TBSP (Too Busy, Summary Please): The people with the most self-control tend to use the least of it, because they set up their days so fewer temptations reach them. Psychologist Angela Duckworth, best known for her research on grit, builds on that work in her new book. Effort pays off most when your situation backs it up. Most people still try to fix a bad afternoon by promising to try harder tomorrow. This week: four parts of your work situation you can change, starting with your own desk.
Willpower at work gets far more credit than it deserves. When an afternoon slips away to email and half-finished tasks, most people blame their own discipline and promise to try harder tomorrow.
Trying harder is a lot like grocery shopping hungry and promising yourself you’ll skip the chip aisle. Sometimes it works. Most of the time, the chips win.
The Most Disciplined People Fight the Fewest Battles
A team of psychologists led by Wilhelm Hofmann gave 205 adults beepers for a week. Several times a day, participants reported what they wanted and whether it clashed with their goals.
The people who scored highest in self-control reported fewer of those clashes, and they tried to resist temptation less often. Their advantage showed up before the temptation did. They had arranged things so fewer temptations reached them in the first place.
Your Situation Shapes Your Results
Psychologist Angela Duckworth spent years studying grit, the mix of passion and perseverance. Her new book, Situated, adds the other half of the picture. A person’s situation, she says, often matters as much as their mindset.
When Philadelphia magazine asked her about willpower, Duckworth didn’t hedge. She called it “the absolute worst way to change your behavior.”
Four Ways to Stop Relying on Willpower at Work
Duckworth lays out four parts of a situation you can shape in a book excerpt for Knowledge at Wharton. Here’s how each one looks at work.
- Set up your space. “You may not be able to control the world at large, but you reign supreme over your immediate surroundings,” Duckworth writes. She suggests starting with “whatever is within three feet of you.” At work, that might mean putting your phone in a drawer or closing the email tab during focus time. Leave tomorrow’s most important task on top of the pile. A trusted list, the core of the GTD method, does the same job for your head.
- Pick your peers. Find a colleague who will hold you to your goals, and do the same for them. A short weekly check-in is enough.
- Attract mentors. Duckworth’s self-assessment asks whether at least two people come to mind when you don’t know what to do. If you can’t name two, that’s a good place to start.
- Choose your culture. Her test for a workplace is whether it’s “both challenging and supportive.” If you manage people, most of this one is yours to shape. A team that needs willpower just to get through the day usually has a setup problem.
Your Desk Is Full of Cues
Journalist Charles Duhigg explains why this works in The Power of Habit. Every habit runs on a loop. A cue triggers a routine, and a reward locks it in. Duhigg sorts most cues into a handful of categories, and two of them are where you are and who you’re with.
A phone sitting face-up next to your keyboard is a cue. So is an inbox left open all day. Some cues are easy to remove. Others come with the job. For those, Duhigg’s advice is to keep the cue and the reward and change the routine in between. If you reach for your phone after a tough meeting because you need a break, take the break somewhere else. A walk down the hall gives you the same reset without the scroll.
Start at Your Desk
Pick one thing within arm’s reach that pulls you off track, and move it today. Then pick one cue you can’t move and decide now what you’ll do when it shows up. Save willpower at work for the moments you can’t plan around.
What’s one thing in your workspace you already know you should move?
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