If I were to tell you that cigarette smoking is injurious to your health, it would be a no-brainer for any of us today. It's posted on all cigarette packets today to tell smokers that it is detrimental to their good health. Or if I were to tell you that increased cholesterol and high blood pressure had the potential to increase heart disease or that exercise reduces that risk and obesity increases it, you would say that it is known knowledge.
But in 1955, this was not common knowledge. In fact, only in 1960, through intense studies that were done, it was found out that cigarette smoking was injurious to health. In 1980, they found that high levels of HDL cholesterol reduce the risk of heart disease. All this data came out of a study in a little town in Massachusetts called Framingham. This study began in 1949 by Dr. Thomas Dawber. It was an ongoing cardiovascular study on residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, where they took 5,209 residents who signed up to have a medical check up twice a year for the entire duration of their lives, including their children and grandchildren, thereby providing the data that would be necessary to understand the various things that had to do with medicine. They called it a longitudinal study, which would be used by repeated observation of the same variables over a period of time. Only history, as we look back, shows how valuable this Framingham Heart Study was, because today a lot of the things that we have come to know, have come out of that study. In fact, it continues to go on. They have committed to a hundred years of the study.
I thought how interesting it was – when we look back to 1960, we didn't know any of the things that we take for granted today. This challenged people at Google. I was reading this article titled "Google's Scientific Approach to Work-Life Balance (and Much More)". They have a lab called the People Innovation Lab, which developed gDNA. This is going to be their long-term study aimed at understanding work. It is headed by Dr. Brian Welle and Dr. Jennifer Kurkowski.
Here's the interesting thing. They found that there are two kinds of people at work – the Segmentors and the Integrators. Guess where you would fit in! Would you fit in as a segmentor or would you fit in as an Integrator? The definition for Segmentor – they are able to break free of this burden of blurring; the blurring between work and life and home and family. They will often say that they don't like to think about work while they are at home. These people are able to clearly delineate that this is work and this is home. I remember that last December we were trying to put together a program. One of our staff members called a gentleman who was helping to set up the entire program. He had tried calling him at work and couldn't reach him. So finally called him at home at 9 pm. He picked up the phone and when he heard what she wanted, he said, "Excuse me! This is not something that I handle at my home. Call me at work." It seemed to me that he had very clearly been able to say, "This is not what I do at home. This is what I need to do only at work." That's a segmentor – to be able to segment one's life.
The other is the Integrator, for whom work looms constantly in the background. They are always checking their emails all through the evening, pressing refresh on gmail again and again, to see if any new work has come in, and so on. Where do you fall? Are you a segmentor or an integrator?
Here's the interesting thing that gDNA found out. 69% of people were integrators, that is those who have trouble segmenting their work; the segmentors were only 31%. But more than 50% of the integrators wanted to get better at segmenting. This group expressed preferences like "It's often difficult to tell where my work life ends and my non-work life begins." Google has started trying to help these people because they realize that if you are doing something that you are not comfortable with – it's an unhealthy situation. It leads to unhappiness and ultimately to reduced productivity. They want happy people working in their office. In fact, their Dublin office ran a program called 'Dublin Goes Dark' where people were asked to drop off their devices at the front desk before going home for the night. All the Googlers reported blissful, stressless evenings.
I wonder what you and I need to do to have that kind of a balanced life. It is important for us to have a balanced life. It is important for us to be able to say, "I have this time that I will give to my work, but I also have responsibilities to my family." One of the favorite maxims of Dr. Varghese Kurien, "Eight hours for the dairy, eight hours for family and eight hours for sleep." Evenly distributed! I know that sometimes it is not eight hours; it has to be ten. But do we make it up? Are we able to say, "I wasn't able to spend eight hours with family, but maybe I need to spend extended time by going with them on a vacation." Or, "I haven't been able to give myself the eight hours that I need, the sleep that I need. I'm working too hard doing stuff. Can I take care of it?"
We spend so much money doing the things we do to take care of ourselves when we have a crisis like a health crisis. What if we took a little bit of care to make sure that we prevent those kinds of eventualities? Just as we didn't know in 1950 that smoking was injurious to health, but post-knowing, people stopped smoking. We know today that if we are not balanced in life and family, we get out of sync and there are detrimental consequences. Let's take the time to look realistically at our lives and take good hard decisions and say, "Here's something that is out of sync. I need to fix it." Let's have the moral courage and conviction to fix it.
That's my thought for this morning. I was so captured with all of this. Life is about balance and when we get out of balance, then we have all kinds of consequences. Then we spend time trying to play catch-up. So maybe we ought to think preventive, rather than curative. What is it that I need to put into my life that can prevent something that I know could happen down the road when I can prevent it by bringing in some kind of balance. A segmentor or an integrator? That might be the call for us today.
Can I pray with you? Almighty God, you created this whole world with such balance. We look at everything and see the balance and the movement that comes because you spoke those things. And you created us to be men and women of balance. Maybe this morning as we look at our lives, we might be out of balance, out of sync. Would you give us wisdom to know how to change things in our lives so that we can get back to a healthy balance. I pray this, Lord Jesus, in your name. Amen.
• Laszlo Bock, "Google's Scientific Approach to Work-Life Balance (and Much More)." http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/03/googles-scientific-approach-to-work-life-balance-and-much-more/
• Framingham Health Study, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framingham_Heart_Study
• "Eight hours for dairy, eight hours for family and eight hours for sleep" – words from Dr Verghese Kurien who is known as the Father of the White Revolution. http://www.mapsofindia.com/my-india/society/dr-verghese-kurien-father-of-the-white-revolution-and-man-behind-amul
• Longitudinal study, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_study
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