You Turned the Heating Up to Twenty Six and Your Afternoon Reviews Got Worse

November.

The office went cold,
so someone turned the heating up.

Then the afternoon sun
came through the windows
on your side of the room.

By three o'clock
it was twenty six degrees.

Nobody complained.

It felt cosy.

You had two pull requests to review,
and you reviewed them.

One of them
had a missing null check
that reached production on Thursday.

You read that line.

You remember reading it.

You did not feel slow,
and you did not feel tired.

You were warm.

In 2006
Olli Seppänen,
William Fisk and Q.H. Lei,
in a report for
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
pulled together
the published studies
of how temperature affects work.

Typing,
call handling,
office tasks,
measured in real offices
and in laboratories.

Performance rose
as temperature climbed
to about twenty one or twenty two degrees.

Above about twenty three or twenty four
it started to fall.

At thirty degrees
it was around nine percent lower
than at the best point.

Nine percent sounds small.

On a review
it is not spread evenly.

It is the one line
you read and did not check.

The awkward part
is that comfort and performance
are measured differently.

A warm room
can feel pleasant
while the work slips,
and nothing tells you.

There is no alarm
for slightly worse.

So measure the room,
not the feeling.

Put a small thermometer
on your desk.

They cost almost nothing.

Look at it
when the afternoon
starts to feel easy.

If it is past twenty four,
do something about it.

Turn the heating down,
open a window for ten minutes,
or move to a cooler room
for the careful work.

Twenty one or twenty two
is a sensible target
for work that needs your attention.

Not cold.

Just not cosy.

And pay attention
to when the heat builds.

In many offices
it peaks after lunch,
just when the after lunch dip
is arriving anyway.

That is the wrong hour
for the review that matters.

Do it in the morning,
or in the cool room.

Your attention
has a climate.

You can feel
whether you are comfortable.

You cannot feel
how much less you are noticing.

Read the number
instead.

– Serguey Asael Shinder