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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning. This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is that everybody likes to finish.
We all like to complete our tasks and achieve our goals.
You can leverage this appeal to boost your own productivity.
And if you're a manager, you're team members as well.
In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Islett Fischbach and Annabelle Roberts wrote about a research finding that seems to contradict economic theory.
People, it seems, would rather pay or be paid sooner, even when it is in their financial interest, to delay.
For instance, lots of people want to pay off their mortgage as soon as they can.
Even if they would be better off financially, making the contracted payments and investing what's left over in the stock market.
In research that the authors did, they found that many people would rather pay more for a service sooner rather than pay a little less in the future.
Given the time cost of money, this doesn't really make sense.
But the authors attribute it to what they call the promise of relief.
As they put it, people often prefer to incur larger costs sooner and receive smaller benefits earlier when doing so allows them to achieve a sense of completion.
They say this is especially true when a task or payment is the last one to complete a goal, and when people believe the unfinished task will hang over their heads until it's done.
They say the psychological benefit of closure can outweigh small time or financial gains.
leading to choices that might seem irrational at first glance but provide significant psychological value.
And you know what? I get that.
The truth is that everyone likes to finish.
Keeping track of undone tasks can be a pain, but there is a downside to this desire to close the loop.
We often focus on easy stuff that we will be able to finish.
Rather than wrestling with harder stuff where the payoff isn't immediate.
So Fischbach and Roberts have a few suggestions for warding off this temptation.
One is that managers reframe important goals as a series of smaller tasks, each of which would grant employees a feeling of closure upon completion, they write.
That way, their direct reports won't be pulled away by completing easier and quicker tasks, like deleting all their emails, that may be a little bit less important.
So for instance, if you have a direct report who's working on hiring a new marketing firm, you might reframe that big goal into several smaller tasks, gathering insight from your team about what you're looking for, writing a request for proposals, circulating that RFP, reviewing the proposals, conducting
screening interviews, arranging panel interviews for finalists, collecting evaluations from interviewers, checking references, negotiating the contract, and finalizing the hire.
That's a lot of tasks, and all of them will be satisfying to complete.
If the employee had been focused on the big goal of hiring the new marketing firm, it might have been harder to maintain focus and easier to get pulled away to quick tasks.
Much better to make the most important goal a little more motivating.
I think an individual contributor could apply this logic to reframing their own tasks, too.
Your manager doesn't have to do it for you.
You could consider each of the incremental steps in a big project as a goal that it will be satisfying to finish.
You could also identify distinct phases in the project.
You will find yourself excited to finish the final task in each of those phases.
there is no point lamenting that people are irrational we are and so we are a lot better off figuring out how to leverage what we know about human behavior to nudge us in the direction we want to go and in this case that's in the direction of giving ourselves things to finish because finishing feels
good in the meantime this is laura thanks for listening and here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam .com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, Please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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