Employees are in a constant state of distraction and hyper-responsiveness.
Another study found that the average employee checks email 74 times a day, while people touch their smartphones 2,617 times a day. Many of today’s organizations sabotage flow by setting counter-productive expectations on availability, responsiveness, and meeting attendance, with research by Adobe finding that employees spend an average of six hours per day on email. The Modern Organization Sabotages Productivity A study by scientists at Advanced Brain Monitoring also found that being in flow cut the time it took to train novice marksmen up to an expert level in half.
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Flow refers to the state of full immersion in an activity, and you might know it best as “the zone.” A 10-year McKinsey study on flow found that top executives are up to 500% more productive when they’re in a state of flow.
Heuristic work requires people to get into the physiological state of flow, coined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975. “Like most humans,” Grant says, “leaders are remarkably good at anchoring on the past even when it’s irrelevant to the present.” The internet fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and play, and the nature of work itself has transitioned in large part from algorithmic tasks to heuristic ones that require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.Īdam Grant, organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, says that “the more complex and creative jobs are, the less it makes sense to pay attention to hours at all.” Yet despite all of this, the eight-hour workday still reigns supreme. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, and the industrial revolution saw children as young as six-years-old working the coal mines, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour work week, eventually ratifying it as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The eight-hour workday harkens back to 19-century socialism.
By cultivating a flow-friendly workplace and introducing a shorter workday, you’re setting the scene not only for higher productivity and better outcomes, but for more motivated and less-stressed employees, improved rates of employee acquisition and retention, and more time for all that fun stuff that goes on outside of office walls, otherwise known as life. Cut your default meeting time from 60 minutes to 30 minutes. Block off time in calendars to allow for several hours of uninterrupted work each day. Encourage employees to turn off notifications and batch-check e-mails. How can you foster a shorter, more productive workday for your own team? Make it okay for employees to not be in a hyper-responsive state. The internet fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and play, and the nature of work itself has transitioned in large part from algorithmic tasks to heuristic ones that require critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and uninterrupted stretches of time to get into a state of flow. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour work week.
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