We’ve all been there: it’s 4.30pm on a Friday and although there’s one more job to finish, the sun is out and you can practically taste the beer being sipped alfresco in the street below.
Or perhaps you’re struggling with two tasks at work and the least critical one happens to be the most fun. How do you persuade yourself to crack on with the dull one first?
These are the moments when good impulse control can be crucial for getting through those important things on our to-do lists – whether you’re running a microbusiness or just trying to navigate through the working day.
In a world increasingly governed by instant gratification and our addictive smartphones, controlling our impulses may seem borderline impossible. After all, it’s only human nature to want to enjoy ourselves or indulge in some short-term gratification. But with a few cunning tricks and a little willpower, it is possible to resist temptation and plough through the important stuff first.
Perhaps the most famous work on impulse control involved the so-called “marshmallow test”. During the 1960s and 1970s, in a nursery on California’s Stanford University campus, groups of children aged 3-5 were offered a marshmallow or similar sweet treat, but with a catch: if they waited for 15 minutes without succumbing to temptation, they could have two marshmallows.
Walter Mischel, the psychologist who led the research, suggested a link between the children’s ability to exert self-control and better outcomes in later life. More recent research, however, has raised questions about how significant or lasting any such link is – with some academics finding that the effect of a child’s self control is outweighed by other factors, such as their environment and family background.
One of the children who took part in the original tests was Susan Wojcicki, now the chief executive of YouTube, who waited longer for her sugary treats than many of the other children. Her mother, Esther Wojcicki, a California-based teacher and author of How to Raise Successful People, thinks the challenge set her daughter in good stead: “Susan is one of the most patient and logical people I know. She’s also tremendously calm under pressure. Nothing fazes her. She has enormous self control.”
When it comes to improving your own impulse control, it can be helpful to think of it as a two-stage process: first, resist the initial temptation, and second, maintain that resistance. You can do the former simply by making it harder for yourself – for instance, locking your mobile phone in a drawer or disabling your social media apps when you need to focus on a task. You could then set up a routine to reduce your long-term dependence on your phone, perhaps by exercising instead of scrolling.
One trick is to slow down and force yourself to really think through the repercussions of giving into that whim. After all, when our whims hijack our precious time, they become obstacles to our ultimate goals. If you can picture the future you, work finished, craving forgotten, then you can think more rationally about the task in front of you. Another option is to write yourself a memo about why you are tempted by something, or even just send yourself a voice message. The point is to just make yourself more aware of it.
Jules McKeen, a former advertising executive who has just launched Sarka London, a clothing brand for postnatal women, likens impulse control to the technique called “sighting” used in open-water swimming. This involves holding your course in, for example, a river, by fixing your gaze on a tree in the distance. “If you lose track of the tree and glance instead at a nice bird, you will end up swimming much farther and it will take you longer,” she says.
McKeen recalls how working to a tight deadline before her new website went live meant she had to work extra hard to curb her usual urge to say yes to everything: “I had to be very disciplined about [for example] not meeting up for lunch with someone who might be helpful in three years’ time.”
Zoe Whitman, who runs But the Books, a bookkeeping business in Bristol, emphasises the importance of resisting digital distraction. She advocates closing your inbox and checking for email just twice a day, or opening a new browser window when you need to concentrate on something online.
That said, when it comes to juggling different tasks at work, Whitman says acting on certain impulses can sometimes be useful, provided that whatever you’re tempted into doing won’t take you too long.
She advocates the “two-minute rule”, made famous by productivity guru David Allen: “I work to the rule that if something will only take two minutes to do, I should do it straight away because otherwise I’ll add it to my to-do list, procrastinate about it, and then eventually get around to doing it in a week’s time.”
Whatever your business, don’t keep knocking essential tasks to the bottom of your to-do list.
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