if it were fun, and then build your projects around the answer. Third, lower the stakes. Failures are only failures when you think they are – and not every problem need be approached with such a straight face. So what would it mean to approach your work with less seriousness and more sincerity? — *location: 545* ^ref-23742 --- Feeling confident about our ability to complete a task makes us feel good when we’re doing it, and helps us do it better. The origins of this insight can be traced back to the Canadian-American psychologist Albert Bandura. Born in the tiny town of Mundare, Alberta in 1925, by the time of his death in 2021 Bandura was one of the most influential psychologists in history. That influence was, in large part, down to an idea that he introduced in 1977 and one that would make him famous: self-efficacy. Drawing on his research over the previous decade, Bandura argued that it’s not just our abilities that are important in human performance and wellbeing; it’s how we feel about our abilities. Self-efficacy was the term he coined to describe such feelings, referring to how much belief we have that we’re able to achieve our objectives. — *location: 615* ^ref-22390 --- To oversimplify just a little, self-efficacy is psychology jargon for confidence. — *location: 623* ^ref-43405 --- My favourite method involves what I call ‘flipping the confidence switch’; in other words, challenging yourself to behave as if you’re confident in your task, even if you’re not. The method is even more simple than it sounds. The next time you’re not feeling good enough to take a chance, simply ask yourself, ‘What would it look like if I were really confident at this? What would it look like if I approached this task feeling confident that I could do it?’ — *location: 652* ^ref-47632 --- As the philosopher Seneca said, Qui docet discit – ‘He who teaches learns’. — *location: 786* ^ref-30993 --- And if you’re concerned that you’re not ‘qualified’ enough to teach someone else, it’s worth remembering that the people we learn from best are often the ones who are just a step ahead of us in the journey. So anyone can become a teacher. You don’t need to be a guru. You can just be a guide. — *location: 795* ^ref-19649 --- Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War Two, put it beautifully: ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’ — *location: 907* ^ref-20599 --- ‘Power’ is a scary word, but it doesn’t have to be. When we say the second energiser is power, we don’t mean exerting control over others. Here, we simply mean feeling empowered to take your job, life and future into your own hands. There are three ways you can increase your sense of power, starting now. Begin with confidence. We think our confidence is fixed, but actually it’s extremely malleable. So why not try ‘flipping the confidence switch’ – and playing the role of someone who’s already filled with self-belief? Next, level up your skills. Ask yourself: if I were completely new to this task, what would this look like? And how can I start teaching others even though I’m not an expert yet? Finally, see what you can do to take ownership, even in moments when you don’t have as much control as you’d like. Remember, if you can’t choose what you work on, you can still choose how you work on it. The outcome isn’t always in your hands. But the process, and certainly your mindset, often is. — *location: 911* ^ref-48768 --- This concept is today known as the ‘Benjamin Franklin effect’. It suggests that when we ask someone for help, it’s likely to make them think better of us. It’s the flipside of the transformative effects of helping others: we can ask others to help us, which will help them feel better, too. — *location: 1086* ^ref-43029 --- Life is more fun with friends around. That’s why our third energiser is people. There are some people who naturally uplift our energy – the trick is finding them. That starts with becoming a team player. Try treating the people you’re working with as comrades rather than competitors. Building connections with people is also about lending them a hand. This cuts both ways; not only do we too rarely help others, we also too rarely ask for help. So try asking: what can I do to brighten someone else’s day? Finally, remember the most oft-forgotten truth about human interaction: when you think you’ve communicated too much, you probably haven’t communicated enough. Is there a piece of information you’re hoarding that might just make someone else’s week? — *location: 1205* ^ref-22505 --- I call this solution to procrastination ‘the motivation method’. It’s very common. And it’s total nonsense. The trouble with the motivation method is very simple. There are plenty of us who genuinely do want to do the things we struggle with. We feel like we’ve got enough motivation, but there are barriers that get in our way – time and financial constraints, family responsibilities, physical and mental health issues, among countless other things. Motivation clearly isn’t enough. And telling people to simply ‘feel more motivated’ isn’t just unhelpful, it’s potentially harmful, contributing to the sense of paralysis that caused procrastination in the first place. — *location: 1242* ^ref-1509 --- So when motivation fails, where do we turn? When not obsessing over whether you truly are motivated, much advice turns to another principle: discipline. Put simply, discipline is when we do stuff that we don’t feel like doing. It’s the opposite of motivation; it’s taking action despite how unmotivated you are. — *location: 1248* ^ref-56615 --- While the motivation method advised us to make ourselves feel like doing the thing, and the discipline method advised us to ignore how we feel and do it anyway, the unblock method encourages us to understand why we’re feeling bad about work in the first place – and tackle the issue head on. — *location: 1262* ^ref-7294 --- inverse of the feel-good energisers we encountered in Part 1. When — *location: 1283* ^ref-42282 --- When negative feelings like confusion, fear and inertia stand in our way, we put things off. This leads to even more bad feelings, and in turn even more procrastination. It’s a negative loop of low mood and stagnation. — *location: 1283* ^ref-39715 --- Commander’s intent, as outlined in the Field Manual, consists of three crucial components – all built around the basic point of the mission: 1. The purpose behind the operation 2. The end state that the commander was aiming for 3. The key tasks that the commander felt should be taken to accomplish the objective — *location: 1337* ^ref-17462 --- Above all, Toyoda is famous for his obsessive focus on eliminating errors in his factories, by ensuring everyone is focused on the things that matter. Toyoda always hated misused time and resources: he first made his name for designing a hand loom that stopped automatically when a thread broke, preventing it wasting any further cloth. This emphasis on eliminating waste led him to develop a now-famous method called the ‘five whys’. In its original form, the five whys offered a simple method to work out why something had gone wrong. Whenever there was a mistake on the production line, Toyota’s staff would ask ‘why’ five times. — *location: 1389* ^ref-58712 --- Back in 1981, George T. Doran, a consultant and former director of corporate planning for the Washington Water Power Company, introduced the concept of SMART goals in an issue of Management Review. The acronym stood for Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Relevant, Time-related – a simple and memorable formula that quickly gained traction in management and personal development circles. — *location: 1429* ^ref-41909 --- My preferred method doesn’t involve fixating on an external outcome or destination, but instead emphasises the feel-good journey. It’s based on what I call NICE goals. - Near-term: Near-term goals ensure that we’re concentrating on the immediate steps we need to take along our journey. They help us avoid being overwhelmed by the bigger picture. I find that a daily or weekly objective is the most helpful time horizon. - Input-based: Input-based goals emphasise the process, rather than some distant, abstract end-goal. Whereas an output-based goal would home in on the end result – ‘Lose 5kg by the end of the year’, ‘Hit the bestseller list with my book’ – an input-based goal would focus on what we can do in the here and now – ‘Go for a ten-minute walk everyday’, ‘Write 100 words each morning for my novel’. - Controllable: We want to focus on goals that are within our control. ‘Spend eight hours a day on my novel’ probably isn’t something you can actually do, since many external factors would have to come together for such an input to be possible. Setting a more genuinely controllable goal (like allocating twenty minutes per day to the task) is far more realistic. - Energising: We’ve already discussed plenty of principles and strategies for making our projects, tasks and chores more energising. Is there a way to integrate play, power and people into the goals you set yourself? — *location: 1455* ^ref-39845 >Interesting but his examples really are not goals but tactics. Its not clear what the purpose or intended outcome is. --- according to an influential study by Wharton professor Deborah Mitchell, ‘prospective hindsight’ – the process of imagining that an event has already occurred – increases our ability to identify why things will go right (or wrong) by 30 per cent. — *location: 1488* ^ref-14150 >Pre mortem --- As General Eisenhower said, ‘No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.’ — *location: 1497* ^ref-19647 --- If you don’t know when you’re doing something, chances are you won’t do it. — *location: 1509* ^ref-27218 --- If you’ve only got a handful of free hours in your week, and you don’t use them to every possible advantage according to the dictates of ‘productivity’, you’re not necessarily procrastinating; maybe you’re just prioritising. — *location: 1513* ^ref-57021 --- Implementation intentions have been the research focus of Peter Gollwitzer, a psychology professor at New York University. They offer a method that builds moments for your new behaviour into your daily routine, just like the cues in that Boston study. If you decide beforehand when you’re going to do something, you’re much more likely to do it. According to Gollwitzer, the best formula for implementation intentions is a conditional statement: ‘If X happens, then I will Y.’ — *location: 1531* ^ref-32951 --- The result is remarkable. You no longer need to think about when you’ll do it. You just do it. — *location: 1546* ^ref-51357 --- We get procrastination wrong. All too often, we approach procrastination by treating the symptoms rather than the underlying causes. And all too often, those causes relate to our mood: when we feel bad, we achieve less. So the unblock method is about establishing what’s really blocking your good mood – and finding a way to eliminate it. The first emotional barrier is the simplest: uncertainty. The solution? To gain clarity about what you’re actually doing. That involves asking ‘why?’ and then using this to figure out your ‘how’. Next, ask ‘what?’. That means an alternative approach to goal-setting. Forget SMART goals. What you need are goals that feel NICE (near-term, input-based, controllable and energising). Last, ask ‘when?’. If you don’t know when you’re going to do something, chances are you won’t do it. One solution is to use implementation intentions – where your common daily habits become triggers for the things you intend to work on: for example, if I brush my teeth, then I’ll stretch my hamstring. — *location: 1587* ^ref-52331 --- This technique is called ‘affective labelling’. Put simply, it’s the act of putting your feelings into words, which forces you to identify and get to know the sensations you’re experiencing. It works in two ways. First, it increases our self-awareness. By naming and acknowledging our fears, we cultivate a deeper self-awareness that helps us better understand our emotional patterns. Second, it reduces our rumination. Cyclical thoughts about our fears can make us even more convinced the fear is justified. When we label our emotions, we become better able to process and release them – and so escape the cyclical thoughts that make us put things off. — *location: 1665* ^ref-20479 --- One strategy I find helpful is to tell myself the experience I’m going through, but as a story about someone else. Of course I’m not scared, I tell myself. But if I were to write a fictional story about someone like me, in my position, who was procrastinating on this task because they feared something, what might they be scared of? What fear might be holding this fictional character back from starting their task? — *location: 1683* ^ref-8241 --- Think of something you’ve been putting off due to self-doubt: taking up a new hobby, or perhaps launching a side hustle. Now, identify an alter ego who would have no trouble with it. Who embodies the qualities you want to have, qualities like confidence, bravery, determination, or even (dare I say) discipline? Next, step into your alter ego. Find a quiet space where you can be alone and take a few moments to visualise yourself transforming into the alternative ‘you’. Imagine yourself adopting their posture, voice and mindset. The more you practise, the easier it will become to channel the Batman effect when you need to overcome fear or procrastination. — *location: 1879* ^ref-7865 --- Our second emotional blocker is even thornier: fear. If you’ve ever put off applying for a daunting job or asking someone you like on a date, you’ve encountered this particular monster. The solution isn’t to get rid of fear, though – instead, it’s to develop the courage to face up to it. That courage comes from three sources. The first is to understand your fear. Ask yourself: why have I not started on that task or project yet? What am I afraid of? Where does this fear come from? The second is to reduce your fear. Our fears are often blown out of proportion. Ask yourself these questions to prevent yourself from catastrophising: will this matter in 10 minutes? Will this matter in 10 weeks? Will this matter in 10 years? The third is to overcome your fear. If you’re scared of what other people think, remind yourself that most people are not, in fact, thinking about you. We’re a self-conscious species, but we’re not usually a judgemental one. — *location: 1890* ^ref-30646 --- Well, the trick is to tweak your environment to make the thing you want to make a start on the most obvious, default decision. And, in turn, to make the things you don’t want to do the more difficult decision. — *location: 1956* ^ref-52323 --- Tim Pychyl knows procrastination better than anyone. Over the course of two decades, he has published over twenty-five papers on the subject, and his Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Canada is arguably the world’s most influential source of scientific insight into why we put things off. It has rubbed off on him. ‘I don’t almost ever procrastinate,’ he told me, ‘I’m a poster child for saying that once you learn some things about procrastination, you can reduce it if you want to.’ ‘So what’s the trick?’ I asked him. What’s the one piece of advice you give to people to help them overcome procrastination? His response was surprising. Pychyl told me that whenever he finds himself procrastinating from anything, he simply asks himself, ‘What’s the next action step?’ — *location: 2008* ^ref-50165 --- This progress-tracking can have a profound effect. In 2016, researchers combined 138 studies consisting of almost 20,000 participants to conduct a meta-analysis of its effects. They found that tracking progress, whether through writing down progress goals (like whether you completed the training sessions you aimed to do) or writing down output goals (like your 5km time), dramatically increases your chances of actually attaining that goal. — *location: 2041* ^ref-62474 --- Procrastination isn’t something we can always control. Forgiving ourselves is something we can. You can focus on the small losses. Or you can celebrate the small wins. By accepting and forgiving our inevitable tendency to procrastinate – and celebrating the little victories instead – we can begin to conquer its hold over us. — *location: 2135* ^ref-32508 --- Our third emotional blocker is the commonest of all: inertia. When you’re doing nothing, it’s easy to carry on doing nothing. And when you’re working, it’s much easier to carry on working. But there are some simple ways to battle through. Look for the frictions in your life: what obstacles are preventing you making a start? And how can you get rid of them? The best antidote to doing nothing is simply to do something. You can take action by first defining your next step and then tracking your progress, so you’re surrounded by tangible evidence that you’re moving towards your goals. The final step is the kindest: creating systems that can help you support yourself long-term. Above all, cut yourself some slack and celebrate the small wins. — *location: 2140* ^ref-63888 --- My favourite idea comes from the writer and musician Derek Sivers, which he calls ‘hell yeah or no’. His advice is as follows: when you find yourself weighing up whether to take on a new project or commitment, you’ve got two options – either ‘hell yeah’ or ‘no’. There’s no in between. — *location: 2282* ^ref-36701 --- She told me about a powerful concept: the ‘six-week trap’. The trap is when you look at your calendar six weeks from now, see all the blank space and think, ‘I could totally say yes to this.’ As the weeks count down, the space that was empty six weeks ago starts to look more and more full. By the time the day itself comes around, you’ve realised you really shouldn’t have said yes to the commitment – but you’ve done it now and you don’t want to disappoint people by reneging. — *location: 2299* ^ref-31264 >Funt A Minute to Think --- Our next strategy for energy conservation relies on two insights. The first is obvious: that humans are bad at multitasking. The second less so: that we’re not bad at it in quite the way you think. I learned this from a study undertaken by the computer scientists Rachel Adler and Raquel Benbunan-Fich in 2012. The duo developed an experiment in which people had to switch between six tasks: a Sudoku puzzle, a challenge that involved unscrambling some letters into a word, some ‘odd-one-out’ visual problems and so on. Next, they gathered a bunch of people and split them into two groups. In the no-multitasking group, the participants had to do each of the tasks in sequence. This means they had to finish the Sudoku task before moving to the unscrambling word task. In the multitasking group, different tabs were open for each of the six tasks and participants were told they could click between the tabs to switch between tasks. The outcome was surprising. Of course, the people who were massively distracted – those who were incessantly switching from task to task – performed badly. But it wasn’t the least distracted volunteers – those who focused solely on one task at a time – who performed best. When the researchers plotted a graph of ‘productivity’ on the vertical axis against the number of switches between tabs on the horizontal axis, they found an upside-down U-shaped pattern. There was a healthy level of distraction in the middle – the highest performers were those who occasionally switched between tasks, but didn’t go overboard. — *location: 2310* ^ref-50141 --- The greatest cause of burnout isn’t exhaustion. It’s low mood. If you can make yourself feel better, you won’t just achieve more – you’ll last longer, too. Our first kind of burnout arises from overexertion. The solution: do less. There are three ways to do less in practice. The first is to stop yourself from overcommitting. Limit the list of projects you’re working on and get comfortable with saying ‘no’. Ask yourself: if I had to pick only one project to put all my energy into, what would that be? The second way is to resist distraction. Ask yourself: can I uninstall social media apps on my phone so that I can access them only through my web browser? How can I correct course and restart if (or, more realistically, when) I get distracted? The third way is to find moments in your working day to do nothing. Ask yourself: am I treating breaks as a special event rather than a necessity? And what could I do to take more of them? — *location: 2474* ^ref-2443 --- Our second kind of burnout relates to rest time. Depletion burnouts result from not giving yourself enough time or space to truly recharge. The solution: understand how to rest in a way that energises you. The best way to rest is all about feeling calm. Or rather, CALM. Find an activity or project that makes you feel Competent, Autonomous, Liberated and Mellow. A second solution is to spend time in and with nature. Even a tiny amount of greenery can have a transformative impact. So take a walk, even if it’s a short one. And try bringing nature indoors – whether that’s a new house plant or just the soundtrack of some birds chirping. Not all rest needs to be so strategic, however. Sometimes, the most energising thing you can do is to do nothing at all. By doing less today, you’ll feel better tomorrow. — *location: 2729* ^ref-44895 --- Identified Motivation. ‘I’m doing this because I truly value the goal it’s helping me work towards.’ People who highly rated this statement have high identified motivation. — *location: 2799* ^ref-18371 --- Using this framework, Sheldon spotted something fascinating about the PCT hikers. The best predictor of their performance was the specific kind of extrinsic motivation they drew upon when their intrinsic motivation waned. Using the data he collected on the hikers’ motivation, wellbeing and hike performance, he showed that those who had higher levels of both introjected and identified motivation were far more likely to complete the trail. They managed to tap into these forms of extrinsic motivation to help sustain their progress even when the going got tough. At the same time, Sheldon asked each of the walkers about their mood on the hike, using a series of well-established tests for subjective well-being (SWB), psychology jargon for ‘happiness’. Therein lay his second intriguing insight: the only type of extrinsic motivation that corresponded with greater happiness was identified motivation. In other words, it was the hikers who motivated themselves by aligning their actions with what they truly valued who not only completed the trail – but also felt happiest at the end of it. — *location: 2808* ^ref-25601 --- Misalignment burnouts arise when we spend time on goals that don’t match up with our sense of self. Overcoming misalignment is a lifelong task; one that requires us to continually work out what really matters to us, and change our behaviour accordingly. There are some surprisingly simple ways you can work out what matters to you today. First of all, look to your long-term future. Try envisioning yourself on your deathbed. Morbid as it sounds, this is the best way to give you a clearer view of what you want from your life right now. Next, think about your medium-term future. Reflect on what accomplishments you’d want to be celebrating in a year’s time. Then ask yourself: what does that 12-month celebration mean for my actions this week? Last, you should be ready to think about your short-term future. Because the good news is, you can take a step to alignment right now. What are three actions today that might take you a little step closer to the life you want in a year? — *location: 3079* ^ref-35946 --- But my real error wasn’t with my productivity tactics. It was with my overall strategy. I believed that if I simply learned every productivity hack and read every internet blog, I would achieve what I yearned for. It was exactly the opposite of the approach that I needed: to learn to think like a productivity scientist. — *location: 3106* ^ref-28434 ---