Having email on our phones and tablets has, he reckons, increased our working day from 7.5 hours to 9.5 hours. But rather than improving our productivity, it has created more stress.
And stress leads to being less productive.
He gives the example of Charles Dickens, who wrote 15 books, 200 short stories and edited a weekly publication – and didn’t work in the afternoons. Instead he went for walks, of ten to twelve miles. “Nowadays we’d put him on performance review, to get his hours up”, commented Bruce.
Above all, sitting at your desk rarely leads to creativity or innovation. Bruce describes how Aaron Sorkin (writer of the West Wing and The Social Network) discovered he got his best ideas in the shower. So he had a shower installed in the office and now takes 8 to 10 showers a day!
Daisley’s book offers lots of good ideas to help us feel less overwhelmed:
Halve your meeting time:
Do them in less time or have less of them. Research indicates that meetings are responsible for just 3% of productivity.
Get people talking to each other:
“Ideas flow” results from talking to people, not from emails. That research finds one-to-ones are responsible for 38% of productivity: Chat more, meet less.
Suggest a tea break:
Initially try breaks two or three times a week and see what happens
Have a Monk Mode Morning:
At least two mornings a week, have no meetings and no emails until 11am. Instead get some “deep work” done. (I do this, normally sitting in a café, and it works.)
Go for a walking meeting:
Even if its only 7.5 minutes, it gets you out and stimulates your creativity.
Turn off notifications on your phone:
Avoid the interruptions and get more done, or give yourself a break. One group of researchers could not get participants to turn off notifications for a week, so they settled on just one day. Two years later, half the group still have notifications off.
Go to lunch:
Go and sit in a park, go for a walk, book an exercise class.
Laugh!
Find time for laughter in your meetings and offices.
Be a good boss:
First, ‘do no harm’. Empathise, understand, spend a week in their shoes.
For the other 21 ideas, all backed up by research, you will have to get the book, The Joy of Work. A recommended read.
Bruce started on this journey when staff turnover at Twitter UK reached 40%. He knew something needed to change. And the new approach certainly seems to work: Staff turnover is now down to 3%.
Hear more from Bruce at the 2021 Happy Workplaces Conference
Can your company become more productive and created more joy for its people? Join us at the 2021 Happy Workplaces Conference on 22nd July, held online via Zoom.
Other speakers at the conference include leadership gurus Tom Peters and David Marquet, as well as Nand Kishore Chaudhary of Jaipur Rugs, Helen Sanderson MBE of Wellbeing Teams and Sarah Pugh, CEO of Whizz-Kidz.
