When I joined The New York Times as a columnist in 2022, I hadn’t worked in an office in over two decades. Before, I wrote freelance articles and books at home; my only co-worker was Tux, my tuxedo cat.
On my first day, I was shown to my cubicle and given a computer. Feigning confidence, I sat down, opened my laptop and found myself unable to log in. I tried again. I started to sweat. Then, I called our I.T. department. The person who answered volunteered to assist me over the phone.
“Please, no,” I whispered. “Everyone will hear me fumbling. Can’t I just come to you?”
I grabbed my computer and hurried upstairs, where a man named Adnan gently asked if I was OK. In his five years working at The Times, he told me, he had seen a lot of colleagues feeling overwhelmed.
So he shared something that he thought might help. He told me to imagine a jar and suggested that I add a metaphorical penny to it every time I achieved something — even a task as small as finding my way back to my desk.
Over time, he said, you will fill up the jar. You will see that you are moving forward, even when you don’t feel that you are, he added.
I still think about that jar, especially when I’m having a rough time. I still deposit “pennies.”
Tallying up victories, even little ones, can be motivating, said B.J. Fogg, the founder of the Behavioral Design Lab at Stanford University and the author of “Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything.”
In his two decades of research for his book, Dr. Fogg found that adults had many ways to say “I did a bad job,” and very few ways of saying “I did a good job.” But tracking your wins by using something like the penny method is effective for morale and motivation, he said.
“You’re deliberately causing yourself to feel successful in the moment,” Dr. Fogg said. And it adds up, “so you can reflect back and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I have made progress.’”
Big achievements, like completing an important project, do have more motivational power, said Teresa Amabile, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and an author of “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work.” But major accomplishments are rare, she added, “which means we can’t count on them to keep people motivated day to day.”
Dr. Amabile said her research suggested that most people have “experienced a kind of outsized enjoyment” from small wins at work. She explained how one subject, for example, fixed a bug in his office’s computer system, and that made him feel “happy and motivated for days.”
The penny jar method works for other areas of life, too. My friend’s father died recently, and she was so grief-stricken that she struggled to complete the simplest tasks. I told her about the jar, and now she uses the method. Get out of bed? One penny. Manage to brush your teeth? Two pennies. Even that, she said, gives her momentum.
If you feel overwhelmed or stuck — by a challenging new circumstance or an overwhelming task — you can use an actual jar, envision one or write down the small victories that earn pennies.
I recently told Adnan how much his advice had helped me. I thanked him for giving me tech support, and emotional support, too.
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