If you are in a meeting and the CEO suddenly asks you for an opinion, your mind is likely to snap from passive listening to active involvement—and if you’re not careful, a cognitive tunnel might prompt you to say something you regret. The damage would later be described as one of the worst midair mechanical disasters in modern aviation. In Smarter Faster Better, he applies the same relentless curiosity, rigorous reporting and rich storytelling to explain how we can get better at the things we do. Experiments have shown that people with SMART goals are more likely to seize on the easiest tasks, to become obsessed with finishing projects, and to freeze on priorities once a goal has been set.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in

As he did in The Power of Habit, Duhigg melds cutting-edge science, deep reporting, and wide-ranging stories to give us a fuller, more human way of thinking about how productivity actually happens. CHARLES DUHIGG is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and the author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. You need to be able to discern the consequences of your decisions, whether these consequences will be positive or negative, and whether they’ll help or hinder your productivity.You’d want them to be able to move large objects around quickly and operate heavy machinery with a minimum of rest or redundant effort. The next step is ensuring that you’re making productive decisions; decisions that will move you further towards meeting your goals.

Smarter Faster Better - Penguin Books UK

A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. So the spotlight inside Darlene’s head went to the child’s skin, the blot of blood on her heel, and the distended belly. There was nothing specific that she could point to, but this baby simply didn’t look like Darlene expected her to. Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity.Thanks to improvements in technology and the omnipresence of the Internet, we have access to vast amounts of data, both about ourselves and about the world at large. What's a task you're not looking forward to tackling, or one that you frequently have trouble motivating yourself to complete? But the mistake some people make is trying to avoid making any predictions because their thirst for certainty is so strong and their fear of doubt too overwhelming. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat.