New
York Times article on the benefits of relaxation
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
practicedramatically 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, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
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 have studied elite performers,
including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these
fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in
uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the
morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and
a half hours in any given day.
“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.”
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.”
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