Surviving the Workday

Some tips from Surviving the Post-Vacation Blues:

Throw a party. “I would suggest that offices have post-vacation office parties that allow people to show photos from their vacations and talk about their vacations, and thus bring some of their vacation spirit back to work with them,” advises Virginia Commonwealth’s Humphrey. “For example, if some of the people went at beach locations, they could have beach parties, with beach blankets, etc.  More importantly, if companies use good motivational principles throughout the year, then employees shouldn’t feel too blue about coming back to work.” ?

Step away from the e-mail. You know your e-mail inbox is going to be overflowing, so take time before you jump in, recommends workplace communications trainer Laurent Duperval. “Most people receive too much e-mail every day, and if the first thing you see upon your return is that you have 328 e-mails waiting, that’s a good recipe for the blues,” she says.

Pamper yourself. “Schedule a meal at a fabulous restaurant for when you return. Ditto for a spa, concert or whatever else turns you on,” says Adrian Miller, a sales training expert.

Get a jump on work. While it might sound counterintuitive, “some people find it helpful to go into the office early on their first day back, or even on the night before their first day back, in order to clear out their inbox,” says Joseph Weiner, chief of consultation psychiatry at North Shore University Hospital.

Bring a bit of sand to the office. Photos of your vacation or souvenirs are a great way to relive the fun you had. “Good feelings aren’t over because vacation has ended. You can conjure up a good memory anytime you like,” notes Debbie Mandel, author of the upcoming book, “Addicted to Stress: A Woman’s 7-Step Program to Reclaim Joy and Spontaneity in Life.”

Would these help? I’m not particularly into the party and photos idea. Not everyone takes a vacation (and not everyone deserves to see your photos!).

This is a post that I’ve had in draft form all week. Friday afternoon seems like a good time for it.

Falling Off the Productivity Wagon is intriguing, really. Here’s the premise: You’ve been working hard. Then not so hard. And maybe it’s because you’ve been checking email often, or you’ve been sick, or something personal has come up. But it’s time to get back on track with these tips!

Generally speaking, I loathe the notion of “productivity” in terms of workplace behavior because it is notoriously hard to measure on an individual level. Yes, if you sew jeans, you can track the number of pairs per hour. But few of us can keep a top pace for long. Because if we were meant to be “productive” human beings all the time, I’m pretty sure we would have been born with gears (and even then, machines break!).

You cannot be productive all the time at work, and I’m not even sure what that means since I think productivity is pretty invisible at times.

There’s a new web site: Transgender at Work. It has quite a bit of information, and seems to be still under development. Possibly the most useful tip for me was how Gretchen used a Powerpoint presentation to inform HR about how they could help in her transition in the workplace. Sometimes you just have to speak the right language to get people to listen.

Consumerist has three air travel tips for business travel (and all other sorts):

1. use a saline spray (a small one, presumably) to ward off the effects of dry air (which basically dries out your nasal passages and makes you more receptive to germies);
2. bring your own empty water bottle and fill it with tap water (presumably in the bathroom past security?), which avoids some of the grosser airplane water (and we’re serious about grossness);
3. ask how many air packs are working, which seem to control air flow in the plane.

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.

This is the most elaborate list of tips to prevent jet lag that I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I could do more than two of these (carbo loading the night before, and protein loading the day after) without collapsing from exhaustion.

As a writer, I’m always interested in finding ways to be more creative as a person (and a writer). However, generally speaking, paid work often seems to kill my own creativity. I find that if I spend enough time in front of the computer (especially with other people in front of the same computer) and with tight deadlines from day to day, I lose all will to create anything.

What exactly is going on? All Things Workplace summarizes nine tips for introducing more creativity into your own workplace practice:

1. Aloneness. Being alone allows the person to make contact with the self and be open to new kinds of inspiration.

2. Inactivity. Periods of time are needed to focus on inner resources and to be removed from the constraints of routine activities.

3. Daydreaming. Allows exploration of one’s fantasy life and venturing into new avenues for growth.

4. Free thinking. Allows the mind to wander in any direction without restriction and permits the similarities among remote topics or concepts to emerge.

5. State of readiness to catch similarities. One must practice recognizing similarities and resemblances across to perceptual of cognitive domains.

6. Gullibility. A willingness to suspend judgment allows one to be open to possibilities without treating them as nonsense.

7. Remembering & replaying past traumatic conflicts. Conflict can be transformed into more stable creative products.

8. Alertness. A state of awareness that permits the person to grasp the relevance of seemingly insignificant similarities.

9. Discipline. A devotion to the techniques, logic, and repetition that permit creative ideas to be realized.

I am rapidly reaching the age of irrelevance for women. But I don’t worry. It happens to men too. They just aren’t encouraged to stick poison in their faces. This video starring Sarah Haskins on the marketing of Botox is nicely paired with a disturbing piece from the Wall Street Journal on Botoxing Your Resume (removing the experience!).

I have filed this under “tips”, but that’s mostly a joke.

Steve Roesler takes on the myth of intelligence in all areas in But She’s So Intelligent! Generally speaking, the myth is that we assume that because a person is really spectacular in one area of her life (great sermons, perhaps, or great sales or great writing, or great interpersonal skills), we assume that she is really spectacular all over and are shocked to find out that people hate her, resent her, or don’t want to work with her.

Roesler offers these scenarios as examples:

Global Operations Director who hits all of the monetary goals but no one wants to work with her. They don’t trust her because she withholds information and doesn’t include other managers in decisions that impact how they do their work.

Brilliant Vice President of Finance who can’t conduct meetings, doesn’t like to plan, and knows more ways to help the company earn money on its money than its bankers do. Up for promotion for top job. Really doesn’t want it. People love working with him because they learn from him. He wants to continue developing investment methods and models.

Director of Regulatory Compliance. No one explains new (regulated) products to the government better than this guy. So what’s the problem? To the company it means the difference between a commercial product or nothing new to sell. His direct reports described their feelings toward him as “hate” (never a real good sign). They say he is a “bully,” “condescending,” and “has no patience with anyone he thinks is less intelligent than him.” When offered the possibility of being a high-level individual contributor, the director digs in his heels and says, “No. I want to be a manager.”

Those all seemed pretty darn familiar to me from time in corporate and non-profit life. He also offers five tips for dealing with these “intelligent” folks.

Spring Cleaning Tips (from a graphic designer) seem more realistic than other tips we’ve seen. Still…I’m not inspired to clean.

Here’s some Advice for freelance workers on dressing for success. I can’t say I follow any of this advice, except for the suit part. I do have a suit that I own and wear and like. I also try not to smell bad.

Here’s another story about a surge protector and electrical smouldering after a power surge. You’ll recall that after oral surgery, our power went out and when it came back on the surge was so significant that a ball of flames shot out the back of Jim’s computer. And, yes, it was plugged into a surge protector though not particularly a new one. Read more tips about surge protectors here.

5 Useful Things You Could Do Tomorrow has some tips for being more “productive”. You probably can’t use the first one (get up earlier) right now, but as the title suggests, these tips are for tomorrow.

Colleen at Arbitrary Marks writes about generational values in her Generation Y classroom, which got me thinking about generational differences in the workplace again.

One of the best overviews of generational differences at work is Mixing and Managing Four Generations of Employees, which, as the title suggests, incorporates all four generations (not just the Baby Boomers and Generation X).

This table is from the article. And while we know that generalizations always leave some people out, I’ve found this information helpful, if only in understanding my parents’ attitudes (Veterans) to my generation (Generation X) about work.

Finding Your Valentine at Work devotes considerable attention to how to hide your relationship with a co-worker from other co-workers. This amused me to no end, possibly because it reads like an episode of The Office.

A few tips from the article:

 1. Don’t sit or stand too close.

2. Don’t spend time with each other during the workday (e.g., coffee breaks and lunches).

3. Don’t arrive or leave at the same time.

I suppose if you did those three things consistently people probably wouldn’t suspect a thing. Now why exactly might you want to hide your relationship from co-workers? I think new relationships need nurturing and often public critique does not seem particularly helpful. And, of course, depending on your workplace, relationships may not be allowed.

I’m so glad it’s February, because I enjoy the barrage of green sex tips from every environmental blog and newsletter that I read. I’m not quite sure why I find the notion of green sex tips and toys so funny, but it may be because this is one of those very upper middle class first world problems while, say, much of the world struggles to eat. This isn’t to minimize pthalates in dildos and the endocrine-disruptors in lube or the pursuit of fair-trade condoms, some of which I’ve written about before. It’s just to say that I’m not sure this is the best use of time to devote quite as much energy and enthusiasm to this as much of these environmental publications seem to….

Nevertheless, I give you Green Valentine 2008, Let’s Talk about Green Sex, Baby, How to Green Your Sex Life, How to Buy a Green Sex Toy, Tips for Greener Sex, and Ideal Byte’s green sex tip library.

I started thinking about the extreme cost of workshops and conferences when I read Jacqueline’s Missing Out on Spirituality. It seems a worthy topic to explore. Many of us hope to expand our lives in some fashion with an enriching workshop, retreat, or conference, but they are often very expensive.

This past weekend I was in Chico with a group of women that I met originally at Squaw, which is a writing conference in the Sierras. We met to workshop new poems over the course of three days. We congregated in one woman’s home on a lake, cooked for ourselves, and cleaned for ourselves. It cost me a plane ticket (which I feel guilty about) and $40 for food, and, most importantly, provided a community of like-minded supportive people. We did this on our own, sort of taking the authority to do so into our own hands.

I mention authority, because I think we tend to place far too much value on it for workshops, retreats, and conferences, as if the only way to learn meditation is from the Dalai Lama and not our neighbor Joe who has meditated for twenty years or we can workshop poetry only with Mary Oliver and not with our own quite well published poet-friends. We get caught in thinking we have to operate within the bounds of a conventional experience when that may not suit our needs. (Enter bar camp for unconventional thinking about conferences and authority.) Please note that there is nothing wrong with a conventional experience, but it often leaves lots of people out due to cost and logistical issues. Furthermore, I sense that many of us are starved for community, so it seems a shame that we may be missing out. There is no reason you can’t create a small workshop or retreat on your own. We did it in LRY/YRUU. We can do it now too.

I suggest you consider the following elements:

• What is our purpose (e.g., to learn meditation, to build a community, to write new work)? 
• Where can we best meet our purpose (e.g., campground, vacation rental, conference center, someone’s home)?
• How can we best structure our time (e.g., an opening prayer, workshops or silence, and closing ceremony of sorts)?
• What sorts of spaces are available (e.g., private rooms, public spaces, outdoors)?
• What do we want to do about food and sleeping arrangements (e.g., bring food, cook for ourselves, have it catered, sleep in sleeping bags, bring mattresses, etc.)?
• Who will lead? And when? And what are the expectations for leadership?

Most of us who have done a bit of event planning (e.g., your own wedding, parents’ anniversary brunch, parties for others) understand some of the logistical and cost issues, and I think there are good ways to keep these to a minimum with small intimate gatherings at home and outdoors rather than large meetings at corporate facilities. 

Resources

Making a Retreat

Start Your Own Writers Workshop

Yes, I’m sorry, but it appears to be time for Tips for Surviving a Recession. I know we don’t want to hear this or think about this, but I sincerely believe it is still happening.

Tips include:

• Build your emergency fund.
• Pay off your credit cards.
• Increase your income, if at all possible.
• Don’t buy a new home without selling the old home.
• Don’t quit your job without finding a new one.

That’s my summary, but there is more at Tips for Surviving a Recession, including things to tighten in the family budget.

My favorite quote from the article deserves to be called out with a snarky reply:

“I have a friend who just lost her job. She is having a ball selling a whole bunch of stuff on eBay, everything from a gold Cartier watch to smaller things,” says Kit Yarrow a marketing and psychology professor at Golden Gate University.

Oh, Kit, I’m sure your friend is “having a ball” selling her possessions on ebay. Perhaps the words just came out wrong? Say it’s so. Please.

Resources
Recession? Maybe.
Recession Proof Financing
Recession Ready Advice: Careers
The Brazen Careerist

You might read Work, Computer: Neck Stretches which includes a bunch of small stretches. I liked the last wrist stretch the best (please insert the word “gently” at each step):

Wrist Stretch

1. hold arm (gently!) straight out in front of you
2. pull the hand backwards (gently!) with the other hand, then pull downward
3. hold for 20 seconds (gently!) 
4. relax
5. repeat 3 times each (gently!)

Now yoga postures at work is from Ladies Home Journal, and you may have to click past the ad, but the slideshow of the entirely normal looking folks doing desk-side yoga is worth it because not everyone who does yoga looks like Rodney Yee. And don’t stay in the last pose for too long or a coworker may call an ambulance.

I wish there were tips for surviving a miscarriage, but, honestly, I’m surprised anyone survives at all. To me, it feels akin to rape in that once it happens you should immediately get a Do Over card to come back in the next life in a more protected and innocent form for a while. Read the rest of this entry…