About This Book

"The Joy of Work" offers 30 ways to improve work culture and fall in love with your job again. The book highlights the negative impact of open-plan offices on productivity and advocates for distraction-free concentration, or "Deep Work." Walking and spending time in nature can also aid concentration and creativity. The book encourages setting boundaries with technology and recognizing that constant busyness does not equate to productivity. The Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) offers a different approach to work, allowing teams to set clear goals and work in any way they want.

Top Highlights

• Open-plan offices have been studied time and time again, and the conclusion is always the same: in productivity terms, they’re a disaster.
• No distraction leads to quiet, quiet leads to flow, flow leads to progress, progress leads to satisfaction.
• Writer and academic Cal Newport has his own term for the ‘flow’ this involves: ‘Deep Work’, defined by him as ‘professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to the limit’.
• ‘I’m starting to see more entrepreneurs,’ he told me, ‘especially CEOs of small startups – doing what I call the Monk Mode Morning, where they say, “As far as anyone is concerned I’m reachable starting at 11 a.m. or noon and I never am available for meetings, I’m never going to answer an email and never going to answer the phone before then.”
• Perhaps the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it best: ‘I have walked myself into my best thoughts,’ he wrote, ‘and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.’1