We spend a staggering amount of time on social media platforms—143 minutes per day, on average, according to 2024 research from GWI. That’s over 36 days per year spent on social media. Some of the time is of course well spent (we are connecting on LinkedIn around this topic after all). But imagine the potential if we reclaimed even a fraction of these hours.
A study from Lund University found that reducing social media use to 30 minutes a day significantly improves mood, focus, and reduces stress. In addition it could free up 687 hours each year—over 34,000 hours over the next 50 years. That’s more than 2 years of our lives we could dedicate to things that truly matter: meaningful work, deep friendships, picking up that guitar or writing that book.
By shifting our mindset and being intentional about how we spend our time, we can achieve more balanced, fulfilling lives without sacrificing performance.
Sustainable high-performance isn’t just about optimizing for wellness or productivity. It’s about adapting your effort and ambition levels intentionally toward your long-term goals. This means focusing on what’s important to you, rather than being driven by socially fueled overachievement.
❓ What would you do with 34,000 hours of reclaimed time
One of my favorite assignments last year was a Team Effectiveness Project for a consumer goods company.
THE CHALLENGE
The head of the Consumer Insights team approached me since his team struggled with collaboration. The team was divided between seasoned members and newcomers, leading to low engagement scores and a reluctance from other departments to collaborate.
OUR APPROACH
When interviewing team members, it became clear that they didn’t have common goals, nor did they play by the same rules. We used Team Pro, a structured and well researched method for team development. With an online assessment and a series of workshops we worked on strengthening:
1. Transitional Processes: The interactions that occur before and after work processes where the team plans and evaluates. (To use a sports analogy: before and after the game)
2. Action Processes: The interactions in the team where they perform their work duties to achieve their goals. (During the game)
3. Interpersonal Processes: Activities addressing the team’s emotional climate. (Around the game)
During exercises and simulations, my co-facilitator and I observed the team and gave them feedback on their behaviors. The team then developed an action plan for what they wanted to improve and how.
THE RESULTS
– 8-percentage-point increase in employee engagement score.
– 27% uptick in internal net promoter score.
– The team was recognized as a good place to work, with more internal applications for vacancies.
A key reason for the results was the team leader’s willingness to invest in team development over time. This year we are doing another Team Pro check-in with the team 😊.
Interested in how your team can work better together? Let’s talk
Emma Vallin, Organizational & Leadership Consultant
I’M CRAZY BUSY RIGHT NOW
I hear many people saying that work is crazy busy right now. It usually is this time of year. On top of the end of year frenzy, many of us struggle with pressure to deliver more with less resources, often with less clarity.
I listened to a talk by an emergency physician about Triage – a sorting system to allocate limited resources to do as much good as possible. The criteria differ between country and situation, but in essence: when disaster hits, there should be no doubt about whom to treat first.
Without in any way comparing corporate pressure to emergency care, wouldn’t it be great to have a clear-cut way to allocate our personal resources (time, energy, and cognitive capacity) when things get ‘crazy busy’?
As a starting point, ask yourself:
1️⃣ What are my top 3 priorities? (the easy part)
2️⃣ How are they reflected in my calendar? (the painful part)
3️⃣ How can I design my work, so that my most productive time is spent on my top priorities? (the game-changing part)
Or as Steven C would say: When you have too many top priorities, you effectively have no top priorities.
Emma Vallin, Organizational & Leadership Consultant
Knowledge workers spend on average 85% of their time in meetings, which studies show negatively affects well-being. Not surprisingly many organizations are opting for meeting-free days.
But how does this effect cooperation and productivity?
A study* of companies who had implementing meeting-free days, found that:
ONE meeting-free day a week resulted in:
✅ Autonomy: +62%
✅ Cooperation: +15%
✅ Engagement: +28%
✅ Productivity: +35%
✅ Stress: -26%
With TWO meeting free days, the numbers jumped to:
✅ Autonomy: +78%
✅ Cooperation: +43%
✅ Engagement: +32%
✅ Productivity: +71%
✅ Stress: -43%
Is there such thing as too few meetings, I hear you ask?
THREE seems to be the optimum number of meeting-free days, according to the study. After that, metrics like productivity and satisfaction start declining and micromanagement starts creeping up again.
❓ What if anything, surprised you about these numbers?
* The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days. Benjamin Laker, Vijay Pereira, Pawan Budhwar, and Ashish Malik. MIT Sloan Management Review, January 18, 2022
Pulling an all-nighter, doing 80-hour weeks, burning the midnight oil.
There are countless cultural references and expressions of overwork, most of them talk about the number of hours we work.
Emma Vallin, Organizational & Leadership Consultant
The 8-hour workday can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution and was introduced as a way to give workers enough time to rest from heavy manual labor. In a knowledge based society, where many of us mainly work with our brains, what would be the equivalent rule? How should our workdays be structured to optimize and protect our cognitive muscles?
We have all experienced days or meetings that left us completely spent, barely able to hold a conversation with our family at the dinner table. Some tasks are just more cognitively demanding than others. A 30-minute disorganized Teams meeting with conflicts can leave us mentally drained while a whole week of working on a passion project can even add to our energy depot. These insights are particularly important when you’re in a billable hour practice or run your own business.
Or as George Orwell might have put it, had he been writing LinkedIn articles in 2023:
‘All hours are equal, but some hours are more equal than others.’
I find human capacity and performance management fascinating and I’m not surprised that it’s a well researched topic. There are numerous behavioral science studies and psychology papers exploring human endurance and how we maximize performance. From looking at what world record holding athletes have in common to analyzing iconic chess games.
I recently came across Samuele Mancona’s study about how mental and physical fatigue are linked. It was described in Alex Hutchingson’s book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, which I can really recommend. In the study, Manconaasked volunteers to be part of two time-to-exhaustion tests on a stationary bike. Basically, the participants were asked to cycle until they were too exhausted to continue. Ahead of the first test, the volunteers were asked to spend 90 minutes on a mentally draining computer game that required their full attention. Ahead of the second test, the participants were instead asked to watch a bland and emotionally neutral documentary.
After the mentally draining computer game the volunteers gave up 15,1% earlier on the bike test.
There were no physiological explanations to the time difference – their heart rates, lactate levels etc. were the same. They were similarly motivated in both the tests as the best performance was rewarded with a $50 prize. The difference was that when the participants were mentally fatigued, they reached their perceived point of physical exhaustion quicker.
In the study, they used the Borg scale, after Swedish psychologist Gunnar Borg, to measure perceived exertion. In his view perceived exertion is the best measurement of physical strain since it’s based on signals not only from muscles, joints and the cardiovascular system but from the central nervous system as well.
Here’s more from Orwell:
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
The results of the study might make sense to us instinctively even if I for one can’t explain it. But it does make me wonder why so many workplaces are still organizing work based on hours, as if all hours were indeed created equally. Surprisingly often I meet managers who expect their team to clock 40, 60 or 80 hours per week, regardless of the kind of work the employees have done or the results generated.
Our jobs are more cognitively demanding today than ever before. The value we add, as simpler tasks are AI’ed out, is often about solving complex problems, managing change or generating ideas – mentally expensive work. Add to that all the distractions we expose our brains to every day.
I believe managing our cognitive resources will be a critical skill going forward, both for achieving meaningful work goals and for important social interactions.
So how would we organize and measure work if LinkedIn-Orwell had a say in it?
USE COGNITIVE RESOURCES WISELY. Since attention is a scarce resources, be mindful what you spend or waste it on. Do a cost benefit analysis for the things you spend a lot of time on, like meetings and emails. A study published in MIT Sloan Management Review 2022 found that by implementing just one meeting free day per week companies improved autonomy by 62%, cooperation with 15% and engagement with 28%. Avoid powering through when you feel exhausted, it’s counterproductive.
AUTOMATE. We make thousands of decisions every day and each decision uses a part of our cognitive capacity. To focus your decision-making energy on the things that really matter we need to automate as many decisions as possible. Barack Obama allegedly only had one type of suits to eliminate that decision every morning.
HAVE STRIPED DAYS. Mix more challenging tasks with easier throughout day. Balance physical and cognitive tasks. Take frequent breaks and longer breaks. Change the environment you’re in – go work in the office canteen for an hour. Avoid de-prioritizing rest, exercise or sleep. Avoid back-to-back meetings and tasks.
LEAD THE WAY. As leaders, you need to role model this way of viewing work. Be open about what you need to do your best work and what boundaries you have. As organizations we need to start rewarding and promoting responsible energy management. In business planning or when resourcing projects, make sure you are crystal on the cognitive capacity you have and how to prioritize it. Call out ways of working that misuse people’s energy.
Over to you:
How can you organize your work to get the highest ‘ROCI – return on cognitive investment’ or ‘bang for the mental energy buck?’
Last month I celebrated my 3rd anniversary as a fulltime entrepreneur. Happy birthday to me!
Emma Vallin, Executive Coach & Leadership Consultant
In some ways you can compare starting a business to parenting a child. It’s an exciting idea to bring a child into the world but few of us were prepared for the toddle tantrums and a 3-year old’s talent for accidents. (My youngest son went through a period of putting peas, sweetcorn, and anything small enough up his nose 😫).
What parents learn, often a bit too late, is that their toddler isn’t trying to drive them crazy nor kill themselves. They are simply learning and developing by testing boundaries.
A small business goes through similar growing pains. It can be equally challenging, unpredictable, and full of ups and downs. Just as parents can draw strength from watching their cherubs sleep peacefully after a day of food attacks, entrepreneurs can find energy from reflecting on their experience.
– We need to remind ourselves of why we set out on the journey in the first place.
So, as my ‘third child’ turns 3, here are my reflections:
🎂 My BS ratio (Nonsense work/ Meaningful work) has dropped from about 10-1 to 1-10 since I left my corporate career. Back then my days were filled with ineffective meetings, impression management and producing endless amounts of PPT presentations. Today most of my time is spent on what I consider meaningful work, things that help me achieve my mission.
🎂 The freedom that comes with being your own boss is even greater than I imagined. Perhaps the greatest freedom for me is being able to choose whom I want to collaborate with.
🎂I’ve grown and developed a lot in these years. It’s incredibly rewarding to be able to use all your talents and experience to create something of your own.
A big thanks to my supporters, clients, partners, and the amazing fellow entrepreneurs I’ve met along the way.
Here’s to the next 3 years, hoping they will be as fun and rewarding, but perhaps a bit less crazy.
Emma Vallin, leadership consultant & coach. Photo: Janine Laag
Decisive, bold, assertive, fast, consistent – these are traditionally highly valued traits in the corporate world. Many of us have heard them in performance reviews, either as qualities we have or should develop.
In brand management, where I spend most of my career, we were trained to know our data, do our research, then to commit to an idea and stick to our plan. Often spending most of our energy convincing the world about its brilliance. There was little room for honest reevaluation or rethink.
Why is changing our minds so hard?
I recently read Think Again by Adam M. Grant. Grant starts by describing the concept of Escalation of Commitment –
“When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan”.
If we’re collaborating with others on this plan, it can be ever harder to change our minds. We are social creatures and challenging the direction of our team comes with risk. Nobody wants to come across as arrogant, stupid or indeed insecure. Most of us want to fit in. It takes a very open and inclusive team climate to accommodate this kind of risk taking. A psychologically safe environment in which candor and half-baked ideas are welcomed. With leaders who encourage us to rethink, relearn and challenge truths.
The ability to change our mind is more important today than ever
In stable and predictable industries and markets, like the ones I worked in at the time, being consistent and sticking to your guns is often a good thing. It inspires confidence in stakeholders and gives your brand consistency. However in uncertain, fast-paced and ever-changing corporate environments, the courage to reevaluate and change direction becomes business critical.
To do this we need people with the right cognitive skills. We often think of mentally fit people as intelligent people. The smarter you are, the more complex problems you can solve, faster. But in a rapidly transforming world, there are, according to Adam Grant, cognitive skills that could matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.
“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything – George Bernard Shaw”
The value of reflection
For those who dare to be indecisive, there’s a lot to gain. Kahneman’s work on Thinking, Fast and Slow gives us another take on the virtue of the slower, more deliberate System 2 thinking.
Reflection is also important for developing our self-awareness. Professor Daniel Newark, who studies decision-making, identity and behaviour, claims that pondering over outcomes of two or more options allows us to be introspective and gain unique dimensions of self-awareness. He says: “The contemplations and conversations characteristic of indecision may help construct, discover, or affirm who one is.”
For me, this speaks to the theory of ‘slowing down to speed up’ and the value of reflection.
Invite others to rethink with you
There is lot to gain from opening up about our doubts and inviting others to reflect with us. Otto Scharmer talks about self-reflection as one of the prerequisites for new thinking. We cannot go from disagreement to generative dialogue without being curious about our own views and willing to challenge them.
So why not invite your collegues to reflect with you? Newark also found that when you seek advice before making a decision it can inspire conversations of meaning and build professional connection. Quite a nice side effect.
First up in my series of blog posts on psychological safety is the dimension of open conversations and dialogue.
Defined as:
‘the degree to which difficult and sensitive topics can be discussed openly’ –
open conversations help your team take advantage of opportunities. It gives you invaluable insights into each other and can help you move past challenges. Quality dialogue is necessary for the team to learn and stay engaged.
In contrast, if the quality of the conversation is low it can stop you from speaking up about risks or challenges. As an organization you might lose out on business-critical information and miss opportunities. One of the symptoms can be that your meetings are very short or often rescheduled.
“The quality of your conversations will determine the quality of your outcomes” – Amy C. Edmondson
Here are some tips for encouraging open conversations:
Share your learnings or take-aways from conversations
Ask twice as many questions as you tell. Replace “I think” statements with “what if” statements to invite voice and limit self-promotion
Make yourself available and listen with curiosity & empathy
What meetings do you reschedule regularly? What is causing that change and what is the impact on the team?
