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Go Back to the Simplest Advice
Tweet Share on Facebook August 13, 2008 Comment (2)Advice seems to get more and more sophisticated with time.
Plato says: "Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly."
Stephen Covey says:
I recommend a time management credo that says: "I will not be governed by the efficiency of the clock; I will be governed by my conscience. Because my conscience deals with the totality of my life. And since it is well educated from study and from experience, it will help me make wise decisions." Under the influence of a well-developed conscience, you make decisions on a daily, hourly, and moment-to-moment basis to be governed by principles. If you are immersed in an extremely productive or creative work, don't let anything interrupt. Can you imagine a surgeon taking a telephone call in the middle of surgery? Most people are buried in urgency. Most production and management jobs call for quick reactions to what is urgent and important. The net effect of a reactionary, urgent lifestyle is stress, burnout, crisis management, and always putting out fires.
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Most Workers Are Afraid to Telecommute
Tweet Share on Facebook August 12, 2008 Comment (4)A couple of decades ago, telecommuting was said to be the future face of work—when technology would enable us to be connected away from the office just as easily as if we were sitting at our desks, and the work itself would have geographical mobility.
Well, the technology and the information economy are here now, but the telecommuting is not. A study released this week finds a majority of office workers are afraid that telecommuting will hurt their careers.
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How Knowledge Can Help You Save Your Job
Tweet Share on Facebook August 12, 2008 CommentI've blogged recently about ways to secure your job amid layoff rumors. It's a timely subject. Fortify Your Oasis—an excellent careers blog—offers some more advice today. One good thing to "stock your lifeboat with," Fortify says, is:
In-depth knowledge of your sector—who is up/down? Who is hiring/firing? Who is expanding/merging/hostile-takeovering?
If layoff rumors aren't worrying you but your bad relationship with your boss is, the advice is a bit different:
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Should Women Tell Coworkers if They're Menopausal?
Tweet Share on Facebook August 11, 2008 Comment (14)Menopausal symptoms can be a real drag, especially at work. Hot flashes and memory glitches can look pretty bad during a board meeting or employee review.
A Newhouse News Service story on menopausal women at work raised the question: To tell or not to tell? If employees misinterpret menopausal symptoms as signs of your disapproval, shouldn't you just tell them what you're going through? The story quotes one woman as saying: "I don't worry about what people think about me going through menopause. I'm more concerned about what they'll think if they don't know."
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How to Negotiate Your Way to Job Security
Tweet Share on Facebook August 8, 2008 Comment (5)Layoff rumors spread like the flu—and many of you sure are feeling sick.
This week's Wall Street Journal article on layoff rumors suggests several things for anxious employees—update your résumé, plan your exit strategy so you can leave with work samples and customer letters, install a business phone line at home, and get your achievements in front of management.
But I wondered about a strategy that involved more of an effort to stick around, so I called Peter Johnston, author of Negotiating With Giants: Get What You Want Against the Odds. I wanted to know: Can savvy negotiation help us fend off job loss? "You don't want to assume that you can't influence your fate in a tough economy," he told me. It was a good start.
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Be the Guy (or Gal) Behind 'Dark Knight'
Tweet Share on Facebook August 7, 2008 Comment (1)Jobless claims hit a six-year high last week, the Labor Department told us today. Yes, it's lousy news. Economists had expected the number of claims to be around 430,000—not 455,000.
But before we lose our minds over the new number, and I'm speaking to the employed here, let's look at a few other numbers.
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Hero Bus Driver Couldn't Save His Job
Tweet Share on Facebook August 6, 2008 Comment (1)You can save your acts of bravery for after hours, folks. A young Scottish bus driver who saved a passenger's life was fired at the end of his probationary period with the bus company, the Daily Record reports.
Despite the 21-year-old's heroics—which saved a woman suffering from a heart attack—the bus company let the driver go:
Stagecoach defended the dismissal, saying: "The individual failed to turn up for work on a number of occasions and there was no option but to let him go."
The takeaway: Regular attendance is a very important part of successful employment.
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Study: How to Look Trustworthy
Tweet Share on Facebook August 6, 2008 Comment (1)Two researchers at Princeton University have discovered they can tweak certain features of a computerized human face to maximize its appearance of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness.
The researchers say their work may have implications for people in jobs like sales—where facial expressions would have a considerable effect on customer interaction and business overall. Humans "make split-second judgments on faces on two major measures—whether the person should be approached or avoided and whether the person is weak or strong," according to the report on Princeton's website.
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Why Cosmetic Surgery as a Career Move is BS
Tweet Share on Facebook August 5, 2008 Comment (14)If the news about people investing in cosmetic surgery to benefit their careers makes you cringe, you're not alone. CareerDiva blogger Eve Tahmincioglu writes that if she sees "another story about women getting plastic surgery or getting Botox injections in order to land jobs I am going to puke."
It's media hype, she says. The real career-boosting move is job training.
Yes, go out and take a course or get a degree. Your money will be better spent improving your skills and improving your mind.
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The Inside Job Has a New Focus
Tweet Share on Facebook August 4, 2008 Comment (2)When I started writing the Inside Job in March, I wasn't sure how best to blog about careers, so I sort of tried everything. The quickest way, of course, to do nothing well is to try to do everything—particularly in the world of blogs, where niche tends to reign.
I'm going to focus on improving your at-work life—how to succeed and survive exactly where you are right now. (In the past, I've tackled research on nutrition and productivity, why you need to make it home in time for dinner, and why telling white lies at work can be ruinous.)
