Ep 104. Katy Milkman: Exercising Your Self Control

Katherine Milkman is the Evan C. Thompson Endowed Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching and Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a secondary appointment in the Perelman School of Medicine. And she is the co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative.  Professor Milkman specializes in the study of self-control failures and how to improve self-control by using big data to glean insights that can help us all.   Her undergraduate degree from Princeton University is in Operations Research and Financial Engineering and a her Ph.D. is from Harvard University’s joint program in Computer Science and Business. Poets and Quants named her one the top 40 business school professors under 40 and she was a finalist for the Thinkers 50 2017 Radar Thinker, among many other awards and accolades. She publishes in leading social science journals as well as in the popular press.Katy explains how we can limit temptation, tie tasks together, and use the calendar to bolster our self-control. She talks about “me-search” and how she studies the self-control issues she herself faces in order to encourage personal growth and inform others. Stew and Katy examine the effect of small distractions on productivity, and Katy provides examples of ways to use those distractions for positive change in self-control.  Here’s Katy’s awesome Ted Talk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.