Willpower

by their worst-case predicted date. The planning fallacy can affect just about everyone, but it takes a special toll on procrastinators who expect to get the job done in one concentrated burst of effort at the last minute. This strategy might work if they left themselves a big enough chunk of time right before the deadline, but they won’t do that. They’ll underestimate how long the work will take, and then they’ll discover that they don’t have enough time left to do it well.
    One way to avoid the planning fallacy is to force yourself to think about your past. If Tice’s dilatory student had seriously considered how long it had taken her to write previous term papers, she might have allowed more than a couple of hours for the next one. In the honors-thesis experiment, when students were directed to base their future plans on their previous projects, they were much more realistic in predicting the completion date of their theses. Another finding was that students were also much more realistic and hence more accurate at predicting the completion dates for other students’ theses. All of us, whether or not we’re serious procrastinators, tend to have an optimistic bias toward our own work, so it makes sense to ask others to review our plans. You might write a quick e-mail outlining your plans, or just describe it briefly in a conversation. Or you can be a little more systematic (without getting too complicated) by following the management technique that Aaron Patzer used to guide Mint.com from a small start-up to a company tracking the finances of millions of people.
    “We simply ask our managers and other workers to set their top goals for the week,” Patzer says. “You can’t have more than three goals, and it’s fine if you have less than three. Each week we go over what we did last week and whether we met those goals or not, and then each person sets the top three goals for this week. If you only get goals one and two done, but not three, that’s fine, but you can’t go off working on other goals until you’ve done the top three. That’s it—that’s how we manage. It’s simple, but it forces you to prioritize, and it’s rigorous.”

Don’t Forget the Basics (like Changing Your Socks)
    As you start working toward your goal, your brain will automatically economize on willpower expenditures in other ways. Remember those college students at exam time whom we discussed in chapter 1—the ones who became lax about changing socks, washing their hair, cleaning up the dishes, and eating healthy food? To them, these cutbacks might have seemed a fair price to pay in order to channel all their energies into preparing for exams. But it probably didn’t seem fair to some of the roommates who had to smell their socks and clean up the messes, and the resulting disputes may well have left everyone drained. In the long run, slovenliness can leave you with less energy—and fewer healthy relationships.
    Forget the image of starving artists who do great things by working around the clock in filthy garrets. Self-control will be most effective if you take good basic care of your body, starting with diet and sleep. You can indulge yourself in rich desserts, but be sure to get enough healthy food on a regular basis so that your mind has adequate energy. Sleep is probably even more important than food: The more that researchers study sleep deprivation, the more nasty effects they keep discovering. A big mug of coffee in the morning is not an adequate substitute for sleeping until your body wakes up on its own because it has gotten enough rest. The old advice that things will seem better in the morning has nothing to do with daylight, and everything to do with depletion. A rested will is a stronger will.
    Another simple old-fashioned way to boost your willpower is to expend a little of it on neatness. As we described in chapter 7, people exert less self-control after seeing a messy desk than after seeing a clean desk, or when using a sloppy rather than a neat and wellorganized Web site. You may not care about whether your bed is made and your desk is clean, but these environmental cues subtly influence your brain and your behavior, making it ultimately less of a strain to maintain self-discipline. Order seems to be contagious.
    Watch out for other kinds of cues, too, that can influence your behavior one way or the other. Bad habits are strengthened by routine: The doughnut shop you pass on the way to work, the