The Joy of Work summary

If you’re feeling stuck with a creative task, especially one with a quickly approaching deadline, you may not feel like stepping away from your work to go for a stroll. Yet, as J.K. Rowling, author of the world-famous Harry Potter books says, “There’s nothing like a night-time stroll to give you ideas.”

As it turns out, Rowling’s claim about the creative benefits of going for a walk are supported by science.

It’s common to feel like you’re in a rush or under pressure to get things done, but did you know that having a persistent level of stress can affect your behavior? 

Just think of those times when you’ve been waiting for the elevator and feel the need to keep pressing the call button again and again, even though you know it won’t make the elevator arrive any faster. This is a typical example of what’s known as hurry anxiety.

In a 2013 interview, British tennis champion Andy Murray explained just how exhausting a tennis match can be. As he explained it, physical exhaustion is only part of it. A tennis match also results in a great deal of mental exhaustion, due to having to make so many split-second tactical decisions.

As Murray’s comments suggest, we are only capable of making so many decisions before we’re left feeling exhausted, which is why there’s a limit to how much work we can do before our productivity begins to suffer. Ultimately, the more decisions we’re asked to make, the more exhausted we become and the more we’ll gravitate toward undemanding tasks. 

Have you ever dreamed of having an all-seeing eye and monitoring every worker in your company to see how they’re really spending their time? If the answer is yes, then your dream may already be a reality thanks to the new technology behind sociometric badges.

Developed by Alex Pentland, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sociometric badges combine traditional ID badges with smartphone technology, and make it possible to monitor workplace dynamics. Now, all the data behind an employee’s movements and interactions can be recorded and analyzed to reveal valuable information about individual behavior, such as how much time an employee spends in face-to-face conversations, as well as group behavior.

Finding the right data to monitor productivity can vary from job to job. But at a call center, the information is pretty straightforward: there, we can easily see the number of calls being made and the success rate of those calls. And because these numbers are so apparent, employees at call centers feel a lot of pressure to spend more time making more calls to boost those numbers.

However, this approach isn’t very effective. It may sound counterintuitive, but a better way to boost productivity in a call center is to give people more social breaks.

There’s one group of people who shouldn’t get left out when it comes to the productive benefit of social interaction at the workplace, and that’s the employees who are working remotely. While working from home may make it easier to enter Monk Mode and block out distractions, it doesn’t help when it comes to taking social breaks.

While they didn’t announce their reason, the lack of communication between colleagues is likely why Yahoo recently launched a policy that forbade remote work. Yahoo and other companies know that, when employees spend too much time away from company headquarters, it can hurt productivity.

There’s a good chance you laughed a lot more as a child than you do now. Children can be such constant gigglers that they even get on the nerves of more serious adults. But the fact of the matter is, every adult could benefit from more laughter in their lives.

As we’ve come to find out, laughing is an effective and valuable way of coping with life’s challenges – even if you’re experiencing the stresses of war.