When a workday goes badly, we blame the coffee or the sleep. Almost nobody blames the room. But the air quality, temperature, and noise around you have a measurable effect on how well you think and make decisions.

Alex and Moah recorded this episode with a CO2 monitor in the booth and watched the number climb while they started having trouble finding words.

Harvard's Joseph Allen put office workers in a controlled office and dialed the air quality up and down. Cognitive scores were 101% higher with enhanced ventilation, and dropped 50% at 1,400 ppm of CO2, a level plenty of bedrooms and conference rooms hit routinely. A modest rise in fine particle pollution made expert chess players 26% more likely to blunder. Students in dorms without AC performed 13% slower during a heat wave.

Air, temperature, and pollution have an ideal range no matter what you're doing. Everything else depends on the task. Alex and Moah get into why a 60-decibel air conditioner beats a 45-decibel conversation two desks away, what ceiling height does to a brainstorm, why open-plan offices backfired, and how to fix your space when you don't control the thermostat. Also: Moah's plan to monetize all of this with a scented candle.

This episode is dedicated to Ryeon, our editor, who made us sound better than we deserve to.

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Links from the show!

CO2 is a big deal https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26502459/

Temperature for health and productivity in offices https://www.osti.gov/biblio/886957

Colour of noise and work efficiency https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347958829_Spectral_content_colour_of_noise_exposure_affects_work_efficiency

Aromatherapy: effects on cognition and mood https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10808709_AROMAS_OF_ROSEMARY_AND_LAVENDER_ESSENTIAL_OILS_DIFFERENTIALLY_AFFECT_COGNITION_AND_MOOD_IN_HEALTHY_ADULTS

Chessmaster paper: Indoor air quality and strategic decisionmaking - https://dusp.mit.edu/news/how-indoor-air-quality-impacts-decision-making

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Everyone needs to learn to delegate effectively in the age of AI, even if you don’t manage any humans. AI agents will research the paper, write the draft, crunch the spreadsheet, just about anything you need, short of grabbing your coffee. So why does it still go sideways so often? In this episode, Alex and Moah reveal the ways delegating tasks to a machine are the same as delegating to a person — and the science that explains why most of us are bad at both. Research shows the CEOs who delegate well make 33% More revenue — yet 75% of top CEOs admit they're bad at this one skill.

Along the way, Alex and Moah dig into why we struggle to let go, like the psychology that makes your own work feel superior and the cognitive bias that mistakes long hours for good results. To help you level up your ability to delegate, they walk through the five levels of managerial delegation, the 1974 Harvard Business Review classic that asks "who's got the monkey?", and the military’s concept of "Commander's Intent". You'll leave with one concrete assignment: find the single task on next week's plate that only you can do, and hand off something else to a person or a machine. The hard part was never the handoff. It's the trust.

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Links from the show!

Gallup: Companies with CEOs who delegate better https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182414/delegating-huge-management-challenge-entrepreneurs.aspx

9 Tips to Delegate Effectively https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/how-to-delegate-effectively

Commander’s Intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_(military)

Who’s Got the Monkey? https://internalmedicinefaculty.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2018/05/Whos-Got-the-Monkey-HBR.pdf

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*Correction: We misstated a statistic in the audio. Delegator CEOs had a 3-year growth rate that was 112 percentage points higher (1,751% growth vs. ~1,639% for low delegators.)

Ever close your laptop and realize you're snapping at your kids over the smallest thing? You might be experiencing what researchers are now calling AI brain fry but even if you've never touched an AI agent, the underlying problem is one we all share: our brains were never built for the amount of multitasking we are handling today.

Moah and Alex dig into why multitasking exhausts us (even as we're getting more done), the unsettling stat that our average focused attention has dropped from 3 minutes in the early 2000s to 47 seconds today, and what actually helps.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why our brains weren't built for the always-on workday
• The 7-second cost of a single notification glance
• The 2.5% of people who are actual "supertaskers"
• How to leave a "start here" note for your future self

Good news, though: you don't have to become a luddite and swear off AI to maintain your sanity. Moah and Alex share practical tactics like subtask boundaries, self-interrupted context switching, and the "routine complex cycle" for making the work more sustainable for your mental energy. If you've ever snapped at someone at the dinner table because your brain was still stuck at your desk, this one's for you.

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Links from the show!

Got to-dos? Get GQueues! gqueues.com

Boomerang for Gmail boomeranggmail.com

Boomerang for Outlook boomerangoutlook.com

Switching at breakpoints is better for your focus than being interrupted: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/oasis-a-framework-for-linking-notification-delivery-to-the-perceptual-structure-of-goal-directed-tasks/

Gloria Mark: Why our attention spans are shrinking https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans

Digital dementia and shrinking gray matter: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32062336/

*Correction: In the audio we said time between task switches used to be three to six minutes, but the median was actually two and a half minutes.