Willpower

immune system. The next time you’re preparing to drag your aching body to work, here’s something to consider: Driving a car with a bad cold has been found to be even more dangerous than driving when mildly intoxicated. That’s because your immune system is using so much of your glucose to fight the cold that there’s not enough left for the brain.
    If you’re too glucose-deprived to do something as simple as driving a car, how much use are you going to be in the office (assuming you make it there safely)? Sometimes the job has to be muddled through, but don’t trust the glucose-deprived brain for anything important. If you simply can’t miss a meeting at work, try to avoid any topics that will strain your self-control. If there’s a make-or-break project under your supervision, don’t make any irrevocable decisions. And don’t expect peak performance from others who are under the weather. If your child has a cold the day of the SAT test, reschedule it.
    When you’re tired, sleep. We shouldn’t need to be told something so obvious, but cranky toddlers aren’t the only ones who resist muchneeded naps. Adults routinely shortchange themselves on sleep, and the result is less self-control. By resting, we reduce the body’s demands for glucose, and we also improve its overall ability to make use of the glucose in the bloodstream. Sleep deprivation has been shown to impair the processing of glucose, which produces immediate consequences for self-control—and, over the long term, a higher risk of diabetes.
    A recent study found that workers who were not getting enough sleep were more prone than others to engage in unethical conduct on the job, as rated by their supervisors and others. For example, they were more likely than others to take credit for work done by somebody else. In a laboratory experiment offering test takers the chance to win cash, students who had not slept enough were more likely than others to take advantage of an opportunity to cheat. Not getting enough sleep has assorted bad effects on mind and body. Hidden among these is the weakening of self-control and related processes like decision making. To get the most out of your willpower, use it to set aside enough time to sleep. You’ll behave better the next day—and sleep more easily the next night.

3.
    A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TO-DO LIST, FROM GOD TO DREW CAREY
    In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; and the earth was without form and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was brooding upon the face of the waters.
    —Genesis 1:1

    I n the beginning was the list.
    Creation, as the Bible tells it, was not a simple job, not even for an omnipotent deity. The project required divine brooding, which did not mean that God was unhappily mulling it over. It meant that the heavens and earth, like an egg, required a period of incubation. The project had to be broken down into a schedule of daily tasks, starting with Monday’s to-do list:
    1. Let there be light.
    2. Observe light.
    3. Confirm light is good.
    4. Divide light from darkness.
    5. Give name to light (Day).
    6. Give name to darkness (Night).
    Thus was writ the weekly calendar: Tuesday for firmament-making chores, Wednesday for creating land and trees, Thursday for stars, Friday for fish and fowl, Saturday for man and woman, Sunday for R&R. The tasks were checked off one at a time, then reviewed at the end of the week: “And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
    Does that restful weekend sound anything like yours? At first glance, the Genesis strategy seems ridiculously obvious: Set a goal; make a list of the steps to reach it; do them; relax. But how many mortals actually cross off all the items on their weekly list? Our failure rate keeps climbing as the lists keep getting longer. At any one time, a person typically has at least 150 different tasks to be done, and fresh items never stop appearing on our screens. How do we decide what goes on the list and what to do next? The good news is that there are finally some practical answers, but it’s hardly been a straightforward process to discover these strategies. Only after decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists, after centuries of self-help books and millennia of trial and error, can we recognize the essential components of the Genesis to-do list.
    The first step in self-control is to set a clear goal. The technical term researchers