THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired?
Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab
something on the run that's not particularly nutritious? Rarely get
away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no
time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume
of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you'd like, and still
feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?
More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming
demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically,
the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A
new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that
strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps,
longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more
frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of
course, health.
"More, bigger, faster." This, the ethos of the market economies since
the Industrial Revolution, is grounded in a mythical and misguided
assumption — that our resources are infinite.
Time is the resource on which we've relied to get more accomplished.
When there's more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and
many of us feel we're running out, that we're investing as many hours
as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside
work.
Although many of us can't increase the working hours in the day, we
can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to
understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as
the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time,
it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of
us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most
companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More
than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on
a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they'll work during their
vacations.
In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest
and most continuously over time. But that doesn't mean they're the
most productive.
Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and
insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study
of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that
sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was
one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard
study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2
billion a year in lost productivity.
The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male
basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in
practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting
each increased by an average of 9 percent.
Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift
air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an
average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that
measured vigilance and reaction time.
Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara
C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California,
Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test
results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm
Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that
for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their
year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to
five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also
significantly less likely to leave the firm.
As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance
demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we're under pressure,
however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder
rather than rest. This may explain why a recent survey by Harris
Interactive found that Americans left an average of 9.2 vacation days
unused in 2012 — up from 6.2 days in 2011.
The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human
beings aren't designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we're
meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.
In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman
discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from
light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the
Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman
discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking
lives.
The difference is that during the day we move from a state of
alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every
90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often
override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine,
sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline,
noradrenaline and cortisol.
Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for
maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his
colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers,
including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of
these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically
practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.
They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely
work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.
"To maximize gains from long-term practice," Dr. Ericsson concluded,
"individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an
amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly
basis."
I've systematically built these principles into the way I write. For
my first three books, I sat at my desk for up 10 hours a day. Each of
the books took me at least a year to write. For my two most recent
books, I wrote in three uninterrupted 90-minute sessions — beginning
first thing in the morning, when my energy was highest — and took a
break after each one.
Along the way, I learned that it's not how long, but how well, you
renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires
practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and
relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the
breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also
turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me,
unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both
books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less
demanding work.
The power of renewal was so compelling to me that I've created a
business around it that helps a range of companies including Google,
Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, the Los Angeles Police Department,
Cleveland Clinic and Genentech.
Our own offices are a laboratory for the principles we teach. Renewal
is central to how we work. We dedicated space to a "renewal" room in
which employees can nap, meditate or relax. We have a spacious lounge
where employees hang out together and snack on healthy foods we
provide. We encourage workers to take renewal breaks throughout the
day, and to leave the office for lunch, which we often do together. We
allow people to work from home several days a week, in part so they
can avoid debilitating rush-hour commutes. Our workdays end at 6 p.m.
and we don't expect anyone to answer e-mail in the evenings or on the
weekends. Employees receive four weeks of vacation from their first
year.
Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far
more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number
of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it's possible
to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one
has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and
generally applicable. When we're renewing, we're truly renewing, so
when we're working, we can really work.
NYT
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