The planning session
was booked for the afternoon.
Six people,
in the small room
with the window that does not open.
The first hour was good.
Sharp questions.
Two bad ideas killed early.
By the second hour
the same people
were agreeing with everything.
Someone read out an estimate
that was plainly wrong,
and nobody pushed.
You felt it too.
A heavy head.
Reading the same line twice.
A yawn hidden behind your cup.
You blamed lunch.
Then somebody brought
a small air quality monitor
out of the office manager's drawer
and left it on the table
for the next session.
Outside air
sits a little above four hundred
parts per million of carbon dioxide.
The room started there.
Forty minutes in
it read fifteen hundred.
By the end of the second hour
it read over two thousand.
Here is the mechanism.
Every person breathes out
carbon dioxide all day.
Six people in a small sealed room
add it faster
than the ventilation takes it away,
and nothing about the air
looks or smells any different.
The number is also a stand in
for everything else you breathed out,
and for how little fresh air
is coming in.
Studies of office workers
have found decision making scores
falling as those levels rise,
at concentrations
ordinary meeting rooms reach
by mid afternoon.
The research argues about how much.
Your own second hour
does not need a paper.
You were not losing focus.
The room was taking it.
So treat air
like any other input to the work.
Put a monitor
in the rooms you think in.
It costs less than the meeting.
When it passes a thousand,
open the door,
or stop for five minutes
and leave the room empty.
Book long sessions
in the big room,
not the cosy one.
Split anything over an hour
into two halves
with a corridor between them.
And look for the pattern
in your own week.
The decision that always feels heavy
might be booked
in the same airless room,
at the same hour,
with the same six people breathing.
Your head is not the only thing
in the meeting.
The room is in it too.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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