Sometimes we forget how powerful small actions can be. Each time the seasons change and it’s time to switch from heat to cool (or cool to heat) I’m reminded of a simple lesson in applied physics.
We moved into our house in December. The heat in our house worked fine. When summer came and we were ready to switch on the air conditioner, I couldn’t figure out why the upper floor of our house was so hot. It seemed that no matter how low I turned the thermostat, the upper floor just wouldn’t cool down.
I googled it and learned a trick that solved my problem. Hot air rises, so in the winter you should close all of the vents on the upper floor of your house and open the vents on the lower floor. This allows the lower floor to get heat, then the hot air rises and heats the upper floor. In the summer the opposite is true. Cool air falls, so the vents should be open on the upper floor and closed on the lower floor. The air cools the upper floor, then naturally falls to cool the lower floor.
There aren’t hacks for everything in life, but there are principles that can be applied across domains to make our lives easier. Just as cooling the upper floor of my house was hard when the downstairs vents were open, doing work with the wrong tools and in the wrong way makes it harder than it needs to be.
For example, when you’re writing an email it makes no sense to use a smartphone. Yes, there are some people who need to have email on their phone for work, but not most of us. Save your email for a computer with a keyboard. This has the dual benefit of making you more effective at processing your email and sending useful replies, and saves you from constantly checking email on your phone or receiving notifications.
Removing email from my phone was something that made a huge difference to to my happiness and my productivity. Even if this isn’t something that will directly apply to the work you do, you can find similar applications of this principle in the work you can do. Look for ways to affect a large improvement from a small change.
