在2012年的畅销书《习惯的力量》中，纽约时报记者，曾获普利策奖的查尔斯·杜希格帮助读者理解为何很多人每天下午都想吃饼干。今年3月8日由兰登书屋出版的新作《更灵更快更好：生活和工作更高效的秘密》中，他用飞机坠毁、海军陆战队和扑克玩家当引子，还结合了迪士尼电影《冰雪奇缘》，解释人们怎样变得高效。

借此次采访之机，《财富》向杜希格了解他如何在个人生活中运用这些策略，以及其他人可以如何学习。

《财富》：您的核心观点之一是效率和生产力有很大差别，而人们往往混淆这两个概念。您能解释一下吗？

杜希格：这方面最好的例子是电邮。我可以肯定地说，电邮提高了沟通的效率。今天我发出的电邮比20年前打的电话多得多，但并不代表生产力也同步提高。有时我们会把忙碌和生产力混为一谈，而且是非常常见的误解。这正是本书探讨内容的重要部分：帮大家区分忙碌和生产力，不要纯粹为了追求高效的感觉掉入瞎忙的陷阱。

我们处在变革的时代，这就带来了问题：生产力的定义应该如何调整，才能反映出人们日常生活中哪些事真正重要？

《财富》：是不是说我们应该更关注重要的事情，不要只想着完成更多工作？

杜希格：答案因人、因地而异。但核心观点是，所谓生产力是在尽量减少浪费、压力和麻烦更少的情况下完成重要的事。这意味着，不单单要运用最先进的工具或者技术，还要慢慢学会用崭新的方式考虑如何决策，怎样集中精力，怎样学习自我激励，以及怎样帮助他人提高生产力。

《财富》：我们来聊聊你说的延伸目标。企业领导怎么分辨哪些目标可以激励员工的延伸目标，哪些目标会打击士气而且不可能实现？

延伸目标的实质是积聚个人最优秀的能力追求重大的目标，单从目标本身来看其实特别大。如果某个人跑步从来没超过6公里，我却告诉他“你应该去跑马拉松”，或者告诉别人“应该减掉18公斤体重”，那是很吓人的。对方根本不知道从何开始。所以一定给延伸目标搭配相应的系统，要清楚地知道明天早上上班该做什么。

这就是我喜欢SMART目标系统的原因。通过这种思考体系，只用45秒就能明确明天的具体目标（SMART里用S代表），如何衡量（M代表），目标一定要可以实现（A代表），也是务实的（R代表），还有为达到目标明天早上要做哪些调整（T代表的时间表）。现在我一天可能会用上五次SMART思考方法。

《财富》：您写到，商业媒体对成功有偏爱。您说不仅记者，其实大众也应该多看看失败的例子，因为只看成功案例会导致决策基础出现偏差。我想知道，您有没有试着汲取别人失败的教训？

杜希格：我爱看那些讲初创公司以十亿美元被收购的故事，看着很有意思。我爱读介绍热门餐馆的文章，也喜欢去人多的餐馆。你可能不会意识到，但如果一直沉浸在成功的氛围里直觉会受到影响。你会只知其一不知其二。

这就是那么多公司失败的原因。任何人创业都不会想着以后关门大吉，可我们知道，三分之二的公司都以倒闭告终。所以我希望通过研究数据和材料对为何企业倒闭形成充分的理解。

所以我努力向别人了解失败的原因，因为如果不是亲身经历整个过程不会有概念。我发现，很多人并不介意分享失败的经历。实际上，这是你能经历到最有意义的对话。讲述成功很容易，但常常流于表面。描述失败的谈话才会真正有趣又有意义。

《财富》：你提到讲故事已经变成一种宝贵的职业技能，通过讲故事既能够看穿复杂形势，也能够准确描述当前的情况。为什么讲故事这么重要？

杜希格：围绕可视化有很多胡说八道。《秘密》一书（朗达·拜恩2006年的励志畅销书）讲故事的“秘诀”就是将向往的和会想办法得到的东西表现在纸上。我觉得，很多人都觉得这种说法没什么说服力。

但我们也知道，运动员或者表现出众的人一直都把可视化当成极其重要的工具。为什么对某些人格外有效？因为他们努力追求的就是讲脑中渴望的事情付诸现实。因此，当现实偏离他们脑海里的设想时，他们就会对周围环境更为敏感。他们可以很快了解哪些是应该关注，哪些事忽视也无妨。

这种能力非常宝贵，因为周围的信息和刺激太多，总是分散注意力，特别是在技术发达的当代，干扰我人们注投入的技术实在太多。但实际上我们不想搞清楚所有事，只想对重要的事保持敏锐的嗅觉。假如出现值得关注的事，我们希望投入注意力，不要受到不必要的干扰。

《财富》：我经常随手记笔记，很高兴看到您在作品中说，动手写写有助于提高专注力。信息处理的过程越复杂，我们就记得越牢。还有什么切实可行的方法能让我们记牢信息？

杜希格：要想把信息记得更牢，最好的一种方法就是向别人复述。读到一个有趣的观点之后可以告诉朋友：“我刚刚发现有个观点挺有意思。”“可能此人是想教导朋友，但如果是真正的聪明人，真正的原因就是希望提升自己。

医学研究就是这种模式。其过程先是发现，然后亲手做一遍，最后教一遍。第三步的教学本意并不是一定要教会别人，而是希望借机巩固自己的知识。

我认识一家公司的首席执行官，他每读一本书的时候都会写出心得，告诉助手书里写了什么内容。他的一位副手说：“嘿，我可没时间读。”这位首席执行官回答：“我不是给你写的，你可以扔掉，我是为自己记的。”

《财富》：你在书中也写到，有些创造力特别丰富的人实质上才智平平。他们只是好好利用了已有的好点子，比如公主系列迪士尼电影，编剧们自己兄弟姐妹的经历结合在一起，推出了类似《冰雪奇缘》的影片。有没有什么方法充分利用已有创意？

杜希格：我们身边一直有很多令人叫绝的新瓶装旧酒的例子。我就找了一些网上的例子，发现有人做了一种熏肉味的婴儿配方奶粉，这显然不是什么好点子。问题不是我们一定要怎么结合创意，而是如何把适合的创意整合在一起。擅长如此处理创意的人通常不擅表达，还没有在更广阔的天地站稳脚跟。因为他们实际上在留意自己对学到的东西有什么反应。

我个人就经历过。有次跟一群会计师聊天，我听到了一个新想法，听起来很有趣，我暗自记住了这个想法。然后我跟一群牙医聊，他们说了点什么，我会接着说之前从会计师那听来了一些有趣的想法，你们刚才说的提醒了我，其实跟他们的想法挺类似的。这可以解释，为什么聪明的经纪人能量会非常大。这不仅是因为他们在各个不同领域散播创意，而是因为他们能注意到不同领域里相似的好点子。

劳拉·范德卡姆著有多部时间管理和成效相关的著作，包括《我知道她的高招：成功女性如何充分利用时间》、《一流成功人士早餐前都做什么》和《168小时：你的时间比你想象得多》。（财富中文网) 

译者：Pessy

审稿：夏林

In his 2012 bestseller, The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg helped readers understand why they eat those cookies every afternoon. Now in his new book, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, due out March 8 (Random House), Duhigg, a New York Times reporter, weaves together stories about plane crashes, the Marine Corps, poker, and the movie Frozen to explain how people can improve at what they do.

Fortune caught up with him to learn how he incorporates these strategies into his life, and how other can do so as well.

Fortune: One of your central arguments is that there is big difference between efficiency and productivity—and too often people confuse the two. Can you explain?

Duhigg: The best example of this is email. I think unequivocally email has made communication more efficient. I can send way more emails today than I could make phone calls 20 years ago. But that does not mean people are more productive. Sometimes we can confuse busyness with productivity. It’s very easy to do that. That’s part of what this book is about: teaching people how to recognize busyness and recognize productivity and not fall into the trap of simply being busy because I want to feel productive.

It really raises the question as we’re living through this period of change: How should the definition of productivity change to reflect what are really the priorities of people as they go about their days?

So we need to focus more on our priorities, not on getting more stuff done?

It changes from person to person and place to place, but at its core, productivity is about getting the things done that are important to you with less waste, and less stress, and less strife. That means not simply applying the latest tools or the latest technology, but instead teaching ourselves to think differently in a kind of fundamental way about how we make decisions, about how we focus, about learning how we motivate ourselves, about learning how to manage others in ways that make them more productive.

Let’s talk about what you call stretch goals. How can business leaders figure out the difference between a stretch goal that is motivating and one that is demoralizing and impossible to achieve?

A stretch goal is essential for marshaling the best parts of ourselves to aspire to something big and important that on its own would be too big. If I say to someone, “You should go run a marathon!” and they’ve never run more than four miles before, or “You should lose 40 lbs!” it’s terrifying. I don’t think people know how to start. So you have to pair a stretch goal with some system that tells you what to do tomorrow morning when you get to your desk.

That’s why I love SMART goals. It takes 45 seconds to figure out what’s the Specific (S) goal for tomorrow, how am I going to Measure (M) it, is it Achievable (A), is it Realistic (R), and what am I going to have to change tomorrow morning in my schedule in order to do this (T, Timeline). I probably do SMART goals five times a day at this point.

You write that there’s a bias toward success in the business media. You say journalists, and people in general, should look more at failures because successes give us a false baseline for decision-making. So I’m curious, do you try to learn from other people’s failures?

I love to read articles about the start-up that got bought for a billion dollars. It’s fun. I love to read articles about hit restaurants. I love to go to restaurants that are crowded. You don’t realize it, but your intuition gets biased because all you’re exposed to is success. You know one end of the distribution curve, but not the other.

That’s why so many companies fail. No one starts a company expecting that it’s going to fail, yet we know that two-thirds of companies end up failing. I would much rather have a data set in my head that includes why people fail.

Now I go out of my way to ask people to tell me about failures because unless you’re getting exposed to the full set of experiences, you just don’t know. And I’ve found when you ask people about their failures they don’t mind sharing them. In fact, often it’s the most meaningful conversation you can have. Describing success is very easy and often superficial. Describing failure can be a really interesting, meaningful conversation.

Speaking of telling stories, you write that storytelling—being able to look at complex situations and create a narrative of what is going on—has become a valuable job skill. Why is it so desirable?

There’s lots of hippy-dippy talk around visualization. It turns out that The Secret [the 2006 best-selling self-help book by Rhonda Byrne] was just to visualize what you want and you’ll somehow get it. I think many people understand that doesn’t seem like a compelling argument.

Yet we also know that visualization is this incredibly important tool for athletes or high-performance individuals. Why does it work for a number of people? It turns out what they’re doing is they’re building these mental models of how they want something to go. As a result, they’re much more sensitive to their environment when things deviate from the stories inside their heads. They know very quickly what to pay attention to and what they can safely ignore.

This is really valuable, because we know that there’s so much information, there’s so much stimulus around us that we can be distracted constantly, particularly in today’s age with so many technologies that can intrude upon our focus. We don’t want to blank everything out. We want to be sensitive to the things that are important. If something comes along that deserves our attention, we want to give it our attention, we just don’t want to be distracted by everything else.

I often take notes by hand, so I was happy to read your in your book that writing by hand helps us pay more attention to information. When information is slightly harder to process, we remember it better. What are some other practical ways we can make information stick in our brains?

One of the best ways of making information stickier is to repeat what we’ve learned to someone else. When someone reads an interesting idea, they turn to a friend and say, “Let me tell you about this interesting idea that I just learned.” We assume they’re doing that because they want to educate their friend. But the real reason they’re doing it, if they’re smart, is because they want to educate themselves.

Medical education is built around this model. It’s see one, do one, teach one. The reason the third step is teach one is not because you want to educate someone else, necessarily. It’s because you want to cement that learning.

I know one CEO who, every time he reads a book, he writes up a memo for his deputies about what the book said. One of his deputies said, “Dude, I don’t have any time to read.” The CEO said, “I’m not writing it for you. You can throw it away. I’m writing it for me.”

You also write that exceptionally creative people are essentially intellectual middlemen. They take existing good ideas like Disney princess movies, blend them with their own sibling experiences, and get Frozen. Are there ways we can get better at this pairing process?

We’ve all been exposed to combinations of ideas that are terrible. I was actually looking for some examples online, and I found somebody made bacon-flavored formula for babies. Clearly that’s the worst idea ever. The question isn’t necessarily how do we combine ideas. It’s how do we combine the right ideas. The people who do this well are not simply speaking up more often. They don’t have their feet in more worlds. It’s that they’re actually paying attention to how they react to things they learn.

It’s like being an observer of our own experience. I hear an idea when I’m talking to a bunch of accountants, and it seems interesting to me, and I notice that I’m interested. Then I’m talking to a bunch of dentists and they say something, and I say, you know I heard this interesting idea from accountants the other day, and I notice that you guys are talking about something that plucks my attention and my interest in the same way. That’s why an intellectual broker becomes so powerful. It’s not just that they’re spewing out ideas from different fields. It’s that they’re paying attention to which ideas in different fields seem similar.

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time-management and productivity books, including I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours.