Questão 30556

Are You Training Yourself to Fail?

Did you get done what you wanted to get done today?

By Peter Bregman, September 13, 2011 / Psychology Today

Some people are naturally pre-disposed to being

highly productive. They start their days with a clear

and reasonable intention of what they plan to do, and

then they work diligently throughout the day, sticking

5 to their plans, focused on accomplishing their most

important priorities, until the day ends and they've

achieved precisely what they had expected. Each day

moves them one day closer to what they intend to

accomplish over the year.

10 I am, unfortunately, not one of those people.

Left to my own devices, I rarely end my day with

the satisfaction of a plan well executed. My natural

inclination is to start my morning with a long and overly

ambitious list of what I hope to accomplish and push

15 myself with sheer will to accomplish it. I'm prone to

be so busy — answering emails, multitasking, taking

phone calls, taking care of errands — that, without

intervention, I would get very little of importance done.

And then, exhausted by my busyness,

20 but unsatisfied by how little of importance I'd

accomplished, I would distract myself further by doing

things that made me feel better in the moment, if not

accomplished — like browsing the internet or eating

something sweet.

25 Our instincts most often drive us toward instant

gratification. And the world around us conspires to

lure us off task. Given total freedom, most of us would

spend far too much time browsing websites and

eating sweets. And being totally responsive to our

30 environments would just have us running around like

crazy catering to other people's agendas.

For me, the allure of accomplishing lots of little

details would often override my focus on the big

things I value. Each morning I would try to change my

35 natural tendency by exerting self-control. I would talk

to myself about how, starting this morning, I would be

more focused, psych myself up to have a productive

day, and commit to myself that I wouldn't do any

errands until the important work was done.

40 It almost never worked. Certainly not reliably.

And so, without understanding it at the time, I

was teaching myself to fail. People talk about failure

— I talk about failure — as critical to learning. But

what if we don't learn? What if we do the same

45 things, repeatedly, hoping for different results but not

changing our behavior?

Then we are training ourselves to fail repeatedly.

Because the more we continue to make the

same mistakes, the more we ingrain the ineffective

50 behaviors into our lives. Our failures become our

rituals, our rituals become our habits, and our habits

become our identity. We no longer experience an

unproductive day; we become unproductive people.

You can't get out of this pattern by telling yourself

55 you're a productive person. You're smarter than that;

you won't believe yourself and the data won't support

the illusion.

You have to climb out the same way you climbed

in: with new rituals.

60 For me, the best way to discover the most

effective rituals to help me achieve my most important

priorities was through trial and error. Every evening

I looked at what worked and repeated it the next. I

looked at what didn't and stopped it.

65 What I found is that rather than trying to develop

super-human discipline and focus, I needed to rely

on a process to make it more likely that I would be

focused and productive and less likely that I would be

scattered and ineffective.

70 Rituals like these: Spending five minutes in the

morning to place my most important work onto my

calendar, stopping every hour to ask myself whether

I'm sticking to my plan, and spending five minutes in

the evening to learn from my successes and failures.

75 Answering my emails in chunks at predetermined

times during the day instead of whenever they come

in. And never letting anything stay on my to do list

for more than three days (after which I either do it

immediately, schedule it in my calendar, or delete

80 it).

It doesn't take long for these rituals to become

habits and for the habits to become your identity. And

then, you become a productive person.

The trick then is to stay productive. Once your

85 identity changes, you are at risk of letting go of your

rituals. You don't need them anymore, you think to

yourself, because you are now a productive person.

You no longer suffer from the problem the rituals

saved you from.

90 But that's a mistake. Rituals don't change us.

They simply modify our behavior as long as we

practice them. Once we stop, we lose their benefit.

In other words, being productive — forever more —

requires that you maintain the rituals that keep you

95 productive — forever more.

I would love to say that I am now one of those

people who is naturally pre-disposed to being highly

productive. But I'm not. There's nothing natural about

productivity for me.

Available at: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-we-work/201109/are-you-training-yourself-fail>.

Retrieved on: Sept. 17, 2011.

The sentence “It almost never worked.” (line 40) refers to the fact that the author