I have a confession. Some of my best design ideas have shown up on days when I was laughing.
Not the days when I was grinding through a permit set at 11pm with cold coffee. The days when the work felt light. When a client said something funny in a meeting, or I got a little silly sketching options on trace, or I took the long way to a site visit because the leaves were turning and the light was good.
For a long time I assumed those were coincidences. Our profession has a deeply held belief that serious work requires seriousness. If you’re enjoying yourself, you’re probably not trying hard enough. I’ve written before about the burnout side of that belief. This month I wanted to look at the other side of the coin: is there real evidence that enjoying your workday makes the work better?
It turns out there is.
The candy and comedy experiments
In the 1980s, psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues ran a series of experiments using a classic puzzle called Duncker’s candle problem. You get a candle, matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and you have to attach the candle to a wall so it burns without dripping wax on the table. The trick is to see the tack box as a shelf instead of just a container. It’s a test of flexible thinking.
Before the puzzle, some participants watched a few minutes of a comedy film or received a small bag of candy. Those people did better. Participants who were put in a negative mood, or who simply got their heart rate up with exercise, didn’t get the same boost. It wasn’t energy that helped. It was feeling good.
Isen’s explanation was that mild positive feelings, the kind that come from small everyday moments, make us more likely to think flexibly and connect ideas that don’t obviously belong together. If that doesn’t describe design, I don’t know what does. Seeing a box of tacks as a shelf is basically what we do every time we turn an awkward corner into a reading nook.
Happiness and productivity: faster without getting sloppy
Economists at the University of Warwick came at the question from a different angle. Andrew Oswald, Eugenio Proto, and Daniel Sgroi ran four experiments with more than 700 participants. Some were shown a comedy clip or treated to chocolate, fruit, and drinks before doing a paid task. Those people were roughly 12% more productive than the control group. The researchers also looked at people who had recently been through real hardships like a death or illness in the family, and found that lower happiness lined up with lower productivity.
The part I found most interesting was their explanation. Happier workers seemed to use their time more effectively, picking up their pace without giving up quality. That’s the opposite of what most of us assume. We tend to think fun costs us time.
Good days carry over
The study that resonates most with me comes from Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School. She and Steven Kramer collected nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 professionals working on creative projects. People were more likely to come up with creative ideas on days they were in a better mood, and the effect carried into the following day too, regardless of how they felt that second day. Amabile describes it as a kind of incubation. A good mood gets your brain making connections, and those connections keep surfacing.
Her biggest finding was what she calls the progress principle. Of everything that made a workday feel good, the most powerful was simply making progress on meaningful work, even small progress. And setbacks hit harder than progress helped.
What this looks like in a design practice
I’m not going to tell you to install a ping pong table. Fun in a residential design practice looks different, and it’s usually quieter. Here’s what it looks like for me:
Consider this your permission slip
If you’ve been carrying around the idea that enjoying your work means you’re not taking it seriously, I’d gently suggest putting it down. The research is pretty consistent: a good mood isn’t a reward you earn after the work is done. It’s part of what makes the work good.
So go find something that makes you laugh today. It’s for the project.
