#1 Routine, Not Willpower, is the Key to a Successful Workday

It was as if the first few times a rat explored the maze, its brain had to work at full power to make sense of all the new information. But after a few days of running the same route, the rat didn’t need to scratch the walls or smell the air anymore, and so the brain activity associated with scratching and smelling ceased. It didn’t need to choose which direction to turn, and so decision-making centers of the brain went quiet. All it had to do was recall the quickest path to the chocolate. Within a week, even the brain structures related to memory had quieted. The rat had internalized how to sprint through the maze to such a degree that it hardly needed to think at all. The key to a successful workday is to replace manual effort with habits and routines. Habits allow us to process more work without using extra energy that drains us by mid-afternoon. The attitude of hard work is great, but hard work has a downside because it depletes our energy levels when focused on low-value activities. We can’t produce quality work. -The Power of Habit, Duhigg

In his book, Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains how to channel habits into powerful assets to improve our lives.

Becoming exceptional is hard. The professional world is competitive, full of intelligent and ambitious people vying for the same top positions.

To make things more complicated, there isn’t one exact set of rules we can follow that guarantees success. Hundreds, if not thousands of books are published every year promoting magic formulas for success. But how many of these books create lasting change?

How many of us really achieve the success we expect?

Where do we go wrong?

What do we need to change if we don’t like the path we are on?

Do we practice becoming exceptional like we practice golf, triathlons, or public speaking?

We say time is our most precious resource, yet our behavior and actions suggest otherwise. We waste time with haphazard and unfocused behavior but complain about how busy we are. We agonize over losing a few dollars but disregard the immense cost of poor time management. Only when we face an impending time crunch do we realize the cost of our wastefulness. Parkinson’s Law helps explain why we are so ineffective at allocating our time.

Cyril Parkinson, a British naval historian, first mentioned Parkinson’s Law in The Economist magazine in 1955. Parkinson’s Law states – “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” As Parkinson stated, “It is the busiest man who has time to spare.” (1) Parkinson extensively researched the growth of bureaucracies in Great Britain. Parkinson found that just as the growth of bureaucrats had little relationship to the increase in the actual amount of government work, the time allocated to a project had little relationship to the actual work necessary to complete the project.

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” -The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

We all make hundreds of decisions every day. They range from the predictable – what to eat for breakfast, to the complex – making a significant investment in the market. For the straightforward, repeatable tasks, we’ve developed routines and habits to automate those decisions. This automation serves us well. We’ve freed up our mental capacity to shift from debating non-essential decisions to focusing on major, life-changing decisions.

When we debate any high value decision, most of us follow a predictable pattern. We figure out the desired outcome, gather as much information as possible, and weigh all the information as logically as we can to come up with the right choice.

When we typically think of science, we immediately bring up images of high school science: chemistry, physics, and biology. We are conditioned to think of science in a very basic manner – it’s just another subject that we used to study.

But science is more than physics formulas or chemistry experiments. It’s a way of thinking and understanding the world. Think of science as more of a “process”, and less of a “thing”. It’s a way of thinking, observation, and learning. It’s not memorizing a collection of facts. People rarely understand the power of the scientific method and the advantages it delivers in not only understanding the world, but improving yourself. The scientific method allows us to make educated guesses about the world and then design ways to test if those guesses are correct. If they are correct, we’ve succeeded in understanding a little bit more about our world. If they are not, we’ve still succeeded in understanding how the world doesn’t work, which allows us to update our knowledge, broaden our thinking, and build new guesses to test.