How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life

This book should suck. Really. The title clearly over-promises (“How To Have a Good Day,” indeed) and the text attempts three of the most difficult non-fiction high-wire acts: popularizing science without making stupid errors, presenting business advice that doesn’t trigger your bulls*** detector, and giving self-help tips that don’t fall off into either banality or featherbrained woo. Nearly impossible. And yet, somehow, Caroline Webb has pulled it off. “How to Have a Good Day” is a meticulously documented, step-by-step approach to leveraging contemporary research in cognitive science and behavioral economics to solve the real problems that keep us from being effective — and happy — in our day-to-day jobs and lives. And it’s not aimed at helping you “feel” better, but, rather, outlines a rigorously pragmatic approach to actually *doing* better: analyzing situations more effectively, making better decisions, and communicating with others with empathy and impact. Every piece of advice comes with a footnoted scientific study — often more than one — buttressing its claims. And Webb, a former partner at a management consulting firm, peppers the text with mini-case studies, anecdotes from business leaders across a wide spectrum of industries that reinforce each of the learnings. Taken together, these present a compelling argument that the advice doesn’t just work in the lab, but in the rubber-meets-the-road environments of the shop floor and the conference room. Webb opens the book with a section on the science. There are some familiar big ideas (the brain’s two-systems of deliberate thought and automatic or pre-conscious process; the fight-flight-freeze response which can keep us open to discovery or shut us down in defensive threat reaction; and the mind-body loop in which influence can go both ways) which Webb will weave throughout the book. If there is a core theme, it would be that by better understanding how our brain processes the world, we can become aware of and avoid the shortcuts and pitfalls of our unconscious biases and blind spots — and in so doing, increase the odds of our having successful interactions. (And that, often, it can be as simple an act as setting intentions that alerts the brain to the salient features it should be picking out.) If you’re familiar with cognitive science (or phenomenology) some of this may be sound obvious, but Webb’s skill is in taking these insights and showing how they lead to dysfunction in our everyday lives. We do not directly experience the world, but rather offload much of our administrative processing to sub-conscious systems — and therein lies the problem: we make snap judgements, improperly weight data, and can miss things that are literally right in front of our eyes. One example Webb uses to demonstrate this kind of inattentional blindness is the famous “gorilla in the basketball game” video (if you’re not familiar, here’s a helpful NPR backgrounder: [...] ). Webb offers a variety of tested methods for re-focusing our brain’s attention, keeping us in a creative, open state, and engaging the teams around us in ways that help keep them working at their full potential. Hint: It can be as simple as using the “yes…and” familiar to anyone who’s done improv comedy to keep other team members from going into the “amygdala hijack” of defensive mode. One weird trick I found particularly compelling was harnessing our social brain to solve abstract logic puzzles. Webb uses the example of the Wason selection task (see Wikipedia: [...]), in which you have four cards, showing D, F, 3, and 7, and are asked which cards you would need to turn over to test the truth of the assertion that any card with a “D” on one side must have a “3” on the other. A majority of people get this wrong. But then Webb suggests reframing it in social terms: “You’re a bartender. You have to make sure that anyone drinking beer in your bar is over twenty-one, or you could lose your license. Each of the cards below represents information about four of your patrons. One side of the card shows what they’re drinking, and the other side of the card shows their (real) age. Which card or cards to you need to turn over to see if the twenty-one-and-over rule is being violated?” The cards are: Beer, Coke, 25, and 16. Three times as many people get this right, because they’re leveraging their social knowledge. And as Webb points out, we can easily apply this framing to everyday conceptual challenges to provide extra processing power. And that’s just one cherry-picked example. The 300 pages of this book are packed with equally powerful bits of advice. Webb conveys this all with style and wit, in prose that is at once warm and unpretentious and yet totally at home with the complexities of the evidence she marshals to support her arguments. It is well-written down to the footnotes, and contains two helpful appendices on applying the book’s insights to the two main productivity killers of the business world, meetings and e-mail. I came away with half-a-dozen ideas for things to do differently (some as simple as single-tasking and batching the times I respond to e-mails) and I can virtually guarantee that you’ll find things that will make your days more productive and, yes, happier. Full disclosure: I used to work at the same company as Ms. Webb’s husband, but I have never met her.

For those of us without the time, means, or gumption to hire a career/life coach, there is help. Profound, tangible, and accessible help from this book. And blessedly, it requires little heavy lifting on our part. It turns out, the ways we get in our own way, the procrastinating, time-wasting, goal-sabotaging, can be squelched. While we’ve been suffering, a small army of academics has been figuring stuff out. It might in how our brains function, our evolutionary tendencies, or the habits (good or bad) we pick up. To be clear on what “How to Have a Good Day” is not: it requires no deep plumbing of the psyche, it pushes no “alternative” way of thinking. The topics are well known. We all know procrastination is bad, we may know multi-tasking is a fallacy. But why? And what can I do about it today? The author, professional career coach, researcher, and reader of 600(!) books on the topic of behavioral science, has distilled the best, most illuminating discoveries to help those of us who know better, but can’t do better. As declared in the title, yes, there is a measure of science-talk, but this is no science text. HTHAGD kicks off with an introductory primer on the concepts in play. Yet rest assured any haughty terminology has been thoroughly humanized, without being cerebrally neutered. Though even the author allows the book is navigable even if you skip chapter one. The remaining chapters drill down on seven topics, such as productivity, resilience, etc. Each topic is loosely pegged to a real individual’s overcoming of their respective obstacle (e.g. priorities). Webb threads in the most revelatory science and explains why this subject’s course of action worked. She then details the actionable things we can do (a specific breathing technique, a check-list, a mantra, and so on) to bring into our day. All the “tips” are packaged at the end of the chapter. So indeed, the book is built to be revisited by topic, say, two years from now on your worst day ever at work. An exhaustively comprehensive Rx for our everyday challenges. At once probing of our mental innards, and plainly, wonderfully practical. We know it does us no good to have another wasted day. With this book, we need no longer search in anguish for what to do about it. Fantastically beneficial from the first sit-down.

The advices in this book are useful, but they seem a bit superficial to me. I recommend "The Art of Thinking Clearly", or "Thinking, Fast and Slow" instead if you're interested in this field. Or if you are more proactive type, what about reading or rereading "4-Hour Work Week"?

This review isn't about the content but the format of the book. It's way too tiny in font and the page is filled from margin to margin with text. I'm not sure if I've received the wrong type of copy but this book needs magnifying glass! You probably can't tell by the photo but the space between lines seems a bit smaller than usual, and font is small, etc.

I really loved the concept of this book: The author uses research and case studies and combines them to practical advice for your working life. I did know the research already before, but Webb put the puzzle pieces for me together. The book covers different topics which are the ingredients of your working life: 1. science essentials (deliberate thinking, discover-defend-axis, mind-body loop) 2. priorities 3. productivity 4. relationships 5. thinking 6. influence 7. resilience 8. energy

Questo libro è stato per me una scoperta perché non mi ero mai avvicinato alla psicologia. Mi sono ritrovato molto nei comportamenti e nelle vicende rappresentate nel libro. Mi ha fatto riflettere sul fatto che qualsiasi attività umana, se analizzata con un approccio scientifico, risulta più facile da affrontare e da portare a termine.

Every chapter has a one decent insight. This is both the advantage and the problem the book.