Cool Down (3 page)

There are a great many busy people who will declare that there's nothing wrong with having two Mondays in a week. After all, that's where opportunity lies: “The early bird gets the worm,” they say. But when using bird analogies, surely the size and type of worms you're after must count for something. People who remain preoccupied by incessant incoming messages and additional tasks face the danger of only ever noticing the smaller worms, while the larger ones go unnoticed, to say nothing of cats and other dangers that may also lurk nearby. When work expands to fill the time available, quality and value do not necessarily follow suit.

The neat thing about Parkinson's law, though, is that it swings both ways. Anyone who's ever had to write a term paper for school or put together a PowerPoint presentation for work knows that it usually takes right up until the drop-dead deadline to get it done, and often this means working into the late hours of the evening. But the shifting of a project's timelines can also happen in reverse. A person, for example, who decides to spring clean his house, might find it will take all weekend,
unless
he receives a surprise phone call from his mother-in-law, announcing her arrival in 45 minutes. Then, the spring cleaning will take 45 minutes. The energy allotment of a project tends to bend according to the observer's perception of the project's value.

This skewed awareness of time and work is truly quite mystical. It defines humans as unique, for although other animals are aware of time in the sense of when it's time to migrate south, when it's time to hibernate, or when it's time to sleep, these responses are governed more by internal sensations such as hunger, fatigue, and instinct. We're the only creatures that regularly troll through personal timekeeping systems, afraid equally of deadlines and empty spaces.

At the end of the day the busy person in the radio commercial will go back home on his train, and as efficient as he was in completing all of his work on the way in, the commute home will find him working on all those additional tasks that he was not able to finish during his busy workday.

The second of our three principles comes out of the research put forth by a scientist and writer by the name of Temple Grandin. Dr. Grandin designs slaughterhouses, and she is also, by her own admission, autistic. She works with some of the nation's largest food processing companies to design abattoirs that allow animals to follow a herding instinct, rather than simply be forced to their end. Though it may seem a moot point to some, she has demonstrated and proven many economic, humane, and consumer-related health benefits to having animals avoid the stress of entrapment in unfamiliar surroundings during this difficult and final chapter of their short lives.

Dr. Grandin's autism gives her an advantage, she states, since it confers upon her the unique ability to visualize how animals process information, and by contrast, how humans do. When surveying an area in which to walk or graze, she says, an animal's attention will be inevitably drawn to any unique or unusual item or visual cue in its visual field. This item will take on a disproportionate significance in the animal's mind and will greatly impact its decision or desire to continue moving in that direction. For example, she teaches slaughterhouse employees to stay on the lookout for litter, since stray items such as a paper coffee cup lying innocuously on the floor, an item that would go unnoticed by the workers themselves, turns into a strange object of focus and fear for an already stressed cow. The cup becomes an obstacle, an irregular object, something that causes the animal to want to turn away in panic. This, she says, is also how many autistic people perceive things. They take intense interest in small singular objects, to the exclusion of all else.

The reason this is important to us in the high-speed working world is that, through the lens of her own autism, Dr. Grandin is able to tell us a lot about ourselves—the non-autistic, time-pressed working masses. She describes how non-autistic people take in information: “Like a lamp store,” she says. “Everything is on, all the time, and it's all taken in.”
¹
This metaphor speaks volumes about the challenge that 21st-century knowledge workers face, due to their internal wiring. For us, everything is on all the time. New stimuli, such as email, phone calls, and text messages arrive constantly and are immediately accepted as additional important elements of the day. Each of these interruptions or messages represents another lamp being lit inside the lamp store, illuminating itself inside an already brilliant cluster of lights.

We non-autistic humans are better able to handle this, we feel, because it is part of an overall multidimensional awareness machine that is controlled by the brain. Along with binocular vision, acute binaural hearing, a highly reactive sense of touch, and more deeply and mysteriously, instinct and intuition, these attributes have kept human beings alive and evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. But just as we can never see the forest when surrounded by trees, it takes the perspective of an autistic person, someone who does not share such a capacity for multiple inputs, to truly see that our predilection for a constant inflow of stimuli comes from within. It's all speed and brightness. We demand it and expect it of ourselves. But that doesn't mean we're entirely good at it.

Now, there are many who would ask, so what's wrong with speed, light, and multiple stimuli? After all, the pace, scope, and breadth of business has increased. The bright lamp store of human perception, they argue, is the hallmark of a multitasking environment, and it's up to the individual to keep up or get out. And that might be an appropriate assessment if the human body and brain were able to evolve faster, but as it is, with our body design still better attuned to finding and eating raw foods in the wild than snacks from a vending machine, there is only so much that can be pulled, both from muscles and synapses, before things give way. Every light bulb eventually burns out.

People who understand the rudiments of economics and business will know about the
law of diminishing returns
, the third in my list of three founding principles, and one that states that by adding more resources to a situation, there comes a time when productivity peaks and then declines. Simply continuing to add more and more resources doesn't necessarily produce consistently bigger and better returns, in just the same fashion as working more and more hours doesn't yield consistently high quality. There comes a point at which you just can't do anymore, you can't pull any more out of the day, whether you want to or not.

Yet the economists and MBAs who know all this are among those who fire up their laptops and PDAs on the train ride home, satisfying themselves that in getting one more task out of the way they can get back to the family and finally relax. They will argue that doing work on the train is an act of liberation that allows them to actually leave the office and get home in time for supper.

Parkinson's Law shows that people work on the train because they have the time to work on the train. They have allowed their working day to expand to include the hour or two so spent commuting. When people know, even subconsciously or reluctantly, that they'll be able to catch up on the train, they then allow more work to fill up the rest of the day. They may not think they're allowing it—they may feel instead that it's being forced upon them by outside powers. But that's precisely the point. Working at continual high speed with no opportunity for cooling down, they have lost a great part of themselves. They have lost the ability to set limits and negotiate around these limits. They have lost the skills needed to prioritize tasks and to say no to excessive workloads. They have lost the ability to assign realistic durations to tasks, and realistic volumes to workdays and workweeks, and they have lost the ability to educate the people they work for and to manage expectations constructively. The cushion of time that the train ride represents now becomes a solid fixture: just another hour or two in an expanded workday. When put in terms of human physiology, it's on par with noticing that your waistline is expanding and then solving the problem by buying bigger pants.

It's natural, of course, to feel justified in overworking the way we do. That's what Dr. Grandin's lamp store analogy shows us. We are wired to expect and demand multiple sources of stimulation, constantly. But as more and more of these tasks and messages insinuate themselves into the hours before 9:00 a.m. and after 6:00 p.m., there comes a point where clear, creative productive thought gets obscured for the entire day. The Law of Diminishing Returns sets in. Does an 80-hour work week truly yield 80 hours of productive work? Can anyone really be “on” for 80 hours? Is it a matter of taking 80 hours to get done what could be achieved in 60 or 40 hours were it not for the distractions of the workplace or the fatigue and overload you are experiencing? Or is it that you work for someone who expects 80 hours of dedication per week—someone with whom you have neither the time, the energy, nor the confidence to negotiate? There's nothing wrong with working hard, of course. Working hard is good. Working really hard on the wrong things is bad. When you're working so fast and furiously that you cannot spare a moment to tell the difference, that's when the problem takes root.

Stress, like work, is another component of the day that people accept as normal and constant: a necessary evil. It is also blamed as a major contributor to error, burnout, and illness. Indeed, one of the two major types of stress is bad for you. But another kind, as we'll see, is actually very beneficial. Can you tell the difference? Do you have the time to strategize how to avoid the bad type and encourage the good type? Have a look at this example:

There is a difference between walking fast because you like to and walking fast because you have to. If you tend to walk fast because you like it, because it matches your energy level and metabolism, or simply because you have long legs or big feet, then to walk fast is comfortable and relaxing. It's an action that you enjoy, even if it is vigorous and swift. This is an example of a positive form of stress on the body and mind, known as
eustress
. From the vigor of the action comes relaxation and a sense of cool control. From this relaxation comes a sense of freedom pacing that the brain and body truly enjoy. Thus from this positive form of
fast
(the act of walking fast) there comes a positive form of
slow
.

By contrast, when you walk fast because you have to, because you're running late and under pressure, your body and mind have to deal with negative stress, referred to clinically as
distress
, in which reaction, reflex, and haste take over, and your metabolism focuses on merely getting by. You start to sweat, to curse quietly, to wonder why you're surrounded by idiots. From this negative form of
fast
(haste) comes a negative form of
slow
(frustration, delay). No depth or progress can be achieved here, no strategy. Just coping.

When work rushes in to fill the hours available before 9:00 a.m. and after 6:00 p.m., there is a great danger of moving into this negative stress zone—working late not because we want to but because we feel we have to. Again, there are many who would respond to this by saying, “I enjoy my job, and it gives me pleasure to get some more of it done in the evening. It does not stress me at all.” Or they might say, “The nature of my work demands that I be available to take a call in the evening hours. If I didn't, I would lose business to my competitors.” These are fair comments. But enjoying work on an intellectual level does not guarantee a matched amount of enjoyment on the metabolic level. Similarly, though there may be complete legitimacy in taking a necessary call in the evening, the temptation then remains to continue working on the administrative elements that follow that call—elements that don't share the same level of urgency. The body needs rest. It needs an opportunity to summon up the chemicals of sleep and inject them into the bloodstream. It needs to prepare the brain for overnight shut-down, overhaul, and upgrade. We, as human beings, also need to experience activity, emotion, and interaction with significant others, children, and friends. People who continue to work outside of the working hours traditionally defined by their job may accomplish some more ground-level achievements, but they come at significant cost. The effort put in often fails to match the value of what comes out. It is a central tenet of this book, therefore, that we be able to slow down enough to distinguish between these types of actions. Can you give yourself permission to leave work behind as evening starts and allow your post-workday life to begin? Can you give yourself permission to take the important call, but then leave the follow-up parts for tomorrow? Ultimately the choice is yours, of course. But this book wishes to cut through the fog of reactionism, so that you use and maintain your most valuable commodity—yourself—optimally.

Every morning, millions of hard-working men and women commute to their places of employment. For the vast majority of these people, the first thing they do upon arriving is check their email. At that moment, as the messages waiting in the inbox pour into their conscious minds they transform into reactionary beings.

There is an interesting emotional component to this morning email habit that has nothing to do with the level of importance of the messages themselves. Email is a visual medium, but it is not primarily a printed-word medium. Though the subject lines and the messages themselves consist of typed text, they appear first through a light source (the computer, phone, or PDA screen), and are therefore routed through the brain in a manner different from text on paper.