The Rat Experiment

There was an experiment where researchers were given a set of rats and told to rate their ability to learn mazes.  They were told that certain rats were "smart rats" and had an abnormally high IQ.  When the researchers tested the rats their studies showed that the "smart rats" performed significantly better than the ordinary rats.

The experiment however wasn’t focused on the rats, it was testing the researchers.  All of the rats were the same, but telling the researchers that some of the rats were smart caused them to rate the rats better, even though there was no difference.

People will view what you do through their own set of prejudices.  To a certain extent, your ability to succeed is determined by what people think of you ahead of time.  When it comes to humans, very few things are actually objective.

By being aware of this, you can help yourself prepare for the future by nurturing positive impressions of yourself with those around you.  If they expect you to succeed, you are more likely to (at least in their eyes) than if they expect you to fail.

Personal Productivity from Management Theory - Ouchi

This is the fourth of a four part series examining management theories and how they can help understand our own personal productivity.

William Ouchi was born in 1943 and raised in Honolulu.  He earned his Ph.D from the University of Chicago and is currently on faculty at the University of California.

Ouchi studied the different work cultures of America and Japan.  In America he found the "Cowboy" culture, where people are rewarded for their individual efforts and employees are acting out of what is good for themselves in the short term. Americans tend to value people who are mavericks and accomplish stuff even if they work against the "system" to do so.  In America it is common for someone to be admired because they buck corporate culture and do things their own way if it leads to good results.

In Japan where people often work at the same company for their entire life.  Because of this they take a long term approach.  In Japan they tend to reward people for long term allegiance to the company.  Workers are rewarded not as individuals but as part of a team. Japanese value people who conform to culture and are solid predictable members of a group that can be counted on to work just like everyone else.

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Personal Productivity from Management Theory - McGregor

This is the third in a four part series examine the relationship between management theories and personal productivity.

Douglas McGregor lived from 1906 to 1964 and was a professor at MIT.  Four years before his death he published his theory on management which is known as theory X and theory Y.

Theory X is that employees are lazy and don’t want to work.  Under this theory managers must create very structured environments in order for work to get done.  They don’t trust the employees and often see themselves in competition with them.  This leads to managers who run their business as a dictatorship.

Theory Y is a different way for managers to look at their employees.  It is the opposite of X, in that it believes that employees want to work in a fulfilling job.  Given the right direction and guidance employees will perform well.  Managers using this approach are generally less autocratic, trust employees, and look out for their well being.

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Personal Productivity from Management Theory - Maslow

This is the second of a four part series examining how management theory can be applied to help improve one’s personal productivity.

Abraham Maslow lived from 1908 to 1970.  He started studying Law in New York, but soon transferred to University of Wisconsin where he switched to psychology and earned a Ph.D by 1934.

Maslow developed a theory known as the hierarchy of human needs.  This hierarchy is usually represented as a pyramid.  On the bottom are needs such as food and shelter–the basic needs of the human body.  At the top of the pyramid are the categories of esteem with self actualization (reaching your potential) at the top.  Here is a representation of the hierarchy:

Self Actualization Esteem Love/Belonging Safety Physiological Needs

Maslow said that people start with the lowest level of this hierarchy and that their basic motivation comes from trying to meet their needs sequentially at each level.  Any time their needs aren’t being met, their motivation always reverts to meeting the needs at the lowest unfulfilled level.  So someone who doesn’t have food, will not be motivated to try to get esteem and respect. 

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Personal Productivity from Management Theory

This is the introduction to a four part series that will explore three management theories and how they relate to personal productivity.  This may seem odd, but if management is the art of accomplishing work through other people, then personal productivity can be seen as being effective managing yourself.  By examining the methods of motivating others we can become more skilled in motivating ourselves.

Here are the three theorists we are going to look at:

1. Abraham Maslow - Hierarchy of Human Needs
2. Douglas McGregor - Theory X and Theory Y
3. William Ouchi - Theory Z (Cultural Management)

Most people will be familiar with Maslow’s theories.  McGregor is less well known. Most of Ouchi’s writings  have been aimed at business people and he has published at least one NYT bestseller.  All three researchers were studying the best way to motivate workers.  They all came up with different theories, but there is value in each one.

In the next post, we’ll examine Maslow’s theory and look at how we can use his findings to increase our own personal output.

List of Academic Lecture Podcasts

This list has been updated for 2006. Here is the new list of academic podcasts you can listen to for free.

I discovered early on that an iPod or MP3 player full of good spoken audio content went a long way toward keeping me productive when traveling, doing yard work, exercising, etc, but the charges from audible.com and buying CDs adds up quickly. Podcasts can automate the process of getting content and lower the cost, but much of the content available has more in common with radio entertainment than a well written book.

Several universities are making lectures available as Podcasts. Not every class is work well on an iPod, but the content is much more directed toward people who want to learn and not just be entertained. Of course the flip side of this is that some professors are boring in person, to say nothing of listening to their recordings on an iPod.  You may need to look around to find someone who is interesting to listen to, but once you find the right feed, you have a tremendous amount of content regularly published for entire semester.

You can subscribe to a class and set iTunes to download new lectures, sync them with your iPod, automatically delete them once you’ve listened to them (configured under iPod properties in iTunes).  This is a great way to expand your education without spending the time required in a traditional class.  One of the problems with playing mp3s on an iPod is the fact that it doesn’t keep track of where you are in the file.  So if you shut off your iPod and come back to it later, you may have to scan through the content to find your place.  This isn’t much of a problem on an iPod like the Nano where you have a wheel to navigate, but it can be a little difficult on the iPod Shuffle or other mp3 players that don’t have a way to visually see where you are in the recording.

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Paradox of Powerful Tools

I once worked with an organization that was using two different word processors. They had an old mainframe system with an integrated office suite that been in use for years. The mainframe was accessible from dumb terminals as well as from the newly added PCs. As they added PCs more and more employees began switching to Microsoft Word.

Word was a much more powerful system than the mainframe word processor. The mainframe only offered basic formating (bold, italics, and underline), a single monospaced font, and a few other features like tabs and the ability to center a line of text. It seemed obvious that individuals using Word would be much more productive than those who used the mainframe system. In actual practice this was not the case.

The people who were switching to Word found that it was taking much longer to create documents than it use to take on the mainframe system. Word offered some definite advantages over the old way like real time spell checking, but in terms of how long it took to create a document, it was slower.

After talking to a few people, I realized that when someone created a document on the mainframe they were faced with far fewer choices than in Word. While the flexibility of Word made it much more powerful, that power came at a price. The price was the number of decisions required to make a document. Word users had to decide what template to use, whether to change the font, if they should save the document on their computer or the server, whether to accept the Office Assistant’s offer to help, and and what font to use. And that is all before they even started typing on their document. I saw people spending hours selecting clip art, trying different fonts, changing margins and struggling with indents and tabs. These were all things that hadn’t been an issue before because they weren’t possible on the mainframe.

Your productivity with a given tool is inversely proportional to the number of unnecessary decisions the tool requires. Even if the tool doesn’t “require” you to make a decision, it will slow you down if it occupies your thoughts. This means that many “powerful” tools will actually make you less productive by offering you options that you will never use.

To be productive you need to have the simplest tool that does everything that you need. A jackhammer is much more powerful than an icepick, but if you are trying to break up ice cubes the most powerful tool is not the most productive.

Writing Down Goals

Marston online has some comments on research related to productivity. The most interesting comment was:

The researchers wanted to know what accounted for the dramatic difference between that top 3 percent and the others. They found that of all the possible variables, the only difference between the top performers and the rest was the the top 3% wrote down their goals.

The research was done by the Ford Foundation, but I haven’t been able to locate that particular study.

Some New Tools

YackPack is a tool to communicate with people in your “circle”. It lets you click on someone and record a message for them to hear when they next logon. The founder has a PhD. in Physicology and the product was built as a solution to the disconnect that happens when groups communicate exclusively by email. Currently the product is free in its beta form.

ActiveWords helps cut down on the time it takes to accomplish work with your PC. It allows you to type in a single word and push a button to do something. For example, you can type in “word” and push F8 to launch Microsoft Word. In some ways it brings the speed of working at a command line back to the computer. It also has the ability to to text replacements and certian types of scripting. You can find an interview with the CEO at PodTech and he makes an offer to give listeners a free license.

Activewords allows you to specify your typing speed and hourly pay rate. Using these figures, it keeps a running tally of how much it has saved you expressed as a dollar amount. This is a nice marketing strategy for them to get people to buy it after the 60 day trial. It is going to be hard to stop using a piece of software if it can prove to you it’s worth. There is a review of ActiveWords at the Slacker Manager site.

Free411 is a new company that gives you free directory assistance by calling 1-800-FREE411. I know that I personally waste a lot of time trying to lookup phone numbers using my phone’s web browser, simply because I don’t want to deal with the insane charges for using my cellular companies directory assistance. According to their CEO 92% of the money you pay for a normal 411 call is profit to the phone company. They are setup to let the advertisers pay for their operating costs, by allowing them to put a 10 second ad in front of their competitors listing. CNet has a review of their service.

Another free phone based service is Tell Me. They use voice recognition software to give you information on sports, weather, traffic, movie information, and news through their 800 number at 1-800-555-TELL.

NextPage is software that lets you maintain and work with versioning information in Microsoft Office documents. It provides much of the functionality that programmers get with version control systems, but in a way that is easy for average computer users to understand. One of the biggest advantages of their software is the way it allows you to work with people who are not using the system. It has a very nice visual way of showing what changes have been made to what version of the document. NextPage has been reviewed here.

If you’ve run across any products or websites that are helping you accomplish more, please leave a comment.

Work vs. Time

A great deal of productivity is lost because people focus on time instead of work. It isn’t the amount of time spent on a task that matters–it is the amount of work that is accomplished. Unfortunately time is often the easiest thing to measure. Because it is easy to measure, most people are paid for their time instead of what they actually accomplish.

Of course in some rough way time does translate into work. You can usually get more done in 2 hours than you can in 1, but the time element isn’t where the focus should be. It is easy to spend 2 hours without really accomplishing anything significant.

When we are focused on time instead of work, we tend to do the tasks that are the most pleasant first. When we focus on accomplishing work, we tend to start with the tasks that give the greatest return. By shifting our focus away from hours and thinking more about what is actually being accomplished we can increase productivity.

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