Relaxing on Purpose

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I spent some time thinking about how we relax. Personally I find that there are two ways achieve "down time".  The first way is when I intentionally plan to take some time relaxing.  This occurs when my wife and I decide to watch a movie, go on a walk, take some vacation and visit family, or go to the lake.  The second way is when I have a list of things that I need to work on, but I really want to take a break.  In this situation, I intend to do work, but instead I find myself fiddling with some gadget, browsing the web, etc.

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How Much Time do You Actually Have

The September October issue of The Futurist has examines American’s use of time. According to the article the common perception that there just isn’t enough time, isn’t supported by the stats from a national study using time-diaries.  Basically the findings show that Americans average 35 hours per week of work time and 35 hours per week of free time.  This is much more time than what most Americans perceive.

One of the reasons people feel like they have no time is because of marketing.  There are many businesses who make money if you don’t feel like you have enough time.  Everything from self-help books to prepared foods to services depend on people who feel like they are too busy.

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The Role of Lighting

Lighting plays a much greater part in our productivity than most people realize.  There is quite a bit of research that supports the idea that productivity increases along with the amount of light in your workspace (at least up to a certain point).

However if the increases produce glare they are counter productive.  This is especially true for people working in front of a computer. The best lighting solution is one where the lighting is indirectly bounced off the ceiling.  This helps diffuse the light and cuts down on the amount of glare. Some of the best lamps I’ve used are the halogen floor lamps that shine their light all on the ceiling.

Another thing to consider in lighting your workplace is the spectrum of the light. Different light bulbs give off light in different parts of the spectrum.  Ideally you want light that is as close as possible to sun light.  In the past florescent bulbs have not been very good at this.  I once attended a university where the communications department had specifically put in incandescent bulbs in their classroom areas because they felt that the florescent light was distracting.  There are modern florescent bulbs that cover a very wide spectrum.  They are more expensive, but the cost is often more than offset by increased productivity.

A final area to consider is the impact of the seasons on your lighting.  Areas that are well light in the summer may be less than adequate during the darker winter months.  If you feel like you are hitting something of a winter slump the remedy may be as simple as turning on some additional lights.

Don’t try to Catch a Pizza Thief using Email

Like most technological advances, email can help productivity, but it
can also hurt it.  It takes intentional effort to reap the benefits of
advances without suffering from their negative side effects.  Easy communication is good when you have something that needs to be communicated.  Easy communication is bad when it means you are saying things that just waste everyone’s time.

I ran across an article titled "Efficiency Experts" that talked about how Joe Phelps (CEO of the Phelps Group Inc.) explained proper use of email to his staff using a recent example of an employee who had used email to try to track down who stole his piece of pizza.

With technology revolutionizing office
communications, Phelps stresses the need to tap the right tool for the
right task. "There are three ways to communicate now within our
organization: E-mail, voice mail, and face mail," he explains. "Each
one has a different bandwidth. When you walk into my workstation,
interrupt me, and give me a little schedule change, you’ve used the
wrong medium. E-mail me with that. You don’t need a lot of bandwidth.
On the other hand, if you try to handle an emotionally charged subject
with E-mail, you’re using the wrong medium, too."

But that’s not to say that just because a
matter is small, it is necessarily fodder for E-mail. Phelps recently
explained this to his staff, using a case of purloined pizza to
illustrate the point.

The Phelps Group is small enough that anyone
can push a button and send an E-mail to everyone. One employee recently
did just that, asking, "Who took my slice of pizza?" from the group
refrigerator. Armed with a perfect teaching tool, Phelps ran through a
bit of math at a company wide meeting. Assume–for mathematical
simplicity–a billing rate of $60 an hour, or a buck a minute. Roughly
50 employees. Say it took each a half minute to open the "pizza
message," read it, and put it in the trash. Twenty-five minutes at a
dollar a minute–$25 to try to finger the pizza thief. Says Phelps:
"Since we all share 40 percent of the profits, everyone quickly grasped
what general E-mail distribution means."

(Inc Magazine 1997 Vol. 19 Issue 13, p38,)

Investing in Excercise

There has been a long running belief that your body never produces new brain cells.  This has been disproved.  The brain does create new brain cells.  There was a study done recently with mice to see how exercise impacted memory.  The research was conducted by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

    Gage and his colleagues allowed a group of old mice and a group of young mice to exercise on a running wheel as much as they wanted. The mice ran about 2 miles every day. The researchers also kept a third group of older mice that didn’t exercise. After a month of the regular exercise, the team subjected the mice to a memory test.

    The researchers taught the mice to find a platform submerged in a pool of water. After the mice had learned the location of the platform, they had to find it even when it was hidden in cloudy water.

    The Salk team found that the old mice that had worked out on the wheel performed as well as the young mice: The elderly mice remembered the location of the platform and swam quickly to the spot without much trouble.

    In contrast, the older mice that didn’t get the daily workouts flunked: These mice, much like older people who are starting to show declines in memory, had trouble remembering the location of the platform. In most cases, the mice swam aimlessly in the pool and never found the platform or found it by chance, Gage says.

    (from USA Today Sept 21, 2005)

If excercise has the same impact on humans it would suggest that you can increase the quantity of new brain cells in your brain in a way that will improve your memory.  Excercise has many other benefits as well.  It can help relieve stress, extend your life span, increase your ability to concentrate, and help you rest better.

Most people say that they don’t exercise because they don’t have time.  If exercise makes one more effective, it is possible that they don’t have time because they don’t exercise.  Success comes from deliberately investing in yourself.  Excercise is one of those investments where the benefits in terms of making you productive are greater than the cost in time.

The Zone

There are two things that will impact how much you get done.  First there is the amount of time you spend.  Obviously you can get more done in 20 minutes than in 2.  The second is how focused you are.  This factor is referred to as being in "the zone". 

When it comes to your personal productivity the seconds factor is usually more important than the first.  How many times have you spent 30 minutes working on a task that you didn’t really want to do and made very little progress, but when you truly decide you want to complete that task it only takes 15 minutes? This a common occurrence for most people. Often the biggest differentiator between highly productive and less productive people is their ability to concentrate and focus on the task at hand.

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Should he drop out of college?

In a recent conversation, I had a friend explain how he was trying to talk someone out of going to college. The young man he was referring to was going to a community college to appease his mother who wanted him to go to a university. He was talented at computer repair and my friend thought he should drop out and focus on acquiring more computer troubleshooting skills.

I disagree with my friends assessment, but it made me wonder why I value education so much. Surely there is something to be said for someone who enters the workforce and learns everything then need to know through on the job experience. Is my belief that getting a degree is better rational or is it just because that is the path I took?

According to this article the actual wage for people without a college education dropped by 13% over the past 23 years while the actual wage of college educated individuals grew by 20%. Now I’m sure that there are people who didn’t go to college who are making millions, just like there are people who went to college who are flipping hamburgers. However, I for one would rather be in the group that does better statistically.

If the next 23 years are like the past, following my friends advice will result in an average drop in income of 13%. I hope the student in question listens to his mother.

Don’t Repeat Yourself

In software engineering there is a principle known as DRY — Don’t Repeat Yourself.  The idea is this: If you are going to solve a problem, do it only once.  Don’t solve the same problem again and again in different parts of your code.  In software this means that you take your solutions to these common problems and code them in a way so they can be used from where ever necessary.

The DRY principle can also apply to your personal work habits as well.  Over the course of a week, a good portion of our time can be taken up by unnecessary tasks or overly complicated processes.  Proactively looking for areas where we are "repeating" ourselves can unearth these areas where we can improve.

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Hawthorne Effect

The Hawthorne effect refers to some studies that were done on how training impacts employees productivity at work (edit: this statement is a little misleading, please see the note at the bottom of the article). The studies found that sending someone to training produces employees that work harder. The funny part about it, is you still get the productivity increase even if the training doesn’t teach them how to be better at their jobs. Sending someone to training helps them feel like they are important, like the company is investing in them and they are valuable. Because of this they work harder.

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