In 2013, Dante Williams graduated from the fifth grade at South Avondale Elementary. On his last day of school, he went to a party at the same playground where the teenager had been murdered at the Peace Bowl six years before. There were balloons and a bouncy castle, a cotton candy machine and a DJ. South Avondale was still located inside one of Cincinnati’s poorest areas. There were still drugs and boarded-up homes near the campus. But 86 percent of the school’s students exceeded the state’s education standards that year. The previous year, 91 percent of students had tested above the state’s standards. There was a list of kids from outside the district waiting to transfer in.
No school changes because of just one program, of course, just as no student succeeds because of one class or one teacher. Both Dante and Delia, as well as South Avondale and Western Hills High, changed because multiple forces came together at once. There were dedicated teachers and a renewed sense of purpose among administrators. There were focused principals and parents supporting the reforms. But dedication and purpose only succeed when we know how to direct them. The data rooms that turned information into real knowledge, the teachers who learned how to see their students as individuals with different needs and strengths: That’s how Cincinnati’s public schools shifted.
At the graduation ceremony, as Dante walked across the makeshift stage, his family cheered. Like all diplomas handed out that day, his contained a blank space. There was one last thing, the principal told him. No one was allowed to finish elementary school without doing a final bit of work. Dante had to transform this diploma and make it his own. She handed Dante a pen. He filled in the space with his name.
APPENDIX
A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas
A few months after I reached out to Atul Gawande—the author and physician from the introduction who helped spark my interest in the science of productivity—I began reporting this book. For almost two years, I conducted interviews with experts, read piles of scientific papers, and tracked down case studies. At some point, I began to imagine that I had become something of a productivity expert myself. When it came time to start writing, I figured, translating all those ideas onto paper would be relatively easy. The words would fly from my fingertips.
That is not what happened.
Some days I would sit at my desk and spend hours jumping from website to website looking for new studies to read, then organize my notes. I would get onto airplanes, my carry-on bag stuffed with scientific papers I intended to read, and spend the flight returning emails, writing to-do lists, and ignoring the big, important tasks I needed to complete.
I had a goal in mind—I wanted to write a book about how we can apply these discoveries in productivity to our own lives—but it seemed so far off, so overwhelming, that I kept focusing on easier-to-accomplish objectives. A few months went by, and all I had to show for it was a series of outlines, but no chapters.
“I feel like a failure,” I wrote my editor during one particularly dispiriting moment. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
When he wrote back, he pointed out the obvious: Maybe I needed to take what I was learning from the experts and apply it to my own life. I had to live by the principles described in this book.
MOTIVATION
One of my hardest challenges, for instance, concerned my motivation, which seemed to flag at exactly the wrong times. While I was working on this book, I was still also a reporter at The New York Times. What’s more, I was out promoting my previous book, and trying to be a good father and husband. In other words, I was exhausted. After a long day at the Times, I would come home and need to start typing up notes, or draft a chapter, or help put my kids to bed, or clean up the dishes, or reply to emails—and I’d find that self-motivation was in short supply. Emails, in particular, were a small form of daily torture. My in-box was constantly stuffed with questions from colleagues, queries from other authors, correspondence from researchers whom I hoped to interview, and other miscellaneous questions that required a thoughtful response.
However, all I wanted to do was watch TV.
As I struggled each night to find the drive to reply to emails, I began thinking about the key insight from chapter one and the ideas that Gen. Charles Krulak used to redesign Marine Corps boot camp by strengthening recruits’ internal locus of control:
? Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice. Doing so gives us a sense of control.
On any given day, for instance, I had—let’s say—at least about fifty emails that needed responses. Every evening, I would resolve to sit down at my computer and deal with them as soon as dinner was over. And, every evening, I would find ways to procrastinate—by reading the kids one more story, or cleaning up the living room, or checking Facebook—in order to avoid the drudgery of typing response after response. Or, I would sweep through my in-box, hitting the reply key again and again, and then, confronted with a screen full of responses awaiting my words, feel overwhelmed.
General Krulak had told me something that stuck with me: “Most recruits don’t know how to force themselves to start something hard. But if we can train them to take the first step by doing something that makes them feel in charge, it’s easier to keep going.”
I realized that Krulak’s insight could help me motivate. And so one night, after putting the kids to bed, I sat at my laptop and hit the reply button, creating a series of responses. Then, as fast as I could, I typed a sentence within each email—any sentence at all—to get me going. For instance, a co-worker sent a note asking if I could join him at a meeting. I had put off replying because I didn’t want to attend. I knew the meeting would be long and boring. But I couldn’t completely ignore him. So I wrote one sentence in my response:
I can attend, but I’ll need to leave after twenty minutes.
I went through two dozen replies just like that, writing a short sentence in each one, hardly thinking about it. And then, I went back and filled in the rest of each email:
Hey Jim,
Sure, I can attend, but I’ll need to leave after twenty minutes.
I hope that’s okay.
Thanks,
Charles
I noticed two things: First, it was much easier to reply to an email once I had at least one sentence on the screen. Second, and more important, it was easier to get motivated when that first sentence was something that made me feel in control. When I told Jim that I could only stay for twenty minutes, it reminded me that I didn’t have to commit to his project if I didn’t want to. When I drafted a reply to someone asking me to come speak at a conference, I began by typing:
I would like to leave on Tuesday and be back in New York by Thursday night.
Which reinforced that I was in control of whether I attended or not.
Put differently, as I typed a series of short replies, each reminded me that I was in control of the choices being put before me. (As a psychologist might say, I used those sentences to amplify my internal locus of control.) Within thirty-five minutes, I had cleared out my in-box.
But what about other kinds of procrastination? What about when you’re confronting a bigger, more involved task, like writing a long memo or having a hard conversation with a colleague? What if there isn’t an easy way to prove to yourself that you’re in control? For those, I remember the other key lesson from the motivation chapter:
? Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.