Reasons to Play Angry Birds at Work

The moment we have been waiting for is here; we now all have a good excuse to waste our time looking at pictures of baby animals and playing Angry Birds or Logos Quiz on our phones as new research suggests that this will make us more productive.

‘Engaging in some activities we assume are non-productive may actually be a smart way to spend time, especially at work’ says Jane Mcgoniga in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review.

This Kitten has already
increased your productivity
for the day

Mcgoniga, author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011), has now made it a personal goal to waste at least four minutes every hour.
After recovering from a traumatic brain injury Mcgoniga became interested in why some of the seemingly biggest waste of times, such as looking at baby animals, were the things that ended up helping her most in recovery. This led her to the subject of resilience. She found that these seemly time wasting tasks can actually make people ‘more-resourceful problem solvers, more collaborative, and less likely to give up when the going gets tough. In other words, they can make people more resilient.’
She goes on to discuss how greater resilience will make you more capable, and how it will benefit your organization; tell that to your boss when they give you a telling off for getting distracted by suddenly remembering a logo from logos quiz game app!

Its not just your workplace that will benefit from these previously thought of as time wasting actions, you will also personally benefit by improving your emotional resistance. If you try to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of the day, you are able to improve your emotional resistance; making a satisfying hit in Angry Birds counts as one positive emotion, watching a baby animal video counts as another.

Mcgoniga suggests improving resilience by developing a regimen or game to do every day, with Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Cut the Rope, and other similar mobile games the perfect prescription to momentarily take your thoughts away from work without further exhausting too much of your mental resources. These games are just right to give your brain a break from the intense concentration and thinking of work, so that you can come back refreshed and thus more productive.

There has been enough research out there backing up these theories to make them plausible. A team of researchers at Hiroshima University recently conducted a study which involved showing university students pictures of baby animals before asking them to complete various tasks. They found that those who saw the baby animal pictures did more productive work after seeing those photographs (You can check out that study here)

So strictly for productivity enhancing purposes why don’t you go check out some cute kittens right now, and to increase your resilience why not download some games. We already spend 300 million minutes a day on Angry Birds alone, why not give Bad Piggies or Logos Quiz a try. Just remember, the key is not to try to hard, and not to use up any extra mental resources, even sending an email would count as to much brain action. So what a great excuse to use the cheat sites for these games too, the logos quiz cheat can be found here.