More than a year ago I bought Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. I read the first bit of it, and then let it gather cyber-dust on my Kindle. Recently I dug back in and finished it. Mostly, I liked it a lot. The authors talk about willpower as a finite entity, something you can use up and have to replenish. You just can't say to yourself, "I am going to work hard all morning, without succumbing to distractions, and then eat an entirely virtuous lunch, and then be perfectly calm and reasonable while talking to the relative-in-law who drives me up the wall." It doesn't work.
One of the most interesting bits of the book for me was the role of glucose in easing ego depletion (the authors' term for the state in which your willpower is tapped out for the time being). You need physical fuel to exert your will. This is one of the reasons that dieting is a losing proposition, they say, because trying to consume less fuel (for the diet) at the same time that you are trying to exercise more willpower (also for the diet), is a little like trying to run while your feet are duct-taped together. (My analogy, not theirs, so disregard if it doesn't work for you.) It was interesting to me to see this in action on a recent Monday. I had a long list of things to accomplish, and I spent the morning hustling through it and resolutely pushing aside all distractions. I had eaten my usual breakfast, but by the time noon rolled around I was so hungry I was shaking.
It's a good thing they didn't put the chapters in chronological order, because the one on kids had enough clunkers in it that I might have abandoned ship altogether had it come earlier in the book. I would not Ferberize a baby in the name of fostering self-discipine; I would not leave an infant shrieking with hunger to shriek in the interest of teaching him to wait for things. If there is long-term research suggesting that a parent's choice to respond to a wailing baby is associated with later willpower deficits, I'm not aware of it. The religion chapter also made me laugh, because they seem so determined to find a non-supernatural explanation for the ways that religious commitment can strengthen people's willpower. I'd recommend it anyway: it's well grounded in the existing science but at the same time full of interesting anecdotes and highly readable.
Not long before I read this book I finished Eat That Frog, which was challenging and thought-provoking but also a little discouraging. Why, I wondered as I was reading it, can I not discipline myself to sit down at 8:30 and crank through 3 hours of grading? Willpower gave me some concrete strategies for figuring out why and making progress toward the goal, even on days when I do not have the heart to eat all of my frog in one go. Eat That Frog instructs readers to write down some goals. I am surprised to find that I am already making headway on some of them -- more headway than I would have expected. (On others, not so much. I'll keep plugging.)
I also picked up the third in Laura Vanderkam's series of three ebooks, What the Most Successful People Do At Work. Some of the material in this one was familiar: logging your time is a concept that she comes back to again and again. I was struck by the chapter on making success possible. I am the queen or perhaps the empress or perhaps even the Grand Poobah Of The Known Universe when it comes to overly ambitious to-do lists, and this chapter was a good reminder that you shoot yourself in the foot when you set yourself too many tasks to do in a week and resolve to finish them in a day.
A theme across both Willpower and What the Most Successful People Do is the need for accountability in meeting goals. I've abandoned my Sunday Night Strategizing lists here in favor of a Ravelry group for academics. It's been an unexpectedly powerful tool for getting things done. I've been busy, often working late into the night, but it's been a good busy, a productive busy.
P.S. In a guilt-alleviating addendum to this post, I would like to say that I requested a review copy of Laura Vanderkam's book All the Money in the World before I realized that review copies leave me feeling pressured and reluctant to write. Kind of silly, but both times that I have requested review copies I have avoided the actual review-writing for more than a year. Lesson learned! All the Money was worth reading. I'm also a fan of the other What the Most Successful People... ebooks -- in fact, I think I prefer the first two. One could argue that I have not actually discharged my reviewer responsibilties with a belated single paragraph, but I'm going to heave a sigh of relief and delete All the Money from my Kindle anyway. (Not because it's bad, but because I only keep current reads on my Kindle.)
Oh, wakeful girl upstairs. Posting without proofing...
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