I’m going to be blunt, but stick with me. I do not like autumn. I don’t like the change in the weather, I hate the shorter days of sunlight, I don’t even dress up for Halloween. My friend once called me the Halloween Grinch, which I found hilarious. But what really annoys me this time of year is that my productivity goes down. So as any normal person with the Sunday scaries does, I began researching productivity studies and here is what I found.
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that its busiest users, the top fifth for pings received, get interrupted by a meeting, email or message every two minutes in the working day. Across a full day that comes to around 275 interruptions. And 80% of the 31,000 knowledge workers it surveyed said they lack the time or energy to do their job. When that’s your week, the only options feel like skipping the chicken fillet roll (Google this delicacy, non Irish readers) and keep stacking calls, meetings and work deadlines.
Then I came across a study that made me rethink that. Researchers from HEC Paris, Harvard and UNC followed new hires through a training programme at a call centre. Everyone got the same training, but one group was asked to give up the last 15 minutes of each day to write down what they’d learned, while the control group used that time to carry on training. By the end, the writers who reflected scored almost 23% higher on the final test, despite having had 15 minutes less training every day.
I don’t want to oversell it. These were new hires at one company, and as far as I can tell it’s a working paper and not yet in a journal, so it doesn’t prove the same thing happens for a leader running a team of forty. But it was enough to make me curious on a cold Sunday evening, and I’d rather test it than keep nodding along to advice about slowing down.
So starting on 5 November, for 10 working days up to 18 November, I’m doing it. Last 15 minutes of the day, pen and paper, phone in another room. I write down what the day taught me, then ask what I’d say to a colleague who’d had the day I just had. That second question is deliberate, because research on reflection at work finds that going over a bad day from the inside tends to make it worse, and stepping back to see it as an outsider helps. (I don’t want to add to your work trauma.) Then I pick one thing to do differently tomorrow.
If you’re already short on time and energy, another daily task probably sounds like I’m having a laugh. But if we do it together and hold each other accountable, then at least we can wallow in each other’s agony… I’m joking, we will have fun.
I’ll write up what I find, including if it turns out to be a waste of a quarter of an hour. In December I’ll take a proper hour to ask what 2026 cost me, and try to say my top priority for 2027 in a single sentence before I write the list.
Who fancies doing a bit of reflection with me?