I don’t usually fly for work on Mondays, but this week I woke up early and caught a short 7am flight to Durham, North Carolina. While making my way through the airport I noticed a vibe…something bordering on stress and panic. The baristas at the coffee shop were fussing at each other as the backlog of orders piled up. The TSA agents seemed overwhelmed. Even my Uber driver seemed frazzled by the unexpected traffic. It’s not just me. We’re all due for a respite. Workers have been operating at their breaking point for a while now, but we still haven’t done anything about it. So whose responsibility is it to shift the untenable conditions that most workers find themselves in? Managers certainly have their own role to play, but as the pandemic should have taught us, the worker-job relationship is still ripe for disruption. How might we imagine a less extractive way of working that helps us to all get off the struggle bus?
Forbes recently reported that over 4 out of 5 people say their stress primarily comes from work. And we all know that it doesn’t end there. Oftentimes the way in which we work, our habits and our pace, spills over into our personal lives. A frenetic, hurried way of work leads to scattered results, more stress, and less productivity. Imagine the ongoing costs personally, relationally, and economically. What if we instead took a lesson from the calendar to embrace a more sustainable way of working that allows us to redefine our expectations of productivity?
Years ago I read the book, Wintering by Katherine May. In it she reframes our understanding of winter as not a catastrophic time, but a necessary crucible. She invites the reader to embrace the gifts of dormancy and hibernation. While it looks like things are slowing down, perhaps even dying, winter in fact is a time to let what you’ve planted already take root deep within the ground, while it looks like nothing is happening. Wintering and by another name, slow productivity, is in direct conflict with our expectations for visible activity as a proxy for actual productivity. We need a reframe of what it means to be productive.
Lately our team has been leaning into a few strategies that have helped us to redefine productivity on our own terms. Along the way, we’ve learned a few lessons about what is working and what we still need to tweak. Here’s a few suggestions on how managers can embrace habits of slow productivity to reduce stress and cognitive loads for themselves and their employees as we end 2024.
Do fewer things.
Cal Newport writes in his book Slow Productivity that the demand to prove your worth through visible activity produces inner turmoil. Resolving this inner turmoil is key to reframing productivity. This essentially means that we’re all doing the most. What if instead, we chose to do less? For years we’ve used language of deep work to grant ourselves permission to block off long stretches of time to work intensively on a singular project. Initially, there didn’t seem to be much to show for our effort. But, over the course of time we’ve produced new products and better content. We’re still working on our practices of balancing the volume of ongoing competing demands of small tasks that need to be completed (which we call rubber balls). We’ve learned that when we do prioritize the most important things, overall we do less and it usually leads to better results. Bonus, doing less also reduces our cognitive load which in turns means we’re carrying less mental and emotional labor from work back home.
Slow down..
Here’s what we know: our brains work better when we’re not rushing. One of the most damning things about our current pace as humans is what it’s doing to our bodies. Simply put, our bodies weren’t built to operate at our frenetic pace, it’s just not sustainable. As a team we’ve identified a few rhythms of rest and work, similar to the natural rhythms of output and dormancy found in nature. We take individual and collective sabbaticals. When someone is sick, our expectation is that they take care of themselves, no questions asked. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is rest.
Embrace Radical Downtime.
In their book, The Self Driven Child by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, they argue that “radical downtime, doing nothing on purpose, is one antidote to the mind-scattering and mind numbing effects of 24/7 technology and multi-tasking.” This matters because our minds need this alternation of rest, activity, rest, activity in order to function properly. Accordingly they offer two strategies: meditation and daydreaming as ways to provide ourselves with the necessary radical downtime that will ultimately lead to a refreshing of our brains. Since we know the brain develops according to how it’s used, if we want to operate as reflective, conscious beings, then they argue we really need unstressed periods of downtime everyday. For managers and leaders with pressures to produce, this is where it matters most. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin contends, “insights are far more likely to come when you are in mind wandering mode than in the task focused mode. It is only when we let our minds wander that we make unexpected connections…”
Our culture values getting things done, but it’s time to question whether the cost has become too high. I’m grateful to be a part of a team at ManagerEQ where we’re reimagining a way of work that aligns more with our natural rhythms. It’s beyond time for this movement, and we believe managers are the key lever. To learn more about our work and get involved, connect with us at www.managereq.com.
