[Music] [Music] what do these four people have in common World War II General George Patton Oprah Winfrey photographer Edward Weston and Andy Warhol well they may have many things in common but the one that I know about is that they all are or were Avid diarists keeping track daily of the events in their lives their thoughts and their feelings over many years why do some people do this is it a personal eccentricity maybe a childhood habit that they never grew out of could it be something that they do because they want to get included in
the history books or might it be something useful that we could all take advantage of let me ask you how many of you keep a regular diary or Journal just raise your hand okay we clearly have a few eccentrics in the crowd but my guess is that many of you who didn't raise your hand gag at the thought of keeping a daily diary right yeah maybe you had a bad experience with it when you were a kid and your mother nagged you to keep writing that little diary that grandma gave you or maybe you've tried
journaling and you got intimidated by that blank page staring at you every night or maybe you were forced to keep a journal in a college course you took taught by some Nutty Professor that would be me when I teach my managing for creativity course at Harvard I require the students to keep a creativity Journal I tell them after the first class to write about a problem in their work or their life that they want to solve and then I say after each class spend about 15 minutes thinking about any connections between that problem and the
class readings the discussion that we had the exercises that we did during the day I encourage them to think broadly and to record their thoughts in any way that they wish writing sketching anything I'll never forget a student who took that course about 10 years ago named Sarah cow Sarah hated that assignment of course she didn't tell me at the time I found out from her last year she thought it was a childish exercise a waste of time keeping her from the important things she needed to be doing like her other coursework looking for a
job networking socializing she gritted her teeth and she did that assignment only because she didn't want to flunk the course but she told me not long ago that something interesting happened after she'd been keeping that diary for a couple couple of weeks she started to look back on her entries and she began to see some ideas that she could piece together and she actually began to look forward to her F few moments of reflection well here's Sarah today she's a successful entrepreneur she's shown here with her swell bottle the product that her company makes it's
been getting rave reviews in O magazine and the Today Show and lots of other places Sarah is is still a devoted diarist even now that her growing company keeps her working at least 15 hours a day in fact she told me last week that she needs that diary especially now because she's so busy so there's another piece of the puzzle keeping the diary because she's so busy and not despite it the rest of the puzzle comes from some research that my colleagues and I did over the past 10 years we wanted to look at what
makes people happy motivated productive and creative at work in order to look at that we ask people to well we ask them to do the thing that I seem to like making people do and we ask them to keep a diary and specifically we ask dozens of creative professionals to send us a daily confidential electronic diary during the entire course of a creative project that they were working on so every day Monday through Friday we sent a diary form by email to all the people participating in the study ask them to fill it out at
the end of the day the diary form had some survey questions at the beginning asking them about their emotions and their motivation that day that's what we call Inner work life at the end of a diary form there was an open-ended question asking people to briefly describe one event from the day that stood out in their mind and we that it can be anything at all as long as it's relevant to the work or the project in all we had 238 creative Professionals in 26 project teams in seven companies keep this diary for us and
all of them were working on projects that required creativity that is that required new ideas that would work in all we ended up with nearly 12,000 of these individual daily diary entries giving us an incredibly Rich look at the events that these people were experiencing in their lives and their inner work lives so when we put the inner work life data together with separate performance data we'd collected on everyone we made our first discovery and that is when people are feeling most deeply and happily engaged in their work they're more likely to be creatively productive
we call this the inner work life effect in other words on those days and those weeks when people are feeling most positive emotions the strongest intrinsic motivation for the work itself that is when they have the best inner work life that's when they're more more likely to be both creative and productive so if inner work life is so important for performance what drives inner work life to look at this we went into those 12,000 Diaries and we pulled out the very best inner work life days that people were experiencing so those days when they felt
happiest most proud of what they were doing when they felt most deeply engaged in the work and we looked at what events were happening on those days and that's when we made our second Discovery we call it the progress principle the number one driver of posit positive inner work life is simply making progress a meaningful work even if that progress is a small win a small win is a step forward in the work that when it happens it looks so incremental it seems almost trivial and yet even progress events like that can boost in a
work life tremendously I've got an example here of a small win from the Diary of a a programmer in our study he'd been struggling for a few days with a bog in a program that he was creating for an important client and this is what he said the day he solved the problem I smashed that bug that's been frustrating me for almost a calendar week that may not be an event to you but I live a very drab life so I'm all hyped no one really knows about it three of the team members who would
be involved are out today so I have to sit here rejoicing in my solitary smugness our third main Discovery was completely unexpected we thought it would be like pulling teeth to get people to send us this diary every day and yes for some people it was but we got an astonishing 75% response rate that means that on average these people were sending us back these Diaries completed 4 days out of five and even more surprising at the end of our study many of these people thanked us for sending them this diary form every day for
months and some of them even asked us to keep sending it to them when the study was finished a number of them told us what value they found in keeping the diary I have a couple of examples here I did find Value in doing the questionnaires especially when I was disciplined enough to do them at the end of the day when everything was still fresh in my mind it helped me to reflect on the day my accomplishments the teams work and how I was feeling in general when you are working at a hectic pace reflection
time is rare but is really beneficial thanks again to all of you and this next one came from a team leader I sorry this is coming to an end it forced me to sit back and reflect on the day's happenings this daily ritual was very helpful in making me more aware of how I should be motivating and interacting with the team thanks again for your help in making me a better person now clearly there's something going on here we basically forced 238 creative professionals very few of whom were in the journaling Habit to keep a
work diary every day for actually up to nine months in some cases if that's how long their progress their project lasted and yet not only did most of them do it but many of them found value in doing it so we wondered what might the value be in keeping a work diary we went into what they said and analyzed it and we also delved into the psychological literature on journaling and we identified four benefits keeping a work diary can help you to celebrate the small winds that happen in your work even on a day that
is frust actually especially on a day that is so frustrating it feels like you didn't get anything done on your most important work you can usually find one thing where you did move forward if you did keep track of it you can celebrate it this way this is the best way to leverage the progress principle you can use your diary to plan your next steps so if you had setbacks in the work use the diary to think about what happened and why and what you might be able to do the next day to overcome those
obstacles you can nurture your own personal growth through your diary because keeping a diary can help you to work through difficult even traumatic events that have happened and help you get New Perspectives on them the other thing that you can do with a diary is to spot patterns in your own reactions and behaviors that can help you to identify your greatest strengths and also the weak spots that you might need to work on and it can help you to cultivate patience because it can show you that in the past you have persevered and succeeded on
days that might be even worse than whatever you're experiencing today I have an example here from a software engineer and I think this diary illustrates many of these benefits this engineer worked in a company that was going through an agonizing unnerving downsizing this morning my project manager came over and sat next to me and asked me if I was okay after all the layoffs that went on yesterday I thought that was really nice we all had a very rough day yesterday but I feel better today in 45 days we will all know our fate and
then we can get on with our lives one way or the other the outcome of all this is really out of our control I'm trying to concentrate on what is in my control by doing my job this engineer frequently used her diary as a way to get some distance on really tough things that were going on a way to hold on to her most deeply held values and goals and a way to improve her mindset this next example I think shows you how this kind of benefit can be derived maybe I've convinced some of you
at least to try a diary I hope that I have if I have let me give you some tips on how to go about doing it don't make a big commitment to it tell yourself that you'll do it for just one month 5 to 10 minutes a day focusing on just one one project one issue that you want to work on pick a time in the day when you're likely to have about 10 minutes uninterrupted it's a good idea if it can be the same time every day attach a reminder to that time so if
you want to do your diary before you leave work you might set a repeating alarm in your calendar for 15 minutes before you take off or if you want to keep your diary at the end of the day you might put a little diary notebook and a pen at your bedside find a medium that you know you're going to enjoy using maybe it's a physical book that has a nice silk bookmarker or something maybe it's uh an online application of some kind or a Word document anything that you think will be easy for you to
keep at the beginning of your journaling period give yourself one or two minutes just to refresh yourself just to relax and clear your mind and then reflect down the day see what stands out from you from from your work day anything that you want to capture and then capture it in any form that seems to fit whatever it is you're trying to keep for yourself and it is for yourself so what should you write about I'm going to make a few suggestions I do suggest that you keep track of your progress the big breakthroughs and
yes the small winds and pat yourself on the back for them if you've had setbacks keep track of those too and ask yourself what you can learn from them Crystal moments are wonderful things that happen during the day that might be so fleeting that you'll forget about them a day or two later but it's good to hold on to them it could be something that you heard that sparked an idea for you it could be an Insight something that made you curious it could be something beautiful that you saw that was fleeting that lasted just
a couple of seconds be grateful for it and record it hassles and Horrors are those really tough things that happen in our work lives get them off your chest that's one of the great things about a diary you can get them down work through them leave them behind you might want to think of one thing you can do the next day that will C analyze your progress in your most important work and plan exactly how you're going to do that or anything anything at all that you want to keep track of now there are a
number of tools that you can use to keep your diary some of are actually very cool I like the feeling of a physical book that I can write in and the one that I use was recommended to me by my student Sarah uh this one is from levinger it has 366 pages one page for each day of the year and you'll notice that each page has five sections so that you can keep track of five years it's called The fiveyear Diary so each day when you go to write in it you just write in the
year the day of the week if you want and then you have five or six pre- ruled lines to keep track of your thoughts your events from the day the really nice thing about this is that when you're writing on a given day you can look back and see what was going on a year ago or two years ago three four five years ago it can be incredibly revealing at the other end of the technology spectrum is my co-author and husband Steve Kramer who likes using online tools he uses an online journaling program that's free
as many of them are it's called I done this when you sign up for I done this you get an email every day that asks you to reply to the email by saying what you got done that day now of course you can write about anything you want but I like this question of what did you get done today because it's really the progress principle in action this is a sample I done this email hi there take 30 seconds to write out what you got done today you've set off on the right foot one step
at a time is good walking so they give you these little uh tips hints encouragements and they vary from day to day you can get a calendar in I this that will allow you to go into any day and look at what you wrote that day that month that year this is from March 23rd this year and you can do things like at a word cloud that will show you which ideas which thoughts words were most prominent for you on a given diary entry or a set of entries you know the medium that you choose
is less important than the fact that you do it in fact you might want to just invent your own medium but if you're going to do it do it regularly even if it's just for that one month and then review review this wonderful personal history that you've kept for yourself that's really the best part that's where the insights are going to come out I encourage you if you do keep a diary for a long time to do an annual review actually make an event of it but if you do it for just a month then
review it at the end of the month see what you've learned or maybe do it weekly grab a favorite beverage get cozy with your diary and go back and look at your previous selves 10 years later Sarah has notebooks full of her musings her plans her small winds her setbacks her Joys and her sorrows she told me that every time she goes in there she sees a new revelation she can trace the evolution of the IDE ideas for her company she often finds remnants of ideas that she left behind and she can now piece them
together and use them in new ways and she said she always discovers something new about herself you know of all 26 teams that we studied the best was one that we call the vision team because they were the only one of the 26 teams to have a true breakthrough during the time we were studying them the name we gave them the pseudonym is a little ironic because although they had this breakthrough they didn't have the vision to actually see how it was happening as it was happening it was only when we gave them a workshop
at the end of their study and gave them physical diary logs each of them showing them what they had written in their diaries that they were able to talk to each other and piece together the fact that they had created a new collaborative process for themselves that allowed that breakthrough to happen they were incredibly jazzed when they left that meeting because they saw a process that they could now use in their projects going forward you never know where your next breakthrough might be hiding don't forget that small winds can accumulate to Big breakthroughs but unless
you occasionally look back at where you've been it can be hard to see where you're going [Applause] oh [Music]
