How good are you at balancing all the important things you want to get done? Not just various work projects, but balancing work with family responsibilities, exercise, and even hobbies?

Most of us struggle with some aspect of this. And the solution isn’t to try to find more time in the day to do it all, explains clinical professor Harry Kraemer.

“When [people] realize they’ve got more things to do than time to do it, the usual reaction is, ‘well, I’ll just go faster and faster.’ And I think what ends up happening is many of us can confuse activity and productivity,” he says.

Today Kraemer will walk us through an exercise to help us figure out how we can better allocate our time so that we’re prioritizing what really matters. Then, we’ll look at some research on the power of boycotts.

Does your life reflect your values?

Kraemer, who is the former CEO of Baxter International, explained his approach to aligning one’s life with one’s values in a recent The Insightful Leader podcast episode. Those of you who are familiar with Kraemer’s approach to leadership will not be surprised to learn that his strategy is rooted in self-reflection.

“Most people that are having trouble balancing things haven’t been self-reflective enough to figure out what they’re trying to balance,” he says.

Here is an exercise he recommends to facilitate this sort of self-reflection:

First, think about the activities for which you want to find time. For most people, these fall into six buckets:

• your career or your education
• your family and the people you care about
• your spiritual or religious activities
• your health
• things you do for fun
  
• your social responsibilities or volunteering

Next, take out a piece of paper and write down the percentage of your time that you want to spend on each of these activities. Then write down the percent you’re currently spending on each. (Consult the past few months of your calendar for this if it will keep you honest.) Finally, calculate the difference between your goal and reality.

If you see some big differences, don’t worry. That’s normal. “I’ve yet to meet the person who says, ‘well, that’s an amazing coincidence. … My goal lines up with exactly where I’m spending my time,’” Kraemer says.

Your job, now, is to try to get reality closer to your goals. That is unlikely to be an easy task. But at least you have a map of your destination. It should be easier to think through which activities you’ll need to let go of to get there.

You can listen to the full podcast episode with Kraemer here.

Do boycotts really work?

No leader wants their company to be the target of a boycott.

But while boycotts are certainly unpleasant, it can be surprisingly difficult to determine just how much they actually hurt a company’s bottom line—especially since, in our politically charged climate, opposing camps may in turn launch “buycotts” that urge consumers to go out and purchase the targeted company’s goods.

Anna Tuchman, a professor of marketing, wanted to find out what really happens to consumer behavior —and sales—when a company finds itself in a political social-media storm. Earlier research mainly looked at boycotts, but Tuchman was interested in the more comprehensive view of the impact of simultaneous boycotts and buycotts.

Along with coauthors, Tuchman focused on the 2020 boycott and buycott of Latin food purveyor Goya. The campaigns were in reaction to CEO Robert Unanue’s praise of President Trump during a meeting at the White House. Many Latino leaders called for a boycott, while Trump supporters started a buycott countermovement.

The researchers analyzed detailed shopping data for 33,486 households that purchased a Goya product at least once between January 2019 and December 2020. They found that the buycott effect overwhelmed the boycott effect, raising Goya’s sales 22 percent during the two-week period immediately after Unanue’s comments. But the impact was temporary; there was no detectable sales increase after three weeks.

What happened? Tuchman points out that brand loyalty can be powerful—particularly for products that do not have an equivalent substitute, such as Goya’s Adobo seasoning.

And, in one important way, the failure of the boycott in the face of a buycott was completely predictable. Only seven percent of American households were already buying Goya products regularly and could effectively take part in a boycott. In contrast, any shopper can participate in a buycott.

Of course, grocery-store brands are not highly visible signifiers of political identity. “No one knows what brand of beans your family buys,” Tuchman says. Products that are more visible, such as clothes or cars with a brand logo, may see a larger or longer-term impact from boycotts or buycotts.

You can read the full Insight article on Tuchman’s research here.