Public commitment pledges are a surprisingly effective and free way to help you reach your goals. A public commitment pledge is simply writing what you will or won't do, perhaps something you know you find hard, signing it and displaying it publicly.

In her excellent book, How to Change, Katy Milkman describes how the simple intervention of a public commitment pledge in doctors' offices significantly reduced prescriptions of unnecessary antibiotics—just through a poster on the wall. Commitment pledges are a form of what Katy calls a soft commitment device (of Odysseus fame). This strategy helps us stick to our commitments even when tempted to go astray.

Pledges may work through our desire for consistency and create cognitive dissonance when considering going against the pledge. The benefits of what we desire to do, say "eat cookies," are pitted against the potential guilt or discomfort we'd feel by going against what we said we'd do, not "eat cookies." You don't want to let yourself down. The pledge gives us a greater chance of sticking to our actions and a defence against our present bias.

Is there something you wish you'd do more of or less of? A simple public commitment pledge could help you on your way.

Other free ways to help you achieve your goals: Temptation bundling, The Fresh Start Effect, commitment device, Nine-enders, Implementation intentions

Public commitment pledge

Feedback is how we get better. It's how we find out what we couldn't see ourselves. But there are many reasons why it's more challenging to gather than we might hope.

You might have a design prototype, a book or article draft, a new practice you want your team to adopt, or a project you've been working on. Feedback will make it better, but it's easy to feel anxious.

You might want to avoid having to talk to people. Maybe you're worried about what others think—perhaps they won't like it. Maybe you'll have to start over. Maybe you'll hear what you know deep down. Maybe you might see that others could do it better than you, that it shouldn't be you that's doing it. Maybe you'll find out that you're a failure.

If we care about achieving the best outcome, we can dispel most of these fears with a few moments of reflection—of course, I'm not a failure for trying!—but it doesn't mean they feel any less real at the time. As is often the case, action can be the solution, and gathering feedback is, in my experience, usually energising and confidence-building—now you can see what will make your project fly.

Jane Austen was known to read her novels aloud to her family for both evening entertainment (pre-Netflix) and to help revise and hone her writing.

Remember, the first draft is always perfect.

Don't take things personally or yourself too seriously.

Don't get attached to one option—attach yourself instead to a great outcome.

To avoid sunk costs clouding your judgment, seek feedback before you're too invested.

Share multiple options when you can. It makes it easier for others to give comparative feedback and reduces the chances of taking it personally.

Remember how valuable good feedback has been in the past.

Consider who to gather feedback from. Sometimes complete strangers can help (who cares if they don't like it?), and other times a friendly face can ease you into it.

Remember the spectrum policy to focus on the good in an idea.

Feedback fear

Temptation bundling is a self-enforced technique that combines something you want to do with something you find hard to do.

If you find it hard to work out at the gym, you can make it more appealing by only watching your favourite shows when you're there. If you struggle to get down to working on a project, combine it with the only time you order your favourite drink. The hope is that the treat is enough to get you stuck into the hard task.

Temptation bundling is a kind of commitment device like that used by Odysseus.

Temptation bundling is from Katy Milkman, who also taught me about the Fresh start effect, and has a book called How to Change. It's also one of the techniques discussed in James Clear's Atomic Habits.

For a study evaluating temptation bundling, see: Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation Bundling, Milkman et al., Management Science, 2014

Temptation bundling

The magic of a first draft is that the first draft is always perfect. It doesn't matter if it's rubbish, if it's messy, if it doesn't flow, if it lacks personality, or if it won't work. The job of a first draft is to be a draft and get the process started. So however it turns out, the first draft has done its job perfectly.

In the illustrated art collection by Dr Seuss you can see some of the first drafts and iterations of text and images that go to refine the seemingly effortless rhythm, rhyme and combination of text and images from his wacky illustrations.

Donald Schön, in his classic The Reflective Practitioner, goes further by sharing his analysis of design as a reflective conversation – observing each mark sketched on paper informs the next you make. You don't know how it will turn out until you put pen to paper. Seeing what comes out allows you to adapt and modify as you go in a back-and-forth of discovery and evaluation.

Don't worry about your first draft — it'll be perfect.

I read this for the first time in an article by Casey Fowler that's no longer live. Most likely, it originates from the novelist Jane Smiley:

"Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It's perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist."

The first draft is always perfect

Extrinsic motivation is the carrot or the stick — when the motivation for doing something is an IF/THEN reward or punishment. We use extrinsic motivation all the time like paying people to come into work, or issuing speeding fines to make people slow down. It can work well for simple problems, basic compliance, and short-term results.

However, when you need long-term behaviour change, when creativity is needed, or you're tackling complex problems, external rewards and the threat of punishments can even decrease performance and productivity. Rewards only go so far if you want to inspire a hit album, create the next Oscar-winning film, or create a breakthrough product. That is, for most of the important work we do in our lives, including I believe parenting, using extrinsic motivators of rewards or punishments is likely to be far less effective than tapping into intrinsic motivation — motivation that comes from inside ourselves.

I like Dan Pink's Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose framework for intrinsic motivation. His TED talk on the Puzzle of Motivation is also a fun and interesting watch.

Extrinsic motivation

Intuitively, we can relate to this: as we get closer to completing a goal we can feel more motivation to complete it. Getting close to the last piece of a puzzle, the last clue of a murder mystery or escape room, the final chapter of your book (perhaps), the final kilometre of a marathon, or as you find you need just one more stamp to get a free coffee, being so close to our goal can give us a motivation lift to get to the end. It has a name:  the goal-gradient effect*.

In the example in the sketch, Oleg Urminksy and coauthors found that as people approached the final stamp towards a free coffee they were more likely to pick up the rate of buying coffees. And when issued with the new card, the coffee buying rate went back down again. They also found that it wasn't so much the absolute 'distance' from a goal, but the perception of distance. So, people who started out on a 12 stamp card with 2 stamps already complete tended to complete the card faster than the people who had a 10 stamp card starting empty even though it was the same number of stamps to the goal.

Read more in Katy Milkman and Kassie Brabaw's Scientific American article, Why Feeling Close to the Finish Line Makes You Push Harder.

Katy Milkman also educated me about the fresh start effect.

*The goal-gradient effect is also known as the goal-gradient hypothesis

The goal-gradient effect

In Manager Time a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’ll be doing next as your calendar will tell you.

In Maker Time a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making. Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour are ideal to make progress on hard problems and tackle something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long meaningful chunk into two that make it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off.

Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It’s great for meetings but comes at a cost for getting meaningful work done. If you’re a maker you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done you feel you need to do it at the weekend, or in an evening after everyone’s gone home, when you’ll be free of interruptions.

If you’re a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting.

If you haven’t already, you should read the original article Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, by Paul Graham from whom this excellent observation is from.

Manager time, maker time

Sometimes we’re smart enough to know that we’ll have trouble doing something we want to get done. That might be going to the gym, finishing that essay instead of goofing around, quitting smoking, doing your taxes, or, if you happen to be Odysseus, listening to the sirens’ song without going crazy and diving in the water or driving your boat to be crashed on to the rocks.

In these cases, you can try a commitment device: a voluntary restriction to help maintain our future self-control. In Odysseus’s case he instructed his men to fill their ears with wax and to bind him the mast and told them if he asked them to let him go then they were to bind him tighter. In this way, he managed to listen to the sirens’ song without ending up at the bottom of the sea.

Other commitment device’s may be more mundane, such as publicly announcing to your friends that you’re going to do something, paying a bunch of money to sign up for something upfront, or handing a $20 bill to a friend with instructions not to give it back until you’ve done what you’re supposed to.

Here are some nice examples of commitment devices.

Commitment device

Ever had that feeling when people said "well done" or "thank you" for what you did, that you didn’t deserve it? It’s called imposter syndrome.

It’s a pernicious and pervasive feeling of doubting your accomplishments and fear of being exposed as a fraud — at any moment, everyone will wake up and realise you aren’t so great after all.

My thoughts: Hang in there, keep trying your best, stay humble, and don’t take things too seriously. And accept compliments.

Imposter syndrome

A streak — achieving something on a schedule without missing a slot —  has a remarkable pull over us when it comes to helping us get things done. As Seth Godin points out, streaks turn an activity into a game. And while we may have started out with the intention simply of completing the activity, our continued motivation can transfer to simply be the motivation of keeping the streak going.

If you’re into streaks or want to give them a try to achieve something yourself, you might like the Streaks app (which is how I knew I’d done 2 years without missing), Austin Kleon’s 30-day challenge, or the simple power of one-a-day.

Streaks can also have a dark side: if you break the chain you can think it’s not worth getting started again. For that reason, I like James Clear’s advice to never miss twice.

The power of streaks

The Doorstep Mile is a brilliant Norwegian concept for how the hardest part of a journey can be just getting out of the door.

So, sometimes, as Seth Godin would say, the most important thing is just to start — start small, start now, step by step, day by day, and you can give yourself the chance to make something amazing.

Got something you’ve been meaning to start? Maybe today’s the day?

When I created this sketch, it was my 104th in consecutive weeks — 2 years of weekly sketches without missing — and sketchplanation number 583 in total. And I can tell you that it didn’t start glamorously, and they weren’t high quality or even interesting, but I did start. Sketch by sketch. Week by week.

More sketches about starting and getting started.

The doorstep mile

In Dan Pink’s book Drive, he looks at scientific studies showing that the all too common approach to motivating people involving rewards and punishments, or the carrot and stick approach, ultimately doesn’t help motivate people for the tasks and work we have to do today.

Instead, we do our best work when driven by intrinsic motivation — motivation from inside us rather than imposed externally like rewards or punishments. And the 3 facets he highlights that help intrinsic motivation are:

Autonomy: being in control and able to guide both what we do and how we do it

Mastery: our desire to continually be improving and learning and bettering ourselves

Purpose: working towards something we think is worthwhile. Having a North Star to aim for and a reason it’s worth doing what we’re doing.

I find it a useful framework to think through whenever I’m not feeling motivated or when I want to help make sure the people I’m working with are motivated.

Also see: flow at work, Goldilocks tasks, the zone of proximal development, on parenting

What drives us: autonomy, mastery, purpose

The simple fact that the start of something, pretty much anything, means we’re more likely to try something new. Be it your birthday, your next house, a new day or a new country, these turn out to be great mental triggers for us to get started.

For more, you could do much worse than listen to Katherine Milkman, an assistant professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, on the Freaknomics podcast: When Willpower Isn’t Enough.

The fresh start effect

…but it increases quality because your name is attached to it.

…and it almost always provides unexpected benefits, because you never know what others will do.

I have experienced all of this first hand through this Sketchplanations project. I credit sharing and creating in public, with Sketchplanations eventually becoming the book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

Sharing your work

Having played the piano most of my life I only started composing when I started spontaneously dropping by the music practice rooms at UC Berkeley in the middle of the day. Without any music I was practically forced to start making things up. Every now and then it’s new and nice. You can listen to a few short piano pieces on youtube.

I strongly believe in this as advice, but it does presuppose years of copying and playing others’ music as well as the basics of music theory. Replicate, then innovate

More sketches about starting and getting started

Want to compose? Just sit down without any music

A few minutes of writing each day or a sketch can end up as a book (like Big Ideas Little Pictures)

One piece of litter from each of us ends up as a trash heap, or a small souvenir taken with you can mean nothing is left for anyone.

Thanks to Seth Godin for sharing the simple power of one a day. Sketchplanations was founded on this principle.

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Category: motivation