My most productive perk: Lunch

One of my favorite stories involves Ronald Coase, a Nobel laureate in economics. Back when he was just starting out his career, Coase submitted an essay to a new journal at the University of Chicago. The article he submitted turned out to be The Problem of Social Cost and would later prove to be a foundational essay in economics (it was also the main reason he later won a Nobel prize).

However, when the editors first read the article, they thought it was absurd and heavily discounted the ideas in it. The editors thought that Coase had made an “obvious mistake”. George Stigler, a future Nobel laureate, went so far as to call the ideas in it “heresay”. However, the faculty of University of Chicago gave Coase the benefit of the doubt and invited him to dinner, asking him to explain his views to a group of distinguished economists, including numerous soon-to-be Nobel laureates. George Stigler wrote of the dinner: “In the course of two hours of argument the vote went from twenty against and one for Coase to twenty-one for Coase. What an exhilarating event! I lamented afterward that we had not had the clairvoyance to tape it.”

What strikes me is that these kinds of stories happen a lot. Often, major problems or theorems will be solved over lunch or dinner. For instance, when lawyers from the patent department at Bell Labs tried to figure out why certain people were more productive, they found that the people with the most patents usually ate lunch with Harry Nyquist, one of the founders of Communication Theory. The book Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman is littered with anecdotes of Feynman’s lunch and dinner meetings that happened to lead to some new revelation.

Generating Ideas

So what? Well, eating seems to generate ideas and can be a good time to think about things. It gives you time to slow down and mull over things. Many business leaders and politicians do lunch meetings precisely because they provide a comfortable environment to discuss ideas.

Lunch meetings were so important to George W. Bush, that he’d rely on them to keep in sync with Deck Cheney. Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Suskind said that “these lunches with Cheney and Bush with the doors shut … almost entire strategies of the government were conducted in these little rooms with no transcripts, with no one there except the president and the vice president.” Whether you like him or not, George W. Bush undoubtedly made important decisions that would shape the American landscape for decades to come — and his lunches served as his idea generation sessions. Bush isn’t the only world leader who mixed lunch with governance. Winston Churchill enjoyed lunch so much that he would usually spend two to three hours in the afternoon eating and relaxing.

During lunch, ideas and discussions flow freely. At most places, you’re able to bump into people during lunch with whom you’ve interacted with before, but aren’t necessarily seeking out. The activation energy for starting a conversation is much lower than normal.

Moreover, you’re getting recharged while you’re eating—making it easier to generate ideas. Studies have shown that parole officers have a much higher likelihood of giving parole for applications they review after lunch (see http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889). The effect is called decision fatigue in psychology. Your brain operates like a rechargeable battery — as you work, you use up your mental energy and become less and less productive. Lunch offers a break and food provides nutrients for your brain, making it easier to think.

Keeping to Intuition

Another great thing about lunch is that there isn’t enough time for people to have access to hard evidence or statistics. If you get into a debate, you have to use your intuition. This means that the best logical argument usually wins, which is tremendously helpful for obtaining an opinion based on first-principles.

One of the great scientists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman, explained how intuition was paramount for solving problems. When analyzing physics problems, he would “have the specific, physical example of what [I’m] trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing…I was perpetually asking not for mathematical equations, but for physical circumstances.” Feynman worked based on his intuition — using what his mind had built up as the physical world to inform his math. Lunch is the best time to do this intuition building, because you have people to talk to and no pen and paper to even try writing down anything too complicated.

You Can Always Eat

The other thing about lunch is that you’ve got an escape route. If you’re not in the mood or if your conversation ends up turning sour, it won’t be as awkward as in other situations (like sitting in a car and not speaking for an hour). You can always just eat and excuse yourself after you’re done.

I hate sitting at my desk and eating while I work — it’s really a waste of a very precious resource. One of the great pleasures in life has been my ability to talk to smart people about interesting things, and there are few times that are better than lunch. If you at all enjoy company (or talking about interesting ideas), maybe you should take a longer lunch break.