By Hannah Hamilton
Monster Contributing Writer
If you’re interested in an easy way to improve your job performance and boost your career, it’s time to start a writing habit. A study
from Harvard Business School tested whether taking 15 minutes at the
end of a work day to reflect on that day’s work improved their
performance and found the participants tasked with daily written
reflection did 22.8 percent better on an assessment than the control
group.
But wouldn’t internal reflection by itself be enough to bolster performance? “My
speculation would be that writing things down would be more beneficial
as the act of writing imposes a discipline on us to stay focused,” says
paper co-author Brad Staats, an associate professor of operations at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Reflection
forced people to process their days, find patterns and link actions.
Some people might think the experiment focused on the successes of the
day, but Staats says the parameters of the experiment when explained to
the journaling employees didn’t specify giving the reflections a
positive or negative slant.
“What
we wanted was for them to reflect more on whatever they thought was
most important from the day,” Staats explains. “The positive/negative
point is a great question, but not one we looked at here. In other
research, Francesca and I have explored how individuals struggle to
learn from failure, but when they accept internal responsibility for
their actions then they learn from failure.”
One
idea of why a writing habit helps is that thoughts running through your
mind about your day suddenly become significant and deliberate
catalysts for change through thinking them over and writing them down.
“Reflection on experience and learning facilitates deep processing,
which allows you to retain information for a long time — as opposed to
simply cramming it in your brain and promptly forgetting it after the
test,” says career coach George A. Boyd.
Despite
taking a portion of time out of the work day, essentially working less
than the control group, the new distribution of energy towards
reflection heavily impacted performance. Even Staats was surprised by
how much of a difference the exercise made.
“I
thought reflection might help a bit, but I didn’t expect it to make
such a meaningful impact on performance,” Staats said. “These people
weren’t spending extra time at work — they were spending 15 minutes less
on training each day so they could reflect, however by reallocating
their time in such a small way we see a significant, positive impact on
performance.”
Making
writing a habit could be a simple way to both gather your bearings and
be a better employee, but it is also a hard habit to adopt and keep
consistently. “In talking to people, one of the real challenges with
reflection is finding the discipline to maintain it,” Staats warns.
“That means people need to find ways to continue the practice — whether
that is blocking your calendar, finding an accountability partner who
might also reflect at the same time, or something else that works well
for you.”
