Welcome to the Monthly Newsletter by Amer Kaissi 

Edition #5, March 2020

The book for this month is “Eat Sleep Work Repeat”, which was published earlier in 2020 by Bruce Daisley. Daisley is the European Vice-President for Twitter and host of the popular podcast by the same title. In this book, he argues that because of Artificial Intelligence and automation, the only jobs that will remain human are those that require every-day creativity. However, due to smart phones and constant connectivity, we are overworked and less creative than ever. To deal with this double-bind, Daisley suggests 30 deceptively simple yet very effective practices to recharge and regain our creativity. In this month’s newsletter, I will share some of these evidence-based practices with you.

One suggestion that Daisley has for leaders and employees is to have “monk-mode mornings” in which they block a certain amount of hours for thinking/working where they avoid all distractions by logging out of email and silencing their phones. Another practice is to shorten the workweek. He notes that “we need to stop celebrating overwork: Working in concentrated bursts allows us to achieve just as much but leaves us plenty of time to relax, think and be creative.” Another simple practice is just to go to lunch: the research is clear that forgoing lunch every day results in physical and mental exhaustion and leads to weekend tiredness and sleep disturbances.

One of the most significant ideas in this book is that emails and formal meetings contribute very little to productivity and creativity in organizations. The most important predictors of productivity and creativity, instead, are the casual conversations that people have with each other outside of formal meetings. Workplace dialogue at the water-cooler or coffee machine is a powerful driver of new ideas, and everything should be done to encourage it, including re-arranging physical spaces. For example, if we want two groups to interact more with each other to work on new ideas together, we should consider for example putting the coffee machine halfway through their respective work areas.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of the Newsletter. Every month, I will share with you one leadership or management book that I am reading, and tell you what I learned from it. Please invite your colleagues and friends to sign up.

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Dr. Amer Kaissi is a Leadership Keynote Speaker and a workplace culture and high-performance teams’ expert.