When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would hold “high-IQ” meetings at the online retail giant, he would opt to schedule them before lunch. Bezos said, “Anything that’s going to be really mentally challenging—that’s a 10 o’clock meeting.” He shared his rationale behind this scheduling decision, “Because by 5 p.m., I’m like, ‘I can’t think about that today. Let’s try this again tomorrow at 10.'”
Making critical business decisions and exercising good judgment can become increasingly challenging after you have hit that mid-afternoon slump. The billionaire’s productivity plummet actually makes him more relatable to working Americans.
In fact, a recent report by Microsoft that analyzed one month of data from Microsoft Teams saw a 7% drop in meetings scheduled between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., according to the Wall Street Journal, in what is being deemed a “dead zone” for work activity.
The study uncovers the corporate facade that employees are productive for eight consecutive hours.
Productivity Peaks And Dips
Humans all have their own biorhythms, and it seems like workers are becoming more attuned to their internal biological clocks by tailoring their own work schedules to meet their individual productivity peaks.
In a recent Blind poll, nearly 45% of tech workers said they spend four hours or fewer on “focused work”—uninterrupted time spent in a flow state, concentrating on high-priority tasks.
Microsoft observed a “triple-peak” phenomenon throughout the workday, where productivity spiked at around 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and then again at 10 p.m., according to an analysis of keyboard strokes.
Mental strain throughout the workday can diminish a worker’s output. So, employees use the hours between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. to exercise self-care. They are dedicating this time slot to their families, going to the gym, playing golf and beating rush-hour traffic.
Supervisors, however, are not too happy about how employees are splitting up their work day, as they feel it severely hinders collaboration and productivity when their workers go missing in action.
After interviews with managers, the Wall Street Journal reported, “The [4 p.m. and 6 p.m.] dead zone is one reason so many executives are cranky about hybrid work. They say it’s the hardest time to reach people, and things would be easier if everybody were present and accounted for in person, even though many workers seem to be leaving offices earlier, too.”
Bosses fail to understand that forcing workers to sit in meetings or in front of their computers between 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. can be counterintuitive to productivity levels. Just because they would be physically present does not mean they would be mentally available.
Stressful job demands, which include making hundreds of daily decisions and putting out constant fires, lead to worker fatigue. If you reach this point, you can actually start making poor decisions out of sheer exhaustion, as your brain is functioning at a lower level.
These mental breaks, where workers can psychologically detach by going to the gym or playing a round of golf, are necessary to ensure that employees don’t suffer from mental strain or decision fatigue.
Not to mention, as evidenced in the 10 p.m. productivity peak, workers are still holding themselves accountable to completing their tasks and tying up loose ends before the start of a new work day.
Source: Forbes
