Learning By Thinking

My Tea Break Coach video last week featured one of my favourite science snippets.

I share it at least once a week with clients who are time poor and have a real challenge with the volume and pace of their work.

What if I told you that investing just 15 minutes per day could make you more than 23% more productive within just 10 weeks. And that this had been tested and evidenced in a study of more than 4000 people?

What if I also told you, it was also simple, free and needs no special skill, training or equipment?

It would be a no-brainer right?!

The magic comes simply from stopping ‘doing’ for just 15 minutes per day and using that time to reflect instead.

The study is called Learning by Thinking by Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano and Staats and it’s easy to find online. It’s not an obscure theoretical piece. This is a study you can trust. Two of the four researchers were from Harvard Business School.

Here is an extract from their executive summary:

“It is common wisdom that practise makes perfect…we find evidence that when given a choice between practising a task and reflecting on practise, most people opt for the former…we argue this is misinformed”

The study took two groups of people. They worked in sales and did regular hours for the duration of the study so they could measure their outputs and compare the groups.

Group 1 did nothing different. 9 to 5. Worked the whole day through.

Group 2 finished at 4.45 and took part in reflective activities. Nothing complex. Just the sort of questions you would imagine asking yourself if you took 15 minutes to reflect.

At just over 9 weeks of the 12 study they found some remarkable differences in the performance of the two groups. The group reflecting were outperforming the ones who were working more hours by some margin. The average was 24%.

The group doing the reflection (and spending less time on the ‘doing’ had the option of reflecting in groups or reflecting alone. Whilst the group work seemed marginally more effective, it wasn’t statistically significant. My practical suggestion with my clients is try both, see what works for you.

I did my own experiment. I asked a Director I trusted implicitly to replicate the experiment. We looked at his results before the 12 weeks and afterwards. There were many more variables affecting his P&L but we saw the same pattern. A marked difference in his performance over the test period. He also reported feeling more in control and more focused. He’s kept up the habit ever since.

In the Harvard study the reflection was done at the end of the day. In my one-off study the Director found it worked better for him to do right at the start of the day – he found that ‘sleeping on yesterday’ gave him deeper food for thought. Again, my practical suggestion for clients is ‘try both’.

So, if the secret to increased productivity is that simple, why isn’t everyone doing it?

I’ve included a link here to a paper in HBR which is a helpful resource. It has a link to the original research but will save you time as a multi-purpose paper as it also tackles some of the reasons we don’t reflect – so we can be the exception to the lie we are likely to tell ourselves “It’s a great idea…I don’t have time to do it today so I’ll start tomorrow…”

One of the key reasons this research found is that we are unsure about good reflection looks like. If you want to give it a try you won’t go far wrong by asking yourself these questions on repeat and writing down your answers: