Posts tagged work
Winter Blues
Sep 3rd
Studies have shown that in areas where winters are long cold and grey the depression and suicide rates increase during those months. In those same areas, during the summer those rates decrease, which to me indicates that we have the same troubles throughout the year, but during the winter months when the outside is cold [...]
Act Like You’re Teaching to Avoid Sloppy Work [Mind Hacks]
Sep 2nd
If you find that you tend to rush certain jobs to the point of sloppiness, reader Tanner Bush has an easy solution: pretend like you’re teaching someone else, and you’ll slow down. More »
"Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours, and greater quality of life" [Work Culture]
Aug 26th
This article at news site Salon isn't necessarily an endorsement of European socialism, but it is at the very least a good reminder that working non-stop is not the key to being more productive. Oh, and maybe the most surprising number: "Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours — the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year." [Salon] More »
Creativity May Favor the Smelly and Unkempt [Work From Home]
Aug 24th
If you’re working at home and trying to spark your creativity by showering, brushing your teeth, getting dressed, and so on, you may not be giving yourself the head start you think. More »
Top 10 Ways to Lead More Effectively with Humor
Aug 12th
Humor and laughter provide so many rewards. Studies have shown 20 seconds of laughter yield the same benefits as 30 minutes of hard rowing. A Robert Half International study reported 84% of executives believe a worker with a good sense of humor does a better job. Incorporating humor more effectively in the workplace allows you to defuse difficult situations, reduce stress, create attention for new ideas, build rapport, and be a more approachable and memorable leader.
With those benefits, it behooves you to hone your workplace comedic skills. So in the tradition of David Letterman, here are the top 10 ways to more effectively lead with humor!
#10. Look for Joy in Life
An important step is continually looking for joy throughout your life. This happens in a variety of ways:
- Focus less on yourself and more on helping others. Need help? Read “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” the classic by Norman Vincent Peale.
- Laugh more – kids reportedly laugh 400 times per day vs. 15 times for adults. Aim for laughing 40 times daily to be at least 10% of your former self!
- Regularly read humorous comic strips and look for quips and funny comments in your reading.
- Even in challenging situations, hunt for something funny or humorous you can take away.
#9. Learn What Makes You Laugh
If you’re trying to laugh 40 times daily, it’s important to know what makes you laugh and have ready access to laugh-provokers. Figure out 107 things which make you laugh. Unrealistic? Hardly! Why 107? Because 107 is funnier than 100! Here’s a recipe for listing what makes you laugh by simply identifying:
- 13 Movies
- 11 TV Shows
- 5 Words or Phrases
- 19 Personal Stories
- 5 Cartoons
- 7 Audio or Video Pieces
- 11 Comedians
- 7 TV Personalities
- 7 Funny Photos
- 7 People You Know
- 15 of Anything Else
- TOTAL = 107 Funny Things
Collect & save these humor starters in a “Smile File” when you quickly need a laugh or comedic inspiration.
#8. Use Your Own Comedic Material
Personal experiences are the most genuine humor sources for effective leadership. Look for humor in situations from your own life:
- Funny things you have said or others have said to you
- Pratfalls, be they mental, interpersonal, & physical
- Embarrassing moments or unexpected happenings
- Times of change or learning
- Difficult life events (yes, even these can be humor sources)
When turning personal situations into comedic material, remember lessons learned from a childhood humor staple: Knock-Knock Jokes. These simple jokes work because the knock-knock structure highlights familiar situations, uses only essential words and phrases, and clearly signals a laughing opportunity. They also demonstrate how humor springs from surprise. The laughs come from not knowing who or what exactly is behind the door based on the initial response to “Who’s there?”
#7. Adapt Somebody Else’s Material
Beyond your own experiences, there’s a tradition of “borrowing & adapting” (I didn’t say stealing) funny stuff from others. That’s why old-time comedian Milton Berle was called the “Thief of Bad Gags.”
Part of borrowing successfully is using easily accessible humor sources in ways many don’t consider. Beyond simply Googling “funny” in front of quotes, one-liners, definitions, pictures, or videos, here are two other common sources you can adapt:
- Cartoons – You can use cartoons in various ways by showing one in a presentation, telling the cartoon’s story (potentially making yourself a character) without any images, or using its punch line as a starting point for new humor.
- Comedians – Mainstream comedians’ jokes or catch phrases are another source to modify and adapt to your personality or work situation. Watch lots of comedians and learn how professionals do it so well.
#6. Understand Your Audience
Using humor in a leadership position requires understanding boundaries on its proper use. It all starts with really understanding your audience by:
- Paying attention to top management’s attitudes toward humor.
- Knowing the audience’s composition – this directly affects which humor types are appropriate.
- Loving your audience as much or more than you poke fun at them.
- Inviting others into humor since you can’t assume they share your same humor sensibilities.
In case you’re contemplating using ad lib humor, completely knowing your audience is even more vital. Ad-libs have the potential for going horribly wrong because audience sensibilities have been misjudged. It’s very beneficial to actually plan and rehearse ad libs. It may sound odd, but identify common work situations you encounter and think through what usually goes wrong or provides a source for potential humor. Work out some “safe” funny comebacks to use as “planned” ad libs.
#5. Know the Rules and Boundaries
There are blatant humor no-no’s in the workplace which are quite acceptable for an onstage comedian. At work, avoid harmful practical jokes or pranks, heavily sarcastic comments, and humor rooted in religious, sexual, ethnic, or racial themes. Think you know your work setting well enough to tread on this dangerous ground? Here’s some advice: DON’T. The way questionable humor will be perceived by a workplace audience is too much of an unknown to take big risks when your career is at stake.
Use this checkpoint to actually see if your intended workplace humor is SAFE. To pass the SAFE test, all of these statements need to be true regarding your joke, comment, or image:
- I can Say/Show this to my mother.
- It wouldn’t Anger me if I were the butt of the joke.
- This wouldn’t trigger an FCC violation
- Everyone in the audience will be able to get it.
With even a hint of one false answer, dramatically modify your idea or better yet, abandon it and start over.
#4. Get over Yourself
Effective leaders don’t take themselves too seriously. They’re comfortable laughing at themselves and letting others be funny as well. Leaders should become adept at appropriately using self-deprecating humor, i.e., self-directed humor downplaying your own talents, stature, or accomplishments
You don’t want to use self-deprecating humor on simply any topic, however. It’s most effectively & appropriately used in:
- Situations where you’re comfortable & self-confident
- Areas where your credibility & competence are clearly established
- Ways that fit your known personality & sensibilities
Remember – when trying to borrow someone else’s self-deprecating humor, you need to share that person’s perspective & situation. If not, it’s simply deprecating! I once heard a decidedly non-technical Marketing VP call out “data geeks” in the audience. While that’s what they called themselves, she wasn’t a part of their group, and her comment, intended to build affiliation, fell completely flat.
#3. Need Humor Ideas? Just Look Around
The workplace is filled with situations lending themselves to comedy. Humor springs from exaggeration, wordplay, misunderstandings, ambiguity, contradictions, paradoxes, pain, and inconsistencies. If you work in any type of business or organizational setting, there are plenty of these situations to go around!
As a leader, it’s your role to use the proper opptunities to encourage and employ humor successfully by ensuring that:
- Your humor makes others feel good about themselves.
- Hurtful fun isn’t made of those less tenured than you in the organization.
- You don’t use humor when agitated since it can lead to apparent meanness.
#2. Surround Yourself with Joy
If you’re looking for more joy and levity in leadership, surround yourself with joyful people. These are people who are funny, easily spur laughter, and routinely cheer people up through their presence.
Cultivate relationships with these types of people. Spend time with them, learn from their successful uses of humor, and emulate elements of their approaches that work for you.
Beyond basking in the joy these people create, select 3 or 4 of them to be an informal comedy team. As your comedy team, solicit their opinions to help you generate and refine humor ideas. They can also provide perspectives on potentially questionable humor material that makes it through the SAFE test, but still feels like it might not be right for a workplace audience.
#1. Dive into the Fun
Ultimately, the most important part of successfully using humor as a leader is actually sharing it in the workplace. Here are a few final tips to keep in mind:
- Practice your humor in appropriate, low-risk settings to find out what works before trying it out with a bigger audience.
- Signal a laughing opportunity through your words, actions, and tone. It’s also a good practice to give people “permission” to laugh in the workplace.
- Finally, be earnest in using humor; don’t focus on laughs so much as lightening and adding fun into work settings.
Mike Brown leads The Brainzooming Group, helping organizations succeed more rapidly by expanding their strategic options and efficiently implementing innovative plans. He authors the Brainzooming™ blog, shares innovation ideas on Twitter, and wrote the ebook “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation.” He’s also a frequent keynote presenter.
Plan Your Breaks for More Successful Telecommuting [Telecommuting]
Aug 10th
If you work at home you’re likely aware of the many distractions surrounding you, but keeping your focus can be pretty easy if with a little advanced planning. More »
Set Up a Lunch Swap for Better Brown Bags [Brown Bag]
Jul 29th
Packing a lunch can save you money and save your diet balance, but it’s easy to get sick of your own creations. CNN’s Eatocracy suggests finding a like-minded soul at work and setting up a grade-school-style lunch swap. More »
Replacing a Crappy Job
Jul 28th
There are really only two things you can do with a crappy job: tolerate it or replace it. Happily, it’s a fact that the crappier the job is, the easier it is to replace.
When people think of replacing a crappy job, they automatically think of getting another (hopefully less crappy) job. I’d like to suggest a combination of three alternatives. Then I’ll work through some numbers to show that my suggestions aren’t as impractical as you’re initially likely to suspect.
Freelance or Casual Work
Unless you’re a natural hustler, it’s pretty tough to put together enough income in freelance or casual work to replace a good job. Replacing a crappy job, though, is a lot easier because you’re already facing low pay, unreliable work, and unreasonable demands.
Go ahead and look at all the usual suspects—temporary work, seasonal work, and so on—but the point is not to replace one crappy job with another. Give special consideration to freelance work doing something that you really enjoy, even if you won't earn as much. The fact is, you can replace the job even if your freelance work falls well short of replacing 100% of the income. That's because it's expensive to work at a job.
Reduced Spending
Having a job (whether crappy or not) means that you have higher living expenses.
- Transportation is the first large expense that most workers face. It’s thousands of dollars a year if you own your own car, and hundreds even if you take public transit or just ride with a friend and kick in for gas.
- Childcare is another huge expense, unless you don’t need it or can get it for free.
- Food often costs more. Even if you don't eat out for lunch, you're still likely to spend some extra for lunches (hardly anyone brings leftovers every single day) and you're likely to spend some extra for dinner as well—picking up a convenience item when you're especially late or especially tired.
- Clothing is another expense that’s usually higher for people with crappy jobs. Some require that you dress nicely; others put additional wear and tear on your clothing. A worker probably ends up paying more for laundry as well, one way or another.
- The biggest (financial) cost of having a crappy job probably comes just from having to spend specific hours working. That increases all your expenses, because there’s less time for shopping around and less time for doing things yourself.
- Somewhat arguable are all the expenses that aren’t really directly related to having a job, but that somehow seem justified when you’re spending too many hours a day at a crappy job: vacations, booze, cable TV, blood pressure medicine, etc.
Whether you allow that last category or not, I think it’s inarguable that it costs money to keep a job. It may not cost more to keep a crappy job, but it doesn’t usually cost a lot less.
Capital
Finally, it's possible to replace a job with capital. (This is what your retirement savings are intended to provide—an income stream that doesn't depend on your job.) But replacing a crappy job is much easier than saving for retirement:
- Retirement investments need to be secure for the rest of your life. "Crappy job replacement" investments can be pretty risky and still be more secure than a crappy job—after all, it might disappear at any time.
- Retirement investments need to keep up with inflation. Crappy-job-replacement investments can fall well short of that and still grow faster than the meager raises that you get at your typical crappy job.
Besides that, just because you’ve replaced your crappy job with capital doesn’t mean that you can’t keep looking for a good job. (You can do that during retirement too, but your retirement plans need to allow for the fact that at some point you may no longer be able to work at all.)
Worked Example
So that we’ll have something specific to talk about, I’m going to imagine a particularly crappy job. I hope none of you have jobs that are actually this crappy, although lots of people have jobs that are almost this crappy.
In my example crappy job the poor working schlub only makes minimum wage ($7.25 an hour is the current US minimum wage). Further, the job isn’t full time, the guy only gets 30 hours a week on average, and only has work 50 weeks a year. Of course the job provides no benefits. Somebody with an income that low isn’t going to be paying much income tax, but FICA will take 7.65% off the top
Annual income: (30 x 50 x $7.25) – 7.65% = $10,043
That’s our first cut at what you’d need to replace, but it’s actually a lot less than that, because of the spending reductions that go along with replacing the crappy job.
Just $20 a week toward gas for your car pool comes to $1000 a year in work-related transportation costs. That brings us down to $9000.
Buying an occasional lunch out and an occasional convenience food item could easily come to $20 a week. That’s another $1000 bringing us down to $8000.
Lump clothing, laundry, and all the other extra expenses that you’re stuck with because you’re at work and can’t shop around or do stuff yourself and call that another $1000 a year, bringing us down to $7000.
Still, reduced expenses only go so far. You need some cash. That can come from freelance or casual work (as long as you’re in control of your schedule, you can still seize these cost savings), but I’d like to put in a plug for replacing a crappy job with capital.
If we were trying to provide an equivalent retirement income we’d need to follow the 4% rule, which would mean that we’d need $175,000. Fortunately, as described above, we don’t need nearly as much to replace a crappy job, because the crappy job is already a risky proposition.
I took a quick look at some risky investments. The top dividend-paying stock in the S&P 500 is yielding over 10%. That stock may be even more risky than a crappy job, but if you invest in ten or twelve other of the top dividend payers, you can get an average yield of 7% at a much more moderate level of risk. That would let you replace $7000 with just $100,000 in capital.
Now, $100,000 would seem completely out of reach if you were trying to save that much out of your earnings from a crappy job. But that’s not what you’re doing. What you’re doing is replacing your crappy job with a combination of reduced expenses, whatever you can earn from doing work of the non-crappy variety—and income from capital.
The income from capital will be minimal at first. But think of it this way: $100 in capital will replace one hour per year of crappy work. Over time you can stash away a good number of those hours. And once you’re no longer working a crappy job, you’ll find there’s really no need to hurry.
A good job offers reasonable compensation in exchange for a reasonable amount of time and effort. What makes a job crappy is usually the pay being unreasonably low or the time and effort required being unreasonably high. The result is that a crappy job is easy to replace. If you can’t replace it with another (better) job, replace it in pieces. Replace some by doing for yourself things that you used to have to pay for. Replace some by doing freelance or casual work. Replace some by selling things that you make. Replace some by giving up any expenses that you used to justify on the grounds that someone who worked as hard as you deserved a few luxuries. And, of course, replace as much as you can with a little capital.
The Science Behind "Having a Bad Day" (and How to Solve It) [Mind Hacks]
Jul 26th
Steve Schwartz had a bad day. Then his girlfriend did. Then he did a little research on what “having a bad day” really entails, and how he can avoid losing his day to one next time a “bad day” comes around. More »