Overwhelm and the never-ending to-do list

a post by Karen Skidmore for the CanDoCanBe blog

I was moved to go and find this having just posted about being overwhelmed from a different perspective. Or is it? Karen is writing from a business/work viewpoint and Joanna from a more personal, psychological viewpoint and yet both are pointing out ways in which you can help yourself to calm your mind.



I get it. There are times that you find yourself in the trenches of to-dos. No matter what’s gone on before and how well prepared and organised you may have felt last month, stuff can easily pile up and get on top of you.

Sometimes it shows up as piles of post-it notes and scraps of paper, but in most cases, it’s a mental overload. You’ve got too much thinking going on and your brain can’t keep up with the number of tabs you’ve got open; you need to close down your mental browser.

Multi-tasking is a productivity myth and the word ‘priorities’ is a modern-day oxymoron.

You can NOT have more than one priority at one time.

But we are speeding up and trying to get more stuff done more than ever, so it’s no surprise that the feeling of overwhelm and the never-ending to-do list are common problems amongst entrepreneurs and mico-business owners like you.

I’ve been triggered to write this article this week because the conversation of how to deal with too much to do has come up in several client sessions these past few weeks. It’s Week 5 of my Momentum members’ 90 Day Plans and, at this time, I ask them to complete the 4 Week Review and Re-Do process.

Making time to review your progress every 3 or 4 weeks and map out the detail of the tasks for the next few weeks is critical to avoid overwhelm. I know this may feel counter-intuitive to stop and take time out but if you don’t, you run the risk of getting stuck in the trenches.

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Automation and jobs: When technology boosts employment

an article by James Bessen for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Do industries shed or create jobs when they adopt new labour-saving technologies?

This column shows that manufacturing employment grew along with productivity for a century or more, and only later decreased. It argues that the changing nature of demand was behind this pattern, which led to market saturation.

This implies that the main impact of automation in the near future may be a major reallocation of jobs, not necessarily massive job losses.

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How to Stop Overthinking

a post by Darius Foroux for Forge: Beat yesterday. A new Medium publication about personal development. [brought to us by Stephen’s Lighthouse]


Photo by 胡 卓亨 on Unsplash

How many hours per day do you think?

“I never thought about that,” you’re probably saying. So let me get this straight: You’re thinking all the time, and yet you never consider how much time you spend thinking. That sounds like an addiction to me. I know, because I’m addicted to thinking, too.

Overthinking is a common problem, but when it gets out of hand it can lead to sleep disruption, “analysis paralysis,” and even threaten mental health. It’s also a difficult one to diagnose, let alone cure.

When I eat too much, I can say, “I’m overeating. I need to eat less.” When I work too much, I can say, “I’m getting burned out. I need to stop working.” When I drink too much, I can say, “I need to stop. I need a bottle of water.” But when I think too much, it’s not enough to just say “I’m overthinking.” I need a different approach to unclog my brain.

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Untouchable firms: Market power, business dynamism, and productivity growth in the intangible economy

a column by Maarten de Ridder for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

The slowdown of productivity growth, the decline of business dynamism, and the rise of market power and firm concentration are three trends that have attracted a lot of attention in academic and policy debates.

This column points to the rising use of intangible inputs as a unified explanation for these trends. Firms with high intangible adoption disrupt sectors and initially boost productivity, but negatively affect the entry of new firms and suppress the effect of R&D on innovation and growth in the long run.

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Like it or not? Online platforms and productivity

a column by Alberto Bailin Rivares, Peter Gal, Valentine Millot and Stéphane Sorbe for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

While the innovative features of online platforms offer the potential to improve the performance of service sectors, they raise many new challenges for policymakers.

Using Google search data on service industries in ten OECD countries, this column shows that platforms generally stimulate the productivity of incumbent service firms, but the impact crucially depends on the type of platform considered. Productivity gains tend to be lower when a platform is persistently dominant on its market, suggesting that the contestability of platform markets should be promoted in order to maximise their economic benefits.

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Leisure-enhancing technological change

a column by Łukasz Rachel for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

How we spend our time is changing rapidly.

This column argues that an important driver is leisure-enhancing innovation, aimed at capturing our time, attention, and data.

Leisure-enhancing technologies can help account for both the rise in leisure hours and the decline in productivity observed across the industrialised world. Their nature carries important implications for the long-run viability of the platforms’ business models, for measurement of economic activity, and for welfare.

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Globalisation and state capitalism: Assessing the effects of Vietnam’s WTO entry

a column by Leonardo Baccini, Giammario Impullitti and Edmund Malesky for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

The recent success of China and Vietnam over the past three decades has triggered a debate over ‘state capitalism’ as a viable growth and development model.

This column studies the effect of the 2007 WTO accession on the productivity, profitability, and survival rates of state-owned and private Vietnamese firms. The findings reveal that state-owned enterprises have hampered the efficiency gains brought about by globalisation.

An analysis suggests that productivity gains from trade five years after WTO entry might have been 66% higher in the absence of state-owned firms.

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Promotions and the Peter Principle

a column by Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shu for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

The Peter Principle states that organisations promote people who are good at their jobs until they reach their ‘level of incompetence’, implying that all managers are incompetent.

This column examines data on worker- and manager-level performance for almost 40,000 sales workers across 131 firms and finds evidence that firms systematically promote the best salespeople, even though these workers end up becoming worse managers, and even though there are other observable dimensions of sales worker performance that better predict managerial quality.

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Performance-based pay linked to employee mental health problems, study shows

a post by Chuck Finder (Washington University in St. Louis) for the phys.org blog [via World of Psychology’s “Psychology Around the Net”]

Credit: Shutterstock

Roughly seven of 10 companies in the United States, if not around the globe, use some form of pay-for-performance compensation system: bonuses, commissions, piece rates, profit sharing, individual and team goal achievements, and so on. But does such an incentivized workplace create a negative effect on the mental-health wellness of those workers?

In the first big-data study combining objective medical and compensation records with demographics, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Aarhus University in Denmark discovered once a company switches to a pay-for-performance process, the number of employees using anxiety and depression medication increased by 5.7 percent over an existing base rate of 5.2 percent.

And the actual number of affected employees is almost certainly much higher, said co-author Lamar Pierce, professor of organization & strategy and associate dean for the Olin-Brookings Partnership at Olin Business School.

"This is the tip of the iceberg, and we don't know how deep that iceberg goes beneath," said Pierce, who has focused much of his Olin research on productivity, wellness and pay systems in organizations. "If you believe that the generation of significant depression and anxiety requiring medication represents a much broader shift in overall mental health, it's probably a much bigger effect in terms of people."

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Techies, trade, and skill-biased productivity

a column by James Harrigan, Ariell Reshef and Farid Toubal for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Economists have studied the nexus between labour demand, globalisation, and technology adoption for decades, but quantifying the relative importance of these factors is challenging.

Using firm-level data from France, this column proposes a new measure of productivity based on the number of workers in technology-related occupations.

It finds large effects of importing, ICT, and R&D on the relative demand for skilled workers through their effects on productivity. Interestingly, the demand for both skilled and unskilled workers rises when firms hire ‘techies’ or engage in offshoring.

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Innovation and production in the global economy: The consequences of recent shocks

a column by Costas Arkolakis, Natalia Ramondo, Andres Rodríguez-Clare and Stephen Yeaple for VIX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

One consequence of the last decades of globalisation is that, thanks to multinational firms, goods are increasingly being produced far from where ideas are created.

Using general equilibrium modelling, this column analyses the welfare and distributional effects of the recent wave of protectionism. Central to the results is the flexibility that multinational firms have in locating their innovation and production activities around the globe.

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The productivity-wage premium: It’s productivity, not size, that matters in a service economy

a column by Giuseppe Berlingieri, Sara Calligaris and Chiara Criscuolo for VIX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

The evidence that bigger firms pay higher wages and have higher productivity is mainly based on manufacturing, which nowadays accounts for a small share of the economy.

Drawing on a unique micro-aggregated dataset, this column reveals that while the size premia for both wages and productivity are significantly weaker in market services than in manufacturing, the link between wages and productivity is stronger – the most productive firms at the top are not necessarily the largest ones in terms of employment, but they do pay the best.

This increases the likelihood of productivity and wage gains being shared with fewer workers, a further challenge to achieving inclusive growth in the new service economy.

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Government must urgently deliver Industrial Strategy plan to solve productivity puzzle

from South West Skills Newsletter

Britain’s manufacturers are calling for the Industrial Strategy Council to be immediately created and given the urgent task of setting clear goals that will focus on solutions to boost manufacturing productivity growth.

The call from EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation, comes on the back of new research showing the evolution of manufacturing sub-sector productivity growth against key international competitors before and after the financial crisis, including where the problems and opportunities for growth now sit.

Full text of the EEF press release (HTML)

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How to solve the UK’s wealth inequality problem

an article by Torsten Bell published in the New Statesman

A family on the average wage would have to bank every single penny for 43 years to reach the wealthiest 10 per cent.

This year, average wages are set to be flat. British households, meanwhile, are in the middle of a projected four-year income stagnation. And our productivity has barely risen since the 2008 financial crisis.

Pay, incomes, productivity – that all are flatlining is the defining feature of our economics and our politics today. There’s a reason calling a general election in 2017, as wages fell, was a risky choice by Theresa May.

But one economic number that we rarely discuss has been increasing for some time: wealth. The value of land, it was recently reported, has increased by 412 per cent since 1995; UK households have £12.8tn of wealth. Crucially, our wealth is growing much faster than our income. Between 1955 and the 1980s, wealth was steady at two and a half times national income. Today, it’s closer to seven.

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Does education raise productivity and wages equally? The moderating role of age and gender

an article by Stephan Kampelmann (Université libre de Bruxelles, SBS-EM, CEB and DULBEA, Brussels), François Rycx (Université libre de Bruxelles, SBS-EM, CEB and DULBEA, Brussels; IZA, Bonn, Germany; IRES, Louvain-la Neuve, Belgium; humanOrg, Mons, Belgium), Yves Saks (National Bank of Belgium, Brussels) and Ilan Tojerow (Université libre de Bruxelles, SBS-EM, CEB and DULBEA, Brussels; IZA, Bonn, Germany) published in IZA Journal of Labor Economics Volume 7 Number 1 (2018)

Abstract

We estimate the impact of education on productivity, wage costs and productivity-wage gaps (i.e. profits) using Belgian linked panel data. Findings highlight that educational credentials have a stronger impact on productivity than on wage costs.

Firms’ profitability is found to rise when lower educated workers are substituted by higher educated ones. This effect is found to be more pronounced among younger workers and women.

Findings thus suggest that the productivity to wage cost ratio of low-educated workers is detrimental to their employability, especially when young or female.

They also support the existence of a glass ceiling on women’s career development.

JEL Classification: C33, I21, J24, J31

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How the barcode changed retailing

a column by Emek Basker and Timothy S. Simcoe for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

ICT fuelled rapid growth in US retail during the 1990s and 2000s. This column maps the adoption of universal product codes and scanners to show that the barcode was one of the main drivers of this growth. Companies adopting barcodes employed 10% more employees, delivered a wider range of products, and were more likely to procure from abroad.

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Ideas aren’t running out, but they are getting more expensive to find

a column by Nicholas Bloom, Chad Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb for VOX: CEPR's Policy Portal

The rate of productivity growth in advanced economies has been falling. Optimists hope for a fourth industrial revolution, while pessimists lament that most potential productivity growth has already occurred. This column argues that data on the research effort across all industries shows the costs of extracting ideas have increased sharply over time. This suggests that unless research inputs are continuously raised, economic growth will continue to slow in advanced nations.

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Labour reallocation is not why China’s economy is slowing: Busting the myth of surplus peasants in China’s growth

a column by Peter Robertson and Longfeng Ye for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

The conventional wisdom is that labour reallocation has been a key driver of China’s growth miracle, and slowing migrant labour flows and rapid wage growth have raised concerns over whether this source of growth has run its course. This column argues that the literature on growth and labour reallocation in China has been dominated by a method that, relative to the now standard growth accounting model, substantially overstates the gains. Allowing for this and for human capital differences across sectors, sectoral labour reallocation has not been a key source of productivity growth in China.

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Are ICT displacing workers in the short run? Evidence from seven European countries

an article by Smaranda Pantea (European Commission, Brussel, Belgium and Ministry of Public Finance, Romania), Anna Sabadash (Eurostat, European Commission, Luxembourg) and Federico Biagi (European Commission, Seville, Spain and University of Padua, Italy) published in Information Economics and Policy Volume 39 (June 2017)

Highlights

• We study the short run substitution effect of ICT use on firms' employment.
• We use highly accurate quantitative measures of ICT use within firms.
• We use a longitudinal dataset containing internationally comparable firm level data for seven European countries, covering manufacturing and services sectors.
• We find no evidence that ICT substitutes labour in the short run.
• The insignificant effect of ICT is very robust across ICT measures, countries and sectors.

Abstract

This paper examines the short run labour substitution effects of using ICT at firm-level in the manufacturing and services sectors in seven European countries, during the period 2007–2010. The data come from a unique dataset provided by the ESSLait Project on Linking Microdata, which contains internationally comparable data based on the production statistics linked at firm level with the novel ICT usage indicators.

We adopt a standard conditional labour demand model and control for unobservable time-invariant firm-specific effects.

The results show that ICT use has a statistically insignificant labour substitution effect and this effect is robust across countries, sectors and measures of ICT use. Our findings suggest that increased use of ICT within firms does not reduce the numbers of workers they employ.

JEL classification: J23, J24, O33, L86

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The UK National Minimum Wage's Impact on Productivity

an article by Marian Rizov (Lincoln International Business School, Lincoln, UK), Richard Croucher (Middlesex University Business School, London, UK) and Thomas Lange (Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia) published in British Journal of Management Volume 27 Issue 4 (October 2016)

Abstract

Low pay poses issues for managers internationally.

We examine productivity in low-paying sectors in Britain, since the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW). We use a multiple channel analytical strategy, emphasizing the wage incentives channel and linking it to a model of unobserved productivity.

We estimate firm-specific productivity measures and aggregate them to the level of low-paying sectors. Difference-in-differences analysis illustrates that the NMW positively affected aggregate low-paying sector productivity.

These findings highlight increased wage incentive effects with implications for management practice and public policy since ‘living’ wages may be productivity enhancing.

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