Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

“a whole picture” In an email sent in reply to a fact-checking inquiry, Crandall wrote: “The other nurse was a preceptee—in training to provide nursing care in a NICU. Darlene was her preceptor—helping her learn and providing oversight and guidance as she learns how to care for premature babies. So, the baby WAS Darlene’s responsibility in the sense that she was supervising/precepting the nurse caring for the baby. You are correct, she noticed that the baby didn’t look ‘good.’ Here is the incident account that we wrote up based on our interview notes: ‘When this incident took place, I was teaching, serving as a preceptor for a new nurse. We had been working together for quite awhile and she was nearing the end of her orientation, so she was really doing primary care and I was in more of a supervisory position. Anyway, we were nearing the end of a shift and I walked by this particular isolette and the baby really caught my eye. The baby’s color was off and its skin was mottled. Its belly looked slightly rounded. I looked at the chart and it indicated the baby’s temp was unstable. I also noticed that the baby had had a heel stick for lab work several minutes ago and the stick was still bleeding. When I asked my orientee how she thought the baby was doing, she said that he seemed kind of sleepy to her. I went and got the Doctor immediately and told him we were “in big trouble” with this baby. I said the baby’s temp was unstable, that its color was funny, it seemed lethargic and it was bleeding from a heel stick. He reacted right away, put the baby on antibiotics and ordered cultures done. I was upset with the orientee that she had missed these cues, or that she had noticed them but not put them together. When we talked about it later I asked about the baby’s temp dropping over four readings. She had noticed it, but had responded by increasing the heat in the isolette. She had responded to the ‘surface’ problem, instead of trying to figure out what might be causing the problem.”

  “creating mental models” Thomas D. LaToza, Gina Venolia, and Robert DeLine, “Maintaining Mental Models: A Study of Developer Work Habits,” Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering (New York: ACM, 2006); Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird, “Mental Models and Cognitive Change,” Journal of Cognitive Psychology 25, no. 2 (2013): 131–38; Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird, How We Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird, Mental Models, Cognitive Science Series, no. 6 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Earl K. Miller and Jonathan D. Cohen, “An Integrative Theory of Prefrontal Cortex Function,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 24, no. 1 (2001): 167–202; J. D. Sterman and D. V. Ford, “Expert Knowledge Elicitation to Improve Mental and Formal Models,” Systems Approach to Learning and Education into the 21st Century, vol. 1, 15th International System Dynamics Conference, August 19–22, 1997, Istanbul, Turkey; Pierre Barrouillet, Nelly Grosset, and Jean-François Lecas, “Conditional Reasoning by Mental Models: Chronometric and Developmental Evidence,” Cognition 75, no. 3 (2000): 237–66; R. M. J. Byrne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); P. C. Cheng and K. J. Holyoak, “Pragmatic Reasoning Schemas,” in Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and Its Foundations, eds. J. E. Adler and L. J. Rips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 827–42; David P. O’Brien, “Human Reasoning Includes a Mental Logic,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32, no. 1 (2009): 96–97; Niki Verschueren, Walter Schaeken, and Gery d’Ydewalle, “Everyday Conditional Reasoning: A Working Memory–Dependent Tradeoff Between Counterexample and Likelihood Use,” Memory and Cognition 33, no. 1 (2005): 107–19.

  the child’s bassinet In response to a fact-checking email, Crandall wrote: “The key to this story (for me anyway) is that experts see meaningful patterns that novices miss altogether. As an experienced NICU nurse, Darlene has seen hundreds of babies. She is not reflecting on all of them…they have merged into a sense of what is typical for a premie baby at X weeks. She has also seen many babies with sepsis (it happens a lot in NICUs, for a variety of reasons unrelated to quality of care). The combination of cues (bloody bandaid, falling temp, distended belly, sleepiness/lethargy) brought with it the recognition ‘this baby is in trouble’ and ‘probably septic.’ At least, that’s what she told us in the interview….I agree that people often create narratives to help explain what’s going on around them, and help them make sense—particularly when they are having trouble figuring something out. In this incident, Darlene was not having trouble figuring out what was going on—she recognized immediately what was going on….I think of Darlene’s story as being about expertise, and the difference between how experts and novices view and understand a given situation….Storytelling takes time, and stories are linear (this happened, then this, and then that). When experienced people describe events such as this one, what happens is very fast: They ‘read’ the situation, they understand what’s going on, and they know what to do.”

  “It’s even harder now” In response to a fact-checking email, Casner expanded his comments: “I wouldn’t say that pilots are ‘passive’ but that they find it exceedingly difficult to maintain their attention on an automated system that works so reliably well. Humans are not good at sitting and staring….Humans have limited attentional resources (e.g., how our kids do stuff behind our backs and get away with it). So we have to keep our attention pointed in the direction that we think is most important at all times. If a cockpit computer in front of me has worked impeccably for 100 hours in a row, it’s hard to envision that as being the most important thing to think about. For example, my kid could be getting away with some insane stuff at that very moment. In our study of mind wandering among pilots [Thoughts in Flight: Automation Use and Pilots’ Task-Related and Task-Unrelated Thought], we found that the pilot flying was thinking ‘task-unrelated thoughts’ about 30% of the time. The other pilot, the monitoring pilot, was mind wandering about 50% of the time. Why wouldn’t they? If you don’t give me something important or pressing to think about, I’ll come up with something myself.”

  people build mental models Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Marshall Van Alstyne, “Information, Technology, and Information Worker Productivity,” Information Systems Research 23, no. 3 (2012): 849–67; Sinan Aral and Marshall Van Alstyne, “The Diversity-Bandwidth Trade-Off,” American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 1 (2011): 90–171; Nathaniel Bulkley and Marshall W. Van Alstyne, “Why Information Should Influence Productivity” (2004); Nathaniel Bulkley and Marshall W. Van Alstyne, “An Empirical Analysis of Strategies and Efficiencies in Social Networks,” Boston U. School of Management research paper no. 2010-29, MIT Sloan research paper no. 4682-08, February 1, 2006, http://​ssrn.​com/​abstract=​887406; Neil Gandal, Charles King, and Marshall Van Alstyne, “The Social Network Within a Management Recruiting Firm: Network Structure and Output,” Review of Network Economics 8, no. 4 (2009): 302–24.

  leveraged existing skills In response to a fact-checking email, Van Alstyne expanded upon his comments: “One of the original hypotheses attributed the gains of the smaller project load to the efficacy associated with economies of specialization. Doing a singular, focused activity can make you very good at that activity. The idea goes all the way back to Adam Smith and the efficiency associated with focused tasks at a pin factory. Generalization, or pursuing diverse work in our context, meant spreading projects across finance, education, and commercial IT. These are very different industries. Running projects across them requires different knowledge and it also means tapping different social networks. Specialization, in these consulting projects, meant focusing on, say, just the finance projects. Knowledge could be deepened within this focal area and the social network could be adapted to finance contacts alone. At least this is one theory as to why specialization might be better. Obviously, specialization can restrict the number of possible projects—there might not be a new finance project when there does happen to be one, or several, in education or IT. But perhaps if you wait, you’ll get another finance project.”

  deemed a success In response to a fact-checking email, Van Alstyne identifi
ed other reasons why joining small numbers of projects, and a project at its start, had benefits: “The first is multitasking. Initially, taking on new projects strictly increases output, in this case revenues generated by these consultants. Revenue growth can continue even past the point where the productivity on a given project starts to fall. Consider a project as a collection of tasks (assessing client needs, generating target candidates, selecting candidates, vetting resumes, presenting options to clients, closing the deal…).As a person takes on new work, its tasks displace some tasks of the existing work. So an existing project can take longer when a person takes on a new project, drawing out the period over which he/she gets paid. Total throughput, however, can still rise for awhile as a person takes on new projects. The stream of revenues brought in by a person juggling 6 projects tends to be higher than the stream of revenues brought in by a person juggling 4 even though each of the 6 projects takes longer than it would have taken if it were only in a group of 4. At some point, however, this relationship trends completely downward. New projects take too long and revenues decline. Taking on another project strictly decreases productivity. As one consultant put it, ‘There are too many balls in the air and then too many get dropped.’ It takes too long to complete tasks, some tasks are not completed at all, and the flow of revenues dribbles out over a really long period. So there is an optimal number of projects to take on and this is below 12. The second consideration, as you suggest, is access to rich information. This exhibits a similar invert-U pattern. We were able to judge how much novel information each person received by tracking their actual email communication. We measured this both in a sense of ‘variance,’ i.e., how unusual was a fact relative to other received facts, and also in terms of ‘volume,’ i.e., how many new facts a person received….Initially, greater access to more novel information strictly increased productivity. Superstars did receive about 25% more novel information than their typical peer and this access to novelty helped predict their success. Eventually, however, those outlying people who received the absolute highest novelty—about twice that of the superstars—were less productive than the superstars. Either excess information was too weird, off-topic, and not actionable or excess information was too much to process. A massive volume of novelty introduces the white-collar worker’s equivalent of the ‘Where’s Waldo’ problem: You can’t find the important information in all the noise. Both of these factors were statistically significant predictors of the superstars.”

  bright morning sky Richard De Crespigny, QF32 (Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2012); Aviation Safety Investigation Report 089: In-Flight Uncontained Engine Failure Airbus A380–842, VH-OQA (Canberra: Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Department of Transport and Regional Services, 2013); Jordan Chong, “Repaired Qantas A380 Arrives in Sydney,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 22, 2012; Tim Robinson, “Qantas QF32 Flight from the Cockpit,” The Royal Aeronautical Society, December 8, 2010; “Qantas Airbus A380 Inflight Engine Failure,” Australian Transport Safety Bureau, December 8, 2010; “Aviation Occurrence Investigation AO-2010–089 Interim-Factual,” Australian Transport Safety Bureau, May 18, 2011; “In-Flight Uncontained Engine Failure—Overhead Batam Island, Indonesia, November 4, 2010, VH-OQA, Airbus A380–842,” Australian Transport Safety Bureau, investigation no. AO-2010–089, Sydney.

  de Crespigny later told me I am indebted to Captain de Crespigny for his time as well as his book, QF32. In an interview, de Crespigny emphasized that he is speaking for himself, and not for Qantas, in recalling and describing these events.

  “models they can use” In response to a fact-checking email, Burian expanded upon her comments and said that her comments should be read in the light of “shifting focus from what was wrong/malfunctioning/not available to what was working/functioning/available was a turning point. I spoke of how this happened for him in this specific situation but generalized to how this shift in mindset has been found to be quite helpful to pilots, particularly when faced with multiple failure conditions….Modern aircraft are highly technically advanced and their system designs are tightly coupled and fairly opaque. This can make it quite difficult for pilots to understand the whys and wherefores of some malfunctions and how multiple malfunctions might be associated with each other. Instead of trying to sort through a myriad of malfunctions and think about how they are connected and the implications they have, shifting focus to an aircraft’s capabilities simplifies the cognitive demands and can facilitate deciding how to do what is needing to be done….Once a critical event has occurred, really good pilots do several things—they try to determine what is most critical to be dealt with first (narrowing of attention) but also pull back from time to time (broadening of attention) to do two things: 1) make sure they are not missing cues/information that might contradict or alter their understanding of their situation and 2) track the overall situation as part of their assessment of the most critical things to be attending to. For example, consider a catastrophic emergency (requiring an emergency landing/ditching) that occurs at cruise altitude. The crew will have some time to deal with the condition, but at some point, their attention should shift from dealing directly with the malfunction/condition to preparing for and executing a ditching/landing. Good pilots are constantly assessing the actions being taken, their efficacy, and needed actions relative to the overall status of the aircraft and phase of flight. Of course, good pilots also fully enlist the help of others in doing all this (i.e., good CRM). Good pilots also do a lot of ‘what if’ exercises before any event occurs, mentally running through a variety of scenarios to think about what they might do, how the situation might unfold, circumstances that would alter the way(s) in which they would respond, etc. General aviation pilots are taught to do something similar during flight when they say to themselves at various points along their route ‘If I were to lose my (only) engine right now (i.e., engine dies), where would I land?’ ”

  “land the plane” In response to a fact-checking email, de Crespigny expanded upon his comments: “Dave used [an onboard computer] program to check the landing distance. His first pass resulted in NO SOLUTION because there were too many failures for the program to come up with a landing solution. Dave then simplified the entries for the failures. The LDPA program [the landing distance performance application] then displayed a landing distance margin of just 100 metres. Whilst Dave and the others were calculating the performance (that turned out to be incorrect anyways because of errors in the LDPA program and more extensive aircraft (brakes) damage than what was reported), I kept a broad situation awareness of the entire operation: aircraft, fuel, critical paths, pilot duties, cabin crew, passengers, air traffic control, emergency services….Simplifying the A380 (with 4,000 parts) down to a Cessna (the flying version of the 1938 Ariel Red Hunter motorcycle) kept things very simple for me, removing the complexity, making each system simple to understand from a mechanical (not mechatronic perspective), simplifying my mental model of the aircraft’s systems, freeing up mind-space to manage the entire event. It [is] vital in an emergency that there is a structured hierarchy of responsibility and authority. It’s even more important that pilots understand the roles, tasks, and teamwork required in an autonomous team of just two pilots (more in our case on board QF32), isolated from help but in charge of 469 lives.”

  fail every time In response to a fact-checking email, de Crespigny explained that it is impossible to get a simulator to re-create the conditions of QF32, because the problems with the plane were so extreme.

  CHAPTER FOUR: GOAL SETTING

  about to attack For my understanding of the events leading up to the Yom Kippur War, I am indebted to Professor Uri Bar-Joseph, who was kind enough to provide extensive written comments, as well as the following sources: Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (New York: Schocken, 2007); Uri Bar-Joseph, The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012); Uri Bar-Joseph, “Israe
l’s 1973 Intelligence Failure,” Israel Affairs 6, no. 1 (1999): 11–35; Uri Bar-Joseph and Arie W. Kruglanski, “Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure: On the Psychology of the Yom Kippur Surprise,” Political Psychology 24, no. 1 (2003): 75–99; Yosef Kuperwaser, Lessons from Israel’s Intelligence Reforms (Washington, D.C.: Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, 2007); Uri Bar-Joseph and Jack S. Levy, “Conscious Action and Intelligence Failure,” Political Science Quarterly 124, no. 3 (2009): 461–88; Uri Bar-Joseph and Rose McDermott, “Personal Functioning Under Stress Accountability and Social Support of Israeli Leaders in the Yom Kippur War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 1 (2008): 144–70; Uri Bar-Joseph, “ ‘The Special Means of Collection’: The Missing Link in the Surprise of the Yom Kippur War,” The Middle East Journal 67, no. 4 (2013): 531–46; Yaakov Lapin, “Declassified Yom Kippur War Papers Reveal Failures,” The Jerusalem Post, September 20, 2012; Hamid Hussain, “Opinion: The Fourth Round—A Critical Review of 1973 Arab-Israeli War,” Defence Journal, November 2002, http://​www.​defencejournal.​com/​2002/​nov/​4th-​round.​htm; P. R. Kumaraswamy, Revisiting the Yom Kippur War (London: Frank Cass, 2000); Charles Liebman, “The Myth of Defeat: The Memory of the Yom Kippur War in Israeli Society,” Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 3 (1993): 411; Simon Dunstan, The Yom Kippur War: The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2007); Asaf Siniver, The Yom Kippur War: Politics, Legacy, Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  “sharp as possible” Bar-Joseph, Watchman Fell Asleep.

  nothing more than words In an email, the historian Uri Bar-Joseph wrote that the concept was “a set of assumptions that were based on documented information that was passed to Israel by Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of late president Nasser and a close advisor to Sadat, who since late 1970 worked for the Mossad. The main assumptions were: (1) Egypt cannot occupy the Sinai without neutralizing the Israeli air-superiority. The way to do it is by attacking the bases of the [Israeli Air Force] at the beginning of the war. In order to do it, Egypt needs long-range attack aircraft which she won’t have before 1975; (2) In order to deter Israel from attacking strategic targets in Egypt, Egypt needs Scud missiles that will be able to hit Tel Aviv. Scuds started arriving in Egypt in the summer of 1973 but were not expected to be operational before February 1974. (3) Syria will not go to war without Egypt. Zeira became an ardent believer in these assumptions and turned them into an orthodox conception, which he kept until war started.”