Surprising Truths About Margin & Productivity
Why less might be more, margin is the unlikely hero, and energy is everything
SUMMARY: When we want more productivity, more employee buy-in, more results, and more revenue, we think we need to give more of ourselves—more time, more effort, more meetings, more emails, more programs. The counterintuitive truth is that less can very often be more. And yet, while role-modeling scaling back time spent is critical as a leader, it’s not nearly as important as facilitating a culture where people can bring their greatest energy. This is how productivity truly soars—without burnout.
Chris lived in Mountain View, CA, with a high-powered job in tech—a role he stretched to get and felt like he had to keep stretching to retain. He worked 14-hour days and by the time he lifted out of his work to see his wife and three young daughters, he was still tethered to his phone—physically present but mentally not. He prized responding immediately and communicating his dedication by being accessible at all hours. The off-hour requests most often came from his superiors, and while few were true emergencies, he knew they expected swift replies. Each new day started from a place of depletion, and, you can guess, he was miserable.
The commonness of this story illuminates a fundamental misunderstanding in most corporate cultures. We believe (wrongly) that more time spent and 24/7 availability equals more productivity. We support this notion by bonusing those most willing to blow up their family vacations when emergency strikes. We expect employees to operate like bottomless pits of production—machines without an off switch. And so often, it’s the leaders at the top who set these expectations through how they operate and communicate.
Consider these key truths:
More time expended does not equal more productivity and value.
Cutting back on time spent working misses the point unless we take a critical look at how our energy works.
Leaders need to set the example and actively support these rhythms.
More time expended does not equal more productivity and value.
Research has shown that when we dive into a challenging project, our performance increases steadily with time spent. But there’s a breaking point where the direction changes. Either stress makes the quality of our output go down or motivation stalls. And yet, we pride ourselves on denying our limits and we press forward, sinking more and more hours into a project, when the project would be better served by us walking away and coming back to it fresh tomorrow.
The Yerkes-Dodson Law marks the relationship between pressure and performance, two qualities inherent in most of our work activities. We feel pressure to perform (as we should), yet we misconstrue how to produce the highest value. Pressing on when you’ve reached physiological limits harms the project.
As our CEO Karl illuminates in his book, The Cave, The Road, The Table and The Fire, for most of human history, there was a natural cadence to the day, a circadian rhythm that provided guardrails around human production, dictated by daylight. When Thomas Edison developed the light bulb, we became capable of denying these natural rhythms. As Karl says, “Now you can defy the laws of nature and stretch the hours of daylight and change the way you work and rest and play and relate. And we have been doing it ever since and calling it good. Or ‘progress.’” Add internet and devices and we’ve turned ourselves into rarely-stopping machines.
Thomas Friedman shares in Thank You for Being Late, a book about how the age of acceleration has moved faster than humans themselves can evolve, that we are living in an unprecedented era.
We feel a panicked, incessant urge to keep up with the rate of change in the world around us and not be left behind. And yet, we can’t. Human beings were built for margin. And those who obey the natural rhythms of rest and work win out in the end.
Thomas Friedman quotes his friend and teacher Dov Seidman, Founder and Chairman of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership:
“When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start. You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reimagine a better path.”
And yet, it defies everything in us to “quit” for the day when a problem is unresolved or a project is not quite finished. It becomes a matter of identity, as we are not lazy, we are not irresponsible, we are not lacking drive in our pursuits, and we won’t tolerate behavior that could appear as such. While intellectually we understand Seidman’s words about the value of a pause, we have a board and investors to answer to. We set the pace for those we lead, and if we leave the office and don’t go back online until morning, will the whole company follow suit? What then?
In Karl’s words:
“I’ve counselled and coached many leaders caught in a leadership hamster wheel. They can’t stop, but they are breaking. Or won’t stop because they are broken. But they will end up with no choice but to stop. Stop will happen to them. If you don’t create margin, margin may well be all you have.”
We respect physical limits, but not mental or emotional ones. We wouldn’t dare put more water in a glass than it could hold, and yet we do it with other parts of our lives routinely and project confusion over the mess.
Despite Chris’ dedication, he was laid off as his company merged with another, making him an “unnecessary redundancy.” His seven years of personal sacrifice didn’t feel at all worth it. He couldn’t help but feel like he just wasn’t good enough until he had space to lift up and out and see his hamster wheel with a wider lens. He constantly operated from a low fuel tank, not just from hours logged, but from breakless slogging through projects he hated, believing they’d help him get ahead. He’d suffered from a phenomenon called “cognitive tunneling,” where he got so fixated on completing a project, he didn’t evaluate how valuable it was, consider secondary information, or see creative alternatives; Harvard research has shown people’s IQ drops by about 13 points when they’re caught in the frenetic busyness of tunnel vision. His dedication ultimately backfired.
We were made for margin. We operate best when we allow margin to work for us, and stop believing it will work against us.
It would be grossly simplistic to assert we just need to work less. While that is often a good foundation, there’s more to the margin story, anchored in energy.
Cutting back on time spent working misses the point unless we take a critical look at how our energy works.
For one, every person has a different capacity. As Richard A. Swenson, author of Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives says, “The threshold point where breakdown occurs varies from person to person.” And we often don’t know where it is until it smacks us in the face. “Often we don’t feel overload sneaking up on us. We instead feel energized by the rapidity of events and the challenge of our full days. Then one day we find it difficult to get out of bed. Life has become a weight,” Swenson says. We have energy, but if we don’t know how to maintain it, it’s gone and pain takes its place.
Let’s explore the science of stamina.
From the Harvard Business Review article, Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time:
“As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work—their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better. Time is a finite resource, but energy is different. It has four wellsprings—the body, emotions, mind, and spirit—and in each, it can be systematically expanded and renewed.”
Most organizations have an unspoken goal of squeezing as much work as possible out of their teams each day when they should really be focused on how they can create an environment where each employee can maximize their energy.
Here’s a summary of the research on maximizing energy through the body, emotions, mind, and spirit.
THE BODY
Healthy habits: While we all know the basics of eating well, exercising, and getting enough sleep, few of us follow those rules—to our peril. Diet, movement, and sleep massively contribute to energy and efficiency.
Work in timed-out chunks: When you work for 90 to 120 minutes (“ultradian rhythms”), you’ll move from high energy to low, and your body will crave some sort of replenishment. A break, even a short one, allows you to think about something other than work for a few minutes can result in “higher and more sustainable performance,” according to Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project and author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working.
Go for a quick walk. Go down the hall and ask a friend if they caught last night’s game. Grab a coffee and sit somewhere that’s not your desk. You think you don’t have time, but you’ll be more productive when you do.
EMOTIONS
Negativity: We have the most productive energy when we feel positive; any negative emotions deplete energy. Unfortunately, humans have a negativity bias, which must be interrupted frequently to intentionally get back to the positive.
Anger, impatience, and frustration: Throughout any normal day, we’ll also feel a fair share of fight or flight instinct, impatience, and downright frustration, all of which can get us further off track than we realize if we don’t deal with them.
Researchers recommend the following:
Take a break as soon as you notice a negative emotion. Name it. Feel it. Move on.
Breathe deeply.
Express gratitude. Find something to be thankful for and say it.
Reframe any story where you’ve put yourself in the role of victim. What else could be true?
MIND
Single-task: Shifting your attention frequently can be costly because it takes so much time to get back to what you were originally doing. Scheduling your day and setting a timer for 90- to 120-minute sprints allow you to focus on one project fully for that time, take a break, and move on to the next.
Start with the most important: Energy hackers recommend starting your day with your most important project before allowing any interruptions.
Check email 2x a day: Slot two times per day when you open your inbox with only 45 minutes allowed for responses. Those who’ve done this after attempting to be on top of their inbox all day find they are much more likely to clear out their inbox daily.
SPIRIT
This is perhaps the least valued, but most important aspect of energy. There is nothing like the intrinsic drive and motivation behind working on projects that bring meaning and purpose.
Leaders rarely stop to communicate the reason behind projects or the positive value they will bring to people’s lives, missing an opportunity to tap into untold volumes of employee energy. Additionally, Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project comments, “Most people are living at such a furious pace that they rarely stop to ask themselves what they stand for and who they want to be.”
At Arable, we find great value in using a tool with our clients called Five Capitals, originally developed by 3DM. The premise is we are all born with agency to invest in 5 key areas, called “capital.”
Most leaders and companies overinvest in the bottom three and neglect the top two. And yet, the top two carry within them massively catalytic energy, because they matter. Not only are they the path through which people will joyfully spend fly-by hours on a project, but they are the stuff of life that empowers us to get to the end of our lives with satisfaction, rather than void.
The companies that give their people room and permission to bring what they really care about to work unlock unparalleled possibilities for productivity—without burnout.
Lastly, leaders need to set the example and actively support these rhythms.
Chris has been job hunting with a new lens. As a mid-level executive, he knows there’s only so much influence he’ll have over a culture he joins, so his main criteria for a new role he’d be willing to accept is a place where the leaders have healthy margin themselves.
He’s right. As Schwartz says, “new workday rituals succeed only if leaders support their adoption, but when that happens, the results can be powerful.”
As a leader, how will you set the tone, pace, and practice? Where will you be willing to take what will feel like a risk to create margin and facilitate energy?
Something tells us if you’re brave enough to do it, you’ll wish you could turn back time.
