The Unconventional Habits of Highly Productive People
“It turns out that the most productive people actually have more time for their families and for their hobbies. That’s why they’re so productive — because they have these balanced lives.” — Charles Duhigg
How do some people and companies manage to be so much more productive than others?
Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer-winning journalist for The New York Times and author of The Power of Habit, has spent years figuring this out. Duhigg released his findings in a book titled Smarter Faster Better.
We recently had the chance to interview Duhigg on our podcast, The Growth Show, where he shared some of his findings on how to build a happier and more productive team, career, and life. In addition to telling memorable stories about Disney and Google, Duhigg covers some more personal stories relating to his unique career trajectory.
The following excerpts are from our conversation with Duhigg, which highlight what these people and companies are doing differently to make time for both work and play.
They See the Full Picture
Really genuinely productive people, they govern their own minds in a way that most of us don’t. They see these choices that most of us don’t even realize are there, and because they understand how their brains work and they can control how they think a little better, they’re just much, much more effective at choosing the right goals and focusing at self-motivating. They get more done with less stress and waste.
They Rehearse Potential Outcomes
[Productive people] very actively manage their focus by building mental models, or envisioning what they expect to see, what they expect to have happen — because when your brain has some narrative that it can apply to a situation, it’s much more attuned to noticing the important discrepancies and ignoring the distractions.
They Leverage Their Strengths
It’s not about just getting more stuff done. It’s not about working harder. It’s about choosing the right goals and being focused on them, and understanding your own frailties and weaknesses and strengths, and structuring your life in a way to take advantage of the strengths, and to discourage the frailties.
When you govern how you think, when you are really aware of what you do … it just makes it so much easier to get the right things done.
They Share the Floor
The first is this thing known as “equality in conversational turn-taking,” which basically means that everyone at the meeting, everyone on the team, they all feel like they can speak up. Not every day or every meeting, but say over a month or over two months, the people generally speak in roughly equal increments. There’s no one dominating the conversation.
There’s some people who love to hear the sound of their own voice, and there’s some people who are very concise, but the point being that everyone kind of gets airtime when they want it.
They’re Perceptive
The second thing that a team must have to become effective as a group … is that they must have what’s known as high social sensitivity, which means that if you’re pissed off, I can kind of pick up on that without you having to tell me you’re pissed off, right? Maybe I say, “Jim, I notice that your arms are crossed and you look like you’re not really happy about what’s going on, can you tell me about that?” Or, “Susan, you look really excited about this idea, do you want to take lead on it?” People who can pick up on what each other is thinking means that they’re really listening to each other.
It isn’t necessarily intuitive to some to take the time to listen to non-experts, or listen to the small talk at the start of a meeting — but Duhigg argues these behaviors are imperative to a team’s success.
If you have these two things — equality in conversational turn-taking where people can speak up, and social sensitivity — when they come together, they essentially create this thing that psychologists call psychological safety. If you’re on a team that has psychological safety, it means everyone feels like they’re free to be themselves. They can say what they need to say without fear of recrimination.
What’s interesting about this is if you were to look at teams with psychological safety from the outside, if you just saw a five-minute clip of a meeting … [it] wouldn’t necessarily look efficient, right?
It turns out that these things that in the short term look a little bit inefficient, over the long term, they add up to teams that actually come together, teams that become greater than the sum of its parts. That is critical in making a team function.
Want to hear the rest of our conversation with Charles Duhigg? Check out the full interview on The Growth Show on iTunes or listen below.
