You're not lazy at 3pm. You're breathing the CO2 everyone in the room breathed out, with nowhere to go. It has a number. And now you can prove it.
You can't see it. You can't smell it. But your brain feels it. Foggy. Slow. One eye on the clock. That's not you being tired. That's the air getting dumb.
It's called CO2, measured in parts per million. Fresh outdoor air is around 400. A room with decent airflow stays under 1000. I've sat in "eight person" meeting rooms that blew past 2000 ppm with three of us inside. That's not a meeting room. That's dumb air.
Harvard put people in rooms at different CO2 levels and ran cognitive tests. As the CO2 climbed, the scores dropped. Decision making, using information, strategic thinking. At the levels found in normal, busy meeting rooms, some scores fell by close to half.
We fill offices with smart, expensive people, then seal them in rooms that quietly knock points off their IQ. We call the result a productivity problem. It's not. It's dumb air.
Your alertness, your focus, your decisions, the exact things you get paid for, all drop as the CO2 climbs. The 3pm slump isn't your lunch. It's the air.
Cognitive performance vs CO2 — illustrative, based on the Harvard COGfx direction.
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I'm the guy who opens every window. I got tired of arguing with a feeling, so I started measuring. This is that, out loud. — Gustav