Optimizing for Happiness and Productivity: Modeling Opportune Moments for Transitions and Breaks at Work.

[amoralesg001]

Optimizing for Happiness and Productivity: Modeling Opportune Moments for Transitions and Breaks at Work (2020)

Summary

This study gathered data for three weeks in order to build a predictive model for each participant in order to maximize their productivity. Their model and information gathered were used to recommend break times for each participant in order to improve productivity and happiness. Their results showed that they "can jointly model positive affect and productivity with reasonably goodness-of-fit (R2 0.2-0.7) and low error (<15%)."

Key Points

• One study that observed 42 software developers found that “happy developers are indeed better at analytical problem solving and critical thinking.” I found this an interesting finding since this could help the overall well-being of software developers if they were to switch to a analytical/critical thinking task when they feel unhappy or unproductive.

• They based the motive of their study on the Happy-productive worker hypothesis: You cannot be the most productive and do your best work without first being happy. The paper states that a recommended way to keep workers happy and productive is to change states when people are at unhappy or unproductive states (since positive emotions are correlated with shorter issue fixing time).

• Results showed that participants used the program to replenish their energy and were more reflective about their work as a result. This intelligent system improved overall well-being.

• One flaw from this system was that interruptions during wrong times and during flow can result in lower productivity, increased frustration, anxiety, and annoyance. It would be interesting for future research to see what constitutes an "opportune" moment for a person to take a break.

Citation

Harmanpreet Kaur, Alex C. Williams, Daniel McDuff, Mary Czerwinski, Jaime Teevan, and Shamsi T. Iqbal. 2020. Optimizing for Happiness and Productivity: Modeling Opportune Moments for Transitions and Breaks at Work. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–15. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376817

[elaineraybourn]

Hi Alex, this is an interesting read. I have used RSI Guard at Sandia and at first, it was useful in identifying breaks. Then it became too much of a nuisance, so I would ignore it (had to click it though). Now I have a new computer and I will not be installing it. Regarding the article: taking a longitudinal approach would add a lot of value.