Working Too Hard Makes Leading More Difficult

In 2007, the same day Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone and the same year Twitter debuted at SXSW, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith published a book called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

In it, Goldsmith makes the case that many of the behaviors that initially propel high-achievers up the corporate ladder are paradoxically the same ones preventing them from reaching the very top. Habits like winning too much (the need to win every workplace disagreement, even when it doesn’t matter), adding too much value (adding your two cents to every discussion), and goal obsession (becoming so wrapped up in achieving short-term goals that you forget the larger mission).

Early in your career, these behaviors demonstrate that you are driven. But the moment you step into a position of leadership, they become counterproductive.

Since Goldsmith’s book first appeared in print, another double-edged workplace habit has cropped up—one that would have been difficult to foresee when he first conceived of his book.

Failing to disconnect.

Like many of the practices Goldsmith identifies in his book, it is surprisingly hard to recognize the damage working excessive hours inflicts both on leaders and their teams.

In part, it’s because when you’re first starting out, working evenings and weekends gets you noticed. It is what differentiates you from less motivated colleagues, yielding early recognition and promotions. In this way, hard work becomes ingrained as part of your identify.

While working long hours is often beneficial to early career advancement, as you rise to a position of leadership, maintaining this practice can damage your career prospects.

For one thing, it’s because of shifting job responsibilities.

Early in your career, the primary measure of your performance is how well you manage yourself. But the higher up you go, the more likely you are to have a job that involves managing others. No longer are technical abilities quite as important. Now, success hinges on interpersonal skill.

What happens to our interpersonal skills when we work ourselves to exhaustion? Studies indicate that when we’re low on energy, we tend to misread those around us, typically in a more negative fashion. Happy faces appear more neutral. Neutral face start to look like frowns. What’s more, when we’re fatigued we find it harder to resist lashing out at perceived slights. Not only to do we incorrectly perceive the world around us more negativity, we’re also more likely to act upon that information.

Weaker communication isn’t the only danger of failing to disconnect. So is impaired judgment.

The more senior you are in an organization, the more frequently you’re called upon to make complex decisions. And when it comes to navigating uncertainty and negotiating risk, the research is clear: Decision quality plummets when we’re tired. The more choices you face, the more critical it is for you to restock your energy. Overwork and the sleep deprivation it fosters prevent you from seeing problems clearly and identifying creative solutions.

But perhaps the biggest hazard of failing disconnect once you arrive in a senior position is that your actions make it harder for your team to stay engaged. Why? Because suddenly, your workplace habits are no longer a personal matter. As a leader, your behaviors communicate expectations.

A 2010 study looked at what happens when employees are unable to psychologically detach from work during off-hours. Hundreds of employees at a variety of organizations were surveyed twice—once at the beginning of the study and then again a year later.

The findings were unambiguous. Not only were employees lacking work-free time off less invested in their job a year later, they were more likely to report emotional exhaustion and physical symptoms, like headaches and stomach tenseness.

To be sure, working long hours isn’t always a path to disengagement. As anyone who has experienced sitting in an empty office on a Saturday morning can attest, freely choosing to work on the weekend is a completely different psychological experience than being expected to do so.

Which underscores yet another reason disconnecting from work is vital to leaders’ performance: when laboring non-stop becomes standard operating procedure, it’s difficult for employees to feel like working hard is their choice.

What can we all do to make disconnecting easier? Here, a recommendation Goldsmith noted in his book nearly a decade ago continues to have value: think small.

Find one thing you can change about your behavior and start there. Most attempts at behavior change—from trying to eat healthy to adopting a grueling new exercise regimen—fail for the same reason: they’re too ambitious.

Rather than attempting to modify all of your work habits, find one modest change that you feel comfortable implementing. For example, try leaving your smartphone in another room when you get home in the evening, so that you’re not tempted to check your work email every time your smartphone appears in your peripheral vision.

Or, spend a few minutes learning how to program the emails you send in the evening to arrive first thing in the morning, so that you’re not sucked into a back and forth with colleagues at all hours.

Just as useful: Stop “trying to disconnect” and find an enjoyable activity to fill your time outside the office. Ideally, identify something active you’d like to master: take up biking, join a sports league, sign up for baking lessons. Not only can activities like these refresh your thinking and offer you the perspective that comes with distance, they also enable you to reframe your time away from the office in terms of gain instead of loss.

Rather than chiding yourselves not to work after hours, you are better off proactively engaging in activities you can look forward to doing.

It’s what behavior change experts know: Breaking a bad habit takes more than trying to stop. It requires finding something more appealing you can do instead.

Staying Motivated After a Major Achievement

In 1993, after leading his country to an Olympic gold medal, winning his third NBA championship, and scoring more points than any player in the league for a seventh consecutive season, Michael Jordan announced his retirement from basketball. He was 30 years old.

“I just needed to change,” Jordan would later recount. The regular season was just weeks away and he was finding it impossible to get motivated. “I was getting tired of the same old activity and routine and I didn’t feel all the same appreciation that I had felt before and it was tiresome.”

Jordan’s sentiments were recently echoed by another prominent high achiever. In a November interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Jon Stewart made the following remark about returning to the routine of The Daily Show after directing his first film. “I don’t know that there will ever be anything that I will ever be as well suited for as this show,” said Stewart, whose contract to host the show expires later this year. “That being said, I think there are moments when you realize that that’s not enough anymore, or that maybe it’s time for some discomfort.”

Many of us have experienced some of the same feelings after completing a major project, or winning a big sale, or making a crucial presentation to the board. For months or weeks you were ruthlessly focused on a single, herculean undertaking. And then inevitably, that assignment is done.

When we think about achieving a major goal, we picture the exhilaration of reaching new heights. What we often fail to anticipate, however, is that once we’ve scaled that mountain, it can be surprisingly chilly on the other side. After a period of massive productivity we have to revert back to life as usual and settle back into an established workplace routine.

It’s a lot harder than it looks.

For one thing, it’s because of the emotional letdown of going from an exciting, challenging, or pressure-filled situation to one that’s considerably less demanding. High-stress situations and the adrenaline rush they produce can be addictive. When the constant sense of urgency we’ve adapted to comes to an abrupt halt, we experience withdrawal.

In many cases, reverting back to a predictable routine also means the work is no longer as stimulating. To be fully engaged, we need to experience an ongoing sense of growth on the job. At no point is the gap between rapid learning and intolerable stagnation more prominent than after a period of intense professional development.

But perhaps the biggest reason we have a hard time motivating ourselves after a major success is that we fail to recognize the symptoms of burnout.

Mastering new challenges involves an outpouring of mental, emotional, and physical effort. Sustaining that effort over an extended period of time depletes your energy. Burnout can happen when the amount of energy required consistently exceeds the amount of energy you have available.

But here’s the thing we often miss: unlike exhaustion, burnout can be surprisingly hard to detect. You won’t find any glaring markers. The symptoms are subtle. You might notice yourself taking a few extra minutes in the morning to get out of bed. Or delaying important decisions. Or feeling a bit more cynical about your job.

Even mental health experts whose job it is to identify these symptoms struggle recognizing their own burnout. In part, it’s because of this unfortunate fact: burnout damages your ability to recognize the symptoms of burnout.

We’re all susceptible to burnout, especially in the wake of tackling difficult challenges. That doesn’t mean, however, that inefficiency, cynicism, and procrastination must necessarily follow every major success. Here are some adjustments worth considering the next time you transition from a big win back to your normal routine.

Recognize that your job is about to get more difficult. A common mistake we make after succeeding at a major challenge is having unrealistic expectations about the work that follows. After a major outpouring of effort, your energy stock is likely to be depleted, which makes it hard to maintain your concentration. Tasks that may have required little exertion in the past suddenly demand a lot more of you. Adjusting your expectations is important because it helps minimize the self-blame that often accompanies and exacerbates burnout.

Separate thinking from doing. If your job is like most, it’s rare for you to have the opportunity to savor your successes for very long. In fact, there’s probably an enormous backlog of work that accumulated while you were seeing your project out the door, because the rest of your job didn’t stand still during that time.

While you may feel tempted to immediately dive in, doing so is generally not in your best interest. When we’re depleted we find it harder to distinguish tasks that are important from those that simply feel urgent. It’s at this point that we’re at our most vulnerable to doing busywork.

Carve out a few hours outside of the office to list, clarify, and prioritize your tasks. A focused strategy session will help declutter your mind and ensure that you devote the limited energy you have to activities that have value. The sense of direction is itself energizing, while preventing you from falling prey to easily-accomplishable tasks with limited worth.

Unapologetically restock your energy. To achieve top performance the human body requires periods of recovery. Laboring when our physical and cognitive resources are depleted yields low quality work and makes engagement more difficult.

When taking extended time off after a big win is not an option, integrating recovery into your day is especially valuable. Schedule intermissions onto your calendar and use them to take a walk. Have lunch away from your computer. For a few days, turn off your work email after hours, or better yet, when you arrive home, leave your phone in a different room.

What should you do at home to replenish your energy? A 2014 Journal of Occupation Health Psychology article offers clues. Within the study, psychologists compared how different after-work activities affect employees’ recovery from burnout. While many of us assume that passive, relaxing activities are best, researchers found evidence that engaging in exercise and social interaction can be even more revitalizing.

The lesson: slowing down isn’t the only way of filling up your tank. Sometimes renewal requires accelerating in a different direction. Instead of just flipping on the TV and vegging out, consider calling your friends and suggesting a game of tennis.

Find your next mastery goal. To be at our most engaged, we require experiences that grow our competence. Leadership consultant Jim Collins argues that organizations need a “big hairy audacious goal” to achieve great things. The same can be said for employees.

If you’re aiming to perform at your best, you need something new to be excited about. Building time into your routine to explore new ideas, for example, by reading before work or setting aside 15 minutes after lunch to review industry blogs, helps foster a sense of growth even when the tasks you’re working on are predictable.

Another method of growing on the job: mentoring. We tend to think of mentoring as a means of educating others and improving their performance. But new studies indicate that in many cases, it’s the mentor who reaps the greatest benefit, especially when it comes to mitigating perceptions of having reached a “career plateau.”

How does mentoring help? Research suggests mentoring prevents job monotony and enhances the way we look at our jobs. It contributes to the perceived meaning we derive from our work. In so doing, mentoring helps us find growth in new ways, mitigating emotional exhaustion.

Ultimately, how you approach your work in the days and weeks following a big win can be just as critical to your long-term success as the achievement itself. By anticipating and proactively addressing a depleted mental and physical state, you’re more apt to turn an isolated victory into a consistent winning streak.

A New Year’s Resolution for the Workplace

Imagine that after a routine medical exam your doctor delivers some devastating news: Since your last checkup your cognitive performance has plummeted.

Your ability to connect with others has eroded. And your memory for everyday events is no longer operating as it once did.

But as it turns out, there is a cure and it won’t cost you a penny. The treatment is simple.

Would you follow the doctor’s advice?

All that’s required is that you put away your smartphone.

Few of us will have this conversation with our doctors. But perhaps we should. Over the last few years, scientists have begun studying the way cell phones affect the human experience. Early results are alarming.

Consider the findings of a study in this month’s issue of Social Psychology, examining how the “mere presence” of a cell phone — even when it is not being used — influences people’s performance on complex mental tasks. Within the study, participants were asked to quickly scan a row of digits and cross out consecutive numbers that add to a pre-specified total (for example, any two numbers that total 3). Before they started, half of participants were asked to put away their phones. The other half were asked to place it on their desk, ostensibly so they could answer a few survey questions about its features.

Not a single cell phone went off during the experiment. Yet compared to those whose phones were stowed out of view, participants with phones on their desk performed nearly 20% worse.

Why would the presence of a silent cell phone inflict such a heavy toll? One possibility is that years of cell phone usage has conditioned us to anticipate the arrival of new messages. Consequently, even when our phones sit perfectly still, simply having it in our peripheral vision tempts us to split our attention, leaving less mental firepower for doing our work.

And it’s not just our execution on problem solving that suffers. A University of Essex study found that the presence of a cell phone also interferes with our ability to form close interpersonal connections.

In one lab experiment, researchers paired volunteers who had never met and had them take turns discussing an interesting personal event that occurred in the past month. Half the conversations took place with the experimenter’s cell phone on the table. In the other half, a small spiral notebook was used in its place. Afterwards, participants in each pair evaluated their experience.

The results were striking. Participants who spoke with a cell phone in view perceived their partner as less understanding and less trustworthy. They were also more skeptical that further dialogue with their partner would yield a close friendship.

A follow-up study conducted at Virginia Tech confirmed that it’s not just people’s impressions of their partner that dip in the presence of a cell phone. It’s the actual quality of their conversations. “In the presence of a mobile device, there is less eye contact,” lead author Shalini Misra observed. That makes both partners more likely to miss subtle changes in one another’s expression or tone.

In addition to splitting our attention, there is strong reason to suspect that frequent smartphone use and the constant connectivity it engenders interfere with memory formation. To transfer information from short-term to long-term memory, the brain requires periods of rest. In a world where every free moment is spent refreshing email or responding to text messages, there are fewer opportunities for long-term memories to form.

There is something deeply ironic about a device designed to improve efficiency and foster connections achieving the exact opposite. In this way, smartphones are emblematic of a bigger issue with the way we use technology. Often, the tools we use to control our lives end up controlling us.

Nowhere are the perils of technology more commonly overlooked than in the workplace.

As I explain in a new book on the emerging science of workplace excellence, to perform at our best, we require distraction-free periods in which we can leverage our full, uninterrupted attention. For many of us, these conditions are surprisingly difficult to come by, in part because of the way we allow technology to interfere with our work.

Consider what happens when a new message arrives in your inbox. Unless you’ve changed the default settings on your email, you are treated to a pop-up message, the sound of a bell, or a counter that signals your growing number of unread messages. Each time this happens your brain is forced to make a series of decisions (“Check email or keep going?” … “Respond now or later?”) that drain your mental energy.

These disruptions add up. Studies indicate that even brief interruptions exponentially increase our chances of making mistakes. This is because when our attention is diverted, we use up valuable cognitive resources reorienting ourselves, leaving less mental energy for completing our work. Research also suggests that frequent decision-making causes us to tire. The resulting fatigue makes it harder for us to distinguish tasks that are truly important from those that simply feel urgent.

 Unfortunately for many of us, the habits that lead to these cognitive and social deficits are extremely hard to give up. So what can we do differently if we’re looking to make a change in the coming year?

A good place to start is to make cognitive distractions less tempting. Avoid keeping your smartphone on your desk. Banish email alerts that shatter your concentration. Schedule distraction-free periods on your calendar, during which you can fully attend to one task at a time.

Companies interested in achieving top performance would be wise to support employees in these endeavors. Like any attempt at organizational change, it is the behavior of those at the top that often yields the strongest influence.

Modeling the use of distraction-free periods and shunning smartphones during meetings can go a long way toward signaling to employees that focused work is valued, and that they need not feel tethered to their email.

In 2015, we can expect the role of technology in the workplace to expand. And this is why it is vital that we acknowledge that not all innovations are equally effective at improving our productivity, and that sometimes, the best way of enhancing our performance is to turn off the monitor, disconnect the telephone, and simply think.

You Need a Work Best Friend

Do you have a best friend at work? This seemingly simple question once caused quite a bit of controversy at Gallup, the management consulting powerhouse. The question is included in the Q12, one of 12 survey items that are thought to be the best indicators of employee engagement. But Gallup’s researchers freely admit that more than a few senior executives balked at using the Q12 altogether, because they couldn’t quite understand why the friendship item was in there in the first place.

But Donald Clifton, the former educational psychologist who founded Gallup and developed the Q12 survey, insisted on measuring workplace friendships for good reason; It’s one of the strongest predictors of productivity. Studies show that employees with a best friend at work tend to be more focused, more passionate, and more loyal to their organizations. They get sick less often, suffer fewer accidents, and change jobs less frequently. They even have more satisfied customers.

Why would friends be better at working together than acquaintances? A joint study by management professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota offers a clue. Researchers began by asking students in a large course to identify classmates with whom they have a “close interpersonal relationship.” They then used that information to assign students to small groups made up of either close friends or mutual acquaintances.

What the researchers wanted to know was this: Could pre-existing friendships benefit some activities but interfere with others? To find out, they had all the groups complete two different assignments. The first was a decision-making project involving collaborative thinking, and the second was a model-building task involving repetitive manual labor.

The results were definitive: Friends outperformed acquaintances on both tasks. The reason? Friends were more committed at the start of a project, showed better communication while doing the activity, and offered teammates positive encouragement every step of the way. They also evaluated ideas more critically and gave one another feedback when they were off course.

Acquaintances, on the other hand, took a different approach. They appeared to prefer working alone, engaging one another only when it was absolutely necessary. They were also less comfortable seeking help and resisted pointing out when one of their coworkers was making a mistake. Instead of fusing into a group and leveraging one another’s strengths, their lack of connection was holding them back. They were operating in silos.

Research suggests that workplace friendships yield more productive employees, and it’s not just because friends are easier to work with. It’s also because there is more on the line. Feeling a connection with colleagues can motivate employees to work harder for a simple reason. When colleagues are close, a poor effort means more than a dissatisfied customer or an unhappy manager. It means letting down your friends. The social pressure to do a good job can often serve as a stronger motivator than anything a boss can say.

Workplace friendships also benefit organizations for another reason: Employees with better friendships tend to stay on with their company for longer periods of time. In today’s world, loyalty to an organization has become an antiquated concept, one that rarely determines people’s career decisions. But when our coworkers are our friends, it suddenly becomes harder to leave. Often it’s our loyalty to our colleagues that keeps us from accepting a tempting offer with another company.

What happens when there’s a lack of friendships in the workplace? Psychologists call it process loss, and if you’ve ever worked with a difficult colleague, you’ve probably witnessed it firsthand. The technical definition is “wasted energy and loss of productivity caused by interpersonal difficulties.” We all recognize the symptoms. The mild version involves the occasional miscommunication. More acute cases are rife with unresolved tension, breakdowns in collaboration, and, eventually, full on turf wars. Instead of focusing all your attention on your work, you find yourself sidetracked by interpersonal drama, which invariably makes you worse at your job.

So how do you make workplace friends? According to a famous 1997 study by relationship expert Arthur Aron, intimacy can develop rather quickly between strangers with a little self-disclosure — deeper personal revelations than the standard small talk stuff. But how relevant are Aron’s observations to workplace friendships? After all, self-disclosure might be a good way of bonding with a buddy at the gym or a new neighbor. But in a competitive work environment, where everything we say and do reflects on our level of professionalism, shouldn’t we be a little more discreet? Is opening up and sharing emotionally sensitive information with coworkers really a wise approach?

Research conducted by Washington State University professor Patricia Sias suggests it is, at least if your goal is to make friends. Sias and her colleague Daniel Cahill investigated the development of workplace friendships by asking employees to identify one coworker with whom they have a close relationship. They then interviewed both colleagues to determine how the two initially became friends.

What they discovered is that close workplace friendships tend to follow a distinct pattern that is marked by three key transitions. The first is the transition between acquaintance to friend. Sias and Cahill report that, for the most part, all it takes for this transition to occur is working near a colleague for a period of about a year and occasionally collaborating on team projects. How can you tell if coworkers are friends? Usually, by the amount of time they spend discussing non-workplace topics. The more frequently colleagues talked about non-work matters, the closer they tended to be. There’s an important lesson here for anyone interested in growing their influence in the workplace: When all you do at the office is talk shop, you might develop a reputation for being competent, but you’re not likely to end up with a lot of friends.

The real surprise in Sias and Cahill’s study came when they looked at the second and third transitions, the ones that turned friends into close friends, and close friends into best friends. Here the proximity and common ground that prompted the first transition were nowhere near enough to catalyze a strong connection. What was? Sharing problems from one’s personal, home and work life. The self-disclosure that Aron’s research indicated was so critical for generating interpersonal closeness was also, as Sias and Cahill discovered, at the core of long-term relationships at work.

The challenge for many of us, of course, is that proactively sharing potentially embarrassing information is a little like visiting an emotional casino. If your listener reciprocates with a few revelations of their own, the payoffs can be big: You stand to win a deeper and more satisfying relationship. But if your disclosure isn’t reciprocated — or worse, if it’s criticized — you end up feeling exposed, and that experience is painful.

The irony is that close relationships are often built upon a foundation of shared risk. It’s when we reveal our vulnerability that we acquire new friends. Even, it seems, at the office.

You Can Learn Anything Through Reverse Engineering

Throughout our lives, we’ve been told two major stories about how top performers, like Simone Biles, Steve Jobs, and Barack Obama, achieve at the highest levels.

The first story is that greatness comes from talent. According to this view, we are all born with certain innate strengths. Those at the top of their game succeed by discovering an inner talent and matching it to a profession that allows them to shine.

The second story is that greatness comes from practice. From this perspective, talent gets you only so far. What really matters is an effective practice regimen and a willingness to do lots of hard work.

There is, however, a third story about greatness, one that’s stunningly common among icons in a wide variety of fields — from groundbreaking artists and athletes to successful inventors and entrepreneurs.

It’s called reverse engineering.

To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure — one that reveals both how an object or idea was designed and, more important, how it can be recreated. It’s the ability to taste an intoxicating dish and deduce its recipe, to listen to a beautiful song and discern its chord progression, to watch a horror film and grasp its narrative arc.

In Silicon Valley, reverse engineering is well known. There’s a long history of coders deconstructing winning products to learn how they’re made. It’s how inventions like the personal computer, the laptop, and the iPhone were born.

What’s less well-known is that reverse engineering also explains how writers like Stephen King and Malcolm Gladwell learned to write, how painters like Mary Cassatt and Claude Monet became groundbreaking artists, and how the automotive and pharmaceutical industries have achieved life-saving advances over the past decade.

Reverse engineering is an approach that takes many forms, all of which involve searching for clues that reveal how an object can be reproduced.

In the world of writing, non-fiction authors turn to the bibliography at the end of a book to identify the sources that went into its construction. In the world of cooking, chefs order dishes “to go” so they can spread intricate sauces out on a white plate and parse out the ingredients. Photographers scan images for clues, including reflections in the eye of the subject and the length of the shadows, to determine the location of a light source and the time of day.

But it’s not just the arts. Reverse engineering can facilitate skill acquisition in any field, and is especially useful for knowledge workers whose success depends on their ability to learn quickly and adapt to rapidly evolving fields.

So how do you do it?

Here are three practical steps you can use to elevate your skills by reverse engineering exceptional works in your field.

Become a collector.

The first step to learning through reverse engineering is starting a collection of outstanding examples that are worth analyzing. When we think about collections, we tend to think of physical objects, like artworks, wine, or stamps. That definition is too narrow. Copywriters collect headlines, designers collect logos, and consultants collect presentation decks. Working professionals can collect well-crafted emails, persuasive memos, or winning proposals.

Spot the difference.

To learn from extraordinary examples, you need to pinpoint what makes them unique. A variety of strategies can help but the simplest is a version of the old children’s game, Spot the Difference. By comparing the exceptional works in your collection against average works that you chose not to include, you can identify critical ingredients that make them distinctive.

Score your performance.

Once you’ve keyed in on what specific features the works in your collection have in common, you can develop metrics that help you assess your own performance when attempting to recreate them.

For example, let’s pretend that you’re trying to build your personal brand, and you want to start by building an outstanding online portfolio. You’ve collected a handful of compelling websites and determined that they tend to feature short, punchy headlines and lots of vivid imagery. By developing metrics for those two features (headline word count and number of vivid images) you can track the degree to which your own website includes the important features you’ve deemed vital to creating an engaging experience for visitors.

Case Study: How to Reverse Engineer a Compelling Client Email

Now, let’s break this down even further with a real-world example. Let’s say you are drafting an outreach email to a client who has yet to sign an important contract. You need this contract finalized quickly. You’re hoping to prompt your client to sign, but you want to do so in a way that doesn’t come across as pushy or desperate. In fact, if at all possible, you’d like your email to strengthen your relationship.

Fortunately, you’ve collected a handful of well-written client emails and identified a number of important features to build off of. You’ve deduced that your email should include:

• A non-work-related opening, preferably on a topic you and your client have bonded over in the past

• A brief mention of the action you need your client to take

• A rationale explaining why taking action quickly will benefit them

• New information your client is likely to find valuable, such as an article or insight that illustrates that you are working toward shared goals

• A closing that expresses enthusiasm for the relationship or for hearing back from your client

Needless to say, these particular features won’t feel appropriate for every email or every client. But let’s just assume for now that these are the ingredients that you consider essential for a well-executed, “Where’s that thing you promised me?” email.

The next step involves transforming each element on your list into a scored item.

Here’s one way to do it. After composing your email, evaluate your draft by scoring your performance. Rate each of the above characteristics on a scale of 1 (low) to 7 (high).

The simple act of self-rating your draft both provides instant feedback on your performance and alerts you to features that can be improved. Scoring less than a 7 is instructive; it indicates precisely what you need to adjust before hitting send.

By applying these three strategies (collect, analyze, and score), we all have the potential for building our skills, elevating our performance, and delivering more impactful work.

If you’re looking to rise to the top your profession, staying on top of new innovations and industry trends is vital. No matter what your field, having a systematic approach to learning from extraordinary examples is essential to getting ahead.

Where You Spend the Most Creative Minutes of Your Day

A surprising recipe for inspiring workplace insights

Not too long ago, as I was putting the final touches on a client presentation, I stumbled across a surprising observation. The best insights in my report didn’t emerge in my office, during conference calls, or at meetings. They somehow appeared in the bathroom.

Research on the nature of creativity suggests my experience isn’t all that unique. Often, the most effective way of solving a difficult problem is simply walking away. The moment we allow ourselves to disengage from the individual pieces of a puzzle is the moment a solution appears. It’s why Albert Einstein regularly went sailing and why Charles Darwin planned his day around a countryside stroll. Thomas Edison simply napped.

In many ways, problem solvers are like artists. Taking a few steps back provides painters with a fresh perspective on their subject, lending them a new angle for approaching their work. Problem solving follows a similar recipe, but it’s not always the physical distance that we need. It’s psychological distance; mental space for new insights to bloom.

In a world where finding solutions makes up the crux of a typical workday, we are all artists. Cognitive artists. And to deliver our best work, we need revitalizing breaks. Distancing ourselves from our work grants us a broader view, activating a global perspective that precedes breakthrough.

So, why the bathroom?

If you’re like most office employees, access to sailboats, the countryside and a relaxing couch is in short supply. A walk to the bathroom is one of the few opportunities you have for disengaging, letting go of trivial details and refocusing on the bigger picture–even Steve Jobs recognized the bathroom’s potential, insisting that Pixar only build two in its studios, to provide employees with maximum enforced mixing. Neurologically, it is during these moments away from your desk the right hemisphere of your brain comes to life, making you more appreciative of the forest and less sensitive to the trees.

While most of us give little thought to our workplace bathroom, there’s good reason to believe it can have an impact on the quality of the work we produce — especially in organizations that rely on creativity and problem solving to stand out. Over the past decade, studies have shown that both our thoughts and behaviors are heavily influenced by our surroundings, in ways we often fail to recognize.

A few examples:

• The sound of classical music makes consumers spend more money

• The smell of cookies makes shoppers more likely to help a stranger

• The sight of red hurts intellectual performance but improves physical performance

Psychological findings like these are now commonplace, pointing to one irrefutable fact: Our environment shapes our thinking in powerful ways.

Which brings up some intriguing questions: How can we make the most of our time away from our desks? Is there a way of designing bathrooms to make them more inspiring? And what can organizations do to maximize the insights its employees get out of each bathroom visit?

Recent research on the science of creativity provides some helpful suggestions.

Rethink Muzak

One of the ways we become more creative is by exposing our minds to a broad variety of stimuli. The wider the selection of information you mentally digest–whether it be foreign movies, experimental novels or exotic travel–the more remote associations you’ll have in your arsenal. Or, in laymen’s terms, the more creative you’ll be.

Hearing unusual music primes us to think different–inspiring ideas, emotions and experiences that increase the associations active in our brain.

Surprise The Senses

Another creativity nugget: We tend to find more insightful solutions to a problem when we’re in a good mood. One method experimentally proven for improving people’s moods is enjoyable scents. Positive scents don’t just make us feel better–they lead us to set higher goals for ourselves and experience a greater sense of self-efficacy.

Now, if you’re like most people, the restroom isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of positive scents, and partly that’s because of how hard custodians work to mask negative smells, leaving most bathrooms feeling like an assault on the senses. But in our case, that’s a good thing. It means the bar for surprising people with positive scents is that much more accessible. A few opportunities for enhancing the scent of a workplace bathroom: unusual soaps, exotic candles, and the hallway outside a bathroom, boosting people’s mood before and after a visit.

Encourage Mental Stimulation

Part of what makes bathroom visits a boon to creativity is that they represent one of the few times during the workday when our physiological attention is directed inward, mimicking the psychological experience of insight. But it’s not just inward attention that’s needed–it’s inward attention in the context of fresh ideas.

Think about the last time you saw graffiti in the bathroom. Chances are, not only did you read it, you probably thought about the person who wrote it, perhaps wondering what (the hell) was going through their mind. We can’t help but think about the things we see, but we can choose what we look at. Providing a diet of mentally stimulating material in workplace bathrooms can be done in a number of ways: posting unusual artwork, leaving out thought provoking magazines or using digital picture frames to keep the imagery fresh. The key is for the material to be stimulating and indirectly related to work you do

Once upon a time, going to the bathroom was a distraction. Something that kept us from work; an unfortunate bodily shortcoming that compromised efficiency. But that world doesn’t exist anymore. Today, our economy is powered by an engine of insight. Creativity in the workplace isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s what keeps companies in business. Which is why it’s ironic that most office bathrooms offer a bleak and unwelcoming environment. One that discourages insight and implicitly chides us to get back to our desks.

There’s just one problem. Creativity doesn’t work that way.

And if the science has taught us anything about the creative process it’s this: Finding unexpected solutions often requires an unexpected approach.

Do You Need a Best Friend at Work?

Why “all work all the time” makes you a bad employee

In the late 1960s, after nearly twenty years of teaching educational psychology at the University of Nebraska, Donald Clifton made the stunning decision to hand in his resignation.

He had found a better opportunity—in his basement.

Clifton had never quite fit in with other researchers in his field. While most psychologists were consumed with curing mental illness, Clifton had other interests. He was less concerned about ways the mind could go wrong than with determining what it did when things were going right.

What was different about high performers? Clifton wondered. He was convinced that somewhere in the data lay insights that could help ordinary people achieve more fulfilling lives. And so, at the age of forty-five, Clifton gave up his cushy job as a professor and started a company that focused on identifying exceptional employees.

Clifton died in 2003, but you might recognize the name of his company. It has forty offices in twenty-seven countries and more than 2,000 employees. It’s called Gallup.

Before his passing, Clifton developed a survey that in many ways represented the culmination of his life’s work. It’s known as the Q12, a measure made up of twelve survey items that Clifton believed were the best indicators of employee engagement. Among them is one question that has attracted a little more attention than all the others—and not all of it has been positive. In fact, Gallup’s researchers freely admit that more than a few senior executives have balked at using the Q12 altogether, because they couldn’t quite understand why the item was there in the first place.

The question at the heart of the controversy: Do you have a best friend at work?

Clifton insisted on measuring workplace friendships for good reason: It’s one of the strongest predictors of productivity. Studies show that employees with a best friend at work tend to be more focused, more passionate, and more loyal to their organizations. They get sick less often, suffer fewer accidents, and change jobs less frequently. They even have more satisfied customers.

Why would friends be better at working together than acquaintances?

A joint study by management professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota offers a clue. Researchers began by asking students in a large course to identify classmates with whom they have a “close interpersonal relationship.” They then used that information to assign students to small groups made up of either close friends or mutual acquaintances.

What the researchers wanted to know was this: Could pre-existing friendships benefit some activities but interfere with others? To find out, they had all the groups complete two different assignments. The first was a decision-making project involving collaborative thinking, and the second was a model-building task involving repetitive manual labor.

The results were definitive: Friends outperformed acquaintances on both tasks. The reason? Friends were more committed at the start of a project, showed better communication while doing the activity, and offered teammates positive encouragement every step of the way. They also evaluated ideas more critically and gave one another feedback when they were off course.

Acquaintances, on the other hand, took a different approach. They appeared to prefer working alone, engaging one another only when it was absolutely necessary. They were also less comfortable seeking help and resisted pointing out when one of their coworkers was making a mistake. Instead of fusing into a group and leveraging one another’s strengths, their lack of connection was holding them back. They were operating in silos.

Research suggests that workplace friendships yield more productive employees, and it’s not just because friends are easier to work with. It’s also because there is more on the line. Feeling a connection with colleagues can motivate employees to work harder for a simple reason. When colleagues are close, a poor effort means more than a dissatisfied customer or an unhappy manager. It means letting down your friends. The social pressure to do a good job can often serve as a stronger motivator than anything a boss can say.

Workplace friendships also benefit organizations for another reason: Employees with better friendships tend to stay on with their company for longer periods of time. In today’s world, loyalty to an organization has become an antiquated concept, one that rarely determines people’s career decisions. But when our coworkers are our friends, it suddenly becomes harder to leave. Often it’s our loyalty to our colleagues that keeps us from accepting higher salaries and better titles with another company.

What happens when there’s a lack of friendships in the workplace? Psychologists call it process loss, and if you’ve ever worked with a difficult colleague, you’ve probably experienced it firsthand. The technical definition is “wasted energy and loss of productivity caused by interpersonal difficulties.” We all recognize the symptoms. The mild version involves the occasional miscommunication. More acute cases are rife with unresolved tension, breakdowns in collaboration, and, eventually full-on turf wars. Instead of focusing all your attention on your work, you find yourself sidetracked by interpersonal drama, which invariably makes you worse at your job.

So how do we make friends at work?

Research by Washington State University professor Patricia Sias and Daniel Cahill offers a clue. In one study they asked employees at a variety of organizations to identify a coworker with whom they shared a close relationship. They then interviewed both colleagues to determine how the two initially became friends. What they discovered is that close workplace friendships tend to follow a distinct pattern that is marked by three key transitions.

The first is the transition between acquaintance to friend. Sias and Cahill report that, for the most part, all it takes for this transition to occur is working near a colleague for a period of about a year and occasionally collaborating on team projects.

How can you tell if coworkers are friends? Usually, by the amount of time they spend discussing nonworkplace topics. The more frequently colleagues talked about nonwork matters, the closer they tended to be. There’s an important lesson here for anyone interested in growing their influence in the workplace: When all you do at the office is talk shop, you might develop a reputation for being competent, but you’re not likely to end up with a lot of friends.

The real surprise in Sias and Cahill’s study came when they looked at the second and third transitions, the ones that turned friends into close friends, and close friends into best friends. Here the proximity and common ground that prompted the first transition were nowhere near enough to catalyze a strong connection. What was? Sharing problems from one’s personal, home and work life.

Self-disclosure, an ingredient psychologists have long described as vital to the formation of intimacy and romance, turned out to be at the core of long-term relationships at work.

The challenge for many of us, of course, is that proactively sharing potentially embarrassing information is a little like visiting an emotional casino. If your listener reciprocates with a few revelation of their own, the payoffs can be big: You stand to win a deeper and more satisfying relationship. But if your disclosure isn’t reciprocated—or worse, if it’s criticized—you end up feeling exposed, and that experience is painful.

The irony is that close relationships are often built upon a foundation of shared risk. It’s when we reveal our vulnerability that we acquire new friends. Even, it seems, under the bare florescent lights of the office cubicle.

Your Brain’s Ideal Schedule

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. Today, I’m talking with Ron Friedman, a psychologist and author of, The Best Place to Work- The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. He’s also a regular contributor to hbr.org. Ron, thank you so much for talking with us today.

RON FRIEDMAN: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

SARAH GREEN: So Ron, a lot of your writing for HBR has focused on becoming more productive and especially around some smart ways to structure our daily routines. And I thought we could just start at the beginning. It’s first thing in the morning, you’ve just arrived at work. What do most of us do wrong at this point in our day?

RON FRIEDMAN: Well, in many cases, most of us start out day by checking our email, or listening to our voice mail. It’s kind of the default. And I think we do it for some really well intentioned reasons. We want to be responsive to our clients, we want to be responsive to our colleagues, but being responsive first thing in the morning is really cognitively expensive. And for one thing, it’s because it prevents us from leveraging our best hours.

Typically, we have a window of about three hours where we’re really, really focused. We’re able to have some strong contributions in terms of planning, in terms of thinking, in terms of speaking well. And if we end up squandering those first three hours reacting to other people’s priorities for us, which is ultimately what voice mail, or email is, is a list of other people’s requests for our time, that ends up using up our best hours and we’re not quite as effective as we could be.

The other a major reason being response first thing is not a good idea is because it puts you in a reactive mindset. So you’re looking outward for direction, rather than looking inward. And switching from a proactive to a reactive mindset is easy, but doing the reverse is much, much harder.

SARAH GREEN: So let’s then talk about maybe some ways to be more proactive and to get our day off on the right foot.

RON FRIEDMAN: Well, I think one solution to this problem is developing a habit at the beginning of every workday. When you first come to the office and sit down at your desk, to start with a brief planning session. I think you see a great example of this in the world of cooking, in a practice called, mise en place, which is French for, everything in its place. If you look at the way that chefs operate, they don’t rush into the kitchen and immediately start cooking. Instead, they very deliberately take time at the beginning to picture the perfect execution of a dish and then they work backwards.

They identify the steps they need to perform, they select and gather the right tools, they prepare the ingredients in the right proportion, and then they arrange everything they’ll need in their station. So in short, they’re strategizing first, but then they’re executing second. And I think we can all learn from that approach and apply a similar technique by devoting the first few minutes of each day to a strategic planning session.

SARAH GREEN: So that sounds like a great way to start your day, but I’m wondering also about what happens in the middle of the day. I’m specifically thinking of that maybe 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock lull where suddenly, you just want to take a nap, or check Facebook, or you’re just having trouble focusing. I think a lot of us have that little lull in the middle of the day. Is there any way to salvage that time and make it more useful?

RON FRIEDMAN: Yes, I think there is and I think it’s by recognizing, first and foremost, that you’re not the same person at 3 o’clock that you are at 9 o’clock in the morning. So our energy levels fluctuate over the course of the day. We’re a lot sharper first thing in the morning. And again, that window lasts maybe two to three hours and we really need to leverage that time. But then the reality is, at 2 or 3 o’clock, we tire. We function as human beings and our level of energy fluctuates. We’re just not as focused.

And so what I would urge people to do is to take those fluctuations of energy into account and plan some of the less taxing work, the work that requires less will power, less concentration, focus on doing those types of tasks at 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Or take a meeting that maybe is a lower level priority meeting. The other thing that I talk about in my book, The Best Place to Work is how we’re actually better at being creative when we’re fatigued, which is kind of an interesting and counter intuitive insight.

And it’s partly because in order to be creative, sometimes you need to consider some ideas that don’t necessarily feel like they’re on track with what you’re trying to achieve. And so having all of these ideas come into your mind, because you’re not quite as good at putting them off when you’re tired, can actually make you more creative. So scheduling a creative task for the time in your day when you know you’re a little bit tired can actually be beneficial.

SARAH GREEN: That’s really interesting. And actually that’s kind of a nice segue way to the next thing I wanted to ask you about, which was the importance of fitting exercise into the day. That’s something you wrote about a lot in your book, just the cognitive benefits, all kinds of mental benefits from being physically tired as well. So tell me a little bit about why that’s so important because I think a lot of us think of it as something– well, it would be great to go to the gym, so I could look better in my bathing suit, but we may not necessarily be connecting it with the mental benefits. And then, how do we fit that into our schedules? Is there an optimal time to do it?

RON FRIEDMAN: This is one of the more interesting things that I uncovered when I was doing the research for the book is that the benefits of exercise– most of us, as you said, think of it as something that we do to look good, or maybe even to feel good, but what research is starting to show is that some of the strongest impacts of exercise are the immediate benefits it has for the way that we think.

When we exercise regularly we get more blood flowing to the brain, which enables us to focus better. It activate memory regions of the brain, which enables us to soak up information more quickly. And it puts us in a better mood, which is critical if you’re looking to create teams that are more collaborative, or if you want employees who are in a good mood and therefore influence the mood that their customers are in.

So I think what we ultimately need to do, both on the organizational level and on the individual level, is really re-frame exercise not as something that we do for ourselves selfishly, but rather something that we do to be more productive, and to better, and more effective at whatever it is that we’re doing. On the organizational level, I think more companies need to realize that there’s a business case for creating the conditions that allow their employees to get more exercise.

Whether that’s by giving them the flexibility to come in a little late, or leave earlier, or maybe take an extended lunch, or taking out a gym membership near the office, or even just something as simple as modeling the behaviors, such as taking walking meetings, if you’re a manager. And encouraging your employees to do that as well because that’s an easy way of getting exercise over the course of the day.

SARAH GREEN: So can I just interject there and ask a clarifying question? So a lot of people then are talking about things like treadmill desks. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?

RON FRIEDMAN: That’s a little bit more provocative because there’s research showing with treadmill desks is that when you first start using it, there’s a dip in performance. And that dip typically lasts about six months.

SARAH GREEN: Oh, wow.

RON FRIEDMAN: You’re going to making typing errors. You’re multitasking physical activities is what you’re doing. Multitasking, you can get better at that over time and typically people do. Over the course of the year, first they recover their performance and sometimes it gets a little bit better, but I’m not convinced that we should be attempting to multitask physical activities.

SARAH GREEN: So then to go back to what we were talking about, sort of scheduling it into your day, is there an optimal time, or does it just matter that you do it, at some point at all?

RON FRIEDMAN: I would urge for people to find a time where it feels the most fun. So in other words, if getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning is going to be really, really stressful for you the night before and first thing in the morning, that’s going to eat up your will power. And if you have less will power, I don’t know that it’s going to benefit you at your job. And in fact, there’s research showing that having less will power as a function of doing unpleasant exercise makes you worse at saying no to fatty foods later in the day.

So I don’t know that that’s really beneficial. What I would urge people to do is to find an activity that makes exercise fun. And it’s important to think of exercise not just as standing on a treadmill, or going on a walker, but rather playing tennis, or going dancing, or even playing the drum. Anything that’s going to get your heart rate going and is going to strain your muscles is going to be good for you.

SARAH GREEN: OK. Great. Now, I’m sort of following the chronology of the average day here. So you’re coming home from work and you are maybe still thinking about what’s going on at work. I know a lot of our readers have trouble disconnecting from work when they get home. And anecdotally, I’ve heard from a lot of people that they have trouble falling asleep. Some of them listen to the IdeaCast when they’re having trouble following asleep. I hope that does not actually result in them sleeping, though. So I’m just wondering, if people are having trouble disconnecting, falling asleep– these things seem important to cognitive functioning. So what are some better habits that we can develop here at the end of our day?

RON FRIEDMAN: Well, first of all, I think we need to re-frame why it is we’re disengaging at the end of the day. And again, this is much like exercise where it’s something that you’re doing not just for your own personal, selfish benefit, but rather something that can help you be more effective at work. And there are studies showing that people who don’t disengage, the people who are constantly checking their emails on evenings and on weekends, those people tend to be less engaged a year later. And it’s because they’re burnt out.

So if we don’t fully log off, we just can’t fully recover. So to the extent that you are interested disconnecting and you feel supported in that endeavor by an employer, I think there are some things that you can do to make that easier. And these are some things, frankly, that I’ve been experimenting on my own because I feel like it’s hard for me to do it as well. And in part, it’s because we use our devices not just for checking email, but for lots of other things, too.

So in my home I’ll use my phone for Spotify to listen to music during dinner and then that leads me to look at my phone. And then sometimes if I have a good idea, I’ll email it to myself, or to my Evernote account, and that’s another reason to look at my phone. So every time you look at your phone, there’s another incentive to want to look and check your email.

So a few things that I think you can do to try and disconnect after work hours. One is to place your phone in different room to the extent that that’s possible, if you’re not using your phone for multiple purposes. Not having it in the kitchen, for example, so that every time you pass it, you’re not tempted to go and check your email. That’s something that can be a valuable tool. And then to the extent that you have the financial means to do this, and this is something, again, that I have found to be personally effective, is to use different devices for distinct purposes.

So I have a phone, but I also have an iPad. And so what I’ve started to do is put Spotify, for example, on the iPad. And I don’t have email on my iPad. So the iPad becomes a device that I use for pleasure, whereas the phone is a work tool. And so it’s easier for me to put my phone away because I still have all the things that I want to do, but it’s not related, or associated to work in that way.

And then finally, if you’re in an organization and you find yourself emailing after hours, what I would strongly urge you to do is to find a tool that enables you to write the email, but then have it either go out, or arrive in other people’s inboxes first thing in the morning. And that’s a means of still capturing all that good information that comes after you’ve had your beer, or glass of wine after dinner– sometimes you can have those really creative insights. But not necessarily getting involved in a back and forth with colleagues at 10 or 11 o’clock at night. And that’s really critical if you’re a manager because your behavior is setting the tone for how others are expected to behave.

SARAH GREEN: And it’s funny, too, because as we’re talking here, I’m remembering we’re sort of focused today on what individual people can do, but in the book you have a lot of interesting examples of companies going to extreme lengths to actually force people to disconnect. So paying them to take a vacation, but they only get the money if they don’t check their email. Or shutting down the email server after a certain time of night and stuff like that. So it seems like something companies maybe are trying to take a little more seriously.

RON FRIEDMAN: Yes. And I think if we’re looking at the future of work, I think you’re going to see more and more companies recognizing that it’s in their interest to not have employees work 24/7. We work and live with these devices that make everything feel urgent and it’s become neurologically addicting. We’re having a really hard time with these tools.

Sarah, you and I have talked about this in some of the pieces that I’ve written and that you’ve edited, on how recent some of these devices really are. And we often forget that the iPhone was introduced in 2007. That gives it eight years. And so these are really, really new tools that we’re incorporating into the workplace and some of us aren’t using them in the most effective way possible.

SARAH GREEN: Well, and to go back to something that we were talking about a little bit before, I think when you’re disconnecting from work, you’re not just necessarily meditating, or staring at the wall. It’s important to actually do other things. One of the things you’ve talked about being actually really important is play, which it sounds kind of fun, but I have to say, I’m slightly skeptical. I’m like, OK, I understand that exercise is important, but why is play so important?

RON FRIEDMAN: Well, first I think it’s important to define play. And play is anything that’s something you do for fun, but without necessarily having a goal, or a purpose behind it. So that could be playing video games, it could be reading, it could be looking through magazines, it could be anything that you’re doing that’s not necessarily something that’s involved with your work. And as it turns out, making time for play can make you more successful at work. Particularly if you’re work involves creative thinking.

So when we’re engaged in play, we’re rewarded for taking risk. Like in a video game, or playing sports, that puts you in a risk taking mindset, which could be beneficial. Oftentimes, we get really conservative in the way that we do our work. It helps us cultivate an attitude of curiosity and interest and that spills over to other aspects of the work that we do in all aspects of our lives. And it opens us up to alternative ways of thinking.

What’s really interesting is that I think many workplaces have misinterpreted this to mean that they need a ping pong, or a billiards table in the break room. And that’s what’s going to take care of putting people in a playful frame of mind. But the reality is that play is more of a mindset than it is a particular activity. So I think it’s less about having a ping pong table, or billiards table in your office, but rather promoting this idea that it’s OK to occasionally pursue your curiosities even if they don’t necessarily have an immediate reward.

SARAH GREEN: It’s funny because even as you’re sort of talking about some ways that companies have gotten it maybe a little bit wrong there with the foosball tables, I’m also thinking I have a lot of very high achieving acquaintances who take their hobbies and turn them into work in a way. It’s like, I used to love traveling, and so I started this travel blog, and now that’s the thing that I do outside of work. But that almost becomes its own kind of job. So I know a lot of people who have passion projects outside of work, but I’m almost wondering if that’s, in a sense, taking your play too seriously?

RON FRIEDMAN: Well, that’s an interesting question. And I think that a lot of times games that we play outside of work become really, really engaging to us because they have a lot of the elements that we desperately seek in our work and we just don’t get. And I’ll give you an example of this. I talk about this in, The Best Place to Work. The example of video games, and how much we can learn from the design of video games in terms of why they’re engaging for people, and how we can make work more engaging as well.

Here’s some of the features of video games. One is they provide immediate feedback. And I guess that would apply to your friends blog as well. Whereas in work, a lot of times you write a memo and you don’t know, was that a good memo? I don’t know. You get your feedback in six or 12 month intervals, which is not necessarily a recipe for engagement. But in video games, you get that immediate feedback. And your friends blog, perhaps she posts it right away and gets that feedback from readers, so that’s nice.

The other thing that video games have that often work doesn’t is recognition when we succeed. So when you do well at a video game, you get to the next board, you get points, you get all kinds of new tools, you’re expanding your skill set. And then finally, progressive difficulty. So video games get harder the longer we play them. Every board is more difficult. And in work, It’s often the opposite trajectory. We don’t have that progressive difficulty.

When you first enter a job, first six months, or first 12 months, it’s really, really interesting. You’re constantly learning new things, you’re being challenged. And then a year or two later, It’s the same thing again and again. And I think all organizations can learn from this is incorporating some of these elements of immediate feedback, recognition and progressive difficulty to make jobs more interesting.

I think what happens for a lot of us is when we don’t have these elements, that’s when we start looking to video games and to tangential interests. If you’re not growing on the job, you’re looking to grow elsewhere.

SARAH GREEN: That’s really interesting. And that sort of gets to the bigger picture here, which is that a lot of people are interested in developing these better routines and better habits to feel happier at the end of the day. That’s the big goal. But one of the points that you’ve made in your writing is that we don’t always know what makes us happy, which I find kind of interesting, and puzzling, and philosophical. So tell me a little bit about why is that the case?

RON FRIEDMAN: Well, human beings are terrible at predicting their future happiness and this been well documented in a number of recent books. What I try to do here is talk about how relevant that is to making good decisions about where we should work and what we should focus on at work. And I’ll give you just some examples of why we’re not very good– or rather, how we’re not very good at predicting our happiness.

One is, I think we would all assume that salary and job satisfaction would have a very high correlation. So to the extent that you’re making more money, you’re going to be happier with your job and more satisfied. But as it turns out, that relationship is not quite as strong as we would imagine. It’s a very, very, very small correlation. And it’s because what impacts your satisfaction with your job is more of the conditions that are either present, or not. So are you getting to grow on the job? Are you feeling connected to your colleagues in a meaningful way? Do you feel autonomous in the way that you do your work? Those are the things that determine job satisfaction, not necessarily salary.

Another example of this, and I wrote a blog about this recently, is how we all kind of assume that success at a very difficult undertaking can lead us to happiness, and lead us to be euphoric, and feel like we can take on the world. But oftentimes, it’s not that. It leads to burnout. And finally, at an example that I talk about in the book is how daylight impacts our happiness on the job.

Again, not one of those things that we would typically think of, but there’s research showing that you can actually predict the level of satisfaction of employees by the amount of sunlight entering the workspace. And it’s because daylight is healthy for us. When we’re around daylight, our bodies are producing more serotonin, which puts us in a good mood. It’s producing more melatonin, which enables us to sleep better at night. And it lowers our blood pressure. And so there’s research showing that telemarketers who rotate seats, when they’re seated near a window, they tend to do a lot better at their jobs than when they’re seated further indoors without access to daylight.

SARAH GREEN: So I wanted to finish up by talking a little bit about the flip side of happiness, those negative emotions that we sort of wish would just go away. What’s the proper role, as we’re pursuing happiness, what is the proper role for some of those negative feelings? And why is important not to discount them necessarily, or see them as a sign of failure?

RON FRIEDMAN: Well, emotions really serve as guideposts in terms of whether or not we’re doing the right things both for our physical and mental health. And so when you’re experiencing negative emotions, there’s a temptation to want to sweep those negative emotions under the rug and kind of power through. And what I talk about in the book is that there’s a lot of research showing that by acknowledging negative emotions, we can actually make improvements in our lives that ultimately lead us to be happier.

And I talk in the book about this story, my first encounter with Ed Deci who’s the founder of self determination theory, which is the basis of Daniel Pink’s book, Drive. And I was applying to work with Ed at the University of Rochester, this was my graduate school interview, and I’d written this application essay about how I felt it was really important to study happiness. And I felt like happiness was one of these things that we can all achieve. And so what’s more important than happiness?

And so in my interview with him, Ed said, can you tell me a little bit about this essay? And I said exactly what I just told you. And he said, well, I think happiness is a bunch of crap. And that was really startling for me because this was a guy who has spent his career talking about psychological well being. And I said, well, why? And he said something that was really enlightening for me, which is that if you’re ignoring your negative emotions, then you can’t live a full life. And there’s been research in recent years looking at what are the benefits of negative emotion?

And so if you look at why we feel angry, it’s because that serves as a signal that we’ve been slighted by someone else. Or why do we feel guilty? It’s because that’s a signal that we’ve damaged an important relationship. Or why do we feel embarrassed? That’s because it’s a the signal that we violated a social norm. So I think the reality is if you’re working to create something of value, not every day is going to be a picnic.

There are going to be periods of struggle, and occasionally frustration, and that’s useful information. That means you need to make adjustments, or that maybe you’re heading down the wrong path. And so I think it’s better to acknowledge and respond to your negative emotions than again, to just to simply sweep them underneath the rug in an effort to feel happy.

SARAH GREEN: Well, Ron, thank you so much for talking with us today.

RON FRIEDMAN: It’s my pleasure.

SARAH GREEN: That was Ron Friedman. The book is, The Best Place to Work – the Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. For more of Ron’s writing, visit hbr.org.

Why Work Should Get a Little Harder Every Day

If you’re lucky, at some point in your life you’ll discover an activity that captures your attention in ways you never thought possible. One in which you’re fully immersed, losing track of time and place.

Psychologists have a term to describe these experiences: flow.

When people enter a state of flow, they are entirely absorbed in an activity, concentrating fully on the present moment. Action feels effortless. The world disappears. All that matters is the task. Gamers experience flow often, but they’re not the only ones. Surgeons, athletes, and artists all report a similar psychological state.

Pioneering researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has studied these experiences and identified a number of factors that promote a state of flow. They include having a clear understanding of the goal we’re trying to achieve, and immediate feedback on our performance. Chess, golf, and painting all fit this criteria and represent prototypical flow experiences.

But there’s one more element to flow that is just as vital. One that, ironically, most workplaces try to minimize instead of promote: progressive difficulty.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, in order to experience flow, we need to face challenges that either match or slightly exceed our current ability. If the tasks we’re engaged in are too simple, we get bored. And if we find ourselves in situations that are too far beyond our skill level, we get overwhelmed.

In both cases the impact on our engagement is the same: We lose interest.

One of the reasons video games are so good at sustaining our attention is that they get harder with every level. At work our experiences tend to take the opposite trajectory. Jobs tend to get easier the longer we do them, making flow experiences all the more difficult to achieve.

Compounding the problem is the fact that in most organizations, the goal is to minimize the complexity of work. Efficiency is about simplifying projects, creating replicable practices, and making output more scalable. From a profit standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. But from an engagement perspective, it’s a path to ruin.

To create opportunities for flow in the workplace, we need to find the sweet spot that lies just beyond our current abilities. It’s when we’re stretching our skills and building our expertise that we are at our most engaged.

One way for managers to apply the lessons of flow is by deliberately looking for ways to challenge employees and by assigning them projects that are just beyond their current skill level. Sure, doing the same tasks over and over might make your employee more efficient. But that’s not the same thing as keeping them engaged. Flow comes through growth, not stagnation.

Another flow-promoting approach: asking employees to set a stretch goal every quarter and to develop a specific plan for achieving it. It’s one thing for a manager to task employees with a difficult assignment. It’s quite another for an employee to self-identify a challenge they want to master. The more autonomous employees feel directing the course of their development, the more likely they are to show sustained engagement.

Finally, if you really want to promote flow experiences and intellectual curiosity in your company, consider making on-the-job learning a requirement. Offering a reading budget, encouraging employees to scan industry blogs during the day, and inviting employees to take courses that can help them build their skills are all ways of creating the experience of growth at work. Our minds thrive on finding and integrating new information. When learning becomes part of our routine, we train ourselves to see new patterns and recognize important connections. Expanding our mental horizon primes us to think more creatively.

A labor force that’s consistently acquiring new skills is also likely to be happier, more invested, and smarter about their work. Neurologically, learning is inherently rewarding. Acquiring new information increases our production of dopamine, which improves our mood and heightens our interest in related activities. It makes everything we do more interesting.

The moment employees stop growing, their enthusiasm sinks, undermining their engagement and productivity. It’s when our work becomes predictable that intellectual gridlock sets in and critical thinking stops.

By making it explicit that employees are expected to master new skills and by providing them with the time and resources to do so, organizations can prevent boredom, improve intellectual firepower, and enhance their competitive advantage. That may not guarantee that everyone at your company will experience flow. But it vastly improves the chances of that happening.

5 Myths of Great Workplaces

Suppose that later this evening, after you have stepped away from your keyboard, put on your coat, and traveled home for supper, your organization underwent a magical transformation, reshaping itself into the world’s best workplace.

How would you know? What would be different the next time you entered the building?

When we think about extraordinary workplaces, we tend to think of the billion-dollar companies at the top of Fortune magazine’s annual list. We picture a sprawling campus, rich with generous amenities; a utopian destination where success is constant, collaborations are seamless, and employee happiness abounds.

But as it turns out, many of the assumptions these images promote mislead us about what it means to create an outstanding workplace.

In recent years, scientists in a variety of fields have begun investigating the conditions that allow people to work more successfully. As I explain in a new book summarizing their discoveries, not only are the factors that contribute to creating a great workplace not obvious—often, they are surprisingly counterintuitive.

Consider these five “great workplace” myths:

Myth 1: Everyone Is Incessantly Happy

Over the past decade, the happiness literature has produced some compelling findings. Research conducted in lab and field experiments indicates that when people are in a good mood, they become more sociable, more altruistic, and even more creative.

Not surprisingly, many organizations have attempted to capitalize on these outcomes by searching for ways to boost employee happiness. In many ways, it’s a welcome trend. Surely, a workplace concerned about the mood of its employees is preferable to the alternative.

But happiness also has a surprising dark side. When we’re euphoric, we tend to be less careful, more gullible, and more tolerant of risks.

Not only is workplace happiness occasionally counterproductive, there is also value to so-called “negative” emotions, like anger, embarrassment, and shame. Studies indicate that these emotions can foster greater engagement by directing employees’ attention to serious issues and prompting them to make corrections that eventually lead to success.

Instead of espousing positivity at all costs, leaders are better off recognizing that top performance requires a healthy balance of positive and negative emotions. Pressuring employees to suppress negative emotions is a recipe for alienation, not engagement.

Myth 2: Conflict Is Rare

Workplace disagreements, many of us implicitly believe, are undesirable. They reflect tension in a relationship, distract team members from doing their jobs, and therefore damage productivity.

But research reveals just the opposite: in many cases, disagreements fuel better performance.

Here’s why. Most workplace disagreements fall into one of two categories: relationship conflicts, which involve personality clashes or differences in values, and task conflicts, which center on how work is performed. Studies indicate that while relationship conflicts are indeed detrimental, task conflicts produce better decisions and stronger financial outcomes.

Healthy debate encourages group members to think more deeply, scrutinize alternatives, and avoid premature consensus. While many of us view conflict as unpleasant, the experience of open deliberation can actually energizes employees by providing them with better strategies for doing their job.

Workplaces that avoid disagreements in an effort to maintain group harmony are doing themselves a disservice. Far better to create an environment in which thoughtful debate is encouraged.

Myth 3: Mistakes Are Few

Suppose you’ve just been hired to oversee two teams. Before your first day on the job, you receive a report summarizing each team’s performance during the past year. One statistic immediately jumps out: In the average month, Team A reports 5 errors. Team B reports 10.

Which team is more effective?

On the surface, the answer seems obvious. Of course Team A is better—after all, the data show they commit half the number of mistakes. But are fewer errors really the best metric of a team’s success?

In the mid-1990s, Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson conducted a study looking the performance of nursing units at a university hospital. What she expected to find was a simple correlation; one showing that units with the best managers and coworker relationships recorded the fewest drug treatment errors. Instead, she found the opposite.

Much to Edmondson’s surprise, nursing units with better nurse-manager relationships reported significantly more drug treatment errors, but not because they were less effective. They were simply more comfortable admitting mistakes when they happened.

Edmondson’s research underscores an important point. To achieve top performance, we must first recognize and learn from our mistakes. And for that to happen within a workplace context, for employees to willingly acknowledge errors, they need an environment in which it feels safe to have honest dialogue.

Paradoxically, fostering top workplace performance requires a new way of looking at failure. Instead of treating mistakes as a negative consequence to be avoided at all costs (thereby making employees reluctant to acknowledge them), organizations are better off making improvement rather than perfection a primary objective.

Myth 4: They Hire for Cultural Fit

Organizations no longer select job candidates solely on the basis of their skills or experience. They hire those whose personality and values are consistent with their company culture. Among the more vocal proponents of this approach is Zappos, the online shoe distributor. But lots of other companies have extoled the virtues of hiring for cultural fit.

The idea holds intuitive appeal: When employees share similar attitudes, they’re more likely to get along, and more likely they are to produce. Right?

Not necessarily. There’s a point at which too much similarity can stifle performance. For one, similarity fosters complacency. We get stuck doing things the way we’ve always done them because no one is challenging us to think differently. Similarity also breeds overconfidence. We overestimate the accuracy of our opinions and invest less effort in our decisions, making errors more common.

In a 2009 study teams of three were asked to solve a problem with the help of a new colleague who was either similar or dissimilar to the existing group. While homogenous teams felt more confident in their decisions, it was the diverse teams that performed best. The newcomers pushed veterans to reexamine their assumptions and process data more carefully—the very thing they neglected to do when everyone in their group was similar.

Finding the right degree of cultural fit in a new hire is tricky. When the work is simple and creative thinking is rarely required, a homogenous workforce has its advantages. But the same can’t be said for organizations looking to be on the forefront of innovation. Here, exposing people to different viewpoints can generate more value than ensuring that they gel.

Myth 5: Their Offices Are Full of Fun Things

On every list of great companies to work for, the top organizations offer lavish amenities. Twitter, for example, has a rock-climbing wall. Zynga lines its hallway with classic arcade games. Google provides a bowling alley, roller-hockey rink, and volleyball courts, complete with actual sand.

Given the frequency with which resort-like workplaces are recognized, it’s become easy to assume that to build a great workplace, you need to turn your office into an amusement park.

Not true. To thrive at work, employees don’t require luxuries. What they need are experiences that fulfill their basic, human needs. As decades of academic research have demonstrated, we perform at our best when we feel competent, autonomous, and connected to others.

What differentiates great workplaces is not the number of extravagant perks. It’s the extent to which they satisfy their employees’ emotional needs and develop working conditions that help people produce their best work.

For too long, we’ve relied on assumptions when it comes to improving our workplaces. Isn’t it time we looked at the data?

Dear Boss: Your Team Wants You to Go on Vacation

Over the past decade, a staggering number of studies have demonstrated that our work performance plummets when we work prolonged periods without a break. We know that overworked employees are prone to mood swings, impulsive decision-making, and poor concentration. They’re more likely to lash out at perceived slights and struggle to empathize with colleagues. Worse still, they are prone to negativity — and that negativity is contagious.

Yet at the average American company, 4 out of 10 employees (including those in management roles) will forfeit vacation time this year.

There is every reason to believe that the cost of the mental and physical depletion that invariably results is exponential when its victim is a manager. Not just because a supervisor’s mood and decision-making affects more people, but because when a manager chooses to forgo time off, it starts a domino effect that shapes cultural norms.

As I describe in a new book on the science of building a great workplace, organizational culture has little to do with a company’s mission or vision statement. It is determined by the behaviors of those at the top. As humans, we’ve evolved to mimic those around us, especially those in higher status roles. Lower-status group members often copy the behaviors of those in leadership positions because it helps align them with individuals who hold more influence in the group. The best managers know that as leaders, their actions influence the behaviors of everyone around them.

When managers forgo vacation time, it not only places them squarely on the road to burnout, it also generates unspoken pressures for everyone on their team to do the same. And ignoring the body’s need for rest is not just a poor long-term strategy. It also comes with considerable opportunity cost.

We now have compelling evidence that the restorative experiences we have on vacations bring us a sharpened attention, mental clarity, and inspired insights. Take reaction time – a simple measure that indicates how quickly we pick up on new information. Research commissioned by NASA found that after just a few days of vacation, people’s reaction time jumps by an astonishing 80%.

Studies on creativity have found that spending time outdoors and traveling to a foreign country — two activities people commonly engage in when they go on vacation — are among the most effective ways of finding fresh perspectives and creative solutions. Simply put, you’re far more likely to have a breakthrough idea while lounging on a beach in St. Martin than you are while typing away in your office cubicle.

Vacations are not only a boon to the way we think; they also foster greater life satisfaction. Just last year, Gallup released an eye-opening study showing that how often you vacation is a better predicator of your well-being than the amount of money you earn. In fact, according to Gallup’s data, a regular vacationer earning $24,000 a year is generally happier than an infrequent vacationer earning 5 times as much.

And that elevated well-being affects more than just people’s moods. It also influences the way they think about their jobs. According to a Nielsen poll, more than 70% of regular vacationers are satisfied with their job. But those who don’t vacation? A measly 46% are satisfied.

Just why do vacations affect us so strongly? In part, it’s because they allow us to disengage from the stress of work and replenish our mental and physical energy. But psychologists believe there’s more to the story than just recovery. Vacations provide us with an opportunity to engage in autonomous experiences and allow us uninterrupted time with loved ones and close friends. They also enable us to build our competence in hobbies we cherish. In others words, a good vacation grants us what we desperately seek in our work — energizing experiences that fulfill our basic, human psychological needs.

Given all the benefits of vacations, perhaps it’s time we considered treating unused vacation days as a valuable metric — one that reflects the inverse of a healthy workplace culture; an indication that a company is suffering from energy mismanagement.

So how do we reverse the trend of unused vacation time? How do we get more people feeling good about taking vacations when clearly, their company benefits from them taking a break? Encouraging managers to model the right behaviors and educating employees about the benefits of time off is a good start, but it’s unlikely to be enough — not when recent economic struggles have trained so many workers to avoid appearing replaceable, even if it’s for just a few days.

For those who are genuinely serious about getting employees to vacation, a more promising approach involves offering a monetary incentive that rewards taking time off. It’s a tactic that’s slowly gaining traction among a growing number of companies. The RAND Corporation, for example, no longer pays employees their regular salary while they’re on vacation. Instead, they pay time and a half. The US Travel Association has set up an internal raffle worth $500. To be eligible, employees have to do one thing: Use up all of the previous year’s vacation days.

Then there’s the Rolls Royce of pro-vacation policies, furnished by FullContact. The Denver software company has implemented a program that actually pays employees $7,500 to take their family on vacation. The only stipulation is that they not do any work during their time off. If you’re on a FullContact-sponsored getaway and you’re caught opening a single work email, you’re obligated to return every penny. (As a result, job application numbers at FullContact are up, and turnover has dropped.)

What makes these policies notable is not their generosity. It’s that they provide clear evidence that a company is serious about encouraging employees to restock their mental energy so that they can continue to excel.

We live in an age when vacations and the restorative experiences they provide are no longer a luxury. They are essential to our engagement, performance, and creativity.

How to Support Employee Health Instead of Sapping It

How do you create a great place to work?

Once, paying people well, offering interesting assignments, and providing recognition may have been enough.

But the nature of work has changed. Over the past decade, technological advances have enabled us to work at all hours, often at great expense to our sleep. We’re surrounded by devices that make everything feel urgent, peppering us with distractions and contributing to an ongoing experience of stress. And we’ve become more sedentary, as tasks requiring movement have quietly disappeared.

A growing number of companies have begun recognizing that helping employees maintain their wellbeing is now a vital component to creating a thriving workplace. And many are taking steps well beyond the usual corporate wellness programs to foster employee wellbeing.

Here are the some of the most intelligent workplace practices I’ve encountered recently and why I believe the research supports their use.

Facilitate physical fitness. A wide range of studies have found a direct link between physical movement and mental agility. We have clear evidence that regular exercise improves concentration, memory, and creativity – not to mention mood.

Many companies now offer their employees access to standing desks, onsite gyms, and even company bicycles. It’s a welcome trend. However, as important as offering employees access to workout equipment, is making it practical for them to exercise without worrying about putting their appearance or hygiene at risk.

Not long ago, offering workplace showers, washer/dryers, and personal lockers may have seemed like a laughable extravagance. But when you consider the undeniable benefits of exercise on employee engagement, stress management, and productivity, the real wonder is how long it will take more companies to follow the lead of Patagonia, Hootsuite, and many other organizations that already see value in these investments.

For companies seeking more affordable methods of promoting exercise, The Calvert Group provides an alternative worth considering. The Washington D.C. mutual fund firm offers employee who walk to work a $120 voucher toward a new pair of shoes. It’s a relatively inexpensive way of signaling that exercise is not only valued – it’s rewarded.

Make healthy eating easy. It’s obvious that having access to nutritious food makes it easier to stay energized throughout the day. Yet at most companies, almost no attention is paid to employees’ diets. And when food is provided, it’s often unhealthy – pizza or donuts.

Clearly, providing healthy, prepared meals is not an option for many workplaces. It can be pricey, involves planning, and requires space. But it’s hard to think of situations where offering employees an assortment of nutritious snacks like nuts, fruits, and vegetables would be a bad investment.

Not only do healthy foods keep us energized, research indicates they facilitate higher quality work. Consuming fruit, for example, has been shown to elevate mood and creativity by providing our bodies with the nutrients they need to produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a pivotal role in the experience of curiosity and motivation.

Smart companies like Danone are already taking advantage of this insight by providing employee with free fruits, salads, and, yes, yogurts at the company cafeteria, while charging more for less healthy alternatives. L’Oréal offers only healthy food options, eliminating unhealthy snacks entirely.

Companies without a cafeteria can apply the same thinking to their vending machines, by offering healthy items – and selling them at a discount. Or they can follow the example of Cassaday and Company, a financial planning firm in Virginia that has fruit platters delivered to the office daily.

Foster mental growth. As human beings, we have a psychological need for growing our competence. That applies to all domains in life, but it’s especially true at work. Our engagement peaks when we’re being challenged and acquiring new skills. In contrast, when our development stalls, we experience boredom and inevitably disengage.

How do great workplaces ensure that employees are growing on continuous basis?

Motley Fool, a financial services company, invites workers to purchase any book they want (non-fiction or fiction) at the company’s expense, empowering them to explore new ideas. Ontraport, a software developer in Santa Barbara, has created an apprenticeship program that allows employees to shadow those in different departments, where they can learn more about their coworkers’ areas of expertise and identify new roles in the company they can fill in the future. Square Root, a software company in Texas, offer every employee a $3,000 budget for personal development, that they can spend any way they see fit.

All of these practices feed employees’ intrinsic need for learning, enabling them to pursue new interests in a self-directed fashion, fostering both autonomy and personal development.

Pay employees to stop working. A workplace trend that’s made headlines in recent years is offering unlimited vacation time. The idea is well intentioned: by eliminating annual limits, companies like Netflix, Evernote, and Virgin empower their employees to restock their mental energy as needed – regardless of how many days they’ve already taken off.

But this approach is not without its critics. The trouble, they rightly point out, is doing away with a prescribed number of vacation days can have a negative consequence — employees may actually take less time off. Without a set number of vacation days, employees can find it harder to gauge what’s appropriate. It’s also easier to put off taking a break when there’s no annual deadline limiting how many vacation days you can accumulate.

Intelligent workplaces recognize that taking time off is not a luxury. It is essential to top performance, an optimistic mindset, and full engagement. For leaders who are genuinely interested in preventing burnout and fostering productivity, there is a useful alternative to unlimited vacations: providing a set number of vacation days and incentivizing people to actually use them.

Among the early adopters of this approach is the RAND Corporation, which pays workers what amounts to a small bonus for going on vacation: on days when employees are on vacation, they earn time and a half.

A useful (and considerably less expensive) alternative to this approach is the US Travel Association’s practice of holding an annual raffle for $500. To qualify, there’s only one requirement: employees must use up all of their vacation time in the previous year.

The nature of work is changing. And with it, so must our prescriptions for creating an extraordinary workplace. Great organizations know that engagement goes much deeper than what we do between 9-5. It’s about living a sustainable life where mind, body, and spirit are equally nourished.

Defusing an Emotionally Charged Conversation with a Colleague

Work with anyone long enough and you’re bound to encounter a difference of opinion. Most of the time, these disagreements are resolved amicably. But if you’re like most people, every now and then you find yourself immersed in a conversation so emotionally charged it seems to have nothing to do with the issues you’re supposedly discussing.

What do you do when a conversation is spiraling out of control? When you’ve tried all the patient listening you can muster and the other person still won’t budge? How do you get the conversation back on track?

Anthony Suchman has invested a good portion of his career in searching for an answer. A charming physician with a profound intellect, Suchman has been studying the dynamics of human relationships for more than three decades, publishing his results in some of the world’s leading medical journals.

According to Suchman, every workplace conversation operates on two levels: a task channel and a relationship channel. Occasionally the two get fused, which is when disagreements intensify and collaborations break down.

Here’s what he means: Suppose you and I are working together on a project. Along the way, we have a difference of opinion about our next steps. Perhaps I think we should use PowerPoint to deliver an important presentation, and you see PowerPoint as a poor communication tool. When I express a point of view that’s different from yours, you may take our disagreement at face value by saying, “Hmm, I guess Ron sees it differently.” But if we’re new to working together, or if we’ve had a few run-ins in the past, you’re likely to read beyond my suggestion, using it to draw inferences about our relationship. For instance, you may misinterpret my suggestion as a lack of trust, a sign of disrespect, or even proof of competition.

It’s at this point, Suchman argues, that our task-focused disagreement becomes contaminated with concerns about our relationship. And when that happens, things escalate. Fast.

Neurologically, what Suchman is describing is the activation of a fear response. When we perceive danger, our hypothalamus sends a signal that releases adrenalin and cortisol into the bloodstream. That triggers a fight-or-flight response that sends our bodies into overdrive, short-circuiting our ability to concentrate or think creatively. We experience tunnel vision.

In the evolutionary past, having an automatic reaction to fear was quite useful. It helped protect us from oncoming predators and kept us alive long enough to reproduce. But in today’s workplace, an involuntary fear response can interfere with our ability to work collaboratively with others. It’s one reason why the greater the emotional charge, the harder it is to get either side to listen.

To defuse an emotionally volatile situation like this, Suchman believes the first step is to disentangle the task and relational channels. “When people disagree, it’s often because one party misinterprets the feedback they’ve received as a personal attack,” he says. “So it becomes: ‘If you like my idea, you like me,’ and ‘If you don’t like my idea, you don’t like me.’ That puts a huge encumbrance on the task channel and makes it really hard to speak openly.”

Our mental capacity is limited, Suchman points out, which means we can attend to either the task channel or the relationship channel. It’s when we get the two channels crossed that our ability to collaborate constructively suffers. One approach to reducing tensions during disagreements involves deliberately attending to the relational channel and reaffirming your commitment to the relationship. This way there’s no confusion about what the argument is really about. By momentarily focusing on the relationship, you disentangle the personal from the business.

Suchman recommends using a specific series of relationship-building statements to make the conversation more productive, which are represented in the acronym PEARLS:

• Partnership:

  • “I really want to work on this with you.”

  • “I bet we can figure this out together.”

• Empathy:

  • “I can feel your enthusiasm as you talk.”

  • “I can hear your concern.”

• Acknowledgement:

  • “You clearly put a lot of work into this.”

  • “You invested in this, and it shows.”

• Respect:

  • “I’ve always appreciated your creativity.”

  • “There’s no doubt you know a lot about this.”

• Legitimation:

  • “This would be hard for anyone.”

  • “Who wouldn’t be worried about something like this?”

• Support:

  • “I’d like to help you with this.”

  • “I want to see you succeed.”

Using relationship-building statements can feel unnatural at first, especially when you’re not accustomed to complimenting others. I know they did for me when I first started using them in workplace conversations. The key, I’ve discovered, is to employ them sparingly at first and to only say the ones that genuinely reflect how you feel.

Almost immediately, you’ll notice that inserting a well-timed PEARLS statement can dramatically alter the tenor of a conversation. Because no matter how far up we climb on an organizational ladder, we are still stuck using an emotionally-driven brain. When fear enters the equation, it’s impossible to get people to do their best work, which is why restoring confidence in the relationship can be a powerful tool.

The value of relationship-building statements extends far beyond the workplace. They’re as effective with spouses, children, and friends as they are with colleagues. The reason is simple: anytime you attend to people’s psychological need for connection, you have the potential to improve the quality of an exchange. The more heated the argument, the more vital the statements become.

Why Too Much Data Disables Your Decision Making

Best known for killing cats, curiosity can also slay your judgement. 

Quick, think back to a major decision. You know, the kind that compelled you to read everything on a topic and lead you to spend hours devouring every last scrap of data.

How’d that work out for you?

We like to think that more information drives smarter decisions; that the more details we absorb, the better off we’ll be. It’s why we subscribe to Google Alerts, cling to our iPhone, and fire up our TweetDeck.

Knowledge, we’re told, is power. But what if our thirst for data is actually holding us back? What if obsessing over information actually reduces the quality of our decisions?

That’s the question raised by Princeton and Stanford University psychologists in a fascinating study titled On the Pursuit and Misuse of Useless Information.

Their experiment was simple. Participants were divided into two groups. Group 1 read the following:

Imagine that you are a loan officer at a bank reviewing the mortgage application of a recent college graduate with a stable, well-paying job and a solid credit history. The applicant seems qualified, but during the routine credit check you discover that for the last three months the applicant has not paid a $5,000 debt to his charge card account.

Do you approve or reject the mortgage application?

Group 2 saw the same paragraph with one crucial difference. Instead of learning the exact amount of the student’s debt, they were told there were conflicting reports and that the size of the debt was unclear. It was either $5,000 or $25,000. Participants could decide to approve or reject the applicant immediately, or they could delay their decision until more information was available, clarifying how much the student really owed. Not surprisingly, most Group 2 participants chose to wait until they knew the size of the debt.

Here’s where the study gets clever. The experimenters then revealed that the student’s debt was only $5,000. In other words, both groups ended up with the same exact information. Group 2 just had to go out of its way and seek it out.

The result? 71% of Group 1 participants rejected the applicant. But among Group 2 participants who asked for additional information? Only 21% rejected the applicant.

To say the findings are surprising is to state the obvious. After all, everyone had precisely the same information. So why would the rate of rejection be three times higher in Group 1?

The answer underscores a troubling blind spot in the way we make decisions. One that highlights the downside of having a sea of information available at our fingertips, and just might convince you to ditch your iPhone the next time you’re faced with an important choice.

Cliffhangers: Great for Television, Disastrous for Decisions

Remember Seinfeld and Friends? Fifteen years ago, a handful of television shows ended on cliffhangers. Daytime soaps were among the first to regularly end on a climax, and 24 made the practice a fixture of mainstream television. Today, most dramas are loathe to end an episode without one. Even comedies like The Office and Modern Family now rely on cliffhangers to draw viewers back.

There’s a psychological reason cliffhangers are so effective. The human mind hates uncertainty. Uncertainty implies volatility, randomness, and danger. When we notice information is missing, our brain raises a metaphorical red flag and says, “Pay attention. This could be important.”

Generally, that curiosity is useful. In our evolutionary past, knowing whether that rustling in the bushes belonged to a tiger or a mouse could have meant the difference between life and death. We’re wired to reduce uncertainty because our minds were adapted for another, more hazardous, time.

Seeking out information comes with a downside, however, which accounts for the intriguing difference between the two groups. When data is missing, we overestimate its value. Our mind assumes that since we are expending resource locating information, it must be useful.

Participants in Group 2 couldn’t help but ask for additional data. The mind, after all, hates information gaps. And because their attention was focused on whether the debt was $5,000 or $25,000, their thinking about the loan had shifted. They no longer saw the big picture–that the applicant had a history of defaulting. They were simply too fixated on a relatively minor detail, the size of the debt.

The Seduction of Data

The research underscores a sobering message: We’re fascinated with filling information gaps and that obsession can lead us astray. Especially today, when reducing uncertainty has become all too easy.

What’s the forecast for Friday? Pick up your iPhone. What’s Lindsey Lohan up to? Type in TMZ. Wonder what that girl from 10th grade drama now looks like? Facebook!

And it’s not just trivial information that’s easily accessible. It’s data that drives major business decisions. There’s always one more report, one more analysis, and one more perspective that’s a click or two away.

Neurologically, information is addicting. Learning is associated with the release of dopamine, the same as powerful drugs like cocaine. It’s why we are so vulnerable to an Internet rife with attention parasites that leave us worse for the wear.

In a world where every click brings the promise of a discovery, we are all at risk of becoming addicts. The challenge lies in differentiating between questions worth exploring and questions best left unasked.

How the Science of Love Can Make You a Smarter Marketer

What the world’s best brands have in common with thriving relationships.

If you’ve watched your share of romantic comedies—and I’m not ashamed to say that I have—you know that there’s a certain formula involved.

Step #1: The protagonists get off to a bad start.  

Step #2: The two proceed to date other, usually better looking alternatives, only to have these relationships blow up in their face.

Step #3: Between misadventures, the protagonists confide in a wise, outspoken and occasionally flamboyant best friend.   

Oh, and there’s one more thing.  In a romantic comedy it’s clear to everyone except the couple themselves that they’re destined to be together.  This obvious piece of information rarely dawns on them before the movie is three-quarters of the way through.  And even then, they’re not quite sure how it happened.  To them, love is a mystery.

Fortunately, the rest of us don’t have to remain quite so clueless.  

Over the past few decades, social scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the dynamics of human relationships.  We’ve become a lot smarter at predicting whether people will hit it off, at identifying couples with the best chances of staying together, and at spotting marriages headed for divorce.  To the experts in the field, love is rarely an accident.

So what’s that got to do with marketing?  In a word: everything.

It’s because the same neural circuits that light up when we connect with another person also fire when we find ourselves thinking about a favorite brand.  The psychological experience of love is grounded in a common physiological language.

Yet surprisingly, few of the insights psychologists have uncovered about the science of love have made their way to the field of marketing.

Here are some of the highlights of what we’ve learned.

1. We Love What Makes Us Grow

As humans, we have a psychological need to enhance our skills and improve our competence.  When we click with someone new, we increase our interpersonal resources, gain new perspectives and enhance our identity.   

In short, we grow.

The self-expansion we experience in a new relationship is often exhilarating and intense, especially at the beginning, when every interaction has the potential for revealing something new about your partner’s talents, their history and their dreams.

But as relationships mature, opportunities for mutual growth become harder to come by.  Which is why marriages turn dull and friendships fade.

In the absence of novelty, we experience boredom.

Interestingly, the same is true for our connection with brands.  Brain imaging studies reveal that consumers experience greater emotional arousal when thinking about newly formed brand relationships than for long-standing ones.  It’s because newer brand relationships spark many of the same reactions as a blossoming romance: surprise, fascination, curiosity.

Inevitably, however, the excitement fades.  We adapt.  And suddenly we experience an itch to try something new.

How do you revive a tired relationship?  Marriage therapists recommend finding new adventures that partners can engage in together.  Sharing in novel experiences can be a powerful tool for preventing adaption and restoring some of the elusive magic that was there when a couple first met.

The lesson: The older the relationship, the harder you need to work to generate excitement.  Even the most successful brands can often benefit from a well-timed refresh to reinvigorate consumer interest.

2. We Love What Moves Us Toward Our Ideal-Self

Not all romantic relationships are equally rewarding.  Some partners help us achieve our intrinsic goals while others stifle them.

The trouble is, it’s not always easy to tell these partners apart.  Suppose, for example, that you’re interested in learning how to rock climb.  You share your ambition with your boyfriend one night over dinner, and receive a seemingly positive response. “That’s great,” he says, pouring you a glass of wine.

He’s being supportive, right?

The answer depends on what happens next.   If he subtly shifts the conversation onto a different topic, you are likely to register a mental note: rock climbing does not generate an enthusiastic response.

Research shows that the best relationships are the ones in which partners help one another clarify their plans, offer assistance and actively encourage.  When partners serve as allies, their connection deepens and their relationship grows.

The same can be said for the relationship between a brand and its customers.  The moment we view a brand as a partner in the quest to achieve our ideal-self, we become attached.

The lesson: Creating strong brand connections involves more than simply offering great products.  Showing a broader commitment to helping your audience reach their ideal self can naturally enhance their brand loyalty.

3. We Love What Makes Us Feel Accepted

There are times, however, when focusing exclusively on the consumer ideal can backfire, especially when that ideal is too distant from the current reality.

Consider the success of Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which generated billions and became a viral sensation by purposely eschewing professional models in favor of ordinary people.  By highlighting customers’ reality instead of their ideal, Dove was able to demonstrate that it understands its audience in a way that its competitors don’t.

According to a 2011 paper published in the Journal of Marketing, when the images a brand projects are too far ahead of its customers, the reaction is not always positive.  Consumers tend to infer that what the brand is selling is out of their reach and consequently irrelevant.  

The lesson:  Perfection is not always appealing.  For a brand to be successful, consumers must view it as relatable first.

4. Satisfaction Is Not Love

Being satisfied with your marriage is not the same thing as being passionately in love.  The same can be said for brand relationships.  You might be perfectly satisfied with your Samsung refrigerator but that doesn’t mean you’re going to rave about it to all your friends.

But there’s an important distinction between these relationships.  While the personal and financial cost of getting a divorce can keep a lackluster marriage going for years, the consequences to ending a brand relationship are relatively trivial.

Which is one reason customer satisfaction can be a surprisingly poor predictor of long-term loyalty.  When the opportunities for defection are high and the barriers to switching are low, satisfaction alone is rarely enough to sustain customer interest.

What does predict long-term loyalty?  Emotional attachment.

When we’re emotionally attached to a brand, we come to view it as part of our personal identity.  We overlook appealing alternatives.  And we become willing to sacrifice valuable resources, like time, money and attention, just as we would in a committed romantic relationship.

The lesson: The more competition you face, the more vital emotional connections become.  Satisfaction alone is rarely enough to keep a relationship going, especially when switching is easy.

So, what can the science of love teach us about marketing?

The answer is a lot.  Which is why we should listen.  And perhaps, like the newly enlightened couple at end of a romantic comedy, even consider the possibility that we’ve been searching for answers in the wrong places all along.

Why the Last 5 Years of Your Life Have Disappeared

How to slow down time and get more done. 

If you’re like many people, this week will feel shorter than the last. August will pass more quickly than July.  2014 will end before you’ve fully processed that it even began.

The symmetry of clocks lulls us into believing that time is a fixed commodity but studies indicate that’s not the way it’s experienced.  Time speeds up as we age.  And the older you get, the more quickly it appears to vanish.

If that weren’t bad enough, we also retain less as adults.  Consider, for instance, your memories of high school.  How much more vividly do you recall the minutiae of those four years compared to the last four years at your job? 

The hormonal burst we undergo as teenagers does more than trigger facial acne and questionable decision-making.  It also stimulates the growth of neurons that soak up memories of that first prom, cigarette and kiss.  Combine that with the fact that emotional memories feel more recent than memories of the mundane, and you can see why high school is so easy to remember—or, depending on your experience, so difficult to forget.

The Science of Lost Time

Psychologists haven’t pinned down exactly when our perception of time begins to accelerate, but they do offer a few interesting theories about why it happens.

There are biological accounts, having to do with natural changes in heart rate, metabolism and body temperature as we age.  Neurologically, the mature brain also produces less dopamine, a chemical that plays an important role in controlling our internal clock. 

But there’s another viewpoint—one that opens the door to the possibility that our tendency to compress time can also be reversed.

According to this “Habituation Hypothesis,” the older we get, the less there is that feels truly new.  Our minds have evolved to conserve mental energy and when life is predictable, we tune it out.  We automate major parts of our day—getting dressed, commuting to work, cooking dinner—because it is beneficial to do so.  The more efficient we are at carrying out simple tasks, the more mental resources we have available for more pressing issues. 

But our mindless efficiency comes with an experiential cost.  The less attention we pay each passing moment, the more quickly time fades.

So what can we do to reverse the trend?

How to Slow Down Time

Seek out beauty

Studies show that experiencing awe, which is the feeling we get when we encounter something inspiring and transformational, like a stirring piece of artwork or the grandeur of nature, expands perception of time.  In a series of experiments, psychologists found that prompting the experience of awe in the lab led participants to estimate that they had more free time available.  Consequently, they were also less impatient, more satisfied with their lives, and even more willing to volunteer.

Unless we’re on vacation, few of us actively seek out experiences the promote awe on a regular basis.  What this research suggests is that a monthly visit to the museum or the occasional nature hike can alter the way we perceive time while elevating the quality of our daily experiences.  

Make fewer decisions

The more decisions you choose to make, the less attentional resources you have for focusing on the present moment.  What’s more, continuous decision-making is mentally draining, causes stress levels to spike, and ironically, leads to poorer-quality decisions over the long run. 

If you’re prone to overanalyzing every minute decision, consider this: research shows that the more options you weigh, the less satisfied you’ll feel about your eventual choice. 

Taking the time to choose what not to decide can be a valuable investment, freeing up cognitive bandwidth and keeping you more in tune with the present.  Just ask Barack Obama.  He’s limited his suit collection to exactly two options—blue and gray—preserving attentional resources for more important matters.

Stop monitoring your email

By now, you’ve probably heard that multitasking diminishes rather than enhances your performance.  Sure, simultaneously working on tasks feels more productive, but the attentional resources chewed up toggling back and forth leads to significantly poorer results.

Multitasking also comes with another cost—one that’s obvious when you consider the relationship between attention and time perception.  It hinders the formation of new memories.  By feeding our insatiable desire to get more done, we leave fewer resources available for consolidating new memories, prompting us to feel as if our lives are shrinking. 

Embrace the new

New adventures are more memorable, especially when they’re emotionally engaging.  Making new friends, experimenting with novel hobbies, and taking on challenging projects at work require more from us cognitively and focus our attention on the present. 

Going away on vacation can similarly provide a mental marker between life events, breaking up the routine of everyday life.  It’s when every Wednesday night consists of going to yoga, ordering sushi and watching Modern Family that the weeks, months, and years begin to blur.

Is Time Affluence the Secret to Happiness?

We all want more time.  Time for pursuing new hobbies, for visiting exotic cities, for growing closer to the ones we love. And yet, let’s be honest: expanding our perception of time helps us achieve none of these.  So what’s the point?  What good does it do us to feel as if time is passing more slowly when what we really need is more actual time?

Here, the research is enlightening.  Studies show that people who feel “time-rich” tend to be happier and more fulfilled than those of us who constantly feel rushed.  They experience fewer headaches and upset stomachs, and regularly get better quality sleep. And it’s not just people who are time-rich and financially successful.  Studies show that time affluence is independent of income.  Feeling less pressured promotes a happier existence, regardless of how much you earn.

And this is why there is value to slowing down our perception of time.  The more we view time as plentiful, the better we are at savoring life’s essential moments as they unfold.

Want to Get More Done? Start Taking Breaks

The benefits of taking 15-minute breaks before (not after) 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.

How Exercise Improves Your Performance at Work

Why working out can give you a mental edge. 

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.

The Secret to Staying Engaged at Work

The surprising power of restocking your mental energy. 

How often do you check your cell phone after leaving work? The answer might reveal your future productivity.

According to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the less employees detach psychologically during off-hours, the higher their emotional exhaustion in twelve months’ time.

Staying connected is addictive. It helps us feel needed, in the know, productive. But constant communication comes with a cost. An onslaught of e-mails, text messages, and phone calls breeds a sense of perpetual emergency, fostering an ongoing stress response in the brain. And continuous pressure has a damaging effect on the way we think and feel.

When we can’t fully log off, we can’t fully recover.

Jim Loehr is a sports psychologist who has coached some of the world’s top athletes. Early in his career, Loehr spent countless hours studying elite tennis performers, trying to pinpoint what makes them better than everyone else. What he found was surprising. According to Loehr, the key difference can’t be found in players’ serves, their volleys, or their play at net. It’s not even their experience or innate ability that sets them apart. It’s what they do between points. Some athletes are better at calming their nerves and restoring their focus, and they’re the ones who tend to win most.

Loehr’s observation is as applicable to the workplace as it is to the tennis court. A careful balance of work and recovery is as vital for mental athletes as it is for those whose job it is to excel at physical skill. In both cases, when we deny ourselves the opportunity to recuperate, our performance invariably suffers.

In many organizations, being available around the clock has become an unspoken expectation. When a manager sends late-night e-mails, he implicitly endorses a round-the-clock work culture, paving the way for after-hours stress that spills over into the home, where a curt e-mail can spoil a dinner or ruin a weekend.

While there are undoubtedly instances when staying connected is legitimately necessary, it’s rare for a business to require that every team member stay logged on continuously. In fact, it’s in a company’s interest to allow employees to recover. If an associate is frequently working late into the night and through the weekend, she is likely doing so at a cost to long-term engagement.

It used to be the case that managers had to push employees to work harder. Today the opposite seems to be happening. In many industries, a key to retaining top talent involves protecting employees from working nonstop, which is why some pioneering organizations are starting to take matters into their own hands, leaving employees little choice but to recharge.

Volkswagen, for example, has begun turning off its e-mail server thirty minutes after the end of a shift and turning it back on just before the start of the next one. They’re not alone in limiting access. Others organizations, like Empower Public Relations in Chicago, are also adopting an e-mail blackout policy, because they find that it helps employees arrive at work fresher the next day.

Daimler, another German automaker, has programmed its server to automatically delete e-mails received during employee vacations, telling senders who they can contact in an employee’s absence. Even the highly regarded Boston Consulting Group has begun monitoring employee paid time off (PTO)—not to identify employees who take too much personal time, but to flag individuals who accrue too many hours without taking a break.

A surprising number of companies have stopped limiting vacation time altogether, including IBM, Evernote, and Netflix. It’s a way of communicating trust in their employees and encouraging them to take the time they need when they need it.

But the workplace with the most outrageously pro–time off policy? Without a doubt, that title belongs to FullContact, a Denver software company that in 2012 implemented a program that actually pays employees seventy-five hundred dollars to take their family on vacation. There are, however, a few strings attached. To receive the bonus, employees must first agree to three strict provisions, as outlined on the blog of FullContact CEO Bart Lorang:

1. You have to go on vacation, or you don’t get the money.

2. You must disconnect.

3. You can’t work while on vacation.

And just why are they being so generous? Lorang put it this way: “We’ll be a better company if employees disconnect.”

There is a lesson here for organizations aiming to inspire top performance. Within a knowledge economy, productivity and time off are no longer incompatible. Quite the opposite.

Producing extraordinary work requires learning to stop.

Is Your Smartphone Making You Dumb?

A series of studies finds that the devices do the opposite of what we expect.

Imagine that after a routine medical exam your doctor delivers some devastating news: Since your last checkup, your cognitive performance has plummeted. Your ability to connect with others has eroded. And your memory for everyday events is no longer operating as it once did.

As it turns out, there is a cure and it won’t cost you a penny. The treatment is simple: All that’s required is that you put away your smartphone.

Few of us will have this conversation with our doctors. But perhaps we should. Over the last few years, scientists have begun studying the way cell phones affect the human experience. And the early results are alarming.

Consider the findings of a study in this month’s issue of Social Psychology, examining how the “mere presence” of a cell phone—even when it is not being used—influences people’s performance on complex mental tasks. Within the study, participants were asked to quickly scan a row of digits and cross out consecutive numbers that add to a pre-specified total (for example, any two numbers that total 3). Before they started, half of participants were asked to put away their phones. The other half were asked to place their phones on their desk, ostensibly so they could answer a few survey questions about its features.

Not a single cell phone went off during the experiment. Yet compared to those whose phones were stowed out of view, participants whose phones sat on their desk performed nearly 20% worse.

Why would the presence of a silent cell phone inflict such a heavy toll? One possibility is that years of cell phone usage has conditioned us to anticipate the arrival of new messages. Consequently, even when our phones sit perfectly still, simply having it in our peripheral vision tempts us to split our attention, leaving less mental firepower for our work.

But it’s not just our problem-solving execution that suffers: A University of Essex study found that the presence of a cell phone also interferes with our ability to form close interpersonal connections.

In one lab experiment, researchers paired volunteers who had never met and had them take turns discussing an interesting personal event that occurred in the past month. Half the conversations took place with the experimenter’s cell phone sitting on the table. In the other half, a small spiral notebook was sat on the table instead.

Afterward, participants in each pair evaluated their experience, and the results were striking: Subjects who spoke while a cell phone was in view perceived their partner as less understanding and less trustworthy. They were also more skeptical that further dialogue with their partner would yield a close friendship.

A follow-up study conducted at Virginia Tech confirmed that it’s not just people’s impressions of a partner that dip in the presence of a cell phone. It’s the actual quality of their conversations. “In the presence of a mobile device, there is less eye contact,” lead author Shalini Misra observed. That makes both partners more likely to miss subtle changes in each other’s expression or tone.

In addition to splitting our attention, there is strong reason to suspect that frequent smartphone use and the constant connectivity it engenders interfere with memory formation. To transfer information from short-term to long-term memory, the brain requires periods of rest. In a world where every free moment is spent refreshing email or responding to text messages, there are fewer opportunities for long-term memories to form.

There is something deeply ironic about a device designed to improve efficiency and foster connections achieving the exact opposite. In this way, smartphones are emblematic of a bigger issue with the way we use technology: Often, the tools we use to control our lives end up controlling us.

Nowhere are the perils of technology more commonly overlooked than in the workplace. As I explain in a new book on the emerging science of workplace excellence, to perform at our best, we require distraction-free periods in which we can leverage our full, uninterrupted attention. For many of us, these conditions are surprisingly difficult to come by, in part because of the way we allow technology to interfere with our work.

Consider what happens when a new message arrives in your inbox. Unless you’ve changed the default settings on your email, you are treated to a pop-up message, the sound of a bell, or a counter that signals your growing number of unread messages. Each time this happens your brain is forced to make a series of decisions—”Check email or keep going?” “Respond now or later?”—that drain your mental energy.

These disruptions add up. Studies indicate that even brief interruptions exponentially increase our chances of making mistakes. This is because when our attention is diverted, we use up valuable cognitive resources reorienting ourselves, leaving less mental energy for completing our work. Research also suggests that frequent decision-making causes us to tire. The resulting fatigue makes it harder for us to distinguish tasks that are truly important from those that simply feel urgent.

Unfortunately for many of us, the habits that lead to these cognitive and social deficits are extremely hard to give up. So what can we do differently if we’re looking to make a change?

A good way to start is to make cognitive distractions less tempting. Avoid keeping your smartphone on your desk. Banish email alerts that shatter your concentration. Schedule distraction-free periods on your calendar when which you can fully attend to one task at a time.

Companies interested in achieving top performance would be wise to support employees in these endeavors. Like any attempt at organizational change, it is the behavior of those at the top that often yields the strongest influence.

Modeling the use of distraction-free periods and shunning smartphones during meetings can go a long way toward signaling to employees that focused work is valued, and that they need not feel tethered to their email.

We can only expect the role of technology in the workplace to expand. This is why it is vital that we acknowledge that not all innovations are equally effective at improving productivity, and that sometimes, the best way of enhancing our performance is to turn off the monitor, disconnect the telephone, and simply think.