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From having fewer bad habits to being proactive and procrastinating less often, the advantages of being a morning person have been well covered. You could chalk it up to circadian rhythm, but it could be because morning people leverage the unique characteristics of the morning that help us all be at our best, says Josh Davis, author of Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done. “People who get up early in the morning are hitting it out of the park, doing things we struggle with at other times of the day,” he says. “If we can be amazing at certain times of the day there must be associated psychological conditions. Morning offers several benefits that can’t be found at other times of the day.” Shifting your schedule might take some adjustment, but it’s worth it. Here are four productivity-related advantages that naturally occur in the morning:
Via The Learning Factor
Stand-up desks, wellness programs, flexible schedules, financial consulting, access to health professionals, and a strong emphasis on employee recognition have all recently become focal points at many workplaces. It makes you wonder why leaders are suddenly so keen to create workspaces and cultures that bind teams together and make employees (dare we say it) happy and healthy to be at work. Our world, as we’ve seen recently in the news, isn’t getting any softer. However, research shows that companies that focus on creating happy, healthier, motivating, and appreciative workplaces are onto something profound—even, and maybe especially, during turbulent times. It’s not about creating atmospheres lined with rainbows and butterflies either. Instead, these studies prove the “hard” impact a workplace environment has on productivity and engagement—on both the individual and team level. Read on to discover which traits in your workplace are helping you achieve your best possible outcomes, and which might be derailing your potential. You’ve got allotted breaks—and you take them. It sounds almost too good to be true, but research has shown that regular breaks are crucial to productivity. Your brain needs a breather in between tasks so it can fully focus and engage when you need it to. In fact, the most productive employees take a full 17-minute break for every 52 minutes of concentration. Try their pattern out for a day, and see if it makes a difference. Even switching to a simpler task can count as a breather. Just remember the benefits of taking a break the next time you’re tempted to skip yours—because even just five minutes off can make a big difference.
Via The Learning Factor
In the UK, various government policies officially aimed at supporting employees to manage both their family and work responsibilities have been introduced over the last two decades.
Indeed, the current coalition government has extended the right to request flexible working further to all employees, meaning that employers now have a duty to consider all requests in a reasonable manner.
This sounds good in theory but…
It is how this is applied within organisations in practice that actually impacts whether ‘flexible working’ has a positive or negative impact on employees, organisations, and society as a whole.
I like being happy. I like it so much that I’ve made more than a few difficult career decisions in order to avoid things that make me unhappy — things like working with people who treat me badly, long days trotting after carrots that always seem to hang just out of reach, and countless hours on planes, trains, and buses. Each “I would prefer not to” came at a professional and financial cost. But, hey, I figured, I’ve only got one life. So you can imagine the dismay I felt upon reading The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success (Harper One, 2016), by Emma Seppälä. In it, Seppälä, the science director of Stanford School of Medicine’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, argues that the pursuit of happiness is actually a key to achieving professional success — not an obstacle to it. Unlike much of the literature about happiness at work, The Happiness Track doesn’t approach its subject from an organizational perspective. There are no free lunches on offer. Instead, Seppälä focuses on six personal “strategies for attaining happiness and fulfillment [that] may, in fact, be the key to thriving professionally.” If you’re familiar with the discipline of Positive Psychology, it’s likely that you’ll have run across these ideas before: be in the moment; nurture your resilience; manage your energy; access your creativity; be good to yourself; be compassionate.
Via The Learning Factor
Time has a way of slowing down to a glacial pace when you are watching the clock at work. The idea of putting in "face time" seems antiquated in the age of flexible work schedules. But what if you work in an office that seems to value how long you're at your desk more than what you are accomplishing? Psychologist Art Markman helps a reader navigate the peer pressure of staying late.
Via The Learning Factor
The older you get the faster time seems to pass. So instead of reaching the end of your fleeting life and wishing you had done things differently, take some simple steps right now to be intentional about your thoughts and actions.
Via The Learning Factor
Think happiness is unattainable? It might not be as out of reach as you think. Read on for three ways you can come closer to happiness every day.
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Is the traditional 40-hour work week dead? Today’s nine-to-fiver can only look at all of the alternative proposals being bandied about and savor the possibilities: the four-day work week, the 30-hour work week, the 21-hour work week, and even the no-day work week. With the advent of telecommuting, flexible hours, globalization and answering emails after hours and on vacation, the American worker has entered the era of the fuzzy work-home divide.
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Everyone with a job knows how stressful it can be when personal priorities clash with work schedules. The conflict could involve a continuing medical concern, taking care of children or aging parents, or getting enough exercise or running errands. A too-strict schedule combined with too many demands can cause workers to feel that they have let down their companies, their families and themselves. A recent study, published in The American Sociological Review, aimed to see whether the stress of work-life conflicts could be eased if employees had more control over their schedules, including being able to work from home. As might be expected, the answer was yes — but before everyone deserts their desks, some important caveats bear consideration.
Via The Learning Factor
In the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.
Via The Learning Factor
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From having fewer bad habits to being proactive and procrastinating less often, the advantages of being a morning person have been well covered. You could chalk it up to circadian rhythm, but it could be because morning people leverage the unique characteristics of the morning that help us all be at our best, says Josh Davis, author of Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done. “People who get up early in the morning are hitting it out of the park, doing things we struggle with at other times of the day,” he says. “If we can be amazing at certain times of the day there must be associated psychological conditions. Morning offers several benefits that can’t be found at other times of the day.” Shifting your schedule might take some adjustment, but it’s worth it. Here are four productivity-related advantages that naturally occur in the morning:
Via The Learning Factor
It’s 9 p.m. and you suddenly remember that you wanted to ask your employee about an upcoming project. Before you fire off an email, ask yourself, "Is this urgent?" If you’re sending the email simply because you don’t want to forget, your employee may not know your response expectations, and this can cause stress that negatively impacts your staff’s productivity and performance. In a new report called "Exhausted But Unable to Disconnect," professors from Lehigh University, Virginia Tech, and Colorado State University found that an "always on" culture may prevent employees from fully disengaging from work, causing stress. "It’s easy to depersonalize people when you’re using email, because you don’t see the effect you’re having," says coauthor William Becker, associate professor of management at Virginia Tech. "When boundaries are blurred, it can create all kinds of problems. A lot of companies see the good parts of using email, and don’t think beyond that." In the study, participants reported spending an average of eight hours a week doing company-related emails after hours. The greater the amount of time spent on after-hours work, the less successful the employees were at detaching from work. This translated into poorer work-family balance, and even contributed to emotional exhaustion, which Becker says has been shown by prior research to negatively affect job performance.
Via The Learning Factor
How do we improve who we are? The most effective--and often most difficult--way by far is to self-analyze. When we deconstruct our notions of ourselves and who we think we are, we are able to overcome potential obstacles standing in our way to becoming a better person. By answering these 5 questions you can begin the journey of becoming your best self. 1. If you had one day left to live, would you be ready to go? Although it's very easy for us to reach temporary states of complacency, reaching a level of complete fulfillment at life's end is a totally different story. So many of us end up going through the motions instead of actively enjoying what we do on a daily basis. Making sure we are content, right this moment, is a great way to keep this tendency in check.
Via The Learning Factor
It may not feel like it at times, but you live in the most fortunate sliver of humanity.
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Many things that we value in life are the result of accumulating stuff; experience, wealth, and education all come from adding more to what we have. By contrast, the act of being happy is often more about subtracting things that weigh us down, tie us to the past, or keep us engaged in unhealthy situations and relationships. But letting go is hard. We attach ourselves easily to behaviors and patterns that are comfortable because they are known, even if they limit us and our capacity to succeed and to be happy. By the way, if you think happiness is an elusive and fuzzy concept, I'll prove to you that it's not by posing this question: If you came back in another life, would you want to be yourself all over again? Yeah, how's that for a benchmark of happiness? So try this. There are 20 weeks left in 2015. Start focusing on subtracting behaviors that stand in the way of your success and happiness. Here's a list of 20 things that happy and successful people don't do. Pick one for each week and make a commitment to let it go, and then practice the letting go religiously for the week. I promise you'll be not only happier but incredibly more energized and ready to build the future as well.
Via The Learning Factor
Do you identify with your work? I do, a lot of the time. Ask me who I am and the word "writer" will pop up early in my answer, even though that's only one of many things I am. I'm also a wife, a daughter, a stepmother, a sister, and someone with an adventurous nature who recently pulled up stakes and moved all the way across the country. I'm good at cooking and yoga. I'm bad at horseback riding but I love it so I do it anyway. But when I think about my identity, how I mark my place in the world, I think of my profession first. I bet you do, too. Being work-focused can be good: It motivates you to do your best, to try new things, to take risks in pursuit of greater goals, to find creative solutions to problems, and to dig in and do what's needed when challenges come along. Identifying with your work, though, is a very bad idea. If you, like me, have been confusing yourself with your job, it's time for a subtle but essential attitude shift. Here's how to get started:
Via The Learning Factor
Throughout my 18-year corporate life, I would find myself staying late in the office more often than not. If I’m brutally honest with myself, I did it for two reasons – to try to stay caught up with what I felt was a massive workload, but also, to show management that I was a very hard worker. One day, a senior vice president who noticed my habitual late hours said, “If you’re staying late so often, Kathy, you’re just not prioritizing and managing your work effectively.” And boy did that make me mad. At that time, I didn’t see myself as the problem – it was my boss and the never-ending chaos on my plate each day that was the culprit. Today, in my coaching work with emerging women leaders, one of the chief complaints I hear is, “I simply cannot balance my other life priorities with the number of hours I have to work.” It’s truly an epidemic.
Via The Learning Factor
Achieving work-life balance can look impossible. And, frankly, it seems like it's getting harder. In the ten years from 1986 to 1996 work-life balance was mentioned in the media 32 times. In 2007 alone it was mentioned 1674 times.
Via The Learning Factor
From taking lunch breaks to digital sabbaticals, one key to success at work seems to be to stop working so much. For many of us, breaks for the sake of productivity provide the perfect excuse to be our lazy selves. But for the work obsessed, the suggestion of easing up doesn't, well, work. Still, with a growing body of research to back it up, the benefits of stepping away from the drudgery of day-to-day tasks are hard to deny. So what's a workaholic to do?
Via The Learning Factor
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Hello all you morning people... good news...
People who get up early in the morning are hitting it out of the park. Morning offers several benefits that can’t be found at other times of the day. Shifting your schedule might take some adjustment, but it’s worth it. Here are four productivity-related advantages that naturally occur in the morning.