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Summer Reading List 2019

Summer Reading List: Ursina's Book Recommendations on Creative Decision Making and Goal Achievement Somehow it became a summer tradition of this blog: here’s my latest list of book recommendations (you can see the lists from previous years here). As usual, they all have something to do with creative decision making and goal achievement. The first is a novel, the rest is non-fiction:

Wood, Benjamin (2016). The Ecliptic. A Novel.

More than the plot, it was the premise and setting that had me hooked from the start: an isolated artists’ colony on a small island – its anonymous residents lingering for years, all expenses paid. Relieved of their own ego and the burdens of everyday life, they should be free to create their next masterpieces. Needless to say, it doesn’t work out quite so smoothly for everyone. You can start reading here.

Two excerpts highlight why this book fits this particular reading list and the topic of my blog.

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Should You Become an Intrapreneur?

Could you make your job better by becoming an intrapreneur? Intrapreneurship means to think and work like entrepreneur, even though you are still a part of a large organization.

For example, you might have an idea of how to improve a product, and suggest those changes to your boss. Or, you might look for ways to make a specific service more profitable for your company. Maybe you discover a new opportunity to market a product or a service. You might find ways to communicate better within your team, and with that, speed up the workflow. Or you might go the extra mile to increase customer satisfaction. In other words: whatever your role within the organization, you actively drive innovation and keep looking for opportunities to improve your company.

Good employers realize how valuable intrapreneurs are to their organization, and a lot of research is being done in the attempt to understand how different leadership styles and company cultures can encourage intrapreneurship among employees.

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Beat Procrastination Habits With A Three-step Intervention

Do you want to give your productivity a boost? This three-step intervention can help you diagnose and beat some of your most persistent procrastination habits.

Beat Procrastination Habits: Three Step Intervention

Step 1 – Assessment: Diagnose the Problems

Each person is different. What triggers your procrastination?

Procrastination is at its worst when we’re not aware of it. The first step in this intervention is therefore to increase your awareness of what’s tripping you up. You’ll want to get as much insight into yourself as possible, recognizing any problematic habits, or any patterns in your thoughts and behaviors that are getting in your way.

With that goal, keep a productivity journal to collect some data about yourself. You can download a template here and print it out.

Here is how it works: the night before your workday, write a to-do list and a schedule for the following day.

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Common procrastination triggers and fixes

What are some of the most common procrastination triggers? Finding out why you procrastinate will help you tackle each problem one by one.

Summer Reading List 2018

New Summer Readings: Books on Decision Making and Goal Achievement Another hopefully long and beautiful summer is coming up, and my intention is to spend a lot of it productively: reading. Preferably in a hammock. If you feel the same, here comes my new list of book recommendations about decision-making and goal achievement.

Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler (2017). Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter. I’ve always enjoyed Dan Ariely’s self-deprecating sense of humor, and in this collaboration he found a great match in Jeff Kreisler. Even though I was familiar with most of the concepts they discuss, this book not only kept me entertained, but also highlighted very clearly (and sometimes painfully) the irrationalities around money that I still allow into my life. Read a sample here.

Chris Guillebeau (2017). Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days.

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Employee Coaching ROI: Is It Worth It?

What is the return on investment (ROI) of employee coaching for an organization?

Offering coaching for employees – especially at the executive level – has become a widespread management tool. Companies often hire coaches with the goal to improve performance and develop talents, but also to keep high-performing people within an organization.

However, coaching is an expensive intervention: aside from the fees of the coach, there’s also the opportunity cost of the employee’s time spent with the coach during working hours. Therefore, companies who are paying for coaching for their employees will want to know whether it is a good investment. Does it improve the company’s bottom line enough to be worth the cost?

A look at the evidence

What effects does coaching have? I put together a selection of research articles investigating this question, including all the meta-analyses I could find that have been conducted in the past two decades.

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How to Manage Stress at Work

If your job is causing you a lot of stress, you’re not alone. In a 2014 survey in the US, almost a third (31%) of the workers reported that they typically feel tense or stressed out during the work day. This number is even higher among millenials (18-34 year old workers) than among any of the older generations.

What are the most common causes for stress at work?

So many issues can cause stress at work. The survey lists the following, with the most commonly experienced stressors on top:

Low salaries
Lack of opportunity for growth and development
Uncertain or undefined job expectations
Job insecurity
Long hours
Too heavy of a workload
Unrealistic job expectations
Work interfering during personal or family time
Lack of participation in decision making
Inflexible hours
Problems with my supervisor
Commuting
Physical illnesses and ailments
Problems with my co-workers
Unpleasant or dangerous physical conditions
Personal life interfering during work hours

Does any of this sound familiar when you think or your own job?

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Summer Reading List 2017

My latest picks: (mostly) recent books about decision making and goal achievement.

The promise of a long summer ahead makes me very happy, and so does the knowledge that no matter how much I read, there will always be books out there that I haven’t read yet, as well as books I want to re-read. So, while the truth is that I spend a lot of time reading all year round, not just during the summer, I love the idea of a special “summer reading” list – maybe just because I love seeing two of my favorite words so close together.
So here’s my latest list of book recommendations. Most of these came out within the last year, and all except the last are non-fiction. That last one is very much fiction indeed – a special treat. It’s on my treasured list of books that I’ve read many times,

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Valentine’s Special: Chocolate and Coaching

I’m offering a new coaching package for couples. Could you use some help improving your shared time management, figuring out priorities, getting better organized together? If you sign up for your first exploratory Strategy Session before Valentine’s Day, you’ll receive a box of the world-famous Teuscher Champagne Truffles at our first meeting.

Read more about the couples coaching program and schedule a first session here.

Couples Coaching Valentine Special
And no, you’re not the only one wondering: people keep asking me whether I’m related to the “Chocolate Teuschers”. Sadly, not that I know of. But that won’t stop me from loving them, and from using their most delicious treats to get us all started on a sweet note.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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Binge Working and Procrastination

Thanks to all of you who shared your experiences and thoughts about binge working and procrastination! Your insights have given me food for thought and an opportunity to make an addition to my hamster-wheel image. It now includes an additional stage: what one of my readers called the “tidal wave of joy and relief when you finish the thing and it is a success!”

Binge Working and Procrastination - Revised

It is clear though that there are many individual differences as to how people experience binge working. The figure only shows one type of a particularly stable loop of reinforcement.

For some people, for example, bouts of binge working are very positive and productive experiences, without any of the ill effects shown in the image. For them, intense phases of working around the clock are simply a temporary effort for special projects. Rather than leading to exhaustion and burnout,

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Binge Working and Procrastination: Your Experience

Last-minute stress and binge working will improve your future procrastination as much as a hangover will improve your drinking habits.

At least that’s my hypotheses.

Guilt, Binge Working and Procrastination

Or what do you think? I’d love to hear about your experience. Do you sometimes work in somewhat excessive “binges”, for example through the night or throughout a weekend? If so, is this productive for you in the long run, or does it lead to the vicious circle in the image?

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Am I a Procrastinator?

Am I a procrastinator? “I know that I am a procrastinator, but taking this survey made me realize just how bad it is!”
– One of my students.

Clarry Lay, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto created the “General Procrastination Scale” as a research tool. While it is not intended for diagnosis, you can still get a general sense of your tendency to procrastinate across a pretty wide a range of situations.

In the interactive form below, you can simply move the sliders around and see your total score at the bottom. The total will be updated as you go along. A lower total score mean less procrastination, from 1, which would mean you don’t procrastinate at all in any of those situations, to 10, which would mean you procrastinate at every opportunity. Only the overall score at the bottom matters,

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New Productivity Coaching Group

Time is our most precious resource – are you getting the most out of yours? Or are you ready for a change?

My next productivity coaching group will come in a new format, starting with one-on-one sessions and an in-depth assessment before the group meetings.

It is a 3-month package that includes:

Two individual coaching sessions of 50 min each and an initial in-depth assessment of your goals, your individual style, your situation, and your personality along the Five Factor Model (FFM). A part of the assessment will happen during our sessions together, and a part of it will be homework for you in between our meetings.
A copy of the workbook: “Increasing Personal Productivity in Healthy and Sustainable Ways” by Ursina Teuscher.

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Productivity Wallpaper

Organize Your Desktop Strategically with this Productivity Wallpaper

Loosely inspired by Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Principle, I designed a Productivity Wallpaper that you can download here as a template. It is a customized desktop background that helps you stay focused by organizing your tasks in a spatial layout.

The idea is that it gives you room to arrange your documents, folders or apps according to when you want to use them:

In the upper left quadrant of the screen, you would place stuff you need for your most important tasks. By important, I mean tasks that you truly care about, that have long-term significance, and that make your life more meaningful. Typically, those are bigger projects, often without a deadline (because they matter to YOU, more than to other people). They are therefore most in danger of being infringed upon by other people’s more urgent demands.

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“You Are on the Fastest Route”

Did you notice? According to the encouraging GPS voice, you are always “on the fastest route”.

It’s true though: as long as you know where to go next, none of the past detours, U-turns, or missed exits, change the fact that you are, NOW, on the fastest route.

FastestRoute

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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Poll Results: My Readers’ Guesses on Retirement Savings

Thanks to all of you who submitted your guesses on retirement decisions!

You can still access the poll, and read the original post.

We always hear that people are not saving enough money in this country, and I was therefore curious to find some actual data on how people are doing with their retirement savings. But I was also curious as to how my readers would estimate the numbers. Here are the results of my little poll and my search:

My readers’ guesses are shown in red, and the correct answers according to the U.S. Census Bureau in blue.

Sadly, it turns out you all were not nearly pessimistic enough! The actual data look a lot bleaker than my average reader’s guess. As many as 80% of Americans aged 30-54 believe they will not have enough money for retirement;

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Savings and Retirement Decisions

How many Americans aged 30-54 believe they will not have enough money put away for retirement? According to the U.S. Census Bureau (retrieved from Statistic Brain Research Institute), as many as 80%.

How many Americans don’t save anything for retirement? The U.S. Census Bureau estimates 38%.

How many Americans who started working at the age of 25, have adequate capital stowed away for retirement by age 65? The correct answer is 4%, again according to the U.S. Census Bureau, as retrieved from Statistic Brain Research Institute.

Decision scientists have long been interested in savings decisions. They have found many reasons why people don’t save enough,

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Book and Video Recommendation: Skills Are More Important Than Passion

“Follow your passion” is a very commonly heard career advice, but Cal Newport argues it’s actually quite terrible as a guiding principle.

In his quest to figure out how people find great careers, he found not only that preexisting passions are very rare, but that they have little to do with how most people end up loving their work. The pressure to “find our passion” can therefore unnecessarily lead to anxiety, dissatisfaction and unproductive career changes.

Instead, passion for a career seems to come after you put in the hard work of becoming excellent at something that adds value to other people’s lives, not before.

This is the book that resulted from his research, and where he includes more advice on how to go about building a career based on skills:

Cal Newport (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You –

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Book Recommendation: How To Write A Lot

Paul J. Silvia (2007). How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing.

Paul Silvia makes a strong case for scheduling in his book “How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing“.
It has been one of the most influential books for my own writing practice, and I often find myself mentioning gems of practical wisdom from this book in my own workshops and coaching sessions.

The book focuses on academic writing, but a lot of its advice applies to anybody who has a hard time working towards goals that are important in the long run, but not urgent on any particular day. Writing is just a really good example of such a goal.

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling,

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A Career Development Tool For Academics

Continuing my series about self-assessments, the one I’m reviewing here is for academics:

the myIDP.

The myIDP is an Individual Development Plan for science careers, and is mainly targeted to grad students and postdocs, with the goal of helping them define and pursue their career goals.

It includes a self-assessment part covering skills, interests, and values. Aside from the online questionnaires that show your scores right away, can also download blank skills assessment forms to share with a mentor or colleague. Based on the assessment, it offers a long list of career paths and shows you how well each matches with your interests and skills. As you explore those options, you get suggestions of how to consider your values in those contexts.

After this assessment and exploration part, the website includes a personal planning system for setting your own goals and implementing next steps.

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