Your Best Work

Seth Godin: 

Do your work, your best work, the work that matters to you. For some people, you can say, "hey, it's not for you." That's okay. If you try to delight the undelightable, you've made yourself miserable for no reason.

Why You Hate Work

Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath, The New York Times: 

More broadly, just 30 percent of employees in America feel engaged at work, according to a 2013 report by Gallup. Around the world, across 142 countries, the proportion of employees who feel engaged at work is just 13 percent. For most of us, in short, work is a depleting, dispiriting experience, and in some obvious ways, it’s getting worse.

Demand for our time is increasingly exceeding our capacity — draining us of the energy we need to bring our skill and talent fully to life. Increased competitiveness and a leaner, post-recession work force add to the pressures. The rise of digital technology is perhaps the biggest influence, exposing us to an unprecedented flood of information and requests that we feel compelled to read and respond to at all hours of the day and night.

Curious to understand what most influences people’s engagement and productivity at work, we partnered with the Harvard Business Review last fall to conduct a survey of more than 12,000 mostly white-collar employees across a broad range of companies and industries. We also gave the survey to employees at two of The Energy Project’s clients — one a manufacturing company with 6,000 employees, the other a financial services company with 2,500 employees. The results were remarkably similar across all three populations.

Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work.

Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian:

This realisation is alarming at first, but it's ultimately deeply reassuring. As the UK organisation Action for Happiness likes to point out, one of the biggest causes of misery is the way we chronically "compare our insides with other people's outsides". We're all mini-New York Timeses or White Houses, energetically projecting an image of calm proficiency, while inside we're improvising in a mad panic. Yet we forget (especially in an era of carefully curated Facebook profiles and suchlike) that everyone else is doing the same thing. The only difference is that they think it's you who's truly competent.

The Cult of Busy

Have you ever had someone say that they’re ‘too busy’ to do something? Think we all have. Do you know what they really saying? They’re saying that they don’t have the time, don’t have the desire, don’t have…the list goes on and on. And if you are reading between the lines you will see if someone is claiming to be ‘too busy’ they are really saying something else entirely.

Matt Knisely on the many excuses we make when we allow unimportant things determine how we spend our time. 

Gretchen Rubin: The 4 Ways to Successfully Adopt New Habits

When someone (even yourself) gives you a rule to follow what do you do? Are you a Rebel, refusing to follow all directives? Or are you more of a Obliger who will respond to outer rules, but so much to inner rules? In this 99U talk, bestselling author Gretchen Rubin shares the four personality types when it comes to adopting new habits or “rules.” Knowing your personality type and its pros and cons are instrumental for us to adopt new habits and behavior.