Why Modern American Business Culture Is Bad for Productivity (For Business Owners)
Do you feel like you don’t have enough hours in the day as a business owner? Or do you feel like you have plenty of time to get everything done?
If you live and work in the US, the chances are you feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day. It’s not necessarily true, but our culture can definitely make you think that there is always more work to be done and that you need to be busy.
But why is that culture so bad for productivity in the workplace?
Science of the brain and a productive day
I focus on the brain and neuroscience because my clients, and most of my audience, are people involved in knowledge work. If you’re working almost exclusively with your mind, then your brain is going to be critical when you want to be more productive. Or find ways to reclaim more time in your day away from work and toward other things that you enjoy (and are good for you too.)
You’ll see a lot of sources here. There is a scientific basis to what I do. Facts from research shed light on the brain and productivity.
That’s why bringing more efficiency to your day and to your business means you need to understand your brain better. In some ways you need to understand your personal brain better, but in other ways you need to understand the human brain itself.
The human brain developed over a couple hundred thousand years or so.(1)
The Industrial Revolution occurred only several hundred years ago, bringing factories and offices to the human condition.
Office computing is only about 50 years old, and the internet is younger than that.
This means that human brains have not evolved with factories, offices, computers, and the like, so these are not natural environments for humans and their brains.
The human brain is not a computer and therefore you can’t treat it like one if you want it to function well. Computers use electricity, but human brains involve both chemical and electrical signaling.
Human brains come with cognitive biases, or errors in thinking that can be bad for productivity. (Computers don’t. But you have to remember all programming is GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.) A good example of cognitive bias is loss aversion, where the pain of a loss is twice as great as the joy in a similar-sized gain.(2)
There are more cognitive biases that affect productivity specifically, especially in areas of time management.(3)
Zeigarnike Effect - the brain remembers unfinished tasks, no matter how unimportant they are.
Mere Urgency effect - brains respond to tasks that are urgent over tasks that are important. This keeps you busy as opposed to productive. It’s a great reason to turn off email notifications.
Sunk cost fallacy - the brain wants to include previous investments in decision making. So if you spent time on something in the past, you want to keep doing it, even as it no longer makes sense to do so.
Complexity bias - the brain’s tendency to believe that things that are more complex are better than simple ones. No wonder so many people think that their problems will be solved by a complex piece of software – instead of simple things like turning off email notifications and batching similar tasks together.
Our culture makes productivity in the workplace more difficult than it needs to be
There are a variety of reasons for this. One of them is that we’re not that great at science as a whole. American 15-year-olds placed 24th in science according to an international survey. (4) (Some American kids are great in science. I’m talking about education as a whole.)
That leads to adults who don’t know a lot about how brains work. And even what science actually is. When I mention that all my stuff is backed by neuroscience, I get a lot of responses that are more like pseudoscience.
NLP, neuro-linguistic processing, has no scientific evidence behind it. (5) Though it definitely sounds sciencey! Pro tip: Just because someone threw “neuro-” into the name doesn’t make it scientific.
Quantum anything - Let’s be honest: Deepak Chopra and the like know nothing about quantum theory. The fact that they claim to understand it tells you right there that they’re wrong. Scientists who study quantum mechanics will tell you they don‘t really understand how it works.
Human design - to be fair, most of the people I know who do human design say it’s woo-woo. It combines astrology (which is not scientific in any way, shape or form) with the I Ching (also not scientific in any way, shape, or form) in addition to some other beliefs.
One of the ways that people get the human brain wrong is by thinking it’s like a computer. It isn’t and one of the biggest differences that affects productivity is the fact that brains get TIRED. Making lots of decisions is one thing that makes your brain tired. Trying to “multitask” by doing two things simultaneously also wears out your brain.
The idea of multitasking is endemic to American culture. Check emails while you’re in a meeting, do two tasks at once, never leave a minute unoccupied. However.
The brain is not able to multitask.(6)
Switching back and forth between tasks tires out your brain.(7)
We’re also expected to be available at all times to everyone. Checking emails at home, which is time better spent with friends and family. Interruptions pull your focus, and actually make your job performance worse.(8) Engineering your environment to reduce or eliminate interruptions therefore has a huge effect on productivity in the workplace.
Recap (tl;dr)
Productivity begins in the brain for knowledge workers, so you need to know how the brain works if you want to be effective. Brains are not computers, and the expectations of modern culture actually make them more tired and less productive.
If you’re a business owner who’s hit a profit plateau and would like some help to make the business more effective, schedule a call with me. I may be able to help.
Sources