Health improvement is one of the popular topics that attracts and hold attention from the reader. Here is an excellent article on this topic: Written by Tony Schwartz in New York Times dated 9th February, 2013, it throws a new angle to the health improvement ideas. It simply mentions that relaxation is the best way to improve the individual morale and productivity!
Do you wake up tired every day? Do you check your e-mail without getting out of the bed? Do you generally find time short for breakfast – either skip it or grab something not particularly nutritious? Once inside the office, do you rarely get away from your desk for lunch? In the office, do you keep running from meeting to meeting without any time in-between to do some constructive work? Do you find it impossible to cope with the enormous volume of e-mail (and the other tasks)? Do you generally keep late working hours in the office? If the answers for most of these questions is a ‘yes, read further for breaking news!
Relax!
A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal of body energy levels is one of the best solutions – paradoxically, they report that the best way t get more done may be to spend more time doing less! They recommend that productivity gets a boost when you take:
- Daytime workouts
- Short afternoon naps
- Longer sleep hours
- More time away from the office
- More frequent and longer vacations
As per the report, these help rejuvenate and boost productivity, job performance and, naturally, health.
How?
We depend on time management to accomplish our tasks. The ethos of the narket economies since Industrial revolution is ‘more, bigger, faster’ – this is grounded in mythical and misguided assumption that our resources are infinite. When there is more to do, we spend or invest more time. But time is finite – we do feel that we are running out even as we tend to lose the semblance of life outside work. It is beyond us to increase the working hours in a day; however, we can measurably increase our energy. Unlike time which cannot be retrieved, energy can be renewed. The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously.
Loss of sleep – More hours at work leads to less time for sleep; insufficient sleep takes its toll on performance and results in a job burn-out. A recent Harvard study indicates that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity. Another sports research registers that when the basketball players were given 10 hours rest in the night, their performance improved dramatically – free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9%.
Daytime naps – The study registers that shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap, they performed much better on the vigilance and reaction time fronts. A University of California research establishes that short daytime naps improve the memory.
More vacations – The study conducted by Ernst & Young found that each additional 10 hours of vacation improved the year-end performance of the employees. Similarly, frequent vacationers were less likely to leave their organization.
Renewal – Professor K. Anders Ericsson has done an extensive study about energy renewal – he observes: ‘the more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward!’
So, relaxation does really contribute to better productivity.