summary Q&A Understanding our compulsions

Q&A Understanding our compulsions

Summary

The article consists of questions which are being answered by the writer. First of all the author writes about how unintentionally bad decision making can impact on us in the workplace. People sacrifice their productive morning time for email and calendar tasks. Another bad decision is aligned with opportunity costs. When someone is doing some task or spending some money then this time and money will not be used for other purposes. Email is a great temptation because email works as random reinforcement. The excitement of getting emails makes us check our email all the time. Three basic things makes us to make bad decisions. The world around us tries to tempt us, we listen to the world around us and we don’t deal very well with temptation. The next question the writer answers is what to do about it. Email temptation is very hard to resist, the best solution is to tell the IT department to not distribute email in the morning. Our ability to exercise self-control to resist temptation is limited. It takes energy to resist a temptation and during the day when the energy levels get lower you easier give in to temptation. The focus that we should have to manage our time better is to work with progression markers. We must make our self like we are making progress at then barriers will become smaller.

Most valuable advice for me personally

The most valuable advice for me in this article is that making a way to feel like you are making progression is important to plan your time in a good way. At some projects I already did that by making a very good planning and crossing off things that I did. This will give me the feeling of progression. I will try to give more progression markers specially while working on big projects where the end is not clear.

What advice is most relevant for students and should be included in the coaching? Why? 

In my opinion the coaching misses a part of planning and looking towards the end product. Every week we get new assignments and things to do but if the whole planning would be available from the start then groups can better organize their own time.

Insight related to Smart Life Rhythms

Temptation is of course a big problem in Smart Life Rhythms in general. Instead of getting a good night sleep a lot of people are tempted by things like Facebook, twitter and YouTube. It is not only a problem because in the context of the new way of working the 24/7 availability of social media is a great advantage. Life is full with temptations and that has a big effect on everybody’s life rhythms. This article shows us that it is possible to find ways to resist a part of the temptation but it will never work for 100%.