How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Make Decisions at Peaks, Not at Troughs
It is especially wise to have a pit strategy for times that you’re working on
mentally taxing tasks. So when you’re planning the day, ask yourself:
What important decisions do you need to make today (whether they’re
analytical or creative choices)?
How can you make those decisions when you’re mentally fresh, rather than
drained?
If you know you have a lot of decisions to make—perhaps it’s a day of
performance appraisals, or you need to review and edit a long document—it is
especially important to plan to take regular short breaks, even if they only last
for a few seconds. You also need to make sure that you don’t let hunger
undermine your ability to concentrate. Anthony says he knows when his blood
sugar is too low to make smart choices. “I can tell, because I get a bit irritable
and insistent in my views. At which point, a colleague will often tell me to ‘eat
some nuts or something.’ Which I do.”
Create Breathing Room with Smarter Scheduling
Plan meetings and calls that are shorter than the standard thirty or sixty

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minutes, whenever possible, to give your brain five to ten minutes to recharge
between commitments.
Wrap up commitments slightly early whenever you have the chance, to give
yourself (and everyone else) a few moments of downtime.
Think about how we usually schedule meetings. If they’re informal, we might
say, “Let’s chat at three this afternoon”; if they’re formal, we might send an
invitation that specifies a meeting time of “3:00–4:00 p.m.” We then think we’re
free from four o’clock onward. But if you go from your three o’clock
appointment straight into a four o’clock commitment, you have no downtime.
And, as we now know, that’s going to erode the quality of whatever you’re
doing after four.
Saku Tuominen and Pekka Pohjakallio run 925 Design, a consultancy
specializing in helping companies create effective workplaces. Their idea is to
apply sound design principles to the way we approach our daily work, to achieve
the kind of elegance and efficiency that a beautifully wrought chair or phone can
give us as consumers.
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After they had analyzed the schedules and routines of
more than a thousand professionals, one of their solutions was this: why not
schedule forty-five-minute meetings, rather than defaulting to the tyranny of the
full hour? The same went for arranging twenty-or twenty-five-minute conference
calls, rather than allowing them to take up a full thirty-minute slot. When they
worked with a range of companies to implement this idea, the result was clear.
People found they could get more or less the same amount done, yet with the
enormous added cognitive benefit of regular breaks.
Of course, we’re not always in control of our schedule. But we usually have
more wiggle room than we recognize. Instead of telling someone, “I’m free at
three o’clock,” for example, try saying, “I’m free from three to three forty-five.”
We can be practical and upbeat, with phrases like this: “I need to finish by three
forty-five, but I think we can get everything done before then.” And we can
block out five to ten minutes in our diaries at the top of every hour. It may not
always be possible to protect that breathing space, but it’s such a
transformational practice that even if it works half the time, you’ll find it
immensely worthwhile.
And you may also find colleagues love you for it, even if you simply make it a
goal to wrap things up a little before you have to. I remember some advice I was
once given by Sir Michael Barber when we were colleagues at McKinsey, after

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he’d stepped down from his role as a senior advisor to the British government.
He said that he always aimed to end meetings early, because giving back those
few minutes of time delighted everyone he worked with—especially the prime
minister, Tony Blair.