The contemporary work zeitgeist has spoken: if you’re sitting down while working, you’re dying. If you stand, you’re more productive. Standing while working has a faddy appeal to the point that it’s no longer uncommon to see people standing throughout their workday. Behold, the standing desk is here to stay. Read more

The data is in and the results are unusual: workers are living farther away from the office in a way that they never have before. This increased distance between our work life and our home life is not only inefficient, but it’s dangerous to the point of affecting our health and the economy. It’s a reflection of jobs increasingly being pushed into the suburbs, where commute times are notoriously longer due to sprawl between communities. Compare this to a densely populated city like New York, where most people get by without owning a car at all. Read more

What kind of talk do people most associate with you? Are you quick to help and encourage, or are you eager to criticize and put down?

If you suspect that your name is more synonymous with the less desirable latter, we suggest you work on pursuing the former: by consciously choosing to stop complaining, you can drastically affect small but important pockets of your personal and professional life. There’s a positivity that going on a complaint diet — avoiding complaining at all costs — can bring about in anyone. And all you have to do to be successful here is think before you speak. Read more

Too many people fall prey to bad habits. Maybe it’s an inability to turn off the TV, maybe they eat junk food for every meal, and so on. But there are good easy habits one can adopt that no only take very little time, but will make you into a far more productive person once they’re successfully folded into your work routine. Read more

Real life happens all the time and work is only one component of it. We’re born, we die, and a lot of stuff happens to us in between, good and bad alike. A lot of it even happens to us while we’re at the office.

Rocky moments, from the romantic and emotional to the medical (or maybe even criminal) can manifest in a flash to derail an otherwise productive employee or colleague. What do you do when the personal meets the professional in an unavoidable way? Read more

Everyone wants a vacation, but we don’t seem to be able to agree on how to let our employees take them. Corporate vacation policies can be anything from liberal and permissive to harsh and constraining. You want to be sure that your own company’s policy drives a happy medium between the two. Employees should feel they can take vacation easily and when they need to, but employees also need to know the time spent away from the office is just that: time spent away from the office. Read more

Navy SEALs are commonly acknowledged as the most hard-core, devoted, relentless military personnel ever. They are physically strong, emotionally resilient, and simply never give up. Their skills have been used with great success all around the world.

So what can we learn from the way that they are trained in order to bring the same kind of excellence to the workplace? It might be easier than you think to bring the same warrior mentality to work. It has to do with establishing good habits. Let’s get into them: Read more

It’s easy to dismiss the act of meditation as a frivolous exercise for long-haired hippies and people who don’t know how to function in the real world. After all, you work in the world of business! There’s no time for such silliness as sitting still and doing nothing, concentrating on your breath without being productive. Read more

Did you know that you can go to MIT for free? Did you know that there are endless educational resources waiting for you to consume them online?

There’s a new educational movement afoot, seeing prestigious universities and educational institutions putting their materials online almost always for free. If you are a committed self-starter, there’s no reason you can’t learn about a topic that you’ve been curious about for years without acting on. These are commonly called MOOCs, short for “massively open online courses.” Read more