Watch out — many of the studies which displayed “cognitive fatigue” (I assume you actually mean ego depletion) have not been replicated successfully.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
The specifics are disputed, but we needn't be so specific for the advise to hold.
> But that story is about to change. A paper now in press, and due to publish next month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, describes a massive effort to reproduce the main effect that underlies this work. Comprising more than 2,000 subjects tested at two-dozen different labs on several continents, the study found exactly nothing. A zero-effect for ego depletion: No sign that the human will works as it’s been described, or that these hundreds of studies amount to very much at all.
I am asking because either I do not understand the ego depletion concept or something that seemed really obvious to me is disputed, which would surprise me.
The mind is a wacky thing, I think we know a lot less about it than we believe. One idea I like which seems to have some real world support is that your mental models make all the difference -- if you believe that something's hard and unpleasant, your belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and you'll experience distress when you do it. If you're able to somehow reshape your beliefs, that distress may diminish. Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on this model and has a strong clinical track record.
> If ego depletion does turn out to be wrong, it’s striking how seemingly well-established it became before more rigorous investigations dispelled the assumptions it rests on. The story of its rise and fall also shows how faulty assumptions about willpower are not just misleading, but can be harmful. Related studies have shown that beliefs about willpower strongly influence self-control: Research subjects who believe in ego depletion (that willpower is a limited resource) show diminishing self-control over the course of an experiment, while people who don’t believe in ego depletion are steady throughout. What’s more, when subjects are manipulated into believing in ego depletion through subtly biased questionnaires at the outset of a study, their performance suffers as well.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/against-willpower
EDIT: It appears the studies are cited at the bottom of the article.
If a group of teenagers were taught that every time they exercise their willpower it becomes stronger, in a very immediate sense, would we see their self control actual improve over the course of day.
IMO that matter is extremely fluid and dependent on many factors. Just consider the fact that lots of the experiments are done with available volunteers which at Harvard or Stanford or Yale are white uber rich privileged young adults. And that’s only one of the many factors.
Another one is the pressure to constantly publish research in order to move forward or be anybody in academia.
When we were kids, my cousin figured out a way to make Fallout 2 playthrough much easier. From the starting location, he would immediately head down to a particular late-game location in which you could acquire a Power Armor (the second-best armor in the game). He avoided getting killed by high-level random encounters by discovering that you could escape almost any of them if you mashed "A" key during loading screen - this would guarantee you started the turn-based combat before the random enemy could spot you, and 99% of the times would let you escape. After reaching the target location he'd acquire[0] the Power Armor, and start a quest chain that let you acquire Advanced Power Armor (the very best armor in the game). After that, the game was much easier.
Ah, videogames were so much more fun when we were kids, and didn't have that much time pressure.
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[0] - I'm fuzzy on the details here; it probably involved attempting to steal it from the shop and reloading game on failure. I later improved this step by just buying it for money, after exploiting a "repeatedly steal merchandise from a guy and sell it back to him" infinite money generator bug that was available near the starting location.
Not sure how you could get power armor early.
In San Francisco. It was (AFAIR) in the lower left corner of the map. Like I described, you could get there easily straight from starting location, if your "A" mashing skill was good enough.
Nobody ever points out the privilege in this statement. Someone has to be the unfortunate grunt getting delegated to, instead of delegating. If a delegator depends on the grunt, can we really attribute super high productivity to the delegator but not to the grunt? That certainly seems to be implicit when CEOs receive 100x more than the average worker. Perhaps they would be equally competent as delegators given the same opportunities some x years back.
"The important work is the work that I, specifically, am good at. Other work that I do not find compelling is unimportant, and should therefore be delegated to less important people."
The routine work done by "grunts" is critical to keep any organization running, whether it's a Fortune 500 company or a family of four. Lots of jobs (customer support, widget assembly, laundry, dishes) are unglamorous but vitally important.
Alao no one ever completes all the tasks they have. So deciding which are the most necessary to do is crucial.
The people who delegate and eliminate well at these low stages are more likely to progress to more delegation. Yes, some people still have no ability to do any of that, but I doubt it applies to most people on this forum.
Indeed: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -- Peter Drucker
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effec...
> I’m pretty sure there’s an eighth habit of highly effective people. They don’t spend all their time reading about the seven habits of highly effective people.
Turns out, Covey came up with an 8th habit years ago: 'The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness ... The 8th habit essentially urges: "Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs."' [1] I need to read both, but it seems like Covey's 8th might cover not being obsessed about the first 7.
BTW, my kids' elementary charter school has actually incorporated the 7 habits into its curriculum. It will be interesting to see how the graduates do over the course of their careers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Covey#The_8th_Habit
Surviving and thriving over time requires constant reevaluation.
No, they don't. There is only one task in your job, to make your boss happy. Strangely, this is rarely achieved by good job performance but often by social skills or idiotic metrics. "How to manage your boss" is worth a read.
There are various strategies one can "manage" their boss in return so that their expectation always remains at an optimal level, allowing them to easily satisfy their boss or even exceed all their expectations.
Everything can be manipulated, hacked, or "managed" as we professionally call it, as long as things continue to be operated by human. Even the largest corporations are susceptible and WILL succumb to this. Facebook and fake news are real evidences.
Their weaknesses just need to be identified so it can be exploited. External forces can even join together with more resources combined to execute their plans. It's not very difficult to identify weaknesses for many targets today, GREED and PROFIT.
Many corporations today only focus on their quarterly growth reports and would do absolutely anything to satisfy their investors. They don't even pay attention to their own customers, let alone those external forces.
I have a manager, but I don't have a boss.
A good manager will identify the optimal point for each of his team members. This optimal point will serve as a target performance ceiling for managers to motivate and encourage their staffs to work toward to. If we try and push them over this point then we will begin trading output quality for needless productivity.
For someone at the top, it’s important to determine the optimal point for your organization’s current equilibrium state as well. The goal is to always operate within this state, but slowly and incrementally move the equilibrium point up over time as your organization develops and increases its capacity.
Depending on each industry, the degree to which this principle will affect organizations will vary. For example, it would be more decisive to those who produce creative content as their main output since the negative impacts can be very noticeable and highly detrimental, whereas a manufacturing business relying on human labor can be quite flexible in re-adjusting their capacity.
Put another way: Focus / attention doesn't help if you're putting such energy into the wrong things.
It starts with problem identification.
The Five Why is always a great tool. Here's a tongue in cheek site it threw together a couple years ago to help :)
I guess those form the category of selfish-effective and selfish-productive people.
"complete one or two tasks in a very short time during their day" these are the people that ruin teams.
Also, the difference between a startup succeeds and one that fails is very simple - execution and productivity. Grand ideas don't solve customer problems. Yes, attention management is important obviously, but that's a part of time management. You also have to grind to solve all the problems that come up.
The whole thing is nonsense wishful thinking that you can just make the hard work disappear.
I'm only through the first chapter. Might be a good read, but harder to implement. So far it's, you gotta say no to things that aren't important. How often has your boss asked you to do unimportant things, and would you be able to say no to any of them? Maybe try to push it off to someone else... But to say no would be harder.
This mirrors Andy Grove's practice (detailed in his book High Output Management) of focusing on "high-leverage" activities, where "leverage" he defines as the ratio of output/impact versus time spent.
One can fill their days by completing many mindless tasks and consider themselves as productive, but in the end hardly any of those tasks really matters.
On the other hand, another person may only complete one or two tasks in a very short time during their day but these were critical tasks that could generate much higher values. This subsequently makes the person more effective than their peers.
The output values must be weight in determining if one is really productive. Effectiveness triumphs mindless productivity.
This is quite similar to the cognitive and decision fatigue principle which indicates that each of us only has a limited pool of cognitive resources and so we must be very selective in choosing what activities we engage in.
To remain highly effective, not just being productive, particularly for a project manager, it's imperative to spend time only on tasks that require critical decisions to be made, and to delegate the rest. When you take on more tasks than you can handle, like some are misunderstanding this may help them appear as productive, it will undoubtedly affect the quality of each of your decisions and the project will suffer.