by Chris Bailey
Positive thinking lets us feel successful in the moment, but at the price of making an actual plan to become successful later. In practice, there’s little difference between positive thinking and wishful thinking.
What does work to increase our level of happiness? Spending time on things that boost our level of positive affect: how good we feel. There is a wealth of actual research demonstrating that becoming happier helps us manage our attention, as well as suggesting proven ways to boost our level of happiness. Curiously, the more we invest in our happiness, the more productive we become in hyperfocus mode and the more creative we become in scatterfocus mode.
Before getting into why, it’s worth noting that you’re likely to find yourself feeling happier simply by practicing the ideas in this book. You’re significantly less content when your mind wanders against your will, even when it’s wandering to neutral topics. You’re about as happy when your mind is unintentionally wandering to a positive topic as you are when focusing on something mundane. Practicing hyperfocus and working with fewer distractions helps focus more attention on the present. Intentionally letting your mind wander takes the guilt, doubt, and stress out of the process, because you choose to unwind rather than doing so against your will. Generally speaking, a wandering mind makes us less happy, unless we’re thinking about something we’re interested in, something useful, or something novel. Scatterfocus—the intentional form of mind wandering—lets us experience all three.
Why, exactly, does investing in happiness foster productivity and creativity?
First, and most important, a positive mood expands the size of your attentional space, regardless of which mode you’re in.
When you’re happy, the amount of dopamine in the logical part of your brain rises, which leads you to approach your work with more energy and vigor—and because you have more attentional space to work with, you have the resources you need to focus more deeply and accomplish more. Being in a good mood also makes you better at recalling information on the fly. You also consume information more actively: the happier you are, the more likely you are to put ideas together in new and interesting ways, and the better you’re able to overcome “functional fixedness” and, like MacGyver, see new uses for familiar things. Happiness also encourages you to seek more variety—but not the risky kind.
On the other hand, a negative mood shrinks the size of your attentional space. Unhappy people are less productive—full stop. The less happy you are, the more often your mind wanders against your will, and the less attention you bring to what’s in front of you. The less happy you feel, the more important it is to tame distractions, as you have less attentional space and energy to resist them. The places where your mind wanders are also different when you’re feeling negative—you’re more likely to make your way to the distant past, ruminating on events that took place then.* While you can sometimes benefit from reliving past experiences, in the short run your productivity suffers—when your mind wanders more to the past, you plan for the future less often and assemble fewer productive ideas. And at the same time that your unwanted mind-wandering episodes increase, they become less pleasant and productive. This is why it’s so important to capture the problems you’re tackling when in a negative mood: whenever you’re feeling miserable, you’re often also dealing with a number of serious issues. The Zeigarnik effect—which keeps unresolved problems front of mind—forces you to think of them more.
People who are unhappy also take longer to refocus after an interruption and dwell more often on their failures. According to one study, habits that train our brain to wander less—such as mindfulness and meditation—are even “effective in reducing relapse in recovering depressive individuals.”
While there is little research on exactly to what degree your attentional space expands when you’re happy, happiness expert and Harvard-trained psychologist Shawn Achor found that happier people are 31 percent more productive than those in a negative or neutral state. Happiness also helps you become more creative in scatterfocus mode. You’re more likely to experience insightful solutions to problems when you’re in a positive frame of mind, which is not surprising, given that your brain has more attentional space and energy with which to work.
How, then, can we invest in our happiness using the findings of science?
One of my favorite studies—the same one that discovered that we spend 47 percent of our time daydreaming—sampled thousands of participants throughout the day, asking two questions: what were the subjects doing at the instant they were sampled (participants received a notification on their phones), and how happy did they feel doing that thing? At the time of the study’s publication, the researchers had received more than 250,000 responses from thousands of subjects. Here are the top five activities that made them the happiest:
Listening to music
Playing
Talking and investing in their relationships
Exercising
Making love
It’s worth noting that our minds wander the least when we’re making love—and that we’re significantly happier doing so than we are doing anything else. Nothing else comes close. (To really invest in your attention, try doing all five things at once.)
As well as these activities, there are a number of other habits that have been proven to make people happier. One of my favorite researchers in the happiness field is the aforementioned Shawn Achor, the author of The Happiness Advantage. In the book, and in his TED talk, Shawn offers a few science-backed strategies to bolster your happiness. A few of his top suggestions:
Recalling three things you’re grateful for at the end of each day (a good companion tactic to the Rule of 3, discussed in chapter 3)
Journaling at the end of each day about one good experience you had
Meditating (see chapter 5)
Performing a random act of kindness
While moods and attitudes aren’t necessarily dots and ideas you can focus on and remember, they do greatly influence how you perceive and relate to what’s in your attentional space, and they affect the size of your attentional space itself. Happiness is the rose-colored lens we place atop our attentional space, which allows us to relate to our experiences in a more productive and creative fashion.
If you need a boost, pick a few items from each of these lists to try. Reflect on the difference they make for you. Try all nine ideas, and keep what works. At the end of the day, these strategies won’t only make you happier—they’ll also make you more productive and creative.
WORK AROUND YOUR ENERGY LEVELS
As you’ve probably experienced, energy levels over the course of the day are anything but constant. They fluctuate according to when your body is programmed to have the most energy (e.g., if you happen to be an early bird or a night owl), how often you exercise, what you eat, and whether you get enough sleep.
Like energy levels, your focus and productivity aren’t consistent either. You’re the most productive when you dedicate your energy-rich moments to your most complex, meaningful tasks.
If you’ve read my previous book, The Productivity Project, you’re already familiar with this idea. Hyperfocus is most effective during your peak energy times—I call these your Biological Prime Time (BPT), and the precise times of day differ for everyone. (By charting your energy levels for a week or two, you’ll be able to identify your own patterns.) The more productive tasks you do during your BPT, the more productive you become.
There’s a flip side to this concept when it comes to scatterfocus. Scatterfocus is most powerful when you have the least energy. Your brain is less inhibited during these periods and doesn’t hold back the ideas it generates. Analytic problems require focused attention to solve, but solutions to creative problems come when you connect the greatest number of ideas. One study discovered we solve 27.3 percent more insight problems during our non
optimal time of day, when we’re naturally more tired.
I call these time periods when we have the least energy our Creative Prime Time.
There’s no shortage of research examining when we naturally have the most energy. For most people this occurs during the late morning (around 11:00 a.m.) and midafternoon (around 2:00 or 3:00 p.m.). Our energy is typically lowest right after lunch.
Energy levels also fluctuate throughout the week: we’re typically the least engaged with our work on Mondays, when we experience the most boredom, and are the most engaged on Fridays.* Everyone is different, of course: if you’re an early bird who springs out of bed at 5:00 a.m., your prime time might fall earlier in the day, and afternoons might be the best time for creative work. Similarly, night owls may find they’re most productive when others have long since gone to bed.
A great way to work smarter is to schedule tasks that require focused attention during your BPT and tasks that require more creativity during your CPT. Block time for these tasks in your calendar.
DRINK ALCOHOL AND CAFFEINE STRATEGICALLY
As far as decreasing your inhibitions is concerned, you’re probably familiar with the effects of alcohol. Much like being tired, drinking has been shown to make people better at solving creative problems. (To test this theory, I rewrote some of this chapter while sipping vodka sodas with a lime twist. I’ll let you be the judge of whether it’s any better than the others.)
A favorite study I encountered in writing this book was one that had participants get mildly intoxicated while watching the Disney/Pixar movie Ratatouille. The researchers split participants into two groups. One group was fed a bagel, as well as multiple vodka cranberry drinks—both in quantities relative to how much each participant weighed. The subjects consumed the drinks while watching the film. The second, significantly less lucky group also watched the movie but didn’t consume any food or drinks in the process.
The study’s findings were remarkable: after watching the movie, tipsy participants solved 38 percent more creative word puzzles than the sober participants. Not only that, they solved the problems more quickly! (As you might have guessed, the drunk participants weren’t better at solving logical problems.) Again, when it comes to solving creative problems, the less control we have over our attention, the better.
This is not intended to advocate the use of alcohol, which is, of course, not without its downsides. The Ratatouille study measured performance on tasks that required pure creativity, but most tasks require a mix of creativity and focus. When it comes time to focus on something, alcohol will absolutely obliterate your productivity.
If you’re into meditation, experiment with having a drink or two before your next evening session. You’ll experience this effect firsthand: consuming alcohol makes your mind wander more often while at the same time decreasing your meta-awareness. Alcohol affects two aspects of the quality of your attention: not only will you focus for a shorter period of time, but also it will take you longer to realize that your mind has wandered.
Being under the influence also diminishes the size of your attentional space and makes it difficult to focus on pretty much anything. The more you drink, the more your mind wanders, the less awareness you have to halt it, and the smaller your attentional space becomes. It’s no wonder we remember less when we’ve had a few drinks—it’s impossible to remember what we don’t pay attention to in the first place.
In practice, alcohol is worth consuming only for very select tasks. If it’s the end of the day and you want to brainstorm, sipping a wobbly pop will help. But keep in mind that it helps precisely because it decreases how much control you have over your attention.
I view drinking alcohol as a way by which we borrow energy and happiness from the following day. Sometimes this price is worth paying—such as when you’re hanging out with friends you haven’t seen in a long time—but often it simply isn’t. If you drink alcohol, do so strategically: in those rare times when you want to let your mind roam more freely (and have nothing important planned afterward) or you want to steal some happiness from tomorrow.
Caffeine is another drug to consider consuming strategically. When it comes to managing attention, caffeine has the polar opposite effect of alcohol: while alcohol helps us scatterfocus, caffeine helps us hyperfocus.
The research is conclusive: caffeine boosts mental (and physical) performance in pretty much every measurable way:
It deepens our focus, regardless of whether a task is simple or complex, and narrows it, which makes hyperfocusing on a task easier (but scatterfocus more difficult).
It helps us persevere, especially with tasks that are long and tedious. (It boosts our determination regardless of how tired or fatigued we are.)
It improves our performance on tasks that require verbal memory, a quick reaction time, or visuospatial reasoning (e.g., putting together a jigsaw puzzle).
In general, these effects diminish after the consumption of approximately 200 milligrams of caffeine (a single cup of coffee contains around 125 milligrams). Amounts greater than 400 milligrams should be avoided, as at that amount you begin to feel more anxious, and your performance becomes impaired. Again, take this advice only if you find it holds true for you. We all react differently to caffeine. Some metabolize it quickly and have a high tolerance, and others find their entire body vibrating after just a few sips. As with most productivity advice, implementing individual tactics with an awareness of how well they actually work for you is key.
Caffeine can also boost your performance on physical work and exercise—it helps you perform in hot conditions, boosts strength-training performance, and increases your tolerance for pain during exercise.
Just like alcohol, caffeine is not without its drawbacks, even when you consume healthier caffeinated drinks that aren’t loaded with sugar, like black tea, green tea, or matcha (my personal favorite). As your body metabolizes caffeine out of your system, your energy crashes, and your productivity dips. Caffeine can also disrupt your sleep, which can make you less productive the next day.
Because of these costs, choose caffeine when you’ll actually benefit from the mental or physical performance boost. Provided it’s not too late in the day, consume a bit of caffeine the next time you’re about to hyperfocus on a task or hit the gym for a big workout.* Instead of having a cup of coffee after you awake, wait until you get to work so you’ll benefit from the boost when you work on your most productive tasks. If you have a brainstorming meeting first thing in the morning, consume caffeine after the session, keeping the walls of your attentional space low to let more ideas flow. If you have a pitch meeting, on the other hand, do the opposite.
OPEN OFFICES
I give productivity talks in many different workplaces, and over time I’ve noticed more companies adopting an open-office plan. Open offices are a mixed bag when it comes to focus and productivity.
It’s easiest to focus when we work in an environment we can control, and obviously we have less control over our environment, and therefore our attention, in an open office. Research supports this: we distract ourselves 64 percent more often in an open environment, and we’re interrupted by others more often as well. An open office can seriously undermine your productivity if you do a lot of work that requires focused attention.
Open offices do have their benefits. One is that they support working for longer on a single project before switching to another. The reason for this is interesting: while our colleagues interrupt us more in an open environment, they’re also more considerate about when they do. Because they can observe us working, they notice when we’ve reached a natural break point in our work—when we return to our desk after a meeting, at the end of a phone call, or when we stand up after completing something. In these environments we’re interrupted more often when we’re switching between tasks, so we don’t need as much time and energy to refocus.
While th
is book focuses on personal productivity, our work doesn’t exist in a vacuum: the projects on our plates are typically intertwined with the work of others. In highly collaborative work, the faster we can get information from others, and the more quickly they can get information from us, the better the collaboration, as the team will become more productive as a whole system.
The bottom line when it comes to open-office plans is that if the work you and your team does is hypercollaborative or involves a great deal of creativity and connecting ideas, an open office is probably worth its disadvantages. If your work involves a significant number of tasks that benefit from undisturbed focus, as more and more jobs seem to, an open office can be detrimental to your productivity.
If you’re a manager, consider the type of work your team does before you plan for an open office. If you do decide this design is worth the potential productivity costs, be sure to educate your employees on how to manage interruptions. One study found that after a team understood how costly interruptions were, they fell by 30 percent.
It’s also worth investigating whether most of the interruptions you (or your team) face come from a common source. For example, if you lead a group of programmers who are interrupted mostly for feature requests and questions about the product, create a tool for those outside your team to suggest new features, and produce more useful documentation, so the interruptions that do come in are less frequent and less costly. If you can’t avoid adopting an open-office plan, be sure to designate a quiet zone where employees can hyperfocus without interruption.