Why I play the piano, and not the saxophone
How you can make sure you actually do the things that are important
Is there such a thing as instrumentoholism? If so, I confess — I am an instrumentoholic: I collect musical instruments. Not because I like collecting, but because I have a deep desire to play them. And yet, much of my collection just sits there.
There is a nice electric guitar that I have not touched in ages, even though it’s not even in its case, and all I’d need to do is plug it in the amp and switch it on.There is an acoustic 12-string guitar in its case under my bed, literally gathering dust. There are three saxophones… the last time I played any of them was at my daughter’s wedding, three years ago.
And the only instrument I have played in the last year, and play with some regularity is the piano.
It’s not that I particularly prefer the keyboard over the other instruments. I love the piano, but I love the guitars and the three saxes just as much. So what is the difference?
One difference is my appointment with a piano tutor every other week.
How come? I think that behavioural science can give us some insight.
For a start, it’s in my calendar. It is surprising how strong the commitment is most of us have to our calendar entries. In comparison, todo list are useless: mine is full of ‘important’ stuff I put in years ago and that is still undone. I feel quite comfortable ignoring its alerts. But if I have an appointment, on a particular day at a particular time, I simply have to do it. The calendar entry is protective of that half hour every other Tuesday, and I arrange my work around it. If there is an inevitable conflict, I rearrange the lesson.
The calendar is a device that can transform good intentions into commitment.
But I don’t just play the piano during those 30 minutes with my tutor. I play it pretty much every day — even if only for 10 minutes. And yet that is not in my diary. Of course, I am motivated to practise, because I want to make progress with Debussy’s La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin on the piano. But I also want to make progress on my other instruments. I want to play the sax like Stan Getz in The Girl from Ipanema, and I want to play the guitar like Jeff Beck in Diamond Dust.
The difference is that nobody knows about these latter two ambitions. My piano tutor knows what I want to achieve, and of course every time he quizzes me about my progress. More than that, I have a reputation to maintain with him. I want him to know that I am a serious student, who practises the difficult bits and who has actually improved two weeks on. I’ve stuck my neck out, and I now need to make good — because I care about my reputation. Reputation is a possession that we are loath to lose — more so even than money.
Reputation loss aversion is a device that can transform good intentions into commitment.
At work
Much the same applies in the workplace. We are often knee-deep in good intentions. We should spend more time with our team; we should Skype our counterpart in Seattle, Stuttgart or Shanghai more often; we should sit down with the people in engineering to really understand their problem; we should get proper 1:1 time with our direct reports or our supervisor. All of this is important, we really want to do it. But none of it is really urgent.
If there is no entry in our calendar to protect the stuff that is important, the stuff that is urgent just takes possession of our time.
What about our reputation? Reputation is an underrated and underused resource in organizations. Of course, we avoid creating a bad reputation. But all that really takes is not screwing up big time. Keeping your head down and doing a decent job is enough.
So in a sea of meh reputations, our own meh reputation doesn’t stand out negatively.But is that really good enough?
Imagine we nailed some of the important stuff down in our calendar. Schedule a bi-weekly team meeting with a solid agenda. Set up a regular call with our overseas colleague. Find a suitable time to sit with the engineering colleagues and invite them. Email our direct reports to commit to regular 1:1s and put them straight in our calendar.
We’ve made the first step to building a reputation that is worth having, and worth preserving. When the urgent stuff is pressuring us again, a dual defence will kick in: the obedience to our diary, and the urge to safeguard our reputation.
That will change the way we make trade-offs. If it is important to us to really understand the concerns and aspirations of our team so we can guide them, to learn from our remote colleagues and share our experience with them, to help solve the problems of colleagues in another department, or to help our direct reports develop their skills — if all that is important, then let’s commit our reputation to it.
Time is our ultimate scarce resource. But reputation is perhaps our most valuable one. Behavioural insights can help us use it to our advantage, so let’s use it to help us do the things we truly find important.
This article was written by Koen Smets and Paul Thoresen.
Thanks for reading this post. If you enjoyed it, please consider clicking, tapping, nudging or otherwise activating the 💚 icon nearby to recommend it, that makes it easier for others to find (and enjoy) it too. And please also share it far and wide (handy icons are hereabouts for Facebook and Twitter; for LinkedIn and others, you need to DIY :-). Thank you!
