photo credit: star5112

You know how it is: some days all the well-intentioned positivity in the world isn’t enough of a kick in the pants.

If you find yourself languishing, having a tough transition from weekend to work week, perhaps you might try a little fear-based motivation. Allow yourself to imagine what undesirable outcomes will arise from not following through on what you know you need to be doing.

It’s perhaps not the best way to feel calm and stress-free, but if you really need to get something done and you’re having trouble, it’s not really the ideal time for calm and stress-free. That time is after you get done what you need to get done. And when you get there, you should definitely enjoy it; you earned it.

What’s your last-ditch technique for days when you can’t get yourself in gear? Give us your tips in the comments.

photo credit: tm_lv

My dad worked 38 years with the same employer. I know there were times he thought about going elsewhere, but since he didn’t have a college degree, he always felt limited by what he thought wouldn’t be available to him.

I, on the other hand, have held a lot of jobs, and most of them were for less than a full year. Some were even 6 months or less. (A few have even been 3 or 4 weeks, but those were generally contracts or really bad fits.) In the earlier years of my professional life, my dad regarded my “job-hopping” with some anxiety and counseled me to stick it out longer with each employer. After a while, though, he began to recognize that I was doing good work and not leaving my employers in a lurch,  that I had a different role in most of these companies than the one he had with his, and that I was more comfortable with change than most people seem to be.

I bring this up to ask this question: do you know what your role is at your workplace? Are you a long-term fit, or are you there to fulfill a more short-term mission?

It’s an important question to ask yourself occasionally, as it may change from time to time. Company cultures do evolve as their leadership and the markets they serve evolve. Subtle changes in management two or three levels up can have ripple effects on your surroundings. And what might have started out seeming like a perfect long-term fit can, over time, become ill-suited to your goals and ideals.

In much of the marketplace, moving from job to job after a year or more is rarely considered suspect anymore. Under a year in each job, though, and you’re at risk of being labeled a “job-hopper.” If you don’t think that’s a weird bias for corporate America to have, ask yourself this: do we have even a quasi-derogative term in corporate parlance for someone who stays in an ill-fitting work environment far longer than they should? Why not?

It’s certainly true that hiring employees can be an expensive process, and training them even more costly. Some estimates put the cost at 1.5x to 3x the cost of the employee’s salary. So when employees leave after only a short tenure, it can adversely affect a company’s bottom line. But employees who make themselves too comfortable after years of service, consider themselves too senior to downsize, and become locked into an outdated view of “the way things are done” come with a cost as well. (It’s a cost that’s more difficult to quantify, and more difficult to find studies about, but the discussion is out there.)

Recently, I’ve had a series of phone interviews as a job candidate. I hadn’t been pursuing a new job (I’d already started a company of my own doing web marketing strategy and services) but I was gladly entertaining the conversations because it’s a company I really respect and, truly, you just never know. But I was struck by the fact that every interviewer asked me about why I had a history of “job hopping.”

As I explained to the folks I was interviewing with, my role in most of my previous jobs was, whether explicitly or implicitly, that of a change agent. And a change agent, by nature, doesn’t generally hold a long-term role inside a company. And in most cases, by the time I left each company, even after some of the shortest tenures, I felt that I had achieved what I was there to do. (By the way, as a side interviewing tip: the tie-in with the job I was interviewing for was that it was a consultant position, and my frequent role as change agent makes pretty good sense in that context. I wasn’t lying or rationalizing at all, but having a way to align your story with the story of the job you’re interviewing for really helps overcome anti-job-hopper biases.)

Could I have articulated at the outset of each of those jobs what I was there to do? Probably not. But that doesn’t change the fact that those companies and I each met at times when we needed each other. And I have, as a result, developed a skill for sizing up a company’s situation and helping it improve.

We each have a purpose in our professional lives, and our roles at work should reflect that, even if it becomes inconvenient to explain to future employers. As Penelope Trunk pointed out when she wrote about job hopping a few years ago:

A resume is not a laundry list of job and duties. It’s a document about a story. Your resume needs to show the story of a person who contributes in large ways wherever you go.

No one chooses at the outset to take on a role as a mindless cog in a machine, yet some of the compromises we are asked to make in the name of seniority require selectively ignoring parts of our life goals or ideals. We all owe it to ourselves to perform periodic checks of how well our roles suit us, and answer ourselves honestly.

What are your thoughts on knowing your role within your company? Thoughts on job-hopping or on seniority? Leave them in the comments.

photo credit: nDevilTV

For many of us in the U.S., this will be a short week: since the 4th of July falls on a Saturday, many offices will get Friday the 3rd off in observance. Undoubtedly, this will be a tremendous relief to most people.

But in some cases (hey, I’m not admitting anything here), the relief will only come on the heels of anxiety about accomplishing all that we have on our schedules for the week ahead.

Last week, I talked about using a planning session on Monday morning to prioritize the week ahead. That kind of planning becomes even more important when your usual time available for tasks is reduced by 20%.

My challenge to you (and, OK, to me as well) is: be extra ruthless this week in determining your priorities. Stay focused on the 2 or 3 things you’ll be able to get done each day.

Having done this, you should find the long weekend a lot easier to enjoy. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for myself.

What are your tricks for getting yourself to focus when you have more tasks than time?

photo credit: Simoneâ™ 13

I don’t know about you, but I have weeks when I’m incredibly disciplined about planning my work and accomplishing big things, and weeks when I slack off and allow myself to react to whatever comes up. The problem with the latter approach is that I invariably spend my time doing less important stuff, like constantly struggling to get my inbox to zero, or trying to keep up with my workload and meetings and all the other demands on my time.

I’ve now started scheduling time first thing on Monday mornings to make good decisions about where my time is allocated. (Hint: I know that fellow Corporate Idealist Sam Davidson takes this approach, too.)

The reason this is more than a productivity tip is that striving for excellence at work sometimes does take a little longer. Not much, a lot of the time — sometimes the difference in time and effort between doing sometime the mediocre way and doing it the way that delights people is negligible. But if excellence is your aim, it’s best to allow the time to let yourself feel you can make good decisions, and not feel pressured into “just getting it done.”

So, if you haven’t already, why not take a little time this morning and carve out some time in your week for going above and beyond? Maybe carve out an extra personal review period on Wednesday so you can re-organize yourself and re-prioritize mid-week. And maybe schedule a little extra time for next Monday morning so you can do it all again, only better.

What are you going to do this week that will make your company better off?

What are you going to do this week that will make your customers better off?

What are you going to do this week that will make you better off?

Happy Monday!

This blog exists because of people like you in the working world who appreciate business for values beyond the obvious: making money. Hey, we like making money too, but we feel better about our earnings when we’re doing something meaningful and constructive, and when we’re helping people if we can.

We also believe in the idea behind work-life balance, but we believe that our work should ideally be a reflection of us, so that our lives at work are balanced.

We think everyone’s motivations are different, and that those differences can be cultivated to make for an incredibly rich work environment.

Image credit: Eneas, via flickr

But here’s where we want your input. This blog will be meaningless without input from you. So please, tell us: besides the paycheck you take home, what are the moments in your working life that make everything more worthwhile?