First off, let me say that this blog isn’t about religion. It’s about juggling work with the pursuit of happiness. People wonder how they could possibly maximize their happiness, while working a stressful job as many of us do. How can you maintain a state of happiness when you’re charged with more work than you can handle, need to complete something that your client wants done yesterday, or are getting reemed out by your boss. Alternatively, if you are career oriented, and want to deliver above and beyond expectations, how can you not be stressed out?
Well, I believe that it’s possible to brave through the trenches that are the corporate environment, and yet maintain a level of happiness throughout the day. This is done by keeping a certain frame of mind and approach when at work. I believe that a lot of people are unhappy at their jobs because of high levels of stress, but there are ways to work whereby you’re minimizing stress. A lot of the work methods I currently employ are derived from David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, which provides a great method for being productive and organized at work and in your personal life. However, I have tweaked some of his methods to suit my needs, and I also have a bunch of my own tactics, which I think make me a happier person at work.
The objective of this blog is to create a community, share ideas, and help each other out. Perhaps we can all become happier people in the end.
Just a word on my blogging habits - I’m a big proponent of efficiency, and that said, I don’t like posting multiple times a day, or for that matter, week. I’d rather have each post be thought-out with the proper time dedicated to them, so that I waste less of my readers’ time.
My other personal blogs are The Ad Agency Blog and Leveraged Credit.
Yeah, I really think that they are. Maybe it’s because I have mildly OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) tendencies so if there is a clock in front of me, I’ll check it incessantly.
About a year ago, someone told me that they got rid of the clock from their computer desktop, and relied solely on alerts to keep them on top of things. I tried it, and I think my productivity must have risen 15% as a result. Clocks are a distraction. You don’t need to know that it’s 12:30 and that it’s time to go to lunch or that you have only 15min of time remaining for you to work on an analysis before you have a meeting. All you need is to be alerted when you have to switch gears.
A natural question is whether or not you might want to know that you have only 30min to work on something, so that you can work faster. My response is that if you work at a pace that is different from what your regular speed is, you are prone to errors and outputting something that is less than your usual quality. You shouldn’t rush work. It leads to stress. If someone is asking you to move quickly, then push back or ignore them. If it takes you 1 hour to do something, don’t agree to do it in 45min. The result is more often bad than good.
The question arises as to how to set up alerts. I do mine in Microsoft Outlook, since I always have it open for work purposes. If I have a meeting at a certain time, it’s always in the calendar, but also if I want to go to lunch at a certain time, I’ll put it in there too. That way, I don’t have to think about lunch until I’m actually alerted. If you’re unfamiliar with Outlook, the program will just pop up a window and make a sound when your appointment time comes up. An important point to note is that if you have meetings on your calendar, and want to set alerts for those, you shouldn’t set the reminder to pop up 15 min before the meeting time unless you actually intend of getting up from your desk 15 min before the meeting. I generally set the reminder to pop up either right when the meeting is supposed to begin or 5 min before depending on how far the meeting is from my desk.
Just like I currently say in my intro, I like to be efficient and I feel that although blogging best practices stipulate that you post often, in doing so, you may be performing a disservice to your readers - that is, making them waste their time re-checking your site or reading multiple posts when they could just read one and get the same thing out of it.
In the advertising industry, where I work, there is a lot of e-mailing. Tons of it. In lieu of conference calls and meetings, people e-mail. However, there is such a thing as e-mailing too much. Many people I work with will shoot off an e-mail or respond to one at the drop of a hat and without thinking it through. They do this because it’s easy. Just open a “compose” window, type out your thought, and press “send”. This is a very reactionary and inefficient most particularly to the people who are receiving your messages. Sometimes people will type out an e-mail, and then follow it up with 1 or 2 additional e-mails containing other thoughts on the same subject. Then on the receiving end, people have to open and read each one. If you have someone who is equally reactionary on the receiving end, you can easily get into a rapid-fire back-and-forth. Unfortunately, there are all too often people CCed on these e-mails who then have to open and read each e-mail in order to follow the conversation.
I’m not saying that one should stop e-mailing. I myself send out about 50 e-mails per day. However, efficiencies can be gained by simply being more careful and thoughtful when e-mailing. Limiting the people you CC (to only those who are directly involved) also helps, although this is at your own discretion as CCing is also seen as covering your back. I tend to be very minimal when it comes to CCing, and it has never gotten me into trouble.
Here’s a good article from 43Folders on e-mail and voicemail efficiency.
This week, I experienced stress caused by other people who you work with, but don’t keep their end of the bargain. One is related to work and the other is for a sailboat share, which I am a part of.
At my day job, I’m currently responsible for the launch of a particular project. There are a number of people who have responsibilities towards this, both internally and externally. However, this job is fairly new to me, and I found that people haven’t been very responsive, especially since the person this comes down on in the event that the launch gets delayed, is me. I would have to follow up with people numerous times, and the pace at which things are moving is generally slow.
I manage a sailboat share so that several of us can make use of my sailboat and share the expenses to make it less expensive for all of us to sail. I’m the only one in the group with any responsibilities (I know, I probably should’ve handed some off), and although the sailing season officially starts in May, the boat yard where I have been keeping the boat has been very slow, and the boat has finally gotten to a useable place one or two days ago. Meanwhile, the other people in the share want to go sailing, and have probably been wondering what’s been going on, even though to this point they’ve been patient.
These types of external stressors are hard to manage, especially if they’re sporadic. I’m not sure if there is a great way to prepare for them, but it goes to show how important it is to work with people you enjoy working with and trust.
