Managing the Productivity Paradox

ELLEN PEEBLES: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Ellen Peebles from Harvard Business Review. We’re talking today with Tony Schwartz, founder of The Energy Project, and the author of the article “The Productivity Paradox, ” featured in the June 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review. Tony is also the author of a new bestselling book, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. Hi, Tony. Thanks so much for joining us.

TONY SCHWARTZ: Thank you. Good to talk you.

ELLEN PEEBLES: Tony, you write in your book, and also in your latest HBR article, that the way we’re working isn’t working. What do you mean by “the way we’re working? ”

TONY SCHWARTZ: The way I look at it is pretty simple, Ellen, and you and I have actually talked about this now for many years together. The demand in people’s lives at every level: the physical demands, the emotional demands, the mental demands, all of the demands in people’s lives have increased exponentially over the last decade or two, and fueled, in part, by all the changes in technology that have allowed us to be on all the time. And our capacity to meet those demands doesn’t get equal attention, so more demand, the same or diminishing capacity, is a prescription for a world in which the way we’re working doesn’t work. So, it’s a demand capacity problem. We are just beginning to run on empty.

ELLEN PEEBLES: So, tell us a little bit about your concept of these renewal breaks or rituals. Can you give us, for starters, an example or two?

TONY SCHWARTZ: Sure. So, one of the core ideas in the work we do with organizations is that human beings are not meant to operate like computers, which is to say continuously, at high speeds, for long periods of time, running multiple programs at the same time. But by some blend of our own instincts and then what organizations ask us to do, we try to operate in this computer-like way. But in fact, when you look at the human physiology, you see that we’re actually designed to make waves. We’re designed to move rhythmically between spending energy and renewing energy, and every system in our body operates best when it’s doing that. Whether it’s the brain, which waves, or the heart, which also waves or pulses, or muscles, which contract and relax, and in fact, we have an internal rhythm in our body that operates 24 hours a day.

The part of that rhythm is very well known. It’s called the Circadian Rhythm, and that’s the rhythm that tells us the difference between day and night. We’re supposed to sleep at night and be awake during the day. And we sleep in these 90 minute cycles, which are called basic rest activity cycles, where you move between light sleep and deep sleep. Everybody, more or less, knows that.

What they don’t know is that that same rhythm recapitulates itself during the day, except in a waking form, so you move during the day from high arousal into a more quiet or fatigue state in 90 minute intervals, particularly if you’re pushing yourself fairly hard, as so many people in the work world are today. And so what we are talking about is aligning– teaching individuals and then organizations in terms of their practices to align– with the natural rhythms that define who we are. And that means working for periods of time, relatively short periods of time, 90 minutes to be specific, and then not going longer than that without taking some sort of renewal break to, very simply, refuel the system.

ELLEN PEEBLES: So what does that kind of renewal break look like?

TONY SCHWARTZ: Well, first of all, it doesn’t look like a 90 minute renewal break. So it’s not 90 minutes on and 90 minutes off. First of all, that wouldn’t be very functional in any organization, and second of all, it turns out that the issue is not how long you take renewal. The issue is how well you renew during whatever time you renew, very similar, by the way, to what happens in the work world, meaning the issue we believe is not how many hours you work– that’s not what determines your value– what determines your value is how well you worked during the hours you do work. So, the most efficient recovery is recovery that happens quickly. And the better you get at recovering, the more you train yourself to recover, the quicker you do recover. So what might it look like? Well, there aren’t rules about this. It really is a subjective call. And what we teach people to do is to experiment with what kind of renewal serves them best.

Here’s one that doesn’t serve people very well: doing email. That’s not a form of renewal, or if it is, it’s a very low quality form of renewal. It is changing channels if you’ve been doing something else, which is a little bit of renewal, but it’s a continued left hemisphere dominated cognitive task in most cases, and so it’s not very effective.

What is effective? Well, it could be getting up and taking a walk, particularly, going outdoors because then you get sunlight, which is a powerful source of recovery. But you also get physical movement, which is a recovery from being sedentary, and then you get the experience of changing your location, which is also helpful. Listening to music, because that will shift your brain from a verbal mode to a visual or a musical, an auditory mode. Making a phone call to a loved one in the afternoon– let’s say you have young kids and they come home from school at 3 o’clock or 4 o’clock, and you take a time where you’re going to stop for five minutes and just very intentionally focus on that part of your life with all of your energy, because it’s a source of emotional renewal. So there are a variety of ways you can renew, but the critical issue is that you do regularly refuel your tank, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally throughout the day.

ELLEN PEEBLES: Maybe to my boss it looks like I’m goofing off.

TONY SCHWARTZ: Of course that’s a problem, and the piece that I’ve written in the June issue of HBR about Sony and what they’ve done with the work that we’ve taught them, is the answer to that question you’re just raising. When we first started going into companies, indeed, when I wrote the very first piece I did for HBR back in 2000, we really focused on what are the things we teach individuals to manage themselves better? And over the years, we began to see that we would get individuals incredibly excited about being able to take more control of their life, to be more productive and more satisfied, and then they’d leave us, they’d go back into organizations and those organizations would, effectively, shut them down, because we hadn’t changed the organization. We’d simply changed the intention of some individuals.

So, when we went into Sony, what we did was we worked at two parallel levels. We worked with individuals, but we also worked with the most senior leaders– starting with the CEOs, there are co-CEOs there, and their senior team– to really address what are the organizational policies and practices and assumptions and cultural messages that influence how people work? And one of the critical things was to begin to normalize or socialize the idea that renewal is something that, when it’s done intentionally, when it’s done effectively, serves performance productivity.

One other thought about that, because it’s so easy for people to reject this idea if they think that all it’s about is, as you said, oh that guy’s just slacking. That guy’s really not getting his work done. The issue here is not to be adding renewal into people’s lives. That’s only half the equation. What the research suggests is that these 90 minute periods during the day, which are called Ultradian Rhythms, that we can concentrate at the highest level for only that period of time, and then the body needs a rest. So, the principle that grows out of that and that’s in the research is that we are best, we are most productive, most sustainable, and most satisfied when we move between periods of intense focus– ideally uninterrupted focus– for periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then recover. Intense work, deep recovery. That’s the secret to really great sustainable performance.

ELLEN PEEBLES: OK. But even if you have your boss’s OK and they’ve bought into the concept, I can imagine listening to this and saying I don’t have time. I’ve got deadlines.

TONY SCHWARTZ: Absolutely. Well, we have two reactions, Ellen, when we first introduce this to people. The first one is oh my gosh, this makes total sense. Of course. This is so obvious. Why wouldn’t it make sense that you had to offset expending energy with recovering energy? And then the second one is, but not when I’m busy. Right? But here’s the irony or the unexpected fact of it.

If you imagine something like the Indianapolis 500, where the assumption, on it’s face, is that the driver who wins that race is the one who drives the fastest for the longest, the most continuously, over 500 miles. It turns out that isn’t the driver who wins. The driver who wins is the driver who does what I just said when he or she is actually racing, and then is most effective and efficient in recovery when they’re in the pit stop. And what do they do in the pit stop? Well, they recover, they renew, they refuel, they have the tires changed, they fill the tank with gas, and they do this at very frequent intervals, far more frequent than we would do if we were driving. Why do they do it so frequently? Because the higher the performance demand, the deeper the need for renewal and recovery. And, of course, that’s counter-intuitive because most of us, when we have a high demand, what we’re instinctively going to do is hunker down, not recognizing that we’re losing focus, that we’re not thinking as freely and as creatively, that we may not, in a relationship with another person, be as open as we get more tired.

When I wrote this new book, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, what I did was I wrote in three 90 minute Ultradian sprints each day. I started at 7:00 in the morning. I worked till 8:30 uninterrupted, and then I had breakfast. Then I worked from 9:00 till 10:30. I went out and took a run. Then I worked from 11:00-11:15 till 12:30 or 12:45 and that was it for the day. I worked three 90 minute periods of work, a total of four and a half hours. Now, why am I telling you this? Because I wrote the book in six months. I’d written four previous books and in every single case, I’d sat at my desk, in some form or another, for 12 hours. And I’d never written one of those books in less than a year. So, to your point, when you are really working and then taking recovery, so that you’re capable of then taking another sprint, you actually get much more done in less time. And that’s what makes this so powerful, ultimately.

ELLEN PEEBLES: Well, you anticipated my question, which was going to be do you practice what you preach? But, I’m curious about sustainability. The Indy 500 drivers keep it up for the course of the race, and you kept it up for the course of the book. But isn’t it easy to just sort of say OK, I’m going to take a walk every day at 3:00, and you do it for a couple days and then it’s easy to just sort of say, maybe tomorrow?

TONY SCHWARTZ: Yes, because there are all kinds of defaults we do. And when the feeling of urgency stands before us, as it does in almost all of our lives much of the time, we often default to the most expedient behavior. So yeah, I’m not going to do my walk today. I’m not going to listen to my music today, because I got to get something done. And it’s almost a primitive reflex. That’s why we teach something that we call rituals.

So, we over-value our will and discipline. Human beings over-value their will and discipline, or put another way, we over-value the power of our prefrontal cortex to help us make decisions that stick. Because the fact is that we have one reservoir of will and discipline, meaning anything we use it on burns down that reservoir, and so, for example, if you were trying to diet and you walk past a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, once you’ve decided to diet, you’d walked by that cookie and would probably get past it without much problem. But if you kept walking by it three or four times, your will and discipline would burn down, and at a certain point, you’d grab the cookie and stuff it down your throat.

The alternative to that is to build behaviors in a way that is so specific in the timing and so precise in the behavior itself, that by repeating it over time, it becomes automatic and you no longer think about it. It simply happens. All of us have these rituals. The coffee in the morning, you brush your teeth at night. We all have them, but most of us are not aware that we can build these in intentional ways in any part of our lives, including how we work, even when it means that we’re going to introduce behaviors that otherwise would be very hard to sustain. So, what we found that we learned this from athletes, who are geniuses around rituals– so, by the way, are many different kinds of artists— is that when we teach a person to put a ritual in to place, there comes a point where they move from pushing themselves toward a behavior, which burns down that reservoir, to feeling pulled to the behavior. So, anyone listening to this, Ellen, for example, who has a regular workout routine knows what I mean. It’s hard to work out. It’s hard to go take a run or to do weights. And it means pushing yourself into a zone of discomfort while you’re doing it, if you’re going to get value from it. But the value you get from it once you’ve ritualized it, is it enough to make you feel pulled to it, so long as you’ve ritualized it. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to introduce these behaviors in ways that people can ritualize.

ELLEN PEEBLES: Thanks again Tony, and congratulations on the success of your book.

TONY SCHWARTZ: Thank you.

ELLEN PEEBLES: Once again, Tony’s article is “The Productivity Paradox” published in the June issue of Harvard Business Review. For more, go to hbr.org or follow us on Twitter @HarvardBiz.