Want to be more productive at work? Flip down your laptop.

I get excited when research backs up what I’ve been saying for years…that exercise feeds your brain and propels your career.

Recently, two professors wrote a piece in Harvard Business Review about a study they conducted to look at the connection between work performance and exercise.

I’ve always found it unfortunate that they don’t teach about this relationship in school. Sure, kids have to do physical activities in elementary and high school, but why don’t they teach this as part of college or MBA programs?

It would have saved me a lot of evangelizing with my clients. 😀

You can read the article here, but let me summarize my takeaways and thoughts on how I’ve seen this in action.

The authors point out that worldwide, 1.4 BILLION people are classified as insufficiently active, and sadly there’s been no improvement in physical activity levels since 2001.

Interestingly, inactivity is twice as bad in high-income countries than in low-income countries.

It seems that those who have the most are most willing to throw it away.

Of course, with the rise in remote working, physical stagnation is even more tempting. People who now work from home are now missing out on the several thousand steps they used to walk around in an office.

Approximately 200 employees from the UK and China participated in the 10-day study, in which the authors captured self-reported and objective physical activity data, via wearable devices.

They then correlated these with self- and supervisor-reported work outcomes.

One of the most interesting findings from the study was how much physical activity generates next-day, work-relevant benefits.

It does this in three ways:

• Quality sleep, or a person’s degree of satisfaction with their daily sleep experience.
• Vigor, an affective resource associated with energy and vitality.
• Task focus, a cognitive resource that supports enhanced information processing, attention and concentration.

I’ve personally seen all of these benefits with my clients and myself.

On those occasions when I’m traveling at crazy hours and the only physical activity I get is walking through an airport, I can feel the difference for days after.

Going back to the study, the researchers found - not surprisingly - that job self-efficacy, which reflects an employee’s perception of their capacity to perform their job, was higher for those who exercised and got better sleep.

And it wasn’t just that these people got more done, they had higher levels of positive attitudes and motivation.

So, what can people do to be more active? These are three things I work on with my clients:

• Practice deliberate movement. You can’t wait for exercise to come to you. It needs to be part of your daily routine as much as brushing your teeth. That means no 7 am Zoom calls. Start work too early and you get into a mode where exercise is unlikely to happen that day.
• A little is better than nothing. You don’t need to run a marathon to reap the benefits of physical activity. This was backed up by the study, which found that even short periods of physical activity, even 20 minutes each day, contributed to employees’ next-day task performance and health.
• Mix it up. Doing the same activity every day can get boring really quickly. Curious about pickleball? (side note: I am) Give it a try! That rowing machine you walk by in the gym? Sit down and give it a whirl. Other than extreme rock climbing, it’s very unlikely any of these activities will do you any harm.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Now, go outside and take a walk!

See you next week!

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