You're listening to Part Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope, and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
What's that? Mango?
So I had a big writing assignment last week, and I was not nearly as productive as I should have been. I procrastinated, I got distracted, and I kind of pushed off the assignment for way too long.
I like that you're leaving out one key fact that you were actually supposed to be on vacation last week.
I know, but I'd set aside a few hours so that I could keep some projects on track. And then I missed my deadline. So I started doing what I always do when i'm behind. I looked up tricks for how to work better, and I stumbled into this old chestnut about how Victor Hugo used to make sure he
didn't procrastinate. Basically, whenever he got writer's block, he'd have his servant take all his clothes away and leave him with only a pen and paper, so we had nothing to do but write in the nude, which I guess is how he hit all his deadlines.
And also sounds a little bit extreme if you ask me.
Yeah, But one thing I've been wondering about is whether it was the fact that he was stuck in his house without clothes that made him write, or whether it was actually being nude that put him in the mood to do the writing and inspired him. Like Hemingway wrote Nude at a standing desk. Ben Franklin famously took airbats where you'd wake up early, you know, sit by a drafty window and feel invigorated to journal before going back to bed for sort of a wonderful sleep. Churchill Agatha
Christie both worked from the back. So there are a lot of these folks.
Wow. But for all our listeners, just to know you you are not only working right now, but you are fully closed as we record. So I'm thankful for that.
Yeah. Well, you know, I'm too Victorian to work in the nude, even in my own house. But hearing those facts made me wonder what are the best ways to work? So that's what this episode is all about. Let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and sitting behind that big booth manning the mixing board, doing it like none other and actually today he's truly doing it like none other. I think he's on a Nordic track. Is that what that is?
Yeah? I guess some people work from standing desks and some people use treadmill dust, but Dylan has decided he's most productive when he's cross country skiings.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know what, there's sometimes I question what Dylan's doing, but this actually feels on brand for him. It seems to makes sense for him. But anyway, mego. You and our researcher Mary Phillip Sandy came up with the topic for this week's episode, and it's all about what are the best ways to work? So let's talk about that.
Yeah, and today's episode is kind of a jumble of things. Mary and I were brainstorming big questions we could answer for the show, and she was like, there are so many little things I don't know, Like I sit all day and I don't know what's the best way to sit. And of course, you know, at the time, I was crossed like it on my bed, and you know, I had a cramped neck from hunching forward. So of course
that's one of the things I wanted to know. But we thought with so many people working from home now, it might be helpful to hear about everything from some productivity tips to how to sit to how far you need to place your laptop screen from your Nordic track for ultimate comfort.
Glad we're going to be giving that tip. So all right, let's figure out where where do we want to start here today?
How about with ergonomics, which is such a clunky and weird word. But what do you think when you hear the word ergonomics.
You know, as soon as you said it, I kind of pictured those wavy keyboards that people started using in nineties, or an office full of yoga ball chairs, like we saw so many of these, how quickly these took over actually our office for a while back in Mental Fluss.
It was like overnight. It was like an epidemic, Like suddenly everyone was either at a standing desk or a yoga ball and I just kept sitting at a normal desk with a swivel chair, just like a rube.
But it's embarrassing.
I was thinking about those giant mouse rollerballs that you know, I don't even know if you remember these, but they were like red arcade ball like controllers almost, and they'd sit in the middle of something that kind of looked like a tiny Tesla truck. But I was also thinking about like the first time I'd seen it in my lifetime. I remember that my dad brought home this Swedish ergonomic
chair for our computer in the eighties. It had no back and you kind of kneel into it, and every single kid who came to my house commented on how weird it was. But the whole idea was it was supposed to make you sit straight and be better for your posture. So, you know, obviously ergonomics has been a thing in our lifetime, but I actually had no idea how old the discipline is.
And because I have no idea, I think you're baiting me into asking you this question. But how old are we talking about here?
Yeah? I like how you picked off on my queue there.
Yeah, thank you man. We really work well together.
Mary pulled this research for me from the Berkeley School of Public Health website, and apparently ergonomics states back to four hundred BCE, all the way back to the ancient Greeks, so just a little before the nineteen eighties when my dad was Swedish kneeling at his tandy or whatever. But According to the site quote, archaeologists have found drawings and paintings of chairs with contrad backs and hand tools that resemble designs we still use today, which you know is really remarkable. Yeah.
I mean, it's funny to think about, like a stone bench with an indentation for your butt to be considered ergonomics, but I guess it makes sense, right, Like if you're gonna sit comfortably, it makes sense to kind of contour it more to your body.
Yeah, And apparently Hippocrates got into the action as well. He wrote about how to arrange surgeons to for optimal workflow during surgery. So really we've been thinking about how best to do our work for a very long time, but for our stories purposes. The real study of work begins in the seventeenth century, and this is when an Italian doctor named Bernardino Ramazzini, which you know is a
great name. For the first time, perhaps he begins to notice patterns that certain types of work brings certain pains, right, and he begins looking at why workers are suffering from various ailments. He starts by visiting their workplaces, observing how they work, and then he does all these interviews to understand how their work is affecting their bodies, and this is in seventeen hundred. He publishes his observations in a book called The Diseases of the Workers.
So if this was seventeen hundred, like, what type of work is he studying here?
He studies over one hundred professions and it's everything from bakers and miller's to fishermen, to stonecutters to glassmakers. He's also in including athletes and singers. It is surprisingly comprehensive, and he starts to notice how various violent motions or irregular motions, and also waits that these workers are carrying daily how that's taking a toll across various classes of workers.
So would he be considered like the father of ergonomics. Then he's more considered the father of occupational medicine. And his contribution is mostly in linking repetitive work to pains and disorders, but it is interesting he also notes the mental stresses on people who are doing things like accounting work. These people have to get the numbers right to keep
their jobs, and so there's immense pressure on them. And he's also looking at things like environmental conditions, so he notices the breathing difficulties that millers get and the asthma that they get from all these like powders and things in the air. And he's quoted as saying it's far better to prevent than to cure. So he's really.
Ahead of his time.
Yeah, no kidding. But to your question.
About ergonomics, the word ergonomics gets coin in the eighteen fifties and this is by a Polish author and it kind of means the science of work or laws of work, and it isn't really until about one hundred years later that it takes on its current meaning of fitting a job to a person or a body. But before we get into that, I want to talk briefly about the concept of business management, which arose in the late eighteen hundreds,
and it is really fascinating to me. So this is during the Industrial Revolution, or at least impacted by it, when industrialization becomes synonymous with work. And just stay with me here because it feels like a tangent, but it's not. Industrials were interested in the idea of efficiency, right, but it wasn't like they wanted to protect workers from these
repetitive stress injuries. As businessmen, their goal was really to extract as much value as possible from workers and kind of treating their bodies like machines, making the most of their bodies. And one consultant who helps figure out how to do this is a guy named Frederick W. Taylor, who basically believed that workers can always be made to produce more and less time with less motion.
Wow, always be made to So he's kind of a nightmare boss.
Yeah. His work is basically going to take any remaining power out of the worker's hands and place it in the hands of the bosses. At the time, they call it quote scientific management, right, that's the term for it, and later they refer to this practice as tailorism. But basically, these efficiency engineers, as they were called, we're trying to figure out the one best way to do every task the quickest and the way they studied this is really incredible.
This comes from an article in Jacobin magazine and goes quote it's hard to overstate how far efficiency engineers went to measure and survey of workers' bodies. They used stopwatches, photographed and film workers, and tied light bulbs to workers fingers in order to trace hand movements across long exposure photographs. One engineer, Frank Gilbert, disaggregated each finger, shoulder, and foot, plotting individual movements in units in the thousandth of a minute.
So yeah, I mean, the observation is intense, and they're collecting amen's data, and they are analyzing every part of every single mechanical task.
That is wild. And so what do they do with all this data?
Basically, they're getting paid to make a company more profitable, right, So they walk the employees through these studies and point out their inefficiencies and show them how to work faster. Basically, they fire anyone who refuses or can't keep up. But because these are upper class men, they're also trying to temp down any class conflicts or resentments that could arise, and they're trying to ease this transition into getting people
to work harder. So they push for pay bonuses based on worker efficiency, and workers are incentivized to work faster, and that way the workers are at least a little happier and managers get more product, which they see as a win win, I.
Mean, I guess so. But obviously these bonuses aren't so big that anybody's getting rich here, right, The workers can do.
A little better, but their bodies are going to take a toll for it. And there's an interesting side note here, a bunch of the more skilled workers start to push back. As the Jacobin article points out, quote the diversion experiences of machinists and shovelers was pretty illustrative. So the shovelers were less organized and easier to replace, and they were
really pushed to the limit by the efficiency experts. One study from the time actually showed that they ended up heaving two hundred and seventy percent more tonnage than before the consultants arrived. Wow, so they're working their tails off. It is brutal and its backbreaking work. And meanwhile, the machinists actually have some leverage. They kind of hold their trade secrets close to them and they unionize their response and this ends up protecting them because when managers try
to control them, they act collectively and can better dictate terms. Anyway, this all leads back to ergonomics.
I'm glad you say that, because I was just about to ask that.
Yeah. So, as tailorism and this mechanization of the human body was taking place, workers want to avoid being fit leagued all the time, and they want to protect their health. So in the nineteen twenties, researchers start making the case for more humane work and not burning out your workforce.
There's this conference in Russia, but this movement takes off all over and you know, this more humane work is called ergology, which later becomes ergonomics, which you know later translates into offices that are wall to wall with yoga ball chairs.
Finally we got there. That was that was worth it though, Manga. That was actually very interesting, and I know there's more story to get to, but I also know we're talking about the best ways to work, and one thing that people definitely want to know is some definitive answer on how to sit and not destroy their bodies because you hear so much about the damage that it does to sit for so long.
Yeah, so I'm glad you took this on because I'm very curious about this. So tell me.
Well, one of the first places to go to if you thinking about anything health related is the Mayo Clinic. So I decided to go to the website and look at the guidelines there. Now, before you start working, you'll want to pull out a tape measure and possibly a protractor. If you don't know what a right angle is, or
if you've got those ready, I'll continue here. One your knees should be about level with the hips when you are seated, with your thighs parallel to the floor, So clearly sitting on a high stool or a bean bag is not ideal. Two your hands should be at or below elbow level with the wrist straight. Three. If your desk has a hard edge, you should pad the edge to protect your wrist from the contact stress. So this includes laptops, Like if you're resting your wrist on a
hard laptop, you'll want padding there. And four, if you're using a monitor, that should be no closer to you than twenty inches and no further away than forty inches, and you'll want the top of the screen to be at or slightly below eye level. Now I have to admit, when I read many of these things, I violated almost every single one of them.
I also have no idea how far my computer screen is for me any time.
Yeah, on that at air inches. I don't know about you. Like on a table, I can do it, but air inches is not my specialty.
I also feel like I assume it must be like twenty to forty inches from my face at all times, but except when I don't have my glasses on and then it's pressed up against my face. Is that distance for your eyesight or is it for neck I posture reasons? Why is that distance so important? It actually prevents both eyestrain and next strain. Though, if you're looking to protect your eyes, the other thing you're supposed to do is
follow the twenty twenty twenty rules. So this is where every twenty minutes you're supposed to take a twenty second break to look at an object twenty feet away. This rule was developed by an optometrist from California name Jeffrey Anshell, and this was a way to help people avoid headaches and eyestrain. But you can also close your eyes for twenty seconds and that has a similar kind of effect.
Twenty seconds doesn't feel like long enough, Like, yeah, that's almost teasing my brain into thinking it's taking a nap. We've covered angle you should say at and how far your screen should be from your face, But what about the whole like sitting standing treadmill desk argument, Like what's the optimal way to work on that front?
You know, the ideal seems to be alternating between sitting and standing, because sitting for too long or being sedentary increases your risk for a whole host of different diseases. I mean everything from Parkinson's two strokes, to cancers, two diabetes to Alzheimer's. Like, it's really as interesting looking at the list and terrifying at this list of you know, sort of tied back to this.
It's so scary like that sitting for long periods can increase your chances of getting six. So how much do I have to alternate for this?
You'll need to turn to the International Ergonomics and Human Factors Association, which I don't think you knew a whole lot about before this episode, and they recommend sitting for ten minutes, then standing up for five, and then repeating that throughout the day. So not too bad.
First of all, please don't make any assumptions, because that is my homepage. I could.
Yeah, you're right, I shouldn't have assumed.
But I also don't know how you're supposed to remember to do that like all the time. Like I feel like the only way I can remember is if my desk automatically lifted and lowered like every five and ten minutes. It just feels kind of impractical. Plus you've got to close your eyes or look twenty feet away every twenty minutes, so like none of those numbers really line up.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's uh, it's interesting. I mean, if you can't pull off the ten minutes sitting, five minutes standing routine, there's an alternative that can help your workflow. You can work for twenty minutes, take a two minute active break. That's like second best option here. But when you do that, you can also close your eyes for
the first twenty seconds or just naturally look around. But hopefully you're not taking this active break and closing your eyes for the first twenty seconds, because that seems dangerous as well.
I also like that you've ranked these like, I guess I've got a whole list, right, I'm gonna go with option too, But is there a third place? The truth is, like, if you're writing or researching, I feel like you get in a flow and then you just forget time.
Yeah, I mean, it actually would be good to make time for that two minute break, just because it's helpful for anyone with a history of diabetes in the family. And I know you have some in the family as well, and according to the site, getting up more frequently can quote lower your post prandial glucose and insulin levels, which means that avoiding sitting for long periods of time can actually be an effective way of reducing the risk of type two diabetes.
That's amazing and I wonder you know, as people start adapting more to this information, if it's like during the SATs, we'll see kids just standing up in the middle of a section and running in place to keep their diabetes away. It kind of makes sense.
Well, there's one other suggestion if you can't keep standing at work or take frequent breaks, and that's the stop, drop and flop.
I go. I love the branding. What's the stop, drop and flop?
So it's exactly what it sounds like. After you send an email or finish a task, you stop what you're doing, let your shoulders drop, flop, your hands down by your side, and give yourself a little bit of a stretch break. But actually, let's talk a little bit more about sitting, because we all know we do this a lot, or many of us do this a lot as we're working. So let's talk about how to best sit for optimal help.
Yeah, I'm guessing sitting cross legged on stools and chairs with my laptop on my lap probably isn't the best way. Yeah.
I actually don't see anybody advocating for that, and I'm guilty of it as well. I mean, the bottom line is that chairs are complicated. So I was looking at self dot com. They interviewed a board certified physical therapist
and an orthopedic specialist about this very topic. And there are just a lot of components here, but mostly you want a firm, flat cushion chair, good Lombard support, Like a lot of really nice cushiony chairs have that seat tilted upward in the front, and that actually puts stress on your spine and tilts your pelvis backwards, which isn't that kind.
Of like how we all drive. I guess that's bad for long periods of time.
Yeah, it's straining the wrong parts. Like basically, you want to be sitting upright with a straight back, so not leaning forwards or backwards, because tilting either way puts pressure on your shoulders and on your neck. And according to this same piece, you also want to scoot your bottom all the way to the back of the chair, because, as the article says, otherwise you will be sitting on your sacram and stressing your back.
So how do you know if you're sitting right?
Well, basically, if you're upright, your feet are on the floor, your hips are square, and you're not tilting forward, then you're doing it.
Right, which sounds like sticking a perfect landing and gymnastics or something. It feels like exactly chair setting should be its own sport. But I feel like we've been chatting for a bit and I am overdue for my stop, drop and flop, which I do all the time now, So why don't we take a two minute break and we'll be back with more part Time Genius after these commercials.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're discussing the very best ways to work. Now that you're all stretched and relaxed, you've taken a twenty second micro nap, what do you want to talk about?
You know, I'm feeling so refresh and not diabetically right now, So that's great. But as we were researching this episode, I was looking up ergonomic keyboards and I found the Stranger's keyboard. It is a vertical keyboard and it's supposed to eliminate any strain on your wrist.
And how does that work exactly? I'm looking at it now. This is wild.
Yeah, So for everyone listening, Basically, the image I'm showing will is it's like if you took a keyboard cut in half and then flip the sides up like a drawbridge, so the keys are kind of facing out on either side of your monitor. The idea is that if your arms are straight out in front of you, the way you slow dance in sixth grade, or at least the way I slow dance in sixth grade, h and you're typing vertically, reduces that strain. It's almost like you're shaking hands with the keyboard.
And that's supposed to help.
I guess because your hands aren't resting on a hard surface, you're you're less likely to get that restrain. And also the vertical keyboard has these cushions or padding to rest the heel of your hand, so it should be more comfortable.
I don't know why the halves of the keyboard have to be so far apart. Just look at this picture.
I guess if they were closer, you'd look like mister Burns twiddling his fingers.
But as you type, which seems to me the goal.
I love this futuristic kind of stuff, Like as a kid, other than on the jetsons, I could never imagined people typing books on treadmills, or like taking naps and giant eggs at work. And it'll be so fun to see how work changes in the next twenty or thirty years.
Oh definitely, Like they're already projections of keypads instead of real keyboard so you can just type in the air, and people working from self driving cars with Wi Fi Like it feels commonplace now, but this would blow the minds of people thirty or forty years ago.
Yeah, so I know you have some tips on how to increase productty not in a tailorism way, more in how to get things down way. But before we go to that, why don't we talk about two very different ergonomic chairs. So the first one I want to talk about is for pilots, and it comes from a paper from a journal called Science, Technology, and Human Values, but
it's about military cockpit design. So basically, in World War Two, ergonomics really started becoming a discipline and it was important to the armed forces, especially because to operate this like machinery correctly and safely, and also with some regularity. You kind of need to build things like tanks and planes and things to human specifications, So the term human engineering comes about. And the engineers were really smart about this.
To make sure people could easily operate leg and hand controls and see all the gauges and displays, they came up with five critical drivers. They looked at the height of someone sitting, they looked at functional arm reach, leg length, buttock to knee length, and weight, and they basically designed a cockpit that could both safely be operated from and that could safely eject you if you were taller than
five percent of the male population. So the idea was that basically everyone from the fifth percentile all the way through the ninety fifth percentile of men in the country could operate these machines pretty effectively. And it's kind of a landmark in ergonomic innovation. Here you've got this beautiful new plane where the dials and gages and buttons and steering wheel are all perfectly within reach for most of the population, except, I.
Mean, what about the women here?
Exactly? They designed this for men above a certain height, but at thirty four inches sitting height, which is what they were using. That excluded close to seventy percent of the female population because according to the paper, only approximately the sixty fifth through ninety fifth percentile female could operate the machinery. So weirdly, mass producer ergonomics have this greater implication on society.
Which I guess isn't that surprising, Like if you think about the right handed scissors, that's excluding ten percent of the population right there.
Yeah, But it's even worse than that because since commercial aviation basically copied all their design and engineering from the military, there was what's called ergonomic bias spillover, and that goes into commercial airlines. As the paper notes, quote, it is not that women are not physically capable of flying these particular aircraft. Rather, the technical artifact has functioned to delineate the other.
So what's the other ergonomic chair you wanted to talk about?
So that one's kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, and it's the guy who built the first modern ergonomic chair, a German Man named Frederick Wilhelm Dauphin, And it's nineteen sixty eight and he's hired by a British company as a consultant to look at how the computer is going to impact office furniture, and he's supposed to advise them on production. But the company, I'm not sure whether it's funding or what, but they can't execute his vision. So he and his wife really believe in
this idea of human centered design. So they do what all great startups do. They start tinkering in their garage back in Bavaria and they designed this very affordable chair that has cutting edge ergonomics. It's a chair where you can adjust the height and back and it offers incredible posture support. He also creates the first synchronized mechanism for chairs,
which I had to look up what it meant. It's when you tilt the back of your chair like twenty degrees, the seapan of the chair doesn't go back the full twenty degrees. It only moves like five or ten degrees, so you still feel like you're reclining, but you don't feel like you're going to tip back. And that's kind of standard on all chairs now. But the big thing for Dolphin and his wife, Elkie, who was his partner in this, was to make sure that these things were
stylish and affordable, but also tailored to individual needs. So the adjusting the height was really important to him from the start. And that's kind of the opposite of the cockpit chair, which was kind of one size fits all, but really it was one size fits most men and some women. Anyway, this chair just takes off and revolutionizes office firm sure across Europe and Americas, and today they are still producing about seventeen hundred office chairs every single day.
Wow, that's pretty amazing. All right, Well, we've talked about how to sit, how to rest your eyes, when to stand, when to flop, But why don't we go through a few quick tips on getting stuff done?
Great? You know I'm always looking for productivity tips.
I know you are, except I'm going to quiz you here.
Great. You know I'm always looking for quizzes.
So okay, good, good, good? All right? So hot or cold? What is better for your office temperature?
I mean personally, like my dad's from Goa and India's which is the beach. So you know I don't love the cold, so I'd go with hot.
All right. Well, you are one for one, being too cold makes it harder to get things done. This comes from fast company. But Cornell actually did a study in an insurance office and when the temperature was low, like sixty eight degrees, employees committed forty four percent more errors than when the thermostat was set to seventy seven degrees. But warm temps are actually better for office politics too.
How's that?
So? The article goes on to say that there was a study in science where psychologists found that when people feel cold, they're quote more likely to perceive others as less generous and caring, and that the same area of the brain that lights up when we sense temperature, aka the insular cortex, is also active when we feel trust and empathy toward another person. So basically, when we experience warmth, we experience trust.
Oh that's fascinating and such a good argument to my wife why we have to keep the temperatures toasty in our house whenever I'm working? So what's next?
All right? Well, how about having someone on a screen doing their work but kind of watching you aka the new trend of body doubling.
You know, I hate when people look over my shoulder or watch me work, even when working in like Google docs, when someone else is in the dock. It feels like such an adjustment for me. H, I'll guess not helpful.
Well, it might not be helpful for you, but it's actually a great hack for people with ADHD. Like this is how an ADHD therapist named Billy Roberts explained it. Quote. ADHD is a disorder of executive functioning, the part of the brain that controls concentration, attention, activation of task, effort
on task, and self control, to name a few. Having a person present during a less desirable task might increase the joy surrounding that task, similar to listening to empowering music while working, he says, and having another person there
also makes you accountable, so you're less likely to procrastinate. Apparently, having a study buddy or this type of virtual body doubling helps people with ADHD by increasing their dopamine levels, And there are lots of websites and apps that help you find a body double.
Body doubling sounds like such a sci fi term, you know, but that is really interesting. Also, it makes me feel a little guilty because both Lizzie and Henry are super ADHD and when we're both working from home, Lizzie always suggests working from the same room and I'm just like you know, I'm good from over here, but it kind of gives me more empathy as they're doing their work. What else you got?
All right? Last one afternoon coffees? What do you think?
Ah, this is tough. I could see an argument either way, but maybe skip them.
Yeah. The latest research, and this is coming from psychology today, is that afternoon coffee confuses the brain, tricking your body into thinking it has more energy than it does. As the article points out, basically, it's pushing your body into overdrive and taxing its resources, which is what makes you crash. And the dependence throws off your biorrhythms. Like this is whole domino effect where you get worse sleep, which curbs your ability to de stress and causes inflammation.
I love the idea that coffee throws off your bio rhythms, but like sitting for ten minutes, standing for five, and closing your eyes every twenty minutes is actually better for your health. Yep, I do really want to be healthier, So I'm sure this will all be in my head for a week, but I'm guessing I will do none of these things except raise the thermostat in my house. But you know, what will definitely make me feel better. How about a little.
Fact off, let's do it all right, So bosses should appreciate their workers working from home, but you know who doesn't cats. According to an article on Mental Floss, cats are creatures of habit so they like set patterns. So when people started working from home during the pandemic and no one had really run this by the cats, their
routines got disrupted. Also, the article points out that they pick up on the emotions and vibes, so chaos from kids who had been at school, or you being allowed on a zoom or whatever it might have been, that was a change that also affects them. But eventually they
will come around to the new routine. But the most interesting thing to me about the article was that it advises when you go back to the office, you don't want to deeply upset your cat, So to help them adjust to this new routine, you should wake up at the time you're planning to go in and start leaving the house for longer periods of time so they can adjust to the new routine.
It's funny, it sounds more like you're trying to please a roommate than a pet, so here's another quick one that happens to evolve dogs. Do you know that workers comp can apply to work from home injuries? In twenty eleven, and Oregon court ruled that an interior designer was eligible for workers comp after she tripped on her dog while moving fabric samples to her garage.
It is insane, that's wild, all right. Well, I think a lot of us have heard of the Pomodoro technique.
Yeah, that's what where you use a timer to focus on a task for like twenty five minutes at a time, and you take little breaks after each one of those sets. Yeah.
I mean it was already kind of a thing, and then it got more popular during lockdown. But I didn't realize it was created by a college kid in the nineteen eighties. So apparently the student Francesco Cirillo, who was having a hard time focusing, so he kind of challenged himself to study or work for ten minutes at a time, and he found one of those vintage tomato shaped timers you can see in kitchens, aka the pomodoro, and he
formed this technique. The other thing I didn't realize is that even though the technique is super simple, he actually kept building out different parts and suggestions for the method, and he wrote this one hundred and thirty page book about it, which led him to this long career as an efficiency consultant for everyone from software engineers to F one teams.
That's pretty amazing. So I am trying to keep all of mine quick today. So here's another snappy one. Do you know that slack is actually an acronym? It stands for a searchable log of all conversation and knowledge?
Wait? Is that real? Did you just make that up?
But no, it's true.
I had no idea. Well, there's a lot of talk about napping being good for you and how it benefits everyone from pilots to astronauts to creatives, but apparently napping was particularly popularized by the early Romans, who loved a sexta aura, meaning a sleep in the sixth hour of a waking day, which became known as the siesta.
Oh, I love siesta so much in India. The fact that you like nap and have this quiet break after a lunch and then wake up and have tea and snacks. It's like my body is built for that. I'm going to go slightly longer on this one. But there are a number of studies on laughter in the office place, and apparently people who laughed at a comedy clip and then were asked to do math problems in a lab, we're ten percent more productive than those who didn't, which,
you know, I thought was interesting. But the other thing I thought was fascinating is that people who crack successful jokes are better perceived. So, according to a Harvard Business School professor Alison Woodbrooks, presenters who make successful jokes are quote perceived as more are competent, more confident, and hire in status.
I like that you said successful jokes, not just not just any joke.
Yeah. According to the study, it's more sweet jokes that are confidently presented versus you know, Michael Scott type jokes that are inappropriate.
Mm hmm that actually I could see that. That makes sense. All right, Well, here's one that's kind of fun to end on, at least for me. So Amtrak's quiet Car has a huge following of loyal travelers and people who swear by how much they can get done on it. But one thing I didn't realize is that it was
actually an idea that came about from commuters. In an interview in Fortune, the company's former chief marketing officer explained how basically cell phone chatter was ubiquitous on trains, and this group of regular commuters begged the conductor to set aside a noise free zone, and as soon as he did, the idea took off, and Amtrak expanded the Quiet Car to its entire fleet. But if you look up Amtrak's Quiet Car online, you can find that people have written
odes and poetry to it. They're fanatical about it, And so I thought it'd end with this quote from a Yahoo Travel story in praise of the Quiet Car. Here's how it reads. As a proud member of the Quiet Car Nation, I will admit that we may be over zealous in our efforts to preserve, protect, and defend it, but that's for good reason. In this hyper connected world, the Quiet car is one of the few places we have left where we are out of reach of our
busy home, social, and work lives. Here we can sit with like minded people, enjoying our silent utopia and just be so. Let us celebrate the Quiet Car, the last bastion of civilized travel. Let us cherish it, let us protect it, let us sing its praises. Just not too loudly.
Oh I like that, and I feel like it needs like patriotic music behind it as you give that speech.
Yeah, definitely.
I don't know how I can't give this to you. So I'm going to silently hand over this week's trophy.
I love it. I felt good about ending on that one. All right. Well, that's it for this week's Part Time Genius. Now remember, if you like our please rate it review. It makes us so happy to know you people are listening. Also, we love hearing from you. But more importantly, our moms love hearing from you, and they have loved so many of the notes that have come in recently. So write to us at PT Genius Moms at gmail dot com. Our moms always passed these amazing messages along from Dylan, Mango,
Mary and me. Thanks so much for listening.
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongshatikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shoory.
For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.