Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com • January 13, 2020 • Hartford Business Journal 21 OPINION & COMMENTARY BIZ BOOKS Why it doesn't pay to be a workaholic By Jim Pawlak "The Hard Break — The Case for a 24/6 Lifestyle" by Aaron Edelheit (Ideapress Publishing, $24.95). "My name is Aaron and I was a workaholic." Early in his career, Edelheit's career man- tra was "work harder." When problems arose, he worked even harder. Always doubling down on work destroyed relationships with his business partner and the woman he loved. As work consumed time, time con- sumed him. One day, he stood in the shower drenched with water and depres- sion's tears and fears. He realized something was wrong with him, but he didn't know what it was. He didn't make time to find out because the business wasn't performing to his too-lofty standards. Serendipity arrived, in the form of appendicitis. During his recovery from surgery, Edelheit was forced to significantly dial back his 24/7 sched- ule. "Idle" time shifted his thoughts to introspection. He realized that "more hours worked did not equal more success." He began to under- stand that the economic law of di- minishing returns applied to hours worked, too. In fact, increasing hours worked resulted in negative pro- ductivity. Why? Think of the brain and the body as a smartphone; if it's not recharged periodically, it ceases to function. Edelheit cites a World War I study of British mu- nitions workers to make the productivity point: When workers put in more than 50 hours a week, output rose at a decreasing rate, and there was no difference in output if a person worked 56 or 70 hours. Munition workers on a six-day schedule produced more than those working seven days. Why can't we "stop" working? Psychologically, there's a tendency to dwell upon unfinished tasks. Since there's always something left unfinished at work, the tasks remain in our consciousness — much like the battery-draining apps running in the background on our smart- phones. Subsequent research on the effect found that students, who interspersed study sessions with unrelated activities, remembered study material better than those who completed study sessions with- out a break. The bottom line: 24/6 increases productivity and reduces stress. OTHER VOICES Reducing electric-vehicle purchase incentive wrong-minded By Barry Kresch Y ou own a pizzeria. You want to grow your business. Your best seller is pepperoni. Would you take it off the menu? That is, in effect, what the Con- necticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) has done with its latest revision to the incentive levels and eligibility rules for its electric vehicle (EV) rebate program. It has caused the volume of rebates to nosedive and undercuts the program's objective of growing EV adoption. And it doesn't appear to have been necessary. The transpor- tation sector is the larg- est source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the state, responsible for 38 percent of emissions, accord- ing to DEEP. Air quality in Con- necticut is often poor as a result of the state being a transit corridor between New York and Boston. Along with investing in mass transit and decarbonizing the grid, moving to EVs is a critical part of greenhouse gas-emissions reduc- tion given how many vehicles are on our roads. Recognizing this, Con- necticut has signed onto the Multi- State ZEV Action Plan, which has a goal of getting about 500,000 EVs registered in the state by 2030. In light of EVs not having yet reached cost parity with conventional vehicles, the state implemented a forward-look- ing EV purchase-incentive program in 2015, known by the acronym CHEAPR (Connecticut Hydrogen and Electric Automobile Purchase Rebate). This program provides differing levels of incentives, more or less based on the electric range of the vehicle. It applies to the purchase or lease of new battery electric, plug-in hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles. The CHEAPR incentives have been well used. As of July 1, 2019, there were 10,797 EVs registered in the state, according to the Depart- ment of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and CHEAPR, from its inception to that point, had disbursed 5,158 rebates. That is a pretty good number, es- pecially when one considers that not all vehicles are eligible, and an indi- vidual is allowed to use the program only once. DEEP has twice revised the incen- tives. The logic is that incentives should change with the technol- ogy (i.e. longer range) and avail- able funding. The legislature last spring passed a bill funding CHEAPR to the tune of "at least $3 mil- lion annually" through 2025. In the recent changes, along with lower rebate levels, the price cap for eligible vehicles was lowered to a maximum MSRP of $42,000 from $50,000. Our EV Club published a blog post on Oct. 27, forecasting that this would cause a steep decline in rebates, and it has. On Dec. 30, DEEP published re- bate data updated through Nov. 30. I isolated two near-identical duration periods before and after the change in rebate levels (38 days from Sept. 3 - Oct. 10 and 39 days from Oct. 23 - Nov. 30), which found that the number of rebates declined by 71 percent, and the dollar amount declined by 87 percent. The specific vehicle that is mostly driving this drop off is the Tesla Model 3, which outsells all other EVs combined and is the first EV to achieve the sales level of a popular mainstream sedan. It lost state rebate eligibility due to the lower cap and its sales have seen a significant drop off. These changes may have been made in the service of managing the rebate budget. But generally, the re- bate dollar volume has been pacing right around the $3-million mark on an annual basis. Our club is brand agnostic, but these changes to CHEAPR paint a bullseye on the Model 3, the most important EV currently in the marketplace, and in so doing, threatens the overall effective- ness of the program. Barry Kresch is a marketing- analytics consultant and leadership team member of the EV Club of CT, an organization that advocates for electric vehicle-friendly public policy (evclubct.com). Jim Pawlak Barry Kresch The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse- gas emissions in the state, responsible for 38 percent .

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