Dear colleague,
Back at the start of November, I guided my students through our first WOOP goal-setting exercise of the year. (For more on that, see this video, this article, or the Define Success chapter of The Will to Learn.)
WOOP is a really beautiful strategy to get good at. It's research-supported, it gives students a chance to set and plan for goals, and if you collect the WOOP sheets your students make, you'll learn a lot about them with minimal reading.
I did get a chuckle at one of the patterns in my students' work, though, and it set me up for a solid little mini-Woodenization moment.
So basically, my students wisely identified that one of their key Obstacles (the second O in WOOP) toward goal achievement is getting distracted or procrastinating or “being lazy,” and in most cases, they linked these problems to their phones.
- When I sit down to do my homework, I get distracted by my phone.
- When I'm about to begin a study session, I'll “check my phone” and then end up procrastinating for an hour.
- When I know I should be reading for 30 minutes, I end up watching TikTok on my phone instead.
And then, again wisely, many of them wrote an if/then Plan (the P in WOOP) that went something like this: If I get distracted by my phone, then I will put it away.
As I was handing back their WOOP work the day after they completed it, I shared with them that this was a pattern, this “If I get distracted by my phone” bit. I chuckled.
“Guess what I'm going to say about that one, guys.”
They rolled their eyes.
“Yeah — when it comes to phones distracting us, there is no IF.”
There are two scenarios that play out when a person tries to pursue a goal with their phone next to them.
- Scenario 1: The person successfully resists the distraction of their phone and completes the goal-striving behavior.
- Scenario 2: The person does not resist the distraction of their phone and fails to complete the goal-striving behavior.
Both scenarios are bad, actually.
- Scenario 2 is obviously bad because the goal-striving behavior doesn't happen. You don't put in the self-quizzing session, complete the reading, take quality notes, improve the draft of writing you're working on.
- But Scenario 1 is also bad because while you're doing the goal-striving behavior, your cognition has this little hamster wheel spinning on the side, wondering what's on the phone, or your finite concentration energies are drained by resisting the distraction of the nearby device. Even though you've completed the goal-striving behavior, it required much more effort (and was likely much less enjoyable) than it would have been had you put the phone in a different room.
“The solution,” I tell them, “is to take your phone, put it in another room, and close the door. Put in the amount of time you have planned for your goal-striving activity, then get up, go to the other room, and do what you'd like on your phone.”
As I'm telling them this last part, I take my phone out of my pocket and put it outside my door and shut the door.
“That's the smarter and more enjoyable way to do this, guys. I promise.”
I get my phone again and I hold it in front of me.
“The stuff this thing offers me,” I say, waving my phone around, “is always going to be more immediately engaging and entertaining and ‘rewarding' than the work of moving toward your goals. But the dastardly deal with this thing,” again waving the phone, “is that it doesn't get me to my goals very reliably. It keeps me stuck.”
What I'm trying to do here is Woodenize how to create a more success-oriented environment for goal-striving behaviors.
It really starts as simply as chucking the phone out the door.
Are all of my students going to take heed of this advice?
No.
But are some?
Yes.
Three minutes well spent, then.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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