what sport can teach us

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Two years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is time to question our well-being, both personally and professionally.

The shock caused by the pandemic and the resulting societal changes have forced us to reinvent our way of life. If our choices have mainly been made in response to current events (in particular health) and even if not all the limitations linked to the consequences of this crisis have been (and perhaps they will not be sooner) the first shock that that we have experienced together has passed. We are today not in the “world after” that many of us have been asking for, but in an aftermath phase. We can now look back and make an initial, preliminary estimate of certain transformations that have taken place over the past two years. What do we as societies and individuals want to stop, keep or start in our daily lives?

Should we rethink our relationship with time?

For example, an OpinionWay-Slack poll published last January found that 75% of employees surveyed approve of the use of hybrid work. And for 43% of those under 35, the return to face-to-face could be a motivation to change companies. The reasons given are not very surprising and can (wrongly) seem rather trivial: time savings on travel, a better balance between professional and private life, more flexibility of hours and places of work, etc. Behind these figures is also a change in our proportion to time that takes shape. More specifically, our management of it and our ability to organize our daily lives around our own needs, especially physiological ones.

Taking this into account the natural rhythms of life, the sports world has long been largely assimilated. The challenge of performance forces athletes to study, data after data, the smallest details that can make all the difference on the field. Why not take inspiration from it, not only to optimize your time according to your tasks in a purely productivist approach, but also and above all to put our biological functioning back at the center of our daily life, or even to awaken our creativity?

Combination of personal well-being and professional performance

This question forms the core of the book “Christophe Urios, une saison en enfer”, co-written by the former rugby player and current manager of Union Bordeaux-Bègles, and by Frédéric Rey-Millet, specialist in management innovation. Among the many examples that resonate with the shock and aftermath that workers have experienced over the past two years, let’s keep those of chronobiology. This discipline of studying biological rhythms gives us the tools to better organize ourselves and teaches us that certain times are more suitable for this or that kind of profession, depending on the chronotype of each person. For example, for most people, it is better to focus on analytical tasks in the morning and set aside creative exercises, such as brainstorming, for the end of the day, contrary to what you might think at first glance. The main contribution of this discipline is that improving the comfort of life and improving performance are not necessarily contradictory concepts and that sacrificing one for the benefit of the other is not necessarily inevitable.

For his part, the psychologist and researcher K. Anders Ericsson, specialist in performance and expertise, in his book “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise”, denies the myth that the world belongs to those who sleep little . There is no need to sacrifice sleep on the altar of quarterly results; the great champions sleep precisely because there is a time for everything. Sleeping longer in the morning is therefore a good argument for teleworking. Sleep embodies a twin issue of well-being and performance – can the second really do without the first? – the mechanisms of which can be counter-intuitive. The research work of Roger Ekirch (“The Great Transformation of Sleep”, “In Search of Lost Sleep”), professor emeritus at the Polytechnic Institute of Virginia, disrupts our certainties about our sleep rhythm. Through the study of historical sources and the mentions of “first sleep” and “second sleep”, Roger Ekirch understands that before the industrial revolution it was common to split the night’s sleep. This is called biphasic sleep: an initial sleep phase between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., followed by a “wake” phase (until about 1 a.m.) devoted to creative activities and moments of conviviality. Then back under the duvet until sunrise. This practice seems to have been lost due to the advent of artificial light and not a physiological transformation.

Performance is linked to personal well-being, and it is for questions about performance and well-being that it is time to rethink our lifestyle. If the health crisis has allowed us to experiment with new rhythms, it is the duty of companies to integrate this flexibility into their organization, both for their well-being and that of the employees who make it up.