Turn Your Heat Up To 77º F
I grew up in a house that was almost always colder than I was comfortable with in the name of keeping the heating bill down. I’m certainly a fan of energy conservation, but now you have a legitimate reasons to keep your home and workplace well heated.
A Cornell study on performance and temperature “found a 74 percent increase in typing mistakes and a 46 percent reduction in typing output when office temperatures fell from 77 degrees to 68 degrees.” That’s more than an obvious result, it’s an obnoxious one. It’s fairly reasonable to assume that if room temperature affects typing in this way, it probably effects your other abilities similarly.
The article also lists out other circumstances that led to decreased performance including inappropriate lighting, a lack of privacy and annoying sounds. It’s worth a read for some insight into how small changes in environment can lead to big changes in behavior.
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Very interesting! Being the cheap bastard that I am, I’m still not going to raise my thermostat. I don’t care how many mistakes I make :).
This was always an issue when I worked as a surgical technician. On one hand, literature argues that keeping the room cold helps prevent bacterial growth and the spread of infection. On the other hand, patients’ recovery times post-operatively were vastly improved by an increase in the room temperature.
Add to that the fact that the surg. techs and surgeons are in gowns and latex gloves, standing under hot lights, and the temperature almost always went down. In fact, I rarely remember it being above 61 or 62 degrees. I think that I discovered that I remained comfortable at 61 degrees, but got cold at 60.
The circulating nurses in the room would wrap warmed blankets around themselves to stay warm while they monitored the paperwork and anesthesia.