How Marketers Can Have Better, More Productive Days

Many Americans work long hours in stressful jobs, often becoming sick or dissatisfied in the process. Caroline Webb wants to help them have better days.  

Caroline Webb loves her work. Case in point: she was called “the happiest person at McKinsey” by a co-worker when she worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Despite her job satisfaction, the long hours and late nights took a toll on Webb.

Three years into her job as a consultant, Webb got sick. An infection of her central nervous system put her out of work for six months. She fought back to health over the next eight months, gradually increasing her workload until she was well enough to work full-time. However, she found herself at a career crossroads: Long hours didn’t always mean better work, she thought, and they certainly didn’t mean good health or a sustainable personal life. “I had to acknowledge that I did not have infinite stamina,” Webb says. “I became very interested in how to do more with less. That was one of the turning points in my career.”

Trained as an economist, Webb became interested in how she could work smarter—“do more with less,” as she puts it. She pored over hundreds of psychology and behavioral economics books and studies and applied the techniques to her life. Webb compiled her research into a book, How to Have a Good Day, and founded Sevenshift, an advisory firm that helps people use science to excel at work.

A 2017 Gallup survey found that 51% of American employees aren’t engaged at work while another 16% are “actively disengaged,” showing their discontent in their words or actions. Employees are also working longer hours, despite the long-promised shortened work week—including a famous 1930 prediction from economist John Maynard Keynes, who said advancements in technology would mean a 15-hour work week within a century. However, it’s 2018, and the work week remains long: The average American works anywhere between 34.4 hours each week (per data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and 47 hours each week (per a 2014 Gallup survey). Gallup reports that 18% of people work longer than 60 hours each week.

Webb and others offer insights on how marketers can improve productivity, do more with less and have a better day.  

The Myth of Multitasking

Many people spend their days clicking from browser tab to browser tab while answering texts, having a conversation and thinking about what’s for dinner—periodically wondering where time went. This is multitasking and it doesn’t work for most. A study from the University of Utah finds that only 2% of people are good multitaskers.

Though many people brag about their multitasking skills in job interviews, most multitaskers create more work for themselves—or someone else. A study from the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University finds that people who do two tasks at the same time take 30% longer and make twice as many mistakes as those who do the same tasks in sequence—which Webb calls “single-tasking.” 

Multitaskers, Webb says, make between two and four times as many mistakes as single-taskers.

“The conscious part of your brain can only do one thing at a time,” Webb says. To avoid multitasking, she suggests batching similar tasks to avoid constant switching, designating “zones” throughout the day to tackle batches of tasks and setting rewards for good behavior such as setting a timer, taking a break or simply crossing completed tasks off a list. 

​​Give Me a Break, Please

Knowing when to step away for a break is an art, Webb says, and most American workers are barely painting by numbers. A survey by Right Management finds that fewer than 20% of American workers regularly step away for lunch, while 39% skip the break altogether to eat at their desk. 

This paucity of breaks may lead to what Webb calls “decision fatigue,” putting the mind on autopilot. On autopilot, the mind sees the easiest choices as the most attractive, and it is sapped of insight, self-control, concentration and effective thinking. 

To fight autopilot and decision fatigue, Webb suggests planning deliberate downtime throughout the day. This may mean scheduling breaks between batches of tasks (approximately every 90 minutes), grouping intensive tasks to do together when the brain will have the most energy and scheduling meetings at intervals of 25 or 45 minutes instead of 30 or 60, creating natural breaks throughout the day. 

And yes, fighting decision fatigue means stepping away from the desk for lunch.

Block Out Online Distractions

Attention was at a premium for Warren Benedetto in 2010. He’d wake up early to work as a freelance web designer and web developer, but he would instead find himself wading into the internet’s ocean of information. Benedetto says he’d lose track of eight hours, then work until 4 a.m. “It was an endless cycle,” he says.

Benedetto—now the director of software engineering for PlayStation Now—created a simple code for Google Chrome to solve his problem. The code set timers on a self-curated list of websites, blocking them until the next day when time expired. He decided to share the idea, titling the extension “StayFocusd” and uploading it to the Chrome web store. Within 24 hours, his creation had 15,000 users. Eight years later, it has more than 700,000 users, all setting their timers to avoid wasting time on websites like Reddit, YouTube and, for more than 80% of users, Facebook. 

People may shudder at the thought of limiting time on their favorite—and most distracting—websites at work, but studies show that employees waste a lot of time online, killing their productivity. A 2016 CareerBuilder study, for instance, found that 19% of employers believe their employees are productive for less than five hours of the day, with the biggest focus killers being cellphones and texting (55%), the internet (41%), gossip (39%) and social media (37%).

Webb vouches for StayFocusd’s efficacy, saying it helped her focus when writing How to Have a Good Day. “I didn’t make it so that I couldn’t look at Facebook at all, but I set it for 10 minutes a day,” Webb says. “It really was a treat if I clicked.”

Use the ‘Positive No’ to Avoid Pointless Meetings

The average employee spends 31 hours each month in unproductive meetings, according to Atlassian. Their meetings are spent daydreaming (91%), feeling overwhelmed (45%) or doing other work (73%)—which is sloppy and unproductive, as studies have shown. 

Though not every unproductive meeting is skippable, Webb says employees should dare to say no to meetings if they need time to work on more important tasks. Employees can use the “positive no,” Webb says, a counterintuitive technique that leads with a yes instead of no or “Sorry, but …”

Here’s how the “positive no” works: First, Webb says you should show appreciation to the person requesting your time, enthusiastically letting them know what your current priority is (leading with what you’re saying yes to). Then, explain that your current priority means that you can’t give up your time to the invitation. End the interaction with warmth, making a helpful offer or suggestion that you can do without distracting from your priorities. 

“If you lead with the yes, then it puts the other person slightly less on the defensive by leaving with something positive, especially if you can make it speak to them and the things that they care about,” Webb says. 

​​Some Peace and Quiet

As more companies choose open office layouts, more employees lose privacy at work. The open office can be a productivity killer—especially for introverted employees, as Susan Cain points out in her book Quiet. A Steelcase study of 10,000 office workers finds that workers in open offices report losing an average of 86 minutes per day due to distractions​. Another study from Exeter University finds open offices cause a 32% decrease in worker well-being and a 15% drop in production.

But with the money open offices save for budget-conscious corporations, these layouts are likely here to stay.  

To find peace and privacy, Webb says employees in open offices will have to be clever. Webb suggests a technique she used in the past: putting on headphones and posting a visible note that says, “thinking time.” People can interrupt if they really need to, but the headphones and note are clear signals that an employee is busy. If that doesn’t provide enough space for concentration, she suggests searching for an open meeting room.  

“I used to be quite proactive in asking myself how I was going to find the mental space to get done what I want to get done,” Webb says. “Once you know your brain needs rest as much as it needs activity, then it seems obvious,” Webb says. “The trick is to know how to get people who haven’t had a health crash to reach the same insight.”

Less-than-mindful work environments are why Webb wrote How to Have a Good Day: Employees who work in difficult situations under challenging bosses can take control of their lives and seize opportunities for more meaningful work. 

“We can be at our best more often,” Webb says. “It’s much easier to do that if you’re on a team where these conversations [about productivity and balance] are happening, but I’m really keen to encourage people to look for what’s possible within the constraints that they’re operating under.”