Monday, February 11, 2013

Relax, you'll be more productive - by Tony Schwartz

Renewal Article from NY Times

I have chosen specific parts of the article and copied them here. If you'd like, email me and I will send you a link to the article itself. Not much commentary from me here, just what Tony has written and which makes complete sense to me.

Here it is..........


"A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

Although many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy.

This impacts two of the three work areas of my life: Leadership consulting for The Ariel Group and T'ai Chi (I already put these principles in place in my performing world)

Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work.

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity

As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest.

Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.

The power of renewal was so compelling to me that I’ve created a business around it that helps a range of companies including Google, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, the Los Angeles Police Department, Cleveland Clinic and Genentech.
Our own offices are a laboratory for the principles we teach. Renewal is central to how we work. We dedicated space to a “renewal” room in which employees can nap, meditate or relax. "