Surviving the Workday

I worked last weekend, and was able to accomplish a lot, mainly because I didn’t have the influx of daily work-related email in my box. One thing I’ve noticed in the past decade is that many people expect a response within an hour. If a longer period of time elapses, I get a phone call, following up. I’ve tried to manage these expectations by only checking email on the hour, or a few times a day, but without much luck (or willpower, perhaps). In any case, I get too much email, and it often interferes with the actual business of doing work.

You’ve got too much email affirms that this is a common experience:

Even if the e-mail is friendly, there’s still risk of offense if the recipient doesn’t respond quickly. Already feeling pressured to keep up with her in-box, attorney Jamison feels added stress from this kind of friendly fire.

“Less than half a day goes by and you’ll get an e-mail saying, ‘Why haven’t you responded to my e-mail?’ ” she says. “The expectation, because you’ve sent it, is the other person is looking at his screen all the time and his job is to look at his screen waiting for e-mails.”

According to Jackson [author of the recently published book “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.”], information overload is not just making life at the dinner table less pleasant as Mom checks her BlackBerry, but it’s also undermining civilization itself.

“We’re so overloaded by information bites that we’re less and less able to go deeply, to create knowledge or wisdom out of all the information,” she says. “This is one reason why I say we’re on the cusp of a dark age.”

I’m reading Time Bank Takes Root in Echo Park, and sort of kicking myself for not moving to Echo Park a few years ago when we were considering it, if only for the time bank. As I understand it, a time bank is something that you donate your time to (through chores, cooking lessons, pet sitting, baby sitting in hour increments), and then can withdraw the time from the bank for other chores or things you need. You don’t directly barter with your neighbors; you trade with the bank.

 The concept is simple: Members create an online profile that includes a list of the work they’ll do free, or “offers,” along with a list of services, or “requests,” they want in exchange. Dog walking, housesitting, guitar lessons, baby-sitting, help with Photoshop — almost any intangible is allowed. Members don’t exchange services directly with one another — they trade with the bank. So the person who picked up apples and artichokes for you at the farmers market isn’t waiting for you to return the favor.

Every hour volunteered earns a time dollar, which can be cashed in for services offered by any other member of the time bank. Crabtree, for example, did some cat-sitting last month, and now she’s hoping to spend her time dollars on cooking lessons, cello instruction or Volkswagen maintenance tips.

It just sounds like a great idea in terms of providing and receiving services as well as getting to know your neighbors. I’m now wondering how difficult it would be to set one up (e.g., What sort of software would be necessary? How big a population would we need?). More on Time Banks here, and a kit ($49) here with information on software.

In comments, Colleen mentions the Shorts Slideshow at the New York Times, which is rather amusing if you’re following the Dress for Success discussion from yesterday. (Jim and I just watched it together. It’s fair to say he won’t be wearing short shorts anytime soon.)

One of the aspects of workplace fashion that I find interesting is how certain things really offend certain people. And we all have these items that seem completely offensive to us. I mentioned my mom forced pantyhose on to me due to her notion of propriety (also slips) and this sense of the necessity of having my legs covered, which may explain why I don’t wear skirts or dresses anymore. However, I’m seeing the same sort of rising sense of propriety in myself when I see all these photos of men in shorts. Please put on some pants! (And get a tan! What is with the whitest legs in New York City contest. A little sun is okay). And, yes, I know I do sound like a big prude.

Of course, you can wear whatever you want. I’m simply commenting on the slide show and the notion of seeing that much of anyone at work. And, thanks to GhostGirl for this lovely image, which really is a bit much.

I really don’t know anything about this, but I say that somewhat in jest. I do think it’s important to appear professional in some manner in the workplace. Although note some of the subtlety:

• West coast standards are very different from the East Coast (and both are different from the Midwest)
• Standards of dress are different from profession to profession (Compare a marketing executive to a geologist)
• Standards of dress are different even within professions (Compare a high school English teacher to a math teacher)
• Even within executive realms, there are many exceptions to what’s deemed “professional” and some of these folks are wildly successful in their casualness (e.g., Southwest and Nike executives)

So setting notions of Dressing for Success aside for a minute (though feel free to comment), I do hear a lot about dress code issues, which tend to rile lots of us up (because they’re rule! Rules that we need to follow!).

How to dress for success identifies four primary battles with dress codes:

Battle No. 1: Employees misinterpret the dress code or they don’t abide by it.

Battle No. 2: Companies have a code in place but don’t enforce it.

Battle No. 3: Companies don’t have a dress code but they still reprimand employees for wearing certain attire.

Or, Battle No. 4: There’s constant objection from certain industries along the lines of, “Why do I have to look nice at work if I don’t see anybody?”

Perhaps that’s the problem with working at home. Ahem. In any case, there are some tips for dressing for success, which include such gems as “Don’t dress for a bar.” I’ll have to try that.

I almost posted a link to 10 Things You Can Cross Off Your Worry List this morning, mainly because the article was so dumb and anti-research and anti-science, but I’m glad I waited because Treehugger has published the Five Ways New York Times Columnist Distorts Facts instead.  

And, of course, you can worry about anything you choose to worry about!

I’ve never had much luck with submitting resumes to be electronically scanned, but this list from Nearly Half Employers Have Caught Employees Lies on Resume is pretty helpful. These are the key words and phrases that are searched for most often that you should insert appropriately in your resume.

    — problem-solving and decision-making skills (50 percent)
    — oral and written communications (44 percent)
    — customer service or retention (34 percent)
    — performance and productivity improvement (32 percent)
    — leadership (30 percent)
    — technology (27 percent)
    — team-building (26 percent)
    — project management (20 percent)
    — bilingual (14 percent)

 As the article suggests, don’t lie. Not only is it wrong, you can get caught fairly easily, according to my headhunter friend. And especially don’t pretend to be a member of the Kennedy family.  Or an astronaut.

This passage from Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times has been lodged in my brain:

A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the social contract of the 20th century — in which the government, employers and the society as a whole pulled together to see that those who worked hard and played by the rules were afforded the basic necessities of daily life and a shot at the American dream — “appears to be unraveling.”

That’s pretty much how I feel. Actually, I think it’s unraveled, and people are just starting to notice.

I’ve been receiving a disturbing (well, disturbing from my perspective) number of hits from people searching for resources about being pregnant and laid-off. I am going to list the important resources that I know about in one place:

• Facts about Pregnancy Discrimination
• How to File a Charge of Pregnancy Discrimination
• Pregnant Workers Report Growing Discrimination and Pregnancy Discrimination Suits on the Rise

In short, in the United States, you can definitely be legally laid-off when you are pregnant. But you can’t be laid-off because you’re pregnant. It’s a critical distinction.

Most places I can think of (parks, churches, businesses) are workplaces for someone. And I’ve been researching workplace violence in terms of the recent church shooting in Knoxville, and came across this table of types of workplace violence from Workplace Prevention Prevention Strategies.

It seems like from what I’ve read the Knoxville shooting is a combination of Criminal intent (domestic terrorism) as well as a Personal relationship (with his ex-wife’s church). For some reason, when I think of workplace violence, I tend to think of worker-on-worker violence, but you can see that this is really only 7% of workplace homicides while 85% involve a perpetrator with no relationship to the business. Scary to think how random that is.

First, begin with a study of this photo. I’m glad that guy in the middle isn’t my dad (or my husband for that matter). Hey, Mr. Stern and Grumpy! And then move to the left for Carmella Soprano (yes, I know she’s a fictional character) and her slightly heavier sidekick with a white visor (the better to see her child at visiting day from afar?).  And then there’s crazy Ms. Two Hands in the Air, who apparently has gone a full 24 hours without seeing her child.

Apparently residential camp has changed as Baby Boomer parents have become more helicopter-like. At least that’s what these anecdotes suggest.

Exhibit A:

Mr. Picon, who owns several auto dealerships, remembered calling Mr. Kagan, the Bryn Mawr director, on Jaime’s very first day of camp back in 2001.

“I called the camp at 7 a.m. and Dan answered the phone,” Mr. Picon said. “He said, ‘Jaime’s fine. And are you going to call me every morning?’ “

Anticipating a lecture, Mr. Picon said, “I think I am.”

To which Mr. Kagan, himself the father of three daughters, warmly replied: “Well, do it at this time of day, it’s when I have some free time.”

If you don’t think your kid is going to be okay at a residential camp, don’t send him. Period. The camp director can’t say that because he needs your money.

Exhibit B:

Norman E. Friedman, a consultant who conducts training at 44 camps, said parents also take up valuable camp resources by breaking the rules they have tacitly agreed to.

“They’ll give their child two cellphones, so if they get caught with the first one, ‘Just give it up and you’ll have the second one to talk to me,’ “ he said. “That’s widespread, not isolated. I call it fading parental morality. What they’re doing is entering into delinquent behaviors with their children. And what kind of statement is that to a child?”

Well, it’s a statement that says, essentially, The Rules Don’t Apply To Us Because We’re Special. Nice.

Exhibit C:

Starting about seven years ago, camps tried to satiate parents’ need to know by uploading pictures of kids at play daily to password-protected Web sites, a one-way communication tool that seemed to respect the sleep-away tradition of maintaining distance. But such real-time glimpses often aggravate the problem, as the obsessed become obsessed with what they are seeing — or not seeing.

“I have parents calling and saying they saw their child in the background of a picture of other children and he didn’t look happy, or his face looked red, has he been putting on enough suntan lotion, or I haven’t seen my child and I have seen a lot of other children, is my child so depressed he doesn’t want to be in a picture,” said Jay Jacobs, who has run Timber Lake Camp in Shandaken, N.Y., since 1980.

I really shouldn’t read the New York Times.

My poet-friend and physical anthropologist, Sharon Hurlbut offers ten things she learned at the Tin House writing conference last week in Portland, Oregon. She also notes that writers don’t drink as much as archaeologists. I’d have to agree from the wee amount of archaeology field work I did. This is not to say that writers don’t drink. This is only to say that archaeologists are in a whole different league.

And here are my own notes on the writing conference at Tin House from 2006.

Dr. Jillian Weiss is offering a workshop on Transgender Workplace Diversity Issues on Friday, November 14, 2008, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in NYC with the precise location to be announcd. Her workshop is geared toward the needs of HR folks, attorneys, and transgender individuals.

The schedule will include:

• Transgender basics
• Legal compliance issues
• How to address policy issues:
  • bathroom and locker room facilities
  • insurance and benefits
  • name/gender changes on government and corporate records
• How to train co-workers and managers
• How to communicate changes to customers and clients
• Recruiting issues
• Roleplaying scenarios - learn to do by doing

 More information here.

The Crestone Energy Fair in Crestone, Colorado, is really a great bang for your buck weekend, providing you can get to Crestone (not the easiest feat). It’s held on Labor Day weekend (schedule here), and is free (though the all day home-tours of sustainable homes cost $15). And most importantly, it is all about people conserving energy on their own by repairing and modifying their homes for energy conservation. Jim got some great ideas for gardening and heating a greenhouse, as well as some more technical engineering stuff with heating hot water.

It’s really not a corporate-driven event as you can see from the straw-bale building workshop I attended (see photo lacking evidence of suits and logos). There’s music and friendly people and lots of dogs (we brought our dog to attend last summer). I wish I could go back this summer!

Here are my posts on the fair from last summer:

Greetings from Crestone

The Sustainable Home Tour

How Much Space Do You Use?

I suppose it’s actually more lame to simply never increase the minimum wage, but an increase to $6.55/hr? Energy costs are up 25%, food costs are up 5% and the minimum wage is up $.70 an hour (12% of its pitiful $5.85/hr). That could be an entire $3.50 a day before taxes.

The new minimum is less than the inflation-adjusted 1997 level of $7.02, and far below the inflation-adjusted level of $10.06 from 40 years ago, according to a Labor Department inflation calculator.

Seriously. Lame.

Ooh, we’ve been linked to from CNN under From the Blogs.

Possibly more amusing than having a cow over a missing article is documenting the beginning and end of why you are firing someone on Facebook:

8:12am Orny is jetlagged and bummed his assistant forgot to put half and half in the fridge for his coffee.

6:50pm Orny is hiring a new assistant and looking for a new webpage designer to work with my current guy… someone hungry and creative.

I can only hope that the assistant didn’t learn about the firing on Facebook. And, really, it’s not funny at all. The comments on Defamer are funny though.

Lifestyle Choices as a Hedge Against Inflation presents some interesting ideas for keeping your costs down (I saw fit to make comments in parentheses):

• Start a garden (It’s harder than it sounds. We do have a garden, and some fruit trees, but that’s substantially different than being able to feed yourself daily. I suppose we do in the summer though).
• Cook from basic ingredients (Yes, cooking is good.)
• Drink your tap water (Yes, tap water is good, but I know there’s a 50% chance someone will write in and tell me how bad chlorine is or how they live somewhere the water is terrible and they just can’t drink it. I know).
• Drill your own well (For the love of God, please don’t. Just don’t. I’m saying this as someone who used to be on the local water board in a community split between private wells and community wells. It’s an expensive way to get out of paying your water bill, there are regulations on private well drilling, it doesn’t guarantee water (particularly clean phosphate-free, sulfate-free, arsenic-free water), and public-policy wise, it really not a good idea to have every house with its own well in terms of maintaining the long-term water supply of any community. Just don’t do this, particularly to cope with inflation. Yes, some homes already have a well. That’s fine. Carry on. But don’t drill a new well to lower your water bill.)
• Reduce your home energy use.
• Walk and bike more. (Presuming it’s safe)

More here.

Three guys with missile codes fell asleep in a room. Together, I assume. And at night? And why? There is so much more I want to know. This story has some critical parts missing. For security reasons, I’m sure.

I’ve attended a series of work-related meetings recently, and revived my favorite habit of interrupting others. Not others who are behaving themselves, mind you, just those who drone on and on and on and seem oblivious to the fact that we are not present as a group discussion to hear a lecture from one person.

I have to admit that I developed the habit of interrupting others at Harvard Divinity School, which doesn’t speak well for the place, necessarily, but I got tired of listening to the same few people talk in class as if their opinion was more important than anyone else. (None of them read my blog that I can be sure of). I was polite about the interrupting, and it was my hard-earned money paying for the classes, so I really didn’t feel obligated to listen to discussion monopolizers for 90 minutes at a time. Still, I felt guilty.

Another Meeting? on the Career Couch has some advice that made me feel a bit better:

Q. One or two blatherers always end up monopolizing the discussion at meetings, and running everything off the rails. How do you get them to stop?

A. Monopolizers need to be reined in because they rarely have the self-awareness to stop talking themselves, said Glenn Parker, a team-building consultant in Skillman, N.J., and co-author of “Meeting Excellence.”

It’s O.K. to interrupt a monopolizer, Mr. Parker said. But be polite about it, perhaps by validating what the person has said. You might say something like this: “I think you’re making a good point. Let’s see how the rest of the team feels about that.”

Then turn away from the talker, preferably to another part of the room, and ask someone else his or her opinion on the topic.

Similarly, he said, if a monopolizer or anyone else goes off on a tangent, you can say something like: “I may be wrong here, but I thought we were supposed to be dealing with customer complaints. If you all agree, let’s get back to the agenda.”

Since we were recently speaking of Yiddish and meaning, this is possibly the most honest letter from a writer to copyeditors ever written, especially about a nosh.

Man, he’s angry. This does illustrate why you either need to see a final version before your work is printed or simply give up ownership of every single word. I tend to give up.

A mini-summary of a study suggests that viewing logos may trigger all sorts of thoughts:

“Every brand comes with a set of associations,” explains study co-author Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of psychology and marketing at Duke University. “When we’re exposed to logos, those associations fire automatically, activating our motivational systems and leading us to behave in ways that are consistent with the brand image”

And Psychology Today tries to helpfully (perhaps?) point out ways we can use logos in our work lives:

What can brand logos do for you? A few (untested) suggestions: They could…

• Motivate you.

  Ugh, you’re slogging up to your fifth-floor walk-up after a long day. Just glance down at the North Face logo on your sleeve. To the summit!

• Start fights.

  Want to liven things up at the office? Don a WWF SmackDown! cap and get ready for people to rumble with you.

• Help you find stuff.

  Where did you put your car keys? Glance at the Google logo and the search is on!

I tend to avoid buying anything with logos. They just seem to trigger sensations of being highly annoyed.

Oh look! The cubicle is 40 years old this month.

What should we do to celebrate?