Renaming ‘To Do’s’ to ‘Small Wins’ — An example of Nudge theory
Like most of us, I keep track of my work deliverables in a handy ‘To-Do’ list. Having a long To Do list on a Friday is like getting stuck in the worst traffic jam in Silk Board Bangalore, when your movie is just about to start. Somedays, my To Do list will have fifteen items, out of which I would have completed five and there are ten remaining. Those ten items looking back at me and the sheer number of TEN remaining tasks itself suck out the motivation in me to go about completing them. At that point, I wont even think of the fives tasks that I did complete.
On a similarly swamped night, just before going to bed, I kept thinking about the To Do list where I could not complete a lot of tasks. But then, I suddenly thought about the ones that I did manage to complete. They were wins in itself. And I forgot to feel happy about them because I kept fretting about the ones that I was yet To Do. Once I realised that, I took note of the tasks I did complete and that invoked a sense of accomplishment in me.
Post this realisation, I just did a very simple thing of changing the heading of my To Do list to Small Wins. Before, if every time I looked at my To Do list and fret about the remaining tasks, after changing the heading to Small Wins, I was able to smile, give myself a small pat on the back, feel a sense of accomplishment and then look at the rest of the items without fretting.
Now I know that this is a very personal experience and many of you might not even have a To Do heading for your list or even a list for that matter. But the point that I wanted to bring across is that sometimes a seemingly small change in your day-to-day activities can bring about a much more favourable and positive output. This is loosely similar to the behavioural economics concept of Nudge. This was the same concept that received a Nobel in the year 2017.
“A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” — Thaler & Sunstein
Nudges are all around us. Marketing often involves the use of this concept in many ways to make us either spend more or use their product or app more and drive revenue.
Take the example of WhatsApp. What started out as a simple messaging app suddenly brought the feature of statuses. And before we know it, we have started spending more time on WhatsApp because we are no longer only sending messages, but also looking at the statuses that our contacts are posting. Take a look at the apps that you spend most of your time in, and WhatsApp will be among the top five for a lot of us. With this feature, the company is successful in nudging us to spend more time on the app.
Another scenario of the implementation of nudge is in the concept of defaults. Having a default considerably reduces decision fatigue in us. When too many choices and tick boxes are in front of us, there is a dilemma of choice. Defaults in this case is a choice in disguise. When you have a plethora of options to choose as elective subjects during college, there are a few defaults set in case you do not choose any. The ‘Recommended’ section in apps such as Swiggy and Zomato is also something along similar lines.
When we are able to identify nudges that can change our response to certain situations to a more positive one, it is a favourable outcome. Similar to the Small Wins change that I was able to implement which gave me positive reinforcement and reduced stress, if we search closely enough, there might be similar nudges that we can try which cost us next to nothing, but can bring positive reinforcement to our lives.
