Happy Employees Are More Productive, or Are They?

You would think that happy employees are more productive. At least I would. On that premise, companies are spending quite a bit of money to improve the workplace.

While there indeed is a correlation between happiness and productivity, increasing happiness does not necessarily increase productivity. Read what Nathan Bowling has to say about this, as quoted by Freakonomics:

My study shows that a cause and effect relationship does not exist between job satisfaction and performance. Instead, the two are related because both satisfaction and performance are the result of employee personality characteristics, such as self-esteem, emotional stability, extroversion and conscientiousness.

Or said otherwise: both happiness and productivity are causes of other factors, themselves not necessarily well known and easy to identify or quantify. So just increasing happiness independently of those factors does not necessarily influence productivity.

What is the most interesting about all this is to see how easily we mistake a correlation for a causality. Because two factors are correlated does not automatically mean that one is the cause of the other. If there is one lesson to be learned from Freakonomics, it would have to be this one.

A Cluttered Desk is Good for You? I don't think so!

Einstein supposedly said:

If a Cluttered Desk is a Sign of a Cluttered Mind, What's an Empty Desk a Sign Of?

I wouldn't take this as a call to make your desk more cluttered. What works for Al Gore or for Einstein most likely won't work for you. This because we are bad at multitasking, even worse than most of us think we are. We work the best when we can stay focused on a particular task for a period of time. A cluttered environment encourages the opposite behavior: it puts right in your face invitations to do something else.

I'll have more time next week!

Erik forwarded me a post from lifehacks.org on how we tend to overcommit.

Participants believed that both time and money would be more available in “a month” than “today,” and believed it more strongly for time than for money. A deeper investigation of a psychological phenomenon called “delay discounting,” in which people tend to lessen the importance of future rewards, showed that people also discounted future time more than both gains and losses in future money.

I can't recall how often I thought this is really a crazy week, but I'll have more time next week, or two weeks from now. Can we do something about it? This is a hard one; the authors observe:

It is difficult to learn from feedback that time will not be more abundant in the future. Specific activities vary from day to day, so [people] do not learn from feedback that, in aggregate, total demands are similar.

Better Action Items: Delegate to Yourself

A few days a ago, I blogged about the importance of describing your action items so the description contains enough information for you to just do it.

Ethan wrote a guest entry for 43 Folders where he gives a practical tip on how to do just that: Write your tasks as if you are delegating them to someone you actually know.

• This will get you closer to having action items you can start doing without having to first think about what and how. I see a connection here with literate programming. Maybe we could call this literate doing?
  
• After you lay out your action items this way, you might discover that it actually isn't that hard to delegate some of your tasks. This takes you on the path of becoming better at delegating, an area where there is room for improvement for many of us.
  

Merlin Mann, Email, Scarcity, and Text Messaging

Merlin nailed it when during a talk at IDEO he said that the problem with email was one of scarcity, or rather lack thereof. It is so easy to CC Jane and Mark on the email you are sending to John, that many of you just do.

Merlin plays with the idea of artificially introducing scarcity in the system. Text messaging (SMS) in a way adds scarcity to messaging, especially when compared to IM or email. This is at the same time a strength and a weakness:

• A weakness first because text messaging is entirely controlled by carriers, it is both expensive and very limited compared to other forms of messaging (namely email).
• But it is a strength because of the sheer fact that sending (and sometimes also receiving) a text message costs money. This means you are not receiving that many text messages. And when you receive one, it does capture your attention, much more so than, say, an email. This means a lot in a world where attention itself is a scarce commodity.

Context in GTD, and Why it is Broken

Context is an important concept in GTD. You are expected to assign a context to each next action. The context you are in the subset of your next actions you can do at that point. In principle it is good way to filter out the tasks that anyway you can't do right now because of your context. The problem is that knowledge workers end up with a first "at computer" context, and a second "errands" context, with most of the important next actions falling in the first context. That doesn't help much.

Since you can't really filter by context, each time you pick a next action you are expected to go through all your next actions. Of course, you not doing that, because that doesn't make sense. Or maybe you do it once a day, and then keep a mental picture of the next actions you are planning to do during the day. But aren't you using GTD to avoid keeping a list of next actions in your head? And in the end, it seems that this is precisely what GTD forces you to do.

What you are missing is capturing when you are planning to do a next action. This isn't about scheduling tasks; it is about capturing if you are roughly planning to do this next action today, this week, or later. Every day, make sure to reevaluate the today list, and every week the this week list. (Those 3 categories work well for me, but feel free to adapt this to your own needs.)

If you are using a GTD software, like OmniFocus, and if like me you find that using the context field in a traditional way is pointless, just define a today context, a this week context, and a later context.

You don't do projects, you do next actions

Kelly reminds us of the difference between an action item and a project. If each item on your next actions list is not simple enough that you can just do it, that is not a next action. Chances are it is a project.

This has been an opportunity for me to go through my next actions and ask myself that question for each next action: is this simple enough that I can just do can just do it? Or do I need to first think about it? Many "next actions" fell in this latter category. Try it on your own next actions list, and see how much clean-up you can do.

GTD: Keep Track of your Next Actions in Google Calendar

What about using Google Calendar to store your GTD next actions? David Allen makes a strong distinction between next action lists and events your calendar. This makes sense: you want to capture in your calendar events that must happen on a fixed date or hour. For next actions you can use pretty much any system... including your calendar, of course as long as you can keep events and next actions clearly separate in your calendar.

I have been experimenting with the idea for a few weeks now and here is one way to do it with Google Calendar:

• Create 4 new calendars: one for your professional next actions, one for your personal next actions, one for completed/done actions, and finally one for "waiting for" items.
• When you create a next action, roughly choose when you will do it. Is this something you'll shoot for doing today, later this week, next week, next month? Also choose how long it should last (1/2 hour, 1 hour, 2 hours...). Roughly place the next action at an appropriate time during the day. Is this an errand you will do coming back from work? Or something you'll want to do in the evening at home? Something for the weekend? Or just any time during the day will be fine?
• When you have done a next action item, or got what you expected for a "waiting for", move it to the "done" calendar.
• Choose appropriate colors: for instance show the "done" calendar in gray, next actions (professional and personal) in different shades of green, purple for "waiting for", and events in different shades of orange.
• Regularly review your calendar and make sure that you don't have any greens (next actions) or purple (waiting for) left in the past. Everything in the past must be gray. If anything green or purple is still there in the past, don't panic: just pick a reasonable date in the future and move it there.

This works great with Google Calendar, because Google Calendar lets you:

• Create tasks at a given time and for a given duration with just one mouse movement.
• Move tasks around with a simple drag and drop (which you will be doing a lot).
• Assign colors to different calendars and choose which calendars are displayed, you won't miss regular events, which would otherwise be lost amongst all your other next actions, done actions, and "waiting for". Maybe you will even be less likely to "forget" about an upcoming event because you will be looking much more frequently at your calendar.

Of course, any calendar software that has the provides those same benefits will work just as well as Google Calendar.

If you give this a try, or have and any suggestion on how to improve this, I would really like to read your comments. Make sure to post them below!

Think Better with Chewing Gum

Did you know that you could think better a Chewing Gum? Should we believe that stuff?

Security Improves Productivity

Clair Michalon, in her book Cultural Differences, introduces a theory establishing a relationship between level of security people enjoy and the amount of risk they are taking. In this context, insurances, social security, retirement plans are considered factors of increased security. The risk people are willing to take can be observed by looking at levels of innovation or adoption of new technologies.

According to Clair, residents of countries with a lower level of security, like most countries in Africa and South America, tend to be more adverse to risk. On the other hand, in countries with higher security, like in the US and in European countries, people take more risk.

Higher risk pushes people to be more conservative. If risk is high, including even the risk of dying, walking on the footsteps of the previous generation (who did survive!) is the most logical choice. This theory can used to explain the differences in behavior we observe at a macro-geographical level (e.g. differences between groups of similar countries). At that level, we can observe that countries that are adverse to risk take longer time to adopt newer productions methods, business models, generate new ventures, and are in general less productive.

A question remains: can this be applied to companies? If it does, that would provide a strong incentive for companies to provide good health coverage, pension plans and other services employees, in the name of increased productivity. For sure, Dr. James Goodnight, the CEO of SAS, strongly believes that investing in what Clair would call "increasing the employee's sense of security" is wise investment, and his ability to grow SAS a sustained 10-15% rate over the last three decades seems to prove his point.