Fuqua Insights Podcast: Are You Building Your To-Do List Backwards?

Welcome to Duke Fuqua insights, a Podcast where we explore faculty research and the actionable takeaways for business leaders at every level,

Sarah Kern 0:16 

High achievers are celebrated for setting ambitious goals and stacking to do lists they plan with ambition first and constraints later. The same way overpackers assume their overflowing suitcase will somehow close. New research points out a fundamental problem that could be limiting even top performers. I'm Sarah Kern, an MBA student at Fuqua, and today I'm sitting down with Professor Jordan Etkin. Her research focuses on goals, how people think about them, and how they shape performance and motivation. Her latest work examines why we systematically over commit and what changes when we plan differently. Professor Etkin, thanks for being here.

Jordan Etkin

Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be chatting with you today.

Sarah Kern

Let's start with our first question, which is, you've studied goals, motivation and performance for years. What drew you to this specific area?

Jordan Etkin

So, this takes me back, yeah, about 20 years ago, when I was thinking about graduate school, I also was a personal fitness hobbyist and decided to get myself certified as a trainer as a way to make some additional money while in graduate school. And at the same time, I started taking classes on the psychology of motivation and motivation science. And so it was this perfect storm of practicing supplying people or helping people cultivate their own motivation with learning about the frameworks and theories that structure how we think about motivation from a scientific perspective. And it really inspired me to start my journey as an academic, as a consumer psychologist or behavioral scientist, and thinking about what tools do people have available to them in the marketplace as consumers that can help them sustain motivation, grow motivation, respond to failures and setbacks and set goals that they actually have a chance of achieving.

Sarah Kern 2:11

The central idea behind your latest research is time-first budgeting. What is time first budgeting? And how does it differ from the white people usually set goals.

Jordan Etkin

So if you're like me, and you're thinking about something that you want to accomplish, you probably just focus on that, right? So I want to go to the gym for whatever amount of time today, do whatever, you know, activities at the gym. Maybe I want to study for, you know, certain classes or complete certain assignments. And we tend to think about those things absent the realities of our life right, the constraints of our time, our energy, our other commitments. And so the central idea in this research is, what if we flip that paradigm right? What if we start by thinking about what time in particular do I have available to me today? What goals or tasks am I hoping to make progress on. And then, given that available time, how much time am I willing to spend, or can I afford to spend on those different types of goals or activities? And if we start by sort of assigning or allocating budgeting time for a specific goal, we can then set targets for our efforts and performance that are better calibrated to that available time and will make it more likely that we can actually accomplish the things that we set out to do.

Sarah Kern 3:27

That makes sense to me. Your research suggests that even motivated, organized people consistently overestimate how much time they have. Why do you think that is, and how does that factor into goal setting based on timing? 

Jordan Etkin 3:41

Yeah. So there's a couple of things going on here, and some of which are relevant to even just thinking about one goal or task. People are generally optimistic in terms of things to do with themselves. So how good we will do at something, how much we will get done of something? We tend to overestimate the reality of what we will actually accomplish. In addition, we also tend to overlook some of the transition pieces between activities. So, to use the gym as an example, if I'm thinking about a workout, I might not account for the getting to the gym piece, the washing my hands afterwards piece, the needing a few minutes to clean up and move on with my day. And so, when I then plan those activities, there's actually more involved in them than I have sort of wrapped my mind around when I set out to do those things. And so that's all just in the sort of single goal world, making it hard for us to be accurate about what we can accomplish. And then when you think about doing that multiple times, we enter this new psychological phenomenon that's central in this research, which is about double dipping from other goals when we think about how much time we have available. And so, if I'm thinking about I have two hours today, and I want to get some exercise, I need to answer some emails, and I want to plan.

And a class I'm going to teach later this week, I set goals for each of those tasks as if the other ones aren't there. And so, when I'm thinking about how much time I'll have for each, I end up taking time away from the others in a way that adds up to more time than exists. And so indeed, when we have people in our experiments estimate how much time they would need for each of the goals that they've set, that total is often 50% larger than the time we told them that they have to set goals for. And so there's a particular wrinkle with multiple goals, this double dipping process into available time that makes it particularly hard to set well calibrated performance targets. I see the wheels turning.

Sarah Kern 5:49 

I wonder if it's a problem particular to America, also in that we're just trying to do too much all the time. And I say that as an overachiever, but sometimes I just get exhausted by do we always have to be achieving new goals? Can we not just be existing?

Jordan Etkin 

Yes, I agree that there are certain cultures, types of people, personality characteristics that exacerbate some of these tendencies, and therefore make this intervention that we demonstrate in this work particularly useful, which is this time budgeting process. Even with that, though, I agree that we don't always need to be hustling, right? And so one of the values I think of thinking about, what time do we actually want to put into these various tasks, is perhaps the answer is zero, and that type of prioritization that can also emerge when we put our time before our goals can also be very useful for protecting well being, managing sort of our mental health, reducing burnout, all of those sort of subjective outcomes.

Sarah Kern 

Along those lines. Some listeners might hear this and worry that budgeting time first means aiming lower. How do you reconcile that with finding that total progress actually increases? 

Jordan Etkin 7:05

So, what's interesting about progress is progress has two components or ingredients. It's the goal you set, and then how much you do. And so when we find that progress goes up across our goals, that's not because people are doing more or less, if we look at just literally how much people are accomplishing across their tasks or the tasks that we give them in an experiment, it's the same, but because people are setting goals that are more appropriate or better calibrated for the time that they have, progress grows up Because the goals come down. And interestingly, to your point, you could interpret that as well, people are aiming lower. So of course, they're doing better, and I would agree that they are aiming lower, but importantly, note that they're not aiming low. And so when we look at people's goal setting behavior in response to our intervention, they're still setting ambitious goals. And by ambitious, I mean that people aren't accomplishing them all, so they're still having to stretch and work and hustle a little bit to try to reach those targets, but they're better able to marshal resources to meet them when they're closer to what is feasible given the time.

Sarah Kern 

It doesn't really seem like aiming lower so much as it's narrowing the focus or just being more realistic

Jordan Etkin

Exactly it's lower, but still high relative to sort of people's natural abilities.

Sarah Kern

Because goals inherently have that stretch component.

Jordan Etkin

Exactly

Sarah Kern

This tension between ambition and realism comes up in conversations about burnout, disengagement and people feeling overwhelmed, both at work and at home. How does time versus budgeting connect to those conversations about motivation and exhaustion?

Jordan Etkin 8:55

You know, when we were starting this research, and this is my formal doctoral students dissertation work, Sarah Mame, who's now a professor at UVA. When we were starting this work, we kept encountering this odd, what we thought was a very odd situation or reaction, where we would tell people that it's valuable to set better calibrated goals and make more progress towards them, and they couldn't understand why that would be valuable. I'll let you fill in the blank of who was providing, type of person that was providing that feedback. But to us, it seems so intuitive that setting goals you can accomplish and feel good about at the end of the day, rather than always having more to do the next day would be psychologically good for people. And so I absolutely think that this tool budgeting time first, is very helpful for reducing burnout in an employment context or work context, and also facilitating sort of quality work outputs and functioning teams, right? So when is it important to be accurate about what you're going to accomplish in a team context, for sure, because you're telling someone else what to expect from you, and so both for sort of individual, psychological wellbeing, but also for work wellbeing, wellness at work, I think that being accurate about what you can accomplish and then doing that has a lot of benefits.

Sarah Kern

I couldn't agree more, being reliable and getting things done when you say you will, is so crucial to success. Think on those lines of goal setting, specifically at work. Is there a particular experience level, role or personality type that can benefit most from this time budgeting skill?

Jordan Etkin 10:35

I think it's the types of people we were talking about before, the ones that are overachievers and do want to do more than they can. People that you know are ambitious, are achievement-oriented as a personality characteristic, are maximizers, if you will, these are the folks that you know consistently bite off more they can chew and then end up sacrificing sleep or sacrificing social relationships, or working over the weekend, every weekend, all weekend, to catch up. And those are the people that I think would benefit the most from this type of approach, and it will do the most to help them protect their wellness and happiness and accomplish things that they care about.

Sarah Kern

And why do you think for those people it is so scary to set more realistic goals or, quote, unquote, Aim lower.

Jordan Etkin 11.25

I think it feels like you are not keeping up, that it is not sort of the implicit societal or workplace expectation that everyone's goals should be. You know, up here, I'm gesturing towards the ceiling all the time, and that there might be some truth to that as sort of a cultural phenomenon at the same time. Though, I think when it comes to evaluating work and your work, hitting what you hitting your targets, and hitting what you say you're going to do, is important, and I think this work also suggests opportunities for employers to think about time use and time management and what their employees actually have time for, and helping them set caliber targets, better calibrated targets that they can actually then accomplish. We can think about time resources as a signal value of importance, right? Employers can help employees know what they should be prioritizing by budgeting time for them, right? Telling them that 75% of your time should be spent on category x of activities. 25% is this other category. And so perhaps individuals are going to have a hard time resisting the urge to set goals high, but certainly their supervisors can help them and will directly experience the benefits of doing so.

Sarah Kern

So, it's your belief that supervisors or managers should incorporate this aspect of time budgeting, perhaps into their evaluations of the people who sit below them?

Jordan Etkin 13:05

Perhaps not evaluations, but they should use it to help structure their work. And so sometimes, part of the reason we set too many goals is that we really don't know where we should prioritize. And if you have a you know an idea in mind of something you want to accomplish, it feels like a loss to let it go. And so at a workplace, right? The benefit of having a supervisor is that they can help you manage those trade offs. And I think time budgeting is a valuable signal for how we should be prioritizing our efforts.

Sarah Kern

Zooming out from individual behavior. What should business leaders take away from your findings. Does this research change how different functions think about time, for example, how marketers think about consumers' time, or how leaders price time as a resource?

Jordan Etkin 13:55

Big question. I certainly think This research contributes to these important conversations.

At a minimum, we can't do things we don't have time for, right? So as individuals, we should care about that. In workplaces, you know, leaders should care about that. Policy makers should also care about that. And so far as health and wellness are important societal outcomes. And so I think from the workplace perspective, or even, you know, in academia, in class, as if you're a student thinking about time as a resource, and where you're investing your resources. And then what you hope to get out of those investments, I think, is a really useful, simple but useful paradigm shift. Try it out, and you can tell me what you think, andthen from a marketer's perspective, and, you know, sort of selling consumers time. I think that's an interesting one, and perhaps a little bit tricky. Certainly, there is a big market for time saving, productivity or efficiency increasing types of products. And I think that when my co-author, Sarah and I surveyed existing apps that either deal with goal setting, task management or calendars, sort of time management, we didn't find an app that would use our approach kind of as we think it would operate best, which is basically prompting people to identify available time, to allocate that time across their tasks and then decide how much they're going to strive to accomplish of those tasks individually. And so we see a business opportunity here, potentially in merging these time management and task management functions, but in a way that encourages people first to think about, what can I do, and then what do I want to do?

Sarah Kern

I think that's the biggest problem with wearables. If your watch tells you, Oh, well, today is a great day to exercise, but you have meetings all day, and then you're picking up your kids, or you're doing you've an event at night, and you can't fit in that workout, then you only feel worse. So without knowing your time constraints in your schedule, some of the recommendations are more anxiety inducing than helpful.

Jordan Etkin 16:05

Absolutely, we don't need to think about the things that we can't do today, right? We need to have a list that exists somewhere in case we can do them tomorrow. But we don't always need to be reminded of all the things we could be doing because we can't do them all. And so I hope that either reading about this research or potential, you know, tools that will come online that utilize this time, budgeting time first approach or mentality, it'll help people be more content and satisfied with what they spend their time on and what they ultimately accomplish with that time.

Sarah Kern

Thanks for being here, Professor.

Jordan Etkin

It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. It was great to chat.

Sarah Kern

Likewise

(music)

Duke Fuqua Insights is produced by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. You can learn more @ fuqua.duke.edu/podcast.