Middles can be hard.
Wednesday has become “hump day” to recognize that we don’t have the
energy that we got from a good weekend any more, but we can’t quite look
forward to the weekend. College students
get their Spring Break in March after the initial excitement of the semester
has worn off, but the panic of impending finals hasn’t kicked in yet.
What makes middles so hard to deal with?
A paper by Andrea Bonezzi, Miguel Brendl, and Matteo
DeAngelis in the May, 2011 issue of Psychological
Science demonstrates that middles are hard, because people switch their
frame of reference as a task goes on. At
the beginning, you focus on how far you have come, and that is quite
motivating. Eventually, though, it
becomes difficult to notice additional progress. When you can’t see your progress any more,
your motivation flags, until you get near the end. At that point, you shift
your focus to what you have left to do.
As you get nearer to the end, this comparison motivates you to finish.
This view suggests that your motivation depends on whether
you are currently focused on how far you have come or how far you have to go.
In one study, participants were given $15 at the end as
payment for their time. They were asked
if they would be interested in donating to a charity that was hoping to collect
$300. People were told about the
progress collecting money so far. Some
people got that information in terms of the amount of money collected. Others got the information in terms of the
amount of money that remained to be collected.
Finally, the study varied whether the amount of money collected so far
was small, in the middle, or large.
When people were given information about how much money was
collected so far, they gave the most money when only a small amount had been
collected compared to what they gave when the progress was in the middle or
near the end. When they got information
about how much remained to be given, people gave more when the charity was
close to the goal rather than in the middle or far from the goal.
These results demonstrate that people’s motivation changes
with the frame of reference they are using.
In a final study, the authors looked at people’s motivation
to do a boring proofreading task. They
had to proofread 9 documents. Some
people got a progress bar showing how many they had done so far. Some got a progress bar showing how many
documents were yet to be completed. A
third group knew that they were going to do 9 essays, but they just had a
marker showing where they were in the task.
The group that had a progress bar showing how far they had
come from the start was most effective at proofreading (as measured by the
number of typos they found per second) when they were near the beginning of the
task than as they progressed. The group
that had a progess bar showing how much remained to be done was most effective
as they neared the end of the task.
Of interest, the group that did not have a frame of
reference that focused on either the beginning or the end of the task was
effective on the first few and last few documents, but performed worst in the
middle.
This result suggests that people shift their frame of
reference as a task goes on. They start
by focusing on how far they have come and then shift to focusing on what
remains to be completed. This pattern
leads to the lowest levels of motivation in the middle of the task.
So, what can you do when you are stuck in the middle?
One way to keep up your motivation in long tasks is to
provide yourself with more landmarks along the way. Those landmarks can be used to help motivate
you to complete sections of the task rather than having a long stretch in the
middle where it is difficult to see your progress.
