A good working life has a lot to do with boundaries. Are you going to answer your phone after 9 PM? Are you going to cut vacation short in order to work on an upcoming project? If you have these hypothetical questions answered ahead of time, then you’re already doing a good job of defining such boundaries, but it’s also too easy
An executive’s days can be bumpy and noisy without a moment’s pause to reflect, make plans, and contemplate solutions to problems. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of becoming a taskmaster that ends up doing the same things over and over again without ever actually advancing the ball forward. These times are essential to build into your routine in a way that best serves your needs—an undistracted slot of time for your brain to explore and put issues to rest.
The leader of a company is both blessed and cursed: he has the burden of a lot of tasks to get through and decisions to make in a day, but if the company is of a certain size, he has the benefit of handing off tasks to other members of the organization. Some items will naturally flow from superior to subordinate, and it’s always excellent to see a person’s effort made more effective when it can be divided well amongst supporting staff. But where is the line between what should and shouldn’t be handed off to someone else to take care of? And how do you delegate without letting anyone else think you’re a lazy manager who can’t do things for himself?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
