If you’re happy and you know it.....

So what did you get up to this weekend? If you went to a concert and go every now and again, you may feel better about life. A study from researchers at Victoria’s Deakin University surveyed 1,000 Australians and found that those who attended any sort of communal musical experience, be that a festival or just a night out dancing reported higher levels of satisfaction with their lives.

This is probably no surprise. Most cultures have a tradition of people meeting up and belting out a few tunes, from the Cheile House in Ireland, to Jamming Sessions in more modern times, to singing at Sunday Service, to rhythmic rituals in ancient or indigenous cultures. Shared communal musical experiences have always been with us and according to Deakin University for good reason - our emotional well-being.

However, in recent times, musical experience has become much more personalized. We have our own playlists on Spotify, shuffle our MP3 collections or stream our favorite artists on YouTube. There is less of a shared musical experience and more of a niche  individual one. That is not all bad, it reflects our choice and preferences.

Many organisations which look at staff well-being have devised appreciation days, team building events and other initiatives to motivate and create a buzz. There has been a move away from the once common company or department night out.

You are now more likely to lift a work colleague over a wall on a team building day than you are to show them a near perfect Moon Walk routine on the dance floor. According to the people at Deakin University, we may need to swing the pendulum back a little and have a few more nights out, be that to concerts or just a night on the tiles, and do so regularly.

If for all kinds of logistical reasons, company nights out are hard to organise, create a scheme where your department regularly has subsidized concert tickets or allow staff to leave early / come in late to make attending events feasible. This could work both ways, staff get a perk and organisations get a workforce that is more satisfied with life.

As artists find it harder to get revenues from singles or album sales (because of the aforementioned Spotify), more and more are now touring. There has never been a better time for live music. Encourage people to leave the playlists at home, pack their dancing shoes or air guitar and enjoy their music.

Figuring out Feelings

Understanding well-being and how we feel is very much in our consciousness. Organisations now see staff well-being and personal happiness as key components of a sustainable way of working and a big influence on staff retention. At a societal level we are concerned about how stressed and unhappy our youth are, how lonely our elderly might be and the increasing suicide rates in many developed countries. If we had a way of measuring and trending how people feel, that may go a long way in designing early intervention programs and reviewing the efficacy of the various initiatives deployed by organisations and society itself.     

I read something which got me thinking a little more about this. Researchers at the University of Manchester and Indiana University have put some science behind this idea of  ‘sentiment tracking’.

They looked at how global emotion and mood, as measured via something like Twitter, could predict stock market activity. They investigated whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large scale Twitter feeds, correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time. They analyzed the text content of daily Twitter feeds by two mood tracking tools, OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS)

Their results indicated that the accuracy of DJIA predictions can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions. If you want to predict closing prices on the Dow Jones, have an eye on the Twitter feed.

This raises some interesting questions about how we look at social media data or activity. It may justify a more qualitative approach. When it comes to social media marketing, we may need to look at how our followers feel, rather than just counting them.

While causation and correlation could be difficult to nail down, there is perhaps something in this for the Data Scientists among us. There is a plethora of online content generated by users across all forms of social media, text, images, video. 

Parsing online content and cross referencing this with behavior may create some predictive tools or highlight some change in public mood. Looking at which emoticons are used and how frequently may be one place to start. Too many ASAPs in emails might signal someone under a little stress, lots of work emails sent at night or weekends could be from someone on the road to burnout. 

The take away is that with a focus on the Internet of Things, we could be relying on devices to tell us more about the world and how we live our lives. However a lot of this information could already be out there, we just have to look for it.  

Bad at saying 'No'? That's a probem

I read a good article by Peter Bregman about how to say 'No'.

This is a very under-rated skill to have. Saying 'No' is vital to keeping work and customer expectations at manageable levels.Failing to say ‘No’ when we instinctively know that we may not be able to deliver is a bad move that can come back to bite us over and over. What ensues is usually a lengthy and awkward process of realigning customer expectations and eventually telling them ‘No’. In the meantime, you probably have damaged customer relationships, frustrated staff and wasted time figuring out how to limit the damage.

This happens quite a bit in software start-ups that code their own product. Feature creep can set in and it’s easy to say ‘Yes’ to an important client when they inevitably ask for a function or change request. At start-up phase pretty much any client is an important client.However, you will find yourself making promises you can’t keep, burning the candle at both ends (working late / weekends) to come good on commitments when you should have said ‘No’. That leads to endless firefighting where you neglect the basics of making sure your strategic business systems are running properly (sales pipeline, support documentation, credit control, cost benefit analysis of activity).

Key staff will get demotivated at constantly working under pressure or jumping from one ‘priority’ to another and probably leave (if you have more than three priorities, you don't have any). You will more than likely rehire in a hurry because you need someone straight away. Because you have taken your eye off the ball on the fundamentals of the business you may neglect your sales process, prospect call backs etc, so the clients that made the initial request now become even more important (as other sales haven't grown as planned ). It then gets even harder to say 'No' to their next change request. On and on it goes.

If you are a start-up company in firefighting mode or constantly find yourself avoiding calls from clients, end up working weekends, late at night, ask yourself how often you have said ‘No’ to a request in the last week. Chances are it’s not very often. There is nothing wrong with being busy and firefighting, just so long as it’s for a strategic or commercially sound reason. If it’s purely because you could not say ‘No’, then it’s a problem. 

As someone once said, 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions', failing to say 'No' might be just laying another stone on that road for your projects or organisation. 

You are your Habits

Aristotle once said "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit". If you want to know why your life is where it is today, look at your past habits. Better still, if you want to know where your life will be ten years from now, look at your current habits. Our levels of exercise, diet, work routines and pretty much everything else we do on a daily basis decide much of our future success and current choices.

A 2006 study by Duke University found that up to 40 percent of what we do every day is driven by habit rather than deliberate decisions. The autopilot kicks in as soon as we get out of bed and includes how we dress, what we do for lunch, how we greet the family when we get home from work, how much time we spend relaxing, playing or chatting. Eventually bed time routine takes over and the day is done.

This raises a simple point. If you want to change your life, (be that career, fitness levels or work life balance) your habits should be first port of call. There is no shortage of self-help books that will tell you how to quit a habit, start a habit, what sort of habits exceptional people have. It is all very interesting stuff, but in reality how difficult is it to create a new habit or better still, ditch a bad one?

Habit formation research from University College London suggests that there is no one standard length of time required for a habit to form. It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days. It will come as no great surprise that this period of time depends on how hard the new activity is and how much effort and commitment is required. Getting your 5 a day of fruit and veg might be a little easier and quicker than learning Chinese for half an hour every evening.

The research does suggest however that, for most new tasks the 66-day mark is when repetition becomes automatic and the habit takes root. These researchers did note that if you’re going to miss a day from your new found daily routine, skip a day that is further along in the 66-day period, since the pay back for habit formation counts more in the early days.

Another tip in learning a new habit is not to go for the complete personal makeover. Especially coming up to New Year it’s tempting to go for it all in one fell swoop. You start changing your exercise, diet, how you work etc. That is a lot of new behaviour to adhere to, especially in the critical first 2 months. Changing one habit can be difficult enough and is no mean feat so don’t spread yourself too thin and try changing everything at the same time.

CharlesDuhigg, has written an interesting book on habits, “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.” Duhigg uses some good examples to explain how habits work. He looks at N.F.L. coach Tony Dungy, who, with lots and lots of practice, taught his players a small number of important moves they could perform without thinking, particularly at crucial moments in a game. When the players were exhausted, autopilot kicks in and everyone does their job. You don’t have to be an NFL line-backer to appreciate this. Pretty much the same thing happens when we get home after a night out, maybe feeling a bit groggy, take off our shoes and socks and barely know we did it.

As well as personal habits, we also have shared social habits. Some of these have been around for generations, such as shaking hands when we meet. Others are continually changing. We have seen this in the recent past where wearing a seat belt in the back seat of the car is now a well ingrained social habit; it was a very different story in the 1980s. These habits are changed by policy makers altering the norms in our society. This is the same principle behind de-normalising smoking via bans in bars, the work place and some public areas. The idea is to make not smoking the default social norm and hope that becomes our shared habit or custom.

Having habits is ultimately a good thing. They allow us to do routine tasks without wasting mental energy or having to make the same decisions over and over every day. Habits also allow us to operate within acceptable social norms so we can function as a society. Ultimately we humans are creatures of habit and it’s a case of trying to have more good habits than bad habits and being aware of how to change the habits we don’t want. List your daily habits and see which ones you want to keep. Bet you have more habits than you realise.

The Bigger they are, the harder they fall

We have all heard the cliché ‘The Bigger they are, the harder they fall’. Some recent research backs this up. Jennifer Marr and Stefan Thau in the Academy of Management Journal looked at how high status individuals coped with drops in performance.

Marr and Thau suggest that the people with the bigger reputations find it more difficult to work through and deal with a an episode of poor performance. Part of their research involved a field study of professional baseball players. They found that although low-status players’ performance quality was unaffected by status loss, the quality of high-status players’ performance declined significantly after losing status. Guys who were not very well regarded were not that bothered about a poor performance but the marquee players took it much worse. If you are a golfer, think Tiger Woods or Padraig Harrington.

In a way this makes complete sense. Individuals who have the pressure of being the best in their field have more much more to lose when their form dips. Their professional ranking, commercial value, earning potential etc make the stakes pretty high compared to the low achievers who may have very little to lose from a bad day out.

However, there is more than professional ranking and commercial opportunities at play here. High status individuals also have more of their own identity mixed in with their achievements. Being World No.1 or a top professional athlete is part of their identity as a person. When this is threatened or removed then who they are in the eyes of the public and how they see their own identity is potentially damaged.

This can also have lessons for the work place. If a sales person is hitting record targets and is employee of the year one year but then runs into a dry spell the next year, their performance can really dip and fall off a cliff. Like the baseball players or golfers, they come under professional and personal pressures that threaten both their livelihood and identity.

It is not all bad news. Marr and Thau found that self-affirmation restored the quality of high-status individuals’ performance after a dip. Getting them to remember that they still have the skills, ability and track record to be successful makes a difference. To use another sporting cliché ‘You don’t become a bad player over night’.

So keep an eye on your star performers and if you see a dip, remind them that they still have it, they are still good at what they do and their worth as professionals or as individuals is not damaged. The dip will hopefully only be a glitch and your star performer will quickly get their ‘A Game’ back on track. 

The Future is more valuable than the Past

We care more about the future than about the past. Several studies have shown that we value events in the future more than we value equivalent events in the past.

The nineteenth century American author Herman Melville (he of Moby Dick fame) is often quoted on this – “The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation.”

As one study puts it, the person who buys a cookie and eats it right away may get X units of pleasure from it, but the person who saves the cookie until later gets X units of pleasure when it is eventually eaten plus all the additional pleasure of looking forward to the event. Looking forward to stuff increases the enjoyment we get from it and hence we value it more.

In research by Caruso and colleagues they found that students wanted more money for a mundane job they would do in the future than for one they had already done in the past, and mock-jurors awarded more money to an accident victim who was going to suffer for a year than who had already suffered for a year.

The results consistently show that once something has happened, we value it less than we did in the lead up to an event. This has a few practical implications for how we pay for services and compensate clients or employees.

If you work in the legal profession, it may be wise to get compensation agreed for your client before they recover from their injuries. If you are drafting a service level agreement with a supplier you would be better off having any punitive reimbursement amounts agreed in advance rather than calculated afterwards. If you are trying to get a bonus organised, get it agreed before you achieve your targets rather than after, don’t go into your boss looking for a rise because you have had a good year. Once it’s in the past your boss won’t value it as much as he might have done six months earlier.

There is also another point to note here. If we plan stuff in the future and take the time to think about it or actively anticipate it, we will feel better. A supporting study by Bryant has found that people who devote time to anticipating enjoyable experiences report being happier in general. Bonuses and compensation aside, it pays to savour. 

Surface Acting, a silent meeting killer

Ever been in a meeting and felt one way but acted another? Most of us have. This behaviour is also quite common in the medical profession when a doctor fakes empathic behaviours toward a patient. They act concerned because that is expected, deep down they might be more worried about their waiting list or getting home on time.

Psychologists call this ‘surface acting’. I recently read an interesting BPS article on how surface acting affects meetings and employee burn out.

It referenced a study in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology which focused on how masking our real feelings could negatively affect our contribution to meetings and our long term well-being.

The central idea is that surface acting requires significant self-control and this puts a strain on our mental resources. This can prove distracting and restrict the attention we give to what is really going on in the meeting.

The study collected online data from 178 participants from a variety of roles with a range of meeting regularity (from just over 2 per week to less than once per week). Participants rated items like 'I tend to fake a good mood when interacting with others in the meeting’ to produce a surface acting score. This score was negatively associated with their rating of typical meeting effectiveness, in terms of networking, achieving work goals, or learning useful information. The more they surface acted, the less effective they found the meeting.

It gets worse, the long term consequences of surface acting were also measured. Participants who indicated higher surface acting felt emotionally exhausted and were prone to burnout. Acting one way and feeling another was emotionally draining, both in the meeting and afterwards. Habitual surface actors were more likely to have an intention to quit their job at short notice. That is not good for anyone.

Guess the point here is that masking how you really feel in work, while required every now and again, it not a good idea in the long term. If you chair meetings try and make it possible for people to express how they really feel. They may be a little more attentive and focus better on the agenda items or discussions.

Aside from meetings, if your organisational culture requires people to surface act or hide their feeling on a regular basis e.g. when dealing with customers, superiors, other departments, be aware that burn out and sudden departures may follow. If this is hard to avoid and the ‘customer is always right’, then give staff some recovery time and let them vent a little. Everyone might feel better and get more done.

To Do or to Have?

You are after a hard week, it’s the weekend, time to treat yourself. There is the temptation to go a restaurant or maybe engage in a bit of retail therapy. You might pick up a new gadget, clothes or some other reward, to make yourself feel better. 

You see this approach used in some advertising campaigns. You are encouraged to “Go out and buy yourself something nice”, the ad tells you that you have worked hard all your career, now it’s time to think of yourself, you deserve a new BMW or a designer watch. As the people in L'Oreal Paris say,  'Because you're worth it'

Research suggests that you may be better off leaning more towards the restaurant idea rather than the clothes or gadgets. Leaf Van Boven from the University of Colorado and Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University addressed this in their article ‘To Do or to Have? That Is the Question’.

They defined experiential purchases as those “made with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience: an event or series of events that one lives through,” while defining material purchases as those “made with the primary intention of acquiring a material good: a tangible object that is kept in one's possession”.

Some items fall between these definitions, for example buying a new bike or a TV, where we get both the goods and a new experience. That said, most people surveyed were able to decide if recent purchases were in the ‘Do’ or ‘Have’ box.

When participants were asked which of these two purchases options made them happier, 57% of respondents reported that they got greater happiness from their experiential purchase, while only 34% reported greater happiness from their material purchase.

Similar results emerged when participants were randomly assigned to think about a material or experiential purchase they had made in the past. People contemplating a past experiential purchase reported being in a better mood than their colleagues contemplating a past material purchase. This suggests that experiential purchases produce more lasting hedonic benefits. The buzz from the experience lasts longer and is more durable than the buzz from getting a new material item.

Of course you do need to choose your experiences wisely. Buying yourself tickets to the Opera if you prefer a football game may not work very well. The idea is that you may feel happier going for a nice meal or some event rather than picking up a new pair of shoes. Better still, the buzz from the experience will last longer than the more temporary hit you get from picking up the clothes, shoes or gadget.

Will that promotion or new job make you feel happier?

Are you working hard to get that promotion or new job in the hope that it will make you happier? Do you drive home from work thinking that if only you got that lotto win and could quit your job, you would be happy? Maybe it’s time to think again.

Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University has done a lot of research on “Affective Forecasting” of what we think will make us happy in the future. In other words, how good are we at predicting our future happiness or other emotional states.

In his 2007 book ‘Stumbling on Happiness', he goes into this in some detail. It turns out that we are really bad at predicting what will make us happy in life. His research consistently found that the things we do in search of happiness like moving house, changing job, winning the lotto don’t make us feel happier, though we expect that they will.

Gilbert links this to the strength of human resilience. We are not the delicate beings which self-help books or day time TV would have us believe. When we suffer real tragedy or disaster, we often recover more quickly than we would expect to. We can rediscover happiness. This is a good thing. As a species it makes us more adaptive and helps us cope with the woes of life.

The downside is that good things which happen to us are also less effective in the long term than we might think. Winning the lotto, getting the new job or house, doesn't feel as good or last as long as we expect it will. Resilience works both ways. We rebound from distress but we also rebound from joy, back to how we normally feel about life. 

According to Gilbert, if you want to know how happy you will be in the future, look at how happy you are now and that will probably answer your question.

This is not to say that we can’t aim to feel happier, we can. It’s just that we overestimate how much happier a specific item or event like a new car, job or house will make us feel. It is not that simple. Moving house or job to spend more time with loved ones or earning more money to do more of the things we enjoy, can make us happier, as long as these things are important to us.

These events or changes are more like an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that we routinely waste because the things we think will make us happy often don't. If that extra salary from a new job is spent on a bigger mortgage and the rewards and stressors in our life have increased in equal measure then don’t expect to feel any different.

If you are wondering if the promotion, job or some other windfall will make you happier, look at what is important in life. Ask yourself if the resulting change will allow you to do more of these important things. If it does then great, if not, then maybe focus on a change that will.

It's OK to check your smartphone

So do you take a sneaky look at your smart phone in work every now and again? Would you do it if the boss was watching? How would you view a colleague you saw checking their phone regularly during the working day? It turns out that maybe we need to take a relaxed approach to this. Sooyeol Kim at Kansas State University got 72 employees to put an app on their phone that tracked their usage throughout the working day.

While it might sound a little big brother like, the findings were interesting. The employees averaged 22 minutes on their phones during a standard 8 hour day, or just about 5% of their work time. In case you think 5% is a bit of a waste, it’s less than the time we spend at water coolers or bathroom breaks (which we rarely take a dim view of). Considering a lot of people eat ‘al desko’ and only take minimal meal breaks, the 22 minutes per day seems fair enough.

Sooyeol Kim also looked at how people felt once their day was done. The workers who took smartphone breaks were happier after their days work. The researchers suggest that the smartphone breaks, even if they are just for a few minutes, allow us to feel connected with family or loved ones. The odd little game or reading the sports news can be a welcome distraction from the stress of the job. This can help us get back into work a little more refreshed.

There are other studies out there which suggest all distractions are bad for productivity and that it takes us a while to pick up where we left off. From a pure productivity point of view this may well be true. However the Kansas State study is more concerned with our well being. While productivity may be a little down, the employees might feel better, be less prone to burn out or other stress related conditions.

This could lead to a more sustainable way of working, beyond smartphone breaks. It could well apply to any similar micro breaks that we take. So the next time you see someone taking the scenic route to the water cooler or checking their phone, don’t judge them. Try it yourself, you will probably feel better at the end of the day. 

Work Out Creativity

The positive impact of aerobic exercise on physiological function is well publicised. The benefits for the cardio-pulmonary system has been extensively studied and validated. There have been several population level fitness programs to target obesity.

Until recently, there was very little research on exploring the potential benefit of aerobic exercise on mental processes and structures. One potential benefit of aerobic exercise where the research was very thin on the ground is in the area of its potential effects on creativity.

Creativity is a much sought after and encouraged thought process. Creativity plays a key role in the establishment and sustained competitiveness of many organisations. In a world where many jobs are in a state of flux and there is a constant churn of new technologies and ideas, the ability to use this change in a creative way is a vital skill.

A study in the Creativity Research Journal looked at how exercise can improve our ability to think creatively. The researchers got half the participants to work out to an exercise video and the other half to just watch a video. The people who worked out performed better than their video watching counterparts when it came to a creative thinking test. The researchers used the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) which examines divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills. Responses are then scored on four scales- Fluency, Flexibility, Originality and Elaboration.

So it appears that if you need to kick start some creativity, get a work out program going. If you are hiring for a creative role, it might help to have candidates that exercise on a regular basis. As an article on Psychology Today put it, “Sweat is like WD-40 for your mind-–it lubricates the rusty hinges of your brain and makes your thinking more fluid. Exercise allows your conscious mind to access fresh ideas that are buried in the subconscious.”

A little acknowledgement goes a long way

I have known a few mangers in the past who paid lip-service to the idea of ‘valuing peoples contribution’. You don’t need to be a genius to know this is a motivational killer.

In his book “The Upside of Irrationality“, Dan Ariely describes an experiment where he puts some science behind this all too familiar situation.

The researchers paid participants to identify and circle instances where the same letter appeared side-by-side on a page of text. They were paid on a descending scale, the highest amount for the first page they completed and less for each page after that until they figured the money wasn't worth it and they quit. People were randomly assigned to groups that would have one of three variations on this basic idea.

The first group wrote their name on page and the examiner looked over the page and verbally acknowledged the work before placing the page on the pile of worksheets.

The second group did not write their name on page. The examiner just placed the finished page on a pile without looking at it or acknowledging receiving it.

The third group did not write name on page. The examiner immediately placed their finished worksheet in a shredder.

If it was just a matter of money, each group should quit working at approximately the same pay rate (remember the descending pay rate). The results showed that the group that had its work shredded when handed up, stopped working at almost twice the pay rate than the group that had its work fleetingly acknowledged. The group that had its unnamed work placed on a pile without acknowledgement stopped working at very nearly the same pay rate as the group that had their work shredded.

The similarity between the last two groups is interesting. “Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort before their eyes,” Ariely says. “The good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivation seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it.”

It is striking how little acknowledgement it takes to motivate people. Just taking a little time to acknowledge and thank employees is critical to maintaining a happy and productive staff. This can be more effective than payment incentives and expensive corporate culture projects. A little acknowledgement really does go a long way.

We care about what we do - a Lego Lesson

Sometimes in work you can feel like a cog in a wheel, working away on your specific task, over and over again without ever seeing the finished product. This could be an admin assistant processing orders or marketing material or it could be a computer programmer writing server side functions for some application.

Dan Ariely, working with Harvard University has thought about this and asked the question, “Does Seeing the fruits of our labour may make us more productive?”

The researchers had participants build characters from Lego’s Bionicles series. All the participants were paid decreasing amounts for each subsequent Bionicle: $3 for the first one, $2.70 for the next one, and so on. However, one group’s creations were stored under the table and disassembled after the experiment. The other group’s Bionicles were disassembled as soon as they’d been built. They were built, taken apart and built again and again and again. “This was an endless cycle of them building and we destroying in front of their eyes,” Ariely says. This is not unlike Paul Newman digging and filling in the hole in the classic movie ‘Coolhand Luke’.

The results between the two groups were very interesting. The first group (who saw the end product which remained intact) made 11 Bionicles, on average, while the second group made only 7 before they quit (in case you are wondering Paul Newman quit digging the hole too).

The point here is that while reward did not differ i.e. one group were not paid more or had better working conditions or other motivational perks, seeing the fruits of their labour seemed to lead to greater productivity and a willingness to keep on going. Just being given the same task over and over with no tangible end product to look at, seemed to dull enthusiasm and results. You could speculate that this group may have felt that they were just assembling but not really creating anything.

The lesson here for the work place is that we may need to think of work as less of an assembly line where each person does their bit and instead give staff a chance to see what their contribution creates. That could be allowing admin staff to see marketing feedback or meet with clients and see the difference they make in getting a sale. It could be having the computer programmer seeing how safe, fast or easy their functions make the system for end users.

This could explain why some start ups find it easier to get staff to work long hours, take on multiple tasks, often with minimal additional financial reward. I’ve worked in a few start ups where this was the case. Perhaps in these scenarios, staff see the difference they make to the big picture, growing the company and building a product that end users enjoy. To paraphrase Ariely, “They see the fruits of their labour”.

Make some time for staff to see the point and end product of their work. Efficiency is more than figuring out ways to doing more stuff. How we think about our jobs and what works means to us plays a big part in motivation which in turn drives job satisfaction and productivity.

Boring is not all bad

Barack Obama has a well reported practice of never wearing anything other than blue and gray suits. According to the president, “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make too many decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” This ties in with the idea ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’.

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has another take on this. The authors tested the idea that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. The study used a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function to determine if decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices.

Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers' self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing takes a greater toll than just deliberating.

There are a few lessons in this. Like Barak Obama, try to focus your limited patience and executive function on the stuff that matters. Spending time at the deli counter figuring out what sandwich to have is not a great idea if you have to go back to the office and make some complex or important decisions on how to manage scarce company resources.

If you are a retailer, you could provide a variety of choices and have customers making decisions just for the sake of it. This may lower their self control and get them to spend a little more freely.

 If you are a consumer and have just made a load of decisions e.g. where to park, whether to buy on credit or pay cash or whether to take out an after sales contract or not, be wary of your self control. It could be on the slide and you may be about to buy something you don’t really need.

If you see some guy in work wearing the same suits everyday and eating the same boring lunch, he could be the go to guy for some of those big decisions or someone to trust with that big marketing budget where self control could be tested. 

The Transition Ritual

I have written before on the price we can pay for using email and its ability to interrupt our day. I recently came across a post by Laura Vanderkam who has an interesting take on this.

She sees email checking as forming part of a ‘transitional ritual’. It is something we do on auto pilot when we get back to our desk after a meeting or after lunch. It also occurs when we are indecisive and have to ponder what to do next. This ritual is an automatic habit we fall into without realising it and is by no means limited to email.

We could find ourselves regularly checking our social media (company policy aside) or a news website or a message board.These rituals are hard to avoid. It’s part of human nature to behave like this. The problem arises because we are interrupted so often. If our ‘ritual’ takes a while then it really starts to eat into our day.

Vanderkam suggests that we ‘go on the offensive’ and rather beat ourselves up over checking our email or Twitter when we ‘transition’, we simply cut out the interruptions and those indecisive moments.

This can be done by having a list of things to do made out in advance so that as soon as we finish one task or get back to our desk, we get stuck into the next item straight way. Keep an eye on your transition ritual, learn to recognise it. Once you find yourself scanning your email for the sake of it, stop and do something constructive or enjoyable or just get on with your next task. This approach also ties in with the idea of having a ‘not to do list’.

Life’s too short to spend it scanning your inbox or timeline in zombie mode.

The Pomodoro Technique

We all have things to do that we’d prefer to avoid or just don’t enjoy doing. This could be something monotonous, something that stresses us out or a task that is hard to do.

I recently came across a system called the Pomodoro Technique. It is a time management technique developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It is named after a kitchen timer called a "pomodoro" and the idea is pretty simple. You set a timer for 25 minutes of work, then take a five minute break, then set the timer again. Every 4 sessions you take a longer break for 15 to 30 minutes. No matter how bad your task is, there are very few things we can’t do for 25 minutes.

The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility and as work sessions are accomplished, you feel more in control and you can see tangible progress. The more in control you feel, the less stressed you feel and the quality of the work may even improve.

If you accurately record what you get done in 25 minutes that will help future planning and show up those hidden items that can take a bit longer than we expect.

I've seen this used in software development where two programmers work together on a screen review. That is a pretty open ended task but the defined sessions focuses the minds and charts progress. This also works with the idea that to solve any problem, you start by reducing it to achievable individual tasks and get each one done one by one.

Try it out and see if it works for you, at the very least you will get regular breaks and have a more accurate record of your efforts.

Excuse to play Pharrell Williams at work

How happy are you or your staff? Do we spend enough time trying to make the work place a happy place? Maybe we should think about this a little more. Research from the University of Warwick suggests that happiness makes people more productive at work. The researchers carried out a number of experiments to test the idea that happy employees work harder. In the laboratory, they found the happy workers to be around 12% more productive.

The research provides causal evidence using randomized trials and piece-rate working. The study, published in the Journal of Labour Economics, involved four different experiments with more than 700 participants. It was much more than a touchy feely questionnaire.

Some participants got a better deal than others. The lucky ones were either shown a comedy movie clip or treated to free chocolate, drinks and fruit. Others, less fortunate, were questioned about recent family tragedies, such as bereavements. This allowed the researchers to assess whether lower levels of happiness were later associated with lower levels of productivity.

One of the authors, Professor Oswald commented that: "Companies like Google have invested more in employee support and employee satisfaction has risen as a result. For Google, it rose by 37%, they know what they are talking about. Under scientifically controlled conditions, making workers happier really pays off."

His co-author, Dr Sgroi added: "The driving force seems to be that happier workers use the time they have more effectively, increasing the pace at which they can work without sacrificing quality."

This has implications for how we structure the working day and how we organise the work place. A few treats and decent conditions can bring a little happiness and help people work better, as well have a more pleasant time. Conversely creating conditions where workers are reminded of negative events or poor outcomes can kill the buzz and productivity.

It may also be worth thinking about how you promote managers. Look for people who can make people happy, can recognise discontent in employees and are approachable. These managers will have a happier team and prove more productive. Even if the research does not quite stack up and you don’t get the 12% bounce in productivity, everyone will enjoy work a bit more. No harm in that. 

Unfriending online matters in the real world

Well, whatever your views on social media etiquette, it appears that online rejection has real world consequences. A study from the University of Colorado Denver suggests that you need to be prepared for the real life cold shoulder when you reject online.

In their research, 40 percent of people surveyed said they would avoid in real life anyone who unfriended them on Facebook. Thankfully, some 50 percent said they would not avoid the person and the remaining 10 percent were unsure.

So be a bit more careful turning down friend requests or cutting ties online when it comes to clients and work colleagues. They could be in the 40% that take it rather badly. While it is a minority, it is a sizeable one.

The No Empathy Sandwich

Having worked in software for a number of years I often noticed how my workload seemed to accumulate almost from no where (I use that term deliberately). I’d find myself with multiple ‘mini’ projects on the go, tight deadlines and a fair amount of pressure. I’d sit back and wonder ‘how it came to this?’. The answer could usually be traced back to a conversation about a proposal, change request or upgrade where I agreed to take on something that in hindsight was not a good idea. It was driven by a reluctance to say ‘No’.

Where this reluctance came from, I’m not quite sure. I worked in a few start-ups where nothing was impossible, crazy deadlines and late nights were par for the course. Saying ‘No’ was not part of the culture in that environment and the customer was literally always right. Not saying ‘No’ and always acceding to customer demands, can lead to a situation where your customers run your business, not you. That is not a good thing, even in start-ups. Product road-maps get hi-jacked, innovation suffers at the expense of piecemeal tweaking and delivery.

So assuming saying ‘No’ needs to be done every now and again, is there a good or bad way of delivering the potentially bad news? Turns out there is.

I came across a neat article which explained it in an equation called the ‘Empathy Sandwich’ as “No= Empathize + Decline + Empathize Again”. For example a client says  ‘Can you add a new screen to report on XYZ?, it takes me ages to do it manually‘ . First comes a little bit of empathy ‘Ok , I see where you are coming from, it’s not easy to get time for that every week’. But then comes the Decline – ‘But I don’t have a project team I could put on that change‘. Followed up by some more empathy  ‘I hope your workload levels out, you guys do a really great job over there’.

That example might sound a touch contrived but you get the point. Saying ‘No’ in a way that shows some consideration and understanding beats a dismissive tone and helps keep the relationship going, despite the refusal.

By saying ‘No’ you will free up more time, finish more projects, deliver higher quality work and end up fire-fighting a lot less. That will make for happier customers in the long term as you can focus on innovative product development, meet the deadlines you do commit to and not get pulled between multiple piecemeal requests. You will be happier too. Who could say ‘No’ to that?

Funny Works

There are many studies which espouse the value of humour in the work place. An often quoted study by Professor William Hampes looked at the relationship between humour and trust. Those who scored high on a test that measured sense of humour for social purposes were considered more trustworthy.

Other studies suggest that humour is good for group cohesiveness and leads to richer, more efficient communication. One such study by Jessica Mesmer-Magnus, David J. Glew, Chockalingam Viswesvaran looked at how humour is associated with employee health (e.g. burnout, health), work-related outcomes (e.g. performance, job satisfaction, withdrawal), perceived supervisor/leader effectiveness and how it can counteract workplace stress.

They found that employee humour is associated with enhanced work performance, satisfaction, workgroup cohesion, health, and coping effectiveness, as well as decreased burnout, stress, and work withdrawal. That is no joke. Supervisor use of humour was associated with enhanced subordinate work performance, satisfaction, perception of supervisor performance, satisfaction with supervisor, and workgroup cohesion, as well as reduced work withdrawal.

As is the case with many studies in this area there is the challenge of defining what is funny (some people just don’t get it). We also need to be careful not to cross any lines with sexist or some other non-appropriate humour among work colleagues.

That aside, given the positive associations with being able to make a few wise cracks, perhaps humour should be a skill we look for when building teams or hiring a supervisor. Worst case scenario, they will be a good laugh on company nights out or a bit of light entertainment on a dreary Monday morning.

To get started try this out ‘I said to the librarian I hope you don't have a book on reverse psychology ‘. Funny?, well you had to be there. Btw, free humour tip: If you find yourself Saying "You had to be there" chances are you need to work on your funny game a bit more.