What’s causing it?

The root of the lost productivity seems to be connected to health. While at work, 40 percent of obese workers said they lost productivity due to health related reasons in the two weeks prior. Lost productivity here was defined as losing concentration, repeating a job, working more slowly than usual, feeling fatigued at work, or doing nothing at work. Ten percent of obese workers said they lost productivity because they missed at least one day of work in the previous two weeks for health reasons. In other words, the workers were less productive because they were missing work but also because they were at work and not able to function at their best.

A little silver lining to these research findings is that people who were simply overweight but not obese didn’t lose nearly as much productivity. They were nearly on par with people who were classified as being within normal weight.

In the study, researchers relied on people’s self-reported height, weight, and other information. It’s possible, they explain, that people under-reported their weight, but it’s just as possible that the subjects over-reported their height. The classifications of obese, overweight, and normal-weight used in the study came from a calculation of body mass index, which isn’t a perfect measurement. Someone who is technically overweight by BMI standards may in fact just be a larger person who is indeed quite healthy. But given the size of the study (more than 7,000 subjects) and the fact that the most important findings had to do with fully obese people rather than overweight people, the data hold up.

These numbers are both shocking and at the same time not really all that surprising. Obesity is a health issue. Workers who aren’t healthy aren’t as productive, on average, as those who are. Obese individuals have many more health problems than normal weight people. They have a higher instance of many chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and sleep apnea (and I’ve pointed out before on this site how losing even a little sleep every night is as bad as not sleeping at all for two days straight, in terms of performance and ability to focus).

In discussions of how to increase productivity, health is often overlooked or ignored all together. But it shouldn’t be. It can’t be. Emotional, psychological, and physical wellbeing must be prerequisites to any attempt at increasing one’s personal productivity. And obesity is a health problem.

If you want to be your most productive self and increase your personal productivity, you need to be healthy. If you’re obese, you’re not healthy.

Let me make clear that I do not think these data should be used to discriminate against obese people in hiring or employment retention practices.

However, I do think an objective look at the numbers regarding productivity and obesity is worthwhile in part to highlight just how deep some of the problems related to being obese run.

References

Ricci, J. A., and Chee, E. (2005). Lost productive time associated with excess weight in the U.S. workforce. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 47(12): 1227-34.

Photo by Keoni Cabral, CC.

Japanese researchers interested in the effects of kawaii, or “cuteness,” on productivity ran an experiment in which they showed pictures of baby animals to subjects to see whether it would change their performance on a dexterity test (Nittono 2012). The performance of people who looked at these pictures of puppies and kittens shot up by more than 40 percent!

When subjects looked at less cute pictures of older cats and dogs, their dexterity rose by only 12 percent (which is still significant), and when they looked at pictures of food, performance only increased 1 or 2 percent, which was so little as to be insignificant.

The study in Japan had a relatively small sample size, and it measured dexterity, which isn’t the best stand-in metric for personal productivity. But another group of researchers led by Oswald (2014) carried out a much bigger study with more than 700 subjects over several years that shows a similar effect.

Comedy and Chocolate

In the Oswald study, productivity was estimated using a test that’s used in other productivity experiments, too. It’s essentially a bunch of math and GMAT problems, but it’s really easy to determine how many questions the average test taker gets right and attempts to complete.

Some of the subjects watched clips of comedians before taking the test. Some watched a boring video instead. Some watched nothing at all and sat quietly in a room for the same length of time as the comedy clip. And some, just to simulate the perks seen in real office environments, got free food and drinks, specifically, chocolate, fruit, and water.

So what happened?

Productivity Boosters

The groups who watched the comedy clips did better on the test, on average, than the groups who watched nothing at all. And the same goes for the group who got free food and drink. Their productivity was higher by 10 to 12 percent on average.

Additionally, the groups who were exposed to these “happiness treatments,” as the research calls them, made more attempts, indicating perhaps greater effort or increased motivation.

If you run a business, don’t be so quick to run out and buy food for all your employees, however. Here’s what Oswald and co. have to say about that:

“Although our work suggests that happier workers are more productive, we cannot, as a rule, say that real-world employers should expend more resources on making their employees happier. In some of the experiments… half of the time in the laboratory was spent in raising the subjects’ happiness levels, and in one of the other experiments we spent approximately two dollars per person on fruit and chocolate to raise productivity by almost 20% for a short period of concentrated work. This study illustrates the existence of a potentially important mechanism. However, it cannot adjudicate, and is not designed to adjudicate, on the net benefits and costs within existing business settings (although it suggests that research in such settings would be of interest).”

Not All Happiness is Created Equal

Let’s not jump to conclusions about the effects of “happiness” as a blanket term, on productivity. I’ve written before about how sunny days and pleasant weather, factors that seemingly make people happier, actually cause personal productivity to decrease.

For example, most people believe that good weather puts us in a good mood, therefore making us more productive, but it just doesn’t play out that way. Sunny, pleasant days actually make office workers less productive, not more (Lee 2014). And days that are rainy, snowy, or have extreme temperatures in either direction cause office workers (who are probably very content indoors) to be a little more productive.

What Can You Do?

How can you use this knowledge to your advantage?

Watching or listening to comedy bits before work or during a lunch break probably isn’t a bad idea, as long as you keep a time limit on yourself. In the research I’ve been citing, the subjects who watched comedy clips or looked at cute baby animals were all limited in their exposure. In other words, it wasn’t in their control to decide to start surfing the Internet for more compilations of kittens cuddling with hedgehogs, or whatever you cute animal of choice may be.

Additionally, the more I research productivity causes and effects, the more I notice a rule of moderation comes up again and again. Multi-tasking, to a point, is beneficial for productivity. Interruptions, to a point, actually seem to make people more productive.

You can easily put limitations on your own happiness treatments by deciding when and where you’ll do them. For example, maybe you’ll listen to stand-up comedy on your headphones only from the car and into the office until the time you turn on your computer. Or maybe you’ll only watch one kitten video before you leave for your commute. You’ll force yourself to stop watching when it’s time to go.

References

Lee, J. J., Gino, F., and Staats, B. R. (2014). Rainmakers: Why bad weather means good productivity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(3), 504-513.

Nittono, H., Fukushima, M, Yano, A., and Moriya, H. (2012). The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus. PLoS ONE 7(9): e46362. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046362

Oswald, A. J., Proto, E., and Sgroi, D. (2014). Happiness and productivity. working paper. Journal of Labor Economics. 3rd Version: 10 February 2014.

Photo by 92YTribeca, CC.

Researchers from University of Warwick, U.K., and IZA Bonn in Germany ran a great experiment in which subjects completed a really neat and reliable productivity test (Oswald 2014). It’s the same test that’s been used in other studies before, so the researchers have loads of data about how well people do on the test on average. The test is essentially a series of math problems and GMAT questions. Researchers know how many questions the average person can get right in the time allowed, and then they analyze the results to see whether that average changes among certain groups.

What would the test scores be, relative to the average, if given to people who had suffered a traumatic life event?

Over the course of several years, Oswald and his team gathered data on more than 700 participants, all college students, and divvied them into different slices. One of those slices was people who have had what they call an “unhappiness shock” or “bad life event” (BLE). These are subjects who took the productivity test and then afterward, when asked about their lives, said they had experienced a close family bereavement, extended family bereavement, serious life-threatening illness in the close family, or parental divorce in the last five years. They also were asked to rate their happiness in general.

Parental divorce turned out to have no significant effect, so the researchers scrapped it. When they focused just on participants with a death or serious illness in the family, productivity was down by 10 to 12 percent! They also put in less effort, as the results explains:

“Those subjects who have recently been through a bad life event are noticeably less happy and less productive. Compared to the control group, they mark themselves nearly half a point lower on the happiness scale, and they achieve approximately 2 fewer correct additions. They also make fewer attempts [at answering questions]. These are noticeable differences when compared to individuals in the no-BLE group. The effects are statistically significant in the full samples; they are also statistically significant in the majority of the subsamples.”

A few more details are important. First, the subsample was 179 participants, which is pretty good. Second, the participants were all students from an elite English university, which on the one hand makes them pretty homogenous, but on the other hand allows the researchers to hold constant a lot of other factors, such as their age and economic situation.

What About Natural or Man-Made Disasters?

What the researcher didn’t address are other kinds of traumas, such as surviving a car accident that was fatal to others or losing a limb on the battlefield. Let’s not assume that those kinds of traumas would have the same effect as a death in the family.

Another kind of trauma not analyzed are natural and man-made disasters. I wonder if there is a similar drop in productivity among people who are part of a much larger traumatic event that isn’t necessarily personal.

For example, how did the 2004 tsunami in Japan and other parts of Asia affect personal productivity among survivors? Or how about n New Orleans after Katrina in 2005? Analysts estimated the financial loss due to businesses being closed, people leaving the city, and fewer tourists hopping around Bourbon Street, but did they estimate the drop in productivity among the people who stayed and worked? Fill in any act of terrorism, and ask the same question.

Meeting Basic Needs

When we consider personal productivity (meaning the productivity of an individual for that individual, rather than as it benefits an organization) I see a lot of overlap between this research on bad life events and other research on scarcity and slack (Mullainathan & Shafir 2013).

We have limits on the bandwidth we use to get through life. When conditions are good, we reserve some of our bandwidth so that we can handle unexpected problems, such as accidents, illnesses, and other stressors. When our bandwidth for handling life is exhausted by unforeseen stressors, we need to take bandwidth away from something else, such as our focus and attention at work or our ability to remember to take medication and pay our bills.

What Can You Do?

In my work on this blog and other writing about productivity, I love to recommend actions people can take to increase their productivity based on what we learn from the research. Whether it’s a life hack or just a simple trick to turn the tables in your favor, I like to look for actionable solutions to problems.

In the case of a bad life event or trauma, however, my advice is more along the lines of “don’t push it.”

We all have physical, emotional, and psychological needs. If those needs are not being met or are being heavily taxed, we don’t have any leftover resources to put into our work. We must assign as much of our available resources as possible to reaching a state of overall wellness first before we try to put any resources toward other things.

To put it more bluntly, I wouldn’t worry about productivity hacks if you’re undergoing chemotherapy. Don’t waste your time looking for ways to improve your work output if you recently lost a family member. Not only are those issues more important and deserving of your attention, but also, you won’t get very far trying to increase your productivity if your core needs are not met.

References

Mullainathan, S., and Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Macmillan.

Oswald, A. J., Proto, E., and Sgroi, D. (2014). Happiness and productivity. working paper. Journal of Labor Economics. 3rd Version: 10 February 2014.

Photo by Beverly, CC.

Researchers from The Netherlands and Russia (Zijlstra et al., 1999) ran an experiment where office workers completed a task in a simulated office environment. While the subjects were trying to get the work done, the researchers called them on the phone and distracted them from the primary task to give them a new interrupting task. Sometimes the interrupting task was simple, like looking up a phone number, and sometimes it was more complex, requiring the subject to leave the window with the open document for the primary task and use some real brain power.

The subjects didn’t know that the researchers were purposefully interrupting them or secretly observing them the whole time.

Now, the primary task was nothing more than routine word processing stuff, correcting text errors of moderate complexity, alphabetizing references, and formatting documents. The subjects were secretaries who do this kind of work all the time. When uninterrupted, the task should take a competent secretary around 45 to 50 minutes to complete, although they were all told they could take as much time as they needed and work at their own pace, a detail that turns out to be crucial to performance.

When the experiment was done, the researchers looked at the quality of the work, and it was as good as when subjects did the task without any interruptions at all. But here’s where it gets weird. When they looked at the total time the subjects spent on the primary task, it actually decreased when they were interrupted! Remember also that there were some variations in the kinds of interruptions different subjects received. Time on task decreased even more, to the tune of 4 to 9 minutes, in cases when subjects were interrupted more frequently.

What’s going on?

Zijlstra and his team think the workers developed “strategies enabling them to deal effectively with the interruptions, while actually over-compensating the potential performance decline” (163). In other words, they buckle down and increase their productivity because of the distractions. Again, the secretaries were allowed to work at their own pace and without a time limit. Other research has shown that when time limits are enforced, workers don’t react the same way at all. Maybe it’s a case of keeping the stakes at a moderate level rather than increasing them; we already know that when stakes are too high, people blow it.

Even if the theory is correct that frequent distractions can actually increase productivity, the researchers warn that distractions are still stressors. Another part of the study examined the effect of the interruptions on the workers’ emotions and well-being, and found that they do in fact take a toll.

“Interruptions seem to have a cumulative effect as far as the workers’ state is concerned. When the number of interruptions grows the level of effort rises and the resumption time, i.e. the time needed to re-start the task execution, becomes disproportionally longer. This effect may be explained in terms of decreasing motivation and growing mental fatigue. Extrapolating our findings, which show a performance enhancement along with rising psychological costs, we expect an inverted U-curve with respect to the optimal eVect of interruptions” (183).

The inverted U-shape is particularly interesting because it’s similar to what’s been found in research on the benefits about multitasking. A little bit under the right conditions increase productivity, but too much causes our productivity to plummet.

References

Zijlstra, F. R., Roe, R. A., Leonora, A. B., & Krediet, I. (1999). Temporal factors in mental work: Effects of interrupted activities. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 72, 163–185.

Photo by Servando Miramontes, CC.

External vs. Self Interruptions

Interruptions are largely categorized into two groups: external interruptions and self interruptions (Jin 2008).

External interruptions are exactly what you’d expect. They come from your environment. A few common examples are chatty co-workers and that needy cat in the home office I mentioned previously. If your boss interrupts you to ask for an update on a project or task, that’s an external interruption. If you have notifications enabled on your email account that flash on screen and ding when you get a new message, those are also external interruptions. When you have to put your work down to attend a meeting, that’s also an external interruption.

Self interruptions are also what you’d expect. They come from within. A few researchers have tried to classify different types of self-interruption, but there is no set that everyone agrees on at the moment. Jin (2008) came up with five ideas that aren’t bad but seem to have some overlap (and no. 2 hardly seems to be a self interruption):

1. breaks – spontaneous recess from work to alleviate stress or to decrease the chance of distraction later through boredom
2. distractions – reactions to minimal external stimuli
3. reminders – intentional actions taken on a different task to prevent future negligence of that task; reminders are often triggers to deviations (see no. 5)
4. obstacles – task switches caused by the need to remove obstacles from the environment that could be distracting
5. deviations – gradual shifts away from the primary task that can span over several task switches, and which may be tied to breaks.

Some researchers theorize that we interrupt our own work in order to keep at it for the long-haul, or because we are trying to achieve a state of flow (Adler, 2013). While it may be true sometimes, I hardly think it’s the primary reason people have self-interruptions. If you ask anyone who is concerned about their productivity to describe their daily interruptions and self-interruptions, you’ll hear that email and meetings are really the big offenders.

Email as an Interrupting Force

Email seems to be both an external interruption and a self interruption. After all, the user is the one who chooses whether to enable email alerts. When a notifications pings on a computer screen or on the phone, how we respond to it is a choice, too.

How we feel about email matters, too. If email is the primary way we become aware of problems that directly affect our work, of course we want to check it obsessively and make sure nothing is going wrong. If we typically respond to notifications by tending to them, then we create a habit for ourselves, and we all know habits are hard to break.

I’m sure it’s no surprise to hear that one study found people left their email programs open and running in the background all times both at work and at home. They checked their inboxes on average every five minutes (Renaud, 2006). That’s how we work and live. It’s a habit, and it’s a very normal, culturally accepted habit. But it probably isn’t the best habit to have if you want to increase your productivity.

In one experiment (Gould, 2013), participants were asked to complete an online task that took about 32 minutes. They were told to only work on the task. Still, during those 32 minutes, 80 percent of the people switched tasks (i.e., self interrupted) at least once, and on average they did it six times! That’s about once every five minutes, which is exactly the same amount of time Renaud found people checked email. Sound like a habit? You betchya.

I’ve noted before that the problem with email isn’t the sheer amount of time we spend in it, but rather that our email time is broken up into little moments throughout the entire day. Email itself isn’t unproductive necessarily, but checking it frequently is.

Our bad email-checking habits are allowing this otherwise banal communication tool to break our concentration and interrupt our flow dozens or hundreds of times throughout the day.

Are Meetings Interruptions?

Workers complain as much about meetings being an interrupting force as they do about email. And based on some research, Ii turns out that meetings may be even more like email as interrupting forces than we previously thought.

“[I]t is the frequency of interruptions and not the amount of time they consume that leads to negative consequences,” (Long, 2005, citing Zijlstra, 1999). Six short meetings of 15 minutes each hurts productivity much more than one long hour-and-a-half meeting.

The underlying assumption behind all this research is that to be productive, we need to focus for long stretches of time. So becoming more productive is as much about creating an environment and habits that are conducive to working uninterrupted as it is about telling your chatty co-worker or cat to scram.

References

Adler, R., & Benbunan-Fich, R. (2013). Self-interruptions in discretionary multitasking. Computers in Human Behavior, 1441-1449.

Gould, S. J. J., Cox, A. L., & Brumby, D. P. (2013). Frequency and duration of self-initiated task-switching in an online investigation of interrupted performance. In Human computation and crowdsourcing: Works in progress and demonstration abstracts AAAI technical report CR-13-01 (pp. 22–23).

Jin, J. (2008). Are You Your Own Worst Enemy? Self‐Interruption on the Computer. [Undergraduate thesis abstract]

Luong, A., & Rogelberg, S. G. (2005). Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees.Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 9(1), 58.

Renaud, K., Ramsay, J., & Hair, M. (2006). ‘You’ve got e-mail!’… Shall I deal with it now? Electronic mail from the recipient’s perspective. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 21(3), 313–332.

Rose, E. (2011). Continuous Partial Attention Teaching and Learning in the Age of Interruption. Antistasis, 1(2).

Zijlstra, F. R., Roe, R. A., Leonora, A. B., & Krediet, I. (1999). Temporal factors in mental work: Effects of interrupted activities. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 72, 163–185.

Photo by Necosky, CC.

I’m a huge proponent of using keyboard shortcuts to increase productivity. Check out some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac, and some essential shortcuts for browsers in the video below.

I’m also a proponent of making sure assumptions are accurate, like the assumption that keyboard shortcuts make us more productive.

Some decent research shows that keyboard shortcuts do in fact make computer users more productive. For example, Lane (2005) found that keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Word shave more than half a second, and in a few cases three times that much, off common tasks, compared to using the toolbar icons or menu dropdown options.

Half a second to 1.5 seconds may not seem like a big deal, unless you perform that same repetitive task hundreds or thousands of times in a single week. Over a few months or a year, those seconds add up.

More importantly, when you use keyboard shortcuts in combination with touch-typing, you can often keep your eyes on the screen and your attention focused on what you’re doing better than if you have to dart your eyes up to a menu to find a command from a drop-down list or among a few dozen icons.

Assumption confirmed: Keyboard shortcuts increase productivity.

So it breaks my heart to also learn that even experienced computer users by and large don’t know or don’t use keyboard shortcuts (Bhavani 1997, Lane 2005). The amount of experience a person has with computers in general or even a specific program has no correlation whatsoever with whether they know the most efficient way to use them.

No one seems to know why people don’t learn keyboard shortcuts or other tricks to make using their programs more efficient. I think it has something to do with motivation and the “use it or lose it” principle.

Use It or Lose It

People tend to learn only as much as they need to get by for their specific job or function that they need to perform. The operations we use most often are obviously the ones that will stick. If we learn an operation that we don’t use, we forget it pretty quickly. Use it or lose it.

I initially learned keyboard shortcuts for a complicated editorial layout program by literally writing down on paper a list of the operations I performed the most. Next to each one, I wrote the keyboard shortcut. I’m fairly certain there’s a For Dummies book with a very similar list, only mine was tailored specifically to the functions I used. The first few weeks were painful, frustrating, and extremely slow. But after about a month, I knew at least a dozen commands by muscle memory. I got faster and more proficient, which meant I had time to take on special projects, like writing and editing more (which was how I really wanted to spend my time at work).

Computers, no doubt, improve personal productivity more than if we had no computers at all. The speed and convenience of email beats that of picking up a phone and hoping that the person you’re calling will just happen to be nearby when the other phone rings. Drafting a blueprint in AutoCAD is faster, cleaner, and easier to edit than putting pencil and protractor to paper. But learning AutoCAD inside and out is really difficult and time consuming. Plus, if you don’t practice what you’ve learned, you’ll forget it.

If I had to guess why people don’t learn keyboard shortcuts, it’s because they take time and effort to learn, and it’s hard to know which ones you’ll use and retain. It’s hard to know before you learn them which ones are worth learning. So why bother? Where is the motivation?

It would be neat to develop a program that monitored all keyboarding and mousing behavior to keep count of how many times a user performs a certain operation. Then, the user would have concrete evidence as to which keyboard shortcuts would be worth learning.

References

Bhavnani, S. K., & John, B. E. (1997). From sufficient to efficient usage: An analysis of strategic knowledge. Retrieved November 17, 2015, from http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/chi97/proceedings/paper/skb.htm

Lane, D. M., Napier, H. A., Peres, S. C., & Sándor, A. (2005). Hidden costs of graphical user interfaces: Failure to make the transition from menus and icon toolbars to keyboard shortcuts. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 18(2), 133-144.

Photo by Leslee Lazar, CC.

Here are six of the most important facts and myths I’ve uncovered so far:

Productivity Facts

Email ruins productivity. Email is just as bad for personal productivity as we always thought, if not worse. The problem is email itself, but rather that it interrupts us continuously throughout the day. To that end, the popular alternative-to-email communication tool Slack is just as guilty. The best remedy is one that remains wildly unpopular, but that truly productive people have always sworn by: Shut email while you work. Open email at dedicated intervals during the day. Set time aside to process email, and the rest of the time, leave it and other notifications off.

Sleep is extremely important to productivity. Yup, and duh. I think people know how important sleep is to their productivity (and health, and happiness…) but don’t like to hear about it because fixing bad sleep is as hard as losing weight. It requires lifestyle changes, and often it even requires losing weight—sleep apnea is strongly correlated with being overweight or obese.

You need a minimum of 7 hours of sleep every night. How much sleep a person needs varies based on the individual, but it’s likely to be at least seven hours a night. And it has to be consistent. In a really good sleep experiment, researchers found that people who consistently slept only six hours per night for two weeks straight had the cognitive skills of someone who was forced to stay away for two days straight! The only real difference was that the people who slept six hours a night thought they were fine. They didn’t know they were bombing their performance tests. t can’t even get across how alarming that fact is. In the same study, people who were allowed to sleep up to eight hours a night consistently had the highest performance.

Productivity Myths

Social media is a productivity killer. Nope! While some people get distracted by social media and online surfing, the number of seconds people spend doing it while at work or when asked to complete a computerized task turns out to be fairly small, according to a few studies. In talking with representatives from RescueTime, a company that makes time-tracking software that monitors which apps and websites you use, most people’s worries about Facebook and Twitter hurting their productivity are nowhere near the real hit they take from using email throughout the day.

Rainy days lower sour mood, sap our energy, and make us less productive. Nope! Office workers tend to get a lot more done on days when the weather is rainy or snowy, or when the temperature is extreme, either super hot or cold. Sunny, comfortable days, on the other hand, caused productivity to drop in all the studies I’ve read.

We should never ever multitask. Once again, let me give a big old “Nope!” to that one. I don’t know who started the war on multitasking, but it was clearly someone who didn’t want to look at what a complicated issue multitasking is. When people multitask in the right way and to the right degree, they are wildly more productive than when they don’t multitask at all. Very often, multitasking has to do with making efficient use of wait times. When we hand off a task to another colleague, should we really sit and wait for it to return while doing nothing else just to keep our brain fresh and alert to the project and its nuances? Clearly, no. If we are required to be in a meeting that really isn’t useful, should we really hang on every word spoken and not catch up on email? No, no, no. As long as people are sensible about what kind of multitasking they’re doing and how much, it is absolutely productive to do it.

It’s counter-intuitive, I know. But to get the most out of yourself, you need to leave some time unplanned, unstructured, and completely free.

One of the most influential books I’ve read that’s indirectly about productivity is Scarcity: Why having too little means so much (2013) by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. The books explains, through both theory and research findings, how scarcity affects behavior and to some degree cognition. Understanding what scarcity does to the mind is absolutely crucial to any discussion about productivity.

The Scarcity Mindset

Scarcity refers to a lack of any resource, which could be money, food, time, or something else entirely. What’s important to understand is that scarcity can be replicated in a lab. Researchers can—and have—run experiments that put people who are wealthy, healthy, functioning adults into situations where they were short on a resource. Regardless what that resource was, the results would almost always be the same.

When we experience scarcity, we worry about managing the little resources we do have, and we expend a lot of mental energy to try and make ends meet. Again, don’t think of scarcity just in terms of money. Think about time. Or think about child care resources. When we don’t have enough of something we need, other areas of life often suffer as an indirect result. Mullainathan and Shafir explain:

“The poor are not just short on cash. They are also short on bandwidth. … The same person when experiencing poverty—or primed to think about his monetary troubles—did significantly worse on several tests. He showed less flexible intelligence. He showed less executive control. With scarcity on his mind, he simply had less mind for everything else.”

So much of what we do day to day relies on having adequate bandwidth. When one thing taxes our bandwidth, something else that requires bandwidth suffers. For example, if you’re preoccupied with getting your house ready for a party, you might not have the bandwidth to deal with your kid getting floss stuck in his teeth. Most of the time we don’t think about “bandwidth” as such. We just say, “I can’t handle that right now because I’m dealing with this.”

When bandwidth is taxed, the first thing to go is usually stuff we keep in our working memory, or “prospective memory,” like remembering to change the oil in the car or refill your medication.

Think about it: When you’re stressed at work because you don’t have enough time or resources to get things done, what slips first? It’s often something like picking up school supplies for the kids, returning phone calls, or the sixth thing on your mental shopping list that you have now forgotten to buy. These are all important things to remember, but they are not immediate life-or-death important.

To have more bandwidth or resources than you need is to have slack.

Slack and Productivity

To truly make the most of our productivity, slack is crucial.

It’s hard to convince people, however, that the key to being more productive is to not use all your resources. Intentionally creating slack means leaving something to spare. The whole concept of increasing productivity relies on the idea that we should use every resource to its fullest and in the most efficient way. To create slack completely counters that premise.

To be as productive as we can be, however, we do in fact need to protect ourselves, as much as possible anyway, from experiencing scarcity. Part of the way to do that is to protect our slack.

Slack is nothing more than wiggle room. It’s extra padding that absorbs problems. Let’s take the case of preparing the house for a party when your kids (or pet) suddenly gets into trouble. If your goal was to be as efficient as possible, you probably budgeted your time to clean, decorate, and cook so that the food would be fresh and hot right as the guests arrived. More experienced party hosts, however, know that it makes sense to prepare food the night before. Why? To give yourself slack. Preparing food in advance enables you to leave extra time, focus, and energy to deal with anything that goes awry, whether it’s the dog knocking over the garbage can or a kid getting his head stuck in the staircase banister.

One concrete example for how to protect slack at work, at least in terms of time, is to put an artificial limit on the number of meetings you take in a day or a week. One meeting is fine. Two might be pushing it. Upon receiving a third meeting request, you might automatically turn it down, or at the very least reschedule the least important meeting that’s already on your calendar. You need to give yourself time to process what happens in the meetings, follow up on any actions tasked to you, prepare for the next meeting, and leave a little room to tackle any problems that arise.

References

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Macmillan.

Photo by Rocio Pilar, CC. flickr.com/photos/rociopilar

There’s just one hitch. You have to do the right amount of multitasking. Too much causes productivity to plummet.

Chances are you’ve heard that multitasking prevents long periods of focus. It interrupts our thought process. Intuitively, you probably believe that’s true. And to some degree it is. The case for multitasking is actually rather complicated.

Multi-Tasking and Task-Switching are Good for You

First, it’s important to mention that by “multitasking” I’m referring to two things: doing two more or more things simultaneously and task-switching.

Multitasking used to exclusively have the first definition, to do more than one thing at a time. Here are a few examples:

• listening during a meeting while also checking email
• breastfeeding while grading papers
• drinking coffee while talking on the phone
• eating lunch while reading a book.

Now let’s talk about task-switching, which is also a kind of multitasking. Task-switching refers to bouncing between tasks, usually over a fairly short amount of time. More specifically, task-switching refers to not completing a task all the way through without interruption. A few examples of task-switching are:

• writing the first few sentences of an article, stopping to check email, and then resuming your writing
• brainstorming ideas for a visual concept, having a meeting with your boss about something else, and then sketching some of the ideas you brainstormed earlier.

One potential value of task-switching that’s often overlooked is that it stands in for taking a break, and we know that taking breaks is good for productivity. When we task-switch effectively, we are letting our brains rest from the job at hand while doing something else that’s still productive.

Researcher Ellen Rose (2011) sees this kind of multitasking among her students who work in online learning environments, such as Blackboard. When students work online, the entirety of the Internet, including their email, instant messaging apps, social networks, and click-bait articles galore are at their fingertips. But, as Rose writes, “these students are in the process of redefining attention and focus, such that even those who admitted to breaking away often from online learning activities, sometimes for five minutes or more each time, described themselves as ‘very focused.’ Distraction is also being reconceptualized as not a hindrance to learning but a necessary diversion, and therefore a positive aspect of online learning.”

One of her students, in a survey, explained how multitasking pays off: “I find the multitasking ability that online learning allows you to do keeps me working for longer than if I couldn’t.”

Put another way, multitasking can increase productivity.

Certain types of multitasking are often overlooked, too. For example, let’s say you send a document to a colleague for comments and expect a quick turn-around, maybe five or ten minutes. Multitasking would mean doing any other task at all during the wait time. If you weren’t multitasking, you’d be sitting there waiting, keeping your mind fresh to pounce on the file the moment your colleague returned it. Making use of so-called downtime is one of the most efficient ways we multitask.

But even when we make use of true downtime, there’s a limit to the value of multitasking.

Show Me the Evidence!

Some good data back up this claim that multitasking is in fact productive. When productivity and multitasking are graphed, several studies find show an inverted-U shape. In other words, it’s highly unproductive to do no multitasking whatsoever (the bottom of the upside down U), and it’s highly unproductive to multitask too much (the far right of the inverted U). But there is a sweet spot in the middle where a little bit of multitasking causes productivity to skyrocket.

One of my favorite pieces of research on this topic comes from a hospital’s emergency department, where Diwas KC (2014) collected more than 146,000 records of patient discharges over three years. KC looked at how fast patients were discharged as well as patient outcomes (how often patients were readmitted to the ER within 24 hours of discharge). When a doctor sees a patient, she or he is never with that patient for an uninterrupted stretch of time until the patient is discharged. Doctors always have multiple patients. They also have fixed salaries, meaning they are not monetarily incentivized to see as many patients as possible.

Every patient typically comes with some downtime in the form of waiting for test results, and doctors use that downtime to swing back to other patient. This patient-juggling is classic multitasking. If a doctor were to see only one patient, uninterrupted, from admittance to discharge, it would be a hugely inefficient way to run an emergency department, and indeed, the data reflect just that.

KC found that the optimal number of patients to see at a time was around four to five. Four was the optimal number of patients to see to optimal results in patient revisits, while five was the target for getting the best discharge speed. The number of patients discharged per hour dropped when doctors had more than five patients.

What About Office Drones, er, Knowledge Workers?

Knowledge workers, of course, aren’t doctors, but they often juggle projects in the same manner that doctors juggle patients. They complete some aspects of a project, send it to another colleague, and use that downtime to work on a different project.

There just happens to be research on knowledge workers and multitasking, too (Aral, 2012), and it finds the same inverted U-shape pattern in productivity. In this study, researchers were interested in the very detailed practices of knowledge workers, specifically their use of technology. Older studies showed whether technology use increases productivity, but not how. This study looked at head-hunters, or executive recruiters. Their productivity is easier to measure than many other information workers’ because it comes down to whether they filled a job and how long it took.

Recruiters had their email use monitored and also answered surveys and were interviewed to find out more about their activities, skills, and behaviors. The recruiters use a special database to manage possible job candidates, called the Executive Search System (ESS). One of the primary findings was that “an inverted-U shaped relationship exists between multitasking and productivity such that, beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation.”

In both the studies, the researchers mention that the optimal amount of multitasking likely varies by person, the type of job they do, and other factors. But on the whole, some amount of multitasking is more productive than none at all.

There are cases in which completing projects from start to finish without any multitasking may be more efficient and productive, but it depends on the job and the goal. Coviello et al. (2012), for instance, developed a model to prove that finishing one project at a time rather than juggling projects can speed up the average completion time. Their dataset comprised Italian judges moving cases through the system. Judges who open a case and don’t work on other cases until they close the first one have shorter completion times than judges who juggle cases. However, as I’m sure many knowledge workers will agree, that method of working consecutively is impractical in many situations.

References

Aral, S., Brynjolfsson, E., Van Alstyne, M. (2012). Information, technology, and information worker productivity. Information Systems Research 23(3-Part-2) 849–867.

Coviello, D., Ichino, A., and Persico, N. (2012). Time Allocation and Task Juggling. November 2012. American Economic Review. 104(2): 609-23. DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.2.609.

KC, Diwas (2014). Does Multi-Tasking Improve Performance? Evidence from the Emergency Department. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. 16:2, 168-183.

Image by ericparker, CC.

“Aroused,” in this context, means incentivized or motivated, of course, not sexually aroused.

Still, it’s an interesting question, and the answer could change how you get work done.

Two researchers, Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson, worked on this idea back in the early 1900s. They landed on a principle that’s now called the Yerkes–Dodson law that says there is an optimal amount of arousal needed to complete any task to the best of one’s capabilities.

Too little arousal, and you won’t do your best. Too much arousal, however, causes the same flummox.

It’s easy to believe that too little arousal won’t motivate us enough to do a good job. But too much? Think for a moment about whether you believe it. Is it possible that you might be too motivated to do something? Could too much incentive, like a really big bonus, hurt your performance?

Batting Under Pressure

It turns out that when the stakes are too high, people blow it. They choke under pressure.

In sports, particularly basketball and baseball, the phenomenon has been proven true. A study of Australian elite basketball players, for example, showed that the players sunk more free throws during practices than in games. In games, making a basket is worth more. It matters more. The stakes are higher (Dandy, 2001).

In baseball, Billy Beane is a case in point. He’s the failed player turned A’s manager whose career is partially charted in the book (and movie) Moneyball. Beane was an extraordinary piece of work on the field showing all the “tools” needed to succeed in the majors, and he was easily drafted to play with the pros. But in his 301 career at-bats, he never did much of anything at all. He was nearly as bad during his time in the minors. The theory is that when Beane got in front of all those spectator eyeballs, he just couldn’t handle it. The pressure was on, and he simply couldn’t perform at his best. He flopped. Call it performance anxiety, if you like. It’s all Yerkes–Dodson law in effect.

In both baseball and golf, there’s a little something known as getting “the yips.” The yips refers to suddenly losing all control of a fine motor skill, like putting in golf or pitching in baseball. If you’ve ever seen a pitcher throw pitch after pitch that goes no where near the plate, and he just can’t recover, that’s the yips. When you have the yips, you don’t recover. You have to leave the game and wait for another day.

Imagine the psychological distress. You’re throwing or putting just fine, and then you have a streak of two, three, four, wild pitches or putts in a row. You worry about it. The heat is on to get it right. But that makes it worse. It’s Yerkes–Dodson law. The person is aroused beyond the optimal point and can’t perform to his or her best.

What Does Yerkes–Dodson Mean for You?

So what does Yerkes–Dodson law mean for your productivity?

Think about it this way: The optimal amount of incentive for you to get a job done might be lower than what you expect. A middling incentive could actually be better for your performance than a very high one.

Some people create rewards for themselves for motivation. Let me brainstorm a few examples:
If I lose 25 pounds this year, then I’ll buy myself that Porsche I always wanted. Erm, the Porsche might be a bit much.

If I write this book I’ve been hoping and dreaming of writing, I could become a New York Times best-selling author. Are you sure that’s what you want? You’re putting an awful lot of pressure on yourself!

It’s even true with money. If your bonus is too big, it might be causing you to choke under pressure. I’m serious.

‘Large Stakes and Big Mistakes’

Two of my favorite researchers, Dan Ariely and Uri Gneezy (with a few others, 2009) ran a bunch of really cool experiments that proved that people blow it when big sums of money were up for grabs.

They called their paper “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes.” Can you tell why I like them?

In the experiments, people who were offered a modest amount of prize money if they could win various games did better at those same games than people who were offered very large sums of prize money. The experiments tested a number of different skills, from hand-eye coordination to memory. Again and again, when a person could potentially win an amount of money that was exceptionally high, that person did worse than someone who could potentially win just a little money or a more modest amount.

We all know researchers don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to pay subjects to play games, but you can certainly replicate that kind of money if you travel to the right places. These experiments were conducted in rural India, where a relatively small amount of money by American standards goes a lot farther. Study participants with the highest incentives were eligible to win “an amount approximately equal to half of the mean yearly consumer expenditure in the village.” In the U.S., half the average yearly consumer expenditure is almost $27,000!

Taking a step back, Ariely and Gneezy say there’s a lot of variability person-to-person and for the task at hand. If the task is something you’re very skilled at and have practiced before, then it’s probably all right if the incentives are on the high side. But in general, an overly big stake is more likely to lead you to blow it than a moderate one.

Think Small(er)

My recommendation to maximize productivity, based on Yerkes–Dodson law, is to think small… or at least smaller.

Any time you want to get a large task accomplish, it helps to break it into smaller component parts. Why not do the same with your rewards or incentives system?

Create modest rewards, incentives, or arousal, whether it’s something tangible or only in your head (like best-seller status). Rather than promising yourself a Porsche, maybe promise yourself a smaller sum of money that you can choose to spend or put into the Porsche fund. Maybe instead of thinking about becoming a best-seller, think about the reward of getting an agent to represent you. Creating rewards, motivation, or incentives that are nearly within reach will probably create a more modest sense of arousal than thinking about the jackpot.

References

Ariely, D., Gneezy, U., Loewenstein,G., & Mazar, N. (2009). Large Stakes And Big Mistakes. Review of Economic Studies, 76, 451-69.

Dandy, J., Brewer, N. & Tottman, R. (2001). Self-Consciousness and Performance Decrements Within a Sporting Context, Journal of Social Psychology, 141(1), 150–152.

Lewis, M. (2003). Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York: W. W. Norton.

Yerkes, R., & Dodson, J. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. J. Comp. Neurol. Psychol., 18(5), 459-482. doi:10.1002/cne.920180503

Photo by Kazuko Tozuka, CC.