photo credit: Jodiepedia

It can be awfully tempting to use your weekend to catch up on what didn’t get done this week, or what perenially never gets done. I know: I do it all the time.

But downtime gives us perspective, lets us recover physically and mentally, and allows us to perform better. So here’s a thought: as you go about your Friday, look for simple ways to tie up loose ends a bit tighter than usual so that you can use your weekend to recharge. Maybe it’s as simple as tidying your desk before you leave. I promise you, you’ll come back fresher on Monday for it.

Have a great Friday, and a very relaxing weekend.

photo credit: melalouise

This year, I started a web marketing optimization company (called [meta]marketer) and we’re truly doing well. I found a business partner I respect and admire and who shares many of my core values, and we hired someone with a lot of smarts and talent and who also wants to make a positive influence on the the world. We’re small, but we’re growing, and we have big plans.

And then there’s this blog, which has been a great opportunity for me to focus my thoughts and remind myself why it’s important to me to lead with integrity and be a force for positive change in the business community, however small my impact. Sometimes it’s a lot to keep up with, especially when I’m up to my ears in leads I need to follow up with and client meetings to attend to, but it’s worth having a place to come back to and renew my passion for good in business.

And of course, there’s my life partner, who, despite being wired for art and beauty and hedonism and everything non-corporate, understands my corporate idealism and patiently puts up with my excessive work hours and workload.

I’m healthy, I’m happy, I have good prospects ahead of me, and I love the people around me.

If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.

I hope you have a wonderful, happy, healthy Thanksgiving and a restful long weekend, and that you come back to work next Monday recharged and ready to do good work.

photo credit: Betsssssy

What? Play at work?

It sometimes seems like only the humorless are promoted to positions of power and they expect everyone else to be just as humorless. But play is linked to creativity, and without creativity, we would all be humorless drones.

So tackle your next task with imagination and wonder, and see what fun you can have even with mundane routines.

You might find a new way of doing the same old thing that saves time, produces better results, or saves money. Or all of the above.

(And by the way, if you get those kinds of results and they aren’t appreciated, maybe it’s time to find another job. One where you can work hard and be playful at the same time, get good results, and be appreciated.)

Don’t ever lose your spirit. Happy Monday!

photo credit: Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes

If the rows and rows of self-help books at the local bookstore are to be believed, we should all be trying to improve ourselves in various ways every moment of every day. And sure, there’s something to be said for allowing yourself to evaluate your own skills and characteristics with unflinching honesty and making efforts to improve areas that matter, especially if something you do (or don’t do) negatively affects other people.

But a post in the wonderful blog Dumb Little Man puts forth that, for greatest gain, we should concentrate on our strengths, not our weaknesses:

It’s so intuitive – “I’m worst at tasks involving my weaknesses, so my greatest potential for development is in these areas. If I work on those things, I’ll become rounded!” Too bad it’s incorrect. Your strengths represent your natural ways of responding to the world; by going ‘with the grain’, instead of against it, you’ll find it easier to perform the amount of practice necessary to reach expertise in your chosen field.

It’s such a great observation, and so easy to overlook. After all, it’s easier to build on momentum than to counteract inertia. I give this advice to my clients when it comes to marketing, as well: concentrate on what’s going right, and figure out how to piggyback off of that in as many ways as possible.

What’s more, as they point out further into the article:

strengths-use leads to happiness. Achieving this happiness means both finding tasks that are suited to your strengths, and finding ways to involve your strengths into the tasks that you do.

Does this mean you shouldn’t look in the proverbial mirror every so often and give yourself a good hard review for potential areas of improvement? Not at all. But it does suggest that the majority of your time is best spent developing your talents and becoming even more of a rockstar at them.

photo credit: tyger_lyllie

Most employee handbooks probably don’t forbid being too serious on the job… but maybe they should. Then again, they also probably don’t explicitly forbid humor, unless it’s of the “inappropriate” variety. But a laugh among colleagues can relieve tension, deepen relationships, and make dull days seem brighter.

In short, it can make the workplace fun. And what’s more motivating than a job you actually like doing?

There’s definitely a way of taking it too far. I’m not recommending anything that risks crossing the line into harassment, although I have worked in some environments where there was almost a sense that unless you were risking HR wrath, you weren’t pushing the envelope hard enough. But that isn’t most workplaces, and that isn’t necessary for a healthy release of tension.

And it needn’t be distracting. Spending 15 minutes of every 30 minute meeting cutting up is probably a bit excessive unless you write comedy for TV. But a light comment now and then, a shared laugh with colleagues, or a running gag the whole office is in on can be the kind of thing you wake up in the morning with a smile thinking about, eager to go to work.

Is there much humor in your office? Share a laugh in the comments.

photo credit: *Zara

I’ve been thinking about happiness at work lately. Having started my own company just about six months ago, and being happily busy and productive, the relationship has been obvious to me between doing something you love and being happy at work. Duh, right?

But it’s more than that: there’s a feeling of empowerment in having chosen my occupation rather than letting it choose me, and being busy with work that I feel good about. I mean, that’s not earth-shatteringly novel either, I realize, but the difference is huge: I went from being a passionate advocate for doing the right thing in multiple environments where that made me a pain in the CEO’s butt to now being a passionate advocate for doing the right thing as CEO of my own company.

Realistically, not everyone is going to start their own company, or will even want to, but we all still need to find happiness. So how do you reconcile happiness with long days doing work you sometimes may not love?

Coincidentally, in some of the blogs I read regularly for inspiration, I ran across a theme this week pertaining to work and happiness.

Gill Corkindale in HarvardBusiness.org had a piece on When Work Doesn’t Make You Happy that addresses that very question, and finds that choice, to the extent that we have it, is key:

“It all comes down to choice, and this is where I believe happiness lies. In choosing — as far as you are able — what you want to do and how you will do it. While not all of us can choose our work and colleagues, we can all choose how we approach things — with an open, optimistic, and positive outlook or with a frustrated, irritated one.”

In a somewhat similar (but perhaps more direct) vein, Jason Seiden, in a piece called Screw Your Career Path. Live Your Story, advocates embracing the surprises in life and finding your true self in the way you live out your choices:

“It’s time, as individuals, to remember that we are each protagonists in our own stories—not fictional ones, either, but real, live, actual, here-I-am-in-the-flesh-stories. [...] Only protagonists can know surprises, friendship, obstacles, twists, victories, villains, daring, love, temptation, loss, luck, setbacks, choices, laughter, tears… only protagonists can know success.”

And finally, from the managerial perspective, SmartBlog on Workforce covered the happiness-productivity connection in a piece called 3 ways to maximize your workers’ happiness — and performance:

“The secret to maximizing performance is to create an environment in which your employees are happy. A happy employee is highly engaged, flourishing and has achieved an acceptable work-life balance.

We know that high employee engagement leads to high performance. Recent studies by the Corporate Leadership Council, Towers Perrin and Development Dimensions International, show that a highly engaged workforce results in a 20% improvement in employee productivity, a 50% reduction in unplanned attrition and a 23% increase in customer satisfaction.”

It’s as if there’s been something in the air to make us all think along the same lines.

What about you – have you been thinking about the link between happiness and meaningful work, or between happiness and productivity, or perhaps the three-way link between happiness and meaningful work and productivity? What conclusions have you come to, different from what we’ve quoted above?

photo credit: Valerie Everett

It’s about as cliche a desk accessory as it gets, but a framed photo on your desk of something that inspires you may be just the thing you need to keep you focused and driven to succeed.

A few jobs back, I was overextended, managing three of the company’s top five goals within my small team, but it seemed worth it because I believed something good would come of it in the end, both for the company and for me professionally. But to try to make it all work, I was putting in really long hours at the office. Which meant that the very reasons why I wanted to succeed — to enjoy my life with my husband at our beautiful home in relative comfort — were out of my reach when I needed the motivation the most.

So I spent a couple bucks on having good quality prints made of some of my favorite snapshots of my husband and my home, and put them in good frames. Sure, I could have just made those images my computer screensavers or desktop wallpapers, but then I wouldn’t have them there in my peripheral vision all the time, just waiting to remind me about why I was there in the first place. Which also reminded me, after I’d put in a long day’s work, to go home and enjoy what I was working for.

Now that I work from home, I don’t need the reminder in such a visual way, but I do occasionally take a break from my desk to go hug my husband or take a stroll through our garden.

Maybe your inspiration is different: maybe yours has to do with places you want to go, or things you want to do. Maybe mementos of the past keep you focused on the present. Whatever it is that keeps you going, find a way to remind yourself frequently.

How do you remind yourself what really matters? Share your tips in the comments.

photo credit: greg westfall.

According to the results of a July 2009 McKinsey Quarterly survey, many of us have more responsibilities (without a corresponding increase in title or pay) and a good deal more stress since the economic downturn began. In an article called Leaders in the crisis, Kevin Lane and Monica McGurk summarize the survey’s findings:

Most respondents are working more hours since the crisis began, and nearly 40 percent have more responsibilities without the benefit of a new title. But although stress levels have increased, most executives say they can cope.

There’s a lot more great content in the article, particularly dealing with motivating employees who are overwhelmed and overworked, and keeping the company staff aligned. Definitely be sure to read the whole thing, particularly if you manage people and want some tips on motivating them through these conditions.

But it leads us to wonder: what are you doing personally to cope with your stress? Even if your techniques aren’t completely healthy, we’re curious. And especially if you have healthy techniques we haven’t listed in the poll, be sure to share them in the comments.

photo credit: MeaganJean

The weekend is here at last! Time to take it easy, put your feet up, maybe do some yard work, and hang out with friends. Or is it?

For many busy professionals (perhaps you!), the weekends are often overtaken with catch-up tasks from the previous week, and in perhaps fewer cases, planning for the week ahead.

We all know we need a break, but the specter of possible layoffs, the increased workload from laid-off coworkers, and the crazy-fast-paced workplaces many of us are in means more and more to do, and a great deal of anxiety about how to get it done.

May we make a suggestion? It isn’t rocket science or anything, but sometimes we need the truth pointed out to us before we can recognize it. You will probably encounter distractions, you won’t get it all done, and you will probably close out the weekend feeling disappointed that you didn’t get to relax more. Instead, why not take the Weekend Idealist approach to Getting Relaxation Done:

1. Decide the two work-related things (no more than that!) that you could do in under an hour this weekend that would make you feel more caught up and allow you to feel less anxious.
2. Pick the best time to do them: if your focus is better in the mornings, get them over with right away.
3. Get them done! Don’t let them turn into an ordeal. Just power through them and knock them out.
   
4. Permit yourself the blissful freedom to do whatever you want with the rest of your weekend.

See? It’s so easy, you’ll wonder why you haven’t been doing it this way all along.

We hope you’ll be able to find balance this weekend. We’re all for productivity and achievement, but everyone needs to unwind now and then.

Got a process for balancing your productive time with your relaxing time on the weekends? Share it in the comments.

And have a great weekend!

photo credit: Jacob Bøtter

Recently I stumbled across an older article at HBR.org about cultural transformation within a company through fun and laughter:

We’re a company—maybe like yours—where having fun was long viewed with suspicion. Sure, a lot of start-ups and Silicon Valley companies have wild and crazy cultures, with pillow fights around the foosball table the order of the day. But ours is a traditional, Midwestern manufacturing company, one that didn’t even allow employees to have coffee at their desks until 1989. Although we pride ourselves on our technological innovation, we make industrial signs and other identification products, not PalmPilots or rainbow-colored iMacs. We are an old-line company that has always taken business very seriously—again, maybe like yours.

So perhaps it comes as a surprise that, for the past seven years, we’ve made fun an integral part of the culture at Brady Corporation—not simply as an end in itself but for serious business reasons. We’ve found that getting people to loosen up and enjoy themselves has numerous benefits. It can break down jealously guarded turf boundaries. It can foster an esprit de corps throughout the company and greater camaraderie on teams. It can start the conversations that spark innovation and increase the likelihood that unpleasant tasks will be accomplished. It can help convey important corporate messages to employees in memorable ways. It can relieve stress—and, heaven knows, we can all benefit from that.

And it made me want to ask you, our readers about your work environment: is your company environment fun? Do you laugh a lot at work? Is fun encouraged, or are you sneaking laughs with coworkers behind the bosses’ backs?