Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

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Why are some people so much more productive than others? How can we increase our own productivity? A new book by New York Times reporter and bestselling author Charles Duhigg mines recent scientific findings for the answers. Fith: decision making, when confronted with the unexpected- envision multiple futures beforehand- wiser decisions The plane began to shake. De Crespigny reached over to decrease the aircraft’s speed, the standard reaction for an emergency of this kind, but when he pushed a button, the auto-thrust didn’t respond. Alarms started popping up on his computer display. Engine two was on fire. Engine three was damaged. There was no data at all for engines one and four. The fuel pumps were failing. The hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical systems were almost inoperative. Fuel was leaking from the left wing in a wide fan. The damage would later be described as one of the worst midair mechanical disasters in modern aviation.

Similarly, the groundbreaking musical West Side Story simply takes the familiar story of Romeo and Juliet and transplants it among New York City street gangs. It is a fresh and surprising combination of conventional elements. And the runaway hit movie Frozen was a very conscious attempt to take the standard princess fairy tale and turn it on its head. Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.” To do this, you should implement two management techniques. The first is lean manufacturing. In this ideology, the person who's closest to the problem should have the authority to fix it. Fulgham and other like-minded programmers were admirers of the Toyota Production System, and had drafted a “Manifesto for Agile Software Development.” Fulgham applied the Toyota philosophy to a skeptical FBI: distributing critical decision-making power to people on the ground. Whoever was closest to a particular challenge was empowered to take initiative, regardless of rank. Top officials were allowed to offer suggestions, but not to micromanage.

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Fourth- maintain focus- what to expect to see (envision once a week or every day)- mental model of what to ignore or go after (a story inside his head) There are valuable lessons in Smarter, Faster, Better. . . . Duhigg is a terrific storyteller, and a master of the cliffhanger.” — Financial Times Type #1: stretch goals. These are ambitious and far-reaching goals that will often take a lot of planning and effort to accomplish. When we start a new task or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves ‘why.’”

In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Duhigg explained why we do what we do. In Smarter Faster Better, he applies the same relentless curiosity and rich storytelling to how we can improve at the things we do. People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. A group of data scientists at Google embark on a four-year study of how the best teams function, and find that how a group interacts is more important than who is in the group—a principle, it turns out, that also helps explain why Saturday Night Live became a hit. Even before Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny stepped on board Qantas Flight 32, he was drilling his crew in the mental models he expected them to use.The following is excerpted from the book, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Productivity in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. A survey of a database of almost 18 million scientific papers found that those with the most novelty and impact (as measured by subsequent citations and other factors) took largely conventional material and enlivened it by pairing it with something unusual — instead of Newton and Einstein, juxtaposing Einstein and the Chinese philosopher Wang Chong, to cite one instance. The consumer design firm IDEO has had some of its biggest successes by combining “existing knowledge from disparate industries.” A top-selling water bottle, for example, mixed a standard water carafe with the nozzle of a shampoo container. Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronic company. Those rated most “creative” were the ones who exported ideas from one division to another. “This is not creativity born of genius,” he asserts. “It is creativity as an import-export business.” He dubs such intellectual middlemen “innovation brokers.” Productivity put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort.” Another important facet of productivity is maintaining focus on your tasks. If you constantly get distracted from your most important work, your productivity will suffer.

The plane was descending at fourteen feet per second. The maximum certified speed the undercarriage could absorb was only twelve feet per second. But there were no other options now. Investigators would later deem Qantas Flight 32 the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely. Multiple pilots would try to re-create de Crespigny’s recovery in simulators and would fail every time.

Having the right goals is crucial in maintaining productivity for a number of reasons. Firstly, to be productive, you need to know exactly what you’re striving towards. Secondly, you need to be sure that you’re aiming for the right results. Finally, whether or not you meet your goals is often used as a measure of how productive you are. That measure will be inaccurate if your goals were flawed from the start. This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control.”