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Transcript

Movement · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we've all heard that sitting all day is terrible for you.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: But did you know that even if you exercise regularly, it doesn't fully offset the damage of sitting too much?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Paul?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: How much do you move during your workday?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, not enough.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yeah, definitely not as much as I should.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which is terrible because I know that I should.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but one thing that's really important here is to understand that movement is not just about scheduled exercise, as you mentioned, right?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's really about how much you're moving during the day.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Standing up, walking, uh, you know, walking the dog, um, but even just like getting up and doing, you know, half a dozen air squats or something like that.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: These are very, these are different to that scheduled block of exercise that many of us focus on.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Just basically, as humans, we are designed to move a lot more than just the half hour on the treadmill in our lunch break.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I had a standing desk for a while uh at a job I was at, and it was it was good actually.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: I I I don't have it anymore.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I sometimes wish I did because it it was it forced you to be engaged in a way that was different than sitting as well.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think there's definitely something to that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so, like I said, I had that in an office.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have that at my home office because moving standing desks are thousands of dollars.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: So uh not everybody can do that.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh how is remote work probably made this worse, I'm guessing.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, what's what's the remote work impact that you've seen?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh it's it's yeah, it's a very interesting point.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: We hear that a lot, by the way.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I have the standing desk at my uh at my job and I don't have it at the house.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, there are there are ways in which you can kind of get to a uh to sort of a halfway house here, right?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: You can have these ones that kind of convert sitting desks to standing desks that are um that are not uh that are not that expensive.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: But in direct answer to your question, um remote work does appear to impact it.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um there is, I think we might have mentioned this on one of our uh one of our other pods, but there was a study, uh I think it was a Stanford study that was done that looked at the amount people move um in remote work settings versus um versus work from office settings and about 90 minutes a day less uh for most people.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's interesting because it talks to those those two things, or it talks to the thing about the um about the exercise piece versus the movement piece.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because many of those same people were getting the workout in, but they were moving a lot less.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just that classic movement because you know, you don't you don't go to there's no water cooler to go to, right?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well there's no meeting rooms.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's no meeting rooms to go to.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: My old company, the campus was big.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes your meeting would be 10 minutes away, like a 10-minute walk on a campus.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Microsoft was the same.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, you could have a meeting halfway across campus and have to everybody was late for everything as a result, but you were moving to those things, plus getting the little break, either fresh air if you're going outside to a different building or um just within a building, going upstairs, things like that.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: I know we used to have a thing where like uh if it was less, I had a uh a VP one time he was like, if it's less than five store five floors, I use the stairs to get there and not the elevator, stuff like that, partially because our one building had terrible elevator.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh wow, that's really interesting.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I didn't even think about that.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: You're not moving to different meetings, you're just switching Zoom rooms.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: And probably back to back sometimes.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: I know certainly for myself.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, so okay, so how can people combat this?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: What can people do?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, the first thing is again, you know, a lot a lot of the themes with these things we talk about, a lot of it is just awareness, right?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And um and dividing this up in this way, right?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we got all of this stuff wrong, to be honest, right?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is uh probably out of the scope of this podcast, but we think of exercise is a great way to lose weight.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's actually very little evidence uh for that, but there's a ton of evidence that exercise is really good for your overall health, so you should be doing it, right?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not uh it's not a weight loss tool.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: We sort of do this thing as well, right?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words, we're saying exercise is how I get my movement.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, exercise is how you get your movement for a period of time where you're functionally exercising, but there is this other thing as well, and you need to do this other thing as well.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you should be exercising, consciously exercising in exercise blocks and moving, right?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: These are the these are these two uh these two separate things.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So being aware of that, right?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Being aware of the fact that you need to that you need to do both is really important.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it can break down to three really simple things fundamentally, which is making sure that your scheduling movement breaks.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now that could be a ding, a reminder, um, along the lines of what you're talking about with your watch.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Those can be somewhat effective, although we've seen in many cases people tend to tune them out.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: You just blow through it and ignore it.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it can be more effective to schedule an actual movement break, right?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and say, look, you know, this is my physical break of a five of five minutes.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: It also has that other benefit of resetting your resetting your brain.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about uh last week, I think it was, um, that that functional thing itself of the mini break is also very good to keeping you productive.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's two purposes.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that schedule uh scheduling movement breaks is really important.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh changing how you work.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this uh the standing desk.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um if you're in an office setting or if you're in a setting where you can uh where you can do uh elements of your meetings while you're walking, start taking the warding uh the walking meetings.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um so for example, in my case, uh for we'll we'll probably talk about this in a future episode, right?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: But I have a uh I have days where I basically take all of my work or do all of my work in a coffee shop.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's a benefit to that in its own right, but also it's a walk it's a walk away.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I walk to that coffee shop and walk back.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a that's a good way of kind of uh uh of getting it in as well.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then also creating a movement-friendly culture.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you are a leader, talk about movement, model it yourself.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: You got a meeting with one of your employees, suggest to your employees that you do it as a walking meeting.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I had a boss that was very, very big on that and it was hugely helpful.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: We actually got a ton done in those uh in those walking meetings.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And our default was to have a walking meeting versus to have a meeting where we're sat down.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really good one.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really good one because uh I had a when we first worked together, actually, uh, I did a lot of walking meetings basically on the phone.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: If I didn't need to be looking at the computer, if it wasn't like a slide type of meeting where it was just a conversational type of meeting, I would walk.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And some days my work day was 10 miles of walking.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and it's just you don't even realize it's happening.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: You're just, you know, I would do loops around the or office park that I worked in.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: So um, that was really, really helpful.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the culture thing is is huge, uh, especially from you know a leadership perspective, uh modeling it gives people the freedom to realize they can do it as well.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, one other thing I would mention, Matt, and it's one that I'm uh I've actually got an accountability partner who's who's helping me uh with me this uh on this right now.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um if you have a treadmill in your home, there will be work that you do.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: It might be 15 minutes a day, it might be an hour a day, but there will be work that you do that is predominantly absorbing information.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words, you're not typing, you're not um you're not even talking to anybody else, but you're viewing something.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say uh let's say somebody you you're clicking through your emails or whatever, and you're just reading them and absorbing.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you can get a little bit better at understanding what it where it is that you're absorbing information versus interacting more directly with it, and you can bunch that together, then you can do that while you're on the treadmill.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because you have that body movement automation sort of thing happening, and you get into the zone of being able to absorb more effectively.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's why it's kind of nice to like watch a show on an iPad while you're on the treadmill.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: The time just flies by.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think I watched succession on a business trip on an iPad on the treadmill, and before I knew it, it was like six miles in, seven miles in.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yeah, I'll just watch another episode.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you just kind of it just goes so much faster.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're not watching the timer on the on the treadmill uh as opposed to just absorbing.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's really interesting.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, get moving.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Challenge for today.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Track how much you move at work.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: If it's low, add a movement habit to your routine.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Paul.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm off, I'm off for a walk.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: All right, have a walk.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Bye.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 10:00
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• 10:04
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• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.