Highlights §
- We have a finite amount of cognitive ‘bandwidth’,6 and this limits our ability to draw on our slower system all of the time. (Location 144)
- So while the fast system can trip us up (we eat too much, fail to save for retirement, never get round to finishing that work assignment), it also holds the key to setting us on the path to achieving our goals in life. (Location 151)
- We have either designed new ways in which governments can nudge citizens directly, for example to save more, get healthier or pay their tax, or we have created new tools to help nudge public sector workers, like those that Melissa used in our job centre programme. (Location 194)
- in this book we will be providing you with the tools to do the nudging – in your personal and work life. (Location 198)
- It is also important to state upfront that thinking small is not about small goals. Far from it. We hope this book will help you to achieve things that will really make a difference to your own life and the lives of those around you at work and at home. Our argument is that in order to reach big, you need to start by thinking small. (Location 209)
- Before giving you techniques for helping you to achieve your goal, we will first encourage you to ask yourself what the goal, and the steps towards it, should be. (Location 269)
- Choose the right goals. (Location 272)
- Focus on a single goal and set a clear target and deadline. (Location 274)
- Break your goal down into manageable steps. (Location 276)
- It’s for this reason that the Behavioural Insights Team splits in-year bonuses into two pots. One is for the recipient to spend on themselves (ideally on an experience – more on that later); the other is explicitly marked for them to spend on people who have helped them achieve whatever they got the bonus for in the first place. (Location 296)
- So, before you set your goals, it is really important that you pause to think about what will make you or others happy. (Location 305)
- strengthening your social relationships; getting healthy and active; learning something new; being more curious; and giving to others. (Location 320)
- The trick is to set a clear target that will enable you to know when you’ve achieved your goal, and will also allow you to see how you’re progressing in relation to it (which, as we will see, is a vital component of feedback). (Location 455)
- For example, this might be something like ‘losing 10 kilograms of weight’; ‘running a marathon in under four hours’; ‘improving my classes’ grade averages by 5 per cent’ or ‘learning French well enough to read a French newspaper without a dictionary’. (Location 456)
- Well, you should of course set yourself a clear deadline for achieving your overall objective. (Location 476)
- The work begins by thinking about how you’re going to set your goal in the first place. Doing so in the right way – by focusing on a single objective, being clear about your target and when you’re going to achieve it by – will require a bit of effort upfront. But putting this effort in at the start will pay dividends in the end, by making it more likely you’ll be able to stick to the plan. (Location 479)
- The whole principle came from the idea that if you break down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike and then improved it by 1 per cent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together. (Location 498)
- The second variant of chunking involves breaking down your overall objective into pockets of time or repeated tasks. (Location 527)
- you might think about how much time you need to set aside every week to achieve your overall objective. (Location 529)
- The first rule encourages you to take time to reflect on what things are likely to most improve your and others’ wellbeing. (Location 560)
- The next steps involved being clear with yourself about what success really looks like, (Location 565)
- breaking the headline goal down into its constituent parts. These small ‘chunks’ are fundamental to a thinking small approach. (Location 567)
- They enable you to see the connection between your bigger longer-term objective and the things you’ll need to do on a day-to-day basis to get there. (Location 568)
- Making it easy and setting bright lines for yourself are the first step in the process for creating simple plans. (Location 686)
- Make a commitment. (Location 920)
- Write it down and make it public. (Location 922)
- Appoint a commitment referee. (Location 923)
- So if you can, when you are setting your own goal, or if you are designing a reward programme to motivate other people, think about how you can gamify the goal, by linking the achieving of ‘chunks’ to rewards and then getting people and teams to compete against each other. These smaller rewards along the way will help you build up good habits. (Location 1368)
- Using feedback effectively involves taking information about how well you’re doing, and then relating this to what it is you are trying to achieve – your goal. (Location 1866)
- feedback should be timely, specific and actionable (Location 1938)
- So it seems that good feedback isn’t just about knowing where you stand in relation to your goal. We’ve seen that when the feedback given is important; the closer to the event the better. We’ve also seen that feedback that is specific and actionable is critical – you need to be able to do something as a result of the feedback (even if this is to keep doing what you’re already doing). And finally, it’s clear that simply praising people for being inherently good at something isn’t as effective as encouraging effort and persistence with a task. (Location 1983)
- If we want to get better at a task over time, we need to think about how we are going to learn, so the best place to start is by thinking about how you are going to practise – by breaking your goal down and engaging yourself in effortful practice focused on making (Location 2401)
- incremental improvements to how you go about tackling the task. (Location 2403)