Writing and Productivity

Image by solidxsnake13224 via Flickr

In 1967, behavioural psychologists Martin Seligman and Steve Maiers discovered quite by accident (while investigating simple conditioning) that dogs which were unable to escape from an unpleasant situation (small electrical shocks given through the floor of their box) gave up even trying. They were conditioned to be helpless, and would just lie there and take the shocks even when free to move.

The ethics and humanity of the experiment are a topic for another time, but they gave psychologists a valuable insight into one of the causes of depression and demotivation - learned helplessness.

If you've been through a prolonged period when you repeatedly fail to get work done or achieve your goals, you may be suffering from a form of learned helplessness yourself. The original cause may be minor (a natural period of low energy or high distraction, selecting or being given a series of goals that were impossible for you to achieve), but the longterm effects can be quite severe. You have literally been trained (or trained yourself) to expect failure or at least a lack of achievement, and when that training becomes strong enough, you have no motivation to even try any more.

Fortunately decades of behavioural research have also shown that what has been trained can be untrained. You just need to create a string of situations where you are visibly achieving what you set out to do.

Set yourself well-defined goals

A vague goal like "Improve my website" has no solid endpoint, so you can keep throwing time and resources at it without ever getting that "job done" feeling which in behavioural terms is your "reward", reinforcing your good habits. A solid goal like "Redesign front page to be less cluttered" is better.

Break down your tasks

"Redesign front page to be less cluttered" is still one big chunk, which means you only get one reward. Better still is break it down into multiple steps:

1. Smaller logo
2. Move news into a sidebar
3. Create boxes for different content
etc.

This creates multiple easily-achievable steps, which means (to the unconscious part of your brain where training takes effect) you get multiple "job done" rewards, and more reinforcement. This is an important aspect of Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" system, but a lot of people don't really apply it.

Keep your successes visible

If you keep a digital to-do list or use whiteboards, you may be inclined to delete each task as it's completed just to keep things neat and tidy. Instead, cross them off and keep them around, at least until the end of the day. Looking at a long list of completed tasks is more reward, and more positive reinforcement of how much you're achieving.

Labels: Dave Allen, Depression, Getting Things Done, Learned helplessness, Martin Seligman, Motivation, productivity