How can you spend time wisely?

We all wonder where the hours go. There’s a good reason for that — we’re absolutely terrible at remembering how we really spend our time.

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career:

Hunting through data from the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other time diary projects, I came to the inescapable conclusion that how we think we spend our time has little to do with reality. We wildly overestimate time devoted to housework. We underestimate time devoted to sleep. We write whole treatises glorifying a golden age that never was; American women, for instance, spend more time with their children now than their grandmothers did in the 1950s and 60s.

Nowhere is this truer than with work. Are you a workaholic spending 75+ hours at work a week? Then you’re probably off by as much as 25 hours.

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career:

These curious blind spots continue into the realm of work. People who get paid by the hour know how many hours they work. People who inhabit the world of exempt jobs have a much more tenuous grasp on this concept but, as a general rule, the higher the number of work hours reported, the more likely the person is to be overestimating. A study published in the June 2011 Monthly Labor Review that compared estimated workweeks with time diaries reported that people who claimed their “usual” workweeks were longer than 75 hours were off, on average, by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction. Those who claimed that a “usual” workweek was 65– 74 hours were off by close to 20 hours. Those claiming a 55– 64 hour workweek were still about 10 hours north of the truth. Subtracting these errors, you can see that most people top out at fewer than 60 work hours per week.

It’s no shock that we don’t spend time wisely — most of us have no idea where the time goes.

We do know some of the culprits. TV. Web surfing. And email. Oh yes, email.

Knowledge workers spend 28% of their time with email. 58 percent of smartphone owners don’t go an hour without checking their device. 9 percent check it during religious services.

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career:

According to a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on the social economy, knowledge workers spend 28 percent of their time wading through their inboxes. According to Lookout, the mobile-security firm, 58 percent of smartphone users say they don’t go an hour without checking their phones. And not just waking hours. Lookout reported that 54 percent of smartphone users check their phones while lying in bed. Almost 40 percent say they check their phones while on the toilet. Some 9 percent admit to checking their phones during religious services.

Why can’t we focus? Dan Ariely says it’s an issue of visibility.

Calendars are great for showing things that take 30 minutes but can’t help us judge progress on big projects or creative endeavors that take 30 hours.

Via Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series):

The next thing working against us is the calendar. It has a tendency to represent tasks that can fit in thirty-minute or one-hour blocks. And tasks that take, say, fifty hours— which could be how long it takes you to complete a meaningful creative task— don’t naturally get represented in that calendar.

Then there’s opportunity cost. With money, opportunity cost is the fact that every time you spend three dollars on a latte, you’re not going to spend it on something else. With time, there is also an opportunity cost— but it’s often even harder to understand.

Every time you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. But you don’t really see what it is that you’re giving up. Especially when it comes to, let’s say, e-mail versus doing something that takes fifty hours. It is very easy for you to see the e-mail. It is not that easy for you to see the thing that takes fifty hours.

How do you break free?

In my interview with Cal Newport he said that the emphasis on productivity tricks was problematic. It’s only part of the solution — and not the important part:

There’s this notion that productivity alone, if you could just get the system right, is going to give you a meaningful career. I think a big shift is happening in people’s thinking as they realize “No, no, productivity can’t do that for you.” It can’t help you crack the new theorem or the new big product. What it can do is help clear the deck so that you can then start the sort of hard work of building and applying skills that leads to the really valuable stuff.

We spend time wisely when we plan:

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career:

Preliminary analysis from CEOs in India found that a firm’s sales increased as the CEO worked more hours. But more intriguingly, the correlation between CEO time use and output was driven entirely by hours spent in planned activities. Planning doesn’t have to mean that the hours are spent in meetings, though meetings with employees were correlated with higher sales; it’s just that CEO time is a limited and valuable resource, and planning how it should be allocated increases the chances that it’s spent in productive ways.

It’s even a good idea with your free time.

Caterina Fake points to management expert Pete Drucker who says working at home in the morning is the only real solution.

Via The Practice of Management:

The only published study of the way chief executives actually spend their day has been made in Sweden by Professor Sune Carlsson. For several months Carlsson and his associates clocked with a stop watch the working day of twelve leading Swedish industrialists. They noted the time spent on conversations, conferences, visits, telephone calls and so forth. They found that not one of the twelve executives was ever able to work uninterruptedly more than twenty minutes at a time—at least not in the office. Only at home was there some chance of concentration. And the only one of the twelve who did not make important, long-range decisions “off the cuff,” and sandwiched in between unimportant but long telephone calls and “crisis” problems, was the executive who worked at home every morning for an hour and a half before coming to the office.

So what do you need to do?

Plan ahead and protect a period of time every day, probably in the morning, and use it to do the long term things that matter.

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Yes, math nerds can teach you how to be more attractive

A lot of people know about the online dating site OKCupid. What many people don’t know is it was built by four Harvard trained mathematicians who wanted to build a compatibility algorithm based on survey questions. So they’re very focused on data.

Singles have been mingling on the site for over a decade. What can all the behind the scenes number crunching tell us about how to be more attractive?

In an interview for the book The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well, the site’s four founders offered a lot of insight into what works.

What the data says about how to be more attractive:

• Ask a prospective date if she likes the taste of beer. If the answer is yes, she is 30 percent more likely than women who say they don’t like the taste of beer to sleep with you on the first date.

• …your profile photo needs to start a conversation. If you’re playing a guitar up on stage, then we know something about you. You’re in a band. Now, we have a conversation: “Oh, you play guitar? I do, too.” If you’re standing in front of the pyramids of Egypt, someone can say, “Oh, I’ve been there.” Now you’ve got something started. Our statistics show that profile pictures of people actually doing something interesting lead to a much higher quality of contacts.

• Getting people to kind of like you is a waste of time. You’re looking for the two or three people who will love you as you really are. If Dungeons and Dragons is your thing, you want that person who will say, “Oh my god! You love D and D? I do too!” And the same goes for your photo. We see so many images that are designed to minimize some supposedly unattractive trait, like the close-cropped picture of a person who’s overweight. Women with tattoos and piercings have an intuitive understanding that when they show off what makes them different some people won’t like it, but they’ll get lots of attention from the men who do. We have mathematical evidence that men will message women that they believe appeal only to them before messaging women they believe will appeal to everyone. 

• If you could have one lie, age might be the one to go with. It can help you avoid being filtered out… If you’re an older woman in the singles’ scene the odds are not in your favor. But here’s the good news: according to our research, attractiveness trumps age. So, if you’re attractive, you’re still fine. You might think that once you reach a certain age you should look more sophisticated, but we’ve found that older women who wear provocative clothing in their photos get more messages. 

• We’ve found with photos, using flash skews your attractiveness to that of someone seven years older, so go for natural light.

• The most successful pose for women is the MySpace angle, holding your camera above your head and being coy. Women flirting into the camera get the most messages; women flirting to someone off camera, the least. The cleavage shot garners women 49 percent more contacts, and the ratio goes up with age to 79 percent for 32-year-old women.

• Best pose for men is mysteriously aloof, unsmiling, looking off camera. A 19-year-old showing his abs gets twice as many contacts, but the rate falls off sharply for older men.

• When it comes to messaging, reply rates plummet for misspellings, bad grammar and Netspeak. And, general compliments like “awesome” and “fascinating” have much higher reply rates than physical compliments like “sexy” and “beautiful.”

• There are a few common lies to look out for. The more highly a picture is rated attractive, the more likely it is out of date. Eighty percent of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender. Both men and women inflate their income by 20 percent.

• Three questions tested above all others in determining if you and someone else have long-term potential are: “Do you like horror movies?” “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?” and “Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” If you find someone that answers all three the same way you do, the two of you might just belong together.

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Brainstorming is broken.

We all know the standard method of brainstorming:

1. Get a bunch of people together.
2. Generate lots of ideas.
3. Don’t be critical.

There’s one problem with this system.

It’s totally wrong.

1) Don’t work in a group

The research consistently shows that individuals who generate ideas on their own and then meet afterward come up with more (and better) ideas.

Via Imagine: How Creativity Works:

There’s just one problem with brainstorming: it doesn’t work. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, summarizes the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” In fact, the very first empirical test of Osborn’s technique, which was performed at Yale in 1958, soundly refuted the premise. The experiment was simple: Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to carefully follow Osborn’s brainstorming guidelines. As a control sample, forty-eight students working by themselves were each given the same puzzles. The results were a sobering refutation of brainstorming. Not only did the solo students come up with twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups but their solutions were deemed more “feasible” and “effective” by a panel of judges. In other words, brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group. Instead, the technique suppressed it, making each individual less creative.

Performance gets worse as group size increases.

Via Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking:

The results were unambiguous. The men in twenty-three of the twenty-four groups produced more ideas when they worked on their own than when they worked as a group. They also produced ideas of equal or higher quality when working individually. And the advertising executives were no better at group work than the presumably introverted research scientists. Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

2) Don’t generate as many ideas as possible.

Don’t write down every idea “no matter how crazy.” Rules help.

Focusing your efforts on being as creative as possible reduces the number of ideas but increases the number of good ideas.

Via Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

Researchers next looked for idea-generating rules that would work even better than Osborn’s. They told their subjects: “The more imaginative or creative your ideas, the higher your score will be. Each idea will be scored in terms of (1) how unique or different it is— how much it differs from the common use and (2) how valuable it is— either socially, artistically, economically, etc.” These instructions are very different from those given for classic brainstorming because people are being told to use specific directions in judging which ideas they come up with. Groups working with these instructions have fewer ideas than brainstorming groups, but they have more good ideas. What’s most important is being explicitly told to be imaginative, unique, and valuable; then, it’s okay if your critical faculties are still engaged. Osborn had one thing right: Most people use the wrong criteria to evaluate their ideas; they think about what will work, about what worked before, or about what is familiar to them. This discovery— that when subjects are told they’ll be evaluated for creativity, they’re more creative than when they’re told not to use any criteria at all— has been reproduced repeatedly in the laboratory. When groups are asked to suggest good, creative solutions, they have fewer ideas but those ideas are better than those generated by groups using the brainstorming rules.

3) Be critical and fight.

Don’t be open and accepting. Fight. When people debate, they are more creative.

Via Imagine: How Creativity Works:

Which teams did the best? The results weren’t even close: while the brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, people in the debate condition were far more creative. On average, they generated nearly 25 percent more ideas. The most telling part of the study, however, came after the groups had been disbanded. That’s when researchers asked each of the subjects if he or she had any more ideas about traffic that had been triggered by the earlier conversation. While people in the minimal and brainstorming conditions produced, on average, two additional ideas, those in the debate condition produced more than seven. Nemeth summarizes her results: “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the [most] important instruction in this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.”

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