Taking Control of your Calendar

Elizabeth Grace Saunders has a great post about respecting yourself and taking back control of your calendar.  This is so simple, yet so difficult for most people to accomplish.  Taking control of your calendar is critical to any hopes of accomplishing work-life balance.  As I mentioned in a previous post, it's really about choices. 

Why Work-from-Home Policies Work

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made the bold move recently to rollback Yahoo's work-from-home policy and require all employees to work at Yahoo's offices.  Best Buy almost immediately followed suit and ended their work-from-home program.  There was a firestorm of media coverage on Yahoo's decision, most of it against the move.  Here's three different takes: New York Times, Forbes, and CIO.  My take: a laughably bad idea.  Here's why.

3 Reasons Why The Bad Boss Has No Clue

Most everyone has had the experience of dealing with a bad boss, some more than others and to differing degrees.  Here's a few articles on this topic:  Bad to the Bone, How to Deal: Don't!, Harvard Business Review.  Hopefully, none of you had bosses who made the Really Bad Boss stories (yikes!).  There's no doubt having a bad boss can truly be a helpless feeling at times.  An employee's relationship with his/her manager strongly influences the employee's overall job satisfaction. 

While many employees invoke the Peter Principle ("Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence") when discussing their manager, there's easily many other reasons why the blockhead boss has no clue.  Here's three main reasons why:

Is Age Just a Number?

Sure it is.  And 'experience' is just a word too.  I got a kick out of Brian Wong's post on LinkedIn.  Brian's a 21-year-old.  Although his age is stated in the article, I could have guessed he was a youngster just by reading the article.  I love his enthusiasm, passion, energy, innocence, and idealism. 

Staying Focused and Productive

It seems like everyone is perpetually looking for ways to squeeze more productivity out of their day.  Much like diets, there is no magic answer.  It all comes down to making better choices and having the willpower to stick with it.  If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you'll need to make an entire lifestyle change.  A quick fix diet will only put you on a weight roller coaster.  It won't address the core lifestyle problem.  Similarly, focus and productivity issues should be addressed by looking inward, not outward.  I like many of the points Nadia Goodman makes to train your brain to stay focused.  Another article embedded in Nadia's has some good tips for finding focus and nixing distractions. 

Humor: Office Holiday Parties, What Our Drink of Choice Tells Colleagues

Well, it's that time of year again.  Holiday parties.  If your company is doing well enough, they may even be throwing an office holiday party that offers (cue the dramatic music) alcohol.  While you should always play it safe when it comes to alcohol at any party, it becomes doubly important at the office party.

So drink responsibly and try to take advantage of the networking opportunities with your colleagues.  Some of them may know you very little or not at all.  With that in mind, if your colleagues don't know you well, here's a humorous attempt to explain what your drink of choice may be telling them about you.

Business Casual vs. Business Professional

The age old question:  Do dress codes at work make any difference on productivity or morale?  It seems the scientific answer is that most studies show little to no effect in either direction.  Here's a few blogs that get into this discussion in a little more detail:  Productivity Blog, Culture in the Workplace, Andrew Jensen.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will offer up that I am absolutely a jeans and t-shirt guy.  So you can guess which side of the fence I fall on.  Personally, I feel if I am comfortable, I am much more likely to be happy and productive.  Business casual all the way for me!  But, I absolutely think business professional attire is warranted at times.  So basically, since company dress codes come down to company preference, here's the three basic questions to ask to determine which one makes the most sense.