Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
Speaker 1: This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
Speaker 1: tip is that everybody likes to finish. We all like
Speaker 1: to complete our tasks and achieve our goals. You can
Speaker 1: leverage this appeal to boost your own productivity, and if
Speaker 1: you're a manager, your team members as well. In a
Speaker 1: recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Islet Fischbach and
Speaker 1: Annabel Roberts wrote about a research finding that seems to
Speaker 1: contradict economic theory. People, it seems, would rather pay or
Speaker 1: be paid sooner, even when it is in their financial
Speaker 1: interest to delay. For instance, lots of people want to
Speaker 1: pay off their mortgage as soon as they can, even
Speaker 1: if they would be better off financially making the contracted
Speaker 1: payments and investing what's left over in the stock market.
Speaker 1: In research that the authors did, they found that many
Speaker 1: people would rather pay more for a service sooner rather
Speaker 1: than pay a little less in the future, given the
Speaker 1: time cost of money. This doesn't really make sense, but
Speaker 1: the authors attribute it to what they call the promise
Speaker 1: of relief. As they put it, people often prefer to
Speaker 1: incur larger costs sooner and receive smaller benefits earlier when
Speaker 1: doing so allows them to achieve a sense of completion.
Speaker 1: They say this is especially true when a task or
Speaker 1: payment is the last one to complete a goal, and
Speaker 1: when people believe the unfinished task will hang over their
Speaker 1: heads until it's done. They say, the psychological benefit of
Speaker 1: closure can outweigh small time or financial gains, leading to
Speaker 1: choices that might seem irrational at first glance but provide
Speaker 1: significant psychological value. And you know what, I get that.
Speaker 1: The truth is that everyone likes to finish. Keeping track
Speaker 1: of undone tasks can be a pain, but there is
Speaker 1: a downside to this desire to close the loop. We
Speaker 1: often focus on easy stuff that we will be able
Speaker 1: to finish, rather than wrestling with harder stuff where the
Speaker 1: payoff is an immediate So Fishback and Roberts have a
Speaker 1: few suggestions for warding off this temptation. One is that
Speaker 1: managers reframe important goals as a series of smaller tasks,
Speaker 1: each of which would grant employees a feeling of closure
Speaker 1: upon completion. They write that way their direct reports won't
Speaker 1: be pulled away by completing easier and quicker tasks like
Speaker 1: deleting all their emails, that may be a little bit
Speaker 1: less important. So, for instance, if you have a direct
Speaker 1: report who is working on hiring a new marketing firm,
Speaker 1: you might reframe that big goal into several smaller tasks.
Speaker 1: Gathering insight from your team about what you're looking for,
Speaker 1: writing a request for proposals, circulating that RFP, reviewing the proposals,
Speaker 1: conducting screening interviews, arranging panel interviews for finalists, collecting evaluations
Speaker 1: from interviewers, checking references, negotiating the contract, and finalizing the
Speaker 1: higher That's a lot of tasks, and all of them
Speaker 1: will be satisfying to complete. If the employee had been
Speaker 1: focused on the big goal of hiring the new marketing firm,
Speaker 1: it might have been harder to maintain focus and easier
Speaker 1: to get pulled away to quick tasks. Much better to
Speaker 1: make the most important goal a little more motivating. I
Speaker 1: think an individual contributor could apply this logic to reframing
Speaker 1: their own tasks too. Your manager doesn't have to do
Speaker 1: it for you. You could consider each of the incremental
Speaker 1: steps in a big project as a goal that will
Speaker 1: be satisfying to finish. You could also identify distinct phases
Speaker 1: in the project you will find yourself excited to finish
Speaker 1: the final task. In each of those phases, there is
Speaker 1: no point lamenting that people are irrational. We are, and
Speaker 1: so we are a lot better off figuring out how
Speaker 1: to leverage what we know about human behavior to nudge
Speaker 1: us in the direction we want to go, and in
Speaker 1: this case, that's in the direction of giving ourselves things
Speaker 1: to finish, because finishing feels good in the meantime. This
Speaker 1: is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the
Speaker 1: most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
Speaker 1: If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
Speaker 1: me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
Speaker 1: is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.