How We Work Now: Seven Twists On The Home Office November 18, 2009
Posted by Jeff Fuchs in Workplace Design, lean office, personal productivity.Tags: lean office, work-life balance
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With millions of people working from home in the United States now, the need for home offices has never been greater. But space, construction permits, and utilities often plague the home-based entrepreneur. It is upon these problems that Fast Company has seized the initiative by putting together a collection of innovative and well-designed home office ideas. From the completely customizable L.O.F.T. workstation, to the Office Pod, to the Trunk Station, Fast Company has assembled seven unique home office solutions.
What will your home office look like in 10 years?
Check out the ideas here.
Experiences, Not Possessions, Lead to Greater Happiness March 2, 2009
Posted by Jeff Fuchs in personal productivity, work-life balance.Tags: personal productivity, work-life balance
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Can money make us happy if we spend it on the right purchases? New research suggests buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness. The study demonstrates that experiential purchases, such as a meal out or theater tickets, result in increased well-being because they satisfy higher order needs.”These findings support an extension of basic need theory, where purchases that increase psychological need satisfaction will produce the greatest well-being,” said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology and head of the Personality and Well-Being Lab at San Francisco State University.
“People still believe that more money will make them happy, even though 35 years of research has suggested the opposite,” Howell said. “Maybe this belief has held because money is making some people happy some of the time, at least when they spend it on life experiences.”
Read the article here.
Don’t Let the Recession Overwhelm Your Staff March 2, 2009
Posted by Jeff Fuchs in work-life balance, workforce.Tags: work-life balance, workforce
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In a recent column in The New York Times, Dr. Gregory Berns explained his fascinating work using brain-scanning technologies to understand how we make decisions. He detailed one experiment in which he placed research subjects in an MRI scanner and administered a moderate electric shock to test the brain’s fear system. The key to the experiment, he wrote, was that subjects had to wait for the shock-and he varied both the strength of the shock and the length of the wait. He noted that in some subjects, the parts of the brain associated with processing pain lit up well in advance of the actual shock. His interpretation of the results? “Worrying eats up a lot of brain processing power that makes other mental tasks more difficult.”
When times get tough, it’s up to leadership to make sure employees are focused on the most important issues. Left to their own devices, those whose mortgages are underwater and whose 401(k) accounts have evaporated will probably spend more time fretting than they did during the boom years. Add to those worries declining revenues and potential layoffs, and a company can quickly find worrying eating up a huge portion of employees’ time. So what can a leader do to counteract employees’ worries?
Find out in the article here.
Six Ways to Manage Leadership Stress January 26, 2009
Posted by Jeff Fuchs in leadership, work-life balance.Tags: leadership, work-life balance
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Effective leaders know that stress can be a good thing. But stress can also be toxic, especially in the brutal economic environment we’re in. Article author John Ryan found that managing leadership stress comes down to a handful of critical elements: maintaining perspective, exercising, opening up, welcoming feedback, streamlining, and recharging.Read the full article here.
Work-Life Balance: How to Get a Life and Do Your Job January 11, 2009
Posted by Jeff Fuchs in work-life balance.Tags: work-life balance
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Some people seem highly competent when it comes to finessing work-life balance. These are the people of the tidy desks and tidy homes. The work-life super class. They don’t skulk in late like the rest of us. They don’t wear rumpled clothes, miss deadlines, or weaken before the vending machine. Are these people for real? Is work-life balance achievable? BusinessWeek asked its readers. Some responders groaned that, owing to a hypercompetitive workplace and the race for status, the answer was no. But more disagreed, having found ways to make their lives less chaotic when it comes to juggling what often feels like two full-time jobs.Read the advice of people who think they have found balance in their lives.
Find the article here.
Managing Stress Can Improve Company Performance January 6, 2009
Posted by Jeff Fuchs in work-life balance.Tags: work-life balance
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Many entrepreneurs say they thrive on stress, but there’s an important difference between healthy pressure and toxic stress. One keeps you motivated, and the other can be a disaster. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell says anything that causes you to fall into what he calls an F-state (when you’re frantic, fearful, forgetful, frenzied, and frustrated) counts as the bad kind. “When you’re in an F-state the quality of your work declines, so this is very related to the bottom line,” says the founder of the Hallowell Center for Cognitive & Emotional Health in Sudbury, Mass. Not to mention that tumbling into toxic stress can make you vulnerable to illnesses such as heart attack, stroke, back pain, migraines, and gastrointestinal problems-none of which are exactly revenue enhancers.
This article in Business Week goes on to describe simple, common ways to combat toxic stress.
Read the full article here.
How To Find That Elusive Balance Between Work and Life November 16, 2008
Posted by Jeff Fuchs in work-life balance.Tags: work-life balance
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in his zenhabits blog, Leo Babauta provides some advice on achieving better work-life balance. Some of his advice includes:
- Realize that, to some extent, work is life
- Do what you love
- Create space for things in your life
- Balance the space you allocate for those things
The advice is general, but generally applicable. Read more here.
