This Habit Will Make You Better At Your Job

Imagine you’re faced with a tricky task at work. What’s your first reaction? If you’re socially minded, perhaps you’d fire off an email or Slack message to a co-worker, hoping to pick their brain. Or if you prefer solitude, maybe you’d shut yourself in a conference room to puzzle through the problem on your own. Either of these strategies could yield good results — but a new study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says the best strategy may be a blend of the two. “With our smartphones and all of these technologies now, we’re constantly able to collaborate, and so we do,” says Ethan Bernstein, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School and a co-author of the new paper, along with Boston University’s Jesse Shore and Northeastern University’s David Lazer. “The assumption behind [constant collaboration] is that’s a good thing for the quality of solutions we’re developing.” But the new study suggests that’s not always the case. In the study, the researchers asked three groups of people to complete a complex problem-solving task: mapping the best route for a person who must travel to 25 different cities. The first group was told to solve the problem in isolation. Some of these people came up with very good solutions, Bernstein says, while others reached very poor conclusions, resulting in a lower average quality of w...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime Mental Health/Psychology onetime Source Type: news