The study used fourteen office workers, one shared printer and a BBC article. In it, a Gloucestershire man with terminal cancer shares the life lessons he wishes he had learned sooner. We sat our volunteers down on a Friday and asked them to read it properly.
All fourteen agreed with every word. Several called it beautiful. One wrote "spend more time with the people you love" on a sticky note and pressed it to her monitor. It now sits directly above a meeting invite called "Quick sync about the other sync".
The average gap between finishing the article and opening work email was fourteen seconds. We also had a control group. A control group is a set of people we do nothing to, so we know what nothing looks like. Ours read the back of a crisps packet instead. They took fourteen seconds too.
I have rerun the numbers many times. The margin of error is tiny. This is the most frightening result of my career.
