§4 · 18 tips
Where does your time go, how do you do less work that pays nothing back, and how do you treat procrastination?
Tips from this section that apply in the United States.
Rewrite "I'm going to do this" as "At 8 a.m. on Tuesday, when I sit down at my desk, I write the introduction first." Pooling 94 tests, people who wrote their goals this way were clearly more likely to reach them, a medium-to-large effect. All you change is the wording of one sentence. It costs no money and takes little effort.
Before you start, write one sentence: if you haven't hit a certain target by a certain date, you stop. Pooling several studies, writing it this way does help people pull out of things that are doomed to fail. What you save is all the time you would otherwise have kept pouring in.
Money and time you have already put in make you want to keep going. Pooling 98 sets of data, this tendency shows up reliably. So to decide whether to continue, count only how much more you would have to put in and how much you could still get back. Leave out what has already been spent.
Students estimated they would finish their thesis in 33.9 days. It actually took 55.5 days, and only 29.7% finished in the time they had estimated. Another group was asked to recall how long the last similar task took before estimating, and the share who finished on time rose from 29.3% to 60.0%.
People are more likely to find a meeting useful if an agenda was sent beforehand. In an experiment, meetings held sitting down ran 34% longer than meetings held standing up, and the decisions made were no better or worse either way.
The more meetings someone has in a day, the more tired they are and the more work they feel they have. When you cut one meeting, the time you save is the length of that meeting, with nothing taken off.
When people estimate how long something will take, they don't automatically split the task up and add up the pieces. If you list the subtasks first and then estimate, you underestimate by less. Once it is split up, every small step is something you can start right away, so you are less likely to put it off.
When someone else set a deadline, 80.6% of students finished by then. Only 38.7% finished within the time they had predicted themselves. When something gets done is almost entirely decided by the deadline and has little to do with your own estimate. So for things with no deadline, set one for yourself and hold yourself to it.
Procrastination has little to do with laziness or personality. What best predicts whether someone puts things off is how unpleasant the task itself is, whether they believe they can do it, and how easily they get pulled away by whatever is in front of them. So what helps is making the task less unpleasant and making the first step smaller, not scolding yourself and forcing it.
The farther something is, the less people take of it. When the same snack was placed farther away, the amount eaten dropped clearly, a medium-sized effect. With fewer options on display, people also took clearly less. These methods don't ask you to hold back in the moment, and you can set them up in a few minutes.
To push yourself to follow through, you can get a bonus when you do it, or you can pay a deposit up front that is returned, with a bonus added, if you do it. Among people willing to join either kind, the deposit group followed through 13 percentage points more. But only 13.7% were willing to pay a deposit, against 90% willing to take a bonus, so a deposit only helps the people who are willing to put one down.
There is no evidence behind "21 days to form a habit." In a study that followed people for 12 weeks, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for an action to become something people did without thinking. It is normal for it not to feel easier after two or three weeks. Missing a day in the middle does not reset your progress to zero.
Procrastination that has become severe enough to cause distress can be treated. People who worked through cognitive behavioral self-help materials for ten weeks, whether with someone guiding them or entirely on their own, did clearly better than people who did nothing. There was no visible difference between being guided and not being guided, so working through it on your own works too.
People in China spend an average of 1 hour 17 minutes a day on housework. Among those who actually did housework that day, it is 1 hour 59 minutes. People who spend money to buy time are more satisfied with their lives. The same amount of money spent on buying time makes people happier in the moment than spent on buying things.
People in China spend an average of 5 hours 37 minutes a day online. Among those who actually went online that day, it is 6 hours 3 minutes. In 2018, by the same method, it was only 2 hours 42 minutes. This is the biggest number in this section. Cutting one hour a day adds up to 365 hours a year.
People in the United States aged 15 and older watch 2.6 hours of TV a day, which takes up half of all their leisure time. People in China watch an average of 1 hour 40 minutes a day, and people aged 75 to 84 watch 3 hours 16 minutes. If you move the information you want to a set time, you save that whole block.
Most people who have used Word for many years still click toolbar icons. In experiments comparing groups, shortcuts were faster than menus and icons. Learning this is a one-time cost, and every operation you do afterward pays it back each day. The longer you do the same kind of work, the more you earn back.
People with longer commutes feel worse about how their lives are going. This loss is not made up for in pay or housing. Cutting 30 minutes from a one-way commute saves 5 hours a week.
