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Sometime back read an article about how proximity to goals motivates individuals to move faster towards the goals. It is very important for people to know their progress to understand the proximity to the goal. I found that it worked on me when I was driving back to town and finished the last 30 kms significantly faster than the average speed during the rest of the journey though the travel conditions were almost similar. I also observed this behaviour with my niece & nephews in kindergarden; I used to carry them from school to home but the moment they see the house, they jump off and run inside.

How do we relate to this at our workplace? No, I am not talking about the carrot and stick approach. It is like having feature completeness charts, burn down charts and other visual indicators at work that helps visualize progress. Brain tends to reward itself with dopamine which gives a sense of accomplishment. Completing a small task does not give much of a sense of accomplishment, but pursuing a tough task may be daunting.

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If people are helped with progress indicators then the task becomes easy. It is the most commonly used part in the loyalty points, people are found to be rushing their last two coffee purchases for a free coffee than the speed in which they consumed their first few. It has also been observed that people will slow down once the milestone has been achieved, they would not be buying their 11th coffee at the same speed they got their earlier onces before their reward. That is because we want to be in a state of Anxiety Neutrality (otherwise known as Comfort Zone) that we would  not kick start something. An illusion of progress or things already started may get people started.

TwoCoffeesMore

In the above illustration both coupons have the same target of 10 coffees but people are likely to get started on the second one faster as already two of them are struck out. This illusion of getting started is used by many organisations which run loyalty programs by giving joining bonus. At workplace I have observed that people at work in long duration projects initially start out slow for few weeks~months and then increasingly put hours to get the project out. Once the project is over then the resetting to a slow pace happens.

I figured out that this kind of behaviour is less common in an iterative approach and there is always a healthy sustained pace. If we plan entire work in small chunks then visualisation of progress get much easier, which gives a sense of progress and creates multiple short term and long term goals. Goal gradient effect plays an important role in iterative development.

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In the story Alice in Wonderland, Alice encounters a cat that disappears. The cat has a long conversation with Alice and grins; slowly it starts to disappear leaving only its grin. Alice remarks

Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; `but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever say in my life!

To Alice it is so easy to associate the grin with the cheshire cat, but someone else who looks only at the grin will not be able to understand where did this grin come from.

During school days,  my programming started with BASIC, it was introduced to me as high level languages. Curiosity and college curriculum made me go little low level and understand assembly & machine level to do some simple addition subtraction programs on it. The pain of using that made me understand the need for using a high level language. I would often write simple C programs and check the assembly generated by it to compare it with hand written assembly code and used to think that I could optimise the assembly code if I hand write and preferred low level for size & performance.

The idea of writing programs in assembly quickly died down after I learnt to write complex programs in C and Java but not able to get the same from assembly in the same amount of time, it plants a grin when we see what we wanted on the screen. I was just curious and sometimes try to see what happens behind the scenes for my C programs. Fast forward into current workplace, there was a rapid change in the way I could create a webapp; all I needed was to run a command and I get a skeleton webapp. It is like the cheshire cat grinning at me but there was no cat only the grin. I understand the grin because I have seen the cat, does it make a difference for people who have not spent time understanding at lower levels? Do people see the modern programming tools as magic or will curiosity drive us to understand what is happening behind the scenes?

 You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. – Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio

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My idea of spending free time more productively were to read books, assimilate knowledge from any source. With less access to internet and gadgets while in school & college, there was a lot of time available to churn what I have read and heard about; and try to do something with that knowledge gained. As the devices and internet became cheaper, my consumption increased a great deal that I ended being a obsessive consumer of information but I do very little with what I have gained.

The tasks which we have cut out ourselves in the name of productivity are called Masked Productivity. I read a blog in which the author describes about a casual encounter with an inventor Russel Kirsch. Reading, listening and watching has been done again and again for generations. The new age gadgets like smart phones, e-readers and tablets makes it more and more easy and compulsive to read, listen and watch. In the rush of overfeeding the senses we forget that all these devices were invented only because few people did something which was never done before. We end up being chronic consumers and leave the awesome creation part to a select few.

From the time that I read that blog I have begun to be conscious of what I do, if not I would have missed some wonderful opportunities of meeting new people, churning up ideas at work and also some good relaxing sleep. Be aware of those masked productivity tasks; they make you tired, miss out good opportunities, deprive you of me time and may be prevent you from creating something.

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