Sitting is the Smoking of Our Generation
Yesterday, I shared with
you the “big” news that I’m speaking at
TED at their Long Beach event a short 40 or so days from now.
The topic of my talk may
surprise you. It’s not on business models of the future, or why collaboration
matters, or about the need to dissolve us v. them architectures that prevail.
The mainstage talk I have been asked to give is on something I’ve come to love
and want to share with others: walking meetings. I wrote up the first pass of
the idea to share it and see what questions / comments / suggestions ended up
being asked. And OH, WOW am I glad I did. The comments section in one short day is chock full of great
nuggets that will inspire the next generation of this idea.
AS IS ALWAYS TRUE, I’d love to hear what you think of this idea. (I know I
probably don’t need to say it because — perhaps with this many years of blogging
history– it can be assumed, but I don’t want to ever take you and it for
granted. The reason I write is to learn and share WITH you, not to do a 1-way
flow AT you.)***
I find myself, probably like many of you, spending way too much time in front of my computer. When I do face-to-face meetings, my colleagues and I typically met around some conference table, sometimes at an airport lounge (nothing like getting the most out of a long layover), and quite often at coffee shops (hello Starbucks!). But that means that the most common denominator across all these locations wasn’t the desk, or, the keyboard, or even the coffee. The common denominator in the modern workday is our, um, tush.
As we work, we sit more
than we do anything else. We’re averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7
hours of sleeping. Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don’t even
question how much we’re doing it. And, everyone else is doing it also, so it
doesn’t even occur to us that it’s not okay. In that way, I’ve come to see that
sitting is the smoking of our generation.
Of course, health studies
conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around. After 1 hour
of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat declines by as much as 90%.
Extended sitting slows the body’s metabolism affecting things like (good
cholesterol) HDL levels in our bodies. Research shows that this lack of physical
activity is directly tied to 6% of the impact for heart diseases, 7% for
type 2 diabetes, and 10% for breast cancer, or colon cancer. You might already
know that the death rate associated with obesity in the US is now 35
million. But do you know what it is in relationship to Tobacco? Just 3.5
million. The New York Times reported on another study, published last year in
the journal Circulation that looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and
found that for each
additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of
dying rose by 11%. In that article, a doctor is quoted as saying that excessive
sitting, which he defines as nine hours a day, is a lethal activity.
And so, over the last
couple of years, we saw the mainstreaming
of the
standing desk. Which, certainly, is a step forward. But even that, while it
gets you off your duff, won’t help you get real
exercise.
So four years ago, I made a simple change when I switched one meeting
from a coffee meeting to a walking-meeting. I liked it so much it
became a regular addition to my calendar; I now average four such meetings, and
20 to 30 miles each week. Today it’s life-changing, but it happened almost by
accident.
My fundamental problem with exercise has always been this:
it took time away from other more “productive things.” Going to the gym to take
care of me (vs. companies, colleagues, family) seemed selfish. My American-bred
Puritan work ethic nearly always won out. Only when I realized I could do both
at the same time, by making exercise part of the meeting, did I finally start to
get more exercise. This is one of those 2-for-1 deals. I’m not sacrificing my
health for work, nor work for fitness. And maybe that’s why making fitness a
priority finally doesn’t feel like a conflict. It’s as easy as stepping out the
door and might require as much as a change of shoes.
And, yet, it’s true that
some people will turn you down. Probably 30% of the people I ask to do these
kinds of meetings say that they are not fit enough to do a walking meeting. I
had one person tell me afterwards that they got more active for an entire month
before our meeting, so as to not embarrass themselves on their hike with me. I
don’t judge the people who won’t do a hiking meeting, and in most cases will
choose to do another type of meeting with them (lunch or whatever) but I am also
reminded of James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis’s research from their related
book, Connected.
They observed that obesity spreads according to network effects; if your
friend’s friend’s friend who lives a thousand miles away gains weight, you’re
likely to gain weight, too. And if that extended friend also loses weight, even
if you’re not in the same city, you’re likely to lose weight, too. My goal is to
be someone who socializes the idea that physical activity matters, and that we
each matter enough to take care of our health.
And after a few hundred of these meetings, I’ve started noticing some
unanticipated side benefits. First, I can actually listen better when I
am walking next to someone than when I’m across from them in some coffee shop.
There’s something about being side-by-side that puts the problem or ideas before
us, and us working on it together.Second, the simple act of moving also means the mobile device mostly stays put away. Undivided attention is perhaps today’s scarcest resource, and hiking meetings allow me to invest that resource very differently.
And, finally we almost
always end the hike joyful. The number one thing I’ve heard people say
(especially if they’ve resisted this kind of meeting in the past) is “That was
the most creative time I’ve had in a long time” And that could be because we’re
outside, or a result of walking. Research
certainly says that walking
is good for the brain.
I’ve learned that if you want to get out of the box thinking, you
need to literally get out of the box. When you step outside, you give
yourself over to nature, respecting its cycles and unpredictability. It keeps me
more awake to what is happening around me by experiencing the extreme heats of
summer, or the frigid power of winter. It makes me present to the world around
me instead of being insulated from it.To keep this commitment — to myself and to others — I’ve marked off certain times on my calendar for these meetings. I block off two morning appointments (when I can take a shower afterwards) and two end-of-day appointments for hiking meetings. I try and schedule these slots before scheduling “regular” sitting meetings because it means I have no excuse to not move that day and it helps me be more awake during the day or less zombie-like (and still-thinking-about-my-inbox) going into the evening. On the rare days when someone bails on a hike last minute, I typically still head out for the time, and I find myself hearing even my own voice more clearly.
***
As is the norm for the
pieces I first write at Harvard, please help me by contributing your comments on
the original
posting site (or in long form:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/sitting_is_the_smoking_of_our_generation.html).
Thanks!
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