This is a continuation of the first part of my review for the book Stolen Focus.
5. The Standard 40-hour Work Week Doesn’t Promote Focus
In Stolen Focus, Johann provides an excellent example of a New Zealand company, Perpetual Guardian. This company trialed a four-day work week while upholding the same five-day paycheck. The employees were challenged to be as productive in 4 days as their usual 5-day week. Auckland University of Technology oversaw this experiment before, during, and after.
Satisfactory work-life balance increased from 54% to 78% among the workforce. Employees became more innovative and efficient with their tasks. They cut out distractions. The stress among staff decreased. And overall, the company achieved more per week than in a 5-day work week.
In Johann’s book, he references other successes with shorter working hours and hence, enhanced productivity:
“In 1920s Britain, W. G. Kellogg—the manufacturer of cereals—cut his staff from an eight-hour day to a six-hour day, and workplace accidents (a good measure of attention) fell by 41 percent.
In 2019 in Japan, Microsoft moved to a four-day week, and they reported a 40 percent improvement in productivity.
In Gothenberg in Sweden, around the same time, a care home for elderly people went from an eight-hour day to a six-hour day with no loss of pay, and as a result, their workers slept more, experienced less stress, and took less time off sick.
In the same city, Toyota cut two hours per day off the workweek, and it turned out their mechanics produced 114 percent of what they had before, and profits went up by 25 percent.”
I don’t find these results surprising. Shorter work days or shorter work weeks incentivize efficiency, innovation, and focus, as well as giving employees a better work-life balance. This follows Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time needed to complete it. Andrew Barnes, the founder of Perpetual Guardian, said, “If you can have parents spending more time with their children, how is that a bad thing?”.
6. Mind Wandering is Great for Creativity and Problem Solving
When I think of mind wandering, I think of teachers in school shunning kids who are lost in thought while staring out a window. I also think of the typical attitude in workplaces – if you’re not actively working on a specific task, then you’re not being productive.
But we need to rethink what mind wandering is. When we let our mind wander, the book reveals that our brains don’t shut off; instead, a new network of neurons lights up in activity, as our brain is still very active. MRI scans validate this. This network that turns on is called the default mode network (DMN).
When you’re not “working” on a task, your brain is still “working” very much in the background. The DMN enhances our ability to produce solutions to problems. It allows big-picture realizations and enhances our ability to link concepts and ideas. So, we can think of mind wandering as another beneficial form of attention, just like focusing on something specific is beneficial.
As Hari says in his book:
“I realized that letting your mind wander is not a crumbling of attention, but in fact a crucial form of attention in its own right. It is when you let your mind drift away from your immediate surroundings that it starts to think over the past, and starts to game out the future, and makes connections between different things you have learned.”