 This is a terrific panel and it's a great conversation. Liza Mundy, who is the moderator, who is the only person sitting here right now, has been a fellow at New America for the last couple of years. She became director of our bread winning and caregiving program in the fall and has really been great guns since she took over the role. Ann Marie and I have been with her all over the Eastern Seaboard, rallying lots of interest in this subject. She's the author of The Richer Sex, among many other books, and she'll be a terrific moderator. Everyone else can come up now. Bridget Shilty, the... Oh, the weather's getting better. We're doing it differently for this last panel. Dislodge your mic, Bridget, while you're dancing. It's really, these are the perils. Sometimes there's less productivity. We'll stop being silly. Bridget Shilty, as everyone I hope here knows, and everyone has bought the book already, is the author of Overwhelmed Work, Love, and Play when No One Has the Time, which I made the mistake of saying wasn't a book but a movement and then landed with that quote in the New York Times on her advertisement a couple of weeks ago. But it really has been an upswell of interest and enthusiasm for this, the idea that it might be possible to actually enjoy your life while you're being productive. And so that's the theme of this conversation. I will quickly say that Eve Moreau, the Senior Partner and Managing Director of the Boston Consulting Group, joins us also, and of course Mark Beaman, Professor of Psychology and Interdepartmental Program in Neurosciences at Northwestern is also up here. So this is a far-ranging conversation about leisure, which again, will not go past six o'clock. Thank you all. Yeah, thank you so much for staying for this conversation. I do think there's some irony in the fact that we're the last panel and that we're gonna try to convince you that leisure is the new productivity. If we were living by our principles, of course we would just dismiss this group immediately and let everybody head to the bar, but we're not going to do that, but we're gonna make up for it by being entertaining so that it will feel like leisure. I feel pressured. You all didn't know that, don't you? I feel pressured for that. I know, yeah, sorry. This is work for us. But in fact, I think that because this is a group of people who have stuck around to the last panel of a two-day conference, this suggests to me that this is actually, in fact, a very hardworking group of people who probably quite love their work and are exhilarated by the life of the mind, and it may take some convincing to persuade people in this group that leisure is, in fact, the new productivity. So, Bridget, I loved in your write-up in our program you invoked John Maynard Kienza's prediction back in 1930 that by 2030 we would be working a 15-hour work week and that all would have the time to enjoy, quote, the hour in the day virtuously and well. And just to make sort of a lowbrow analogy, some of us may recall that in the Jetsons, which was a cartoon that aired in the 1960s, and that envisioned life in 2060, George Jetson was actually working two hours a week. So, he worked one hour a day, two days a week. And so, for some reason, whenever people envision the future, that technology and progress are gonna give us, they envision this life of leisure, of a shrinking work week. And so, I'll start with you, Bridget, to explain why that didn't happen. Yeah, what, yeah, I think Ben Honeycutt is a leisure researcher that I spoke to for the book, and he said that that's really animated his entire career, what the heck happened? You know, you had in the 30s, and you actually, in the 30s to the 50s, you had a lot of economists and thinkers saying we were on the verge of this coming age of leisure, that we would be able to retire by now at age 38, that we would work maybe six months out of the year, that there was this growing productivity, and we would all have sort of our basic needs met, and so that the rest of the time we could work, you know, kind of these short hours, and then have the rest of the time in leisure. And leisure has gotten a real bad rap, and I have to be perfectly honest, when I was reporting this book, I would get very embarrassed to say, here at the New America Foundation, that I was reporting a book about leisure time. I ended up chasing one of the board members out to the elevators once, no, really, there's scholarship, I promise. And I think that's what's really interesting, we really devalue that sense of leisure, we think it's laziness, or we think that it's just sloth and sitting around. And, you know, leisure really is in the eye of the beholder, but it's actually, the ancient Greeks, they said, that it was the time and the place where you most refreshed your soul, where you became so connected with what you were passionate about. And Liza, you make the point that many of us are passionate about work, and so sometimes our work hours creep into the rest of our lives, and well, what's so wrong about that? And what is so wrong about that, and what is so wrong about our overwork culture that we hear, and we'll hear from our other great panelists here, we hear in the United States, if you just look at work hours, we work among the most hours of any advanced economy, to save South Korea and Japan. And I will remind you that in Japan, there is a word for overwork, called for death from overworked, called karoshi, and that in South Korea, the Wall Street Journal just reported that they have meditation prisons, where people who are overworked go to check themselves in, and wear like a little prison outfit, just to get away from work. So we're not quite that bad, but I think what's so important to understand is that, so we work these long hours, but then when you look at our productivity, and you divide GDP per hours worked, or to get a measure of hourly productivity, well, we're not that productive, and Japan and South Korea are actually at the bottom of the barrel. So what that means is that we're working long hours, we are just physically present, but after a while, we become these butts in the chair, we don't really produce much. And as we move into, we're talking a lot today and yesterday about moving into innovation and a knowledge economy, and how that's really going to be the stock and trade, that ideas are really what we need. Where do those ideas come from? And we're gonna be hearing more about that, but I'll just close my little section with, as I was thinking about leisureness, at leisure and even idleness. One of the most compelling arguments that I ran into is a story about J.K. Rowling. At the time, and back in 1990, she was a researcher for Amnesty International. She was on a train between Manchester and London. The train gets stopped on the tracks for four hours. Everybody around her busily takes out work, and I'm sure if they had smartphones, they would have gotten answering emails and dealing with their backlogs. She stared out the window, totally spaced out, completely idle, did nothing. And in four hours, the entire plot of the magical Harry Potter series just fell into her head. And now why? One of the reasons could be neuroscience is finding that when we're idle, our brains are actually most active, and that's something called the default mode network lights up, and that default mode network works like little airport hubs that connect different parts of the brain that don't typically connect and talk to each other, so that in that idle moment, stray thoughts, memories, visions, ideas all come together in a very new way, and that's what leads to innovation and breakthrough thinking. Well, that seems like a great segue, Mark Meehman. If you could just talk a little bit about that brain process and maybe you can explain the difference between these moments of insight when something really actually productive and valuable comes as opposed to moments I've had when some just sort of absurd thought comes that it turns out to not be workable, or just moments of sort of feeling stupefied and drifting in a way that's actually not that productive, or extreme fatigue. So what's going on in these moments of real insight? So yes, first I'd point out that a lot of good ideas come up both ways. You can have a lot of great ideas just by analyzing information and continuing to do the same methodical type of thinking that you have typically done, but sometimes you're stuck and you're not sure about the right way to go about solving the problem or you can't quite find an optimal solution, and sometimes those impasses are resolved by a sudden moment of insight, this a-ha eureka moment, this countless anecdotes about them, but as was pointed out earlier, anecdotes are not scientific evidence, so we naturally are looking at the evidence to see if some of what's told in the anecdotes is true and then what are the actual brain bases to sort of separate these processes. And we do see that there's a trade-off between even successful solving of problems, whether you solve it sort of analytically, step-by-step, methodically, kind of knowing the processes that you're going to engage in order to solve it, as opposed to by insight where sort of the answer comes to you, not from nowhere, it has to come from your brain, it has to come from some thinking, but maybe thinking that you weren't necessarily aware of, maybe when you're in the default mode or mind-wandering or other episodes, or just even sometimes while you're still working on it, but it sort of comes from a different direction of your thoughts. And we see actually opposing patterns in some of the types of processing that are necessary to solve by this sudden insight and sort of more creative type of problem solving than a more step-wise analytical type of processing. And there's a real opposition to the types of attention that you engage. So usually when we talk about paying attention, and most of what you're told to do at work is pay attention, pay attention, you know, focus, focus. And in order to do that, whether you're looking at it sort of cognitively or even with neuroscience, you can see that you're actually, in order to pay attention to one thing, you often suppress a lot of the other information and that helps you focus. And that's great for a lot of what you wanna do. But sometimes you need to pay attention to other information that initially seems unrelated but it turns out to be very usefully related to the problem you're trying to solve. And if you suppress to that thought, you're never gonna get it. But if you have sort of a less focused attention, you might actually be able to grasp these sort of quieter ideas that while they don't seem as instantly related to the problem that you're facing, they actually turn out to be related to the solution. And there's particular ways in which they come up that I don't need to bore you with all the details of yet. But the important point there is that they actually can be in opposition to each other and that sometimes one mode of thinking is better than another. So very often I get asked how do we have more insights? And one key response is well you don't always want to. A lot of times you really do wanna keep working harder and focusing until you've been asked all the information that you need and you're ready to tie up all those loose ends because now you have them somewhere in your mind, maybe not necessarily consciously. And so you can put them together using this other form of attention. And it turns out that stress is really good for causing you to focus. So there's this thing called weapons focus that's been talked about for half a century. If you see a threat, you tend to engage and focus on that threat because you don't wanna be distracted. You wanna make sure you can monitor the threat. And so you can have a very sharp, narrow focus. But then that's gonna make it harder for you to see the other things in the environment or in your own mental landscape that might actually turn out to be useful for you to sort of come up with a more creative solution or to explore your environment. So. So does that argue that we need workplaces that allow us to be flexible enough that we have that period of time where we're gathering information and we're focusing and we're amassing and then we need a period of time where we can allow those thoughts to work themselves out? Well, I would say at least some of the time you need that. So it's good to have this sort of diversity of skills that you can apply one or the other. And so you might need some time when you're not just constantly stressed. And very often when you're stressed to come up with a solution, someone mentioned competition, like sort of government competitions for coming up with the best solution. And those can be useful for bringing other people into trying to solve a problem. But when you give people a big competition or incentive to solve a problem, they actually often will rush to a very quick and rapid solution that's not actually optimal. And sometimes it takes longer thinking and broader thinking to come up with a more optimal solution. So when you're constantly stressed to do it, you might not work out as well. So you wanna have different moments when there's at least the opportunity to be relaxed and not be trying to come up with something instantly that that could be a beneficial approach. And so Eve, when you do your corporate consulting and you've written about complexity and sort of how to cope with complexity and how to simplify, has the workplace and have our work lives become more complex, has the complexity become exacerbated? And if so, why has that happened? Yes, you're very right. The workplace has become more and more complicated. But I was listening to what your panelists were talking about. And what came to my mind is that we talk about work, we talk about leisure, but what was clear in what you were seeing is that we cannot divide our life in one part which is work and another part which is leisure as though they were independent. In fact, we are a whole and there is an interplay between work and leisure. When our work is stressful, a nightmare, we cannot enjoy leisure. Even if you give me one week of holiday after a no-full day at work, it will not, I will not enjoy this week. I will not be able to read, to play music, to be with my children, to be with my wife. So there is a qualitative interplay between what happens at work and the nature of leisure, first interplay. And second, there is another interplay which is not qualitative, which is just quantitative. If we are not productive at work, we will not be able to free enough time for leisure. So this is where I come to your point, Liza, which is basically our organizations are dealing with a new complexity of business in a cumbersome way. You know, in organization, there are more and more structure, processes, systems, reporting needs, incentives, scorecards, committees, meetings that over-consume, that do not create value, by the way, and that just create work on work. So people have less and less time, you know, based on BC, our company, Boston Consulting Group, we have done various research in the most complicated organizations where you have so many layers, structure, process, systems, committees, scorecards, et cetera, people produce sometimes less, there is less than 20% of value-adding time. So if you take the time spent at work and you look at the time that create value, so basically you divide the value-adding time by the elapsed time, at best you have 20%. So people spend 80% wasting their time, but working harder and harder and longer and longer. You know, in your brochure, you were nice enough to talk about France as a country where there is still time for leisure. You know, I remind you that the legal working time in France is 35 hours per week, 35 hours per week, legal, huh? If you cannot work longer than that, huh? Otherwise you have troubles, huh? You get sent to that leisure prison, you voluntarily go. You have to invent tricks like not putting your card or not showing your face because even the elevator counts when you come in and you come out, not to make sure you work more, not to make sure you work less, huh? Otherwise, okay. So but in some French companies, people have 52 hours of meeting per week, 52 hours of meeting per week in a country where the legal working time is 35 hours. Why? Because these companies are poorly organized again and people have more work on work, more control because they're not able to deal with the new complexity of business. They only add procedures, structures, reporting, control, supervisory burden. And this also, okay, I will conclude here. You're right, our organizations are creating complicatedness which kills productivity so people have less time for leisure and when they are able to be on leisure, they are not enjoying it anyway because of the way work is organized. Well, what does happen in France when there are 52 hours of meetings scheduled? Like who gets in trouble? Anybody? Very good, no, no, who gets in trouble? So to come back to your point, Brigitte, some people are so stressed in these organizations that it's not Karoshi. They don't, I want to make jokes on that because unfortunately it's not Fanny at all, so I'm sorry, it's me who started badly. You know, in Japan, there is a word for death by overwork. Karoshi, as Brigitte said, in France, people commit work-related suicide. They commit suicide at work and of course, often in these companies where there is overwork, but when they leave a letter, what they complain about is not so much the amount of work as the stupidity, the absurdity of their work. You know, being submitted to contradictory requirements, contradictory instructions because in matrix organizations some of these people have 25 managers. 25, it's not two managers. 25 managers and the matrix has 25 dimensions and that of course contradicts each other and these people, this is when they commit suicide. So then the workers' council comes in and say, look, people are killing themselves at work. Why? Because they work too much. Nobody makes a root cause analysis. No, it's not because they work too much but because the work is stupid. This is too subtle. So what does the CEO say? Okay, we are going to work less and to make sure that people work less. Now, the factory or the engineering department will close at six o'clock. 6 p.m., no light, no car park. You have to be out, otherwise you will starve and you have to be out by 6 p.m., mandatory. But at the same time, the amount of work remains the same. So what is the consequence? The consequence is that these guys, these engineers, these secretaries, these assistants, these design engineers, now they have to leave their work at six but to accomplish the same amount of work at home in their kitchen when there is no printer, no computer and they don't have an office, a desk at home. So they have to work in the kitchen with their wife, with their children so their life becomes a super nightmare because they have not understood the root cause. The root cause is what you said earlier. We are not able to deal with the new complexity of business. Our companies just create complicatedness to deal with complexity. Work loses meaning, people lose productivity and I think we need to think holistically about the work and leisure interplay. Our life is not an addition of both. So you're suggesting that France maybe is not the ideal model. Perhaps we're idealizing it. I'll let you say, but I didn't say very well. There's the rules and there's the reality, I guess. So and as you talk, I mean you talk about the redundancy and the proliferation of managers and assignments and again I think about technology and I think about this vision that technology was gonna free us and it was gonna make our lives more efficient and give us all of this leisure time in which to contemplate and reflect and it just hasn't happened. And I don't know, what role do you feel that technology plays in these? I mean how should we be coping with it in order to preserve these moments when you talk about flow, Bridget, when you are in that state where you're looking out the train window and there's the landscape and how do we sort of banish technology in order that we can have those moments where we fight the encroachment of email and distractions. Are you looking at either of you? I think the technology was, I think Keynes was actually a typo, he meant 15 hours a day. That was the future he envisioned, not 15 hours a week. That's what we have, I don't think that's what he envisioned. Well, if I could, I'll take a stab at that with the technology. I think what's really interesting, I spent a lot of time looking at time use research and what that does not capture is really this work creep that technology has really has brought upon us. On the one hand, technology's fantastic. It's given us the ability to work in different places. It's given us freedom so that you can work when and where and even how you might work best. But on the other hand, because it's so ubiquitous, we can work all the time everywhere. How many of you raise your hand as we have gotten an email from your boss at 9.30, 11 o'clock at night, three in the morning and how many of you have felt like you needed to answer that? So then you never get away. And you are always on this state that they call on call. So you're never really able to flip into that idle mode where you're able to let your default mode network go. You're always in this vigilant state waiting for the next ding to come in. So I think that's something that managers really need to think about. There's a lot of really good social science that shows we manage for hours. We're still managing as if we are still in the early industrial revolution because it's much more difficult to manage by performance, much more difficult to manage by mission. What is it that you're supposed to do? What if you took hours completely out of the equation? It's much easier to say you're in a chair, you're working, okay, done. But that's really the next challenge for managers so to speak is to really figure out what is the mission of this job? What is the performance that I'm expecting? How much is enough? When is it good enough? How will I know? How can we measure that? One of the things about Yahoo, Marissa Meyer got rid of the telecommuting program there and everybody went all up in arms. The thing about it is that was not a really great telecommuting policy. So what would it take to make that a better one? To have the flexibility to do your work well, to kind of crunch the, you know, bound the hour so that it doesn't sort of creep on and on because I will tell you that work creep is not connected, you know, is not captured in our work hours and if you did, then our work hours would be even longer than our data shows. Do you worry that's a double-edged sword at all because if you do it measured on performance, I mean, part of the thing is that people feel competitive in order to advance, in order to be performing well and to get the resources to keep doing well, you have to, you know, outshine your other workers around you, your colleagues, and so they're just gonna work more. There's a way to find the niche. But that goes back to the whole question of what are you measuring? And right now social science will show that we value the people who are putting in the most face time, you know, that face time in the office is what we value. Well, if that's what we value, then that's what we're gonna get and that's how you're gonna outshine by, you know, look at, I'm so good, I'm here at 11 o'clock at night. You know, what if we changed our metrics? You know, and it's gonna depend. It's gonna be different for every, different industries. It's gonna be different for different offices. It's a much harder task, which is why I think we stay stuck with ours. And, you know, how many people? How about staying stuck with ours but just lowering the hours? Because I do think it's a valid point that if you're gonna be measured by performance, then you're gonna be constantly looking over your shoulder at who's performing and who's working harder and who's spending 23 hours. And so what if the, what if it was to, well, although you've said that in France it doesn't necessarily happen, but. But, you know, France is one of the most productive countries in the OECD. You know, if you take as your measure, right, the GDP divided by the number of worktowers. In May, for example, in France, there is what they call the bridge. The bridge is that whenever there is a holiday on the Thursday, you don't go to work on the Friday because there is no point in going back to work on the Friday if you were already on holiday on the Thursday and it will be on the Saturday. Oh, that's so nice. In May, because you have the first of May, you have many saints and so on. So in May, people, depending on yours, you have six days of work in May, that sounds okay. So France is one of the most productive countries. Now, but still, the standards of living are going down in France for, because to be productive like in the industrial revolution edge, as Brigitte was saying, is not enough. You must not be only productive, but you must be creative, you must be inventive, and I think this is what Marc is talking about. And the way of organizing work in France does not allow for that when it comes to technology. I think this is what is good for about this foundation, the New America Foundation, because all what you are seeing here should be taken into account in boards of directors, in the way organizations are managed because organizations are a bit naive when it comes to technology, to IT, to telecommunication. I am, at the beginning, I'm a social scientist. I am an organizational sociologist. And remember, the first thing you study in organizational sociology is work, of course, and then it is stress, stress. So what is the definition of stress? What is the criteria of stress? And I remember my old professor gave me the ultimate criteria. He said, you are stressed by work when you bring work to the toilet. This is when you bring work to the toilet, it is because you are stressed. That's the criteria. As long as you don't bring work to the toilet, you are not really stressed. Okay, now, if you think... Should we take a poll? You know, people are tweeting that right now. Yeah, yeah, now, if you... And some people are reading it on the toilet. If you think about it, if you think about it, what has happened with the smartphone of the Blackberry? Now we bring work to the toilet every time we go to the toilet. So this technology has had a creeping counterproductive effect. And I think what we are missing are people who, through social sciences, through neuroscience, through psychology, brings a little bit of wisdom in the way we use technology. You know, we are just discovering that. And we are like children who play dangerously with a new game without realizing that it should be handled with care. And it is only this kind of sciences that can bring that wisdom. Technology, as you said, is neither bad or good in itself. It depends on how we are used. But, you know, there is a company, by the way, it happens to be a French company by the French real matter called ATOS, which is a high-tech company, ATOS. They have banned internal emails. No internal emails are forbidden. You can use only external emails, but inside forbidden. And you can use Twitter, 140 things. You can use Facebook, but no forbidden internal emails, because emails can be the ultimate sophisticated way to engineer escalation. You know, in the past, if you wanted to copy your boss, sorry, if you wanted to escalate a problem to your boss, you had to take an appointment with the secretary, knock at the door of the secretary. Hello, Mrs. Secretary, I'm sorry to disturb you. I would like to have some time with the boss. Oh, what is it about? She would take the big book, you open it, when you went, no, no, no. And today you see your boss, and you can see the 25 other matrix bosses that you have, and you engineer. And all these guys will be swimming among problems because of emails and CCs and blackberries and smartphones and so on. So we need wisdom here. This is, again, part of what we call work on work, killing productivity, because, you know, we have a lot of measures on that. It's a disaster. You know what I'm saying? It's fine. You have a new movement, no work on the toilet. I was just going to say, I'd like to have something, I was going to add something. You know, I went to Denmark for the book. And the reason I went there to kind of get back to the idea of leisure is because there were studies there that showed that men and women had more leisure time there than in any other country that they studied. You know, and it certainly wasn't comprehensive, but there were like a group of about seven or eight countries. And men and women had about equal amounts of leisure, whereas in other countries there are fairly large gaps. And the thing that most made me want to go there is because working mothers had more leisure time than men in Italy. It's like, you know, and you think of the cafe culture, it's like, well, what are they doing there? And they had the most pure leisure, or leisure to themselves. Whereas here in the United States, most mothers spend almost all of their leisure time with their children. It's time with adults has fallen off the cliff in the last couple decades here. And so I wanted to know what is it and is there anything to learn from it? And there were a couple of things that I thought were really interesting. Their work is short, but also very flexible, but it's intense. Most places don't have more than say a half hour for lunch and you have a smorgasbord, you just kind of go there so there isn't like these long lunch hours. They do work the 37 hours a week by law and you are out the door at 4.34, you know, or 4.37 or whatever somebody was telling me. And you're actually the bad parent if you pick your kids up at daycare at 4.30. Most people get there at 3.30. So can you imagine? And there was a real commitment to gender equality. I think that's another sort of thing that we don't really talk about that our workplaces demand these long hours of both men and women. And when you're trying to have families, that makes it really virtually impossible for anybody. But there was also this sense of they really valued leisure time for what it could bring to you for your life and then being refreshed in what you could bring back to work. And there are innovative workplaces here that recognize those hours of doing something completely different, changing the channel, brings you in with perhaps an ability to see an old problem in a new way. But I thought it was so interesting that in Denmark they view you rather than here. I can't tell you how many times people have bragged about spending the night at the office or how many hours they've put in. Over there, you get these blank stares and it's like, well, what's wrong with you that you are so inefficient that you can't get your work done in 37 hours? It's a completely different sort of thing that they value. And so you kind of work to whatever the cultural standard is. And I do think that that's something to learn about that a lot of our work hours are because that is what we have come to value, whether we're productive or not. One other thought I had when you were talking about the fact that it used to be that if you wanted to bring something up with your superior, you'd have to go to the secretary. One of the great points that Bridget makes in her book, I think, is the way to just to inject gender into that conversation is that men typically were the executives. And their time, Bridget talks about the fact that men have traditionally had their time protected either by their wife who might say, no, no, he can't be bothered right now. Children stay away. Or the secretary who's saying, no, I can't give you a time with the boss or maybe next week. And I guess nobody has that anymore, right? Nobody has any. I'm not sure that women ever did. And the other side of those emails is for working parents, you're also getting those exponentially proliferating emails from the snack organizer and the soccer team and the trophy chairperson. And so it's coming at you really from both sides, from your internal emails, but also from the external parenting groups. And then people start replying and then everybody's head explodes. Right? I think I would like to speak for neuroscience a bit because at BCG, at the Boston Institute, there is something we believe in what we call the experience curve. You know, the experience curve means that basically the more you do the same thing, the better you get at it. Adam Smith, you know. So if you repeat, okay. So the whole idea, which I had by the way when I started in the career is that if I was able to work 22 hours a day, I would go the experience curve, I mean three times as fast that people who work the normal amount of hour, eight hours a day, which is good because then if you go down the experience curve, you become more productive, so you do more, you earn more, you are promoted faster, et cetera. Until I read about neurosciences and discovered that in fact, in the learning effect, there are two things. Not only repetition, doing the same thing many times, thanks to focus, specialization, division of labor, but also memorizing because if you repeat the same thing without remembering that you have done it already before, the day before, the month before, there is no learning effect. You are like the fish in the bowl who turns without remembering that I've been there already, no, it's new every time. So now, so you need learning and you need repetition and memory. And memory is produced by a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine and acetylcholine, this time I remember, usually I don't remember the name of the acetylcholine neurotransmitter of memory. So acetylcholine is produced only when we sleep. So if we don't sleep, so me when I work with my teams with the BCG consultants and partners and principals, I say make sure your teams sleep, not so much for the work-life balance. If you want, you don't care about the work-life balance, but just for their mere productivity, they need to sleep if they don't sleep. They will not memorize if they don't memorize. There is no learning effect. If there is no learning effect, there is no Boston Consulting Group. So you see there is a natural convergence between a normal good health and even economics. There is a natural convergence. If we look at things smartly, in other sense, you will confirm that memorizing requires a bit of sleep, no? Right, so sleep is very important for memory. Several other things, too. Don't go without it. And also spacing, learning over time, so those are all good ways to memorize. And sleep, we're also investigating how in the way that it's helping you memorize, it's helping you organize your memory. It's sort of pull out the most important patterns that you see, and that is also good for creative problem solving as well. So we're beginning to investigate that. And the other thing that you see is very often, one side of it is people that sort of, I don't believe in creativity or insight, or all you just need is more productivity. And more productivity is good to a point, but the most famous quote for that, of course, is Thomas Edison. Inventions 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration. But I should point out that even Edison took pains to harness that 1%. You could think that 1%, well, Alexander Graham Bell be Alicia Gray to the patent office by a couple of hours. So we had Ma Bell, not Ma Gray. That was probably less than 1% of the time he spent working on it. And Thomas Edison, he would sit in his lab when he got stuck on an idea. He would sit down and relax. He didn't want to quite fall asleep. He believed he had good ideas right before he fell asleep, which actually, there's some support for that, because that's when you're in a looser state of attention and relaxed. So he would hold a handful of ball bearings, steel ball bearings over a pie plate. And if he fell asleep, he would drop them, and they'd clatter on the pie plate. And he'd wake up and he'd write down whatever he was thinking, because he really believed he got some interesting ideas. So he may have thought it was only 1%, but he knew it was an important 1%. And so you need to go back and forth between these two. You just can't always keep your nose to the grindstone and still expect to be able to always be ultimately productive. And as I was saying earlier, really, I'm just interested in understanding the brain and how we do this kind of problem-solving. But there are implications for that. And one of them turns out that you can't attend with high degree of focus and loose focus at the same time. And so you definitely need to trade off at some point in order to take advantage of all the hard work you did before to then remember it and therefore be trained on it and then to see the right pattern and make use of it and maybe come up with creative solutions as well. And I think that's what's so interesting. When you look at some of the history of breakthroughs, like Sir Isaac Newton, it's sort of like this oscillation between deep study and concentration and these kind of idle moments like you're talking about. So he's somebody that was deeply steeped in the study of physical science. And then one evening after dinner, he's hanging out in the garden, he's idle, it's kind of relaxed, he's drinking tea and this apple falls, it's like, oh, gravity. So it's like you need that oscillation between those two kind of poles. And I think the other things that's very interesting to kind of get back to the sense that leisure being productive, that you need these breaks for your brain, for your life, for your productivity. We talk about these 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. This is something that came out a couple of years ago. 10,000 hours and then you become a master at something. Well, that was a study that was based, that was done by this guy named Anders Erickson out of Florida. And he went over to Berlin to the Academy of Music there and he wanted to see what's the difference between the most excellent virtuoso musicians and the people on the teacher track. And what he discovered is how they organized their days was very much that same oscillation, the virtuosos, they would work in these intense pulses and then it would have intense periods of rest. So the picture of their day looked like these steep mountain peaks, whereas the people more on the teacher track, they kind of had this kind of constant habituation, sort of like the same pattern all the time. So I think that's a really great thing to remember. Yes, put in those 10,000 hours, but not constant 10,000 hours. Successive, yes. You need those breaks, you need the peaks and valleys. So I think we ought to have time for a couple of questions. Are there any questions out there? I see the first hand that went up close to the mic, right there, yes. Hi, I'm Maria Saab. I work with NAF. My question is we've seen throughout these past two days a lot of conversations about technology and moving forward and income inequality and lack of jobs. So the implied notion there is we need to work harder and learn more and do more. Do you think in the technological age where we're moving forward at a really fast pace, leisure and mindfulness and wellness can be a counterculture to all that? Is that a possibility or is that going to be difficult to thrive? Or will that have a difficulty thriving? I think you have to have both. I think that with technology and the fast-moving world, and I'd love to hear what you guys have to say, but it's like it's the same thing. More is not more and more is not better no matter what speed you're living in. You have a thought? Well, to me again, productivity is a driver of efficiency. Sorry, technology is a driver of efficiency and therefore productivity which can free some valuable time for leisure. But technology in itself has no effect in itself. It depends on how our structure, our governance, our processes, our managers, our leaders are using it. And this is not in the technology. It is outside the technology. And if we're not able to invent the new way to, we are going through a new economic revolution. And every time there is a new economic revolution, it enters an organizational revolution. And the first industrial revolution of the 17th century created a radically new way of organization. The one at the end of the 19th century created a radically new kind of organization. Today, we are going through a third economic revolution. We can call it globalization, hyper-competition, the networked economy, whatever. It will entail a radically new way of organizing work, of performing work, of managing work. And as long as we have not found this new way, technology will be used in the worst manner for companies or perhaps the best thanks to luck, coincidence, miracle, serendipity. So we need to think about how we organize for this new economic revolution. And technology is just one ingredient in itself. It will not improve work, productivity, and free time for leisure. It depends on the other parameters, the way we structure, manage, organize work, I would say. That's right there. Hi, my name is Yuvan Chong. I'm from Arizona State University. And my question has to do with, we always hear a lot of this data that's very monolithic about work hours increasing or productivity across all industries and all sectors. And I was wondering if the panelists had any information about this being broken down by different sectors and industries, because it seems to me that this data might be skewed by, say, the financial industry or like if you're a big bank, you're working for a big bank and there's a big merger and acquisition thing going on or you have to be on call for a client all the time, that this might actually skew the data so that it seems that maybe not all industries are suffering from this type of issue. Well, I think when you look at the data and you start breaking it down, two things. What really started happening is sort of like a division in work hours. So among white collar workers, to be really clear, that's where the work hours have been climbing since about the 1980s. And you're right, bank industry, Silicon Valley, 90 hours and loving it on their t-shirts. Whereas at the same time, for low wage workers or working class folks, their hours have been falling. So that's why, and then you kind of get this average that doesn't really mean anything because you've got really two very different realities. And then you've got people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum who technically have more, you'd say more leisure time, but that's not really great leisure because you're worried. Or they work less hours in one job but they work multiple jobs because they're not making enough to. Right, and so you're cobbling together a bunch of stuff to just try to hang on and make ends meet. And we've learned earlier today, wages have been stagnant or falling and falling in particularly in that low wage category. So the problems of leisure are there as well but they're very different. And the need and the requirement for leisure is just as critical. The good life requires work, love and play and that's for everybody. The only sectors that have been able to improve their productivity is when, thanks to IT, they were able to have more multitasking. There has been a rebound in productivity in the US around 2000, starting in 1998 and ending in 2004. That's the rebound that basically killed the solos paradox. Remember Robert Solo in 1987 wrote his famous article, we see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics that we should see improve, no improvement. Well, around 2000, a rebound. But why this rebound in productivity? Only in the industrial sectors where you could have multitasking, thanks to IT. What is multitasking? Multitasking means that in the past when you would go to a bank, let's say 30 years ago, you had the tailor, you had the cashier, you had the sales guys. And when there was nobody to whom you could sell a product, the sales guys was reading the newspaper. And the cashers was taking the money from people coming to cash money, et cetera. And when there was nobody caching and the sales guy was perhaps working with a guy asking how can I open a bank account. Today, thanks to IT, people can be connected to potential customers, have on their computer the segments of customers they need to call. They can open a bank account directly. They can give cash to people. So basically, people work more because they are multitasking. The same guy can act in a bank as a tailor, as a sales guy, and as a cashier, so to speak. But if you think about it, what has happened is that there is more hours of work, sorry, there is more minutes of work per hours of presence. More minutes of work per hour of presence. Less idle time. But the extra minutes of work does not create more value than in the past. And more and more it creates less and less value because a lot of this time is spent reporting, meetings, work on work. So this is why the marginal productivity is overall slowing down. And when there are only 24 hours in a day, so when thanks to multitasking you fill up this time, then productivity improvement are bound to slow down. So this is the only sector where people have seen their productivity improve thanks to multitasking. Apart from that, no productivity improvement because we use everywhere the same management solution that are obsolete based on Taylorism, as Bridges was saying, and based on these hard and soft approaches that I'm describing in my book that are totally obsolete across sectors. Well, yes. I feel that the good life requires now that we break for a cocktail reception. I think we all deserve it. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Thank you.