Interesting article in the NYT on the way willpower works (Found at kottke). I can’t say the article itself is good, but the questions it raises are. Check this out:

In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.

Ok. Stop laughing. Don’t we all test our willpower by staring at unchanging tables and walls? I know I do. And then, for fun, I break out the impossible puzzles, just for kicks!

The real problem here is that it’s hard to respect any article that mentions a study without providing references. I refuse to grant credibility to anyone using a study to support an argument without a reference. If the study was published I can read it myself and see what it actually says. Were the participants told the puzzle was impossible? How were they recruited? Were they paid? Did they accurately represent a typical urban population in age, education, etc?

As a baseline, anyone with above average willpower has a busy enough life not to have time to participate in psychological surveys. It’s a shallow, half-baked story that’s told here, and even at that, I’m not sure any conclusions can come from it. Speculation, yes. But a hypothesis, no.

I think I possess above average powers of will, but I would never test them against things I thought were pointless. Willpower works when I’m convinced of the value of the effort, or at a minimum, the value of the attempt. I can eat better or exercise more not because of some abstract force of will, but because my perception of the value grants me greater willpower.

And then the article obsesses about describing willpower in neurological terms, missing the point. For example:

No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.

What would a kung-fu master or sports trainer say about willpower? There are tons of higher level masters of teaching willpower, but since they don’t have neuroscience degrees, this article neglects to give them a voice (Yes, it’s a short article, but the above paragraph is basically an extended guess. Why use 10% of the article on a guess, when a phone call could bring an expert with data).

If we are creatures of habit and increase our abilities at just about anything through repetition, why are the mechanisms for the habits of willpower any different?

My question to you is how do you cultivate your own willpower? When do you feel most in control, and most out of control? How do you use this knowledge to serve you?

Posted in lifehack, philosophy | 11 Comments »

I remember when I first entered the full time working world, I was clueless about how to best use vacation, and I followed the herd like the good young sheep I was. Here in the U.S. the annual average is a measly 13 days (Compared to Italy’s 42 and France’s 37): a pittance if you include time-off needed for weddings, complicated mid-week errands, parole violations and the odd humdinger of a hangover. Yet somehow more than 1/3rd of Americans don’t use all their vacation each year. Yikes.

Over the years, like a blackjack player timing his double-downs, I learned which vacation days earned the most bang for the buck, and which were stinkers: it’s not rocket science, but hey, I cherish all the nuggets I know. And now that I’m self-employed all that knowledge is going to waste, so here it is.

In a nutshell: The week between Christmas and New Years, is the worst time to use vacation. It’s when everyone else is on holiday, turning even the most stressful workplaces into calm zones of highly indepenent and low interruption work time. Spending your vacation dollars to avoid a paid vacation in the office, is the worst bet in the vacation world: sometimes it’s a forced bet, as family plans force your hand, but it’s still a lousy value.

The ideal time to use vacation is when there is peak value, in your own psychology, for escape (say when you feel creative burnout). This rarely coincides with what everyone else is doing (or in the above case, is the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing), as weekend trips with friends or sports team schedules put heavy emphasis on using Fridays and Mondays, regardless of when it is you need relief.

For awhile I found choosing periodic Wednesdays or Thursdays, every few months, was the best possible value for a spare vacation day: like a happy hour martini, they provided a dose of relief at the peak of a stress, and neatly divide up the working life into more manageable pieces. Catching a matin�e, having a late breakfast and wandering my favorite bookstore, going for a short hike, or shopping in the calm of a mid-week crowd, were all low key, super mellow, high value vacation days.

Taken to an extreme, this strategy falls apart: it’d be a mistake to take vacation only at stressful events, or to dodge your responsibilities (”Hey boss, are you ready to present at tomorrow’s BillG review?”, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’m off tomorrow: it’s all yours”). The goal isn’t to avoid hard work, it’s to maximize the value of time off so you’re of most use when you are actually there.

Consider these factors:

1. When do you need stress relief the most?
2. Are you, your friends, or your family, driving the use of your vacation days?
3. When are other people at work on vacation or away, calming the workplace?
4. Can you offset your own schedule, arriving at work before/after your coworkers, to make each morning a semi-vacation, free of interruptions or high stress?
5. Can you make part of your daily schedule include time at the gym, the bar, the coffeeshop, or with friends, breaking up every day with some kind of psychological reprieve?
6. If work is really so unpleasant that you don’t have enough vacation to survive, perhaps it’s not the vacation that’s the problem, but the job itself.

So what tips and tricks for maximizing vacation days do you know?

Posted in Management, Uncategorized, lifehack | 16 Comments »