It probably won’t surprise you to learn that research shows that having an ability to build relationships predicts how well people do at work. I was a little surprised to learn, however, that being skillful at building relationships proved to be more highly rated than a “focus on results” in determining whether or not a manager is rated among the top 10 percent of leaders in a given company. Similarly, a person’s social skills (which are strongly related to the breadth and the depth of their social connections) are twice as important as intelligence for predicting whether or not they will emerge as a leader when they are assigned to a random team project.

Deep office friendships boost job satisfaction by about 50%, according to a Gallup report. Thinking of applying for a job where your best friend works? Do it: We are seven times as likely to be highly engaged at work if we have a best friend that works at the same place.

And a deep well of research shows that positive social connections protect our health. According to Barbara Fredrickson:

A lack of connection is, in fact, more damaging to your health than smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol excessively, or being obese. Specifically, these studies tell us that people who experience more warm and caring connections with others have fewer colds, lower blood pressure, and less often succumb to heart disease and stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and some cancers.

Your relationships are as predictive of how long you will live as obesity, high blood pressure, or smoking! As Matthew Lieberman, author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, puts it: “Increasing the social connections in our lives is probably the single easiest way to enhance our well-being.” This is because what makes us human is our sociality—our desire for and focus on social connections, loving relationships, and warm interactions with others.

This post is from a series about social connections from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

So you’ve finished taking “The Science of Finding Flow”?

Wondering what now? Well, I have good news and I have bad news, folks. First the good news: You’ve already done the bulk of the work that you’ll need to do to regularly find your flow. Now you just need to practice. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but practice does make permanent. The not-so-good news is that finding flow is a skill that you’ll need to practice a lot in order to master.

Many moons ago, when I was in graduate school and had two very small children, I did a year of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to reduce my chronic anxiety. At the end of the year I wasn’t feeling quite so nervous all the time, and my therapist recommended I stop formal therapy and start doing “self-therapy.”

She handed me a worksheet and recommended I schedule time with myself each month to check-in and fill out the worksheet. If I started backsliding again, I could always come back.

You are where I was all those years ago: Ready to start coaching yourself.

It’s important to literally schedule time on your calendar to do this self-coaching. If you find that you are backsliding, revisit this course. Your enrollment lasts a full year.

Here is all you have left to do:

1. Put a monthly 20-minute meeting on your calendar. Include a link to this worksheet, which you’ll need for your self-coaching.

2. Put an annual meeting on your calendar to revisit the core activities of Unit 2: CHOOSE. Schedule something a year from the day that you started this course (or a week or so earlier, so you still have access if you need it).

Here’s what you’ll need to ask yourself at that annual meeting:

1. How do you want to feel in the coming year?

2. What are your five top priorities?

Seriously, people, put these down as recurring events on your calendar. (Right now! Imagine you have a meeting with me! Do it during the work day! Don’t feel guilty about taking time for yourself that is likely to make you more productive in the long run!)

This post wraps up the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

There are countless things we can do for others that take very little of our time. We can make an introduction, help a fellow traveler with their luggage, hold a door open, send a helpful article to a friend who’s looking for information. We can do the earth a favor by using a reusable shopping bag or water bottle. My friends ask me all the time to post information about their work on my social media pages. It usually takes me less than five minutes, but it is a way I can give to my friends by supporting their work.

Acknowledging other people can also be a great gift. Public recognition is, for many people, the highest form of praise. So take two minutes to send an email to a co-worker who is doing great work, and copy the rest of your team. Or make a card for your kid’s teacher, and invite the whole class to write on it something they love about him or her.

Five-minute favors, a term coined by Adam Grant, include random acts of kindness. Google the phrase “random acts of kindness” for literally millions of ideas.

Want extra credit? Research shows that people tend to get more bang for their happiness buck when they do a bunch of five-minute favors together once a week than just one a day. My kids and I call the times when we string together a dozen or so five-minute favors “kindness scavenger hunts.” We make a nice long list of random acts of kindness (things like distributing care kits to homeless people and bringing vegetables from our garden to our neighbors) and then do as many as we possibly can in one afternoon.

Which favors can you do in a cluster? When will you schedule your kindness binge?

This post is from a series about social connections from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

Are you too busy to leave your desk to eat lunch? If so, you aren’t alone, as only 1 in 5 office workers regularly takes lunch these days.

It’s counter-intuitive, but feeling short on time makes it even harder for us to manage the limited time we do have. That’s according to Harvard behavioral scientist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton economist Eldar Shafir.

So eating at our desk isn’t usually a good time-management decision if we want to be productive, creative, or just plain happy — but the pull to keep working, or to feel like we are working, can be huge.

Here’s what to do instead of eating in front of your email or Facebook feed:

1. Leave your office, or at least leave your desk. A change in scenery is a research-tested way to increase creativity.

2. Step away from your smartphone. Really: Leave your phone at your desk. You won’t be needing it. If you take it with you it will take too much willpower to resist. Even if you turn it on silent, seeing it light up or hearing it vibrate will sabotage this effort. This quick lunch break is for letting your brain generate insights. It will also work to restore depleted willpower, so that you return to work better able to focus, make decisions, and exert your self-control. If you spend your lunch break trying to resist the 1 million temptations on your phone — or if you give in and just check it — you’ll return from lunch more depleted, not less.

3. Take a few minutes to eat mindfully. Here’s how:

 Click here to download the eating mindfully PDF

Like meditation, mindful eating brings loads of benefits. For example, Elissa Epel, director of the UCSF Center for Obesity Assessment, Study, and Treatment, led a study that showed that the more mindfulness women in her study practiced, the more their anxiety, stress, and deep belly fat decreased.

Even when (actually, especially when) we feel too busy to stop working for lunch, we tend to gain increases in our productivity by doing so. And in the process, we are able to better access the part of our brain that makes us more creative and better problem solvers. But you don’t have to trust me (or the science) on this one: Just try it and see.

This post is from a series about “strategic slacking” from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!