F·11
Focus & Deep Work
Small Wins Run the Day
The strongest driver of a good working day is visible progress in meaningful work — ahead of recognition, incentives and clear goals.
- Evidence
- shaky
- Topic
- Focus
- Things to do
- 3
- Read
- 1 min
shakyHow strong is the evidence?
Real, but smaller and shakier than the story you have probably heard.
- Amabile & Kramer, The Progress Principle (2011) — 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people across 7 companies
Check it yourself: find this on Google Scholar
A correction to this entry
Downgraded from solid. This comes from diary entries rather than an experiment, so it shows that good days and progress go together, not that one causes the other.
Why it works
On the best days, progress was the most common event; on the worst, setbacks. The win did not have to be large. Asked to rank five motivators, managers put progress last.
What to do about it
- Start the day on what will visibly move, not on what is merely urgent.
- Make the progress visible to yourself — a crossed line, a committed change, a page count. Invisible progress does not do the work.
- Clear someone’s blocker before trying to motivate them. Removing a setback beats any amount of encouragement.
Where people go wrong
Reaching for incentives while the person is stuck. Nobody can be incentivised out of being stuck.
Read next
- Temptation BundlingChain the thing you should do to the thing you want to do, and let the want carry both.solid
- The Fresh Start EffectPeople act on aspirations after a temporal landmark — a Monday, a birthday, a first of the month, a new job.solid
- The Reward Must Be NowPersistence is predicted by how much you enjoy the activity, not by how much you value the outcome.solid
- Praise the Process, Criticise the BehaviourPraise directed at effort and strategy holds up under later failure. Praise directed at the person collapses.solid