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How can you help your employees enjoy their jobs again? Bruce Daisley, author of Eat Sleep Work Repeat, is here to give us practical strategies on reinvigorating your workplace. Discover the importance of belongingness, even though it’s #3 on Maslow’s Hierarchy, why you should encourage laughter in meetings, and why you should reimagine your workplace norms.
About
Get the book, Eat Sleep Work Repeat, from Amazon here:
Website: EatSleepWorkRepeat.com/
Bio: Bruce Daisley is obsessed with making work better. He’s dedicated his last few years to chatting to the leading experts in workplace culture – and using evidence to find a way to improving it. As European Vice-President for Twitter and host of the UK’s number one business podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat he is in the center of the debate about the way work and communication is evolving. Daisley has been one of the Evening Standard’s 1,000 Most Influential Londoners for five years and is one of Debrett’s 500 Most Influential People in Britain. A leading UK magazine asserted that Daisley is ‘one of the most talented people in media’
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Transcript
This transcript is unedited.
Peter:
How does a lunch break spark a burst of productivity? Can a team’s performance be improved simply by moving the location of the coffee maker? Why are meetings so often a waste of time? And how can a walking meeting actually get decisions made? As an executive with decades of management experience at top Silicon Valley companies, including YouTube, Google, and Twitter, Bruce Desley has given a lot of thought to what makes a workplace productive and what factors can improve the workplace to benefit a company’s employees, customers, and bottom line in this book, it’s his w book. He shares what he’s discovered often practical, often counterintuitive insights and solutions for reinvigorating work to give us more meaning, productivity and joy at the office. A Gallup survey of global workers revealed shocking news. Only 13% of employees are engaged in their jobs. And you’ve heard me talk about that in the show and also sort of dispute some of the methodology around that. The question of really is, are only 13% of employees engaged?
Peter:
I tend to think it’s a lot higher in my experience. And, and you know, you’ve heard me talk about why. So we’ll talk about this with Bruce and, and assuming that more people can be engaged than are, it means that employees are burnt out and unhappy. And that’s a reality for a vast majority of workers. Managers and employees themselves can make work better. That’s the promise underneath that underlies this book that Bruce has just written, eat, sleep, work, repeat, which shows them how to engage more deeply and to have worked, not suck offering more than two dozen research backed user-friendly strategies, including going to lunch and a tea break, which is very appropriate since Bruce is a Brit and speaking to us from London conducting a premortem and, and, and other things that we’ll be talking about him I’m talking about with him today in the podcast.
Peter:
So I also want to tell you that Bruce is the European vice president for Twitter and he also is the host of a tough business podcast. Eat, sleep, work, repeat. So Bruce comes to us not just as a writer and a thinker, but a practitioner as a leader, putting these things into practice at Twitter. So let’s welcome Bruce dazedly, welcome to the Bregman leadership podcast.
Bruce:
Hello there. Thank you for having me.
Peter:
So you know, you, you start part one of this book with the subtitles 12 performance enhancing actions to make work less awful. And you know, I, I mentioned here the, the, you know, I sort of said how to make work suck less, but I tend to bristle a little bit at the pessimism of that sentence. Like, is work really awful? I mean, are we starting from this place of, you know, work is awful and we’ve just got to minimize the awfulness of it. Tell me, give me your thinking about this.
Bruce:
Yeah, I mean, for me work is sometimes it can feel a bit like a night out with your partner when you’re tired and no one wants to admit they’re tired, they want to make out. We’re having fun and, and you know, there’s, there’s always been a degree of performance to work. I always like to think when we used to phone my mum at her work, she used to have a phone voice that was considerably more refined than the voice she used on us. So there was always a degree of performance. We’ve always made out that we’re a slightly better version of ourselves at work. But this is a strange thing going on right now where it’s not for, for no reason that people are talking about a burnout epidemic. People are talking about something being a limit being passed where more and more of us are feeling frazzled, worn out, just left a little bit empty by our jobs.
Bruce:
And I don’t think that’s exclusive to lower States as workers, people earlier in their career. I think also a lot of bosses are feeling that as well. So my feeling was, look, I witnessed this at close hand. I worked in very fast moving environments where I was witnessing workers who filled with, you know, we often tell ourselves that the secret of good work is that people feel a sense of purpose, a sense of mission, and always seeing people around me who were imbued with a strong sense of mission and yet there was something going wrong in them. They just felt overwhelmed and no longer able to function in the imaginative, creative and sort of energy filled way that they used to want to. Really?
Peter:
Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense to me. So it’s not necessarily that people are disengaged. They actually might be hyper engaged, but they’re so overwhelmed or they’re working so hard on what they care about that the they get burnt out or that the return isn’t there because other people aren’t necessarily engaged with the same things they’re engaged with and so they tend to work across purposes to others. But that’s, that’s the struggle that I’m seeing that it sounds like you’re saying that you’re seeing that as well.
Bruce:
Yeah, precisely. And you know, repeated. We’ve, we’ve all been in situations where would we know what we would do if it was up to us and yet through a combination of corporate rules, red tape, a boss that doesn’t want to upset anything. We find ourselves in a situation where we know what we’d love to do. We, we, we innately, as human beings, we love working. We love having a sense that we can accomplish something through our work, but sometimes we’re not necessarily disengaged with the task we’ve been charged with doing, but we just feel overwhelmed and not able to bring as much energy to the job as we want. And I think that was my start point. I was observing people with me who may be one in the motivated positive state that they’d been six months, 12 months, two years before. And I sat there scratching my head thinking, well, you know, I know if I walk in and I start lecturing them on feeling the purpose and making the, the, the mission of their job more relevant, they would’ve looked at me like I was speaking. I was, I was trying to in magical spells and my feeling was I needed to try and really just see the state that people were in. And I sat about thinking, what’s the way, you know, as a leader. But I think also as a participant, what’s the way that I can get this team back to enjoying their jobs again.
Peter:
You know, it sort of reminds me of Maslow’s hierarchy, which is sort of like if you’re not dealing with the basic fundamental issues of safety and security or you know, warmth and, and you’re well fed and you’re then, then you’re not going to be able to self-actualize. You’re not going to be able to do the more engaging work. And so just the fact that you’ve, you know how you’ve titled this book eat, sleep, work, you’re, you’re really at that part of the Maslow hierarchy that you’re basically saying, you know, we, we, we talk a good game about the sophistication of leadership and everything that we’re trying to do. But if we’re not taking basic care of ourselves and we’re not working together in basic ways that reinforce the foundation of how we can, you know, exist in healthy ways in society and at our workplaces, then you know, all that other stuff is wasted. Cause we’ll just be burnt out.
Bruce:
And, and exactly that. And here’s one fascinating thing, Peter. I, I discovered in my work that we, we have this Maslow’s hierarchy of needs very strongly established in our minds. But here’s one of the strange things that we often don’t know about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that actually when anyone has looked into it, that the, the two most important elements of Maslow’s hierarchy of food and shelter, but when anyone has done any analysis, they found that the belongingness that is meant to be the next stage up is as important as food and shelter. And this I think is one of the fundamental truths that we often neglect about work. We hear things like the Netflix culture document, Reed Hastings in that says that it’s a team, not a family, meaning you shouldn’t feel the sense of companion that love you. You shouldn’t feel the sense of a bond with these people.
Bruce:
These are colleagues, nothing more. In fact, when we look into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, everyone, this one academic paper that for me is, it’s probably got as many as many citations is any paper I’ve ever seen by two guys, Mark Leary and Roy Baumeister and they said they couldn’t differentiate any difference between the need for food, shelter and belongingness, right? That that I think, yeah, it is because look, let me give you this, a remarkable story. Goes back to Frederick the second Holy Roman emperor. No one has quoted a Holy Roman Roman emperor on your podcast before. But he was a man ahead of his time and he did a lot of experiments. He had one experiment where he sent he gave two villages a hearty meal. He sent one of them out on an evenings hunting expedition. He sent the other one to bed cause he wanted to know ahead of his time eight centuries ago, which one was going to digest more of their food.
Bruce:
The only way to discover, unfortunately at the time was to kill them. Both things cut them open and dissemble them and have a lot. So he was fascinated by another one of his experiments was that he was convinced human beings would speak their own native language if the tutors in his local village weren’t teaching them German. So he took some babies from their mums and he gave them at birth to the midwives that he had and he instructed the midwives, don’t feed them, don’t look at them, don’t talk to them. And here’s what happened. All of the babies died. Why? Because belongingness is as important as food and shelter when it comes then to the workplace. We often imagine this future of work, which has lots of us dialing in from laptops and we might be on a Lake somewhere. We might be sitting at a beach cabin because we imagined that work is, is a thing we do rather than the place we go. And what we miss with that is there seems to be really strong evidence that human being star pretty quickly to feel like something’s missing. That, that, that embarrassing thing of needing to be near other human beings seems to provide far more of our energy and our sense of being a human than we could possibly imagine.
Peter:
So interesting and very compelling and true in my experience. And you know, I think of Susan Cain and her work on introversion and I, and I sort of wonder about that because you know, as an introvert you need to belong as much as an extrovert. You just might do it in, in a different, you know, in a quieter sort of way. I do think it’s an, I want to go through these the, the recharge, sink and buzz, right? Th the, the way you break up the book, when I think about the recharge piece, a lot of it is, and I might be getting this wrong, but it’s a little bit withdrawing from other people like you, you know, like, and, and, and it’s probably that I’m guessing, you know, because the next one is like ways to make teams closer when, when you’re thinking about sync, but in, in a way you need to inhale and exhale. You need both. You need to like and know that you belong. And from that, that I guess, gives you the confidence to be able to withdraw and have the space that you need for yourself so that you’re not getting burnt out. Am I thinking about this correctly?
Bruce:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Exactly right. A lot of us find one of the biggest pieces of work ever conducted, asking people what is a good day at work. And of course the results of all these things are always self-evident. But the biggest piece of work conducted as people a good what was a good day at work and people said it was when they made progress in something meaningful, very simple, very simple. And yet when we look at the, the average working day of anyone who might work with us or the average working day of, of new starters, the book’s very much designed for people in their twenties, thirties maybe getting going in their careers. And when you ask those people, they describe a life beset with interruptions where meetings are only punctuated so they can go in and tackle the, the tsunami of emails that’s arrived on, on, on their computers.
Bruce:
And we struggled to get things done. And that’s one of the reasons why people feel overwhelmed. They feel like they can’t get anything done at work because of the meetings, interruptions and emails. They often find themselves sitting on their couch at home, swiping away emails, responding to Slack messages while they’re meant to be watching a Netflix show. And w we find that work surrounding us all the time. My feeling was there was, I’ll give you one example. I went into a nonprofit recently, so I went through a lunchtime talking to nonprofit and the nonprofit said, you know, we’ve tried to fix the culture around here. We invited everyone to a three hour meeting and no one came. And I thought that’s, that’s the classic example. We, we often think we’re going to fix the workplace culture by adding more to the demands that we’re imposing on our workers.
Peter:
Okay, great. So let’s go take us through these three big buckets and then we can dive to do a little bit of a deep dive into some of the sort of specific tactical behaviors and suggestions and tips that you give. Recharge, sync and buzz.
Bruce:
Yeah. So recharge is very much aimed at before we set about trying to improve our teams, let’s get ourselves back on a, a good, a good firm basis. So some of them are as simple as taking a lunch break. Most of us are familiar now with the, the tradition of eating lunch, Al Desco and we saw all, we, we find ourselves pecking emails a while where we’re, we have a sandwich in hand. And one of the things that you discover when you look into the research for taking a lunch break is that it often improves people’s energy levels at weekends. Maybe obvious, but most of us feel that we, we work through lunch so that we can leave on time. And actually what we find is that we were putting our self in a state of exhaustion. So these interventions that the I’ve found I often teams say we’re trying a monk mode morning or where where we’re working, we’re trying walking meetings.
Bruce:
And so there’s just very simple interventions. Second section of the book is all about building team sync. And I think it’s in recognition of, of what I said previously, there is something that is almost animalistic that when we feel connected to the people around us, it seems to enhance the experience at work. So this part of the book is really, if you’re in a team and you might be in a team of three people or 20 people, but what can you do to try and improve your team culture? Normally what we find is that you can have, you can have one team that sits next to another team in a workspace and yet their teams can be completely different from each other. Often good culture, good working culture exists at a team level. And I think this is where any reader has got the opportunity to actually improve their work life because bringing the, the way that I’ve set about doing this, these 30 interventions, but you could copy one of these darks, one of these, bring these to your boss, bring it to your team off site and say, Oh guys, I wonder if we could guys and girls, I wonder if we could talk about maybe trying something new here.
Bruce:
And these are just ways to try and improve the dynamic in your team. Whether it’s creating a norm that you all agree you’re going to stay off weekend emails or if you’re just going to try and stage interventions that maybe bring a bit more laughter to your workspace. I think these just to try and to improve teams and then the final state is really just trying to take it to the next stage. So this is all about achieving sort of an elevated bus state. When when people report they’re talking about their favorite jobs, they’ll often say there was a real bus to it. And the incredible thing is that one of the people I spent time talking to had actually gone and investigate that had introduced some people meters that tracked workers in a, in a workspace. And they agreed that actually you could measure when there was a good workplace culture. Here’s what they said. They, they staged this incredible intervention where they put almost in the manner of when we watch sports games, we watch where the players are in the field and someone staged an intervention, tracking workers in offices and he said the thing that seems to produce the most productive environments is face to face conversation. But strangely, that doesn’t always happen when you go to an open plan and open office. So it was just an interesting set of interventions that any, any manager or any worker can bring to their team.
Peter:
Okay. So let’s get real. Let’s get concrete in some of these because I think that’s the challenge. And the interesting part, which is the implementation. And you know, we’ve, we’ve, I’ve talked to a tremendous number of people about this idea of Sabbath and yet very few people actually ended up doing it. So what is the difference between a good idea, which is, you know, everybody will admit that they’re far, far more addicted to their technology than they should be, or then it’s healthy for them. And yet I don’t know anybody except for observant Jews that I know who, you know, really take a Sabbath and don’t touch electricity. And so they don’t use their electronics. I don’t know anybody else who’s very successful at taking a digital Sabbath. And that’s one of the suggestions. That’s a recharge number 10. So I’m curious what you’ve learned about this that can help people do it.
Bruce:
And I think my feeling there is that I very much believe in a no fly zone for emails at the weekend rather than completely abandoning gas, social media behaviors or, or staying away from anything screen-based. I’m, I’m very much of the opinion though, that when, when we look into workspaces that see employees in a state of burnout, they often report that they, they feel a pressure to, a pressure to say connected to their email for 70 or 80 hours a week and it’s no, Whoa. It’s no wonder then if we’re giving that mental availability to our work that we feel we can never fully escape it. So I know that there have been people who really have a strongly espoused digital Sabbaths in there in the last year or so. But this is very much trying to establish a no fly zone for emails rather than anything too onerous.
Bruce:
And I think that’s possible. My feeling geese about emails, it’s often about creating norms where everyone can comply with those things. In the, in, in my work at Twitter, there’s often, you know, when new people start, you find that people often will go into the norms of their previous company. They’ll send emails because that’s what happened at the old space. And we almost have taken it upon ourselves to say, okay, well look, let’s police this. Let’s, you know, you send a gentle note to someone, Hey, I wonder if you could go easy on the weekend emails and, and just try and establish new norms. They’ve not always been the case. Sometimes, you know, in difficult times. Everyone I think deliberately gives themselves permissions to move out of it. But in, in the normal order of business, staying off email seems to be a really healthy thing to do. At the weekend
Peter:
And you’ve talked about your process around that in terms of defining your norms. Because if you define the norms for the business or the teams or the company, then it’s easier to follow them.
Bruce:
Yeah, exactly. That. And look, you know, it definitely helps when you’ve got models that bosses that model the same behavior because ultimately, you know, there’s research that says every hour a boss is emailing the weekend, each of their team members will email for 15 minutes as well. So effectively that that were multiplies and, and, and produces more work. So, you know, normally when you ask a boss, you say to them, Hey, why have you been emailing people on Sunday? And they’ll say quite quite modestly. They’ll say, look, you know, I didn’t intend to force anyone else to check email. I was just clearing my inbox. Completely understandable. But as soon as they discover, okay, the moment you do that, you create this virality, this effect that everyone wants to, to start emailing at the weekend. The work becomes performative. And the evidence that we can find and it’s increasingly documented by by psychology, is that when we don’t have a good downtime, it T it tends to be in service of us feeling overwhelmed by our work and not necessarily bringing the freshness to our thinking that we’d like.
Peter:
How do we get a good night’s sleep if it seems to me like getting a good night’s sleep is a lagging indicator of a life well lived. And if you’re stressed and overwhelmed and there’s lots of other things going on that it becomes much harder to get a good night’s sleep. Any tips?
Bruce:
Yeah. look, you know there’s a strange thing though, is that you know, Matthew, Matthew Walker’s why we sleep. He, he talks at great length about if, if someone told you that they had a, a new intervention that was going to reduce our chance of getting degenerative brain disease, reduce our chance of getting a common cold, improve our memory, made us more attractive. W we’d be asking how much it costs and the fact it’s so gloriously enjoyable and free. It seems strange that we fight so much against it. I think, you know, the, the critical thing of all of these interventions for me was trying to create norms in a workplace where we respect the fact that there seems to be good evidence that working longer and longer doesn’t lead to us producing our best work. So how would that inform a workplace culture?
Bruce:
Well, we enacted something very simple, which is that when anyone is up for promotion, when anyone is being considered for promotion, if their boss says in their defense, if their boss makes the case that Jerry’s always at the office at 8:00 PM the, you know, Fiona works all weekend, that we would say actually, look, those things no longer counts towards our, our justification for promotion. We want to reward people who, yeah, they’re showing dedication, but they’re not just putting in performative long hours. And I think, look, you know, there’s nothing in a book that can mandate someone to get a good night’s sleep. You can’t just approve those things. But I think if you can create a context where people feel that their, their workspace is trying to encourage them to do their best work rather than their most work, then it can create that where people feel able to try and get a good night’s sleep.
Peter:
You you talk about you actually shared this great story and I’m now moving into the the next section sink. You know, the eight fixes to make teams closer of a challenge devised by Palm pilot designer Peter Skillman, where he was boring how groups solve problems. And he gave them a bunch of materials, 20 pieces of dry spaghetti, a yard of sticky tape, a yard of string and one marshmallow. And, and had the people put them in groups and had them build this tallest structures that they could. The punchline is that the people who did the worst at this were business school students and the people who did the best at it were preschoolers. Could you talk about this and you know, how do we change the kinds of cultures that shift preschoolers into business school students?
Bruce:
Absolutely. Well, look, here’s the, the intriguing thing about that. So it’s worth saying that the best performers above all were actually structural engineers and thank goodness for that. But aside from the structural engineers, yeah, the best performing were preschool children. But what happens when you watch videotape, when you watch clips of these children doing it, here’s what happens is that they, there are often nonverbal, they’re very focused on experimentation. They set about the task immediately. It’s, it’s very simple when you watch the business school students, that is something very different happened. What they do is they, they set about thinking about the narrative that’s going to evolve from this. And, and so many of us think about stories and what our stories are and the narrative, and they set about thinking how, what will their story be? Will they be the project leader who led the team to victory?
Bruce:
Will they be the chief engineer who came up with a creative idea? And so as a consequence, what you observe is that in contrast to the preschoolers who just set about nonverbally jabbing things and, and shoving spaghetti into the the marshmallow, they these people start trying to think about, I guess to some extent the status, managing the status of sort of the people in the, in the in the experiment. And I think we can learn a lot about how meetings tend to be, most of us find ourselves in this weird situation that I always think, I mean, what would the 10 year old version of ourselves make of the modern world? Number one, that’d be pretty blown away by our phones. We get it. They’ve like, you know, this sort of magical device. But the second thing I think they’d be consumed with is the amount of time we each spend every week sitting in meetings not paying attention.
Bruce:
It’s just like this, this catastrophic loss of human attention and creativity and cognition. Cause we’re all sitting waiting for a department that we couldn’t really identify half of the people in it to finish talking about their part of the business. Here’s the strange thing that we were sort of allowing this destruction of, of human capability in meetings. And I think to a large extent it’s about the same thing that we observe in this, this challenge where they construct the structure to bear the weight of the marshmallow marshmallow challenge. It’s we’re, we’re sort of observing the same sort of thing. It’s about teams managing their status. It’s about leaders projecting that they’re leaders and actually probably work is do a bit of honesty. Where would you an honesty update really where we actually start saying to ourselves, look, these meetings, I think Harvard business review suggests the average executive spends 23 hours a week in meetings. So if we’re spending 23 hours a week in meetings, if we’re spending a day a week doing anything, we’d want to know what the output of it of it was and the fact that most of us would say at the end of the week, yeah, our meetings kind of kicked the can along the road, but we didn’t actually accomplish something. And so through that marshmallow challenge where I think we can just through the sort of the metaphor, it helps us create, we can see some of the reasons why meetings are a bad thing.
Peter:
You talk about laughing and the importance of laughing, which is really great advice. I’m curious how you catalyze it and does even asking that question work against the goal. Like how do you create more laughter in a team or in a workplace? And certainly I’m guessing not at the expense of other people on the team.
Bruce:
Yeah. So here’s this. The reason why this one felt so close to my heart and you know, and laughter features in the book a number of times is because I have witnessed that thing that I think, you know, in hindsight I can empathize with where it came from, but I ever witnessed that thing where a boss came and told us, now he’s not the time to be seen laughing. You know, results weren’t going well. Us creasing up at our desks wouldn’t seem like good optics on a situation. And I found myself fascinated with that because I’ve always taken that to be the lesson that we’re meant to learn, that w that we don’t laugh in bad times. And when you look into it, there’s a wonderful guy who’s the world’s leading laughter researcher, a guy called professor Robert [inaudible]. Fascinating guy. He told me that there’s somewhere in the region of 70,000 papers written on stress and anxiety and there’s about a hundred papers written on laughter.
Bruce:
Why? Because scientists regard it as a little bit frivolous to talk about laughter. But the strange thingies he describes, he said he went round off your seats to try and understand where people laughed because he originally he’d, he’d brought people in to watch comedy videos, set them down together. He said, people don’t, don’t laugh in laboratory conditions. So he felt like I need to go out and observe when they do laugh. And the strange thing he discovered was that people generally laugh in office, in offices at things that aren’t funny. They’re, he’ll go past and someone will say, well, it’s, it’s Sarah’s turn. It’s eight well asks on you about that. There’ll be saying things that to an outside observer are not funny. And he’s, he said that what we find is that the more and more we look at laughter, we observe that laughter is like an impoverished human bird song.
Bruce:
That’s the way he describes it. And impoverished human Birdsong, meaning that birds sing to connect themselves to each other. And he said, human beings love to connect themselves with each other. It’s really interesting. Soon as you recognize that, you’ll notice you love far more around your friends. You love far more around family. You’ll find scenarios where you walk into rooms and they’re lit up with laughter. Why? Because humans do it to connect with how fascinating. Another thing that you’ll just come back is there’s there’s a wonderful writer, a writer called Lawrence Gonzalvez [inaudible] who studied survivors. So these are people that after a, a plane crushes in the undies, three months later, one person emerges from the jungle or from the terrain or a boat gets lost in this Pacific ocean and two months later someone turns up wash the shore. And when they chat to survivors, one of the things that often is a pattern of behavior that’s observed in the people who survive is they often say, you know, I laughed every day at what ridiculous situation I was in.
Bruce:
So it’s not necessarily these survival experts. You don’t need to be bad grills to survive. Actually, it seems that humor, laughter seems to just act as a remarkable coping mechanism, right? So we’ve got some laughter bonds us together. Laughter is an incredible coping mechanism, right? To some extent, seems like laughter’s the sort of thing we should encourage in offices. And so Robert vine says, what can any of us do? And he says, maybe think about creating situations that encourage laughter. Do you have a team meeting where you know, you set about celebrating a funny thing that happened that week. Normally workplaces they, they seem to be built around what, what that workspace seems to Dane as as important. So if you stand up and you talk about the numbers every Monday, sure enough people think the numbers Matt around here, if you make sure that in the space of your week, whether it’s, you know, it might be birthday speechies leaving speeches, it might be anniversaries of people being at the company. If humorous part of those speeches, then you demonstrate that that bond that laughter produces actually act is in service of building team cohesion.
Peter:
Got it. It’s it’s, it’s really interesting and I also think that, you know, one of the challenges is we’re so distracted, it’s hard to laugh when your mind is on three other things. If you’re only partially there, it becomes really hard to laugh.
Bruce:
Yeah, precisely. I think, you know, doing fewer things back to that research that said a good day at work is when you’ve made progress in something meaningful. Right? So what can you do? Maybe give yourself sat back doing taking an hour every morning to try and get your most important thing done. And what you find when you do that is firstly your cognition is really a premium first thing in the morning. It’s a w hospitals make four times as many errors at 4:00 PM as they do at 9:00 AM. Why? Cause people are just more alert. They’re more, they’re more aware. So if you can use that really powerful first hour of the day to try and get some good work done, you often feel, I’ve had a good day today before you, even before you even sat upon the rest of your emails and meetings,
Peter:
We’ve been talking with Bruce dazedly. His book is eat, sleep, work, repeat 30 hacks, bringing joy to your job for this. It’s been really delightful to have you on. You gave us some really specific tips. There’s a lot more in the book. There’s 30 hacks as he says in the book that are sort of worth checking out and incorporating into your life and to sort of do your own research and watch, you know, how, how making some of these very direct changes, you know, can you laugh more these kinds of things and how they affect your life. Bruce, so such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Bruce:
I’m so grateful. Thank you. Wonderful to chat to you.