Value happiness and well-being

If we’re serious about productivity, we have to recognize how emotional health affects productivity. You might intuitively believe that it has an impact on productivity, but you can’t quite explain it. Rest assured, there’s science behind it. Stress and negative emotions have a significant impact on our ability to focus and learn. While some brief stress can be productive, the types of ongoing stress that many people work under are incredibly unhealthy.

Some of that stress is self-imposed, and some of it is a symptom of an unhealthy workplace. You may not always have control over stress at work, and it won’t always be fun and happy at work. However, it’s important to recognize that happiness and well-being contribute to productivity. If you’re a manager, it also means lower turnover which translates to higher productivity in the long-run.

Happiness and stress levels matter

Humans are designed to handle short bursts of stress to help us react in life-threatening situations. However, these days, life-threatening situations for most software developers are few and far between. Instead, things like overwork, unclear goals, unrealistic deadlines, and even lack of purpose can lead to chronic stress. And you don’t have to look far to find data on what chronic stress does to our bodies. It can lead to hypertension and heart disease, immune system suppression, and negatively affect memory processing and storage. At the simplest level, chronic stress can lead to illness and health issues that lead to missed days at work. On a more subtle level, even when present at work, it can make it more difficult to process and learn new information.

On a more insidious level, stress, fear, and anxiety all lead to behaviors focused on self-preservation. Collaboration suffers, and it’s more difficult for people to get into a flow state. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains:

Although a self-conscious person is in many respects different from a self-centered one, neither is in enough control of psychic energy to enter easily into a flow experience. Both lack the attentional fluidity needed to relate to activities for their own sake; too much psychic energy is wrapped up in the self, and free attention is rigidly guided by its needs. Under these conditions it is difficult to become interested in intrinsic goals, to lose oneself in an activity that offers no rewards outside the interaction itself.

For a simpler explanation, have you ever tried to work when you’re incredibly hungry and thirsty? It’s nearly impossible to focus because your body incessantly reminds you that you need to eat and hydrate. If you’re worried about losing your job or hitting an arbitrary deadline, it’s going to be the same. If these kinds of fears are ongoing, and it doesn’t just affect our productivity in the near-term, it invariably affects your health as well.

Interruptions also contribute indirectly to increased stress. A study from 2008 found that an increase in interruptions led to people working faster to make up for lost time from the interruptions. However, the drawback of working faster was a significant increase in stress and errors.

Surprisingly our results show that interrupted work is performed faster. We offer an interpretation. When people are constantly interrupted, they develop a mode of working faster (and writing less) to compensate for the time they know they will lose by being interrupted. Yet working faster with interruptions has its cost: people in the interrupted conditions experienced a higher workload, more stress, higher frustration, more time pressure, and effort. So interrupted work may be done faster, but at a price.

While stress can hurt productivity, boredom can be counter-productive as well. If your work doesn’t challenge you, it’s easy to get bored and drift off. Without that challenge, your brain isn’t fully engaged. So instead of focusing, it wanders. Csikszentmihalyi further explains this:

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.

…and continues…

When all a person’s relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attention is completely absorbed by the activity.

So, you have to find the perfect balance between anxiety and boredom. Too much stress or pressure leads to anxiety and hurts your ability to focus. Too little, and you get bored and lose focus. If this sounds difficult, it is. It’s not impossible, though. It just takes careful planning, and we’ll talk more about that shortly.

Purpose and meaning can upgrade our productivity

In addition to balancing anxiety and boredom, finding purpose and meaning in your work can go a long way to supporting focus. When you know that your work matters, you can often overcome short bursts of anxiety or boredom and maintain focus. Just as important, the more familiar you are with the meaning and purpose of your work, the easier it is to choose the right work and further increase your ability to focus because you know that it matters.

One of the best ways to do this is by coordinating clear goals and expectations with yourself and managers. When it’s clear, you know exactly where to focus, but when goals and expectations are ambiguous, it leads to stress and uncertainty. This also ties in closely with having some control over your work. Without control, it’s easy to fall into the trap of learned helplessness and withdraw from your work. Csikszentmihalyi expands on this further:

The reason it is possible to achieve such complete involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate.

Negative emotions like fear and anxiety that lead to stress can further exacerbate the problem. When we’re fearful, it can suppress the reasoning and logical portion of the brain in favor of relying on emotional reactions. Tens of thousands of years ago, such a focus on survival instincts was useful, but in modern times, this behavior backfires. It inhibits collaboration and prevents us from focusing on anything other than “survival” even though there are no immediate risks.

We’ve touched on stress, boredom, and negative emotions, but what about happiness? Does happiness itself matter? The answer is a resounding yes. If you’re relaxed and happy, focusing is much easier. Happiness isn’t a singular definition in the overall sense of flow, though. Happiness is some combination of enjoyment and satisfaction in the task. But it can’t arrive without the context of constraints, goals, and feedback on the performance of the task. A clear goal and reasonable constraints enable focus. However, unrealistic or unclear constraints and goals can lead to stress and be counter-productive. Like anything, it’s about finding the balance.

The same goes for deadlines. Arbitrary deadlines for the purpose of speeding up work can be counter-productive. Artificially increased work speed combined with stress can increase errors and create a downward spiral. When you have a purpose and a meaningful deadline, it can create a healthy sense of urgency, but if deadlines never move and scope never changes, it creates an unhealthy environment that opens the door to the downward spiral.

Work doesn’t have to be 100% fun and games, but there’s no question that a happy and healthy team will be more productive than the opposite. Teams are still made up of people rather than robots. So emotions invariably come into play, and it’s easier to focus and be productive when you’re not battling negative emotions.

Your next steps

1. Create a list of things that affect your happiness levels and try to optimize for happiness.
2. Avoid arbitrary deadlines for the sake of deadlines.
3. Slow down to mitigate chronic stress.
4. Don’t tolerate incivility between team members.
5. Clearly define goals and expectations for yourself and your team.
6. Embrace asynchronous communication channels like email in order to reduce interruptions.