When it comes to motivation, rewards don’t work that well. They can be good for purely mechanistic tasks. But if there’s a degree of cognitive skill in the task, a larger reward will lead to poorer performance.

Got that? Offer a large reward and performance drops.

Dan Pink, author of bestselling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, admits this sounds like a weird socialist conspiracy. Except that it was the finding of research funded by the US Federal Reserve Bank, which is not a hotbed of radical conspirators. Nor was it a one-off, anomalous experimental result. The apparently counter-intuitive finding has been replicated many times by economists, psychologists, and sociologists, says Pink.

Money is not a motivator. True, if people are not paid enough, they won’t be motivated. But if they are paid enough, money ceases to motivate.

So what does motivate people? The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, says Pink, but an unseen intrinsic drive. “The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.”

Dan Pink identifies essential separate but interdependent elements:

• Autonomy, the desire to be self-directed. Management’s task is to get out of the way.
• Mastery, the urge to get better at stuff.
• Purpose, the need to feel that what you are doing contributes to a greater good that you value.

Pink gave an entertaining Ted talk developing this, below. Or if you like a shorter version, based on a ten-minute talk he gave to the RSA, complete with quick draw animation, try the one below it.

What’s it like working in the new cabinet? Ringless, apparently. Prime minister David Cameron has told members they cannot have their mobile phones and Blackberrys with them during cabinet meetings.

You can see the sense. Though having 25 or so very busy people handing them in somewhere and collecting them afterwards sounds a bit of a palaver. Do they all have lockers? Or write their names on their Blackberrys so they can find them quick?

Or is looking after a cabinet minister’s mobby a task now assigned to eagerly ambitious parliamentary private secretaries?

When I say I can help improve their productivity, some people get uncomfortable. Productivity is not a cuddly term in the non-profit sector. So instead I say I can help make their jobs easier.

They tend to like that. It’s more understandable. And also more accurate.

So here, as the first of an occasional series, are five tips that might help make your job easier. Adopt them, modify them, and if they don’t seem useful, ignore them.

• Get another monitor. Only useful for people who spend a lot of time at a computer. It stops you covering up your active work so much with reference or other material. You can use your second screen to browse the internet, check emails, read a pdf document or whatever. Meanwhile your work-in-hand stays visible in front of you – keeping you focused and cutting distraction time.
• Create a stop-doing list. That’s like a to-do list. Except that it contains things you used to do but aren’t going to anymore. Listing them means you have accepted that taking on new projects and doing them well means dropping some things to make space. It also raises the spirits to be reminded of stuff you don’t have to worry about anymore.
• Find out where your time goes by keeping a time-tracking log. This is standard advice for anyone struggling with financial problems. Knowing where the money is going is crucial to working out a realistic budget. Discovering exactly where the money is going usually contains some surprises, even for people who think they already know. The same is true of work and time. The mere act of keeping a log is likely to cause you to tighten up on some of the waste.
• Never leave a read email in your inbox. This might sound like making your life more difficult, rather than easier. But for most people it’s a change of habit that repays the effort. Deciding what to do with an email now, and then doing it, won’t take as long as you think it will. The pay-off is that you’ll avoid building up a backlog of hundreds of emails that you feel guilty and stressed about and that one day you’ll have to work late to plough through and clear.
• Take a look at the list of things you’re working on and identify the jobs that repel you. Work out why you find them so unappealing. Thinking about why you don’t want to do something will point you to what you can do about it. That might be to clarify it more precisely, redefine it, stop doing it, or delegate it. Or just make peace with the idea that you have to do it. Whatever happens, you should feel better about it.

Some people I work with have a clear desk. Others, and that’s most of them, have a busy desk. Which they explain saying something along the lines of, “I know where everything is. It suits me.”

Maybe.

Anyone who is serious about that might want to change their boring computer desktop. They might want to get it to a similar messy state – piles of articles, notes, pictures, sticky notes, books and lists. In which case they might like Bump Top. The best way to understand it is to see it. Here’s a five-minute explanation by the developer Anand Agarawala at a Ted talk a couple of years ago.

Bump Top is now available in free and pro versions, for Windows and now Macs.

Here’s two common problems:

• Task avoidance. You know what you should be doing. But you don’t do it. It gets embarrassingly overdue. Shame & guilt lie heavy. But still you can’t get started.
• Perfectionism. You’ve already put hours and hours more into a project than you should have. But it’s still not done. There are final adjustments. You’re waiting on some critical element. You can’t let it go.

They look like very different problems. Yet the same solution can work in each case.

You set aside an amount of time – which can be quite brief, as little as half an hour or less. You commit to doing something on the project, but only for the agreed time period. To emphasise that, you set a timer. When it goes off, you stop. You get on with something else. If necessary you set aside another short time period to work on it again.

Before long, the problem’s disappeared. Avoiders find they’ve progressed the job. Perfectionists find they’re ready to sign it off.

The method is known as time boxing. There’s no shortage of analysis as to why it should work. Procrastinators discover that the task wasn’t actually so bad. The anxiety was all in their mind. Avoiders get a reality check about how long they’re spending. That objective view provides what they need to move on.

Dave Cheong has a thoughtful post on it. Merlin Mann has a typically knockabout approach, suggesting very short dashes – even as little as a minute.

Luciano Passuello calls time boxing the most effective time management tool he knows of. And has the  neat idea of ending the time box period with a downloaded round of applause. Or maybe not.

At least one work time life space reader liked teux deux enough to start using it. So here’s another neat, clean, free, web app designed to bring order to the working day.

It’s about recording where your time goes. And your expenses and travel.

The tool is run by 1DayLater, who recommend that instead of jotting such info on post-it notes and scraps of paper, you take ten seconds to enter it on their site. That can be done online or by text.

The 1DayLater site itself shows you a neat visual graph of where the time and money went.

You can export the data to a spreadsheet anytime.

1DayLater is being  developed by two brothers, Paul and David King, who’ve worked as freelances and know the problems of time tracking.  They’re a bit excited at the moment because they’ve been mentioned by the influential Lifehacker website. Not bad for two young lads from the north east.

You’ll need to register on the site. That’s quick and easy. To get an overview of how it works, watch the video.

Who would insist, as part of their contract to perform on stage, that a bowl of M&Ms should be provided for them backstage with all the brown sweets picked out?

I just read the surprising answer in Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. It is the Californian heavy metal rock band Van Halen.

If the bowl wasn’t there, or it contained any brown M&Ms, the contract stipulated that the band could pull out of the gig, with the venue still liable for the full fee.

Singer David Lee Roth explained that this wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a bit of celebrity powerplay.

The reasoning behind it was this. Van Halen had an enormously complex touring production. They had nine eighteen-wheeler trucks full of gear, where the standard was three. Setting it up was a serious business, involving a lot of people and a lot of attention to detail. If the venue organisers weren’t up to it, the repercussions could be expensive and dangerous.

Hence the M&Ms rider. It was a shrewd way of testing the venue’s commitment to detail. It alerted the band to the likelihood of  problems ahead. Roth says if he found any brown M&Ms backstage he knew the venue hadn’t read the contract. There would almost certainly be important technical errors elsewhere.

Sweetly done.

Me, me, me, me….. Improving productivity can be a tad self-centred. It’s about focusing on oneself.

This misses a vital dimension. We mostly work in teams. We make demands on others. Yet we don’t think as deeply about that as we ought. We rarely give much brain space to the way we waste the time of other people.

This is hardly logical, since we know too well how much of our time other people waste.

Peter Drucker had a characteristically simple approach. To find out how and when you waste the time of others, you just ask them. Then you can eliminate it.

Effective people have learned to ask systematically and without coyness, “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask such a question, and ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive.

Peter Drucker, The Essential Drucker, 2007, p177.

You wonder about some people’s pronunciation. In what strange dialect does “teux deux” sound like “to do”?

Put it down to the world shortage of good website addresses.

Then, when you’ve finished muttering out loud and worrying people… have a look at TeuxDeux. That is, if you’re looking for a simple, free, web-based, to-do list app.

There’s no fuss or clutter. With a week in view, you can enter tasks, check them off as done, delete and move them. There’s a someday bucket. All very neat for someone who likes daily lists, and spends most of their time on an internet-enabled computer.

Apps for iPhone and Air being worked on, and Blackberry coming later, apparently.

The intro video, 2mins 20secs, tells it like it is.

TeuxDeux Demo from TeuxDeux on Vimeo.