Book review: Don’t trust your gut: Using data to get what you really want in life

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Don’t trust your gut: Using data to get what you really want in life. New York: Harper Collins, 2022, 320 pages. 

A few years ago, I read Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s book Everybody Lies, which provides a number of stories about how we can learn from data and data analytics. When I found out that the author had published a second book, I knew I was going to be interested in reading it. What I didn’t expect to find in Don’t Trust Your Gut was an example about how remote work might be able to improve employee feelings about work.  

One of the stories from Stephens-Davidowitz’s book discusses research findings from the Mappiness project, which is a research project from the London School of Economics looking to understand individual happiness. As a part of this project, participants are regularly “pinged” via their smartphones to learn about what people are doing at that time and what their feelings are. 

The Mappiness project ranked the activity of working/studying as the least enjoyable thing that people do (with a ranking of -5.43), just above being “sick in bed” (-20.4) However, Stephens-Davidowitz includes a suggestion that working at home can increase an individual’s level of happiness by +3.59. Other additions of working while listening to music (+3.94) and working with your friends (+6.25) can also increase one’s overall work enjoyment. 

Interestingly, I have heard from a number of individuals that working from home makes them feel happier. I have even heard from teams of people that their favorite part of work is when they are playing music together. Therefore, reading this example was particularly interesting to me and might be something that others want to start thinking about in their own work.