I call this "letting all the steam go to the whistle instead of the wheels"
Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
61–70 of 179 posts
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#62How else can you get validation?
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#63How would this work in the context of work in a team? Say you have an idea for fixing a bug. Without telling the manager about your intent how could you actually work on it? The manager comes quickly to find where all your hours went doing what pursuit.
Managers aren't hour bean counters or people you need permission from to do work. Of course, I'm not speaking of toxic environments.
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#64Announcing plans is good because then you can actually get some satisfaction from it. You’re never going to accomplish anything anyway so you might as well take the happiness where you can get it.
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#65Hm. I've heard the exact opposite e.g. if you want to keep yourself accountable about doing something then you should tell everyone you know that you're doing it.
I think that only works if you tell people that will hold you accountable, like if you tell your spouse that you'll mow the lawn, they'll hold you to it. If you're posting "I'm going to lose weight this year!" on social media, people probably won't hold you accountable and you'll still be glad that you collected a bunch of likes and thumbsups without having to accomplish anything.
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#66I'm exactly opposite of that. If I announce plans, that adds an additional cost (embarrassment) to failing to accomplish them, which makes it less likely that I'll procrastinate or abandon the effort.
This only works if people are excited for what you are making. I once worked on an ambitious game for months, and then decided to make an announcement about what I was building. The reaction from most people was meh. I stopped working on it about a month later and all remaining copies of it have since been deleted by now. Never released.
> This only works if people are excited for what you are making.
I suppose I should have been more specific. I'm not talking about a public announcement, I'm talking about announcing it to my personal friends and colleagues. Whether or not they are excited by the project itself isn't really a factor -- they'll still want to know how the project is going.
I tend not to make any public announcements until at least beta.
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#67Reminds me of a quote from Sara Blakely:
“I was very careful right away, it was a gut instinct that I had, to keep it to myself because I believe ideas are most vulnerable in their infancy, and it’s instinct to turn to your right or left in that moment and tell a friend, or tell your husband, and the moment you do that ego is invited into the mix, and then you end up spending all your time defending it, explaining it, and not pursuing it”
How I Built This podcast (9m20s)
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#68Caveat for team and organizations: often leadership announces grand initiatives with great fanfare and the lack of follow-up, perceived or real makes people cynical.
Unfortunately, you cannot avoid announcing your plans if you expect others to follow you - its possible people don't understand what you want to achieve and end up just as frustrated. This is part of a leaders job.
I like what TA said about "make sure not to say it as a satisfaction but as dissatisfaction"- definitely keeping the focus on what you want to fix is better than the specific solution you've devised - you might end up finding a better solution anyway and people will help you do it.
Make announcements on small sub-plans often and follow-up even more often, so that people know feel that whatever you want to implement in your team/organization is happening. Definitely tell them a long-term goal, but keep the focus on the next task that needs to be done. And make the "small" announcements at the moment you feel you are ready to answer all questions the team might ask you, but not earlier.
So, to be effective in an organization you need to do "continuous announcing" of small plans.
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#69This article treats all types of announcements as being equal. Not so! A hazy announcement like "I'll be doing more to fight climate change" may indeed be empty virtue signaling that leads to nothing. But what about a more precise announcement like: "I'll be writing a book on Topic X, which I plan to publish 15 months from now, and I'll be completing one chapter on the 25th of every month until then"? Now we've got i…
The problem is that if the person is looking for some sort of validation, and the responses from people are ho-hum (or, worse, negative) that has a demotivating effect.
"Nobody is excited about my plan now; nobody will care when it gets done; why bother."
Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
#70I really hate this article. Pretty much everything I've ever accomplished in my life is because I speak it into existence and hold myself accountable. But then again, if you're the type of person who makes things happen, you don't rely on crappy psychology studies to tell you how to live your life.