Caroline Webb

In How to Have a Good Day, economist and former McKinsey partner Caroline Webb shows readers how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform our approach to everyday working life.

Advances in these behavioral sciences are giving us ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be smart and savvy. But it's not always been easy to see how to apply these insights in the workplace – until now.

In How to Have a Good Day, Webb explains how three big scientific ideas can help us be at our best every day. She shows us exactly how to apply this science to our plans, tasks and conversations, in step-by-step guidance that allows us to:

– Set better priorities
– Make the hours go further
– Turn every interaction into a success
– Strengthen our personal impact
– Be resilient in the face of setbacks
– Sustain our energy over the course of the day

Webb teaches us how to be at our best under pressure, and gives us specific tools to tackle common work challenges – from conflict with colleagues, to dull meetings and packed inboxes.

Filled with stories of people who have used Webb's insights to boost their job satisfaction and performance at work, How to Have a Good Day is the book so many people wanted when they finished Nudge, Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow, and were looking for practical ways to apply this fascinating science to their own lives and careers.

A remarkable and much needed book, How to Have a Good Day firmly delivers on its promise, showing us all how to have a lifetime of good days.

Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life

How to Have A Good Day

Fabian Beiner

Situation 1: If you have a suggestion to make, connect your idea to their own views and concerns.

Situation 2: If you need help, ask for their advice first.

Situation 3: If you'd like cooperation with something that's fairly fixed, create options. 

(When receptionists at two British doctors' offices asked patients to personally write the time and date of a follow-up appointment on a reminder card, rather than simply being handed the completed card, it led to an 18 percent drop in missed appointments.)

If you know what you really want people to do, ask yourself:

What might stop people from doing what you would like them to do? How can you solve that problem for them, or make it simple for them to solve it themselves?

Could you even make your desired outcome the “do nothing” option for them?

For example, if someone said to you, “Jo hit the man with the binder,” what would you think? Would you decide that Jo had taken a binder and whacked a colleague on the head with it? Or would you assume instead that she'd punched someone who was holding a binder at the time? Both are valid interpretations, the only thing that's certain is that you might want to steer clear of Jo for the rest of the day.

To see this switching cost in action, try this basic exercise:

Say “abcdefg” then immediately after that say “1234567”. Notice how long it takes you to do this. Perhaps even time yourself.

Then, interleave the two: say “a1b2c3d4e5f6g7.” Notice how much longer it takes you to do that same amount of “work” while switching back and forth between letters and numbers—and how much more mental effort it requires from you?

Research unequivocally shows that multitasking damages our productivity. 

A phenomenon known to scientists as the spreading activation effect:

So, if you once spent an afternoon cranking out great work while settled into that window seat, your “window seat” neural network might be connected with the one representing “extremely productive and focused behavior.” 

As a result, you might find yourself getting a subtle efficiency boost whenever you sit there.

(You'll notice I'm saying all these connections might get made. They're not guaranteed.)

An excellent way to reinforce your positive intentions, strangely enough, is to make sure you spend a little time on the negatives. By this, I mean thinking honestly about what's likely to get in the way of achieving your goals, so you can address those obstacles head-on.

It's usually better to break your big audacious goals into a series of small step-by-step goals that are withing your reach.

Science tells us that we're more likely to get something done if we take a moment to think about why it matters to us personally.

Ask yourself: “What positive outcome am I seeking? And what do I need to start doing, or do more, to get that ideal outcome?”

If any of your goals are about avoiding something, turn them around and ask what good thing you'd need to do more of to achieve the same outcome.

Our goals are usually frame din one of two ways. Either they're about doing more of something good, or they're about doing less of something bad. A wide range of research suggests that the first type (known as “approach” goals) are better than the second (“avoidance” goals) at encouraging high performance—even if they're pursuing the same broad outcome. 

In short, the deliberate system is responsible for putting us on our best behavior. […] But our deliberate system isn't actually doing anything in parallel at all; it's switching from one task to another and back again.

At its heart, economics is the study of the way people make choices: how we weigh the costs and benefits of different options, and what we decide to do as a result.

Félix

Do you know the feeling of searching a recipe for a meal or cake online? Do you sometime land on a blog page? At first, it promises a concise list of ingredients and instructions, but then you have to scroll and scroll through an infinite amount of (well-meant) belletristic text and mouthwatering photos before reaching the information you really needed?

Do you know the feeling of immediately reaching that information without having to skim through pages and pages of superfluous, distracting side information?

Well, that's how the well-written, just enough-chit-chat How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life feels. The book is a bouillon cube of self-help, psychology, and career advice, which I'd consider now essential for guiding the reader through the more serious and well-funded ideas about how to get your sh* together at work.

My only complaints are about the structure of the book - and about some issues with content resulting from the no-chit-chat approach: 

The way the author structured the book also feels like eating a bouillon cube without diluting it first. Here is what I mean: The chapters follow typical areas of struggle and groups of advice like "how to work on your influence", "how to increase your resilience" and such. From an abstract perspective, this makes sense and helps you as a reader to get through all layers of improvement - but because the book itself is so dense and giving clear "to-do like advice" every couple of pages, it doesn't do a good job at guiding the reader through what to do of all this information and how to put it to practice without forgetting the couple of pages you read before. The amount of information, ideas, and pieces of advice is just too dense for being processed like a “normal” book. I think a “365 Days on How to Have a Good Day” could be a great follow-up, structuring the knowledge in gentle daily lessons allowing to reflect and practice without information overflow.

Second, some basics the book and theories are based on (e.g. the Dual Process Theory or Kahneman and Tverskys Thinking Fast and Slow) are not as simple or inherently true as they are shown and taught. If you're into this subject, I suggest digging deeper with, for example, The Enigma of Reason.

How to Have A Good Day Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life

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