Why We Don’t Work at Work -And How We Can Do Better

Have you ever had this experience? You are busy at work all day, and by closing time you’re wrung out and ready to head home, but you realize that – despite all the energy you put out – you didn’t actually get much of anything done.

It happens to me all the time, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. It makes me mad. I like my job, but I hate days when I go home feeling like I just blew nine hours I could have been spending with my kids, and I didn’t even get any good work done.

So I was thrilled when I stumbled on Jason Fried’s talk at TED. Fried is the cofounder of 37signals, and he’s spent years thinking about why it is that we don’t get work done when we are actually at work.

Fried says work is like sleep. When you sleep, you actually progress through three different stages -- and it’s the last stage of really deep sleep when all of the healing and recovery happens that gives you energy for the next day. If your sleep is interrupted before you get to that last stage, then you have to start all over from the beginning. People with infants will tell you that short bursts of sleep here and there, even if it adds up to 6 or 7 hours, wiare not refreshing.

Work is the same way. We progress through stages of focus, and it’s only in that last deep stage when you are in the “flow” that you get your best work done. If you get interrupted, you have to start over from the beginning.

Which makes the modern office pretty much the worst place ever to get work done. Between people wanting to chat, your boss checking in on you, and the endless meetings, solid blocks of uninterrupted time to get work done are few and far between.

Since watching Jason's talk, I stated paying attention to how many times people wander into my office while I’m in the middle of trying to get something done. It happens a lot. And half the time it doesn’t even have anything to do with work. A ten minute talk about your weekend here, fifteen minutes to talk about something cute your kids did there, and before I know it the time I had staked out to get something done has evaporated.

Fried has some pretty out there suggestions to fix the problem – my favorite one is that every Thursday afternoon no one is allowed to talk to anyone else.

I took a simpler approach: I close my door. I have to say, it’s awesome. Sure, sometimes people will knock, but I can choose to answer, or to keep working. It has been so satisfying to go home everyday knowing I produced something, that I find myself closing the door more and more.

If you’re like me, and you get pleasure and a sense of self worth from actually making stuff, I urge you to try the door. If you don’t have a door, then leave. Go to a coffee shop, put your ear buds in, and just focus for 90 minutes. It is a fantastic feeling.

Now if I can just get rid of those dang meetings.

Hope this finds you well,

Jacob Braude

VP, Strategic Planner

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Why We Care About Others

The Harvard Business School recently released the results from a new study on generosity (HT @ryandrumwright). As they put it in their press release:

“This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). Analyzing survey data from 136 countries, we show that prosocial spending is consistently associated with greater happiness.”

In other words, humans are wired to feel happy when we help others.

It’s a bit of a foreign idea to old-school economic thought, which has at its core the assumption that everything we do is motivated by rational self interest. Since the meltdown of the markets and the emergence of behavioral economics (if you haven’t read it yet, be sure to check out Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely), we have all begun to clue in to the fact that a good number of the things people do are not the result of logical thought, but instead are the result of a messy collision of different evolutionary impulses that we have amassed over the millions of years.

As Robert Sapolsky puts it in a recent column in the NY Times, “evolution is a tinkerer, not an inventor.” We are not the result of a quantum biological leap that is unique in the animal kingdom. Rather, the faculties that make us human have been built on the foundation of other capabilities. So for instance, the part of your brain that detects that a piece of food is disgusting is also the part that activates when you read about some morally disgusting act (like the banks just rubber-stamping foreclosures).

In one study Dr. Sapolsky talks about in his column, “Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes.”

The scientist Dan Batson applies this thinking to generosity and empathy. In a recent column he wrote for On The Human, he discusses the evidence for the theory that our empathy for others is just an offshoot of the much older evolutionary quality of caring for our children. The same part of our brain that rewards us for nurturing our kids (even when all we want is for them to be quiet and leave us alone – don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about), is the part that rewards us for being kind, generous and helpful to strangers.

The positive emotions we get from generosity are a human universal, and it is part of what has enabled us to succeed as a species. As companies and marketers, we often become so locked in the transactional nature of our business (I’ll give you this coupon or service, but first you have to buy my product), that this very powerful truth seems completely foreign and unworkable. We should take heed of companies like Toms Shoes and campaigns like the Pepsi Refresh Project.

Generosity at a corporate or brand level requires a leap of faith, but there are big rewards for the teams who are able to make the jump.

Hope this finds you well,

Jacob Braude

VP, Strategic Planner

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Doctors of the Future?

I’ve been following the very active twitter stream of Dr. Victor Montori, who heads up the SPARC innovations and design lab at the Mayo clinic (HT @ryandrumwright). At Mayo he leads a team working to improve patient care through design (my words – not theirs).

Their work is centered on a philosophy that may well change the way medicine has been practiced for the last several hundred years.

Until recently, doctors have focused on making measurable improvements in the illness they are treating. If you have multiple sclerosis, your neurologist measures her success by her ability to control the spread of lesions that can be seen when they scan your brain. If you have diabetes, your endocrinologist does her best to ensure that your A1C levels stay within a certain level.

This focus on measurable outcomes has created a revolution in life expectancy. In the short time between 1900 and 1985, life expectancy went from 30 years to 62 years – an astronomical jump.

But our progress has slowed, and increasingly doctors find themselves frustrated by their inability to make measurable improvements in the diseases they treat. The #1 culprit in this trend is people -- millions of whom ignore their doctors’ orders. We don’t take medication we've been prescribed, eat foods we shouldn't, and generally do anything and everything to frustrate our doctors’ desire for us to get better.

We here at Wellness see this dynamic every day. That’s why Dr. Montori’s work is so important and fascinating.

He is one of a growing number of voices from the medical community who are advocating for a wholehearted reexamination of priorities. By crowning measurable improvement as the central tenet of modern medicine, we have created an antagonistic relationship between doctors who want to make the human body work better and patients whose priorities are often more about living well in the time that they have.

Yes, someone living with diabetes would have better blood sugar control if they adhered to a strict diet and exercise regimen. But for many people, this would be a worse fate than suffering from the symptoms of uncontrolled diabetes.

At the heart of everything is a very personal decision about what makes life worth living.

Dr. Montori, and those like him, suggest that we should put this personal decision at the heart of every medical interaction. -- and that doctors learn to first understand what is important to their patient, and then design a care plan around those priorities.

He calls it Minimally Disruptive Medicine. I call it the wave of the future.

If you’d like to read a moving personal narrative from a physician struggling with this issue in his personal practice, check out this piece in the LA Times by Steve Dudley.

Hope this finds you well,

Jacob Braude

VP, Strategic Planner

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Good Ideas Need a Little Help From Their Friends

I recently came across this UPS-guy-on-steroids promotional video for a new book by Steven Johnson titled “Where Good Ideas Come From.” Aside from the super engaging way it tells the story, I think the basic premise is fascinating and familiar.

Mr. Johnson’s theory is that big ideas don’t leap from the minds of solitary geniuses. They actually start as hunches that evolve slowly, over time, as a result of colliding with the hunches of other people who are thinking about the same area. As examples, he talks about how the coffee houses during the Age of Enlightenment served as an environment for colliding ideas, which is why we had such a rich explosion of creativity during that period.

The natural leap to today – and the one he makes – is that the proliferation of social technologies is opening the door for another Enlightenment-type explosion of creativity. We are connected with more people more regularly than anyone thought possible, which should set the stage for some fast and furious colliding of hunches.

The great thing about collaboration is that any of us in any setting working on any problem can do it. We here at Wellness have been moving more and more towards collaborative systems for doing our work. Different functional groups, working together hand-in-hand with our customers, is the ideal environment for some great colliding to generate better ideas than any one of us could have thought up on our own.

One important caveat: this does not mean that good ideas come out of group sessions. We find that often these ideas can occur in solitary settings: in the shower, walking the dog, nodding off to sleep. Although these ideas often emerge when we’re alone, if you trace the genealogy of the idea, you will find the genetic material of many other peoples’ ideas built in.

Hope this finds you well,

Jacob Braude

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Learning How To Learn

We have a new junior planner here at SSW, and one of the perks of having young minds around is that their enthusiasm propels them to discover things we more mature folks might not.

Last week, one of the things he discovered was this article in the New York Times on what recent research has taught us about how people learn – one of our favorite topics here at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness.

Wellness is quite often difficult. For most of us – and our audiences – it includes making some fairly ambitious long-term changes to their behavior. A lot goes into behavior change, but one key ingredient is learning and mastering new information.

Thus I was fascinated by some of the “learning myths” the Times article debunked. Here is my quick-and-dirty synopsis of their three rules for better learning:

1. Say good bye to your favorite study spot. Researchers have discovered that people retain new information better if they vary up the places where they consume this info. They theorize that we store new information by its relation to other data in our brains. When you are learning, your brain is also consuming the sensory data from the environment around you. So, if you change up where you are learning, your brain has more info associated with what you learn, and thus you retain it better.

2. One thing at a time – not so much. Related information gets remembered better than like information. Researchers have demonstrated that students who studied mixed sets of four types of equations retained the whole lesson much better than other students who studied one type of equation at a time.

3. Testing is good! In another experiment, researchers showed that being immediately tested on material you just learned helps you retain that information long term. The effort your brain exerts for the test helps cement the new information into your neurons.

Learning is equal parts important and difficult. It’s comforting that – through the magic of science and research – we can still get better at it.

Hope this finds you well.

Jacob Braude
VP, Planner

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You Are What You Eat? Uh-Oh.

This morning was a regular morning. Some catching up on office gossip. Checking in on some of my favorite college basketball discussion forums. Reading through last night’s work emails.

And then I made the mistake of opening my Gmail. The first note was from my wife, with a link to this article about the foods farmers will sell you, but won’t eat themselves. The premise of the article is that you never know what food you’ve been eating every week for years will suddenly be discovered to cause some horrible disease.

It’s even worse when you find out that the food is something you feed your kids every week. Which is what happened to me this morning.

Thanks to this article I will now be soaking beans from a bag, not popping open a can. Tomatoes will have to come from a glass jar – if I can even find them distributed this way. My apples and my potatoes will be organic or they won’t be in my fridge.

And forget about microwave popcorn. That’s right. Microwave popcorn is out.

Wellness has a great deal to do with making choices. Choices that will help you be physically healthy and mentally well. But these days, as we learn more and more about the unintended consequences of industrialized food, I’m finding that some of my most consequential choices are the ones I didn’t even know I was making. Which is really stressful. And stress isn’t good either.

So today I’m once again reminding myself – as every parent must do pretty much every day of their life – that there’s only so much I can do. And the rest will just have to work itself out. It’s not an easy thing to get used to, but accepting that there’s very little I can actually control has been a big part of my personal wellness.

I am going to miss microwave popcorn. At least until 2015.

Hope this finds you well.

Jacob Braude

VP, Strategic Planner

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Slow Down or Speed Up? Wellness Is About Having the Choice

Back in December, Nick Sternberg posted a piece on the Organic blog about Slow Media and the larger Slow Movement. For those of you who haven’t heard about Slow Media, I would sum it up as deliberately opting out of the regular use of the technologies that consume much of our time. Cell phones, social media, e-mail, DVR all conspire to create an environment in which we are on all of the time, bombarded constantly by information and at the same time spending less and less time connecting face-to-face or in-depth.

If you’re like me, you’re under the basic assumption that this ongoing transformation is largely out of your control. Technology advances at an ever-faster pace, and you really can’t do anything but roll with it. Relationships are becoming byte-sized and hyper-speed.

Slow Media challenges this assumption. Slow Media opts out. Slow media chooses hand-written letters over e-mail, vinyl over CDs, and face time over Twitter and Facebook.

Personally, there are parts of this ideology that I find appealing, especially when you consider recent evidence about less stress being tied to longevity. However, I’m also thrilled by the immediacy of information that results from the technologies condemned by Slow Media. I love being able to read what hundreds of parents have to say about their experiences with a drug my son was just prescribed. I love that I can get work done (like writing this blog entry) in my pajamas at home. I love that the brilliant speakers at the TED conferences are free to me any time I want them.

In the end, everyone has to find their own balance. But as Nick’s post reminded me, sometimes we lose sight of the fact that finding that balance is up to us. That even the most -- seemingly -- inevitable parts of our lives can be changed if that’s what we decide we need to do.

Sometimes the wellness choices we need to make are choices we didn’t even know we had.

Jacob Braude

VP, Planner

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Wellness Is ... Being Responsible

When we think about Wellness, we often think about it in terms of the individual. Things like diet, stress, finances and exercise come to mind. But as I’ve posted before, Wellness is social, and how we impact our community is a big part of our personal Wellness.

Context Marketing recently released the results of a series of 3 surveys they conducted with consumers over a nine month period. The focus of the surveys was to find out if the way a company interacted with the world had any effect on whether consumers bought from that company or not.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last five years, I think you can guess that the answer was a resounding “yes.”

More and more these days, people are letting their dollars do the talking. They don’t just want a great product or a great service, they want to support a company that demonstrates through responsible action that it understands it is part of a community.

And we've used this space before to talk about Responsibility as one of the three big themes for Wellness this year.

How important is it to today’s consumer that a company gives back to the community?

“Overall, 70% of respondents in our survey reported that whether a brand or company behaves ethically influences their decision to purchase. Nearly half (48%) said they have stopped purchasing a brand when they saw the company acting in a socially irresponsible or unethical way.”

In the same vein, Ad Age just published an article detailing the way in which a number of companies are making responsibility a core part of their brand. From the Whole Foods “Take Back Our Plates” campaign to the use of reusable shopping bags in Walmart’s advertising, everyone is jumping on the responsibility bandwagon.

But as the guardians of our clients’ brands, we also have to sit up and pay attention. "Responsibilty" is approaching – or maybe already achieving – buzz status. At some point in the near future so many brands will get into the game that responsibility will become just one more level of noise people learn to tune out.

Which means that, like everything else we do, how you choose to demonstrate responsibility must be based in a deep understanding of what your customers care about.

So the next time you’re in a meeting and someone throws out the idea of doing something “responsible,” be responsible to them and their business and tell them it’s a great idea (because it is) but only if you do it right.

Jacob Braude

VP, Strategic Planner

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