Willpower Doesn’t Work. Here’s the Key to Being More Productive According to Neuroscience.

We have to outsmart the part of our brain that wants us to fail.

I used to believe that being more productive meant getting more done. That my personal productivity was defined by the sheer volume of tasks that I managed to take down each day.

And then one day, tired, exhausted, in a fit of rage that included heavy cursing and the belligerent kicking of stuffed animals (I happened to be in my young niece’s bedroom at the time) I experienced somewhat of an epiphany.

I shouldn’t define productivity by the total volume of tasks I manage to accomplish. After all, do I really care, at the end of the day, how many activities I get to cross off my list of to-dos?

What I should care about, I reasoned to myself, is what those activities promise to earn me. The benefits. The payoffs. The things I really cared about: fulfillment, money, health, status, impact, deeper relationships, etc.

And so right then and there, I decided to begin measuring my productivity using another metric. A metric I call return on effort.

In other words, instead of blindly executing one task after another as it appeared in my inbox, I would regularly ask myself a crucial question: what are the total rewards I expect in return for the total time I’ll spend to get them?

When I came to measure productivity in this way, it became immediately apparent that not all activities were created equal.

Indeed, there were two kinds of activities which, when I considered return on effort, differed considerably: maintenance and growth.

Maintenance vs Growth

Maintenance activities are effectively short-term obligations.

They are the “musts” in our life: consultants must consult, surgeons must perform surgery, managers must manage as well as occasionally conduct performance reviews.

Each one these professionals, moreover, must pay their insurance bills, file their taxes, and respond to emergencies that threaten to burn the house down, either literally or metaphorically.

To be sure, maintenance activities are necessary to perform. We’ve got to do them. Ignore them and you’ll eventually end up unemployed. Homeless. In the clink with the mob still trying to get to you on the inside.

However, for those looking for more than just survival, or even mediocre success, maintenance activities are nowhere near sufficient. Because what most people fail to realize is that these short-term obligations deliver relatively meager return on effort.

Maintenance activities, just like they sound, don’t do much more than maintain the status quo, preventing us from losing what we already have.

But then there are growth activities.

Growth activities drive our most important long-term goals. They take us beyond the status quo. “Coulds” rather than “musts”, these activities, as a result, deliver comparatively high return on effort.

Often strikingly so.

A consultant could spend a couple of hours each day for six months writing and publishing a book — I know one who did and in just a few short years, began earning 7x his salary.

A surgeon could deliver eight speeches a year at high profile conferences and soon find herself a nationally recognized authority with regular appearances in national media.

A manager could carve out time every single morning to read books on behavioral economics, and cognitive psychology, and in eight months become the best damn decision maker in the building.

And so it’s no surprise then, that when you look at the schedules of the world’s most productive people — the Elon Musks, the Oprah Winfreys, the Kevin Harts — what you invariably find is this: a disproportionately high number of growth activities.

Indeed, exceptionally productive people understand a simple truth: being more productive doesn’t mean getting more done. It means getting more of the right things done.

Unfortunately, most professionals, even relatively effective ones, manage to execute a depressingly small number of growth activities.

Not by choice. They try to take on more. However, a pernicious tendency stands in the way: procrastination.

They tell themselves that tomorrow they’ll start their online project management course, meditation practice, investment portfolio.

But when tomorrow comes, they find themselves unwittingly putting it off until the next day, and the then the next day, and then the next day. Until eventually they abandon the growth activity altogether.

That is until months later when the cycle repeats.

In the face of this procrastination, professionals tend to blame themselves. They uncharitably berate themselves for lacking the drive, the resolve, the inner strength.

But they shouldn’t.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience have revealed the real reason we fail. The true, nefarious culprit. A primitive system in our brain that doesn’t quite share our priorities.

But in order to illustrate exactly what that system is and what we can do about it, I need to first tell you a story.

The Real Reason We Procrastinate Growth Activities

I want you to imagine the driver of a car on his way home from work, cruising down a long and narrow road.

This driver, whom we’ll simply refer to as the Driver, has just recently decided to take on what he believes to be his most important growth activity: writing a book.

He’s motivated. He’s determined.

And now coming up on his right in about one mile is the library where he’s promised himself he’ll get started.

Now just as he’s about to make his right turn, he happens to see in the distance, that the local movie theater is screening the new Star Wars movie.

The Driver, committed to his growth activity, tries to ignore the distraction. He looks away. He bites his hands. He whistles loudly the tune to Stronger by Kelly Clarkson.

But it’s no use. He’s struck by a powerfully irresistible feeling that practically bars his hands from turning the steering wheel right.

After the movie, on his way home, 3-D glasses and half empty popcorn bucket on the seat next to him, he curses himself for making such a terrible choice.

The next day the Driver vows to do better. Today’s the day, he tells himself.

But this time, as he nears the right turn, out of nowhere, a thought hits him like a bolt of lightning: I can’t work on my book today, I have that urgent client report I need to write. So the Driver speeds past the library, races home, and plunges into his client work instead. The next morning, he wakes up and wonders, “What the hell was I thinking?”

For the next few days, the Driver continues to try to make the right turn, but fails every single time.

Dejected and confused, unable to understand why he keeps failing to do the very thing that he so desperately knows he should do, the Driver gives up. He throws in the towel.

At this point, the Driver needs help.

That’s where we come in to the story. You and I, dear reader, are his advisors. And our first task, in order to help the Driver overcome his procrastination, is to figure out why. What exactly is the root cause of the driver’s irrational behavior?

If we look again closely at the picture of the Driver sitting inside his car, we’ll quickly learn his persistent failures are no accident.

They’re sabotage.

Sitting beside the Driver, unbeknownst to him, is a passenger. An invisible bloke who, every time the driver tries to make his right turn, makes sure he doesn’t.

To the Driver, his inability to make the right turn is a bug. To the Passenger, it’s a feature.

If we want to help the Driver consistently make his right turn, arrive at library, and perform his growth activity, we have to first answer two obvious questions: Who is the Passenger and what in God’s name does he want?

Who is the Passenger?

By now you probably realize that the Driver and Passenger are a metaphor for the profoundly conflicted nature of the human mind.

The Driver represents the rational part of our brain. The more recently evolved prefrontal cortex. This is where we reason, make decisions, and plan for the future.

The Passenger, on the other hand, represents what is often thought of as the emotional part of our brain, the more primitive limbic system. One of the limbic system’s most important responsibilities is to respond rapidly to potential threats in our environment.

It’s clear from our story that the Passenger sees growth activities as one of these threats. But why? Why would part of our brain want us to avoid such high return on effort activities that, as we’ve learned, most help us thrive?

To make sense of this puzzle, we need to go back hundreds of thousands of years to a time when our singular priority wasn’t to thrive. It was to survive.

In an incredibly dangerous primitive world, early man couldn’t afford to spend his precious time and energy on activities that delivered delayed rewards, such as saving food for a rainy day or practicing proper running technique. By the time the payoff for these activities arrived, he might have already been devoured by a giant hyena.

Instead, he was better off spending his limited time and energy on activities that promised to deliver immediate rewards. Presently available ones like food or sex.

And so, evolutionary psychologists theorize, individuals who had Passengers with a strong preference for immediate rewards, or what we might commonly refer to as immediate gratification, were more likely to survive and pass on copies of their genes.

Today, of course, we are living in a radically different environment. But because evolution hasn’t quite caught up yet, we are still endowed with Passengers that strongly favor immediate gratification, and conversely, disfavor delayed gratification.

What a terrible, terrible, shame. Because growth activities, entail none other than delayed gratification. Whether it’s studying for the bar, practicing free throws, or reading long educational articles such as this one, the one thing these activities have in common is they require substantial effort now, for a greater payoff later.

Nonetheless, the Passenger, still attuned to our ancestral environment, sees growth activities as a threat to survival. Consequently, he does whatever it takes to make sure the Driver avoids them.