By Jurriaan Kamp, Editor-in-Chief

Long before anyone invented the “open plan office”, there was the newsroom. The newsroom looks every bit like you see it in movies: a place of chaos and cacophony. I very well remember how I spent my first day in the newsroom of my first employer, the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad. It took me four hours to write a 40-line story that subsequently was completely overhauled and rewritten by a senior editor in 10 minutes.

I remember wondering how anyone could ever write two meaningful sentences in such a chaotic environment. Even my purposefully disorganized Montessori school childhood didn’t prepare me for the newsroom.

And, yet, I was able to adjust and, at some point, to write a 40-line news story for the front page in minutes before the deadline—whatever the noise or distraction around me. I also remember that there was a lot of creativity in the ongoing commotion. Fast conversations under deadline pressure did lead to breakthrough thinking.

So, I have experienced both sides of the “open plan office” debate that has been fueled as new studies emerge in support of both sides.

The concept is that nobody has a fixed desk but, rather, everyone moves through certain zones depending on whether they are working normally, focusing quietly or collaborating.

Companies have two reasons for pushing open plan offices. The first is financial: Office accommodation is for many companies the second highest expense after salaries, according to a recent study by Jungsoo Kim of Sydney University. The annual cost per desk can be as much as $20,000.

Secondly, companies expect that internal office mobility will spark innovation and will produce better results than the original, early 20th century, office concept of the skyscraper made out of small boxes of individual offices. In addition, a new study published by the University of Arizona reports that open-plan office workers are less stressed and more active than their cubicle counterparts.

In an 1896 essay, Louis Sullivan, the architect of early skyscrapers in the U.S., compared the office with a “cell in a honeycomb, merely a compartment.” In many cases, that “compartment” did not lead to much interaction and, as a result, companies would miss out on the advantages of teamwork and synergy, where the whole can be more the sum of the parts.

However, human beings are creatures of habits. They don’t like moving around too much. Studies show that 70 percent of the employees in “open plan offices” stick to the same desk which seems to defeat the purpose of the open plan. Understandably, companies would like to create the environment that brings out the best in their employees. But it appears that the “office design debate” touches on a deeper topic: the nature and quality of work.

We live in a world where overwork and stress are worn as badges of honor. I regularly interact with people who can only set up an appointment to meet “three weeks from now at 10 AM.” The underlying confusion is that more work equals better work and more financial success. But that is not so.

According to 2016 statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the average employee in the United States worked 1783 hours and the average employee in The Netherlands worked 1430 hours—or 25 percent less. Data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the same year show that U.S. GDP per capita was $57,436 while the Dutch figure was $51,049. The Americans worked 25 percent more—or 7 more hours per week—and created 13 percent more value. That doesn’t seem a great investment.

In a related observation, British economist and London School of Economics professor, John Kay argues in his book Obliquity that companies which are first and foremost focused on improving financial performance are outperformed by companies who treat profit as a by-product of doing great work.

Two recent books try to chart that path to “great work.” Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University wrote Deep Work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world, and Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the founder of the Restful Company and a visiting scholar at Stanford University wrote Rest: Why you get more done when you work less. Both books present essentially the same message coming from opposite perspectives.

In the introduction of his book, Cal Newport explains why office design is not the main issue when it comes to the productivity of workers. He cites a 2012 McKinsey study that found that the average knowledge worker today spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching. Half of that time goes to reading and answering e-mail. That kind of fragmented attention leads to what Newport calls “shallow work:” efforts that tend to not create much new value in the world and that are easy to replicate. In other words: most people spend most of their time doing things that don’t lead to the groundbreaking creativity and innovation that the design of their offices is supposed to trigger.

Instead, Newport advocates “deep work:” activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. This is the kind of work that companies would like their employees to contribute.

It would seem that a quiet—non-newsroom—type of office would support this work. But, as both authors argue, simple quiet is not nearly enough to promote truly meaningful and fulfilling work.

Both books present several strategies to produce better work. Alex Pang’s point is that working better begins with resting better and that we should not see work and rest as opposites like black and white or good and bad. In his perspective—much like the Chinese balance between yin and yang—the one cannot exist without the other. Cal Newport, on the other hand, primarily explores how to structure work more effectively and maximize our ability to focus without distraction.

After reading the books, I selected my six favorite strategies—three from each book. The authors offer others and if you read their books you may find ones that work even better for you.

Embrace boredom
The mobile phone is the arch-enemy of boredom. You can see that everywhere. Whether it is people waiting in line in the coffee shop or at a table in a restaurant waiting for their friend, each minute is used to check messages or read posts and news. It’s hard to remember what we did with all these “lost” minutes in the pre-mobile-phone-past.

Research shows that creativity “emerges” out of boredom, out of doing nothing. When you are continuously engaging and stimulating your brain, you become a “mental wreck,” Newport says, quoting research done by the late Stanford professor, Clifford Nass.

Nass’ research into behavior in the digital age revealed—not surprisingly—that constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on the brain. In an interview, Nass said, “people who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevance.”

Boredom is a vital human emotion. We can absorb lots of information while being immersed in our smartphones, avoiding boredom, but we cannot progress, as this Optimist Daily article argues. So, it is useful to allow boredom back in your life.

Meditate productively
One would expect a place for meditation in this search for better work. Newport has an original take on the topic. He doesn’t promote sitting in the lotus position while paying attention to your breathing. Instead, he presents the concept of “productive meditation.”

He described this as a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally. Take a walk, go for a run, take a shower, or use the time when you are driving your car to focus your attention on a single well-defined problem. As in “traditional” meditation, Newport advises bringing your attention back to the problem whenever you notice that your mind begins to wander.

“By forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles, and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens your concentration,” Newport writes. Like re-creating space for boredom, productive meditation is a practice that will produce better results over time.

Quit social media
You probably saw this one coming too. It’s not difficult to recognize, as Nass demonstrated in his research, that the frequent use of social media fragments our time and reduces our ability to concentrate. However, Newport offers a realistic approach to the challenge. He doesn’t argue for a complete Internet sabbatical and accepts that social media can be vital to success and happiness.

So, the question becomes: is there a way to use these tools without a complete surrender to distraction? Newport suggests we look at social media as any other tool we use to create a product or service. The blacksmith needs a hammer, an artist needs a brush. But a blacksmith can do without a brush and an artist without a hammer. Many authors will argue that Twitter is essential to establish connections with the audience that is going to buy their books. But is that true?

Newport offers a simple calculation: imagine that an author diligently sends ten individualized tweets a day, five days a week—each of which connects one-on-one with a new potential reader. If the author pursues this rhythm for two years and 50 percent of the people he reaches buys his next book, he will sell an additional 2,000 books. That may seem a lot, but a bestseller sells such an amount every week.

Newport’s argument is clear: the author has a much better chance writing a bestseller when he doesn’t allow himself to get heavily distracted every day by his ongoing use of Twitter. “The question is not whether Twitter offers some benefits, but instead whether it offers enough benefits to offset its drag on your time and attention,” Newport writes. There’s a place for social media but when you analyze the tools as Newport proposes, that place is likely much smaller than it is in your life today.

Walk
“I have walked myself into my best thoughts”, said Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Alex Pang presents a long list of famous people from Diogenes and Thomas Jefferson to Charles Dickens and Saint Augustine, who were known to go for long walks every day.

The late French president Francois Mitterrand took his friends for long walks through Paris to explore the challenges and opportunities the French nation was facing. In modern Silicon Valley, walking meetings are becoming increasingly popular. And, to add a personal note: walking simply works. I don’t know how often I have been able to I have been able to cross a writer’s block after a good walk. Going for a walk doesn’t take time, it gives time as it brings you to the solution you are seeking.

Nap
This is possibly my favorite strategy and it feels very good to know that I’m amidst illustrious leaders. Even during the London Blitz attack by Germany during World War II, Winston Churchill took his naps. He undressed, put on his pajamas and slept for an hour or two before continuing his work. John F. Kennedy was so inspired by Churchill’s practice that he did the same thing while he was in the White House.

Research shows that people who nap lying down get more out of their naps than those napping sitting up. And, napping longer is even better. A 20-minute nap provides physical restoration. A longer—60 to 90 minutes—nap that allows the napper to get into a REM sleep provides cognitive improvements and creativity boosts.

Stop
As Pang writes, this is a counterintuitive but effective strategy. Ernest Hemingway was a famous advocate. He made sure that he always stopped working in the middle of a sentence. That would make it easier for him to get into the flow again the next day. Roald Dahl was also careful to leave something unfinished so that he would “never come back to a blank page.” Salman Rushdie makes sure that he has “some notion of where I want to pick up.”

The point of these examples is that the deliberate stop makes you more productive over the long run. The stop allows your subconscious to continue the work and present you with creative insights while you are consciously taking a break. That’s why you will do better work in a shorter time when you embrace the practice to stop. Dividing your work in two or more installments will lead to better results than pushing beyond your spontaneous creativity to finish a project in one long stretch of work.

The overriding conclusion is that working more hours—even in prettier or quieter offices—does not lead to better results. In fact, some of the greatest minds in history are known to have followed four-hour work days and more recent research confirms the efficiency of their schedules.

The greatness of their work emanated as much from the daily hours they did other things from napping to walking. Malcolm Gladwell based the central thesis of his book “Outliers” on a study of violin students at the Berlin Conservatory that shows that 10,000 hours of practice are necessary to become world-class in anything and that every now famous person put in these 10,000 hours before we ever heard of her or him.

It is partially true, but Pang—on a closer reading of the study—makes a critical observation that summarizes the path to better work: “world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.”

Better work is more than work and it must include other healthy aspects of life.

“Deep Work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world” by Cal Newport. Piatkus, 2016.
“Rest: Why you get more done when you work less” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Basic Books, 2016.