According to research data, we receive 6.5438+0.2 million g of information every day, which is equivalent to the amount of information that 240 computers with 500g hard disk capacity can store, and this is only the information we come into contact with in one day. Faced with such a huge amount of information, most people's attention is seriously distracted, even tired of coping, exhausted and listless.

But faced with the same situation, efficient people can control their attention, focus on what is really important, and complete their work and tasks more efficiently and easily.

We all want to be efficient, but most people's efficiency just arranges their time full, thinking that investing more time means efficiency, but in the end they find that they are just busy and seem to have done nothing well.

It can be seen that more time does not mean high efficiency, and it is difficult to bring efficiency if you spend more time. So, what is really efficient? How can we be efficient?

Charles Duhigg, an expert in efficiency research, told us in The Secret of Efficiency that efficiency is not overworking or working hard, not sacrificing one's life, but doing less useless work, making full use of one's time and energy, and getting twice the result with half the effort.

The author of this book, Charles Duhigg, is a Bachelor of History from Yale University, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a business investigation reporter from new york Times. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor award in the American press, and many heavyweight awards such as the National Academy of Sciences News Reporting Award, the National Journalist Award, the George Burke Award, and the Gerald Loeb Award.

The Efficient Secret is the latest achievement of Charles Duhigg's research on neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics, which provides us with a more comprehensive and humanized way of thinking. Explain to us how to motivate, set goals and stay focused, so as to complete everything that needs to be completed more efficiently, calmly and excellently.

0 1 ? Take the initiative to choose, you can have control and stimulate your own motivation.

Whether cars, planes, trains or ships want to reach their destinations, they must ensure sufficient electricity. People are the same, no matter what you want to do, you have to be motivated. If it is always turned off, it is a problem whether it can be completed, let alone efficiently.

It can be said that motivation is the source of high efficiency. Although it is said that you can be efficient without motivation, there is no efficiency without motivation. So how do you motivate yourself?

Through research, the author found that motivation is a skill that can be learned and exercised, and the most important thing to stimulate motivation is to have control. The so-called control means that we believe that we can control the situation, our own behavior and the external environment.

Studies have found that the desire for control in our brains is actually an innate psychological need of human beings. For example, after children learn to walk and eat, they are more inclined to do these things by themselves. Even if they may fall when walking, parents will save more effort when feeding their children. Children prefer to do it by themselves, because it will make the brain feel that they can control the situation.

People who have control tend to work harder, be more confident, be tougher and live longer. If we want to have control, we must make decisions and choices independently, because having the right to choose will make our brains feel that they are in control of the situation, thus generating motivation and pushing us forward.

Therefore, even if we will face many passive, complicated and tedious situations in our life and work, we can improve our control by making choices actively.

For example, when you want to reply to a bunch of messy and boring emails or messages, you can choose a small part of them to reply first; When you have to deal with many tasks, you can start with interesting or simple tasks; When you have to do a lot of housework, you can choose to do something simple and easy first.

In short, actively trying to make a choice is an affirmation of our own values and goals, which can help us to have control and thus stimulate motivation.

In addition to taking the initiative to choose, we should also give meaning to our choices, because many things in life, even if we take the initiative to choose, will still find it difficult to complete and persist, and even want to give up. If we give meaning to our choices and actions, it will be easier to inspire motivation and stick to it better.

The recruits of the United States Marine Corps must receive painful and intensive training. When he is about to fail, the instructor will ask the other party why he wants to join the army, whether for his family or for his ideal. By asking each other questions, the recruits turned hard training into meaningful decisions, and motivation was generated.

Therefore, if we encounter tasks we don't like or arduous in life or work, we should give them meaning, connect them with our life goals and values, regard them as a footprint on the road of life, and tell ourselves that completing them will bring us closer to our goals.

After turning them into meaningful choices, we can feel the huge emotional rewards they bring, which can stimulate our control and give us the motivation to move forward.

Everything is difficult at the beginning, and stimulating motivation can make the beginning of things relatively simple. The core of motivation is to make your own choices, prove that you have control, give meaning to your choices, and prove that you are approaching meaningful goals, which will push us forward.

02 ? Only by combining the expansion goal with the smart principle can we effectively formulate achievable goals and plans.

Power is like car oil. With oil, cars have the power to move forward. However, it is definitely not enough for a car to have oil. It should also have a destination and route so that the car can play its role.

So do people. Motivation is obviously not enough. We also need to know where and how to go. In other words, we must set our own goals, so that the motivation can play a role and push us towards the goals. So, how should we set goals?

In the 1980s, General Electric was already one of the largest companies in the world. Why is GE so successful? The top management of the company once proudly said that one of the important reasons is that after decades of exploration, their company has established a system that can help employees set goals accurately. The system is an intelligent principle system:

Concrete (concrete)

mensurable

Achievable (realizable)

Reality (reality)

Timetable (with deadline)

Simply put, the smart principle requires that the plan must be practical and the goal must be achieved.

General Electric Company requires all departments and employees to make goals and plans according to the smart principle every quarter, and making goals according to the smart principle urges employees to study how to achieve this goal when making goals, not just hoping to accomplish a certain goal, but staying at the level of shouting slogans, so as to turn general wishes into concrete and feasible plans and make GE's performance grow rapidly.

But is it enough just to follow the smart principle? In the process of implementing the smart principle, the company's top management found that not all departments have achieved results, and some departments are even on the verge of collapse.

In this case, the first thought of the company's top management was that the goals set by these loss-making departments did not conform to the smart principle, but this idea was quickly overturned, because even if the loss-making departments made goals and plans that fully conformed to the smart principle, the losses continued. So the company's top management sent an advisory group to the loss-making department to investigate and study, and this study found a loophole in the smart principle.

It turns out that in order to comply with the smart principle, these loss-making departments like to focus on short-term goals that are easy to complete, or even meaningless goals, while ignoring long-term goals.

Short-term goals that conform to the smart principle are concrete and achievable, and often produce immediate results, which makes many employees, even management, addicted to the satisfaction brought by completing simple tasks, thus leading to limited vision and not thinking about whether the set goals are meaningful.

In order to solve this loophole, GE put forward an extended goal in the 1990s, which is difficult to achieve in the long and short term. After a lot of research, it shows that extending the goal can improve the expectation and promote the leap from the status quo, thus stimulating the potential and realizing the leap of innovation and efficiency.

However, although extending the goal can stimulate the potential, it is often out of reach and easy to cause depression. Therefore, the extended target should be used in conjunction with the smart principle to achieve the maximum effect.

The existence of extended goals allows us to set goals according to the smart principle, instead of being immersed in small goals that are easy to complete because of the pursuit of temporary satisfaction; In the face of an extended goal that is difficult to achieve in the short term, it will be impossible to decompose this unreachable goal into specific executable plans through the smart principle. It can be said that the success of GE is inseparable from the ingenious combination of extension goals and SMART principles.

And for us personally, it is the same. We have motivation, direction and goals. When setting goals, we should not only set expansion goals that include your lofty aspirations, but also set specific achievable goals in combination with the smart principle. In this way, we can not only know what we should do now, but also know that we have a long-term goal and avoid indulging in the satisfaction of completing short-term goals.

03 ? Only by establishing a mental model can we control our attention and help ourselves calmly cope with the changing future.

With motivation, goals and plans, we will move towards high efficiency. But it is not enough to be a truly efficient person, because there are many things in life and work that will distract us, so we must also be able to control our attention and keep ourselves focused.

However, concentration seems to be our most scarce ability at present. Our attention is distracted by all kinds of information, and our brain is often exhausted by interference, so we often can't concentrate when we need to concentrate. So, how do you control your attention and stay focused?

The author puts forward a good solution in the book: establishing a mental model. The mental model means that our brains will predict and imagine what will happen soon. People who are good at building mental models will imagine what they want to do. They can imagine many details, so when things happen, they can better decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

Two economists and a sociologist at MIT found that people who are good at building mental models really know how to allocate attention. Anyone can learn the method of building mental models, that is, to cultivate the habit of telling stories. Storytelling here refers to telling upcoming stories, that is, predicting and imagining what will happen. The more details you imagine, the better.

For example, on the way to work, you can imagine what will happen in the company today, what you will see when you get to the office, what you should do, and what you should say if the leader asks you to speak at the meeting; If you are a leader, you can imagine how the meeting will go before the meeting, what you will hear from the employees, and what you should do if the employees don't speak.

When we have predicted and imagined what will happen in our minds and built a mental model, it is easier to know what will happen. When it does happen, it is not difficult to grasp the key points and concentrate. In case of emergency, we can also better judge the information that should be ignored and valued, so as not to be at a loss.

Therefore, if you want to control your attention and focus on the really important things, you should form the habit of telling stories, describe what has happened, predict what will happen, often imagine what will happen next, what you will do, and how to solve such problems when you encounter obstacles or easily distracted things. In short, only by persisting in thinking can we establish a mental model and gain the initiative.

Bernard Shaw once said: There are only two things in the world, high efficiency and low efficiency; There are only two kinds of people in the world, efficient people and inefficient people.

This is an era that needs efficiency. We are all pursuing efficiency, but after investing a lot of time and energy, we often feel that we have little gain. We want to make full use of time, but often find ourselves caught in a false busy cycle; We have learned many efficient skills, but we still feel useless.

Because skills are limited, efficiency is a science and a way of thinking. Only by building an efficient thinking mode can we accomplish everything we need more efficiently and calmly, and can we cope with the ever-changing future better and smarter.