


Get Organized: Dan Ariely on Finding Motivation With Apps

Productivity apps promise to make us more efficient, better focused, and of course, highly organized. But how do they do it? Do they work, and if so, how? How do productivity apps influence us so that we accomplish the things we really want to accomplish?

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist—emphasis on "behavioral"—who's interested in how technology can affect our actions. Much of his research looks at why people so often fail to act in their own best interest.

More formally speaking, he is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and a founding member of the delightfully, yet appropriately named Center for Advanced Hindsight. His first two popular books, The Upside of Irrationality and Predictably Irrational, explore many of his experiments and findings about irrational behavior, including rewards-based motivation.

I spoke with Ariely recently about how technology, and smartphone apps in particular, can keep us motivated and help us procrastinate less.

You can listen to a short clip of the interview in the video, or read the extended text version that follows.

Jill Duffy: You've written a lot about motivation. Are there any differences between how people motivate themselves in the real world versus how they do it with apps and technology, or in the online world?

Dan Ariely: In general, what we do in the app world is very much similar to what we do in the real world, with a few big changes that actually make it much more effective.

First of all, the phone is always with us. Because the phone is always with us, it's easier to create something that we will have a harder time forgetting. If you think about changing something in the environment in your house [to influence your behavior], it will only be effective when you get to that place. Because the phone is with us all the time, it has much more reach into aspects of our lives.

The second thing is that all of a sudden, small rewards are possible, like a compliment or a notification.

It's also easier to do things that are in context. If you think about the broad topic of behavioral economics, it's really about the fact that the environment matters more than we think. If that's the case, that means if we control the environment, or we control some elements in the environment, we can get people to behave differently, hopefully better.

From that perspective, the phone is actually a wonderful tool.

I have a lot of hope for technology in terms of how it can improve people's lives. The reason I spend so much time here—in San Francisco; I spend about a week a month here—is exactly because of that. I spend so much time in Silicon Valley because I'm a great believer in technology as a way to modify people's behavior.

If you gave me control over your kitchen, let's say, I could rearrange your kitchen in a way that would improve it [and help you eat healthier foods]. One of the worst things about the design of a kitchen is the refrigerator drawer for fruits and vegetables. If you're like most people, you spend a lot of money on fruits and vegetables, and when you get them, they rot in that drawer in the bottom. They rot in that drawer because it's often an opaque drawer, and you forget about their existence. This is just bad design. If you gave me more control over your kitchen, I might change the plate sizes and get smaller forks. I could make all kinds of changes that could make you behave better. But this is really, really tough [to change the physical design of the space] with a lot of things.

Not with phones. Not with technology.

Technology provides this great opportunity for good behavior.

JD: I want to circle back to what you were saying about rewards. I test a lot of applications for health and fitness, and one of the things I've noticed is that push notifications are almost never motivational. They're usually reminders, and they're very utilitarian reminders. For example, an app notification might say, "Remind me if by 10 a.m. I have not recorded the calories I ate for breakfast." But what I think would be a better reward system would be something like, "Every day at 4 p.m., send me a notification that says, 'You're doing a great job!'" Do you have some ideas in mind for how you imagine rewards on mobile phones could develop and change?

DA: I think you're right. Objectively you're right, of course. Too many notifications are purely functional. I think it comes from people's lack of understanding of what are the barriers for good performance.

Often people think that the barrier is information. For example:

"Why don't people eat well?"

"It's because they don't have the right information."

Think about that big experiment that happened in New York City, where basically every fast food place had to start having calorie information on the menu. The logic was that people are over-eating. Why are people over-eating? Because there's no information about calories. We'll put the calorie information out there, and everybody would behave well.

It turns out that didn't happen.

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