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Why sloths have it sussed
27 February 2023
Did you know sloths’ faces are naturally shaped to give the impression they are always smiling?
Whilst they look like the ultimate time-wasters hanging out lazily in trees chewing like teenagers with a bad gum habit, sloths’ habits are in fact perfectly designed to maximise their energy and minimise time spent on unnecessary activity. They avoid doing anything that doesn’t contribute to their two main goals: survival and reproduction.
I came across these facts while putting together my talk Healthy Brains: positive habits for thriving at work in which I argue for being more like sloths (who at least make it down to the bottom of their tree once a week) and less like hamsters (spinning on their wheels and getting nowhere).
I came across these facts while putting together my talk Healthy Brains: positive habits for thriving at work in which I argue for being more like sloths (who at least make it down to the bottom of their tree once a week) and less like hamsters (spinning on their wheels and getting nowhere).
I’d shared these sloth facts with my family, so I was delighted and highly amused recently to receive this fabulous mug as a birthday present from my two grown-up stepchildren:
I’ve written about my experiences as a recovering ‘time-addict’ before, so regular readers will know that, along with the majority of working professionals (especially those with any form of caring or parenting responsibilities), our time can feel like an unseemly race to get the important work done, keep on top of the less important but far ‘noisier’ urgent stuff and not drop too many spinning plates when it comes to life admin or family needs.
So I read with interest this Behavioral Scientist article about a new book called ‘Subtract’ by Yael Schonbrun and Leidy Klotz, which explains that we default to adding not subtracting, a habit that intensifies the more we have on our minds. It literally takes us more effort to stop and think about what we might stop doing in exchange for adding something new onto our to-do list.
This echoes many comments I’ve heard from working professionals about their workloads always expanding and new organisational initiatives regularly being launched but few, if any, ever being stopped early and woefully few conversations about how much time it actually takes to do the work required. These are examples of what I call our cultural ‘time blindness’ manifesting in the way we manage work, workloads and working time.
Subtract’s authors recommend maintaining a ‘stop doing’ list alonside our ‘to do’ list, and if we’re not sure what to subtract, then to go back to deeper questions about what kind of life we want to be leading – and I would add, what kind of person we want to be.
I argue that we don’t just benefit from doing this in our lives but across teams and organisations too. By developing ‘time intelligence’, groups can realise a far better return on the cumulative time everyone invests in work. The almost 3,000 participants in the UK’s recently completed 6 month pilot of the 4 day working week are celebrating significant benefits such as 39% reporting less stress, 71% reporting lower levels of burnout and 37% reporting improvements in physical health. Importantly, the 61 participating organisations reaped benefits too with average refvenue rising 35% on previous years and staff attrition down 57%. Much of the increased productivity came from streamlining operations and processes, eliminating wasted time and automating more standardised, routine tasks as former 4 Day Week Global CEO Joe O’Connor explains in this 2 minute video clip and on an upcoming episode of my podcast The Business Of Being Brilliant.
So as we head into March and longer daylight hours, I’m popping ‘subtract’ nudges into my calendar and notebook, setting up a ‘stop doing’ list and putting some extra effort into making sure those lighter evenings don’t simply turn into more hours chasing my tail or glued to my laptop.
If my family start to notice that I’m hanging out more, loafing around with my mug in hand, then I’ll be beaming like a time-rich sloth too.
So I read with interest this Behavioral Scientist article about a new book called ‘Subtract’ by Yael Schonbrun and Leidy Klotz, which explains that we default to adding not subtracting, a habit that intensifies the more we have on our minds. It literally takes us more effort to stop and think about what we might stop doing in exchange for adding something new onto our to-do list.
This echoes many comments I’ve heard from working professionals about their workloads always expanding and new organisational initiatives regularly being launched but few, if any, ever being stopped early and woefully few conversations about how much time it actually takes to do the work required. These are examples of what I call our cultural ‘time blindness’ manifesting in the way we manage work, workloads and working time.
Subtract’s authors recommend maintaining a ‘stop doing’ list alonside our ‘to do’ list, and if we’re not sure what to subtract, then to go back to deeper questions about what kind of life we want to be leading – and I would add, what kind of person we want to be.
I argue that we don’t just benefit from doing this in our lives but across teams and organisations too. By developing ‘time intelligence’, groups can realise a far better return on the cumulative time everyone invests in work. The almost 3,000 participants in the UK’s recently completed 6 month pilot of the 4 day working week are celebrating significant benefits such as 39% reporting less stress, 71% reporting lower levels of burnout and 37% reporting improvements in physical health. Importantly, the 61 participating organisations reaped benefits too with average refvenue rising 35% on previous years and staff attrition down 57%. Much of the increased productivity came from streamlining operations and processes, eliminating wasted time and automating more standardised, routine tasks as former 4 Day Week Global CEO Joe O’Connor explains in this 2 minute video clip and on an upcoming episode of my podcast The Business Of Being Brilliant.
So as we head into March and longer daylight hours, I’m popping ‘subtract’ nudges into my calendar and notebook, setting up a ‘stop doing’ list and putting some extra effort into making sure those lighter evenings don’t simply turn into more hours chasing my tail or glued to my laptop.
If my family start to notice that I’m hanging out more, loafing around with my mug in hand, then I’ll be beaming like a time-rich sloth too.
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