Willpower

isolate Mint’s effects against the larger background trend taking place between 2008 and 2010: a general increase in spending by everyone as the economy slowly improved after the panic of 2008. Still, the data—culled from two billion transactions of three billion anonymous users—showed some clear benefits of monitoring. For the great majority (80 percent) of people, the upward trajectory of their spending was tempered after they joined Mint and began monitoring their transactions. And most people’s spending was further tempered if they used the information to set up budgets and goals on Mint. The biggest effects were observed in people’s spending on groceries, restaurants, and credit card finance charges—some very sensible categories for cutting back.
    Some people are so horrified to see their spending totals that they vow to take drastic actions right away, but Mint’s founder advises a gradual approach. “If you cut too hard and too fast, you’ll never stick with it and you’ll hate yourself,” Patzer says. “If you’re spending $500 a month on restaurants and you try to set a new budget of $200, you’ll end up saying, ‘ Forget that! ’ It’s too hard. But if you reduce to $450 or $400, you can make that without radically changing your lifestyle. Then the next month you can go another $50 or $100. Keep the monthly changes to 20 percent until you get things under control.”

Not-So-Invidious Comparisons
    Once you’ve taken the first two steps in self-control—setting a goal and monitoring your behavior—you’re confronted with a perennial question: Should you focus on how far you’ve come or how much remains to be done? There’s no simple, universal answer, but it does make a difference, as demonstrated in experiments by Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago. She and a Korean colleague, Minjung Koo, asked employees at a Korean advertising agency to describe their current role at the agency and their current projects. Then, by random assignment, half were told to reflect on what they had achieved thus far in their current role, dating back to when they had joined the agency. The rest were instructed to reflect on what they planned to achieve but had not yet accomplished. The ones who wrote about what they had already achieved had higher satisfaction with their current tasks and projects, as compared with the ones who reflected on what they had not yet achieved. But the latter were more motivated to reach their goals and then move on to more challenging new projects. Those who focused on what they had already done did not seem eager to move on to more difficult and challenging tasks. They were reasonably content with where they were and what they were currently doing. For contentment, apparently, it pays to look at how far you’ve come. To stoke motivation and ambition, focus instead on the road ahead.
    Either way, you can gain additional benefits by comparing yourself with others, and that’s never been easier to do, thanks to the abundance of networked data. Mint will tell you how your rent and restaurant bills and clothing purchases compare with your neighbors’ or with the national average. RescueTime will tell give you a percentile ranking of your productivity—or your aimless Web surfing—in relation to the average user. Flotrack and Nikeplus and other sites let runners share their mileage and times with friends and teammates. You can get gadgets and smartphone apps to compare your energy usage with your neighbors’—and the comparisons make a difference, as demonstrated in a study of utility customers in California. When people got bills comparing their monthly electricity usage with the neighborhood average, the people in the above-average homes promptly cut back on their use of electricity.
    These sorts of comparisons become even more powerful when you start openly sharing your data with others. As we researched this book, we heard plenty of stories about people who benefited from monitoring themselves, like using pedometers to keep track of their daily steps. But the most enthusiastic walkers were the ones who shared each day’s tally with a few friends. They were applying a sound psychological principle that was demonstrated in some of Baumeister’s earliest experiments, long before he got involved in studying self-control: Public information has more impact than private information . People care more about what other people know about them than about what they