Commitment Devices -or- Lashing Yourself to the Mast

For those of you who survived reading the Odyssey, you may remember the part where his crew had to pass by the Sirens, whose voices would lure sailors to their watery doom.  To get by safely, Odysseus (Odie to his friends) gave his crew noise-cancelling headphones, or maybe wax earplugs, so they couldn't hear anything.  However, he wanted to hear them and survive to tell the tale, so he had the crew tie him to the mast of the ship and refuse to release him no matter how hard he tried to convince them.

Odie knew his will power would not be enough to stop him from giving into the temptation of the Sirens.  So, he created a scenario where he *couldn't* give in - even when he wanted to.  I've been calling this approach "lashing to the mast" in his honor (Google tells me 277,000 other people had the same idea...).  The principle is simple:  if you know something is going to tempt you, set your world up in a way that makes it impossible (or at least difficult) to give in.

"Commitment devices" is a general term for this kind of approach.  It can take may forms, but one of the more popular is an accountability agreement.  If you don't follow through on your commitment, you face a penalty/ridicule/look of disappointment from your partner.  This is the reasoning behind the advice to have a partner to work out with, so they provide that accountability.

Another fitness approach is the clearing out of the fridge.  The new dieter will go through their kitchen and get rid of everything that isn't in line with the new eating plan.  Of course, they can just go back and re-buy it, but the added hassle makes it a little easier to resist the temptation.

Another temptation, and one I have trouble with myself, is surfing sites when I should be working. (I've lost hours on Wiki-fueled explorations)  To address this, I use an extension for Chrome called StayFocusd.  The premise is simple:  I have so much time per working day (15 minutes) on those sites and then it will block access with a friendly "shouldn't you be working" message.  You can configure the sites to block, allowed sites, time of day/day of week it's active etc.  Because it's a Chrome extension, I can easily use another browser to bypass it, but I find that that extra step is enough to remind me why I installed it in the first place.

Hopefully, some of these ideas will help you (and me) avoid more of the things we know we shouldn't be doing, but find ourselves doing anyway...

Interesting link: Lack of Sleep and Self-Control

This article on PsyBlog is focused on eating habits, but it's not too hard to see it stretching to self-control/willpower in general.   From their findings, it looks like being short on sleep makes the more instant-gratification focused parts of the brain more active and the more forward-looking, self-controlling parts less so.  

Interesting link: Game Theory and the Price is Right.

Not sure what Bob Barker would say, but this was an interesting article in Slate by Ben Blatt about applying game theory to the games in the Price is Right.  (First up was the "bid a dollar more than the other guy" approach)

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/11/winning_the_price_is_right_strategies_for_contestants_row_plinko_and_the.html

Interesting Link: Negotiation and Cupcakes

I saw this over on The Negotiation Blog  and it covered two of my pet topics, Negotiation and Willpower

http://thenegotiationblog.com/2013/10/22/eating-cupcakes-will-make-better-negotiator/

The punchline is that your willpower/mental energy depletes glucose, so giving in to another temptation (like the cupcakes) helps avoid further depletion (and in the case of food-based indulgences, restores glucose).  The whole willpower-as-a-muscle analogy seems to be getting a lot of support by recent experiments..

(added bonus:  Dan Green has an excellent podcast (ConMan Talk) about various conflict management techniques.  I recommend it to anyone who has to interact with other humans)

Interesting Link: The Secret to Success

Laura Vanderkam had an interesting article in Fortune about using accountability to force yourself to do the important-but-not-urgent things in your life.  Nothing earthshaking, but the key is that the accountability partner should be someone whose opinion you care about.

Inertia -or- the Bed Paradox

"Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it." - Sir Isaac Newton


Even if they don't put a name to it, everyone has an intuitive feel for the effect of inertia (which is pretty much just a lack of any other effect).  If I set a bag down, i don't expect it to start moving for no reason.  When I approach a stop light, I know it will take a little bit of distance to stop because the car wants to continue moving forward.

I see the same effect in myself when it comes to sleeping, and a lot of other things.  If I'm awake, I want to stay that way. There's a reason people shell out good money to sell Real-Estate-Secret-System-To-Make-More-Money-Than-Buffett-For-No-Money-Down at 3 am in the morning. I am that reason.  On the flip side, it takes the threat of impending job loss and homelessness to get me out of bed in the morning.  It takes every ounce of willpower to get out of that same bed I was avoiding just 6 short hours earlier..

The effect seems to be the same in a lot of ways.  House/yard/career work, exercise,  healthy eating, etc.  I'm pretty good at maintaining them, but getting started is a bear.

I guess the million dollar question is - how do I/we overcome it?

Interesting Link: Stuff You Should Know

This is one of my favorite podcasts.  Their recent willpower podcast was right down the middle of my interests and they did a good job of explaining.  They, too, seem to subscribe to the "willpower as a muscle" model.

http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/willpower-works/

Interesting Link: Improving your Powers of Persuasion

Bonus link for Christmas:

http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2012/12/21/improve-your-powers-of-persuasion/

Parminder Bahra of the Wall Street Journal interviews Steve Martin (no, not that one) about the power of peer pressure as a persuasion tool (i.e.  all of your neighbors are doing x...)

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone!

Interesting Link: Failed New Year's Resolutions

As the last person with a print subscription to Newsweek, I though I would share an article I ran across. It's about New Year's resolutions, and motivation in General.  The Author, Oliver Burkeman, theorizes that the self-help industry is based on (and requires) our difficulty making major changes.   He mentions the idea of willpower as a finite resource, and proposes "small wins", or ridiculously minor goals, as a way to make progress while not tapping into the willpower reserve.

Interesting Link: Back to Work

Now that my musical tastes are pretty much stuck in my early-90s college era, I've found myself gravitating more toward podcasts for entertainment.  One that I've found particularly interesting/entertaining is Back to Work.  The hosts are Dan Benjamin, who is the Rupert Murdoch and common thread of the 5by5 Network and acts as the straight man to Merlin Mann, who made a name for himself in the productivity arena.  I had been a casual follower of some of Merlin's earlier work, like 43 Folders and stumbled across this show by happy accident.

The basic format of the show is a collection of tangents with a theme/topic thrown in at some point.  Dan and Merlin let their geek flags fly proudly, discussing Star Wars, Comic Books and Software Development Tools with equal ease.  The side discussions are entertaining on their own, and the hosts bring their own insightful and often counter-intuitive views on various life topics like persistence, productivity, etc.  They tend to be long shows (90 minutes is not uncommon), and riddled with inside jokes, but are definitely worth a listen.

Book Report: Carrots and Sticks

In the spirit of trying to re-kindle my blogging and do more reading, I'm going to start doing periodic "Book Reports" on topics I find interesting.

One of the topics I've always found interesting is What Motivates Us.  I'm still holding out some hope that there's some secret button I can push on myself to motivate me to lose weight, save money, and launch my career ad Football Player/President/Astronaut.  I've taken a crack at a motivation theory myself, base on my own observation and experience.

In his book Carrots and Sticks, Ian Ayres presents a more refined view of how incentives motivate our actions.   He pulls a lot of his ideas from Behavioral Economics and backs up his ideas with experimental results. He's also the co-founder of StickK.com, which uses these principles to help people reach goals. (He does make a point of mentioning his site, but not to the degree that the book reads as a commercial..)

Main points:

(of course the book has a lot of examples and explanation not covered here)

• Because we have time-inconsistent preferences, we place a larger value on things we can enjoy now, as opposed to more of the same in the future (aka Hyperbolic Discounting).  This goes beyond rational discounting.  This difference is larger the closer to the actual "now" the decision is made, and is generally regretted after the fact.
• Your present self (who wants to lose weight, save money, etc.) is often at odds with your future self (who makes the decision to have dessert, buy unneeded shoes, etc.)
• Commitment devices (like a large cash penalty for "cheating") can take bad options away if set up correctly.
• Anti-incentives, such as the famous Zappos offer to pay their trainees to leave, can create a greater commitment for those who turn it down.
• Penalties are usually more cost effective that rewards, as they don't require payment normally and people count losses more heavily than gains of the same amount.
• People have a strong urge to conform to what others do.  This can be used as an incentive.
• We have a finite supply of willpower, but this can be increased through "exercise".
• We have a limited capacity to change, but resetting our "normal" can be the basis for further changes.

My opinion:

I think this book is somewhat underrated based on the Amazon reviews.  It covers a lot of the same ground as Daniel Pink's Drive, but on a more personal level.  I would recommend it.

Interesting Link: Data Analysis Using *gasp* Math

Kalid at BetterExplained has an excellent article on the various flavors of "averages" and their uses.

http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-analyze-data-using-the-average/

He runs a very informative and interesting blog that explains a variety of concepts in a the-light-bulb-over-my-head-is-finally-glowing way. I recommend it for just about anyone who wants some insight into the world around them.

BTW, to better appreciate the quality of BetterExplained's take on statistics, just compare it to my attempt:

http://thebusinessofhavingalife.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-do-you-mean-mean.html

(Please give me bonus points for the catchy title, though.)

Interesting link -or- BATNA isn't a Figment of my Imaginiation

Penelope Trunk at Brazen Careerist gives an excellent example of negotiation in the writer's market, complete with BATNA analysis.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/06/18/how-to-negotiate-when-you-have-nothing-to-leverage/

Overall, I like this blog. I find myself disagreeing with the authors (she often has guest writers) pretty frequently, but in an I-can-see-their-point way.

Negotiation Part 3 - Think Win-win

If you've read my previous negotiation posts (here and here), it's easy to get the impression that I see negotiation as an adversarial encounter. The truth is negotiation does not exist in a vacuum, but within the context of a relationship.

The four types of negotiations are

low stakes, low relationship:
This is something like two strangers deciding who will enter an elevator first. There's no relationship at stake, and nobody particularly cares about the outcome. Just decide these quickly and move on.

low stakes, high relationship:
This is where you are dealing with someone who you want to maintain a connection with (or at least not annoy), and an outcome that doesn't matter that much. An example is who would pick up the tab for lunch (unless you've got expensive tastes). Anything that seems fair to both parties is fine here.

High stakes, low relationship:
This relationship may be short-term to nonexistent, such as selling a house. In these cases, getting the best possible outcome (ethically) will be the priority. You can pull out all the stops here, almost.

High stakes, high relationship:
These are the most difficult types of negotiations. The relationship is as important as the outcome, but both will have a large impact on your future. If you are discussing your starting salary with a prospective employer, it does not make sense to poison your relationship over a few dollars. In cases like this, it is important for both parties feel like they have been treated fairly by the other.

One concept that helps in these scenarios is win-win. In other words: how can both sides get as much of what they want at the same time? The key here is to focus on what matters most to each group. The prospective employer may be willing to pay more if the candidate can start immediately. A candidate may be willing to take less pay for a more flexible schedule. These kinds of trade-offs have to incorporate something other than the pay, so they work best when there are multiple variables to talk about. It's even more important to know yourself and your opponent as much as possible, beyond the BATNA.

Negotiation Part 2 - the Environment

Once you know, as well as you can, your and your opponent's BATNA, it's time to set the stage for the negotiations. These are the subtle things that provide one side an advantage before the first words are even spoken. The key components are timing, location, and environment.

Timing can be any number of factors. No car buying advice is complete without telling the buyer to come in at the end of the month. If you come into a store close to closing time, the salesperson may sweeten the deal to get you to buy quickly. I've been in many negotiations with people from outside the United States, and have repeatedly seen delay used to take advantage of the American's impatience. This works more often than I'd like to admit.

Location will usually boil down to home team advantage, but not always. While the person negotiating from their own office is more comfortable and will have most of their resources at hand, the visitor can learn more about their host by seeing them in their natural habitat. Of course, the host generally doesn't have to worry about catching a flight.

The Environment is the additional factors beyond location that can affect the outcome. Having your team in the room with you is an advantage, especially if you make up the majority. If one of you is standing out in the cold, while the other is in a warm car, the frozen party is more likely to make concessions to get someplace warm.

Of course it's possible to put too much emphasis on these factors at the expense of due diligence, but if the options present themselves, you can put yourself in a better position to succeed.

Negotiation Part 1 - The BATNA

Of all the classes I've taken, the one I consider the most useful is one on Negotiations. I find myself using the principles on a near-daily basis and interpreting a lot of the actions I see in others as negotiation tactics. If anyone out there is taking business classes at DePaul, I recommend it highly.

One of the core principles in negotiation is the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA. This term was coined by Robert Fisher and Bill Ury and used in their book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. The concept is straightforward, your BATNA is your best outcome if you do not come to an agreement in this negotiation, or rather, what you get if you walk away.

Knowing your BATNA and your opponent's BATNA (I use the term loosely, the person you are negotiating with shouldn't normally be considered a foe to be conquered) lets you know the best and worst acceptable outcomes.

For example, If you are selling your house and you have an offer from another buyer for $150K, that is your BATNA. If the buyer offers less than that, you should turn them down because you know you can do better. In contrast, if you know the house you want to buy has multiple offers on it, you would expect the seller's BATNA to be pretty close to their asking price, if not higher.

Of course, most BATNA calculations are not this simple. There are usually more variables involved than price, and even the price and costs aren't always as transparent as they are in a home purchase. A lot of effort and research can be spent on getting a better picture of your opponent's BATNA and even your own. Still, having this information is the most effective way to being a better negotiator.

Covering your Assets -or- Do you Need that Warranty?

Be Prepared
-Boy Scout Motto

Unless you've got a way to look into the future*, you have to deal with the unexpected road bumps that life throws your way. How do you keep this from throwing your life into a tailspin? It take a combination of prevention and reaction known in the business world as Risk Management.

Think in terms of a car. Cars break down all the time, so how do you cope with it? You can try to Prevent the breakdown by doing regular maintenance, you can get a warranty to cover those charges, or you can accept your fate and be ready to pay for the repairs.

Prevention sounds like the best option, and it usually is. The drawbacks are that 1) it's not always possible to anticipate everything that can go wrong, and 2) there's some point where the cost of prevention is greater than the expected loss. Foe example, how many homes have sprinkler systems in place? Most people agree that some prevention is necessary in any Risk Management plan.

Sharing the risk through insurance or warranties is another option. You pay someone else to take the risk for you. The drawback to this is that the amount you pay is usually more than the expected loss.

For those of you who are playing at home, the expected value of a loss is the probability it will happen (0 = impossible, 1 = sure thing, .5 = 50/50 chance, etc.) and the amount of the loss. So if you have a 2% chance of totalling your $10,000 car this year, your expected loss will be .02 * $10000 = $200. Anything more than this would be profit for the insurer. Of course, you have to factor in all types of accidents, their probabilities, the values of different repairs based on the accident type and the vehicle involved. If that sounds complicated, it is! The good news is that the insurer has done the work for us. They are out to make a profit, so any amount they charge you is going to be higher than the expected value.

Why would you buy it, then? The only good reason to purchase insurance, which includes warranties, is that you just can't afford to take the loss at all. Life insurance can fit into this category, if there isn't enough in savings and others rely on you income. Catastrophic health insurance, Home owner's insurance, and liability insurance are other potential examples where the risks can't just be accepted. Warranties on your MP3 player or mobile phone aren't. Automobile insurance usually has a combination of the two types of coverages. With any of these, it's important to understand what the plan covers.

The final option is to accept the risk as a part of life. I mentioned that warranties on consumer goods aren't a good idea, this is because if you loose your player, you can simply buy a new one or go without until you can. Raising the deductible on your insurance means you are accepting $X more of the risk involved. Somebody with enough money can afford to become "self-insured" from a life insurance standpoint. This is the best option (combined with prevention) in cases where the loss can be financially managed without coverage.

*How about some lottery numbers, or even the next Superbowl winner?

Funny Link - Office Jargon

My wife thinks it's hilarious that "bandwidth" is applied to people. LifeHacker has a funny translation guide:

The cubicle warrior's guide to office jargon

What do you Mean, Mean?

There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics
-Benjamin Disraeli

When I look at most statistics, I see phrases such as "the average x" or "the median y". Even though I know better, I tend to read them both as "average". This can give a false impression of what's happening. What's the difference and what does that difference mean?

If you haven't repressed your junior high math yet, you remember that the mean, or average, of a set of numbers is the sum of the numbers divided by the count. For example if you have a group of five people aged 10, 12, 14, 15, and 52, the mean would be (10+12+14+15+52)/5 or 20.6. This is accurate, but it means that 4 out of the five people are below the mean. What's worse, you would look at the mean by itself, it gives the impression that this is a group of young adults, probably college-aged, which is completely wrong.

The median is the "middle" value when you order them from least to greatest (if there is an even number, you take the average of the two middle values). In the example above, the median would be 14, which gives the impression of a group of young teens. This gives a better picture of the group, even if it does ignore the oldest person (which a group of young pre-teens/teens would probably be doing anyway).

There is some additional information you can provide, such as standard deviation, that will improve the picture for the reader, but this causes most people's eyes to glaze over. The question is, which one do you use?

If the data can skew greatly in one direction, then median may be the right choice. Income is one example of this. One investment banker can raise the average wages of dozens of tellers, making the average earnings in the finance industry fairly meaningless by itself.

If the data is naturally restricted, then the mean may be more appropriate. There aren't any 1000 degree days in January, so the average high temperature is probably useful information.

The key here is to know the type of data that is being represented and making you decision based on that. Even more important is to know what is appropriate for other people's data and making sure they are providing an accurate picture.

Motivation

Considering that it's been more than a week since I've last blogged, I thought Motivation was a good topic to start with. I'm getting away from the Official Canon of Generally Accepted Knowledge (OCGAK), and throwing my own thoughts out there. So if it makes you wildly successful, I get partial credit. If it makes you fail spectacularly, you're on your own. If you saw these ideas somewhere else, I thought of it first and just didn't write it until now. I don't care if it was from the 16th century.

There are three thinks that get me (or anyone else, I assume) to do something or not do something:

1) Rewards. If we go through the maze, we get the cheese. If I show up for work, I get a paycheck. If I do good things while I'm there, I get raises, bonuses, promotions, etc. There's a lot of research and open discussion on what makes the best kind of reward (Money, recognition, intrinsic satisfaction). I personally believe that people have their own mix of them that best drives them forward.

2) Penalties. This is the opposite of the reward. If we go through the maze the wrong way, we not only don't get the cheese, but we get zapped by the electric floor. If I don't mow my yard, angry neighbors start chasing me with torches and pitchforks. If I take a HDTV from the store without paying for it, I get fitted for a orange jumpsuit. Civil & Criminal penalties, Societal disapproval, and even guilt are examples of this,

The two of these can be balanced against each other and there are cases where uncertainty is a factor. In the example of stealing the TV above, there is a chance I wouldn't get caught, then the Reward of the new free TV would outweigh the avoided Penalty of going to prison. Of course, my luck would make that chance pretty close to zero. Lawmakers use these tools in their attempt to nudge society in one direction or the other. That's one reason the tax code is as complex as it is.

The third and, I feel, most powerful of the motivators is 3) Habit. Habit never starts fully formed, but begins as response to Reward and Penalty that outlives the Rewards and Penalties themselves. A personal example is eating. I originally ate to get the Reward of the taste and avoid the Penalty of being hungry. Those are still considerations, but I occasionally (okay, frequently) find myself eating something I'm not all that crazy about when I'm not even hungry out of simple Habit. On the flip side, people who stay with a long-term exercise program often say that it's become a Habit for them.

So in short, If there's some change you want to make in what you do, look at Rewards and Penalties you can attach to that behavior and work to make it last long enough to allow Habit to kick in.