Last year, the New York Times published an article (login required) citing research finding that about 80 percent of people who make New Year’s resolutions break them by Valentine’s Day. A study from 2007 supports this, saying only twelve percent of people achieve their New Year’s goals.

Perhaps this means that before we list our goals for 2011, we should take a closer look at our own attitudes towards goal-setting. What misconceptions do we have, and what can we do to remedy them?

Myth #1: Tell everyone your goals so that you’re publicly accountable.

In theory, publicizing your goals with friends, or on your blog or Facebook profile, might force you to achieve them, so as not to be seen as someone who’s all talk and no action. But according to a 2009 study by goal-setting researcher Peter Gollwitzer (PDF), this isn’t always true. Most people state their behavioral goals in very general terms (“My goal is to eat healthier”) that gives the premature impression we’ve already done them.

Here’s what works instead: implementation intentions. Gollwitzer defines them (PDF) as a plan spelling out when, where, and how you intend to accomplish a goal. In fact, another study (PDF) shows that implementation intentions work so well that they can help you accomplish your goals despite the presence of distracting thoughts and emotions.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy after you establish a plan. You’ll need to check and update your plan often. It’s also important to start working on your goal as soon as possible. The more time your goal remains inactive after you’ve stated your intentions, the less likely you are to accomplish it.

Myth #2: Reward yourself for your progress.

Some people suggest that to keep yourself focused and motivated in your pursuit of a goal, you need to have rewards for accomplishments. For example, if you successfully stick to your schedule for a week, you’ll give yourself the license to go out with friends during the weekend. While there’s nothing wrong with rewards per se, you need to be careful about how you think of them.

Research shows that for large goals (e.g.. becoming healthier) that have many supporting subgoals (e.g.. sticking to a diet, exercising regularly), whenever you successfully achieve a subgoal, you should reward your personal commitment to the larger goal rather than to  your progress. Rewarding yourself for achieving one subgoal may lead you to ignore the other subgoals, because you’ll view them as substitutes. If you reward your commitment to the larger goal, the subgoals will seem interrelated, and you’ll be more driven to pursue each of them.

Myth #3: Focus on yearly goals.

By definition, New Year’s resolutions are goals that must be achieved within a year. While this tradition can work for some goals, it may not be effective to use such a long time-frame. First, even if we think we know ourselves well, we tend to be poor predictors of what we’ll need or feel in the future. Our perspectives, situations, and desires may differ greatly within a year. Second, most research (PDF) backs up the idea that setting short-term goals is more effective than looking at the big picture. This means that even if you have a list of yearly goals, it’s better to break them down into smaller monthly or weekly subgoals.

Given these goal-setting myths, we should be more attentive to how we set our goals, what works in practice, and what only seems effective in theory. By looking at our goal-setting behavior together with the goals themselves, we’ll be more likely to accomplish more this year.

Do you set goals during the New Year? Which tactics improve your success rate?

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In a recent NPR Science Friday interview, Dr. Christopher Chabris, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Union College, offers a similar position: “It’s a fallacy that we’re able to multitask and do two or three or four or five things just as well as we could do them if we did them one at a time. The problem is that we don’t really get the sense of how badly we’re performing these multiple tasks at once, and we think we’re doing them just fine.” I know plenty of people who claim to be great multitaskers, but I wonder how much of that is perception vs. reality.

I’m a bit of a productivity nut, and I actually take a few minutes at the end of each day to jot down a few things that I accomplished. This helps me make sure that I really am getting work done and being productive, and it gives me a point of reference that I can use later for status reports or questions about my work. From this experience, I know that I get much more work done when I stay focused on the task at hand by working in chunks to complete one thing at a time. When I try to do multiple things at once, I still get everything done eventually, but the tasks aren’t completed as quickly and quality often suffers as a result.

Your Homework Experiment

• Take two periods of time (maybe four-hour or two-hour periods of time) where you plan to do similar work.
• In one time period, multitask as much as you want.
• In the other time period, turn off Twitter, email and other distractions to focus on one task at a time (working in chunks)
• After you finish each period, write down everything that you completed along with a quick quality assessment of the output.

Which time period allowed you to get the largest amount of work done?

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Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian (foreground) speaking at GigaOM's Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco

The rise of smartphones is having an impact across the entire technology food chain. Not only are companies like Motorola moving more phones, app developers are seeing a quick jump in their fortunes. But far from the bright lights and attention are companies that provide vital building blocks, who are also enjoying the good times. These include chip companies like Qualcomm and cloud services provider Heroku, which offers its platform as a service and is based on Amazon’s raw infrastructure.

San Francisco-based Heroku, which has been focused on being a Ruby-on-Rails cloud platform, has seen a sudden demand for its service from mobile app developers, according to Byron Sebastian, chief executive officer of the two-year-old company, which is backed by the likes of Redpoint Venture Partners and Ignition Partners. The biggest boost for Heroku is going to come when RhoMobile, an open mobile framework company, shifts RhoHub, its hosted app development platform, to Heroku. That move alone will add 8,000 mobile developers to Heroku’s cloud service.

According to Heroku, in a survey, nearly 30 percent of its customers said they are building mobile apps, and nearly 60 percent indicated a high interest in developing mobile offerings. Heroku currently has over 83,000 apps (mobile and web) using its platform. Some of the more popular apps are doing 1,000 to 3,000 http requests per minute. Many are offering mobile-friendly HTML, but many are also using RESTful interfaces.

Mobile apps using Heroku’s infrastructure services include Spreadsong’s Freebooksapp and Intridea’s Oil Reporter. Colin Plamondon, co-founder and CEO of Spreadsong, points out that most mobile applications are essentially a pretty interface for web services content and have similar needs to any web application. That’s good news for companies like Heroku.

P.S. If you are a cloud services provider and want to discuss trends with me, drop me an email.

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Balanced Approach to Control

First, you need to take a balanced approach to stress by focusing on the things you can control. Most people who have real issues dealing with stress let too many things that are out of their control increase their stress level. If something is out of your control, then worrying about it or dwelling on it to the point that it causes you stress just isn’t productive. Take a step back and think about the problem with an objective eye toward focusing your time and energy on those things that you can control and focusing your work in areas where you can have an impact. Learning to let the rest go and not letting those things that are out of your control increase your stress level is very difficult, but it can be mastered with practice. People who regularly read my posts will notice that this is a common theme for me; in most things, I have learned to focus on a few areas and let the rest go.

Get Out and Get Moving

Getting regular exercise and keeping your body moving is a time-honored way to reduce stress. Exercise increases your endorphin levels and gives you a boost, which is why I try to exercise during lunch when the weather isn’t too hot because it gives me a nice little break in the middle of the day and lets me hit the afternoon with a fresh burst of exercise-induced energy. This is also a perfect opportunity to get some fresh air and maybe even a little sunshine, depending on where you live. Even if you just get outside long enough to make the trip to the gym, getting out of your home office for a short break and a little fresh air can be useful. On those days where your schedule refuses to cooperate, even a 5-10 minute walk around the block can really help reduce your stress.

Socialize

Great conversation and laughter with friends is one of my favorite ways to reduce stress. When was the last time you had a nice lunch away from the computer or went to happy hour with some friends after work? Make it a point to plan a couple of activities with friends every week. This doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming. Take a 20-minute walk at lunch with a friend, work out or run with a partner, invite a few friends to happy hour or dinner, or even attend some local social events related to your areas of interest. Talking to real people, in person, is a great way to decompress after a long day at work and reduce our stress.

Reading and Hobbies

Turn the television off, shut the lid of the laptop and spend a few minutes doing something in the real world that doesn’t involve typing. I love to read, and I try to spend at least 30 minutes every evening with a book — the dead tree kind — to get away from the glare of the computer screen. I also like to turn on some music and cook a real dinner occasionally (you know, the kind of dinner where you recognize the ingredients as something from nature, rather than something out of a box). If you don’t have a hobby, find one, and spend some time relaxing and forgetting about the things that leave you stressed out at the end of the day.

The real key to managing stress is to stay ahead of it by making your stress reduction techniques just another part of your daily routine. By exercising, getting fresh air, socializing with friends and making time for your hobbies, you naturally keep your stress levels down without having to take any drastic measures later.

What are your favorite ways to reduce stress?

Photo by Aaron Hockley of Hockley Photography used with permission.

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OK, you get the idea. I like a more pragmatic approach. No one response or solution is going to be right for every situation, every person or every organization, and any “expert” who uses this type of absolutist thinking is probably not be someone you should rely on for advice.

Yes, I provide quite a bit of advice on blogs and for clients, but I try to show how my approach has worked for me or for my clients while giving people the flexibility to come up with a solution that works best for their needs. Many of these tips work for some people, but not for others. For example, my recent inbox zero post prompted this tweet from fellow WebWorkerDaily author, Doriano: “Inbox zero is just like the Loch Ness monster, bigfoot and honest politicians… don’t fall for it folks.” Obviously, he’s not a fan of inbox zero, but he probably has a system for managing and processing email that works just as well for him.

I like to try out a variety of approaches and see what sticks over the long term. When I switched from a PC where I used Outlook for email and tasks to a Mac, I had to find a new task management system. I probably tried a dozen different applications before finally settling on Hiveminder, which is working well for me, but I still continue to make slight tweaks to my system to become even more efficient at managing my to-do list. Plenty of friends made suggestions, and I read many online reviews of various task systems, but ultimately, I had to pick the one that was right for me and for my situation.

This is true in social media, too. No one approach will work for everyone, and people or companies shouldn’t be pressured into joining too many social web sites, especially if they aren’t prepared to spend the time required to maintain their presence. Businesses and people don’t have infinite amounts of time or money, so we need to carefully choose how we allocate our resources. The exact mix will probably be different for your business than for mine.

Don’t let consultants, experts, bloggers or friends bully you into a particular solution. Think about what you want and pick an approach that works for you.

How do you decide what works best for you?

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We have to take some risks if we want to be successful and make our mark on the world in some way. If you don’t believe me, here are a few quotes from people you might recognize:

“Taking risks takes practice, and if we keep doing the same things we already know, in the same way, our willingness to dare to be different atrophies.” — Kathy Sierra
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” — Helen Keller
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” — T.S. Eliot
“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” — Pablo Picasso

I’ve taken my share of risks. Some of those risks have turned into amazing experiences, while we’ll refer to some of the others as great opportunities for learning. Some risks that have turned out very well for me: moving to California to take a job at Intel and letting them move me again to Oregon 6 months later; organizing some large events for the Portland technology community where hundreds of people were counting on us to pull it off’ co-founding a non profit; blogging; speaking at events in front of hundreds of people; and many more. I’ve also learned a few things from some of the risks that didn’t pan out as well: not every online community can be saved; the best technological solution doesn’t always win no matter how much you wanted it to succeed; and some projects just need to killed swiftly before they die a long, slow and painful death.

The key to taking risks is to keep things in balance without swinging too far toward either extreme. Don’t jump into something that involves a serious risk without at least taking some time to do a little research and think about whether you are doing the right thing. However, you don’t want to make the mistake of swinging too far toward the other extreme of  over-analyzing every possible outcome and missing the opportunity.

If you aren’t already a natural risk taker, here are some tips to get you started.

1. Find some work that takes you outside of your comfort zone that involves both some risk and a nice reward, but that won’t leave you bankrupt or dead if it doesn’t work out. In other words, start with some small risks and work your way up.
2. Do just enough research to make a smart decision about the opportunity. Don’t just jump in and do something stupid without at least taking a quick look at what you might land in after the jump, but don’t spend forever analyzing it, either.
3. Ultimately, just do it. Try something and see if it works.
4. If you didn’t have a wild success the first time around, learn from your mistakes, go back to step one and try again.
5. If you were successful, go back to step one and try again with something a little bigger.

I try to make sure that I’m always doing something that feels at least a little uncomfortable. It is way too easy to coast along in life, but coasting is boring and not much fun. I’d rather take a chance and do something incredible (or fail miserably) and learn something new in the process.

How do you take risks?

Image by Flickr user lumaxart used under Creative Commons.

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First, let’s look at how people react to boredom in the work environment. According to Susan Cramm on the Harvard Business Review blogs, there is a good chance that you are making your job boring. Here are her three questions to test whether the thing that’s making your job boring is you:

1. Are you on autopilot? When we have been doing any task for a while, we tend to go on autopilot. This makes our jobs easier, but it also reduces our interest level and leaves us bored.
2. Is your energy level down? Boredom saps our energy reserves and makes it more difficult for us to focus on our work and be successful.
3. Have you become a conformist? After you’ve made the big changes needed early in the job, it can be too easy just to let things slide rather than continuing to look for areas where you can make additional improvements.

I have a few suggestions to help you snap out of your work-related boredom.

• Exercise. Yes, this really is my answer to almost everything. Exercising increases our endorphin levels and helps us stay energized. This will help you get your energy levels back up, and you might even think of some new ideas while you exercise.
• Change the way you do routine tasks. Kick yourself off of autopilot and experiment with some new ways of doing things. Take a routine task, and do something a little differently with the goal of finding some way to improve the process. You just might find a better way to accomplish the task, but even if it isn’t an improvement, you’ll probably come out of it with a renewed interest.
• Pick up a new, challenging project. I try to take on new projects that will be a challenge or at least something a little different from my normal client work; sometimes these are fun, side projects or new client engagements. In Meryl’s plans for 2010 post, she talked about how she takes on a new, challenging project every year to stretch herself. When I was working in corporate jobs, I used to always volunteer for special projects and teach classes for employees because doing something new helped me stay energized and excited about my job.
• Set improvement goals. Pick one thing every couple of months that is important, but that you haven’t focused on in a while, and set a goal of making at least one improvement in that area. This could be a personal development project or some neglected aspect of your work. The idea is to make some kind of regular improvements to break you out of the conformity cycle.
• Find a new hobby or non-work related project. I’ve found that when I am bored outside of work, this can carry over into the work day. Find a fun new hobby that will keep you energized during your off-hours, and you just might find that it helps improve your energy during the work day as well.
• Get a full night of sleep. Yes, I know you are busy and that sleep just cuts down on the hours that you can be doing something more fun. However, being a half-asleep zombie at work will drain your energy and make you feel bored even when the work itself isn’t all that boring. Try it for a week, and see if you don’t have more energy. You might realize that you enjoy those waking hours even more when you are well rested.

These are just a few of the techniques that I have used over the years to avoid succumbing to boredom, but I’m sure that there are other great ways to get re-energized and excited about your work.

How do you break out of the boredom cycle and stay excited about your work?

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Really, what is a good work ethic?

I’ve heard a lot over the years that younger generations don’t understand the value of hard work, so if we don’t understand it, how would we know what constitutes hard work these days?

In my own life and business, I’m simply searching for the right balance — not being a workaholic, but also not being lazy or afraid to get my hands dirty, break a sweat, or pay my dues. Where is the happy medium between those two extremes?

I’ve heard many times that “overnight success” takes a long time and a lot of effort to achieve. There are times when I think, “Will I ever get there?” (wherever there is), and I usually follow that question with, “Am I just expecting too much too quickly? Have I really worked long enough and hard enough to deserve success?”

There are many times when I know that I work very hard for long hours, but then the internal debate becomes, “Am I a workaholic?”

I know I have the strength to bring seemingly huge projects to completion in short amounts of time with very concentrated effort, but what does that mean? Does it mean I have a “feast or famine” work ethic, or does it mean I’m hard-wired to work intensely for a certain length of time and then be completely off for a certain length of time to recoup? I don’t know the answer.

Maybe it’s a crazy debate, but I think it’s easy for web workers especially to become workaholics and not have a healthy mix of work, physical health and relaxation and fulfilling relationships.

What are your thoughts? What do you think constitutes a good work ethic?

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