The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

A threat and the cur­rent situation

A recent study by an Amer­i­can-Ger­man trio of researchers, includ­ing the leg­endary Peter M. Goll­witzer, may offer a clue about what we can do to choose to car­ry out the eval­u­a­tion now, so we’ll be glad we did lat­er. In a series of five exper­i­ments with an aver­age of 190 par­tic­i­pants, the researchers had them both imag­ine some­thing neg­a­tive that could hap­pen, but that they could pre­vent by tak­ing action, and reflect on the pos­i­tive, real sit­u­a­tion they are in today, in dif­fer­ent orders.

Take the bad first

The researchers found that par­tic­i­pants who first imag­ined the neg­a­tive future and then the pos­i­tive present became more moti­vat­ed to do ​“the right thing” to pre­vent the neg­a­tive out­come than those who did it the oth­er way around. At a fol­low-up some time lat­er, it also turned out that the for­mer had actu­al­ly tak­en the actions since the ear­li­er exper­i­ments (they hadn’t mere­ly felt moti­vat­ed to do so).

Goll­witzer et al. inter­pret this as mean­ing that when we first imag­ine what we could lose and then pay atten­tion to what we have, we val­ue what we still have more high­ly and become more moti­vat­ed to do what we can to keep it.

Back to reality

Let’s apply this to the project eval­u­a­tion sit­u­a­tion. When we’ve just fin­ished a project and are faced with the choice between spend­ing time on eval­u­a­tion and doing oth­er tasks clam­or­ing for our atten­tion instead, we can imag­ine a future sit­u­a­tion in which, dur­ing the next project, we suf­fer a real­ly unpleas­ant (and expen­sive!) con­se­quence because we failed to address the cause of some­thing that also hap­pened in the pre­vi­ous project. What would it feel like to have to solve that unnec­es­sary prob­lem all over again?

Then we reflect on how things are now, when the lat­est project is fin­ished, and we’ve solved all the prob­lems that arose and have almost for­got­ten them already. Now we’re in the clear, we made it through, and we feel sat­is­fied. It feels as lib­er­at­ing as the day after an exam, shel­tered from the storm of the next course that has yet to blow in.

Sure­ly that makes us more moti­vat­ed to eval­u­ate and fix the flaws so that things feel just as sat­is­fy­ing and pleas­ant towards the end of the next project, because we haven’t had to deal with those neg­a­tive con­se­quences since the prob­lems didn’t arise this time? I think so.

Here’s what to do

1. The next time you fin­ish some­thing sub­stan­tial that you do repeat­ed­ly, such as a project, and you’re tempt­ed to skip the eval­u­a­tion (because you’ve solved the prob­lems that arose now, after all!), first imag­ine what it will be like on that day in the future, next time around, when that prob­lem crops up again.
2. Then reflect on how it feels right now, when you’re through it, free, and eager to jump into the next project. Wouldn’t it be nice if it could feel like this all the time, includ­ing while you’re work­ing on what comes next?
3. Con­sid­er again whether it might actu­al­ly be worth the time and effort to car­ry out that eval­u­a­tion. Couldn’t you at least eval­u­ate more than you usu­al­ly do, even if it doesn’t become the ulti­mate project eval­u­a­tion with all the bells and whistles?

A ben­e­fi­cial contrast

If you engage in this ​“men­tal con­trast­ing”, as the researchers call the method, you’ll be more like­ly to make the changes that you’ll lat­er be grate­ful you made, judg­ing by the find­ings of this study.

If you’ve strug­gled to estab­lish a habit or rou­tine that you believe would be valu­able for your work or for your­self, this fair­ly sim­ple tech­nique could be worth try­ing. I def­i­nite­ly will.

How do you do it?

Do you recog­nise the expe­ri­ence of con­trast­ing a threat­en­ing future with a present worth pre­serv­ing, and find­ing that it moti­vates you to ​“do the right thing”? Write to me and tell me, because any tech­niques we can use to make deci­sions that do us good in the long run are worth their weight in gold, both to me and to every­one I meet. 

(Speak­ing of projects, have you ever found your­self need­ing to devel­op some­thing new with­out a clear idea of how to go about it? Let the project man­ag­er agent in Plan­ner help you with your project!)