Today, both B.J. Fogg of Stanford University and Steven Intille of MIT were featured on Talk of the Nation Science Friday(c). Both men are studying how technology can be used to persuade people to change their behavior.
If you find yourself wanting to stop piling in your office or get positive encouragement to start a new behavior, you might want to give this podcast a listen.
The two guests discuss how emerging research can be used to motivate people to take action.
One of the points made is that motivation isn’t effective if it involves nagging. No duh, right? The key to change is to analyze natural behavior and subtlely dissuade (or encourage) you in the moment before the act.
Another other point is that one’s environment plays a significant role in behavior. So often people blame themselves for their clutter but fail to recognize, for example, that they don’t have adequate storage. I encounter this a lot in my coaching work with clients. Sometimes bad habits aren’t a character flaw! When your office is set up effectively, your productivity increases without your behavior changing much at all.
If you want to stop procrastinating, B.J. Fogg mentioned that there are three factors that do actually motivate us:
- impending reward (or punishment)
- hope (or fear)
- social acceptance (or rejection)
If you’d like your work to feel more organized and effective, you can incorporate these three motivational factors into a plan. For example, once you identify the change you’d like to make, you could:
- Set up a reward system for each positive accomplishment (immediate reward)
- Identify how your work will be positively impacted by the changes you make (hope)
- Include trusted people in supporting you who will give you positive strokes for your progress (social acceptance)
As a sidenote, there seems to be a bit of a dark side to the “persuasive technology” field. The guests both emphasize that this information can be used for good or evil. Some of the platforms already using it include Amazon, Google’s gmail, mobile phone, the new iPhone, and more. As long as the technology and companies collecting our data use it ethically, there’s no cause for alarm.
But since this article is about behavior change, and yours in particular, chime in below about the kinds of changes you’d like to make in your workspace (or have attempted in the past). Chances are good that you’re not alone!
Tags: behavior, business, clutter, habit, iphone, MIT, office, Organize, procrastination, rewardShare This
