The old adage, “separate your friends from your work,” is more outdated than VHS. Here’s how friendship in the workplace can boost productivity, and how you can help foster friendship in your team.
Who accompanies you to the cinema? Who’s on speed-dial in case of a major life crisis? Who does the back-busting work on moving day? Friends, that’s who, and they’re as key a component to a good life as professional satisfaction.
Treadmill desks are one of those products that so well reflect the problems in our culture that their existence is almost a parody. Yet they are real things that exist and some people swear by them.
There is indeed evidence that treadmill desks can boost health and even our productivity and focus at work (see: “Treadmill Desks Aren’t Just Healthier, They’ll Also Boost Your Work Performance”). But, as a new study shows, those benefits may not be all they’re cut out to be. Further, they may not be worth the cost and difficulty of getting treadmill desks set up in the first place.
In one of my first jobs out of college I worked in a small San Francisco public relations firm, Horne, McClatchy & Associates, whose eight employees were all women. Now defunct, the firm raised money and staged special events for non-profit groups like UNICEF and the Exploratorium science museum. I liked my executive assistant job and I especially liked my boss, a kind, creative woman who was also a published poet.
But the longer I worked there, the more I realized I didn’t like that there were no men in the office. I feel like a bad feminist saying this, and it’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it was about the atmosphere that grated on me. A former colleague recalls a kind of “mean girls” targeting of one of the managers, who wasn’t as efficient and well-turned-out as the other three, and there was a competitive atmosphere that I found unpleasant, which seemed tied to the fact that we were all female. Hastings law professor Joan Williams, author of What Works for Women at Work, has called the competition between women at work the “tug of war.”
Straight up, today’s story is some truth telling and what you absolutely need to hear especially if you work from home OR have kids OR run your own business OR work on line. If none of these apply to you, you might find it interesting anyway!
About being productive….
The ironic thing is that when I have enough time to actually take extra time for me and for my various projects – I’m the most unproductive. Is that weird?
If I have a quieter week, you’d imagine I’d be getting all kinds of cool stuff completed right? Wrong.
Just when I breathe out a sigh of ‘thank goodness I have a little extra time this week’, those damn temptations slip in and kill my productivity.
So here’s what the top four killers are and how you can’t do anything to avoid them (aka. What you have to do to survive!!)
Dispatches From The Front 