Everybody likes to finish

Harness that sense of satisfaction to get big things done

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is that everybody likes to finish. We all like
to complete our tasks and achieve our goals. You can

(00:26):
leverage this appeal to boost your own productivity, and if
you're a manager, your team members as well. In a
recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Islet Fischbach and
Annabel Roberts wrote about a research finding that seems to
contradict economic theory. People, it seems, would rather pay or

(00:47):
be paid sooner, even when it is in their financial
interest to delay. For instance, lots of people want to
pay off their mortgage as soon as they can, even
if they would be better off financially making the contracted
payments and investing what's left over in the stock market.
In research that the authors did, they found that many

(01:09):
people would rather pay more for a service sooner rather
than pay a little less in the future, given the
time cost of money. This doesn't really make sense, but
the authors attribute it to what they call the promise
of relief. As they put it, people often prefer to
incur larger costs sooner and receive smaller benefits earlier when

(01:34):
doing so allows them to achieve a sense of completion.
They say this is especially true when a task or
payment is the last one to complete a goal, and
when people believe the unfinished task will hang over their
heads until it's done. They say, the psychological benefit of
closure can outweigh small time or financial gains, leading to

(01:55):
choices that might seem irrational at first glance but provide
significant psychological value. And you know what, I get that.
The truth is that everyone likes to finish. Keeping track
of undone tasks can be a pain, but there is
a downside to this desire to close the loop. We

(02:18):
often focus on easy stuff that we will be able
to finish, rather than wrestling with harder stuff where the
payoff is an immediate So Fishback and Roberts have a
few suggestions for warding off this temptation. One is that
managers reframe important goals as a series of smaller tasks,

(02:40):
each of which would grant employees a feeling of closure
upon completion. They write that way their direct reports won't
be pulled away by completing easier and quicker tasks like
deleting all their emails, that may be a little bit
less important. So, for instance, if you have a direct
report who is working on hiring a new marketing firm,

(03:00):
you might reframe that big goal into several smaller tasks.
Gathering insight from your team about what you're looking for,
writing a request for proposals, circulating that RFP, reviewing the proposals,
conducting screening interviews, arranging panel interviews for finalists, collecting evaluations
from interviewers, checking references, negotiating the contract, and finalizing the

(03:25):
higher That's a lot of tasks, and all of them
will be satisfying to complete. If the employee had been
focused on the big goal of hiring the new marketing firm,
it might have been harder to maintain focus and easier
to get pulled away to quick tasks. Much better to
make the most important goal a little more motivating. I

(03:46):
think an individual contributor could apply this logic to reframing
their own tasks too. Your manager doesn't have to do
it for you. You could consider each of the incremental
steps in a big project as a goal that will
be satisfying to finish. You could also identify distinct phases
in the project you will find yourself excited to finish

(04:08):
the final task. In each of those phases, there is
no point lamenting that people are irrational. We are, and
so we are a lot better off figuring out how
to leverage what we know about human behavior to nudge
us in the direction we want to go, and in
this case, that's in the direction of giving ourselves things

(04:30):
to finish, because finishing feels good in the meantime. This
is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the
most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.

(04:51):
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

(05:13):
listen to your favorite shows.