If you’re an educator, know that all times are not created equal:.
High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.
Sales and theater have much in common. Both take guts. Salespeople pick up the phone and call strangers; actors walk onto the stage in front of them. Both invite rejection – for salespeople, slammed doors, ignored calls, and a pile of nos; for actors, a failed audition, an unresponsive audience, a scathing review. And both have evolved along comparable trajectories.
The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive – our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to make a contribution.
The best endings don’t leave us happy. Instead, they produce something richer – a rush of unexpected insight, a fleeting moment of transcendence, the possibility that by discarding what we wanted we’ve gotten what we need.
E-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss, according to research by Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist who is now a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.1.
So get rid of the unnecessary obligations, time-wasting distractions, and useless burdens that stand in your way.
Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.
In a world where anybody can find anything with just a few keystrokes, intermediaries like salespeople are superfluous. They merely muck up the gears of commerce and make transactions slower and more expensive.
I call time-outs like these “vigilance breaks” – brief pauses before high-stakes encounters to review instructions and guard against error.
The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise – and employees’ spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE’s staunchest advocates.
Breaks are not a sign of sloth but a sign of strength.
The problem is that our corporate, government, and education cultures are configured for the 75 or 80 percent of people who are larks or third birds. Owls are like left-handers in a right-handed world – forced to use scissors and writing desks and catcher’s mitts designed for others. How they respond is the final piece of the puzzle in divining the rhythms of the day.
Each of us has a “chronotype” – a personal pattern of circadian rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology.
We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what.
Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.” – TWYLA THARP.
If you believed in the “mediocrity of the masses,” as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve.
Say it with me now, brothers and sisters: Lunch is the most important meal.
Jobs that offer autonomy but little challenge bore us.
If you’ve got an extra minute left, send someone – anyone – a thank-you e-mail.