Relax!
You’ll Be More Productive
By
TONY SCHWARTZ
Published:
February 9, 2013
New
York Times
THINK
for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your
e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run
that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch?
Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible
to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d
like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?
More
and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and
maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get
more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of
multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime
workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the
office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job
performance and, of course, health.
“More,
bigger, faster.” This, the ethos of the market economies since the Industrial
Revolution, is grounded in a mythical and misguided assumption — that our
resources are infinite.
Time
is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s
more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re
running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to
retain some semblance of a life outside work.
Although
many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably
increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at
play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time,
energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is
counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing
work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time
wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks
on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their
vacations.
In
most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most
continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.
Spending
more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep
takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees,
published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as
less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job
burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs
American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.
The
Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball
players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically
improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9
percent.
Daytime
naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic
controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes —
they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.
Longer
naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a
sleep researcher at the University of California , Riverside
MORE
vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst &
Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional
10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from
supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent
vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm.
As
athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the
greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us
experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. This may
explain why a recent survey by Harris Interactive found that Americans left an
average of 9.2 vacation days unused in 2012 — up from 6.2 days in 2011.
The
importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t
designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between
spending and recovering energy.
In
the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered
that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep
and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or
BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle
recapitulates itself during our waking lives.
The
difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness
progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our
bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals
and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency
reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
Working
in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing
productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University
“To
maximize gains from long-term practice,” Dr. Ericsson concluded, “individuals
must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can
completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”
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I’ve
systematically built these principles into the way I write. For my first three
books, I sat at my desk for up 10 hours a day. Each of the books took me at
least a year to write. For my two most recent books, I wrote in three
uninterrupted 90-minute sessions — beginning first thing in the morning, when
my energy was highest — and took a break after each one.
Along
the way, I learned that it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters
most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly
and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I
felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and
emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best
ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed
both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding
work.
The
power of renewal was so compelling to me that I’ve created a business around it
that helps a range of companies including Google, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain
Coffee, the Los Angeles Police Department, Cleveland Clinic and Genentech.
Our
own offices are a laboratory for the principles we teach. Renewal is central to
how we work. We dedicated space to a “renewal” room in which employees can nap,
meditate or relax. We have a spacious lounge where employees hang out together
and snack on healthy foods we provide. We encourage workers to take renewal
breaks throughout the day, and to leave the office for lunch, which we often do
together. We allow people to work from home several days a week, in part so
they can avoid debilitating rush-hour commutes. Our workdays end at 6 p.m. and
we don’t expect anyone to answer e-mail in the evenings or on the weekends.
Employees receive four weeks of vacation from their first year.
Our
basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more
important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they
work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in
less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the
company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing,
we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.
(Tony
Schwartz is the chief executive officer of The Energy Project and the author,
most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything.”)
