New Year, New me, But does it still count as a new year if it's already March. If you set some lofty goals as part of your resolutions for twenty twenty two, now's when they're truly tested. The optimistic sine of January one has started to wear off, and the new year can start to feel like just another year. So how do you keep your progress chagging along? And what if you don't want to wait until January twenty twenty three to set new goals? Thankfully, Katie Milkman wrote
the book on How to Change. Literally, How to Change is packed with science based tips and tricks for how to pursue your goals and become the person you want to be. It covers everything from getting to the gym more often, to when you should and shouldn't give other people advice. And as a best selling author, podcast home and Wharton professor, Katie's definitely the person to listen to when it comes to chasing down and achieving your goals.
So if you're looking to create any sort of a change in your life, I can guarantee you that this chat with Katie will arm you with a ton of practical ways to make change. Happen. My name is doctor Amantha Imbach. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work.
Over the Christmas break, I read a ton of books, but my favorite book by far was Katie's book How to Change, which is why I reached out to her to come on the show. And interestingly, Katie started writing this book at the same time she became homeowner. So was that timing just a happy coincidence or was it something more deliberate.
I really really use fresh starts in my life to motivate new things. And it's something I've studied, and I studied it because I did it, and then I do it more because I've studied it. So fresh starts are these moments when we feel like we're turning the page on a new chapter because something momentous has happened, something that feels like it brackets time for us. So it could be something like celebrating a birthday or starting a new job. It could be the celebration of a new year.
Even the start of a new week actually can be a fresh start, or the start of a new month. So these are dates in our lives that they feel like they're offering us a new beginning, and because of that, we tend to be more motivated to pursue new goals
at fresh start moments. So we've shown this in data set after data set, from when people search for the term diet on Google to when they visit the gym at the highest frequency to when they set goals about everything from their finances to their health to their environment. It's a really wide ranging phenomenon, but for me, it's come up in particular at moments in life that really feel like transition points. They laid me to step back
and think big picture. And when I bought a new home and was thinking about this big change that my family was about to make, moving from an apartment to our first physical house, it felt like a good time to think about what was the big new project I wanted to take on with this move, and I decided I'd been thinking about writing a book for years. I realized this was a perfect moment to begin.
Now. I've heard that a goal that you've been working on in twenty twenty two is to stay off your phone or computer when you're with your six year old son. Can you tell me more about that and how you sort of pursuing that goal.
Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, writing a book did not help with this because so much, especially in the well, especially in this era when I haven't been able to do
so many in person events. A lot of the promotion for the book was in the digital world, from going on podcasts to posting on social media, and that I think became an even sort of bigger time sink than it was before, and it built some bad habits that I was definitely ready to get rid of with the start of the new year and that opportunity for a little boost and motivation, And in particular, I think I should be present when I'm around my son as opposed
to oggling whatever the latest meme is on social media. So he gets home right around dinner time and we don't have that much time together. We only have a couple of hours before his bedtime, and minew Year's resolution was to spend that time without my phone, without my computer, fully engaged with him. And it's been great. It's actually going quite well. You know. You know, I wouldn't give myself an A plus. I'd probably give myself an a minus. There's been a little.
Little bit just there always is, But.
Mostly I'm using what I'd call a commitment device, which is that I leave my phone upstairs and in my office, and so when I'm downstairs with him, I don't I have to, you know, literally physically get up go up the stairs to find it, to track it down. And that makes it hard enough. There's enough of a barrier between me and the temptation that I don't mindlessly pick it up and engage when I should be fully focused
on him. And it's been really nice to have dinners that have no interruptions and to have our family time without me, you know, wondering about what's the latest work email I need to attend to.
And can you explain exactly what a commitment device is and how you landed on keeping your phone in a completely separate area of the house as the one that was going to help you change your behavior? Yeah?
Absolutely, so. Commitment devices are sort of counterintuitive. They're tools that constrain our future behavior so we won't fall prey to temptation. And we're really used to other people imposing these kinds of rules or sanctions on us for bad behavior right, Think about the threat of a speeding ticket
if you go too fast. You might be tempted to speed, but you know you might get fined, or a restriction on some recreational drug that you might be tempted to use if it weren't illegal and you weren't worried that you could get in huge trouble. So those are the kinds of restrictions and fines that were used to we're
used to other people imposing them on us. What's funny about a commitment device is it's you imposing those kinds of restrictions on yourself in service of a higher level goal, and with an acknowledgment that if you don't take some action to restrict yourself, you might end up making decisions you'll later regret. So an example of a commitment device that I just described would be leaving my phone upstairs. Now I've imposed a cost on myself. It's not a
cost like a speeding ticket. It's a cost of, you know, walking up the stairs. It's a little bit of a hassle factor in order to actually access my temptations. A very minor commitment device. More extreme ones involve things like putting money on the line that you'll have to forfeit.
If you fail to achieve a goal.
Like you know, a twenty dollars fine every week if you eat more than one meal that involves French fries or something along these lines. Then you can define a
reverree who will hold you accountable to this. And there's websites that will literally take your money if you fail to achieve these kinds of goals, So you can set them up in all different ways, and research has shown they're actually very effective tools for helping us achieve more because they prevent us from giving into temptation as easily. They make it more costly in the moment to give into those tugs.
And how about work, Are there any behaviors that you've tried to change where you've used commitment devices like in the last few years.
Oh yeah, I use commitment devices constantly at work, and we all do. Actually, we just probably wouldn't realize that they were commitment devices. So every time you promise a colleague something by a deadline, you're creating a commitment device, right if there wasn't literally a deadline beforehand, and you say I'm going to get that to you by Friday, that is a commitment device, because now this person's going to be disappointed in you if you don't actually follow through.
By giving yourself a deadline, you have made it harder to procrastinate on this task, and you've made it so someone's going to hold you accountable for executing and you'll feel a little shame if you don't actually get it in by Friday. So every deadline we set that isn't required, those deadlines are commitment devices. Every time that we set aside a block of time to work on something, right, you put something on your calendar that isn't just a
phone call or some other kind of meeting. You block time on your calendar and say, you know, this is protected time for purpose X. That's also a commitment device, because now you're going to feel a little paying of shame if you don't accomplish whatever task it is you set out to accomplish for yourself in that time. You've created boundaries around it, and you've a sense of stronger commitment to it. These are a weak examples of commitment
device right there. They pale in comparison to putting thousands of dollars on the line. For instance, if you fail to achieve some specific goal. But they can be very useful and I use them frequently. I'm frequently block time. I always promise people things by a certain deadline in order to make sure that I have a clear goal, even if it's a task that I could put off, and definitely if it's something that I want to prioritize and get done, I choose a date by which I promise it to a person.
That's funny. I've recently started saying to my team who were occasionally saying, Amantha, I'm still waiting for you to respond to that email that I said several weeks ago. I'm like, just give me a deadline, just give me a fake deadline, and then I will get it done. Sorry, exactly. Yeah, it just it's so effective. Now. There are so many different strategies in how to change, and I'd love to know when you're writing the book, which of the strategies impacted the way you work the most, or do you
find the most powerful. Let's see.
I think probably the most important in terms of the way I work is the research that's been done on social norms and conformity, or how the people around us shape our productivity, our happiness and our behavior more generally, and I think recognizing that and recognizing that I could be thoughtful about how I constructed the teams that I work with and how I learned from the people who are around me has been one of the most important
things to my work as an academic. It's an unusual profession and that you have the opportunity to create your own team every time you start a project. So in most lines of work there's some more constraints, but in academia, you essentially it's like a little startup company. Every time you have a hypothesis, you want to go out and test, and you get to decide who am I going to
recruit to work on this startup project with me? And so I have been very thoughtful and careful about the people who I invite to collaborate with me, with a recognition of what they would bring to not only in terms of ideas and background and knowledge that they would bring to a collaboration, but what they would help me
accomplish as a person with developmental goals. And I try to work with other people who stretch me and who teach me new skills and who I love being around because I know that fun is really important to productivity, and if you enjoy the work you're doing, it turns out that you can be much more effective and you'll persist much longer on difficult goals. So I found that the fund can be social and that working with people who I really enjoy makes me love my work and
persist longer. And I also use this tool that Angela Duckworth, who's one of the most fun people to work with, a best selling author of Grit and a frequent collaborator of mine, who maybe sort of best personifies the sort of part of my life and choosing her as a
frequent collaborator has been a wonderful experience. But she and I wrote about something we call copy and paste, which we have both done with each other's lives, which is, there's someone who you are spending time with who is pushing towards a similar goal, and often we're not very deliberate about trying to figure out what are the things that they're doing that are working that we could emulate.
But when we gave people in one research study a little nudge to go find someone with a shared goal who was actually doing better and achieving it and ask them what are they, what are some of their strategies, and then choose one to copy. People ended up doing a lot better than when we just said, you know, go make a plan, go try to figure out a way to get better, or when we gave them lists
of hacks that other people had generated. It was better to go find someone in your social network, someone who was close to you, who you could emulate, than to get sort of arbitrarily collected hacks or to just try to make a plan in isolation, because other people know
so much that's context relevant for you. Right, someone else who's in your zip code, in your social network, who's also trying to run a marathon or write a book, they have a lot of the same pressures constraints, and once you start deliberately trying to learn from them, you can get a lot farther.
So tell me, what what is some things that you've copied and pasted from Angela and Hashei Wicks.
Yeah, well, one of my favorites. And it's sort of embarrassing that I hadn't figured this out sooner. But Angela and I both live in downtown Philadelphia, and we commute on foot to the university where we work, and you know, we neither of us even had cars, I think when we first started working together, all of our and there's
lots of time spent walking across campus to meetings. And what Angela had figured out in life, which somehow I hadn't, is that every one of those commutes, every one of those fifteen twenty thirty minute walks, is actually a an opportunity to take a meeting by phone that would otherwise occupy time when you could be writing a manuscript or doing something else productive at your desk.
So she always.
Combined her commutes with those kinds of phone conversations somebody a reporter who wanted to ask some questions, a student who wanted some advice, and it didn't need to be a face to face conversation. So she never wasted those walks.
Whereas you know, and it's not that it's wasted, right, because you might be having thoughts and so on, But there was a lot of time in my day that involved commuting, since I walked to and from the campus and back and forth across it, and some of that getting consuming it with these kinds of calls so valuable. So I started doing that immediately after I noticed her
doing it. One day she had actually taken a call on a commute to come meet with me, and she was explaining, oh, yeah, I always do this, and I was like, that is so smart. I cannot believe I haven't been combining these things. And it opened up a huge amount of time on my calendar for doing deeper work at my desk.
What else have you copy and pasted from Angela? Let's see.
Another example of something that I think I've copied and pasted from Angela is that whenever she is working on a new project, she actually goes to the sort of world expert and tries to just have a conversation. So there's a lot of conversation copying. I used to just you know, try to read all the papers and ingest all the information and hope that I would be able
to develop the expertise. I still do that, but she's so wise to reach out because the person who's the expert on this, you know, it's flattering to hear from someone else that they want to learn from you and make sure they're getting a science right and share a hypothesis and pick your brain for fifteen minutes, and they can combine it with a walk across campus, so they're normally delighted to say yes. And you can get such deep insight from someone who's truly the expert on a
topic when you're a newbie. That's better than what you'd get if you just tried to read everything they've written, because there's some subtlety that they'll pick up on and whatever it is you're up to. So she really taught me to pick up the phone or make that ask, to have more conversations with people who have the expertise that's necessary than I was before. So I do that a lot more now in my work now.
I loved the forward that Angela wrote in How to Change, and I must say I was excited to read How to Change before I got the book because I felt like I'd heard quite a few people talk about it. But then I read the forward that she wrote, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm even more excited to
read the book now. And one of the things she wrote about you is she said that you're really good at quickly learning how to do things more efficiently, and I'd love to know some examples of things that you've made more efficient and how you did it well.
One thing both Angela and I love is efficiency.
So there's no.
Surprise maybe that you know, we both copied and pasted things that the other was doing more efficiently than we were, and I think we've gotten more efficient in the process. One thing that I think has served me really well is an obsession with templates, like never write the same email twice if you're going to say the same thing,
for instance. So I have a huge document filled with template responses, which isn't to say that they wouldn't be personalized, but to the kinds of emails I get a lot, right, a student looking for advice on companies where they could work if they're interested in behavioral science. Oh, I have a template for that student wanting research assistant options. Someone reaching out and interested in, you know, whether or not I'm taking PhD students next year. Someone would like to
be a guest on my podcast. Someone who's enthusiastic about the book and looking for more places to find advice. So there are all sorts of emails that as a professor you get at a high frequency, and once you start to recognize what those are and see patterns, you can instead of creating something from scratch, you can start from a template. I sort of think of a lot of what we do in life as filling in mad libs.
And I think once you see things that way, you can do less busy work and more deep thoughtful work because you can simplify a lot of these processes. Recommendation letters are a little bit like that. For me, I
have a template for writing a student recommendation letter. Of course, lots of tailoring is required, but there's sort of a structure that can be reused time and again, and that simplifies so much in life that you know, really doesn't require deep thought and all the time that it would take if you recreated the wheel from scratch.
So do you think you bring like you personally bring a different level of consciousness to what you're doing, and particularly when you're doing something that is repetitive, like you aware of that in the way that you work.
That's interesting. So when you say repetitive, you mean you know something that I've done four times before that I yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Once I noticed that, oh I've I've gotten this kind of request or had to respond to this kind of ask previously, I'm immediately going to sort of how can I how can I not waste bandwidth thinking the same thought over and over again, but rather like make this
more efficient. So the fifth time that I have this conversation or get this ask, there's a document to go to. So yeah, I do think that's a huge opportunity for time saving for many of us, because many of us are doing things that resemble I mean, that's how you build expertise, right, It's like you you do the same kind of thing over and over again. That's part of expertise.
But trying to be really deliberate about cutting out unnecessary work that could just be based on templates is really important.
I think we will be back with Katie very soon hearing about why she started and No Club. If you're after even more things to improve the way you work, you might want to check out my very first digital course, The time Wise Challenge, where I've curated the world's best kept secrets and strategies for maximizing productivity to reclaim vital time, energy, and creativity. The time Wise Challenge is a four week program that will guide you through research based methods and
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My goal with this program is to make this a daily, pocket sized productivity coach, right in the palm of your hand, and when you've pleaded the course, you'll have the tools to reclaim your time and energy, lead more productive meetings, boost team efficiency, and conquer your email inbox. Your first step is to sign up and get started today. Visit learn dot amantha dot com. That's learn dot amantha dot com to get started today. Now you have a NO group. Could you tell me about this NO group?
Oh my gosh, I love my NO club. Yes, it is life saving and for so many reasons. Yes, so I have a group of it's three of us, three women at you know, research intensive business schools, all of whom care a lot about doing science, who care a lot about communicating about science and being good teachers and good citizens. We really are very aligned and similar goals.
And we learned about this research that had been done by a team of a economists led by Linda Babcock at Carnegie Mellon University showing that women really struggle to say no when asked to do what she calls non promotable tasks. So these are things like organizing the office party, taking notes at work, giving a talk at an event, or sitting on a committee that won't be rewarded in any way other than sort of appreciated because it's good citizenship.
And men and women both get these kinds of asks a lot. It's part of being in any organization, and women have a lot more trouble saying no than men. They spend a lot of time on these kinds of tasks, and it can take away from doing things that are more valued by their organizations and may prevent them from
rising to the highest levels. So we learned about this work, and we learned that Linda and her collaborators had formed a no club of women who would basically reach out to each other for second opinions whenever they got an ask that fit into this category of something that's not part of your job description that they knew wouldn't strictly be rewarded by the organization, but that might be worth doing because you want to be a good citizen, you
want to do the right things. And we thought this is such a great idea to have this no club, because it turns out when we're in an outsider mode, when we're evaluating these kinds of asks to someone else, it's much easier and clearer for us to say objectively, oh no, that's a bad use of time. And when it's insider mode, you're thinking about the feelings you might hurt and the how are you going to handle everything?
So we have this no club. We reach out to each other whenever we get these kinds of asks, and it has been absolutely incredible over the last I think it's going seven years and strong now for a bunch
of reasons, but actually not all reasons I anticipated. So I know it would be great to have these incredible women on my size or of offering consulting services and to offer my own on these kinds of challenges, and then I might free up a lot of time and help me prioritize better what I didn't fully appreciate when we create this is what an amazing community. It would build right where these women were already friends, but they've become closer because we see each other's struggles.
We're in touch.
Regularly, and it's become more like a support group. We actually recently added joy Club to No Club so that we can celebrate each other's successes, which I love so like emails go out. They used to just have a tag in front No Club and then people would respond right away, but we added joy Club so we could
share good news with each other and celebrate it. A third thing that I didn't anticipate but that I've researched and now appreciate more thanks to that is that when we give advice to each other, it actually ends up helping us too. So I thought that would just be you know, it's reciprocity, right, they give me advice, I give them advice. That's just sort of the price you pay for joining this club, but it's not a price.
It turns out to be really valuable to me every time I see a challenge they're struggling with, because first of all, I'm likely to face some similar challenge and thinking through in an advance, seeing it without outsider perspective, I learn and I build my own confidence because it's easy for me to see, oh, this is the right way to think about it when it's someone else's problem. And then when I face the same challenge myself, I feel confident that I can tackle it because I've seen
it before. So that's actually there's research showing that advice giving improves your own confidence and competence, which I got to be a part of, and that sort of opened my eyes to the power of the advice club, not only as a social support group, not only as a way to tap into the wisdom of others, but actually to build your own confidence and competence as well.
Now, when I think about you, Katie, and after reading your book, I'm like, oh, my gosh, is she just like this fountain of motivation? And I'm imagining, of course you're not. You are human. So I want to know what do you do when you're feeling flat or unmotivated? But you have to be working to with something like how do you pick yourself back up?
Oh gosh. Well, so first of all, I should say your vision of me is not very accurate. I don't think I am a found of motivation. In fact, it's funny I joke with lots of people that the work I do is not so much research as it is mesearch, because I struggle with all these challenges and it's really only through you know, applying these tools from behavioral science to my own life that I've been able to sort of duct tape it all together and get things done. I would not I would not be where I am
if it weren't for all these tools. And there's sort of like two kinds of people, I think, who study motivation and behavior change and goals. I think there's one camp who looks around the world at all the people who are struggling and says, like, what's wrong? Why is this so hard for them? This is so straightforward, that's weird to understand, my fellow humans, I need to study
this topic. And then there's this other camp which I fall into, which is people who have all the challenges that like everything feels like an uphill battle, and who realize, you know, if I don't figure out some solutions, I'll get nowhere. And so then we start studying this and its like a self help tool. So I'm definitely in
that category. I think, you know, when I'm low on motivation, I will say I'm big on task variety and tasks switching, and that's been a way I've managed my portfolio of work really since the beginning, and I always have a
lot of different projects in different areas. I've studied everything from what articles go viral on the New York Times website to how can we improve diversity and inclusion outcomes and organizations, to how do we get ourselves to exercise more, how do we motivate vaccination, how do we help students study more? So really wide range of topics I teach. I have a podcast, I wrote a book, I have
a newsletter that I put out monthly. And that diversity of projects makes it easy for me when I'm really feeling low motivation on one thing, to get a bit of a fresh start and a clean slate by switching and doing something else, even for an hour, just to get my excitement back. And I find I get a lot of value from just taking a little bit of distance from something that I'm struggling with that I'm not enjoying, giving myself a break to be productive on something else briefly,
and then coming back to it. Often I can find my old enthusiasm and of course, sometimes you can't take a break and you just have to grind right through, and you know, deadlines and commitments to others. You know, I promised it by this time, knowing that there's a real cost if I don't come through, tends to loom large enough that I'll get things done when I have to get them done. But the variety helps me a lot.
Yeah, I find that interesting that you think about the task switching as almost like a medi fresh start, Like I've never thought about that before in that context. But I know with my own work, I try to block outs of about two or three sixty to ninety minute sprints for deep work in the morning, and they will never be on the same thing. Like, I'm just at the tail end of the writing a book process and it's being released in July. But when I was congratulations,
thank you, it's very exciting. Just got the proofs in the mail yesterday. Well that is exciting, very exciting, feels real. But I remember when I was writing it, I like, there's no way I could do three sprints in a row on the book because it would just I would have lost motivation. So yeah, I'm really I'm encouraged to hear that this is like a way to kind of pick yourself up when you are lacking in motivation or need a bit of a spark when you're working. What
about failure? How do you deal with failure and setbacks?
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I've been really influen instant inspired by Carol Dweck's amazing research on the importance of having a growth mindset, and I do feel that that is something I've really adopted throughout my career, throughout my life. So a growth mindset is the idea that we aren't fixed in our capability, whether it's our intelligence or you know, our skills as a parent or as a teacher, or whatever it is. You're trying to
excel in almost everything. There's an element of effort that and growth that's possible through that effort. That so, if you have that mindset, when you experience a failure, you can interpret it as an opportunity to learn and grow. So there's another mindset that a lot of us walk around with, which is a fixed mindset where you say, you know, anything that goes wrong, it's diagnostic. It tells
me what I'm capable of. And I have this fixed ability and if something goes wrong, it's just telling me, yep, I'm not that capable. I'm not going to be able to do this. I think having a growth mindset and being really deliberate about that in the things you do, and saying, what does this failure teach me? How can I grow and learn from it, as opposed to just letting it feel terrible and thank god, I'm just not good enough. The more you can deliberately adopt a growth mindset,
the better. And this is a big part of being an academic. We get a ton of critical feedback. The process of publishing a scientific article is basically designed to torture your soul because you send a paper, you know, something that you've worked on for years that reflects all your effort and energy towards understanding this specific hypothesis and what's true about and what's not. You send it out to a journal. Two or three peers read it and
basically try to rip it apart. They send back a list of all the things that are wrong with it. Very rarely do they offer any praise. It's almost exclusively this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong. Most of the time your paper is rejected. Occasionally it's not rejected, but it's not accepted. It's They never say it's good enough. They say, well, there are all these flaws. If you could address all of them, maybe then we'll actually publish it.
So it was such a daunting, miserable experience the first time that happened. But I realized if I sort of changed my mindset and tried to adopt a growth mindset and see all the ways that this criticism could help me grow and become better, so the next time I wrote a research article, I wouldn't make these mistakes and so that this article could have a bigger impact and
be better. That would be more fun, highly functional. And it's true because I really am learning every time I get that criticism, and I can grow and get better, and that helps me so much in dealing with all of life's failures as trying to adopt that attitude, and it's made me a much better scientist.
Something I was interested in the context of goals sitting because often goals like we talk about how they need to be concrete and measurable, and I was wondering, how do you approach that when it's about a soft skill like being a better communicator or getting better like improving your presentation skills. How do you set goals for those softer kind of things that are harder to measure.
Yeah, even when it's a soft skill, I think that it can be really clear once you sit down and make a plan that you're going to have a series of action steps you need to take to achieve that long run goal. So I'll give you an example. I had a student who was a non native English speaker who really wanted to improve so she could be a fantastic presenter, a fantastic communicator, which is important as a
scientist in our area in particular. And you know, we talked a lot and this was these were her goals, but we talked a lot about how is she going to do that? And she didn't just decide I'm going to try harder. We came up with a series of things that we thought would be useful inputs to that. They included things like going to toast masters, watching American TV shows that covered topics that were actually related to her research. So she was interested in medical decision making.
Gray's Anatomy went on the nightly watch list. She was going to sign up to teach a class over the summer. So it was a list of action steps that would get to that goal of a soft skill. And then she had the weekly goals. You know, is she watching Gray's Anatomy every night for a half an hour? No, poor thing? Is she attending her weekly toastmasters? Is she presenting it as many conferences for instance as possible? What is she submitted to this month? Is she preparing for
her summer teaching? So I think even with soft skills, it's really it's important to break down. Okay, that's your long term goal, but what are the action steps that take you closer to it? And what's the weekly or daily action you can commit to pursuing in order to make some progress on that big overarching goal.
Now, health and fitness is an area where I feel like Sermony paid set goals and give you some interesting tactics in your own life to see those goals. Can you can you tell me sort of like, what have been the most effective strategies you've used there? Yeah?
My number one has a lot to do with what we've been talking about on how important it is to make things that might feel like an uphill battle more fun. And so I used a tool that I've since studied that I call temptation bundling to get myself to exercise regularly. When I was a graduate student and my problem specifically was, I would come home from a long day of classes totally exhausted, and all I wanted to do was, you know, binge, watch low brow TV, or curl up on the couch
with a juicy page turner novel. I wanted indulgent entertainment. I didn't want to do my problem sets, and I really didn't want to go to the gym, which I knew I should do because exercise was really important for my health and well being and productivity for but it felt like a chore at the end of a long day. So I have this idea, which was, what if I only let myself indulge in this sort of lowbrow entertainment
while I'm at the gym. Could I create that rule for myself and motivate myself that way to get up off the couch and head to the gym before I hit the books again and get my homework done. And I found that I was able to motivate myself that way, So I call it temptation bundling. I got into audiobooks, though I know lots of people do it with TV and find that useful. Is a little too much sensory input for me, But I would listen to lowbrow audio books like the Alex Cross series or the Twilight books.
Harry Potter was the highbrow on my list, and you know, I couldn't wait to hear what happened next to Voldemort or you know, whatever characters were involved in this. It would pull me to the gym at the end of a day. I looked forward to those workouts. The time would fly by while I was there because I'm so engrossed in the story. And then afterwards I felt great.
I came home, I was rejuvenated, I'd had my rest from you know, doing math, and I was ready to sit down and focus on the work I needed to do that evening. So for me, it was this totally magical experience of combining and indulgence with what felt like a chore and changing the nature of the chore into something that was a source of pleasure in my life. And I've since studied temptation bundling and show that it's
not just for me, it helps other people. When you link these sources of pleasure, these sources of temptation, and only let yourself do it when you're say at the gym. You can do it in other parts of life too, right, only letting yourself listen to a favorite podcast with household chores, or open a favorite bottle of wine when you're cooking
a fresh meal for your family. I even had a student who told me she only let herself burn her favorite scented candles when she was working on her dissertation, so she had something that made it really fun. So you know, I don't know if that would have worked for me, frankly, but if you're into the sense, maybe that can be for you.
Yeah. I love temptation bundling, and like you, I've been doing it for years. I'm exactly the same with exercise, where I'm not a huge fount of reality TV, but I love The Bachelor, the US Bachelor specifically. It is just the most trashiest fun ever and I feel so guilty watching it if I am like just on the couch. So so how I get through seasons very slowly is when I'm on the exercise bike, And the same for
my gym workouts. Like there's one podcast that I love is Mama Mia out Loud, but it has nothing to do with my work. I'm not really learning something that I'm going to be able to apply in my careers. So I feel slightly guilty listening to it, but then I don't. It just brings pure joy when I'm doing weight training, and I just I love that strategy so much.
Now for people all that want to connect with you, and obviously everyone needs to just go out and buy How to Change because it is such a brilliant, brilliant book. What are otherwise that people can connect with you, Katie?
Oh gosh, Well, I have a podcast called Choiceology that listeners might find fun. It's on a very different topic than this, but we talk about behavioral biases that can lead you to make bad decisions and you're with your finances, are actually in any part of your life, and so people might enjoy listening to that. And then I have a website which is Katiemilkman dot com. So Katie with a why like Katie Perry. If that helps, grateful to
her for popularizing the spelling and confusing fewer people. And you can find you know, my research papers there. You can sign up for my newsletter Milkman Delivers, and I'm on Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn as Katie Milkman's you can follow me on I need of those channels too.
I put links to all that in the show notes. Kaitie. It's just made an absolute privilege to spend the last hour with you, so thank you so much for your time and all the work that you're putting out into the world.
Oh, likewise, thank you so much for having me. This was a real treat. I really appreciate you helping me spread the word about science that can help us be more productive and a chief our calls.
I hope you enjoyed my chat with Katie and a feeling inspired to go and create some change in your life. I know for me, I'm going to double down on temptation bundling, which is something that I do with exercise, but I'm now thinking, hmm, how can I do that in other aspects of my life? And if you're enjoying How I Work, maybe you might want to leave a review for the show. You can do that if you're listening in Apple podcasts, just by clicking on the stars
or writing a comment. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Liam Ridan, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes it all sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.