If You’re Not Failing, You’re Not Growing

In 1998, 27-year-old Sara Blakely revolutionized women’s underwear using a pair of scissors. She was standing in front of her closet, trying to choose an outfit for a party later that night, when she came across a pair of crème-colored pants that she desperately wanted to wear. But there was a problem. The pants were tight and didn’t fit her body perfectly. She needed something she could wear underneath to firm up her physique.

Finding a solution wasn’t going to be easy. “The options [for women] were not that great,” she said, recounting the event to an audience at Inc. Magazine’s 2011 Women’s Summit. “We had the traditional shapers that were so thick, and left lines or bulges on the thigh. And then we had the underwear which leaves a panty line… And then came along the thong, which still confuses me because all that did was put underwear exactly where we had been trying to get it out of.”

Form-fitting pantyhose were one possibility, but Blakely didn’t want the nylon ruining the look of her sandals. And that’s when inspiration struck. With her pantyhose in one hand, Blakely reached for the scissors and took two quick snips, creating the first pair of what are now known to shapewear aficionados everywhere as Spanx.

Blakely came home that night with the self-satisfied air of an inventor. “I remember thinking, this should exist for women.”

Today Blakely is a billionaire. Her company sells more than 200 body-shaping products that range from Skinny Britches thigh shapers, to Undie-tectable panties, to full-body Shape-Suits. If you’re interested in buying some Spanx for yourself, you won’t need to travel far. They are sold in over 10,000 locations, from high-end retailers including Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, to big box stores like Target and Walmart. And that’s not counting the other 30 countries in which they sell. There’s even Spanx for men, which, for obvious marketing reasons, have been shrewdly rebranded Zoned Performance.

Between that inspired evening in the closet and her current status as the owner of a multimillion-dollar powerhouse, Blakely overcame a series of remarkable obstacles, including zero experience in the hosiery industry, not having taken a single business course, and a bankroll that was limited to $5,000.

Asked where she found the courage to surmount such staggering odds, Blakely says a big part of the credit belongs to her father. Or, more specifically, to the one question he would ask his children every night at dinner.

Some parents are content asking their children, “Did you have a good day?” or “What did you learn at school?” Not at the Blakely household. The question Sara and her brother had to answer night after night was this: “What did you fail at today?” When there was no failure to report, Blakely’s father would express disappointment.

“What he did was redefine failure for my brother and me,” Blakely told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “And instead of failure being the outcome, failure became not trying. And it forced me at a young age to want to push myself so much further out of my comfort zone.”

Blakely was taught to interpret failure not as a sign of personal weakness but as an integral part of the learning process. It’s this mind-set that prepared her to endure the risk involved in starting her own business. When coming up short is viewed as the path to learning, when we accept that failure is simply feedback on what we need to work on next, risk taking becomes a lot easier.

Her father’s question taught her an important lesson: If you’re not failing, you’re not growing.

What’s odd is that in many ways it’s the precise opposite of the view that’s supported in most classrooms. From an early age, children are taught that success means having the right answers, and that struggling is a bad sign, the sort of thing you do when you’re not quite “getting it” or the work is too hard. Throughout much of their education, students are encouraged to finish assignments quickly. Those who don’t are sent off to tutors.

After 12 years of indoctrination, it’s no wonder that so many of us view failure the way we do: as something to avoid at all cost. In reality, it’s only by stretching ourselves that we develop new skills.

Some educators have begun recognizing the way this fear of failure is impeding their students’ long-term growth. Edward Burger, for one, is doing something about it. For more than a decade the Williams College mathematics professor has literally been rewarding students for failing in his class.

“Instead of just touting the importance of failing,” Burger wrote in a 2012 Inside Higher Ed essay, “I now tell my students that if they want to earn an A, they must fail regularly throughout the course of the semester—because five percent of their grade is based on their ‘quality of failure.’”

Burger believes this approach encourages students to take risks. His goal is to reverse the unintended consequences of a school system consumed by testing. What was originally introduced as a feedback tool to foster better learning has had the opposite effect; when we reduce performance to A’s or B’s, pass or fail, we make the learning opportunities that failure provides hard to appreciate.

At the end of each semester, students in Burger’s class are asked to write an essay examining a mistake they made. In it they describe why they initially thought their approach might work and how their mistake helped them uncover a new way of understanding the problem.

Failure, per se, is not enough. The important thing is to analyze the failure for insight that can improve your next attempt.

To be fair, at just five percent of a student’s grade, Burger’s unusual grading scheme hardly constitutes an academic revolution. But research suggests that his approach of rewarding intelligent failure may have more of an impact on his students than we might initially suspect, especially when it comes to promoting a thinking style that’s conducive to innovation. When the possibility of failure looms as a major threat, our mind does some funny things. Our attention narrows and our thinking becomes more rigid. We have a hard time seeing the big picture and resist the mental exploration necessary for finding a solution. All of a sudden, insights can become a lot more elusive.

Studies show that when avoiding failure is a primary focus, our work becomes more stressful, and consequently a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in reduced creativity and the experience of burnout.

We want to believe that progress is simple, that success and failure provide clear indicators of the value of our work. But the path to excellence is rarely a straight line. Counterintuitive though it may seem, sometimes the best way to minimize failure is to embrace it with open arms.

The Scientific Secret to Improving at Anything

t’s June. Summer is around the corner. The pandemic is (lazily) veering into the rearview mirror. It’s time for a fresh start.

Whether your goal is to master a new hobby, shed your “quarantine 15,” or tackle an audacious goal, one psychological insight can help you achieve faster results. It’s called the Scoreboard Principle, and it refers to the fact that measurement begets improvement.

Want to read more books? Track the number of pages you read. Wish you could lose weight? Track your caloric intake. Desperate to increase your focus at work? Track your daily total of uninterrupted minutes.

Business is driven by metrics, recognizing that “what gets measured, gets managed.” Yet when it comes to our personal lives, the vast majority of us are flying blind. Why?

As I explain in a new book on the secrets of top performers, the moment a score is introduced, we instinctively pay it more attention. When we see our numbers surge, progress feels tangible, sparking satisfaction and pride. In contrast, seeing our metrics plummet generates disappointment, frustration, even shame. These emotional jolts are not trivial. They lend our actions psychic weight, leading us to work harder in pursuit of a higher score.

Why are metrics such a powerful motivating force?

Neurologists believe all mammals are born with a number instinct — a deeply rooted desire to seek out numerical information. In the evolutionary past, attending to numbers helped keep us alive. Having the ability to distinguish a large quantity of food from a small quantity ensured that our ancient ancestors devoted more attention to rewards that maximized their chances of survival.

So, what should you measure? The precise elements worth monitoring will depend on the nature of the task, your level of skill, and your ultimate goals. With that in mind, here are three approaches worth considering.

The first involves breaking down a single activity into multiple sub-skills.

Suppose, for example, that your job involves pitching your firm to new prospects and you want to develop metrics to track your performance. A number of sub-skills come into play when you present at meetings, including: memorization, delivery, body language, presence, and poise. Recording your pitch and scoring these elements individually will provide you with a clear sense of where your performance is strong and where it needs improvement.

The second approach is useful for tasks where success hinges on a single skill. Take writing client memos. Although writing is the primary skill involved, you can still harness the power of metrics to improve by scoring the particular features of your compositions. For example, you can score how well your memo grabs readers’ attention, presents memorable facts, and concludes with a strong recommendation. By turning each of these features into metrics, you create a measure that offers you immediate feedback on your performance and draws your attention to elements of your work that can be improved.

A third approach for using a scoreboard is more holistic than the first two. It involves looking beyond a particular task and evaluating the totality of your performance over the course of a specified time frame.

Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith swears by this technique. He has his clients identify an ideal version of themselves and work backward, listing the specific behaviors their best self would execute on a regular basis. Then he has them rate themselves on each behavior daily.

Goldsmith even uses this method on himself. He tracks thirty-six items that range from work-related tasks to health and hygiene (minutes spent exercising) to showing kindness and empathy to others (complimenting his wife, Lyda).

Goldsmith’s daily questions provide a modern spin on a practice made famous by legendary innovator and American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin. Franklin wasn’t always the distinguished figure many of us think of today. Back in his early twenties, he was widely known as a heavy drinker and notorious gossip, a man whose behavior was fueled less by reason and rationality than by an insatiable sex drive. Franklin was all too aware of his personal deficiencies. To counteract his shortcomings, he developed a list of thirteen virtues that he hoped to instill into his character through the use of self-report.

A sample of Franklin’s daily tracker appears in his 1791 autobiography. Given what we now know of his spotty reputation, it’s easy to grasp why certain virtues appear on his list: they represent the inverse of habits he aimed to extinguish. At the very top of his list is temperance (no heavy drinking), followed by silence (minimize senseless gossip), and later chastity (avoid promiscuity). Every evening, he would pull out his journal and review the list, marking off virtues he had failed to carry out that day.

Goldsmith and Franklin draw upon the same methodology to pursue drastically different goals. Goldsmith’s measure is designed to optimize his performance as an executive coach and spouse, while Franklin’s virtues were selected with the intention of reshaping his personal character.

These examples don’t simply demonstrate the versatility of a daily tracker approach. They highlight a crucial benefit of leveraging the Scoreboard Principle and developing a list of target intentions in the first place. It’s a process that compels you to step back, reflect deeply, and identify the achievements you consider essential.

In sports, the outcomes that define success are unambiguous. To win, players must accumulate points, baskets, runs, or touchdowns. Life doesn’t work that way. In the real world, there are infinite paths to success. And the first step to winning is becoming clear on the points you’re trying to score in the first place.

How to Teach Yourself to Think Like a Creative Genius

Most of us grew up with two basic stories about success. The first story is that greatness comes from talent. The second story is that greatness comes from practice. But there’s a third story–one that’s not often told, but which represents the path that an astonishing number of top performers, from writers and artists to investors and entrepreneurs, have used for generations. It involves mastering a skill called reverse engineering.

In my new book, Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success (Simon & Schuster), I take a hard look at how those at the very top of their professions–think Steve Jobs, Simone Biles, and Barack Obama–got there. What I discovered is that the stories we’ve been told about success are wrong. The book debunks a wide range of success myths, and provides a science-based road map for learning quickly, elevating creativity, and succeeding faster. Here are a few of the highlights.

There’s a faster way to learn new skills

Reverse engineering means studying the best in a field and working backward to figure out how they did it. In Silicon Valley, there’s a long history of coders deconstructing winning products to learn how they were made. It’s how we got the personal computer, laptops, and the iPhone.

There are a wide variety of strategies for reverse engineering. All of them involve looking for clues that reveal how an object was created and how it can be reproduced. Nonfiction authors will flip right to the bibliography at the end of a book to find the sources that went into it. Chefs will order dishes to go, so they can spread sauces out on a white plate and parse out ingredients. Photographers will scan images for clues, like the length of shadows that reveal the time of day and the location of a light source. In business, you can take a systematic approach to deconstructing outstanding work–whether it be a well-crafted memo, an arresting website, or a memorable speech–so that you can learn from the best and continuously upgrade your skills.

Creative geniuses think in blueprints

Working backward can help illuminate powerful business strategies embedded within the case studies of thriving companies. Consider Starbucks and Chipotle. They might seem like very different companies, but their success was built on the same business strategy: Find a customer experience that’s thriving elsewhere and import it into your hometown. Starbucks took the Italian coffee bar experience and introduced it to Seattle, where nothing close existed. Chipotle took the successful burrito restaurants of San Francisco and brought them to Denver, where Mexican food was a novelty.

To outside observers, entrepreneurs can seem like prodigies. They seem to possess an uncanny ability to generate business ideas on demand. It’s only once you start thinking in formulas that you see for yourself: Entrepreneurial opportunities are everywhere.

Don’t just copy; evolve

Reverse engineering can help uncover a proven formula. But copying that formula wholesale rarely works. In fact, it’s one of the most reliable ways of ensuring that your work isn’t taken seriously. In Decoding Greatness, I offer six key strategies you can use to modify formulas. The first one is blending influences.

Creativity can come from anywhere, but it doesn’t happen in isolation. Many of the technological innovations we take for granted today–ones that have fundamentally transformed our world–are, in fact, simply mash-ups of widely available concepts harvested from different domains. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the MP3 player or the cellphone. But he led a team that found a way of combining the two, and created the iPhone. When you recognize that creativity comes from blending ideas, innovative solutions are easier to come by. This approach also grants you the freedom to embrace your natural curiosity and plunge down rabbit holes. Pursuing your interests is essential for finding the ingredients you need for your next creative breakthrough.

The takeaway

Creative superstars don’t passively enjoy the works of others. Any time they encounter a remarkable work–whether it be a book, a website, or a speech–they pause to think, “What makes this different?” and “How can I apply this to my next project?” By habitually studying the best in a field and working backward to figure out how they did it, you too can boost your skills, elevate your performance, and spark creative insights.

Does More Money Make You Happier at Work?

It’s not every day that a CEO voluntarily slashes his salary by 90% after reading an academic article.

Yet in the case of Dan Price, founder of Gravity Payments, that’s exactly how it happened. After reading a study showing that for workers earning under $75,000 there’s a strong connection between income and happiness, he made a decision. Within the next three years, he announced Monday, every employee at his company would earn at least $70,000. And he was going to shrink his million-dollar salary to make that happen.

It’s a remarkable story. Especially in a world with stagnating wages, where most financial benefits go to those at the very top. It should be obvious to everyone that employees can’t perform at their best when they’re worried about making the rent, keeping the lights on or feeding their children. And yet at far too many companies, employee well-being is an afterthought.

But with all the attention Price’s generosity has drawn to the importance of income, it’s worth noting that salary is only one ingredient of a satisfying job. And as it turns out, for many of us, it’s far from the most important one.

Put simply, if you’re looking for a job that makes you happy, basing your decision on salary is likely to lead you astray. That’s because the connection between salary and job satisfaction is weaker than we tend to assume.

In 2010, Timothy Judge, a business professor at the University of Florida, set out to determine the real impact of salary on job satisfaction. To find out, Judge and his colleagues searched journal archives for every published study they could find measuring both salary and job satisfaction. They then combined the results into a single statistical analysis. All told, they looked at 86 different studies and evaluated the experiences of more than 15,000 employees.

Their conclusion: “Level of pay had little relation to either job or pay satisfaction.”

Now, if you’re like most people, these results are deeply at odds with your personal experience. We all know how exhilarating it feels to get a raise or land a job with a big paycheck. And yet the numbers tell us something completely different. How do we account for these findings?

One explanation is that people tend to adapt to their level of income surprisingly quickly. If you earn $45,000 a year and receive word that your manager has just authorized a $5,000 increase, you can expect to feel pretty ecstatic. The question is, how long will that feeling last? A few days certainly. Maybe even a month. But a year from now, will you still be more satisfied with your job?

It’s a bit like driving a new car. You get a genuine thrill out of that first ride home from the dealership. Breathing in the new car scent, you can’t help but notice all the ways your new vehicle is superior to your old one. But after a few weeks, it’s all background. You go back to being the same person, albeit one holding a different set of keys.

To be clear: A rise in income really does make us happier. It’s just that the initial thrill doesn’t last.

Another reason the link between salary and job satisfaction is relatively weak is that in many cases, the promise of a big paycheck lures people to pursue jobs they don’t really enjoy. In one study examined by Judge’s team, “a sample of lawyers earning an average of $148,000 per year was less job-satisfied than a sample of child care workers earning $23,500 per year.” That’s more than six times the salary! And yet it still produced lower job satisfaction.

There’s a sobering message here. Financial wealth is nice. But not when it comes at the price of emotional bankruptcy. Being a lawyer can be incredibly fulfilling for some. It’s just not for everyone.

So what factors reliably contribute to satisfying work? Studies indicate that your best chances of finding workplace happiness lie in having a job that fulfills your basic, human psychological needs on a daily basis. As I explain in a new book on the science of work, we have decades of research suggesting that the most rewarding jobs are the ones that provide experiences that grow employees’ competence, connect them to their colleagues in a meaningful ways and offer them autonomy in how they do their work.

These are the essentials of satisfying work – not lavish perks or fat paychecks.

Not convinced? Then perhaps the following thought experiment might get you to reconsider.

Suppose that you were offered a job that paid an annual salary of $200,000. All it required was that you arrive at the office every morning and stare at the wall, doing absolutely nothing, by yourself, for eight hours a day. Would you take it? If you did, chances are you’d be miserable. Not because you’re not getting paid enough, but because your job fails to satisfy your human desires for building new skills, connecting with the people around you and having input into how you spend your time.

All of which is to say that the best jobs do more than pay well. They provide psychologically satisfying experiences on a regular basis.

Let’s face it: Few companies out there will have the financial flexibility or willingness to follow Gravity Payments’ example of setting a $70,000 minimum wage. Setting aside the question of whether or not they should, one thing is clear. Nearly every organization can do more to create rewarding workplace experiences. And they can do it without breaking the bank.

9 Productivity Tips from People Who Write About Productivity

In recent years, work has become infinitely more complex.

Technological innovations have led to round-the-clock work schedules and mounting expectations. Our assignments have grown more collaborative, requiring more coordination, conference calls, and meetings. We now face an endless barrage of distractions, from the vibrations and alerts on our smartphones to the breaking news stories and viral videos awaiting us at our desks.

Now, more than ever, we need strategies for being productive. But where do we start?

Earlier this year, as part of an online summit taking place in January 2016, I invited 26 bestselling science and productivity writers to share their insights for achieving top performance. Here are nine overarching themes that encapsulate their advice for navigating a rapidly accelerating informational landscape and achieving peak performance at work.

1. Own your time. Our most satisfying work comes about when we’re playing offense, working on projects that we ourselves initiate. Many of us know this intuitively yet continue allowing ourselves to spend the vast majority of our days playing defense, responding to other people’s requests.

Many of the experts I interviewed believe that top performers take steps to ensure a favorable offense-to-defense ratio. Tom Rath, author of Are You Fully Charged?, recommends blocking out time to work away from email, programming your phone to only ring for select colleagues, and resisting emails first thing in the morning until you’ve achieved at least one important task.

2. Recognize busyness as a lack of focus. There’s a satisfying rush we experience when there’s too much on our plate: we feel needed, challenged, even productive. And yet that pleasurable experience is an illusion. It robs us of our focus and prevents us from making progress on the work that matters most.

Sociologist Christine Carter, Ph.D., an expert at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, put it this way: “Busyness is not a marker of intelligence, importance, or success. Taken to an extreme, it is much more likely a marker of conformity or powerlessness or fear.” Instead of viewing busyness as a sign of significance, top performers interpret busyness as an indication of wasted energy.

3. Challenge the myth of the “ideal worker.” Far too many of us continue to believe that an “ideal worker” is one who works constantly, often at great expense to their personal life, but there’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Being productive requires recognizing that you can’t work for extended periods of time and maintain a high level of performance. As humans, we have a limited capacity for focused attention. And yet, as Brigid Schulte, journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Overwhelmed, points out, we have been seduced into thinking that if only we try harder and work longer, we can achieve anything.

Top performers take a different approach. They recognize and honor their physical limitations by getting plenty of exercise and sleep, cycling between 90-minute bursts of focused work and short restorative breaks, and taking time to disconnect from email for some portion of their off-hours.

4. Intentionally leave important tasks incomplete. We often race to finish assignments quickly so that we can move on to the next item on our list. But Wharton professor and psychologist Adam Grant believes resisting this urge can actually make us more productive.

“I used to sit down to write and not want to get up until I was done with a chapter or an argument,” Grant told me. “Now I will deliberately leave sentences just hanging in the middle and get up and go do something else. What I find when I come back is that I don’t have to do a lot of work to finish the sentence, and now I also have a bunch of new ideas for where the writing should go next.” (Note: Hemingway followed the same strategy.)

What both Grant and Hemingway are leveraging is the human tendency to ruminate over unfinished tasks, otherwise known as the Zeigarnick Effect. If you start a project and leave it unfinished, you’re bound to think about it more frequently than after it’s done.

Instead of aiming to complete important tasks in one sitting, try leaving them incomplete. Doing so will encourage you to continue thinking about your work in different settings and, in the process, position you to uncover creative solutions.

5. Make a habit of stepping back. In a knowledge economy, productivity requires more than perseverance — it requires insight and problem-solving. Research indicates quite clearly that we are more likely to find breakthrough ideas when we temporarily remove ourselves from the daily grind. This is why the best solutions reveal themselves when we step into the shower, go for a run, or take a vacation. Top performers view time off not as stalled productivity but as an investment in their future performance.

6. Help others strategically. High achievers, Grant argues in his 2013 book Give and Take, tend to be Givers — those who enjoy helping others without strings attached. While giving can certainly help you succeed, Grant’s data also reveals that helping everyone with everything is a recipe for failure.

So how do you do it right? Top performers, Grant argues, avoid saying yes to every helping opportunity. Instead, they specialize in one or two forms of helping that they genuinely enjoy and excel at uniquely.

7. Have a plan for saying no. The more commitments we agree to take on, the more likely we are to experience what author and consultant Rory Vaden calls “priority dilution.” This is when the sheer number of obligations we’ve committed to prevent us from doing the work that matters most.

One method of counteracting priority dilution involves having a strategy in place for saying no in advance, so that you don’t have to stop and think about how to phrase your response each time you need to turn someone down. Create an email template, or write out a script that you can use when doing it in person.

When dealing with a manager who is asking you to take on more than is reasonable, think outside the yes/no paradigm. Consultant and writer Greg McKeown recommends having a conversation with your manager and listing all the projects you’re currently working on. Indicate which items you think are priorities and invite your supervisor to share his or her opinion. It’s a way of illuminating the constraints you’re under without ever saying the word “no.”

8. Make important behaviors measurable. To make progress toward any goal, it helps to track our behaviors. Bestselling author Gretchen Rubin, an expert on happiness and habits, sees monitoring as one of the keys to behavior changes, saying, “If you want to eat more healthily, keep a food journal. If you want to get more exercise, use a step counter. If you want to stick to a budget, track your spending.”

Marshall Goldsmith, the well-known CEO coach, agrees. Every evening, he reviews a 40-item spreadsheet consisting of every important behavior he hopes to achieve. Among the items: the number of words he wrote, the distance he walked, and the number of nice things he said to his wife, daughter, and grandchildren.

9. Do things today that make more time tomorrow. A final theme to emerge is that top performers look for ways to automate or delegate activities that are not a good use of their time. Vaden suggests asking yourself, “How can I use my time today in ways that create more time tomorrow?” Evaluating your to-do list through this lens makes it easier to commit to activities that are not immediately enjoyable, like automating bill paying or creating a “how to” guide for other team members to help you delegate repetitive tasks more easily.

All of these suggestions are useful individually, but they also highlight an important trend.

In the 1990s, being productive mainly required good time management. Ten years later, the advent of email led to an expanded workday and productivity requiring you to manage your energy, not just your time.

Over the last few years, we have entered a new age in which managing your energy and time is not enough. Today, the magnitude of information rushing toward us from every direction has surpassed our capacity for consumption. No matter how much time and energy you have at your disposal, you can’t be productive without mastering the art of attention management.

Resisting the lure of busyness, having a plan for saying no, maintaining a relentless focus on self-directed goals that only you can achieve — these are the skills we need to cultivate in ourselves to succeed, both at work and in life.

When to Schedule Your Most Important Work

If you work with a team, chances are your inbox is often flooded with invitations. Internal meetings, client conference calls, the occasional lunch request. Assuming you have some control over your calendar, how you respond to these offers generally depends on two factors: the value of attending the meeting and your availability.

Rarely, however, do most consider a third factor in our decision-making criteria: the time of day when you are at your most productive.

By now, you’ve probably noticed that the person you are midway through the afternoon is not the same person who arrived first thing in the morning. Research shows our cognitive functioning fluctuates throughout the day. If you’re like most people, you’ll find that you can get a lot done between 9:00am and 11:00am. Not so at 2:30pm. Later in the day, it often feels like we’re moving at a fraction of our morning pace.

That’s not an illusion.  Recent studies have found that on average, people are considerably worse at absorbing new information, planning ahead and resisting distractions as the day progresses.

The reason this happens is not merely motivational. It’s biological. Our bodies run on a circadian rhythm that affects our hormone production, brain wave activities, and body temperature. Each of these variations tinker with our energy level, impacting our alertness and productivity.

Importantly, we don’t all follow identical patterns. While most people do their best work in the morning (and our preference for mornings tends to increase with age), others are night owls who are more productive later in the day. Research suggests that our fondness for morning or evenings isn’t simply a personal preference—it’s directly tied to the time of day when our physical and cognitive abilities peak. And one new study has even found that morning people are more ethical in the morning – and night owls, more ethical later in the day.

To get the most out of every day, you need to guard the hours when you are at your most productive. Think back to yesterday and the day before. At which points of your day did you feel at your most energetic? (If you’re not sure, tools like RescueTime can help.)  Chances are, these are times with the highest productivity potential.

Once you’ve identified high-potential hours, consider treating them differently—for example, by blocking them off on your calendar. This discourages colleagues with access to your availabilities from suggesting these times for meetings. An additional advantage of having high-potential hours blocked off is that it prompts you to think twice before suggesting your own non-essential meetings at that time.

Proactively setting aside your best hours to get work done saves you from having to scramble later on to compensate. Use these hours for working on high-priority projects, making decisions you’ve been avoiding, or initiating a difficult conversation.

And, if you’re the owner of a dull, 10 a.m. staff meeting, do your team a favor and reschedule it for after lunch. The afternoon is when most people’s energy levels naturally dip. Lower energy levels can be disastrous for work that requires deep focus, but is considerably less detrimental in the context of other people. Having others around also naturally increases our alertness levels, helping counteract the slump in energy.

Fatigue, it’s worth noting, is not all bad. In fact, the findings of a 2011 study suggest that when our minds are tired, we are more distractible and less adept at filtering out seemingly irrelevant ideas. The free association that ensues makes “off-peak” hours an ideal time for finding novel solutions.

Ultimately, the best way to schedule is to take our natural energy fluctuations into account. You can maximize your productivity by calibrating activities to the right time of day. If a task requires willpower and complex thinking, plan to do it when you are at your most alert. In contrast, if what you’re after is a fresh perspective, use fatigue to your advantage by looking for solutions when your energy drops.

In either case, protect your best hours. If you don’t do it, who will?

A Caveman’s Guide to Building a Better Office

Evolutionary psychologists argue that many of our current design preferences can be traced back to our shared history on the savannah. We’re drawn to environments that promoted our survival as hunter-gatherers, and feel uneasy in situations that would have put our forefathers at risk. These preferences, they argue, are largely unconscious. We simply experience safe settings as pleasurable and dangerous ones as repellent, without being able to identify exactly why.

One example: Most of us instinctively enjoy sitting in sheltered locations that overlook expansive areas like parks and oceans. Think waterfront property or apartments overlooking Central Park. In the past, the desire for settings that offered security and a view of our surroundings kept us alive and positioned us to find our next meal. Locations offering prospect and refuge are inherently pleasing, while areas that deny us shelter or a view tend to generate discomfort. We no longer need these features in order to survive, yet we can’t help but prefer them.

Brain imaging research demonstrates the deep-seated nature of these preferences: Our desire for prospect and refuge is so strong, it even affects our perception of art. A 2006 study found that the pleasure centers of the brain consistently light up when we’re viewing landscapes, especially when their vantage point is one of refuge.

Our desire for safe locations also explains why sitting with our backs exposed can leave us feeling tense. We don’t enjoy having others sneak up on us and seek to minimize potential threat. As environmental psychologist Sally Augustin points out, this is one reason that restaurant booths fill up more quickly than free-standing tables. Mafia folklore has it that it’s best to sit with your back to the wall. It seems our ancient ancestors felt the same way.

Another evolutionary insight: We’re happiest when we’re close to the outdoors. As hunter-gatherers, being outside was essential to our survival. It meant proximity to food, water, and other people. An extensive body of work reveals that nature is essential for psychological functioning. A 1984 study, for example, found that patients require fewer painkillers and fewer days recuperating from surgery when assigned to a room overlooking trees. Scenes of nature, researchers argue, reduce our anxiety and lower muscle tension, which helps our bodies heal.

Having a view of the outdoors has also been shown to promote performance in the workplace. Employees who sit near a window are better at staying on task, show greater interest in their work, and report more loyalty to their company. A 2003 study found that when call center employees—who often rotate seats—are placed near a window, they generate an additional $3,000 of productivity per year. Research even suggests that the amount of direct sunlight entering an office can reliably predict the level of employee satisfaction in a workplace.

What is it about access to nature that makes us feel better?

Some experts believe exposure to natural sunlight plays a major role. Daylight regulates our circadian rhythms, affecting our bodies’ functioning. Deprived of sunlight, we experience an imbalance in serotonin and melatonin, upsetting our ability to get a good night’s sleep and compromising our immune systems. To wit: A 2013 study found that employees whose offices have windows sleep an average of 46 minutes more per night than those laboring in windowless rooms. Another study published the same year found that after the sun’s rays hit our skin, our bodies release nitric oxide, a compound that dilates the blood vessels and lowers our blood pressure.

Others believe that the benefits of nature extend beyond the physiological. A number of researchers argue that natural settings are also cognitively rejuvenating and help us restore our mental resources. In contrast to the overwhelming stimulation we often encounter at work, where we’re frequently inundated with calls, e-mails, and text messages for hours on end, natural settings engage our interest but demand very little of our attention. We have the freedom to let our minds wander, noticing as much or as little as we like, entering a state that psychologists term “soft fascination.” The result is an elevation in mood as well as replenished mental energy that improves our memory and enhances our creativity.

Studies show that the mere presence of plants can also provide surprisingly large benefits. Office workers report feeling healthier and more energized when their workplace features live plants and fresh flowers. A 2011 study found that randomly assigning participants to rooms with indoor plants led to significantly better performance on tasks requiring sustained attention and concentration.

When views and plants aren’t available, even reminders of nature appear to help. Research suggests that access to aquariums and fireplaces put us at ease and open us up to connecting with others. Pictures of landscapes make us less anxious. Brief exposure to blue and green, colors ever present in fertile environments rich in vegetation, water, and nourishment, make us feel safe and improve our creative output.

It’s not hard for the evolutionary psychologist to see why so many offices fail to engage their employees. Depriving people of sunlight, restricting their views, and seating them with their backs exposed is not a recipe for success—it’s a recipe for chronic anxiety. So is placing workers in expansive rooms, inundating them with stimulation, and failing to provide them with an area for refuge, where they can recover from attention fatigue.

We tend to assume that employee engagement is about the work, that so long as we give talented people challenging tasks and the tools to excel, they will be happy. But that formula is incomplete. Our mind responds to the signals in our environment. And the less comfortable we are while doing our work, the fewer cognitive resources we have available.

And this is why design ultimately matters. It’s because engaging employees is about creating an environment that positions people to do their best work. Paleolithic man may be long gone, but he can still teach us a few things when it comes to designing a better workplace.

Work-Life Balance is Dead

Once upon a time, work took place outside of the home during designated hours. Today, that world is a fairy tale. If you checked your work email this Thanksgiving, you’re likely aware that at most companies there is an unspoken expectation that employees tend to emails at all hours.

It would be easy to blame heartless managers or short-sighted CEOs for the collapsing boundaries between work and life. But the causes of this cultural shift are far more complex. As Americans, we pride ourselves on hard work and self-sacrifice. As human beings, we thrive on feeling needed. Neurologically, certain elements of work can be addictive. Studies have found that satisfying curiosity about a novel event — say, a new and unread email sitting in your inbox — releases dopamine in the brain, which conditions us to check again and again.

Despite the monumental shift in the accessibility of work, organizations continue to offer employees the same advice they did before the invention of the BlackBerry: Seek work/life balance.

The idea holds inherent appeal. Too bad it’s a myth.

For many of us, compartmentalizing our work and personal life is simply not possible, and not just because of the ubiquity of email. In a growing number of companies, work now involves collaborating with colleagues in different time zones, making the start and end of the workday a moving target.

And even within organizations with more traditional hours, let’s face it — standout employees are always working, even when they’re not attending conference calls or corresponding over email. They’re continuously plotting ahead and thinking up new ideas while showering, driving their kids to gymnastics, or drifting off to sleep.

Until we come to terms with the fact that separating work from home is a fantasy, we can’t begin to have an intelligent conversation about what it means to create thriving organizations. We can bemoan the blending of our professional and personal lives, or alternatively, we can look for innovative solutions.

For the past decade I have been studying the science of human motivation, paying particular attention to how people can work more effectively. Over the course of reviewing thousands of academic articles for my book, I have repeatedly encountered a striking gap between the latest science and the realities of the modern workplace.

Take, for example, the degree of control employees at your company possess over when and where they work. We tend to assume that granting workers too much leeway will lead to reduced effort; that employees will take advantage unless they are closely supervised.

Yet studies have repeatedly found that the opposite is true. Providing employees with more control over their schedule –to the extent that flexibility is possible — motivates them to work harder, produce higher-quality work, and develop greater loyalty for their company.

Why is this the case?

For one thing, placing employees in control of their schedules encourages them to work during hours when they are most effective, instead of requiring them to sit comatose in front of a computer because it’s not yet 5 p.m. Most adults function best in the first few hours after waking. Others are sharper in the afternoon.

Flexible work schedules allow employees in both camps to leverage their best hours instead of conforming to an artificial eight-hour “shift” — one that was originally designed to maximize the productivity of a factory, not human beings.

Studies also show that employees with flexible schedules work more intensely. It’s because as humans, we are motivated by a norm of reciprocity. When a manager grants us the freedom of a flexible schedule, we seek to “repay” that benefit by investing greater effort.

Productivity aside, flexible working offers another crucial benefit — it allows employees to resolve critical personal matters when needed, so that they can bring sharper focus and clarity to their work. No wonder workplace flexibility has been linked with a host of positive well-being outcomes, including higher job satisfaction, lower stress, and reduced work-family conflict.

We live in a world in which it is acceptable for work to interrupt personal time. And yet we’re not as comfortable when personal time interrupts work. Why?

When organizations provide employees with a clear set of goals and entrust them to manage their time responsibly, making it acceptable for a worker to take an hour during the day to attend a yoga class, visit an elderly parent or welcome his or her child off the afternoon school bus, they generate commitment that ends up saving them money in the long term.

Just ask Patagonia, a successful outdoor clothing manufacturer. Employees at the company’s California headquarters are empowered to set their own hours, given access to an on-site daycare and invited to take regular breaks during the day for exercise. Company restrooms even include private showers, transforming the prospect of an afternoon jog from an aspiration fantasy into a practical option.

The result? Over the past five years, Patagonia’s profits have tripled, while employee turnover has dropped to a fraction of the industry average. As for employee satisfaction? In the words of Billy Smith, a 26-year-old Patagonia product tester, “Landing this job was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I feel like I represent the brand as much as it represents me.”

Instead of endorsing the work-life balance myth, organizations are far better off empowering employees to integrate work and life, in ways that position them to succeed at both.

Ultimately, it is companies that are quickest to realize that it is in their financial interests to care for the entire employee –not just the sliver of them that sits in the office for 40 hours a week — that stand to gain the greatest benefits in the form of stronger loyalty, higher engagement, and top performance.

The Collaboration Paradox: Why Working Together Often Yields Weaker Results

On a midsummer afternoon in 1957, a church fundraiser altered the course of music history. It was just after 4:00 when a group of teenagers took the stage. Rumor has it the boys were so anxious about playing in front of their neighbors, they downed a few beers before launching their set.

This may explain why several songs into the performance, their lead singer forgot his lyrics, struggled to improvise, and somehow mangled, “Come little darlin’, come and go with me,” into, “Down, down, down, down to the penitentiary.”

Most of the audience was oblivious to the flub. But not everyone. One listener was watching intently, impressed by the band’s antics. His name was Paul McCartney. And he’d just had his first glimpse of John Lennon.

Half a century later, Lennon and McCartney’s collaborative works are credited with launching a new era in music history—one in which it became acceptable to combine genres, play a sitar alongside a violin, and use technology as an instrument. We know the Beatles were creative, but how they got that way remains something of a mystery. So just what were they doing right?

The Secret Formula

Marriage therapists have an equation they use to evaluate relationships.

In a functional marriage, the arithmetic is simple. One plus one equals two. Each partner has their individual strengths and together, the pair is reasonably compatible. In unhealthy marriages, the math turns funny. Here, one plus one equals one, and typically, it’s because one partner is holding the other back.

Successful marriages are different. Chances are you’ve seen one, or perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to experience it yourself. The husband is a talented chef, the wife a masterful gardener. He tutors the kids in grammar, she teaches them how to defuse arguments. He is a visionary, she is an organizer. Together, they are more than the sum of their parts, and it’s here that the arithmetic turns exponential.

For them, one plus one equals three.

The Beatles illustrate what can happen when you group the right people together. The band’s achievements also lend credence to a belief that’s practically gained universal support within the business community: the idea that collaborations fuel success. The conviction that we all benefit from working in teams, and that more often than not, one plus one does equal three.

But what if we’ve misunderstood the lessons of McCartney and Lennon? What if The Beatles’s productivity teaches us something entirely different about how collaborations work? What if we’ve been doing it all wrong?

Why Workplace Collaborations Often Fail

On paper, collaborations have a lot to offer. By putting our heads together with others, we’re attacking a challenge with greater intellectual firepower. The more perspectives we bring to the table, the more likely we are to eliminate blind spots, unearth creative solutions, and minimize mistakes.

The logic seems irrefutable. So it’s surprising that studies on collaborations have yielded mixed results. First, brainstorming was shown to undermine creativity. A closer look at the literature reveals that brainstorming is hardly the sole culprit. At times, it’s the collaboration itself that diminishes the quality of our work.

Take a look at some of the findings:

• Collaborations breed false confidence. A study in Psychological Science found that when we work with others to reach a decision, we become overly confident in the accuracy of our collective thinking. The confidence boost we gain from working in teams can feel exhilarating in the short term. But it also clouds our judgment. We become dismissive of outside information which prevents us from making the best choices.

• Collaborations introduce pressures to conform. Within many team collaborations, we face an impossible decision: choosing between the quality of our work and the quality of our workplace relationships. Studies show that group members tend to conform toward the majority view, even in cases when they know the majority view is wrong.

• Collaborations promote laziness. Ever been to a meeting where you’re the only one prepared? Then you’ve probably experienced social loafing—people’s tendency to invest less effort when they’re part of a team. When others are present, it’s easy for everyone to assume someone else will take the lead.

The Price of Partnership

But there’s a bigger problem with workplace collaborations. One that is the corporate equivalent of high blood pressure—a silent killer that often goes undetected. Attached to every meeting, conference call and mass email you’re exposed to is an invisible price tag. Economists call it opportunity cost, and it refers to all the tasks you’re not getting done while you’re busy “collaborating.”

In many organizations, the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more often you’re called upon to collaborate. Intellectually, it’s a progressive tax.

So, why are we so enamored with an approach that often fails? Partly it’s habit and partly it’s organizational expectations. Of course, there’s also more emotional risk in presenting ideas alone, and political ramifications to leaving others out.

Attached to every meeting, conference call and mass email you’re exposed to is an invisible price tag.

But there’s something else that makes collaboration’s questionable yield so difficult to spot.

Collaborations seem more productive than they are, in part, because of the way our minds experience them. It’s easy to feel productive when we’re part of a group, listening to other’s ideas and contributing our feedback. Especially when compared to the alternative: sitting at our desks, staring down a blank screen. It’s too bad the progress is often illusory.

Which raises an interesting question. If the research says collaborations often undermine performance, why did it work so well for The Beatles?

The Art of Successful Collaborations

Paul McCartney and John Lennon were not psychologists. But their approach to collaboration highlights many of the recommendations experts are now offering organizations for making groups more effective.

Find teammates who do something you can’t.

McCartney excelled at melody, Lennon at lyrics. His songs were uplifting, Lennon’s had an edge. McCartney was left-handed and, importantly, Lennon was not. Playing together, they each benefited from seeing a song’s chord progression reflected back at them, making it easier to improvise notes that fit the scale.

The lesson: Collaborations are most effective when teammates complement rather than replicate one another’s abilities. Skill duplication leads to power struggles.

Differentiate between roles.

Social loafing isn’t inevitable. It happens when responsibilities are ambiguous and collaborators aren’t clear on where their role ends and another’s begins. When McCartney and Lennon collaborated, it was clear who served as the lead songwriter and who was there to offer suggestions.

The lesson: Delineating responsibilities at the start of a project gives everyone at the table direction and a sense of ownership.

Insist on homework.

McCartney and Lennon are thought of as a songwriting team, but the truth is they conceived of their songs alone. They collaborated after they had gotten a piece as far as they could, and were ready for suggestions. Most of the heavy creative lifting happens when we’re by ourselves, working on our own. We’re in a better position to evaluate the merits of an idea after we’ve given a topic some thought, not when encountering it for the first time.

The lesson: Use meeting time to exchange ideas, not generate them.

***

It would be foolish to suggest that collaborations are always a detriment. Without them, we wouldn’t have Apple, Google or Microsoft, not to mention airplanes or the discovery of DNA. They’re just not the panacea we’ve been led to believe.

Can one plus one still equal three? Potentially, yes. But getting there requires a new kind of thinking. One that recognizes the pitfalls of collaborations and welcomes a sobering perspective that most workplaces like to avoid: It’s only by acknowledging our (individual) weaknesses that we can discover our (shared) strengths.

What Do Your B2B Customers Really Want?

Researchers have long understood that all humans, regardless of gender, age, and culture, are fueled by three psychological needs: an ingrained desire for choice (autonomy), connection with others (relatedness), and experiences that grow their skills (mastery).

While the universality of psychological needs is well established, they have largely been ignored as a tool for growing consumer loyalty and reducing churn. Recently, my team at ignite80, in collaboration with the customer communication platform, Front, surveyed 2,128 office workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy whose role involved working with B2B companies.

Our findings indicate that B2B customers prefer interactions that fuel their psychological needs — even if they require more time or cost more money.

We began our study by identifying respondents with the authority and budget to select vendors at work. We then presented this group of respondents with a series of questions about their preferred experiences. We found that:

Customers prefer choice over problem-solving.

We asked respondents which of the following they would prefer from a service provider:

a) having a problem solved with a single solution, or

b) being offered a few solutions and asked to choose.

Although the first option (having a problem solved with a single solution) takes less time and ensures the issue is resolved, 58% of respondents preferred the opportunity to make a selection. In other words, the experience of choice was viewed as desirable even when it did not provide additional utility and came at the expense of extra time.

Customers prefer human connections over speed.

Customers aren’t just willing to sacrifice time to experience choice — they also prefer trading time for human connection. We asked respondents which they prefer:

a) “speaking” with a chatbot and having their problem solved in a total time of 5 minutes, or

b) speaking with a human and having their problem solved in a total time of 10 minutes.

Although waiting for a human required twice the time and provided no additional utility (in both options, participants were assured their problem would be solved), waiting twice as long was preferred by nearly three-quarters of participants (74%).

The desire for human connections showed up in our study in a number of other ways. For example, we asked respondents to rate effective and ineffective service providers they deal with at work on a variety of attributes, including whether the vendor knows them personally. Among vendors who provide “poor” service, only 33% of respondents reported that the vendor knows them personally. In contrast, among vendors who provide “good” service, respondents indicated the vendor knows them personally more than twice as often (70%). The experience of close connection and impressions of good service, therefore, go hand in hand.

Customers prefer growth over a quick fix.

Next, we asked customers if they prefer a service provider who:

a) solves a problem for them, or

b) teaches them how to solve the problem independently, without needing to contact the service provider.

Sixty-one percent of customers preferred being taught how to solve a problem independently.

The desire for learning was especially pronounced among younger respondents, the group most invested in building their skills. Among Gen Z respondents, more than three-quarters (76%) preferred a service provider who taught how to solve problems independently. In contrast, among Baby Boomers, only a slight majority (51%) preferred being taught solutions over simply having the problem solved.

Putting These Insights to Use

Viewing customer service through the prism of psychological needs opens up a wealth of opportunities for elevating service by empowering customers to experience autonomy, relatedness, and mastery.

1. To fuel autonomy, don’t fix — collaborate.

While customers value vendor expertise, that doesn’t mean they want to be told what to do. Customers prefer being offered a few solutions to a problem and being asked to choose, over having a problem solved with a single solution (58% vs. 42%). The takeaway: Even when you have an effective solution in mind, provide your clients with options so they’re reminded that they’re in control.

2. To fuel relatedness, connect intelligently.

Our data show that customers value vendors who help them do their job more effectively. When we presented respondents with a number of relationship-focused actions a vendor might take and asked whether they would improve or damage impressions of the vendor’s service, the highest-rated actions included 1) reaching out to see if the client needs help with any projects, 2) checking in to see how the client is doing, and 3) sending a monthly newsletter with useful information. But we also found that customers think less of vendors who embed GIFs in emails or send them a friend request on Facebook.

The takeaway: Don’t force the relationship. Focus on ways of making your clients better at their job, paving the way for the development of an authentic relationship.

3. Empathize sparingly.

Our study also included some interesting findings around empathy. Expressing empathy, a common way of increasing connection with our friends and family, can backfire if customers perceive it to be disingenuous. Too often, service providers script empathy into customer interaction, assuming it’s what customers want to hear. That’s a mistake. Our research indicates that customers far prefer a service provider who responds knowledgeably over one who “feels their pain.

4. To fuel mastery, grow your clients’ skills.

As humans, we all have an inherent desire to learn new things and stretch our abilities. That’s especially true for younger B2B customers, who value developing mastery in their roles at work. Instead of simply solving a client’s problem, look to share insights that fuel their experience of mastery.

We often think of customers as rational decision-makers who seek to maximize value, reduce costs, and save time. The results of this study highlight the limits of this perspective. When it comes to choosing service providers, the desire for satisfying psychological needs can be just as significant as the desire to save time and money.

Mimicry, Motivation, and How Corporate Culture Gets Built One Face at a Time

If you’ve received an Amazon.com shipment over the past few days, you may want to proceed with caution. Your brain has been unconsciously primed.

Printed along the side of Amazon’s ubiquitous cardboard boxes is its brand logo, featuring the company name above an arrow connecting the letters A and Z. It’s designed to convey the store’s broad selection of products, but it also serves another very clever and somewhat surreptitious purpose.

Grab an Amazon box out of the recycling bin and take a closer look. You’ll notice that the arrow beneath Amazon is curved, and that the tip is slightly angled. Together, these features lend the logo an unmistakable resemblance to an object our minds find captivating–the human face. Although you may not have recognized it until now, for years, your brain has been associating the Amazon brand with a smile.

The design of Amazon’s logo doesn’t just communicate a strong corporate identity. It makes good business sense. Our minds are wired to mimic facial expressions—whether we perceive them in person, on a television screen or on a cardboard box—so when we see a smile we’re more likely to smile ourselves. This tendency to imitate expressions is one reason comedies seem funnier when viewed in movie theaters and sporting events are more exciting when we’re sitting in the stands. Emotions are contagious. The more people we see expressing a particular feeling, the more likely we are to adopt it ourselves, amplifying it in the process.

Mimicry is just one of the many unconscious tasks our mind performs while we’re busy attending to other things. Like a mental app running in the background of our consciousness, it’s designed to serve an important purpose.

Consider what happens when you meet a major client.

While your conscious attention may be focused on listening attentively and saying the right things, your unconscious mind is performing a series of mental calculations designed to improve your chances of connecting. Which is why during your best meetings, you’ll find yourself unintentionally mimicking a client’s posture, mirroring their head movements, and adopting a comparable level of vocabulary.

We’re programmed to imitate because doing so helps us feel in sync with one another—a hallmark of stable relationships. If you smile and I smile, we both experience a surge of endorphins and serotonin that chemically enhances our mood, lowers our blood pressure and reduces our stress levels. This brief exchange makes it more likely we’ll stick together, pool our resources and perhaps even mate. Evolutionarily, it’s this bonding instinct that’s helped our species survive.

The tendency to imitate is a powerful force in our lives, influencing us in more ways than we recognize. Take, for example, research I conducted with motivational experts at the University of Rochester, calling attention to the way workplace colleagues influence employee performance. In a series of experiments published in Motivation and Emotion, we found that simply placing participants in the same room as a highly motivated individual improved their motivation and enhanced their performance. But when we paired participants with a less motivated individual, their motivation dwindled and their performance dropped.

Surprisingly, when we asked participants if their performance had been influenced by the person working in their room, they said absolutely not. The effect had, in other words, occurred unconsciously.

We call this motivational synchronicity and argue that it’s a byproduct of the way our brains have evolved. By unconsciously mimicking the motivation of those around us, we better relate to one another—a useful habit in the evolutionary past, when belonging to a group could mean the difference between life and death.

The challenge is that this tendency to synchronize our motivation to those around us isn’t always beneficial in workplace settings, especially when we’re collaborating with colleagues who are not a positive influence.

Because we are born to emulate the motivation and emotions of those around us, negative colleagues can have a detrimental impact not just on our attitudes–but on our performance as well. In the studies we conducted, participants performed worse when they were seated next to an unmotivated officemate, even when they avoided verbal communication and worked on completely different tasks.

Which brings us to the ripple effect that naturally occurs inside large organizations. Hiring a single person whose motivation detracts from your company culture can have a dramatic impact because of the way our minds are programmed. Within our studies, all it took for motivation to spread between people was 5 minutes of exposure.

The impact of motivational synchronicity is arguably greatest in organizations that rely on creativity and problem solving to succeed. As anyone working in an ideas-driven industry knows, groundbreaking insights don’t just appear. They require a particular state of mind—one of openness, curiosity and exploration. Creativity is a lot easier to stifle than it is to nurture, and in an economy fueled by innovation, fostering the right blend of workplace interactions has become a major contributor to the bottom line.

There’s another way of thinking about the influence of workplace mimicry—one that highlights just how important it is for each of us to seek out not just a great job but a great workplace. The people we work with shape our thoughts, influence our creative thinking and ultimately determine the quality of our work. By choosing to spend the majority of our waking hours with a particular set of people, we are not only determining the tenor of our daily experiences, we are defining the person we will eventually become.

Which is why it’s ironic that we often base career decisions on a narrow set of criteria like title and salary. Sure, we eventually get around to considering the people we’ll be working with, but too often it’s not until after we’ve started a new job.

If research on motivational synchronicity has revealed anything it is this: Our colleagues (unconsciously) influence us in more ways than we recognize.

Choose wisely.

Want More Productive Workers? Adjust Your Thermostat

Some years back, the Campbell Soup Company stumbled upon a marketing insight worthy of Don Draper.

If you want to predict when people will buy soup, the reasoning goes, you have to look beyond the product. It’s not about the depth of the soup’s flavor, the color of its packaging, or even its price. In fact, it’s hardly about Campbell’s at all.

It’s about the weather.

Consumers buy more soup when conditions are cold, damp, or windy. The question facing Campbell’s was this: How do you leverage this information into sales?

So they did something brilliant. They linked the frequency of their radio buys to the weather of each station. To determine when ads would be purchased, they developed an algorithm called the “Misery Index,” which uses meteorological data to track weather patterns. To this day, if you’re hearing an ad for soup on the radio, there’s a good chance you’re either carrying an umbrella or wearing a coat.

The rationale behind Campbell’s Misery Index is simultaneously clever and obvious, a hallmark of game-changing ideas. But it also raises an interesting question.

If a drop in temperature changes what we buy, what does it do to the way we think?

Typing With Gloves

If you sit near a vent, share legroom with a space heater, or use your desk to store outerwear, the question warrants serious consideration. One of the painful ironies of office life is that we can never quite get the temperature right. We spend our summers shivering in meat lockers and our winters sweating in saunas.

Central air hasn’t made us comfortable, so much as made us uncomfortable in a different way.

The experience isn’t simply unpleasant. It comes with a real financial cost.

To find out just how much, Cornell University researchers conducted a study that involved tinkering with the thermostat of an insurance office. When temperatures were low (68 degrees, to be precise), employees committed 44% more errors and were less than half as productive as when temperatures were warm (a cozy 77 degrees).

Cold employees weren’t just uncomfortable, they were distracted. The drop in performance was costing employers 10% more per hour, per employee. Which makes sense. When our body’s temperature drops, we expend energy keeping ourselves warm, making less energy available for concentration, inspiration, and insight.

Feeling Cold? You Might Just Be Lonely

And it’s not just performance that dips. It’s our impression of the people around us. In a fascinating study reported in the prestigious journal Science, psychologists uncovered a link between physical and interpersonal warmth. When people feel cold physically, they’re also more likely to perceive others as less generous and caring.

In a word, they view them as cold.

When we’re warm, on the other hand, we let our guard down and view ourselves as more similar to those around us. A forthcoming paper from researchers at UCLA even shows that brief exposure to warmer temperatures leads people to report higher job satisfaction.

Why the link between physical and mental warmth?

Psychologists argue it has to do with the way we’re built. The same area of the brain that lights up when we sense temperature–the insular cortex–is also active when we feel trust and empathy toward another person. When we experience warmth, we experience trust. And vice versa.

Neurologically, it seems we have our wires crossed. Except it’s not a coincidence.

There’s a reason we associate warmth with trust, and it’s because doing so promotes our survival, especially early on. As infants, keeping close to our caretaker is vital to staying alive, which is one reason we’re programmed to seek out warmth. Throughout our lives, we associate warmth (a hug) with affection (this person loves me). It’s a connection that grows stronger with every intimate embrace.

Why Lonely People Take More Showers

Because our minds unconsciously link warmth with affection, we’re more sensitive to cold temperatures than we think.

Research shows that when we experience cold temperatures, we’re especially likely to feel isolated. In fact, countering the experience of isolation is one reason people spend more time in the shower when they’re feeling down.

The unconscious desire for physical warmth is thought to be the reason lonely people bathe longer, more frequently, and use higher temperatures.

The Warmth-Productivity Link

We know that cold temperatures worsen productivity. What new research is showing is that it can also corrode the quality of our relationships.

And this, ultimately, is why office temperature matters.

Great workplaces aren’t simply the product of good organizational policies. They emerge when employees connect with one another and form meaningful relationships that engender trust. What’s often overlooked is that connections don’t operate in a vacuum.

It seems obvious that the temperature of a restaurant or theater can alter our experience. So why do we continue to neglect it in the workplace?

How to Spend the First 10 Minutes of Your Day

If you’re working in the kitchen of Anthony Bourdain, legendary chef of Brasserie Les Halles, best-selling author, and famed television personality, you don’t dare so much as boil hot water without attending to a ritual that’s essential for any self-respecting chef: mise-en-place.

The “Meez,” as professionals call it, translates into “everything in its place.” In practice, it involves studying a recipe, thinking through the tools and equipment you will need, and assembling the ingredients in the right proportion before you begin. It is the planning phase of every meal—the moment when chefs evaluate the totality of what they are trying to achieve and create an action plan for the meal ahead.

For the experienced chef, mise-en-place represents more than a quaint practice or a time-saving technique. It’s a state of mind.

“Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks,” Bourdain wrote in his runaway bestseller Kitchen Confidential. “As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system… The universe is in order when your station is set…”

Chefs like Anthony Bourdain have long appreciated that when it comes to exceptional cooking, the single most important ingredient of any dish is planning. It’s the “Meez” that forces Bourdain to think ahead, that saves him from having to distractedly search for items midway through, and that allows him to channel his full attention to the dish before him.

Most of us do not work in kitchens. We do not interact with ingredients that need to be collected, prepped, or measured. And yet the value of applying a similar approach and deliberately taking time out to plan before we begin is arguably greater.

What’s the first thing you do when you arrive at your desk? For many of us, checking email or listening to voice mail is practically automatic. In many ways, these are among the worst ways to start a day. Both activities hijack our focus and put us in a reactive mode, where other people’s priorities take center stage. They are the equivalent of entering a kitchen and looking for a spill to clean or a pot to scrub.

A better approach is to begin your day with a brief planning session. An intellectual mise-en-place. Bourdain envisions the perfect execution before starting his dish. Here’s the corollary for the enterprising business professional. Ask yourself this question the moment you sit at your desk: The day is over and I am leaving the office with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. What have I achieved?

This exercise is usually effective at helping people distinguish between tasks that simply feel urgentfrom those that are truly important. Use it to determine the activities you want to focus your energy on.

Then—and this is important—create a plan of attack by breaking down complex tasks into specific actions.

Productivity guru David Allen recommends starting each item on your list with a verb, which is useful because it makes your intentions concrete. For example, instead of listing “Monday’s presentation,” identify every action item that creating Monday’s presentation will involve. You may end up with: collect sales figures, draft slides, and incorporate images into deck.

Studies show that when it comes to goals, the more specific you are about what you’re trying to achieve, the better your chances of success. Having each step mapped out in advance will also minimize complex thinking later in the day and make procrastination less likely.

Finally, prioritize your list. When possible, start your day with tasks that require the most mental energy. Research indicates that we have less willpower as the day progresses, which is why it’s best to tackle challenging items – particularly those requiring focus and mental agility – early on.

The entire exercise can take you less than 10 minutes. Yet it’s a practice that yields significant dividends throughout your day.

By starting each morning with a mini-planning session, you frontload important decisions to a time when your mind is fresh. You’ll also notice that having a list of concrete action items (rather than a broad list of goals) is especially valuable later in the day, when fatigue sets in and complex thinking is harder to achieve.

Now, no longer do you have to pause and think through each step. Instead, like a master chef, you can devote your full attention to the execution.

The Cost of Continuously Checking Email

Suppose each time you ran low on an item in your kitchen—olive oil, bananas, napkins—your instinctive response was to drop everything and race to the store. How much time would you lose? How much money would you squander on gas? What would happen to your productivity?

We all recognize the inefficiency of this approach. And yet surprisingly, we often work in ways that are equally wasteful.

The reason we keep a shopping list and try to keep supermarket trips to a minimum is that it’s easy to see the cost of driving to the store every time we crave a bag of potato chips. What is less obvious to us, however, is the cognitive price we pay each time we drop everything and switch activities to satisfy a mental craving.

Shifting our attention from one task to another, as we do when we’re monitoring email while trying to read a report or craft a presentation, disrupts our concentration and saps our focus. Each time we return to our initial task, we use up valuable cognitive resources reorienting ourselves. And all those transitional costs add up. Research shows that when we are deeply engrossed in an activity, even minor distractions can have a profound effect. According to a University of California-Irvine study, regaining our initial momentum following an interruption can take, on average, upwards of 20 minutes.

Multitasking, as many studies have shown, is a myth. A more accurate account of what happens when we tell ourselves we’re multitasking is that we’re rapidly switching between activities, degrading our clarity and depleting our mental energy. And the consequences can be surprisingly serious . An experiment conducted at the University of London found that we lose as many as 10 IQ points when we allow our work to be interrupted by seemingly benign distractions like emails and text messages.

The trouble, of course, is that multitasking is enjoyable. It’s fun to indulge your curiosity. Who knows what that next email, tweet or text message holds in store? Finding out provides immediate gratification. In contrast, resisting distraction and staying on-task requires discipline and mental effort.

And yet each time we shift our focus, it’s as if we’re taking a trip to the store. Creativity expert Todd Henry calls it a “task-shifting penalty.” We pay a mental tax that diminishes our ability to produce high-level work.

So what are we to do?

One tactic is to change our environment to move temptation further away: shut down your email program or silence your phone.  It’s a lot easier to stay on task when you’re not continuously fending off mental cravings. This approach doesn’t require going off the grid for a full day. Even as little as 30 minutes can have a major impact on your productivity.

The alternative, which most of us consider the norm, is the cognitive equivalent of dieting in a pastry shop. We can all muster the willpower to resist the temptations, but doing so comes with considerable costs to our limited supply of willpower.

Another worthwhile approach is to cluster similar activities together, keeping ramp-up time to a minimum. Instead of scattering phone calls, meetings, administrative work, and emails throughout your day, try grouping related tasks so that there are fewer transitions. Read reports, memos and articles one after another. Schedule meetings back-to-back. Keep a list of administrative tasks and do them all in a single weekly session. If possible, try limiting email to 2 or 3 predetermined times—for example 8:30, 12:00 and 4:30—instead of responding to them the moment they arrive.

In some jobs, multitasking is unavoidable. Some of us truly do need to stay connected to our clients, colleagues, and managers. Here, it’s worth noting that limiting disruptions is not an all or nothing proposition. Even small changes can make a big difference.

Remember: it’s up to you to protect your cognitive resources. The more you do to minimize task-switching over the course of the day, the more mental bandwidth you’ll have for activities that actually matter.

Get Your Brain Unstuck

It’s 10:20 pm — and you’re still at the office. Any moment now, the cleaning crew will arrive and the vacuuming will start and you’ll have to put on your headphones just to hear yourself think. Your wife calls, asking if she should wait up. “Leaving any minute,” you tell her, staring up at an empty screen. You haven’t produced anything substantive for hours. Yet for reasons you can’t understand, it’s been impossible to walk away. Even now, the answer seems so close.

If your work involves creative thinking, you are bound to encounter times like this — times you feel stuck. Perhaps you’re not sure how to start a project, respond to a client email, or structure an upcoming presentation. You’re trying to be productive, yet as you turn the problem over in your head again and again, you find yourself running into the same barriers.

When this happens, a common reaction is to redouble your efforts. Who doesn’t love a good persistence story? Most of us have been taught that the only thing standing between us and a successful outcome is hard work.

But the research tells us something different. While grit does have its role, when it comes to creative solutions, dogged persistence can actually backfire.

A funny thing happens when you’re thinking about a problem. The more time you spend deliberating, the more your focus narrows.

It’s an experience familiar to all of us. When you first encounter a problem, certain solutions immediately burst to the fore. Occasionally, none of them seem quite right, so you try to reexamine the issue, giving it a fresh look, and then another. Before you know it, something counterproductive happens. You lose sight of the big picture and become fixated on details. And the harder you try, the less likely it is that unexpected, novel ideas will enter your train of thought.

It’s at this point that you’ve reached a point of diminishing returns on your efforts.

So what should you do?

Research suggests that when you find yourself at an impasse, it’s often fruitful to use psychological distance as a tool. By temporarily directing your attention away from a problem, you allow your focus to dissipate, releasing its mental grip. It’s then that loose connections suddenly appear, making creative insights more likely.

While most of us intuitively know that a three-day weekend or an extended vacation can yield a renewed perspective, those options aren’t always available, especially when we’re facing a deadline.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t reap the benefits of psychological distance in our day-to-day work. Here are three practices that can help.

1. Struggling for more than 15 minutes? Switch tasks.

In an earlier post, I described the perils of task switching. When we’re making good progress, allowing distractions to hijack our attention can derail our focus. But the moment we experience ourselves getting stuck, the rules shift. Here, a well-timed distraction can be a boon to creativity.

When we let go of a problem, our perspective expands. This explains why we discover so many solutions in odd places, like the shower, the commute back home, or the visit to the gym. Redirecting our attention to an unrelated task also provides room for incubation, a term psychologists use to describe nonconscious thinking. Studies show that following a brief distraction, people generate more creative solutions to a problem than those who spend the same period of time focusing on it intently.

The trick is to recognize when you are feeling stuck and resist the temptation to power through. In many cases, it is precisely when we are at our most discouraged that we can derive the greatest benefit from walking away.

2. For tasks requiring creative thinking, schedule multiple sessions over several days.

Often, the most productive way of resolving a difficult problem is to alternate between thinking about it very deeply and then strategically shifting your attention elsewhere. Instead of setting aside one continuous block of time to work on a creative project, schedule shorter, more frequent sessions. By planning multiple periods of deep thinking, you’re guaranteed a few transitions away from your task, ensuring that your focus expands.

3. Put mind-wandering periods to good use.

Creative solutions rarely emerge when we’re in the office. Which is why it can be helpful to keep an ongoing list of “thinking problems” that you can access on the go. Glance at your list just before entering mind-wandering periods, like when you’re going out for a sandwich or traveling between meetings. A new context can lead to a fresh perspective.

Ultimately, the key to harnessing the power of psychological distance involves accepting that often, the best ideas don’t appear when we’re pushing ourselves to work harder. They prefer sneaking up on us, the moment we look away.

Schedule a 15-Minute Break Before You Burn Out

When you’re racing 90 miles an hour, the last thing you want to do is slow down.

That’s how it feels on those exhilarating days when you’re completely focused, tearing through your to-do list, racking up accomplishments. You just want to keep going.

You might also worry that if you take a break, you’ll lose momentum and find it impossible to regain your stride.

But the research tells us otherwise. Studies show we have a limited capacity for concentrating over extended time periods, and though we may not be practiced at recognizing the symptoms of fatigue, they unavoidably derail our work. No matter how engaged we are in an activity, our brains inevitably tire. And when they do, the symptoms are not necessarily obvious. We don’t always yawn or feel ourselves nodding off. Instead, we become more vulnerable to distractions.

Consider what happens over the course of a typical day at the office. The early morning hours are when most of us are at our sharpest, but as the day wears on, we inevitably lose steam. And it’s at this point that we become more easily seduced by the lure of viral videos, celebrity gossip, and social media. A recent study examined the time of day Facebook users are more likely to post updates. The finding? Facebook usage builds from 9:00 AM through noon, dips slightly during lunch, and then peaks at 3:00 PM, the precise hour when many of us are at our most fatigued.

While tiring over the course of the workday can’t be prevented, it can be mitigated. Studies show that sporadic breaks replenish our energy, improve self-control and decision-making, and fuel productivity. Depending on how we spend them, breaks can also heighten our attention and make us more creative.

A 2011 study published in Cognition highlights another upside to sporadic breaks that we rarely consider: goal reactivation. When you work on a task continuously, it’s easy to lose focus and get lost in the weeds. In contrast, following a brief intermission, picking up where you left off forces you to take a few seconds to think globally about what you’re ultimately trying to achieve. It’s a practice that encourages us to stay mindful of our objectives, and, as the authors of the study report, reliably contributes to better performance.

The challenge, of course, is finding the time to step away for 15 minutes, or—even when we have the time—getting good at dragging ourselves away from our computers preemptively, before we’re depleted. One approach that can help involves blocking out a couple of planned 15-minute intermissions on your calendar, one in the mid-morning and the other in the mid-afternoon.

Next, find something active you can do with this time and put it on your calendar. Take a walk, stretch while listening to a song, or go out with a coworker for a snack. If these activities strike you as too passive, use the time to run an errand. The critical thing is to step away from your computer so that your focus is relaxed and your mind drifts. (So no, checking Facebook does not count.)

Finally, note your energy level when you return. You are bound to feel invigorated, both because you’ve allowed your brain some rest and because the physical movement has elevated your heart rate.

If this feels like a dereliction of duty, remind yourself that the human brain was not built for extended focus. Through much of our evolutionary history, heightened concentration was needed in short bursts, not daylong marathons. Our minds evolved to snap to attention when we encountered a predator, keeping us vigilant just long enough to ensure our survival. Yet today, we expect far more from ourselves than centuries of evolution have designed us to do.

Ultimately, the question we should be asking is not whether breaks are worth taking – we know they are. It’s how we can better ensure that they actually take place.

Regular Exercise Is Part of Your Job

When we think about the value of exercise, we tend to focus on the physical benefits. Lower blood pressure, a healthier heart, a more attractive physique. But over the past decade, social scientists have quietly amassed compelling evidence suggesting that there is another, more immediate benefit of regular exercise: its impact on the way we think. Studies indicate that our mental firepower is directly linked to our physical regimen. And nowhere are the implications more relevant than to our performance at work. Consider the following cognitive benefits, all of which you can expect as a result of incorporating regular exercise into your routine:

• Improved concentration

• Sharper memory

• Faster learning

• Prolonged mental stamina

• Enhanced creativity

• Lower stress

Exercise has also been show to elevate mood, which has serious implications for workplace performance.  I’m willing to bet that your job requires you to build interpersonal connections and foster collaborations. Within this context, feeling irritable is no longer simply an inconvenience. It can directly influence the degree to which you are successful.

There is also evidence suggesting that exercise during regular work hours may boost performance. Take, for example, the results of a Leeds Metropolitan University study, which examined the influence of daytime exercise among office workers with access to a company gym. Many of us would love the convenience of free weights or a yoga studio at the office. But does using these amenities actually make a difference?

Within the study, researchers had over 200 employees at a variety of companies self-report their performance on a daily basis. They then examined fluctuations within individual employees, comparing their output on days when they exercised to days when they didn’t.

Here’s what they found: On days when employees visited the gym, their experience at work changed. They reported managing their time more effectively, being more productive, and having smoother interactions with their colleagues. Just as important: They went home feeling more satisfied at the end of the day.

What prevents us from exercising more often? For many of us, the answer is simple: We don’t have the time. In fairness, this is a legitimate explanation. There are weeks when work is overwhelming and deadlines outside our control need to be met.

But let’s be clear: What we really mean when we say we don’t have time for an activity is that we don’t consider it a priority given the time we have available.

This is why the research illuminating the cognitive benefits of exercise is so compelling. Exercise enables us to soak in more information, work more efficiently, and be more productive.

And yet many of us continue to perceive it as a luxury; an activity we’d like to do if only we had more time.

Instead of viewing exercise as something we do for ourselves—a personal indulgence that takes us away from our work—it’s time we started considering physical activity as part of the work itself. The alternative, which involves processing information more slowly, forgetting more often, and getting easily frustrated, makes us less effective at our jobs and harder to get along with for our colleagues.

How do you successfully incorporate exercise into your routine? Here are a few research-based suggestions.

Identify a physical activity you actually like. There are many ways to work out other than boring yourself senseless on a treadmill. Find a physical activity you can look forward to doing, like tennis, swimming, dancing, softball, or even vigorously playing the drums. You are far more likely to stick with an activity if you genuinely enjoy doing it.

A series of recent studies also suggest that how we feel while exercising can influence the degree to which it ultimately benefits our health. When we view exercise as something we do for fun, we’re better at resisting unhealthy foods afterwards. But when the same physical activity is perceived as a chore, we have a much harder time saying no to fattening foods, presumably because we’ve used up all of our willpower exercising.

Invest in improving your performance. Instead of settling for “getting some exercise,” focus on mastering an activity instead. Mastery goals, which psychologists define as goals that center on achieving new levels of competence, have consistently been shown to predict persistence across a wide range of domains. So hire a coach, enroll in a class, and buy yourself the right clothing and equipment. The additional financial investment will increase your level of commitment, while the steady gains in performance will help sustain your interest over the long .

Become part of group, not a collective.  One recommendation aspiring gym-goers often receive is to find an exercise regimen that involves other people. It’s good advice. Socializing makes exercise more fun, which improves the chances that you’ll keep doing it. It’s also a lot harder to back out on a friend or a trainer than to persuade yourself that just one night off couldn’t hurt.

But there’s another layer to this research—one that is well worth considering before signing up for an exercise class this fall.

Studies indicate that not all “group” activities are equally effective at sustaining our interest.

We are far more likely to stick with an exercise regimen when others are dependent on our participation.

As an illustration, consider the standard yoga or pilates class. Each involves individual-based tasks that require you to work alone, albeit in the presence of others. Both activities technically take place within the context of a group, however in these cases the “group” is more accurately described as a collective.

Research suggests that if you’re looking to establish a routine that sticks, exercising as part of a collective is preferable to working out alone, but it’s not nearly as effective as exercising as part of a team. So consider volleyball, soccer, doubles tennis—any enjoyable, competence-enhancing activity in which your efforts contribute directly to a team’s success, and where if you don’t show up, others will suffer.

Regardless of how you go about incorporating exercise into your routine, reframing it as part of your job makes it a lot easier to make time for it. Remember, you’re not abandoning work. On the contrary: You’re ensuring that the hours you put in have value.

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity

Think back to your most productive workday in the past week. Now ask yourself: On that afternoon, what did you have for lunch?

When we think about the factors that contribute to workplace performance, we rarely give much consideration to food. For those of us battling to stay on top of emails, meetings, and deadlines, food is simply fuel.

But as it turns out, this analogy is misleading. The foods we eat affect us more than we realize. With fuel, you can reliably expect the same performance from your car no matter what brand of unleaded you put in your tank. Food is different. Imagine a world where filling up at Mobil meant avoiding all traffic and using BP meant driving no faster than 20 miles an hour. Would you then be so cavalier about where you purchased your gas?

Food has a direct impact on our cognitive performance, which is why a poor decision at lunch can derail an entire afternoon.

Here’s a brief rundown of why this happens. Just about everything we eat is converted by our body into glucose, which provides the energy our brains need to stay alert. When we’re running low on glucose, we have a tough time staying focused and our attention drifts. This explains why it’s hard to concentrate on an empty stomach.

So far, so obvious. Now here’s the part we rarely consider: Not all foods are processed by our bodies at the same rate. Some foods, like pasta, bread, cereal and soda, release their glucose quickly, leading to a burst of energy followed by a slump. Others, like high fat meals (think cheeseburgers and BLTs) provide more sustained energy, but require our digestive system to work harder, reducing oxygen levels in the brain and making us groggy.

Most of us know much of this intuitively, yet we don’t always make smart decisions about our diet. In part, it’s because we’re at our lowest point in both energy and self-control when deciding what to eat. French fries and mozzarella sticks are a lot more appetizing when you’re mentally drained.

Unhealthy lunch options also tend to be cheaper and faster than healthy alternatives, making them all the more alluring in the middle of a busy workday. They feel efficient. Which is where our lunchtime decisions lead us astray. We save 10 minutes now and pay for it with weaker performance the rest of the day.

So what are we to do? One thing we most certainly shouldn’t do is assume that better information will motivate us to change. Most of us are well aware that scarfing down a processed mixture of chicken bones and leftover carcasses is not a good life decision. But that doesn’t make chicken nuggets any less delicious.

No, it’s not awareness we need—it’s an action plan that makes healthy eating easier to accomplish. Here are some research-based strategies worth trying.

The first is to make your eating decisions before you get hungry. If you’re going out to lunch, choose where you’re eating in the morning, not at 12:30 PM. If you’re ordering in, decide what you’re having after a mid-morning snack. Studies show we’re a lot better at resisting salt, calories, and fat in the future than we are in the present.

Another tip: Instead of letting your glucose bottom out around lunch time, you’ll perform better by grazing throughout the day. Spikes and drops in blood sugar are both bad for productivity and bad for the brain. Smaller, more frequent meals maintain your glucose at a more consistent level than relying on a midday feast.

Finally, make healthy snacking easier to achieve than unhealthy snacking. Place a container of almonds and a selection of protein bars by your computer, near your line of vision. Use an automated subscription service, like Amazon, to restock supplies. Bring a bag of fruit to the office on Mondays so that you have them available throughout the week.

Is carrying produce to the office ambitious? For many of us, the honest answer is yes. Yet there’s reason to believe the weekly effort is justified.

Research indicates that eating fruits and vegetables throughout the day isn’t simply good for the body—it’s also beneficial for the mind. A fascinating paper in this July’s British Journal of Health Psychology highlights the extent to which food affects our day-to-day experience.

Within the study, participants reported their food consumption, mood, and behaviors over a period of 13 days. Afterwards, researchers examined the way people’s food choices influenced their daily experiences. Here was their conclusion: The more fruits and vegetables people consumed (up to 7 portions), the happier, more engaged, and more creative they tended to be.

Why? The authors offer several theories. Among them is an insight we routinely overlook when deciding what to eat for lunch: Fruits and vegetables contain vital nutrients that foster the production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in the experience of curiosity, motivation, and engagement. They also provide antioxidants that minimize bodily inflammation, improve memory, and enhance mood.

Which underscores an important point: If you’re serious about achieving top workplace performance, making intelligent decisions about food is essential.

The good news is that contrary to what many of us assume, the trick to eating right is not learning to resist temptation. It’s making healthy eating the easiest possible option.

How to Spend the Last 10 Minutes of Your Day

How much sleep did you get last night? If the answer is “not enough” you’re hardly alone. According to Gallup’s estimates, almost half the people you’ll run into today are suffering from some level of sleep deprivation.

We often dismiss a little morning fatigue as an inconvenience, but here’s the reality. Missing sleep worsens your mood, weakens your memory, and harms your decision-making all day long. It scatters your focus, prevents you from thinking flexibly, and makes you more susceptible to anxiety. (Ever wonder why problems seem so much more overwhelming at 1:00am than in the first light of day? It’s because our brains amplify fear when we’re tired.)When we arrive at work sleepy, everything feels harder and takes longer. According to one study, we are no more effective working sleep-deprived than we are when we’re legally drunk.

It’s worth noting that no amount of caffeine can fully compensate for lack of sleep. While a double latte can make you more alert, it also elevates your stress level and puts you on edge, damaging your ability to connect with others. Coffee can also constrain creative thinking.

To perform at our best, our bodies require rest—plain and simple. Which underscores an important point: on days when we flourish, the seed has almost always been planted the night before.

Since most of us can’t sleep later in the morning than we currently do, the only option is to get to bed earlier. And yet we don’t. Why? The reason is twofold. First, we’re so busy during the day that the only time we have to ourselves is late in the evening – so we stay up late because it’s our only downtime. Second, we have less willpower when we’re tired, which makes it tougher to force ourselves into bed.

So, how do you get to bed earlier and get more sleep? Here are a few suggestions, based on goal-setting research.

Start by identifying an exact time when you want to be in bed. Be specific. Trying to go to bed “as early as possible” is hard to achieve because it doesn’t give you a clear idea of what success looks like. Instead, think about when you need to get up in the morning and work backwards. Try to give yourself 8 hours, meaning that if you’d like to be up by 6:45am, aim to be under the covers no later than 10:45pm.

Next, do a nighttime audit of how you spend your time after work. For one or two evenings, don’t try to change anything—simply log everything that happens from the moment you arrive home until you go to bed. What you may discover is that instead of eliminating activities that you enjoy and are keeping you up late (say, watching television between 10:30 and 11:00), you can start doing them earlier by cutting back on something unproductive that’s eating up your time earlier on (like mindlessly scanning Facebook between 8:30 and 9:00).

Once you’ve established a specific bedtime goal and found ways of rooting out time-sinks, turn your attention to creating a pre-sleep ritual that helps you relax and look forward to going to bed. A major impediment to getting to sleep on time is that when 11:00pm rolls around, the prospect of lying in bed is not as appealing as squeezing in a quick sitcom or scanning tomorrow’s newspaper headlines on your smartphone. Logically, we know we should be resting, but emotionally we’d prefer to be doing something else.

To counteract this preference, it’s useful to create an enjoyable routine; one that both entices you to wind down and enables you to go from a period of activity to a period of rest. The transition is vital. Being tired simply does not guarantee falling asleep quickly. First you need to feel relaxed. But what relaxes one person can exasperate another. So I’ll offer a menu of ideas to help you identify a bedtime ritual that’s right for you:

• Read something that makes you happy. Fiction, poetry, graphic novels. Whatever sustains your attention without much effort and puts you in a good mood. (Warning: Never read anything work-related in bed. Doing so will make it more difficult for you to associate your bed with a state of relaxation.)

• Lower the temperature. Cooler temperatures help us fall asleep and make the prospect of lying under the covers more appealing. The National Sleep Foundation recommends keeping your thermostat between 60 and 67 degrees overnight.

• Avoid blue light. Exposure to blue light – the kind emanating from our smartphones and computer screens – suppresses the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that makes us to feel sleepy. Studies show that reducing exposure to blue light, either by banishing screens before bedtime or by using blue light-blocking glasses, improves sleep quality.

• Create a spa-like environment. Create a tranquil environment with minimal stimulation. Dim Create the lights, play soothing music, light a candle.

• Handwrite a note. One of the most effective ways of boosting happiness is expressing gratitude. You can experience gratitude while writing a thank-you note to someone you care about, or privately, by listing a few of your day’s highlights in a diary.

• Meditate. Studies show that practicing mindfulness lowers stress and elevates mood.

• Take a quiet walk. If the weather’s right, an evening walk can be deeply relaxing.

Experts recommend giving yourself at least 30 minutes each night to wind down before attempting to sleep. You might also try setting an alarm on your smartphone letting you know when it’s time to begin, so that the process becomes automatic.

However you choose to use the time before bed, do your best to keep this time free of negative energy. Avoid raising delicate topics with your spouse, and don’t even set your morning alarm right before going to bed – it will just get your mind thinking about the stresses of the next day. (Instead, re-set your alarm for the following morning right when you wake up.)

And finally, keep a notepad and a light-up pen nearby. If you think of something you need to do the next day, jot it down instead of reaching for your smartphone. Do the same for any important thought that pops into your head as you are trying to fall asleep. Once you’ve written it down, you’ll find it’s a lot easier to let go.

How to Make the Most of Your Office Holiday Party

Every year around this time, a fresh crop of articles arrive baring advice on how to survive the office party. If you paid close attention this holiday season, you now know how to diffuse awkward conversations and not to talk incessantly about work.

Why do we have office parties? If the goal is to foster meaningful workplace connections, it may be time we reconsidered our approach. Most office holiday parties fall desperately short of meeting this objective.

In theory, social workplace events should create opportunities for employees to extend their network, develop a richer understanding of their colleagues, and strengthen existing friendships. The reality is much different. Office parties tend to isolate people into groups of those they already know, trapping them in conversations that feel strained and rarely contribute to deeper bonds.

This is a wasted opportunity, and not just because people could be having a more enjoyable time. For organizations interested in achieving top performance, creating high-quality working relationships is a requirement.

Over the past decade, researchers have uncovered compelling evidence that feeling connected to our colleagues makes us more effective at work. We become more willing to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share resources. Studies show that employees with stronger workplace relationships are not only more engaged, they’re also less likely to quit or even call in sick.

Companies should be investing in the quality of workplace relationships. The problem is that from a relationship-building perspective, the office holiday party often gets it all wrong.

How to do it better

Here’s one research-backed approach: Including a novel, collaborative activity that allows colleagues to master new skills by working together like group cookie decorating or holiday-themed games and competitions.

For one thing, experiences of shared struggle and cooperation are a natural catalyst for group bonding. In times of hardship, human beings instinctively seek closer connections with others.

Studies also suggest that engaging in interactive rather than passive activities bolsters relationship quality and leads people to feel closer to one another. By taking the focus off the conversation and placing it squarely on an activity itself, interactive tasks also reduce self-consciousness and make connections easier to grow. This can be especially helpful for the introverts in a group, who are often more successful bonding shoulder-to-shoulder with a colleague rather than face-to-face.

Introducing an unfamiliar task offers another benefit: it makes existing status differences between colleagues less important. Research indicates that people are less likely to form close friendships with a colleague whose standing in the workplace is much higher or much lower than theirs. Status distance, as its termed by psychologists, can serve as a barrier to the development of close relationships.

How workplace status is determined

In part, it’s determined from an employee’s ability to contribute toward valued organizational goals.

Novel activities provide a new frame. They temporarily render colleagues’ workplace abilities irrelevant and present an entirely new context for evaluating competence. Suddenly, an intern can contribute as much to a team’s performance as a CEO. For a few short hours, everyone is on equal footing.

Depending on a team’s size, identifying a single activity that appeals to everyone can feel virtually impossible. Which is why it’s worth considering letting employees decide by inviting them to nominate and vote on group activities.

Alternatively, organizations can offer employees a choice, making several options available. Better that people have meaningful interactions within smaller groups than require everyone to endure the same lackluster experience in the same room. Of course, there’s always the option of having the entire team regroup afterwards for dessert.

For managers who question the value of investing in potentially juvenile activities that appear to have nothing to do with work, consider this: studies have linked playful experiences to creativity, flow, and engagement—all vital to organizational performance. Also worth noting, the laughter an unusual activity can spark is likely to yield its own rewards. Humor in the company of others promotes a sense of closeness.

Simply supplying hors devours and mixed drinks is an ineffective strategy for fostering closeness among colleagues. Throughout our lifetime, we tend to bond over common goals and shared struggle, whether it’s cramming together for a school test, rooting for a local sports team to reach the finals, or preparing an important client presentation.

Business leaders often say they want tighter-knit teams. Redesigning the office holiday party would be a good place to start.