Katy Milkman: “Here’s how to make exercise fun”

0:00Today's guest on Nudge encountered a problem that I'm sure all of us have dealt with before.

0:04Katy Milkman: I was a computer science and business PhD student. It was pretty rough, just the sheer number of problem sets. It was a lot. And I will say I was not in the best place. And like most of us, when we're stressed out by work, we neglect our healthy habits. What I would find is that after a long day of going to lectures about econometrics, I really just wanted to curl up on my couch and indulge in entertainment. But I also knew that one of the most important things to do to keep myself sharp and happy was to exercise. To help, Katie came up with a simple tactic backed by behavioral science. So I came up with a solution.

0:47Katy Milkman: I thought to myself, okay, what if I only get to indulge in the entertainment I'm craving at the end of my long day of classes while I'm at the gym working out? It sounds simple. And yet, in subsequent research, Katie has found that this dead simple technique can keep all of us exercising for 55 % longer. Today on Nudge, she'll explain how.

1:14Most businesses have an overwhelming amount of data. It's typically scattered across the business in different tools with different teams. but because it's scattered, no one can use it. That is where HubSpot come in. HubSpot connects it all, every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation, and they connect it into one platform that every team can work from. Because when you know more, you grow more. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Welcome to today's episode of Nudge. And I'm delighted to say I am joined again by the award-winning professor, best-selling author and chart-topping podcaster, Professor Katie Milkman.

2:00Katy Milkman: I'm Katie Milkman, and I'm a behavioral scientist and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. And I wear some other hats too. I also am the co-director and co-founder of the Behavior Change for Good initiative. I am the author of the book How to Change, and I host a podcast called choiceology. And oh, I was going to forget one last thing. I also write a substack. It's called Milkman Delivers. In the book, Katie walks through her research into one of the most eye-opening new findings in the world of behavioral science. She calls it temptation bundling. This is an example of me-search, which is research about me.

2:38Katy Milkman: So I do a lot of me-search. Actually, I think most scholars in behavioral science are me-searchers to some degree. But this idea came out of something I did in graduate school. So when I was a graduate student, I went to grad school in Boston. I was a computer science and business PhD student. It was pretty rough. My first year in grad school, just the sheer number of problem sets and coding assignments was, it was a lot. Boston tends to have long, dark, cold winters. And I will say I was not in the best place. And what I would find is that after a long day of going to lectures about econometrics and algorithms, I really just wanted to curl up on my couch and indulge in entertainment and like not do anything productive at all, which is a reasonable desire.

3:37Katy Milkman: But I also knew that one of the most important things to do to keep myself sharp and happy was to exercise. So another part of my background is that I was a very serious tennis player growing up. I played division one college tennis for a year and a half until I discovered academic stuff was my real bag. But I still loved the physical activity and craved it and needed it really. But in grad school, I was really struggling to motivate myself to exercise on those dark Boston winter days when frankly it was what I needed most. So I came up with a solution to these problems that I was facing. I engineered a solution, which is like my specialty.

4:19I was like, okay, I see these problems.

4:22Katy Milkman: What am I going to do? I thought to myself, okay, what if I only get to indulge in the entertainment I'm craving at the end of my long day of classes while I'm at the gym working out. I'm going to only let myself do it there. And a few incredible things happened when I made this rule for myself. One, at the end of a long day, instead of coming back and just wanting to collapse in a heap, I could barely contain my excitement to head out the door and indulge in my favorite entertainment. So I'm looking forward to my workouts. The second thing that happened is it's no longer miserable to be, I was an elliptical these are like working out, you know, they used to be like counting the minutes.

4:59Katy Milkman: When will this be over? Even listening to good music. It just was, it still felt like drudgery. But once I started indulging in my favorite entertainment, now I'm like looking forward to finding out what happens to all the characters and the plot is totally sweeping me away and distracting me. I don't even notice the time passing and the workouts over before I know it. And I've had a great time. And then the third thing that happened is I got home after my workout. I'd had my entertainment fix and I'm no longer in need of it. So I'm able to now focus on the problem sets that await me and be productive with that time because I've already done my indulging and entertainment guilt-free, by the way, like zero guilt, as opposed to the way I used to do it, which was like filled with guilt.

5:42Katy Milkman: So it felt like magic. I was like, holy smokes, what is this formula I've created for myself? I've changed everything. But Katie wasn't just content with exercise, she wanted to test temptation bundling to see if it could work in other parts of life. I started thinking about how can I do it in other places in my life? You know, what if I only listen to my favorite podcast while I'm doing household chores? I can only open a favorite bottle of wine while I'm cooking a fresh meal for myself and my partner? What if, you know, I only can get a pedicure while I'm catching up on reading for class that I'm behind on?

6:18Katy Milkman: Like suddenly I started seeing ways to temptation bundle everywhere. Maybe I only go to that greasy burger shop that I love when I'm spending time with like a difficult mentee. There are all these opportunities to temptation bundle that I started to see. But perhaps this is something that only works for Katie. How can we know if it works for the rest of us? Well, to find out, Katie started to study temptation bundling. I decided to run some studies about this. So I've run experiments to look at whether or not I'm weird or other people can also benefit from temptation bundling. And the good news is one, I am weird still, but, um, but also other people are weird in this particular way.

6:55Katy Milkman: And we found that teaching people about temptation bundling, giving them the ability to temptation bundle can help increase exercise. So I did the first study in a very similar context to the one where I first used temptation bundling. We gave people access to a tempting audio book of their choice, but they got to listen to the first 30 minutes during a workout. If they wanted to hear what happened next, they would have to come back to the gym compared to a group that did a 30-minute workout. However, they wanted and weren't given this idea, just a gift certificate to Barnes & Noble. We saw that significantly increased exercise.

7:28Specifically, in the week after the 226 students and staff enrolled in the study, the ones given the loaned iPod with the audiobook exercised for 55 % more than members of the study's control group. But that wasn't all.

7:43Katy Milkman: Teaching people about temptation bundling and giving them free access to audiobooks, also significantly increased exercise for up to 20 weeks in a follow-up experiment. And there's some really nice work by Caitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fischbach, researchers at Cornell and University of Chicago, respectively, that I feel is very similar in flavor where they went into classrooms with students and gave them access to markers to do their math worksheets with and played music and gave them snacks and found that that temptation bundle they created significantly improved persistence relative to distraction-free environments that teachers thought would actually be better.

8:21This is research conducted in one Florida high school. Willie and Fishback ran this study with 156 students and found that those who could work with music, magic markers and snacks completed 90 % of the problems in the worksheet, whereas those in a distraction-free environment without any snacks, magic markers or music, well they solved just 85 % of the problems. That's five percentage points less.

8:45Katy Milkman: Those are sort of my favourite studies that have been done to date on temptation bundling and I think the work aligns really nicely with this broader literature that Ayelet and Caitlin began on the importance of making it fun to pursue our goals because that's a big part of what leads to persistence. And when we dread doing the things that are good for us in the long run, we quit. And so we need to find different ways to make it more enjoyable. Making a task fun doesn't just involve handing out snacks and magic markers. Most adults won't be motivated by that at all. I might be motivated by the snacks, mind you, but magic markers wouldn't do it.

9:22So how can you make a task fun for the majority of adults? How, for example, can you convince thousands of people to spend their free time doing something for free? Something like editing Wikipedia's pages? Well, back in 2012, one economist at the University of Zurich studied just this.

9:41Katy Milkman: This is Jana Gallus at UCLA, who did this amazing project with Wikipedia. And actually, I believe it was with a European subgroup of Wikipedia. Katie is right. It was the editors of the German language version of Wikipedia. That she met up with when she was a graduate student. She was very interested in non-monetary rewards and how they change people's motivation and behavior. And she wanted to see if just giving people a little taste of gamification when they were pursuing this volunteer activity, which is editing Wikipedia pages to make them more accurate, might change their persistence. Yanis ran a study over eight months with 3 ,066 new Wikipedia editors who joined the German language site over that period.

10:29Katy Milkman: She randomly assigned some volunteers with Wikipedia to be given a badge indicating that they had been an excellent contributor, and others who'd been just as good just didn't give them this badge. So they didn't find out they had lost out because this is a private award. So it wasn't a demotivating effect. People aren't like, oh my gosh, why didn't I get a badge? Only the badge recipients really were the ones who are aware the badge even exists. Each month, a computer script identified all the editors who had made their very first article edit in the previous month. That was roughly 3 ,000 people.

11:07These were then filtered down by excluding blocked accounts, bots, vandals, advertisers, and accounts with no surviving edits. And from the remaining pool of about 380 eligible editors each month, 150 were randomly selected to receive the award. But then she looked to see if you get this surprise, delightful award, how does it change your subsequent volunteering?

11:34Katy Milkman: and she found that it significantly increased the amount of contributions folks made to Wikipedia for, if I'm remembering correctly, up to a year. Those given the award were 25 % more likely to stay active on the site two months later. They were 90 % more likely to make edits and 62 % more likely to talk in Wikipedia's internal discussion pages. The only difference, remember, was a small, symbolic digital badge that looked like an idol vice flower. It was a private award that came with a simple message. Out of over 4 ,000 new authors this month, you are among those who have enriched Wikipedia.

12:14Simple message doesn't actually mean much, but that alone with the flower increased retention by 25%.

12:21Katy Milkman: I think it's a nice illustration of a way that organizations can think about using fun and intrinsic motivation because there's no cash prize. There's no signaling value. This is just saying, you know, we appreciate you and giving you a little token of that appreciation that's digital and costless. and so I love that particular study because I think it shows how powerful it is to show appreciation in a joyful way. In her book Katie says that temptation bundling has helped her make more home-cooked meals. She denies herself wine unless she's cooking at the stave. I think that's quite a good one and it's also helped her finish her work projects.

13:04She reserves listening to her favorite podcast until she has finished her tasks. She doesn't mention in the book what her favourite podcast is, but let's hope it's one that's all about behavioural science. She does accept in the book that temptation bundling won't always help other people change, since it asks people to police themselves, and if they aren't fully on board, they can easily cheat. So to get other people on board, she advises to follow the idle vice tip, give a small reward for a behaviour, and you'll make that behaviour more alluring. That's temptation bundling and variable rewards.

13:37After the break, we will cover possibly the most influential study Katie has ever released. All of that coming up. Looking after your health as a self-employed person is entirely on you. There is no employer doing it for you and no one paying you sick leave if you fall unwell. That is something I often think about as a solo business owner and it is one of the reasons why I joined the Federation of Small businesses. Through FSB, members can access a healthcare app for just£39 plus VAT per person per year. It covers a 24-7 private GP, counselling, physiotherapy, mental health support and discounted gym memberships all in one place.

14:21For me, the discounted gym memberships were worth it alone, especially while training for the London Marathon. If you want to become an FSB member, visit get.fsb.org.uk forward slash nudge and use code nudge to get 10 % off your membership. The Ross Simmons Show is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. I've been following Ross for a while. His podcast is great. And an episode I'd highly recommend is called Mastering Time, Prioritization over Productivity. He gives some really well thought out tips on how to prioritize your time, including something I care a lot about which is how a small percentage of your efforts can drive the majority of your results.

15:03So go and listen to The Ross Simmons Show wherever you get your podcasts. Now imagine I was trying to persuade you to commit to 200 hours of volunteering each year. It wouldn't be easy. In fact I'd imagine very few of you would agree but Katie and her colleagues slightly tweaked the way you ask that request and managed to increase their chances by 8%. Here's Katie explaining how.

15:31Katy Milkman: This is a project that was led by another one of my former doctoral students, Anish Rai, who's a professor at the University of Maryland. And we had this opportunity that came through actually Angela Duckworth, who's a fellow co-author, had a connection to this amazing non-profit called Crisis Text Line. What they do is if you are going through a mental health crisis, they make someone available immediately any time of day who will text with you to help you through that experience. And it's a trained volunteer. And Crisis Text Line was growing rapidly, seeing a lot of success. and they came to Angela and said, hey, we don't feel like we're nailing it with getting the most out of our volunteer team.

16:20Katy Milkman: We have these amazing people who are so selfless, who commit to 200 hours of volunteering. They do a 40 hour training program and then they commit to 200 hours of yearly volunteering, but most don't meet that commitment. And because we're seeing all this explosive growth and there's so many people who need our services, it is really valuable to have these volunteers step up as often as possible. And is there anything we could do? Is there any behavioral science lever we could pull that might help convince these volunteers to give a little bit more of their time and effort to us? And we said, well, how do you talk about those commitments when you reach out to volunteers and are asking them to sign up for their weekly shifts?

17:00Katy Milkman: And they said, well, you know, we say you committed, we remind them of that big goal. We know goals matter. And we remind them every time we communicate about that 200 hour yearly commitment they've made. And we asked them to sign up for their weekly volunteering hours. We asked them regularly. We know reminders matter. And we said, okay, but you just talk about the 200 hour yearly goal and doing a little each week. That's it. And that was the answer. And we said, well, we can do better than that because we know that that 200 hour yearly target is really far away. It's really big. It doesn't feel easy to take a bite out of that at any moment and make real progress.

17:36The problem Crisis Text Line had was not volunteer sign up. Thousands of people signed up each month. They had loads of volunteers signing up. It was getting those people to actually start volunteering. Fewer than 5 % actually hit the target they had originally committed to. Katie and Anish feared that the huge 200-hour commitment, well, they feared it was putting people off.

17:58Katy Milkman: But what if we instead are clear by just doing the math for people that they could do pretty trivially if they thought about it, which is that 200 hours a year means you're going to do four hours a week. That's what you've committed to. Or eight hours every two weeks. Like we could try different ways of breaking it down. But in the near term, this is what needs to happen for you to meet this goal that you have committed to. So 9 ,000 volunteers were randomly assigned to receive a message with their commitment broken down or their commitment totals. And we changed emails in an AB test, an ABC test.

18:31Katy Milkman: Actually, we did the same message reminding people to sign up for their volunteering each week. But we either said what they normally say, you know, you said you do 200 hours a year. So please do a little every week. Or we said, you said you do 200 hours a year, but that's four hours every week. Please sign up. Or that's eight hours every two weeks. Please sign up. And what we found is that by breaking that big goal down into a bite-sized weekly or bi-weekly commitment in our communications, we increased volunteering. If I'm remembering the numbers correctly, I think it was by 8%, a pretty significant increase at no cost to the organization, just a tiny change in the framing that more clearly communicated what's expected of you right now.

19:17This is building on some amazing

19:20Katy Milkman: work that was done by Al Bandura of Stanford University's psychology department in the 70s and 80s on the importance of sub goals, breaking big goals into smaller component pieces. But most of that work, as it turns out, was done with like 20 people in survey experiments, right? Really not living up to sort of the modern scientific standard, but it made so much sense. And we felt like, let's see if we can apply that, if that work really holds true at scale, can really help an important organization achieve its mission. And so it was really exciting to get to do this project. The one other thing we found in that work that's kind of interesting, and this was not something we anticipated in advance, it was more of a, you know, like you poke around at the data and do learn something interesting, but let's replicate it before we get too carried away.

20:08Katy Milkman: But one of the things that we found in that process of trying to see if there was anything else interesting happening in the data beyond what we'd expected, is that it looked like there was more persistence in the benefits of the sub-goal message when we focused on eight hours every two weeks, which gives you a bit more flexibility in how you spread your time, than when we focused on four hours every week. So the trajectory of the change in behavior, because we did this experiment over months, was that the eight hours every two weeks seemed to show a slightly more sustained benefit. In her book, Katie shares another study that built on this idea.

20:43Back in 2020, two researchers at the University of Los Angeles and one at UCL worked with the online financial services company Acorns. Acorns is a saving app that helps people put money towards their saving accounts. Promotional messages forwarders' app encourage people to set an amount towards their saving pot each week. Katie writes how the researchers discovered that it is far more effective when asking people to set aside $5 a day rather than asking them to set aside$35 a week or$150 a month, even though all of those numbers amount to the exact same thing. 30 % of users who saw the daily framing started to save.

21:23That dropped to just 10 % for the weekly framing and down to 7 % for the monthly framing.

21:29Katy Milkman: In general, there is a benefit of some flexibility when we help people set up plans when we create tough objectives and this seems like another example of a situation where you want to create sub goals but you don't want them to be so narrow that people feel like I can't fit my life around them and and so finding that perfect balance is an important aspect I think of good behavioral science that is all for today's episode of nudge folks thank you so much for listening. This is my last episode with Katie Milkman, which I'm very sad to say because I've loved chatting with her. The previous episode and this episode have just been fantastic to work on.

22:10I mentioned in the last episode, but I've been trying to get Katie on the show for years. I loved her book when I read it five years ago, and I loved it when I reread it for this episode. I think her work is tremendous. Her studies are fantastic. So if you haven't picked up a copy of her book, go and pick up a copy of it and go and listen to her podcast and read her newsletter. both are fantastic now let me try and apply some of katie's principles to my own work all right here goes now what if i told you that you could improve your work by reading just one email for 60 seconds every week yep that is a blatant use of katie's research but it is also what 12 000 nudge newsletter subscribers do each week when they read my newsletter every friday i send out a free newsletter and it covers the best behavioral science tip i have discovered that week the tips walk through how to apply basically apply behavioral science to your work specifically to marketing to your business and then also tips on how to improve your own habits your own performance your own levels of procrastination stuff like that in recent weeks we've covered how to make an ad that people can't forget how authors decide what book covers to pick a masterclass in persuasion from two window cleaners and if faith can really improve your performance if you're interested in signing up and just to say it again it is totally free well if you are interested, you just have to go to nudgepodcast.com and click newsletter in the menu.

23:31That is nudgepodcast.com and click newsletter in the menu or you can find the link in the show notes to today's episode. That is all from me this week. Thanks again to Katie for joining me on the show. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Cheers.