Midway through the semester, after the class had completed their car designs and moved on to building marble sorters, Delia’s twenty-one-year-old sister had a baby. The child’s father was out of the picture and Delia’s sister, exhausted, begged her to babysit in the afternoons. It felt like a request that was impossible for Delia to refuse. The right decision, Delia’s dad told her, was obvious. This was family.
So one day in Mr. Edwards’s class, Delia pulled the engineering flowchart from her binder and, with her group, put her dilemma through the design process’s steps. If she babysat, what would happen? One of the first tasks in engineering design is finding data, so Delia began making a list of experiences that seemed germane. Another sister, Delia told the group, had taken an after-school job a few years earlier and the family had quickly come to rely on that paycheck, making it impossible for her to quit and putting her hopes of community college on hold. If Delia started babysitting, something similar would happen, she suspected. That was data point one.
Then Delia began writing out what her schedule might look like if she was responsible for an infant every afternoon. School from 8:30 to 3:30. Babysitting from 3:30 to 7:30. Homework from 7:30 to 10:00. She would be tired after watching her nephew and would probably end up watching television instead of doing her math or studying for a test. She would become resentful and make bad choices on the weekends. Data point two.
As her group walked through the flowchart, they broke her dilemma into smaller pieces and brainstormed solutions and role-played conversations while the rest of the class discussed how to separate colored marbles from clear ones. Eventually, an answer emerged: Babysitting seemed like a minor sacrifice, but the evidence suggested it wasn’t minor at all. Delia prepared a memo for her father listing the steps she had gone through. She wouldn’t be able to do it, she told her dad.
Psychologists say learning how to make decisions this way is important, particularly for young people, because it makes it easier for them to learn from their experiences and to see choices from different perspectives. This is a form of disfluency that allows us to evaluate our own lives more objectively, to offset the emotions and biases that might otherwise blind us to the lessons embedded in our pasts. When the animators behind Frozen were trying to figure out their film, the Disney system pushed them to look to their own lives as creative fodder. But it’s not just creative material we can mine from our experiences—we can find data in our pasts, as well. We all have a natural tendency to ignore the information contained in our previous decisions, to forget that we’ve already conducted thousands of experiments each time we made a choice. We’re often too close to our own experiences to see how to break that data into smaller bits.
But systems such as the engineering design process—which forces us to search for information and brainstorm potential solutions, to look for different kinds of insights and test various ideas—help us achieve disfluency by putting the past in a new frame of reference. It subverts our brain’s craving for binary choices—Should I help my sister or let my family down?—by learning to reframe decisions in new ways.
One important study of the power of such decision-making frames was published in 1984, after a researcher from Northwestern University asked a group of participants to list reasons why they should buy a VCR based on their own experiences. Volunteers generated dozens of justifications for such a purchase. Some said they felt a VCR would provide entertainment. Others saw it as an investment in their education or a way for their families to spend time together. Then those same volunteers were asked to generate reasons not to buy a VCR. They struggled to come up with arguments against the expenditure. The vast majority said they were likely to buy one sometime soon.
Next, the researcher asked a new group of volunteers to come up with a list of reasons against purchasing a VCR. No problem, they replied. Some said watching television distracted them from their families. Others said that movies were mindless, and they didn’t need the temptation. When those same people were then asked to list reasons for buying a VCR, they had trouble coming up with convincing reasons to make the purchase and said they were unlikely to ever buy one.
What interested the researcher was how much each group struggled to adopt an opposing viewpoint once they had an initial frame for making a decision. The two groups were demographically similar. They should have been equally interested in buying a VCR. At the very least, they should have generated equal numbers of reasons to buy or spurn the machines. But once a participant grabbed on to a decision-making frame—This is an investment in my education versus This is a distraction from my family—they found it hard to envision the choice in a different way. A VCR was either a tool for learning or a time-wasting distraction, based on how the question was framed. Similar results have been found in dozens of other experiments in which people were presented with decisions ranging from the vital, such as end-of-life choices, to the costly, such as buying a car. Once a frame is established, that context is hard to dislodge.
Frames can be uprooted, however, if we force ourselves to seek fresh vantage points. When Delia put her babysitting dilemma through Mr. Edwards’s flowcharts, it introduced just enough disfluency to disrupt the frame she had initially assumed she should use. When she went home and walked her father through her logic, it shifted his frame, as well. She couldn’t care for her nephew, she told him, because Mr. Edwards’s Robotics Club required her to stay at school until six o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and that club was her path to college. What’s more, the other days of the week she needed to get her homework done in the library before coming home because otherwise it wouldn’t get finished amid the family’s chaos and noise. She reframed the decision as a choice between helping her family now, or succeeding at school and helping in other, more important ways down the road. Her father agreed. They would find another babysitter. Delia needed to stay in school.
“Our brain wants to find a simple frame and stick with it, the same way it wants to make a binary decision,” Eric Johnson, the Columbia psychologist, told me. “That’s why teenagers get stuck thinking about breaking up with a boyfriend as, ‘Do I love him or not?’ rather than ‘Do I want to be in a relationship, or do I want to be able to leave for college?’ Or why, when you’re buying a car, you start thinking, ‘Do I want the power windows or the GPS?’ rather than ‘Am I sure I can afford this car?’
“But when we teach people a process for reframing choices, when we give them a series of steps that causes a decision to seem a little bit different than before,” said Johnson, “it helps them take more control of what’s going on inside their heads.”
One of the best ways to help people cast experiences in a new light is to provide a formal decision-making system—such as a flowchart, a prescribed series of questions, or the engineering design process—that denies our brains the easy options we crave. “Systems teach us how to force ourselves to make questions look unfamiliar,” said Johnson. “It’s a way to see alternatives.”
As Delia moved into her senior year at Western Hills High, her home life became increasingly chaotic. Her sister was there, raising the baby. Another sister had dropped out of school. The family would find a place to live and then something would happen—another lost job or a neighbor who complained about too many people in a one-bedroom apartment—and they would have to move again. In her senior year, Delia’s family finally found a long-term rental, but it didn’t have heat and, sometimes, when there wasn’t money to pay the bill, the electricity went off.
Her teachers, by then, had figured out what was going on, and had seen how hard Delia was working. She was getting straight As. They committed themselves to helping her however they could. When Delia needed to do laundry, her English teacher, Ms. Thole, would invite her over for the afternoon. When Delia seemed exhausted, Mr. Edwards would let her stay late in his classroom and nap, her head on the desk, as he graded exams. They saw her potential. They hoped, with a little help, she could make it to college.
Mr. Edwards, in particular, was a constant in Delia’s life. He introduced her to the school’s guidance counselor and helped her apply for scholarships. He edited her college applications and made sure they were sent in on time. When Delia had a problem with her friends, when she was fighting with a boyfriend or sparring with her dad, when it seemed like she had too much homework and too little time—whenever it seemed like life was overwhelming—she pulled out Mr. Edwards’s flowchart and put her troubles through the engineering design process. It was calming. It helped her think of solutions.
In the spring of Delia’s senior year, letters began arriving from scholarship committees. She won the $10,000 Nordstrom Scholarship, then a Rotary prize, then the University of Cincinnati’s minority scholar’s grant. The envelopes kept coming. Seventeen scholarships in all. She was the class valedictorian and was voted most likely to succeed. The night before graduation, she slept at Ms. Thole’s house so she could take a hot shower and curl her hair before the ceremony. In the fall, she enrolled at the University of Cincinnati.
“College is a lot harder than I expected,” Delia told me. She’s a sophomore now, majoring in information technology. She’s often the only girl in her classes and the only black student. The university has tried to help students like Delia, first-generation college attendees, by creating a program named “Gen-1” that provides mentors, tutors, mandatory study sessions, and guidance counseling. Gen-1 participants all live in the same dorm freshman year and sign a seven-page contract in which they promise to abide by a curfew, respect evening quiet hours, and participate in study halls. The idea is to help them get some distance from where they grew up, to see themselves in a new context.
“There’s still drama at home,” Delia said. But when things feel overwhelming, Delia thinks about Mr. Edwards’s class. Any problem can be worked through, step-by-step. “If I take something that’s bothering me and make it into smaller pieces, it feels like something I can think about without getting upset,” she said.
“I’ve been through a lot. But I feel like, as long as I’ve got a system for getting outside my head, I can learn from it. Anything that’s happened to me can be a lesson, if I think about it right.”
The people who are most successful at learning—those who are able to digest the data surrounding them, who absorb insights embedded in their experiences and take advantage of information flowing past—are the ones who know how to use disfluency to their advantage. They transform what life throws at them, rather than just taking it as it comes. They know the best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information. They take data and transform it into experiments whenever they can. Whether we use the engineering design process or test an idea at work or simply talk through a concept with a friend, by making information more disfluent, we paradoxically make it easier to understand.
In one study published in 2014, researchers from Princeton and UCLA examined the relationship between learning and disfluency by looking at the difference between students who took notes by hand while watching a lecture and those who used laptops. Recording a speaker’s comments via longhand is both harder and less efficient than typing on a keyboard. Fingers cramp. Writing is slower than typing, and so you can’t record as many words. Students who use laptops, in contrast, spend less time actively working during a lecture, and yet they still collect about twice as many notes as their handwriting peers. Put differently, writing is more disfluent than typing, because it requires more labor and captures fewer verbatim phrases.
When the researchers looked at the test scores of those two groups, however, they found that the hand writers scored twice as well as the typists in remembering what a lecturer said. The scientists, at first, were skeptical. Maybe the hand writers were spending more time studying after class? They conducted a second experiment, but this time they put the laptop users and the hand writers in the same lecture and then took away their notes as soon as it was over, so students couldn’t study on their own. A week later, they brought everyone back. Once again, those who took notes by hand scored better on a test of the lecture’s content. No matter what constraints were placed on the groups, the students who forced themselves to use a more cumbersome note-taking method—who forced disfluency into how they processed information—learned more.
In our own lives, the same lesson applies: When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data. It’s not enough for your bathroom scale to send daily updates to an app on your phone. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to plot those measurements on graph paper and you’ll be more likely to choose a salad over a hamburger at lunch. If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you’ll be more likely to apply them in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend—and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.
Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames. We live in a time when data is more plentiful, cheaper to analyze, and easier to translate into action than ever before. Smartphones, websites, digital databases, and apps put information at our fingertips. But it only becomes useful if we know how to make sense of it.
In 2013, Dante Williams graduated from the fifth grade at South Avondale Elementary. On his last day of school, he went to a party at the same playground where the teenager had been murdered at the Peace Bowl six years before. There were balloons and a bouncy castle, a cotton candy machine and a DJ. South Avondale was still located inside one of Cincinnati’s poorest areas. There were still drugs and boarded-up homes near the campus. But 86 percent of the school’s students exceeded the state’s education standards that year. The previous year, 91 percent of students had tested above the state’s standards. There was a list of kids from outside the district waiting to transfer in.
No school changes because of just one program, of course, just as no student succeeds because of one class or one teacher. Both Dante and Delia, as well as South Avondale and Western Hills High, changed because multiple forces came together at once. There were dedicated teachers and a renewed sense of purpose among administrators. There were focused principals and parents supporting the reforms. But dedication and purpose only succeed when we know how to direct them. The data rooms that turned information into real knowledge, the teachers who learned how to see their students as individuals with different needs and strengths: That’s how Cincinnati’s public schools shifted.
At the graduation ceremony, as Dante walked across the makeshift stage, his family cheered. Like all diplomas handed out that day, his contained a blank space. There was one last thing, the principal told him. No one was allowed to finish elementary school without doing a final bit of work. Dante had to transform this diploma and make it his own. She handed Dante a pen. He filled in the space with his name.
APPENDIX
A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas
A few months after I reached out to Atul Gawande—the author and physician from the introduction who helped spark my interest in the science of productivity—I began reporting this book. For almost two years, I conducted interviews with experts, read piles of scientific papers, and tracked down case studies. At some point, I began to imagine that I had become something of a productivity expert myself. When it came time to start writing, I figured, translating all those ideas onto paper would be relatively easy. The words would fly from my fingertips.
That is not what happened.
Some days I would sit at my desk and spend hours jumping from website to website looking for new studies to read, then organize my notes. I would get onto airplanes, my carry-on bag stuffed with scientific papers I intended to read, and spend the flight returning emails, writing to-do lists, and ignoring the big, important tasks I needed
to complete.
I had a goal in mind—I wanted to write a book about how we can apply these discoveries in productivity to our own lives—but it seemed so far off, so overwhelming, that I kept focusing on easier-to-accomplish objectives. A few months went by, and all I had to show for it was a series of outlines, but no chapters.
“I feel like a failure,” I wrote my editor during one particularly dispiriting moment. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
When he wrote back, he pointed out the obvious: Maybe I needed to take what I was learning from the experts and apply it to my own life. I had to live by the principles described in this book.
MOTIVATION
One of my hardest challenges, for instance, concerned my motivation, which seemed to flag at exactly the wrong times. While I was working on this book, I was still also a reporter at The New York Times. What’s more, I was out promoting my previous book, and trying to be a good father and husband. In other words, I was exhausted. After a long day at the Times, I would come home and need to start typing up notes, or draft a chapter, or help put my kids to bed, or clean up the dishes, or reply to emails—and I’d find that self-motivation was in short supply. Emails, in particular, were a small form of daily torture. My in-box was constantly stuffed with questions from colleagues, queries from other authors, correspondence from researchers whom I hoped to interview, and other miscellaneous questions that required a thoughtful response.
However, all I wanted to do was watch TV.
As I struggled each night to find the drive to reply to emails, I began thinking about the key insight from chapter one and the ideas that Gen. Charles Krulak used to redesign Marine Corps boot camp by strengthening recruits’ internal locus of control:
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