WPHT's Rich Zeoli Talks To Author Josh Davis About His Book 'Two Awesome Hours'
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Dr. Josh Davis, author of Two Awesome Hours, said we need to reevaluate the eight hour work day and the way our best work gets done.
Davis told Rich Zeoli on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT that being at work for eight hours does not mean you're necessarily using your time in an efficient manner.
"We're not getting eight or ten hours or whatever it is of productive work done a day anyway. It tends to be far less than that. Once we recognize that, then we can actually shift towards, how can we really focused on being effective in the short term? Depending on the day, some of the things I was learning in doing the research was that it doesn't have to be a special two hour window. There is nothing actually magical about two hours. It can be 30 minutes here, thirty minutes there. It can be four hours sometimes. It's learning that we can set up the conditions at will."
Listen to podcast here:
He said even when most people take breaks from their work, they become too engaged with other activities.
"Our attention systems are not designed to stay focused, they're designed to find things that change in the environment. We shouldn't expect them to just simply stay focused constantly. One of the things that we do when we are always focused on something, even when we think we're taking a break, so we switched from being focused on work to being highly focused on checking Facebook or checking the sports standings or what's happening in the gossip columns or whatever it is, that what we're actually doing is we're blocking a process that turns out to be extremely valuable, which is mind wandering."
Davis insists that allowing our minds to wander will realign the brain to complete the next task at hand.
"Some processes that occur when our minds wander are integration between some of the goal focused networks in the brain and the self relevant processing networks that doesn't typically occur otherwise, we plan ahead for the future more effectively, we rethink things in a way where it's easier to delay gratification, and, also, we tend to come up with creative solutions to problems that we have been working on."
