Just get down and do it!

YOUR intentions for today were good – a grand plan to be at the desk at 8.30am because of a looming deadline.

Instead, you hit snooze four times, bypass the porridge for the coco-pops, postpone your shower ’til lunch-time (you work from home) and finally show up in the office half an hour later than planned.

With your willpower floundering on the floor, you decide to ease into the day by checking Facebook, responding to emails and googling the new series of Mad Men. An hour later you’ve done nothing to appease that deadline.

It could be different, say Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, authors of Willpower, Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength. Baumeister – head of the Psychology programme at Florida State University – and Tierney, who writes a science column for The New York Times, believe willpower is like a muscle that can be strengthened and that it requires and uses up energy.

One of the proofs for this, says Baumeister, comes from a lab experiment he conducted involving students, a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a bowl of radishes. The group of students allowed to eat cookies — who therefore didn’t have to use any willpower to resist temptation — afterwards worked for 20 minutes on a set of impossibly difficult geometry puzzles, whereas the group who’d been offered only radishes (and had to exert lots of willpower to avoid being tempted by the cookies their colleagues were eating) worked for just eight minutes on the same puzzles.

“They’d successfully resisted the temptation of the cookies but the effort left them with less energy to tackle the puzzles,” say the authors, who argue that your body sends you signs when it’s not primed for self-control.

“If you’d like some advance warning of trouble, look out for an overall change in the intensity of your feelings,” they say. Changes such as finding yourself “especially bothered by frustrating events or saddened by unpleasant thoughts or even happier about good news”. With your brain’s circuits not controlling emotion as well as usual, willpower is diminished, they argue. Maybe not a good time for that tête-à-tête with a difficult colleague about the project you’re both working on.

Baumeister and Tierney also say that self-control has a physical basis and is dramatically affected by everyday things, like eating and sleeping, to the point where a life-changing decision may go in a different direction depending on whether it’s made before or after lunch. To maintain steady self-control and good willpower, they advise eating foods that convert slowly into glucose in the body (low glycaemic), such as vegetables, nuts (peanuts, cashews), raw fruits (apple, blueberry, pear), cheese, fish, meat, olive oil and other ‘good’ fats. Baumeister points out that it takes 15 to 20 minutes after eating for energy to revive – so it’s best to schedule that budget meeting with your boss for half an hour post lunch.

Nor is it a good idea to tough it out and go to work when you’re battling flu or otherwise unwell. Driving with a bad cold has been found to be even more dangerous than driving when mildly intoxicated, says Baumeister. “Your immune system is using so much of your glucose to fight the cold that there’s not enough left for the brain. If you’re too glucose-deprived to do something as simple as driving a car, how much use are you going to be in the office? If you simply can’t miss a meeting at work, try to avoid any topics that will strain your self-control. If there’s a make-or-break project under your supervision, don’t make any irrevocable decisions.

“If you start to feel sick, the most efficient thing is often to go to bed for 24 hours and let your immune system work rather than keeping going and working at an impaired level.”

Pointing out that adults routinely short-change themselves on sleep — resulting in their having less self-control at their disposal — Baumeister cites a study that found workers who weren’t getting enough sleep were more prone to engage in unethical conduct on the job.

The radish and chocolate chip experiment put the kybosh on the notion that we use one reservoir of self-control for work, another for dieting and another for being nice to our family, says Baumeister. “Two unrelated activities — resisting chocolate and working on geometry puzzles — drew on the same source of energy. You use the same supply of willpower to deal with frustrating traffic, annoying colleagues, demanding bosses and pouting children. Resisting dessert at lunch leaves you with less willpower to praise your boss’s awful haircut.”

. Willpower, Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tier-ney, €27.20.

Tips to stay on top of it all

The first step in self-control, say the Willpower authors, Baumeister and Tier-ney, is to set clear, attainable goals. Make a plan, including specifics of time, place and opportunity, so as to avoid the phenomenon of monkey mind — where your mind, with a dozen things to do, keeps leaping from one to the other. “When you have several deadlines, make a plan for dealing with each so you don’t get intrusive thoughts while working on one. The unconscious mind is shaped to say ‘you haven’t done this’ — having a plan seems to satisfy it,” Baumeister tells Feelgood.

The authors urge getting active with the plan. Decide what’s the specific Next Action (NA) for each project. Instead of jotting down a vague ‘do taxes’ or ‘write report’, put the NA — ‘call accountant’, ‘get feedback from particular work colleague’.

Baumeister and Tierney refer to Getting Things Done: The Art Of Stress-Free Productivity, a book by David Allen, who — when it comes to work — is a fan of the four Ds: do it, delegate it, defer it or drop it. From Allen, the authors also picked up the Two-Minute rule — if something will take less than two minutes don’t put it on a list. Do it and immediately get rid of it.

Exercising self-control in one area of life seems to improve other areas, says Baumeister, who conducted experiments that showed students scored higher on self-control tests after they’d been told — and took on board — to improve their posture over a two-week period. And other exercises work just as well, such as using your non-dominant hand for routine tasks or changing your speech habits by speaking only in complete sentences or saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ instead of ‘yeah’ and ‘nah’. Baumeister suggests any of these techniques should improve your willpower and be a good warm-up for tackling a bigger challenge, such as sticking to your work budget, filing that report — and getting to your desk by 8.30am.

Reach your goals at work

Here are some tips for increasing willpower at work, courtesy of authors Roy Baumeister and John Tierney:

¦ If making a to-do list sounds off-putting, think of it as a to-don’t list — things you don’t have to worry about because you’ve written them down. You can’t banish unfinished tasks from your mind by putting off doing them or by willing yourself to forget them but making a specific plan will pacify your unconscious. Remember to plan the specific Next Action (NA): what to do, who to contact, how to do it (in person, by phone or email?)

¦ Environmental cues can boost or erode willpower. Use some of your willpower making your surroundings neat and orderly. People exert less self-control after seeing a messy rather than a clean desk or room, or when using a sloppy rather than a neat, well-organised website.

¦ Avoid making binding decisions when willpower’s depleted and energy’s down — you’ll tend to go for options with short-term gains and delayed costs. To avoid giving into irrational biases and lazy shortcuts, articulate your reasons for your decision and think about whether they make sense.

¦ When budgeting your time don’t give drudgery more than its necessary share. Work expands to fit time available, so set a firm time limit for tedious tasks.

¦ Procrastinators rarely sit doing nothing at all. They typically avoid the task they’re meant to be doing by doing something else. Beat this by using the Nothing Alternative tool — set aside time to do one thing and one thing only.

¦ Resolve to start your day with an hour devoted to your most important goal. You have two choices: to get stuck into this most important goal or to do nothing at all. With the latter option, boredom sets in and you’ll turn to your priority goal.

¦ Procrastination can occasionally be positive. If something’s distracting you from getting down to work — like the zany photos your friends has just posted on Facebook — use a postponement strategy. Say ‘I’ll look at those in half an hour, after I’ve got started on the work project’. You may discover once you get started that the work absorbs you until well past the half hour. “Vice delayed may turn out to be vice denied,” say Baumeister and Tierney.