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Stress at Work

How to Use an Amazon Echo for Your Startup Office

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This week’s post is a guest article by Vinay Patankar, CEO and co-founder of Process Street.

If you’re running a startup, you can use every little bit of help you can get.

But to justify an administrative assistant or office manager, you’ll probably need to have raised a big seed round of over $1 million or have bootstrapped your company past 10 employees. Otherwise, that extra help getting stuff done is just a luxury you can’t quite afford yet.

Enter Alexa via the Amazon Echo. In the same way Alexa can help you and your family out around the home, it can also make your office and your startup just that little bit easier to manage, so that you can keep your sanity and focus on what’s important.

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To get the most out of Alexa, you’ll need to set her up specifically for the office. Here’s how.

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How to Handle 3 Types of Workplace Conflict

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Hollywood would have you believe that workplace conflict is awesome. Movies depict the best offices as filled with macho dudes in suits screaming at each other, throwing around insults, and somehow also getting fantastic results.

That’s entertaining, but let’s look at the facts: a 2010 study revealed that the average U.S. employee spends 2.8 hours a week dealing with disputes at work, resulting in losses of $359 Billion across the American economy. In reality, conflict pulls people away from their jobs and kills productivity.

With that in mind, your instinct might be to ruthlessly stamp it out wherever you see it. But that’s not always the best course of action. You need to recognize that not every workplace conflict is the same. It’s like criminal justice—a first degree crime is sentenced differently than a second degree crime. The context, causes, and intentions should influence how you deal with conflict in the workplace.

Here’s a rundown of three of the most common types of office workplace conflict, what they mean for your company, and how to solve them.

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Stop Spreading Busyness Like the Flu

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busyness at train station

Busyness has become such a sign of our times that there’s a trend in architecture of drawing blurry people on the move for office project designs. Apparently it’s a visual that clients can identify with “on an emotional level.”

While you might recognize yourself in that blurry state of being, consider how limiting busyness can be as a state of mind. Since you start coming across as irritable, impatient, and anxious, you start to close yourself off from others. It’s hard to connect with someone who’s a physical or mental blur that can’t sit still for a minute and feels like there’s no time.

One of the toughest part of falling into the busy trap is that you become preoccupied with your own busyness, and you might not realize that you’re spreading your busyness affliction to everyone around you.

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Making Happiness a Habit: The Best of the Internet

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bearHappy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week! 

Why you should stop keeping score at work.

You have to fight to make your distributed team a competitive advantage. And your right to party.

How to attack the dark heart of mismanagement and chronic stress.

Don’t be a Productivity Pinocchio.

Make happiness a habit.

imageDundee’s Tip of the Week: Display a list of entries over a span of time by clicking and dragging over the days you want to show on your iDoneThis calendar. Your chain of progress will show up on the right! You go, you!

 

Dr. David Posen on Treating Workplace Stress

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As a manager, you need to know who’s wilting under the pace or workload… Ask people what they need, what resources would be helpful. And be a good role model… Give people permission to slow down.

Dr. David Posen, author of the forthcoming book, Is Work Killing You? A Doctor’s Prescription for Treating Workplace Stress in a Q&A with the WSJ At Work blog.

Dr. Posen breaks down three main causes of workplace stress: volume, velocity, and abuse. There are longer hours and faster paces in the modern workplace.

And then there’s the abuse:

Abuse is bullying, harassment, and all the politics people play. It’s amazing how one abusive person can create stress for dozens of people. It’s become a bigger problem because people have less freedom to say ‘I don’t want this job’ and go somewhere else. So people aren’t quitting and they’re not even complaining because they don’t want to seem like troublemakers.

Are breaks and reasonable hours enough to combat this type of workplace negativity? Dear readers, tell us about your experiences with what Posen calls workplace abuse or some ways to address abuse in organizations!

When Stress Takes Over

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Take some small step today, and value each step you take. You never know which step will make a difference. This is much better than not trying to do anything.

Dr. Tamar E. Chansky, in Jane E. Brody’s NYT’s Well Blog post, When Daily Stress Gets in the Way of Life.

Dr. Chansky suggests taking a small step and acknowledging it as an effective way to deal with paralyzing anxiety.

“If you’re worrying about your work all the time, you won’t get your work done,” she explains. And don’t forget, every small step is itself powerfully motivating!

What Happens When You Don’t Email?

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We’ve got these social expectations that are wrapped up in email. If an email comes, you’re expected to respond to it fast. We feel compelled to reply.

Gloria Mark, LA Times, Email Stress Test: Experiment unplugs workers for 5 days

Professor Mark did a study to find out what would happen if you did away with work email. She found that people were less stressed, simply communicated face-to-face more (what, human interaction!?), were more productive, and able to focus longer.

While there are great benefits to stepping away from email, it’s hard to escape the compulsion to be chained to work email. How do we shift social expectation and work culture on the instant timing of email? 

Productivity for a Good Day’s Work

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Look at the progress of the day towards the end and ask yourself: ‘Have I done a good day’s work?’

Answering that question is liberating….

It feels good to be productive. If yesterday was a good day’s work, chances are you’ll keep the roll. And if you can keep the roll, everything else will probably take care of itself.

37signals’s David Heinemeier Hansson writes in his post, A good day’s work, about the frustration from those ever-continuous waves of work that lap up against our mind’s shore.

David’s helpful suggestion to deal with that worried and anxious mind is to simply reflect on the day that’s just passed. Oftentimes, you’ve done a great day’s work. Leave your work knowing that you’re ready and primed to have a great day of accomplishments tomorrow.

So ask yourself: “Have I done a good day’s work?” and keep that roll going!

3 Keys to Flow from a Professional Poker Player

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James Chin is a professional poker player living in Las Vegas, Nevada.  He has a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas.  

As a professional poker player, creating and maintaining flow is of great importance. It’s often the difference between a winning hand and losing your shirt.

What is flow?  To me, it’s the feeling of being perfectly adapted to my environment.  My working environment is the poker table.  Here’s how I do it.

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