The Office Misfit's Survival Blog

Office Reflection #1 -- extended sick leave, pre-leave rituals

2011-02-20T12:34:00.000-05:00

As I write this, I’m anticipating at least a week at home following what I hope will be minor surgery tomorrow morning to repair a droopy lower eyelid resulting from previous surgery to repair some broken bones after I fell, on Labor Day, quite literally, on my face! (Bad experience, still going on, but great material for a blog or book – watch for these.)

After my original accident and surgery in September, I took three weeks of sick leave, which exhausted all the time I had banked for the year. In the months that followed, whenever I needed sick time, I either used vacation time or made up the time, dragging myself into work for extra hours when I still didn’t feel that great, cursing my fate. Then, after I found out I was going to have a second surgery for which I would need a lengthier break, I went to our HR office, where I learned that I should have filed for “extended sick leave” at the time of my accident so that I wouldn’t have to use my regular sick time up the way I had. No one had bothered to tell me this and I hadn’t asked, assuming that “extended sick leave” was only for cancer or open heart surgery or mental breakdowns, not for minor mishaps requiring a few weeks’ recovery time. Fortunately, I was able to make this change retrospectively and start my current sick leave without the shadow of a docked pay-check looming over me. The moral: Don’t assume that you know more about your organization’s sick and vacation policies than you do – get the facts, all of them!

Before I left the office on Friday, I went through my usual pre-break rituals. These include: (1) finishing everything that will get horribly screwed up if I don’t do it myself; (2) telling colleagues everything they needed to know to cover for me in case of emergency; (3) e-mailing my boss, now out of the country, a reminder of my impending absence even though I’ve already warned him about it several times; (4) filing all loose papers so I won’t have to come back to a mess; and (5) setting up Out-of-office messages in Outlook and on Voicemail.

What I didn’t do was give anyone my cell phone number so he or she could call me in the OR to ask where I’d filed an expense report. Until further notice, folks, Cindy Glovinsky is OUT!

How Time was Stolen from American Workers and How We Can Get It Back

2010-05-30T19:15:00.022-04:00

At one time, I worked with a lot of survivors of domestic violence. One of the things I learned in training for this work is how gradually abuse can creep up on the victim without her – or him – being aware of it as the abuser gradually conditions the victim to accept it. Consequently, people end up accepting treatment that amounts to attempted murder without questioning it. I believe something comparable has happened in the American workplace over the last few decades, with effects that are hardly less severe than those of chronic abuse.

According to economist and author Juliet Schor, the total number of hours Americans spend working has risen steadily by approximately half a percent per year since the 1980s. In terms of hours, the average American worker added 199 hours to his or her schedule between 1973 and 2000. This translates into 24 more 8-hour days or over 3 more 40-hour weeks per year. This is outrageous, yet hardly anyone seems to question it. In the 1970s, people were predicting that new technologies being developed would shorten the work week, which it very well could have. Between 1969 and 2000, the index of labor productivity per hour went up by 80%. In other words, workers could make 80% more stuff in the same amount of time as they had before. If, as a society, we had been content to maintain the same lifestyles we’d had in the 1960s, we could all have wound up working 20-hour weeks, leaving us more time for our families, communities, volunteer work, hobbies and interests while reducing the rate at which our planet was heating up.

Alas, this was not what happened. The booming economy in the 1990s resulted in inflated consumer norms, i.e., people thinking they had to have more stuff and more gadgets to be “normal.” Meanwhile, new technologies provided new opportunities for making money, and employees were forced to work ever harder, to behave like prospectors during a gold rush so their companies could take advantage of the opportunities. During the same period, health insurance costs skyrocketed, motivating employers to hire fewer workers to work longer hours or to hire more part-time, temporary workers at low wages instead of salaried employees, for whom they would need to provide benefits. The combined result of all this is that the workday did not get shorter but instead got longer and longer for almost everyone during the last several decades of the twentieth century.
The effects of the longer work day in the office world have been devastating to individual workers and their families, and in the long run they haven’t been so great for organizations either. While it may pay off in the short run, on an organizational level, overworking employees can lead to more mistakes, accidents, injuries, illnesses, reduced quality of workmanship, and diminished productivity.

So what can one do to fight back? Here are a few suggestions:

Assess your own situation in terms of time. All of us have been conditioned to think only in terms of the money we make in our jobs and to ignore how we spend our most resource: time. Wake up and think about this! Are you comfortable working the number of hours you’re working? Do you feel rushed or overwhelmed? What changes might you be able to make?
Remind yourself that you deserve time outside of work to spend on yourself, your family, and your community without being disturbed and that in your job you have a right to work at a reasonable enough pace to enjoy your tasks and do them well.
If you believe you have an unrealistic workload, do some problem solving about how this might be reduced and consider making a proposal to your boss. Hiring more staff might be a possibility, but it’s not the only option. Perhaps someone could come in from another department to help out during busy times. Or tasks may need to be redistributed within your own department so as to make better use of people’s strengths. Perhaps a new piece of equipment or a new computer program might save you time.
Discuss the overwork problem with coworkers. Find out how many hours others are working as well as how rushed they do or don’t feel during their workdays. Point out that competing for raises and promotions by working excessive hours can lead to an unhealthy escalation that is hurtful to all.
Visit the website www.timeday.org and find out about “Take Back Your Time,” an organization that is working to reduce the number of hours American workers have to work and increase the amount of vacation time.

Source:

Schor, Juliet. 2003. "The (Even More) Overworked American." Pp. 6-19 in Take Back Your Time, edited by John de Graaf. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Coming next: Take a vacation!

A Great New York Times article on Inactivity in the Office

2010-04-24T16:04:00.000-04:00

Don't miss this great "Room for Debate" article in the NY Times today on the question of "Is All That Sitting Really Killing Us?" with opinions by five experts. The consensus seems to be, as I thought, that just a plain stand-up desk isn't good, as if you only use this, bad things start happening to your legs and feet, but that a desk that raises and lowers is good -- that what's best is what allows you to work in different positions. I was also heartened by a statement by James A. Levine, professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic that "a re-examination of our office culture is under way." Glad to know we're on the mark!

A couple of wonderful websites

2010-03-20T17:35:00.000-04:00

While researching my blog post today, I discovered something fantastic. It's a website entitled The Early Office Museum. It's an online museum, a true work of art, filled with all sorts of wondrous photos and paintings of offices from ancient times to the twentieth century. I wish, wish, wish I had found this before I wrote the history part of my book. More on this later, but in the meantime, give yourself a treat and go take a look at it.

Also, visit the website for Take Back Your Time, a fantastic organization headed by John de Graaf, co-author of the popular book, Affluenza. This organization is working for changes in the laws that will guarantee workers a reasonable amount of paid vacation time and provide other protections to their right to have lives outside of work. Their latest newsletter is now online and talks about how shortening the work week will help to reduce unemployment, something I've been preaching about for a long time.

History of the Office 101: Scientific Management

2010-03-20T17:03:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilberth Carey. It was about growing up in a family of twelve children and their parents, Frank, Sr. and Lillian Gilbreth, who were two of the original efficiency experts. Needless to say, the children lived highly regimented lives. They were required to fill out “process charts” on which they were supposed to check off boxes for washing their faces, brushing their teeth, etc. I still remember, in the fifth grade, making a chart like this for myself after reading about it, though I don’t think my own parents, who were not efficiency experts and had only two children, not twelve, ever looked at it.

The Gilbreths, along with Frederick Taylor, pioneered what was then a new field, which Taylor eventually called “scientific management.” It was all about figuring out the most efficient way to accomplish tasks so as to maximize production. To do this, they timed tasks with stopwatches and analyzed movies frame by frame. At first the tasks were mainly those done in factories, but eventually scientific management – also now known as “Taylorism” -- invaded offices as well as most other types of workplaces.

Its fundamental principles were as follows:

Decision-making should be taken away from workers and given exclusively to managers.
Standard methods should be developed for performing each type of task.
Workers should be selected with appropriate abilities for the type of job.
Workers should be trained in the previously developed standard methods.
All work should be planned for workers and interruptions eliminated.
Wage incentives should be given to workers to increase output.

Obviously, all of this involved making workplaces into extremely hierarchical bureaucracies in which all the power resided at the top, and workers, who were basically treated as parts of a machine, had virtually no say about anything. Needless to say, employees of all types hated Taylorism, for which the origin of labor unions is often blamed, and strikes resulted. It’s important to remember that both Taylor and Frank Gilbreth were engineers whose understanding of human psychology seems to have been limited even for the age in which they lived, although Lillian Gilbreth, who herself held a doctorate in psychology, was continually trying to remind them that workers were, in fact, human beings (for a wonderful account of Lillian’s side of things, see Making Time: A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen” by Jane Lancaster). (As a mental health professional, I can't help suspecting Taylor -- as well as the guys who bought into his ideas -- as having Asperger's syndrome.)

In the office, Taylorism seems, in the early 1900s, to have had a much bigger effect on the newly recruited female clerical force than on the male workers they assisted. Large rooms were filled with desks at which armies of women sat at typewriters, the QWERTY keyboards of which were themselves the product of scientific management principles. The women were strictly ruled by the clock. They had to punch time clocks when they came and left, they were not allowed to talk to one another, only one person at a time could go to the water cooler or bathroom, and they had to make daily reports on their output. According to Harry Braverman in Labor and Monopoly Capital, scientific managers also timed the minute movements of all types of clerical workers and published their findings, recording that it takes .04 minutes to pull out a file drawer or folder, .033 minutes to get up or sit down in a chair, .009 minutes to turn in a swivel chair, and so forth. What they did with this information, I can't imagine.

Although Taylorism later fell into disrepute, it is still very much with us, and some people see such late twentieth century management fads as “corporate re-engineering,” “Six Sigma,” and “lean manufacturing,” all of which are about trying to squeeze as much work out of human beings as possible regardless of the human cost, as being essentially updated transformations of Taylorism. Whether that’s the case or not, it seems likely that those of us who feel that we have to continually hurry about our jobs instead of taking the time to do them well and enjoy the process have Taylorism – along with other early twentieth century movements designed to maximize speed such as Fordism, i.e., assembly lines – to thank. While the emphasis on speed in the twentieth century produced more stuff for all of us to enjoy, I believe that in the twenty-first century it’s time we all slowed down a little, reclaimed the right to think creatively on the job, and retrieved some of the quality of life in the workplace of which factory workers and office workers alike have been deprived for so long.

Sources:
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
Gilbreth, Frank B., Jr. and Ernestine Carey. Cheaper by the Dozen. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co, 1948.
Lancaster, Jane. Making Time. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004.
Wikipedia.

Coming Next: How Time Was Stolen from Workers and How We Can Get it Back

Dealing with E-mail Onslaughts

2010-03-13T12:12:00.009-05:00

When you arrive in the morning, there are forty of them waiting for you. By the time you’ve answered two or three, six more are waiting, and all the time you’re trying to work, notices of new ones keep popping up on your screen. If there’s anything in the office that can make you feel as though you’re being attacked by armies of malicious elves, it’s e-mail. But it doesn't have to wreck your day. Managing e-mail is all a matter of triaging, the way medical staff in an overloaded ER triage patients. Once you’ve got a logical system of directories, some good SPAM software, and a few habits in place, you’ll be able to calmly contend with whatever passes through your in-box, no matter how excessive the quantity. Here are a few tips:

Many of us feel stressed when going through multiple e-mails, which may contain demands, criticisms, and other unpleasant types of text. To counter this, do what Darrin Zeer and Michael Klein, in Office Yoga call “E-mail meditation,” focusing your attention on one e-mail at a time and breathing extra slowly, making each out-breath twice the length of each in-breath.
Model your handling of e-mail on your handling of paper mail. Create e-mail file drawer directories for each category of paper files. As soon as it becomes difficult to find files in a directory, break the contents into subdirectories, which are like the hanging files in the drawers. When new messages come in that don’t fit into an existing directory or subdirectory, make a new one, just the way you would make a new folder. As much as possible, try to use the same labels for your e-mail system that you use for your papers.
Create an action directory labeled “AAA” for incoming e-mails that require some type of action or follow-up and mark super-urgent/urgent messages with red flags before moving them into this directory. (Labeling the directory “AAA” will make it appear at the top of your directory list, and thus make it easy to see.) Leaving e-mails in your main directory to remind yourself to do something is just as counter-productive as leaving papers out on your desk. When you’ve finished the action or received the response you’re waiting for, move the file into the appropriate File Drawer directory.
Resist the temptation to instantly answer each e-mail as it comes in. Instead, decide on a time for what I call “E-mails and Shorties” each day, when you deal systematically with accumulated e-mails and perform those actions in response to individual messages that can be done quickly. My E-mails and Shorties time is when I first get to the office, mainly because my e-mailbox often contains instructions from my boss. Some workers prefer to do their E-mails and Shorties later in the day so they can get project work done first.
Establish a regular E-mails and Shorties routine. Starting with the oldest messages in your Inbox, read each e-mail, delete or file messages to which you don’t need to respond, and send a brief response to those that require this, if only to let the sender know you received it. If the message requires some type of action that you can do in five minutes or less -- looking up a date, for example -- do it then and there, before moving on to the next e-mail. If it’s going to take more time than that or you’ll need to follow up on it, flip to your task list and enter it, then file the message in your action directory, AAA. This is how I handle e-mail on normal days, and it usually takes me less than an hour.
You also need a routine for days when you’re unusually flooded with e-mails, as when you come back after a vacation, for example. When you’re flooded, instead of beginning with E-mails and Shorties, begin with a Read-only Round, during which you’re only allowed to read, delete, or file e-mails, but not to respond to them or take any actions. After you’ve gone through all the e-mail this way and have dealt with any urgent matters, then go back and do E-mails and Shorties.
Talk with your computer support person about what anti-SPAM programs to use, wthout which you’ll quickly find yourself buried no matter how much time you spend on e-mail.
Never open SPAM, as it may contain viruses, and delete all suspicious e-mails immediately. Change your passwords frequently for extra protection. Be careful when you forward a series of messages not to include confidential information, and never send your social security number through e-mail.
Send e-mails asking to be removed from e-lists that you don’t want to be on.
Set some policies about what types of e-mails to file and what types to delete. Some good candidates for deletion are messages the text of which is contained in a later message, thank-you messages, scheduling messages for past appointments, and any SPAM that sneaks through.
When you send someone a message, CC yourself so you can file a copy of the message into the proper directory. If you forget to do this or if you already have a zillion e-mails in your “Sent” box, don’t worry about it. Sent messages are automatically filed by date, making them relatively easy to find if you’ve got the other half of the correspondence filed in directories, and you can always use the “Search” command to locate lost sent messages.
Do not make your life more stressful than it already is by using Instant Messenger or any sort of instant e-mail notification that beeps at you every time a message comes in when you’re trying to get work done (subtler notices are okay as long as they don’t distract you too much).
If you’re in a high-level position where you receive unusually large quantities of e-mail, have an assistant screen your e-mail and send out routine responses. If you can’t do this, you may have to send out automatic responses that let people know that you aren’t able to answer individual e-mails and suggest they contact you by fax or snail-mail.
Take the time to regularly empty “junk mail” and “deleted mail” bins, as your system may slow down if too much junk mail accumulates in them.
Be considerate in not overloading other people’s mailboxes by sending messages only to the appropriate individuals, not to a group, and never forward questionable e-mails to others.

Coming Next: Office History 101: Scientific Management

Crazymakers in the Office

2010-03-02T22:06:00.003-05:00

As a psychotherapist who works part time as an administrative assistant, I’ve come to believe that many employees from CEO on down could have immensely happier workdays if someone taught them just a little bit about what most therapists call “personality disorders.” People with personality disorders have a life history of causing pain and misery to those around them while believing that they themselves are just fine. I call these people “crazymakers” because of the harmful effects they can have on the mental health of others.

What makes dealing with office crazymakers difficult is that most of us want to be good team players. When someone rubs us the wrong way, we assume that this is just because we have differences, and all we need to do is sit down and talk things out. Or we try to be extra nice to the person, telling ourselves that he or she is just having problems at home or under a lot of stress. With most people, these strategies work just fine. But not with crazymakers. The usual rules for building positive relationships will not work with them.

Living or working with a crazymaker is a recipe for depression if you don’t take steps to protect yourself. Crazymakers can be extremely charming until they don’t get what they want, when they may suddenly morph from dearest friend into blood-sucking vampire. This makes them difficult to recognize upon first acquaintance. Even after allowing their true natures to show, they may flip back into their sweetness act again and make you think you imagined all the horrible things they did to you during the vampire phase.

Here are some signs that you may be dealing with a crazymaker:

You often leave a conversation feeling enraged, bewildered, terrified, weepy, or doubting your own sanity.
You feel you have to “walk on eggshells” or the person will do something unpleasant.
You find yourself doing things you know are wrong or changing plans at the last minute in order to give the person what he or she wants, then feel angry at yourself.
You waste hours rehearsing speeches that you’re never able to make when the person is actually there.
Others in your workplace talk about the person, whom they may refer to by such choice terms as jerk, schmuck, asshole, bastard, bitch, etc.. They may also argue about how to deal with him or her, one party favoring lenience and the other strictness.

Crazymakers, like ice cream, come in different flavors, which you can read about in the “personality disorders” section of the DSM-IV. Some common ones in the office are narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, dependent, antisocial, histrionic (passive-aggressive or otherwise), avoidant, and paranoid. Whatever type of crazymaker you’re dealing with, it’s important to remember that the rules for dealing with normal people don’t apply to them.

It’s quite possible to deal with them effectively, but this requires a different set of rules. Here are some suggestions for dealing with crazymakers:

Minimize contact with a crazymaker whenever possible. If you have to deal with the person, try to do so by phone or e-mail rather than face-to-face. Even dealing effectively with a crazymaker can be draining, and you need to save your energy for better things. If your boss is a crazymaker, you should be looking for another job: you deserve better!
Remain calm at all times. Never let a crazymaker know that he or she has upset you. If you pretend, he or she will not be able to see through this. The keyword is “strength.”
Be rigid. Flexibility is great when you’re dealing with normal people. Crazymakers just see it as a sign of weakness and do what they can to exploit it. Set limits and take action when they're violated. If you make a threat to a crazymaker, you must follow through with it.
Don’t try to “be yourself” with a crazymaker. Play act. If you have to flatter a narcissist or pretend to agree with a paranoid’s suspicions to come away unscathed, that’s okay. It’s even okay sometimes to lie to a crazymaker. We’re talking survival here.
Don’t try to build a relationship with a crazymaker. You can’t have one. All you can have with a crazymaker is power struggles. Accept this, do what you can to build your power, and survive.
Get support. This will not be hard to find, as a genuine crazymaker hurts lots of people who will love to compare notes with you. If the crazymaker is a coworker, you may need to talk with your boss about the person; if he or she is your boss, you may need to talk to the boss’s boss, though this can be dangerous.

Yes, I know you’re a kind, compassionate person who would much rather be nice to be people than masquerade as a Nazi prison guard, but this really is the only way of surviving daily contact with a crazymaker. What helps is to think about being kind to the next person the crazymaker might hurt if you don’t take care of yourself. Also, remember, that crazymakers tend to feel better when people stand up to them. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for another person is set limits.

Coming next: Dealing with E-mail Overload

Empathy in the Office

2010-02-27T15:44:00.001-05:00

Recently I started reading an extraordinary book called The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin. It’s an ambitious 700-page volume that rethinks all of world history in terms of two concepts: empathy and entropy, both of which Rifkin claims have progressively increased over time. Rifkin shows how certain conditions – new sources of energy, new communications media, urbanization, increased contact between members of different groups – facilitate “empathy surges” – times when the overall progress of empathy, i.e., the ability of one human being to imagine what another human being feels, takes a giant leap forward. While these surges never last, as energy runs out due to entropy and civilizations decline, they leave traces to be reignited with the next surge, and thus, over time, Rifkin claims, the human race is becoming more and more empathic.

So far, I’ve only read about a third of this book, but already it’s made so many sparks go off in my head I feel like it’s the fourth of July. This guy is a fabulous big-picture thinker. And of course, his ideas have all sorts of implications for the office world, which I plan to spend the whole next year exploring.

Meanwhile, it’s set me thinking about empathy, a concept I first encountered when doing training at a crisis center where I volunteered for a couple of years before starting social work school. Trainings for volunteers in those days began with an “Empathy Weekend.” On Friday nights, volunteers were divided into small groups run by “empathy trainers.” The trainers explained to us what empathy was, and that empathizing with someone with a headache didn’t mean you had the headache yourself, which is sympathy, it meant being aware that the person was suffering, communicating your awareness to him or her and “validating feelings.”

They asked us to take turns naming feelings while they took magic markers and wrote them on big pieces of paper until they were filled with words: happy, sad, scared, hungry, disgusted, overwhelmed, terrified, furious, etc. Then they gave us a list of ways to start empathy statements: “You sound . . . , you feel . . . , you seem . . . you’re feeling . . . , etc. That was Friday night. On Saturday, we practiced doing role-plays in which one person talked about a problem and the other made empathy statements – “you sound sad,” “you’re feeling overwhelmed,” etc. – until we could do so appropriately. Although a few refinements were added later – never use the word “should” or ask “why,” for example – this was the gist of empathy training. Within a few weeks, we were talking on the phone to real people with real problems, usually big ones, and while the best counselors didn’t always follow the empathy statement method too rigidly, we found it that it actually worked pretty well.

Many of us also shared that empathy training improved our lives outside of our crisis center work, including our lives in the workplace. In my own case, I have found that a lot of interpersonal difficulties in the office diminish if I shut my mouth, listen for awhile, and make a few empathy statements. I’ve also learned that it’s not good to make too many, as this may result in the other person telling me more than is really appropriate.

There are, however, some folks with whom empathy doesn’t work. These are people with personality disorders, folks who believe they’re just fine, blame all their problems on others, and leave a trail of hurt friends, family, and coworkers behind them. In my book, I call them “crazymakers,” a term I borrowed from the book, The Artist’s Way at Work by Mark Bryan, Julia Cameron, and Catherine A. Allen. Crazymakers are living proof that not everyone participates in Rifkin’s empathy surges. They have no ability to put themselves in the place of others and imagine what they feel. While many of them will be glad to talk your ear off about what’s wrong with everyone else, empathy does nothing for them.

Crazymakers are for another blog post. Meanwhile, get a copy of The Empathic Civilization and start reading it. This book could change your life!

Coming next: Crazymakers in the Office

Is Your Workload Unrealistic? How to Tell and What to Do

2010-02-23T22:07:00.011-05:00

Do you regularly have a to-do list at the office that’s more than a page long? Has your in-box never, ever been empty? Do you spend the bulk of your time racing against the clock? Do you often stay late or take work home to try to catch up? Do you make more mistakes than you think you should? Does a technical breakdown or bureaucratic obstacle send you into a panic? If so, you may be struggling with an unrealistic workload.

Unrealistic workloads happen for a variety of different reasons. Here are some possibilities:

Your department is understaffed. This is probably the most common reason why workers may wind up overloaded. In today’s tight economy, it may be unavoidable for employers to cut staff and overload those who are left, but it’s a short-term solution that’s likely to lead to job turnover, absenteeism, and poor work quality, especially if the boss uses harsh management strategies to try to get more work out of people than is reasonable.

Your boss has planning problems. He or she may underestimate how long things take, believing that a new online system or computer program will save more time than it does, or failing to realize how slowly projects can move through a bureaucracy. If your boss is a workaholic, he or she may have distorted ideas about the importance of work and expect everyone else to share his/her craziness. Also, bosses who give out assignments as they occur to them in the course of the day may have no idea how they can add up.

You’ve bitten off more than you can chew. You may habitually trap yourself into an unrealistic workload by failing to think about how much time projects you voluntarily take on will really take.

An overfunctioning/underfunctioning dance with a coworker. The more you do the less your coworker does. The less he/she does, the more you do. It’s easy to fall into such a dance without realizing it, especially if you grew up overfunctioning.

Whatever the reason, unrealistic workloads can result in office battleshock if you don’t take steps to protect yourself. Struggling fruitlessly day after day becomes exhausting and demoralizing, and it’s also a set-up for bad comments on performance appraisals about the quality of your work. Here are some suggestions:

Resist the temptation to deal with an excessive workload by working ever harder. This will only inflate your boss’s expectations so you end up even more buried than you are now.
Don’t allow yourself to work more than an hour per day of overtime except under extreme circumstances (when a big project has a deadline, for example). If you limit the number of hours you allow yourself to work, you’ll work more efficiently during those hours. If you still can’t keep up, start looking for a job that isn’t a set up for a physical or mental breakdown NOW.
Don’t let hurrying become habitual. It’s okay to rush once in awhile, but making it into a lifestyle is bound to take its toll on you, and the faster you go, the more mistakes you’re likely to make. If you’re behind, rethink your strategies in order to work smarter rather than faster.
Don’t get into a sick competition with coworkers to see who can abuse him- or herself the most by working the longest hours, taking the fewest breaks, or rushing around fastest for the sake of the company. Instead, compare notes with others about workload problems and brainstorm about ways you might help each other out.
Bolster your time management skills. Make a to-do list every morning in Outlook or a comparable program, categorizing tasks. Enter everything you have to do, large and small, and continue to add to the list throughout the day. Next to each entry, put down the date when you plan to perform the task (not the date when it’s due), breaking large tasks into steps. Add some extra blank lines for each category so you can write in new tasks by hand that come up during the day. Print out your list and use a highlighter to mark each task with today’s date on it. Keep the list next to your computer and cross off each task as you do it. The next morning, delete tasks from the list that you’ve done, write in new tasks, and, after printing the date at the top, file the old list, which serves as a useful record of work that you’ve done.
Don’t expect good time-management skills to accomplish miracles if your workload is truly unrealistic. Instead, print out your fancy, highlighted to-do list and show it to your boss, asking for help with prioritization. Presenting your workload in black-and-white can make a powerful statement to a boss who doesn’t realize how much he or she has given you to do.
Ask yourself what kinds of snags routinely cost you the most time. Does your printer keep jamming up? Are you having to spend a lot of time digging for papers you can’t find? Are you slow at something because of lack of training? Then ask yourself what you can do to solve the problem.
Pool tasks and errands that can be done together, taking all your mail at once to the mailbox, for example.
Do some creative thinking about what structural changes in your workplace might reduce your work overload, and consider presenting a proposal to your boss. How many work hours are realistically needed to keep up with your current workload? Could you convince your boss to let you hire a subordinate to help you? Would you be willing to cut back your own hours so that a second person could be hired to share your workload? Could someone from another department be brought in to help out? While it’s not always the case, sometimes all you have to do to get you what you need is to ask.

If you think inactivity in the office isn't a problem . . .

2010-02-23T20:18:00.000-05:00

check out this article from today's NYT!

Office Movies 101: Office Space

2010-02-20T12:17:00.001-05:00

In this blog, a lot of what I do is write seriously about problems in the office world that others have dealt with only under the guise of humor. As with court jesters under medieval tyrants, it would seem that most creative people feel safe addressing the multiple challenges of office life only with satires that have grown increasingly bitter over the years. This doesn’t solve any of the problems, but it does help us to identify them, which
is half the battle. (For that reason, when I started researching Making Peace with Your Office Life, the first thing I read was not a book on organizational psychology but The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams. If you want to know what’s really going on, start with the humorists.)

In the first few minutes of the 1999 comedy, Office Space, one can identify a host of office issues. In those opening scenes, we see Peter, who appears to be suffering from a severe case of the office blues, driving to his office and starting his workday at Initech with his coworkers, Michael and Samir. Here are some of the challenges Peter encounters:

Disconnected office location. Peter’s office is located not in a downtown business district or residential area but in an outlying area that he and his coworkers can only reach by driving through heavy traffic, thus already arriving at work feeling stressed, or – like Milton, who appears to have Asperger’s syndrome – taking a bus that may or may not get them to work on time. The exterior of the building is sterile and functional, nature is nowhere, and the only places to which Peter and his friends can escape appear to be cheesy, chain-type restaurants, where the waiters are forced to wear cutesy smiles and silly buttons called “flair.”
Sensory depriving office interior. The inside of Peter’s building is an unbroken sea of gray under harsh, white fluorescent lights. Peter’s cubicle isolates him from others while failing to keep out annoying sounds such as the repetitive chirping of a phone receptionist or Milton’s radio.
Bullying. Peter’s boss, Bill Lumberg, is a bully. He talks to his employees in a demeaning, threatening tone, keeping them terrified that he’ll fire them. He also tortures Milton by continually moving his desk, filling his cubicle with boxes, and, worst of all, taking away the red stapler that Milton loves.
Insufficient, repetitive, and unrewarding work. Peter spends his days either sitting around or engaged in a repetitive task that involves changing dates from two to four digits in preparation for the millennium.
Poor organizational structure. Peter reports to eight different supervisors, all of whom show up to inform him that he has failed to put the cover sheet on a “TPS report.”
Ego deprivation. Peter receives only negative feedback about petty mistakes, nothing positive about his contributions. Nor is he given any projects at which he might distinguish himself and thus experience a sense of accomplishment. Although the consultants eventually recommend his promotion, his boss does everything he can to try to prevent it
Lack of support for workers with disabilities. Milton is obviously mentally disabled, yet no one provides any sort of accommodations for this, thus violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. Instead, management bullies and torments him. Milton’s coworkers appear equally heartless in depriving him of his piece of Bill’s birthday cake. No one shows any kindness to him whatsoever.
Inadequate equipment. Peter and his two friends, Michael and Samir, are continually battling with a printer that keeps getting jammed. This later leads to a fantasy-fulfilling scene for those of us with printer problems in which the three men steal the machine, take it out in a field, and go at it with baseball bats.
Uncompassionate, demeaning, management-controlled office culture. Peter’s boss appears to have total control over the office culture and bullies his employees with forced fun schemes such as “Haiwaiian shirt day.” The women who work at Initech appear to have been chosen for their unattractiveness, lack of genuine empathy, and willingness to fake happiness at all times and counter legitimate complaints with nymphet scolding -- “Somebody’s got a bad case of the Mondays” -- and the men for their corny jokes and bad taste. One of my favorite scenes is when the whole, brain-dead staff sings “Happy Birthday” to the boss in an unenthusiastic monotone.
Uncertainty. The employees at Initech are all terrified of losing their jobs, especially after the “two Bobs,” (consultants) show up to interview everyone and make downsizing recommendations. The person who is most terrified of this is Tom, who does get laid off after thirty years in a job he hates but then has a car accident. Severely disabled, he nevertheless throws a party to celebrate because he’s so happy that he’ll never have to work again due to the settlement.

While Office Space clarifies some of the issues associated with routine office jobs, as a comedy it offers no realistic solutions to problems. Instead, it uses the silly device of having Peter go to a hypnotist who dies of a heart attack before waking him from a trance that makes him stop caring about his job. Peter then becomes a complete goof-off, but when he tells the consultants the truth about Initech, they’re so impressed that they recommend his promotion, but at the expense of his two, more competent coworkers.

Instead of problem-solving realistically about ways to improve their job situations, Peter, Michael, and Samir express their anger at Initech by turning to white-collar crime. Michael designs a program that allows them to embezzle funds. Meanwhile, Milton plots a different type of revenge. (I won’t spoil the story by telling you what.)

If Peter had come to me for therapy, I would have advised him to think about changing careers, but in the meantime, I would have suggested he break the problems down in his present job as I have done here and think of ways to address each of them, one by one, considering what he could change and what he might have to accept. In his car on the way to work, for example, he could play music or booktapes he might enjoy rather than sitting in silents. Perhaps he could take a walk outdoors before starting his day. He could deal with the annoyance of Milton’s radio and the receptionist’s chirping by bringing headphones to work and using them to block out the sound with white noise or music. If it bothers him to have eight people tell him about his mistakes, he could make a list of the eight people and send them a daily group e-mail asking for feedback, giving himself more control over the process.

Instead of strategizing this way, however, all Peter does in the movie is complain, goof off, and steal from the till. For that reason, even though at the end, Peter moves on to a different type of career, one can’t help wondering how long his new happiness will last. Every type of work has problems attached, and studies have shown that those who are dissatisfied in one career usually end up dissatisfied after changing careers. If Peter had been my client and his career change didn’t do the trick, sooner or later I would have had to point this out to him.

God in the Office: Religion in the Workplace

2010-02-16T22:37:00.000-05:00

Most of the world’s great religions were created in environments that were vastly different from today’s offices. In the office world, there are no bodhi trees for seekers to sit under waiting for enlightenment, no mountains or caves where prophets can rendezvous with The Almighty. At work we are cut off from sunsets and rainbows, starlight and moonlight, everything that connected the ancients with the gods and goddesses they believed created them. Instead, we have a world that appears to be totally under human control, in which bosses wielding nearly absolute power over our daily lives can easily become idols to whom we continually offer ritualistic, but spiritually empty sacrifices.

In such a world, it’s easy to feel that one’s spiritual life exists only somewhere else, never in the office. There’s also the fact that in many office cultures, “don’t ask, don’t tell” has become an unspoken rule where religion is concerned. Given the amount of conflict in the world at large for which religion serves as an excuse, that’s probably for the best, but I can’t help feeling sad that it has to be that way. Personally, I find it enriching to learn about the beliefs and practices of those whose religions differ from my own and wish we could share about them more openly. I’ve sometimes wondered what would happen if a bunch of people at my office simply sat down and “came out” about their religions – or the lack thereof – to one another. Would a string of holy wars then prevent us from working together? Or would knowing more about others’ beliefs help us understand behaviors that we might otherwise find mysterious?

Strangely, while coworkers may not reveal their religions to us in words, they may do so in other ways. Headgear, hairstyles, jewelry, pictures, poems, or prayers posted on office bulletin boards, avoidance of particular foods or disappearance on certain days of the year may all serve as cues to the observant. Not knowing exactly what is sacred to whom may make it difficult for people to keep from trampling on each others’ religious sensitivities even when intentions are good. The problem becomes even greater when one attends a wedding, funeral, or other ceremony for a coworker of a different faith from one’s own. For those wrestling with such issues, I recommend How to Be a Perfect Stranger: The Essential Religious Etiquette Handbook by Stuart M. Matlins and Arthur J. Magida.

Meanwhile, office life, especially in for-profit organizations, can also be problematic for those who practice religions that are anti-materialistic, i.e., most major ones. Moses became enraged when he caught the Israelites worshipping a golden calf. Jesus instructed his followers to sell all their goods and give them to the poor. Mohammad said there was only one god, an immaterial one called Allah. Buddha left the riches of his childhood home to live a life of voluntary poverty. What would any of these great teachers have said about workers devoting their lives to maximizing profits so as to buy more stuff? How do their present-day followers keep from feeling horribly guilty in a world that demands continual service to mammon? How does one stay anchored to one’s faith even in such a world?

These are questions to which there are no easy answers. For me, part of the answer has been to work only for non-profit organizations, though if I had to work for a corporation to support my family I would. Another part involves small, daily acts that help me stay spiritually connected, such as taking a few minutes every day to pray or meditate, listening to sacred music with headphones, or communicating with church friends by e-mail during my workdays.

I’ve given you my thoughts on religion in the office, but what are yours? Do you talk openly about your beliefs at work or not at all? How do you stay connected to what matters most to you? Whether you’re religious or not, what keeps you feeling peaceful at work?

Coming next: Office Movies 101: Office Space

They Just Keep Piling Up: Paper Management in the Office

2010-02-13T01:44:00.003-05:00

You’re on a roll, putting together all the materials you need for a big proposal that has to be turned in by five o’clock. Everything’s going great until it’s time to scan in that handwritten letter from so-and-so. You’re sure it must be at the bottom of the pile on top of the credenza, but it’s not. A frantic search ensues, and an hour later you finally find the letter in a folder you’d thought was empty.

Poor paper management can be a major source of stress at the office, wasting huge amounts of precious time. A few papers thrown carelessly on top of a desk have a way of swelling into process-crippling piles and even, in some cases, to gargantuan oceans that may have serious emotional as well as vocational repercussions. Once your office is thoroughly deluged, you may get into a vicious circle, in which you waste so much time looking for things that you have no time to de-clutter.

Over the years I’ve come to believe that for most of us, simple is best where papers are concerned. Too many people have the idea that some fancy paper management system that takes a whole book to learn will save them from paper problems. Others spend tons of money buying all the right equipment, somehow believing that genuine mahogany file trays come equipped with little hands that will reach out and pull the papers into them. Unfortunately, this is not how it works. The only way to organize papers is to not only set up the simplest possible system for the different types of papers you deal with but also to establish the habits required to keep putting them there day after day. This can take awhile, but most people can manage it if they approach it in phases. Here are some suggestions for dealing with papers:

For the first round of paper-organizing, I recommend pioneer organizer Stephanie Winston’s classic “TRAF system.” Get four boxes and label them in large letters with a magic marker: Toss, Refer, Act, and File. The Toss box is your recycle box (you may need an extra box if you deal with confidential materials that you have to shred); the Refer box is for papers that go to someone else besides yourself; the Act box is for papers that require some type of action; the File box is for papers you just need to keep.
Once you’ve finished TRAFing all the loose papers in your office, get rid of the Toss and Refer items, then set up a paper-flow system for incoming papers. In today’s fast-paced office environment, this is what I recommend. Get a desk-top sorter from an office supply store, which is simply a box with four cubbies, one on top of the other, put it together, and set it on top of your desk. Set a wire basket on top of it, which makes a fifth cubby. Label the cubbies from top to bottom in large bold type as follows: SUPER-URGENT, URGENT, ACT, HOLD, FILE. To qualify for SUPER-URGENT status, a paper must require action today or something bad will happen. If the bad thing won’t happen until tomorrow, put it in URGENT. If nothing bad is likely to happen anytime soon if you don’t do it, put it in ACT. HOLD is where you put papers that you can’t move along until someone calls you, a certain date arrives, you arrive at a decision, or some other future event occurs. FILE is for the papers you just want to store away. If you try to empty your FILE cubby at the end of every workday, maybe you’ll at least manage to do it once a week.
Now get your file folders in shape. Use colored folders even if you have to buy them yourself. Don’t worry about color-coding – just use different colored folders so you can identify them easily, as in “It’s in that yellow folder.” Print out file folder labels in bold, highly legible 12-pt. Ariel, all caps, with no more words on a label than will fit easily. Poorly labeled files folders – with too much type on them that’s too small to read – are, in my opinion, the number one cause of lost files. If you’ve inherited a big set of poorly labeled files, take the time to replace all the labels with ones you can read – this will pay off!
Once your file folders are all nicely labeled, sort them into piles, using two criteria: frequency of use and category of information. Separate out folder groups that you use many times per day from those you use less frequently. Use a desktop tiered vertical sorter for the minute-by-minute files. For example, as I monitor expenses for various grants in my job, I keep a folder for receipts coming in for each grant on top in a vertical sorter on top of my desk. The folders you need a few times per day should be within arms’ reach, perhaps in your desk file-drawer. The rest you should file according to category wherever you have space.
Now set up your hanging folders. Print out labels for each category of file folders to stick on white strips and force into the little plastic holders. Attach each holder to the left side of the hanging folder. Place the hanging folders in file drawers and label the drawers so you can read them easily. Then set the file folders inside the hanging folders.
Put all the loose papers in your TRAF Act box into your Paper Flow System and file all the papers in your TRAF File box in your new file system. Now all you need to pay attention to is maintenance.
Each time you finish a task or put it on hold, put the associated papers into your system. Make sure you ALWAYS do this, which will be difficult if you’re constantly in a hurry. (When people are rushed, what they tend to do is save three seconds not putting this away, four seconds not putting that away, then waste hours digging through paper piles.) At the end of each day, file all the papers in your File cubby and look through all the papers in the other cubbies, making sure they’re in the right places. That’s all you need to do.
Purge your files at least once a year during the slow times, assuming there are any. If there aren’t, take half an hour each day and purge a few folders at a time. Get rid of duplicates, out-of-date manuals, early drafts of things, product solicitations, brochures and invitations for events that have already happened, and anything you can easily replace.
Break the habit of leaving papers out on your desk to remind yourself to do a task. Instead, write the task on your to-do list (we’ll discuss that in Chapter 12) and put the papers in the appropriate cubby. Take a slow, deep breath as you watch them disappear. Remember: in today’s world, there are few papers that can’t somehow be replaced.
In sorting papers, don’t get stuck making decisions. To speed up your decision-making – a skill that’s easier for some people than others -- time yourself when filing and try to beat your record. Purge your paper files at least once a year, when your boss is out of town, or, alternatively, purge one file drawer per month on a rotating basis.
Be selective about what you print out and what you deal with only electronically. Print out things that are really important to give yourself extra protection from loss, but leave everything else in your computer. If paper management is difficult for you, try to move in the direction of a paperless office, though in that case you may need help organizing your hard disk.
Don’t be ashamed if you find paper management difficult. It’s like math in that some people have an aptitude for it and some people don’t, and you don’t have to be good at everything.
If you have difficulty managing papers on your own, consider hiring a professional organizer to help you. Referrals are available from the National Association of Professional Organizers (http://www.NAPO.net) or the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (http://www.NSGCD.org). This will not be cheap, but if your job is in danger from paper overwhelm, it may be worth it.

Coming Next: God in the Office: Religion in the Workplace

Office Lit 101: Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

2010-02-09T22:51:00.004-05:00

Someday, I’d love to pull together an anthology of office literature, assuming one doesn’t already exist, which would include everything from Melville and Dickens to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Dilbert and “Office Space.” Often, I believe, literary artists have presented a far truer picture in poems, plays, stories, novels, cartoons, and films of office life as real people experience it than any nonfiction writer ever has. Thus, in this blog, I intend from time to time to take a look at one or another of these works and consider what it might have to teach us about the office world.

Our subject in this post is the classic, "Introduction to Fiction" story “Bartleby,” which I reread last night for the first time since teaching it in a community college course. The author, Herman Melville, is best known as the creator of Moby Dick, a huge, cosmic-symbolic adventure tale featuring a white whale, and it’s hard to imagine that its author would have anything to say about office life. Wondering what kinds of experience informed both works, I turned to the obvious place for answers – Wikipedia – and found that Melville spent his early adult years at sea having adventures and writing novels about them, then got married and spent some years in a cabin in the Berkshires writing his two greatest novels – Moby Dick and Pierre – during this time he also got to know Nathaniel Hawthorne -- then, in the 1860’s, he got a job in a customs house, where he wasted away for nineteen years and wrote hardly anything before finally escaping back to full-time writing. So, notwithstanding his sea voyages, Melville did spend a substantial chunk of time in an office, though most of it was long after the years he spent in the Berkshires, which was when he wrote “Bartleby.”

The plot of the story is simple. The narrator is a lawyer who believes in taking the line of least resistance. He’s created a nice cushy life doing routine legal work for rich people on Wall Street (the street name is symbolic,of course – this is Melville!), working as little as possible himself and demanding even less from his employees. Then one day he hires a copyist named Bartleby who immediately begins to test his limits. When the lawyer makes a simple request, rather than complying, Bartleby answers with the words “I prefer not to.”
From then on, these words becomes his litany, which he repeats in response to more and more requests until he is doing no work at all while also refusing to leave the office (where he sleeps, it turns out) even after the lawyer fires him. Finally, in desperation, the lawyer moves to a different building while Bartleby continues to hang around the old one until the landlord has the police take him to “The Tombs,” a prison, where he dies. All this time, the lawyer, caught between his hypersensitive Christian conscience and the desire for a more peaceful existence, agonizes over how best to deal with Bartleby’s strange behavior.

Critics have argued about what Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” means. As a therapist, I’m tempted to diagnose him with Asperger’s syndrome plus depression, possibly brought on by a medical condition, but that doesn’t really explain what his creator, the author, was getting at. As a writer who often feels frustrated by the demands of a “day job,” I can’t help wondering if Melville, newly married and having trouble selling his books, is contemplating the need to get practical himself, while at the same “preferring not to.” The story takes place on Wall Street and all of the windows look out only on brick walls. Bartleby spends his days staring out at the walls from within the cubicle that the lawyer, ahead of his time as an office designer, constructs for him. Eventually, Bartleby ends his life in a prison. To me, the message is clear: working in an office equals imprisonment. Apparently, even in the nineteenth century, office confinement was beginning to get to people, especially creative artists and nature-loving, globe-circling adventurers like Melville.

Bartleby is not the only character in the story whose psyche may have been twisted by confinement to the unnatural environment of a Wall Street office. One of the other copyists, Turkey, is an alcoholic, and the other, Nipper, suffers from indigestion, restlessness, irritibility – he is forever fooling with the height of his table and muttering curses to himself – and a kind of inappropriate ambition. A third employee, a twelve-year-old boy, is described as intelligent, but mainly interested in collecting nuts, perhaps destined for obesity. And the lawyer himself seems to be caught in a kind of paralysis, incapable of taking any kind of constructive action.

How does Bartleby’s office differ from a present-day one? One obvious difference is that the workers are all men, as was typical in the nineteenth century. (Meville seems to like to write about groups of men – think Moby Dick – and male bonding is a favorite theme of his. In this case, the bonding seems to be dysfunctional, symbiosis rather than love.) A second difference is in the pace of life, which appears much less frantic in the days before “scientific managers” started timing typists with stop-watches than it is now. Finally, the technology is different – there are no computers or even typewriters, the lion’s share of the work being copying documents out by hand.

But in other ways, Bartleby’s office may not be that different from our own. Then, as now, bored, lonely, unfulfilled, sensory deprived workers feel trapped. Then, as now, a kind-hearted supervisor agonizes about how to be both firm and compassionate with a troublesome employee. Then, as now, office culture keeps humans from forming healthy connections. Then, as now, a single individual’s faulty brain wiring wreaks havoc on his own life and that of others. Then, as now, we see men in an office worrying about whether or not they’re really men.

To me, “Bartleby” feels like the first piece of writing that called office life into question, anticipating The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by a hundred years or so. It’s an old story, and thus the pace may be slower than what we’re used to, but if you want to understand how offices got to where they are now, it’s a good place to start.

Coming Next: They Just Keep Piling Up: Papers in the Office

"Nature-deficit Disorder" and Office Work

2010-02-06T18:02:00.006-05:00

“Nature-deficit Disorder” is not a diagnosis in DSM-IV but a phrase that Richard Louv uses in his landmark book, The Last Child in the Woods. Louv focuses on the importance of direct exposure to nature for children’s healthy physical and emotional development. He cites studies that show that exposure to nature may reduce AD/HD symptoms and also improve children’s cognitive capabilities as well as their resistance to negative stresses and depression.

“Nature-deficit disorder,” Louv writes, “describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.” But deficit, he goes on to say, is only one side of the coin. The other side is abundance. By becoming aware of the negative effects of nature-deficit disorder, he says, we also become aware of the powerful healing benefits of reconnection with nature.

Louv cites numerous research studies that all support the notion of nature as healer, not only for children but also for adults. Roger Ulrich’s research at Texas A & M showed that the “people who watch images of natural landscape after a stressful experience calm markedly in only five minutes: their muscle tension, pulse, and skin-conductance readings plummet.” In England and Sweden, researchers studied joggers who exercised in natural green settings and found that they felt “more restored, and less anxious, angry, and depressed than people who burn the same amount of calories in gyms or other built settings.”

And here at the University of Michigan, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan surveyed over twelve hundred corporate and state office workers and found that those who had window views looking out at trees or other greenery “experienced significantly less frustration and more work enthusiasm than those employees without such views.”

While Louv’s book focuses on children’s nature-deficit disorder, the implications of his work for adults working in offices are huge. If being exposed to nature is fundamental to health and well-being, this does not bode well for those of us who spend large amounts of time cooped up in a mostly inorganic office environment. Yet the Kaplan study would seem to indicate that one doesn’t necessarily have to move one’s workstation out into the nearest park to get one’s daily nature-dose. Although exactly how much contact with nature you need to be healthy has yet be determined, my guess is that, as with “quality time” with parents for children, even a little bit of nature exposure can make a big difference in how you feel.

In what ways can we, as office workers, act to reduce “nature-deficit disorder”? Here are a few of my own ideas:

If you don’t have a window in your own office, take “window breaks” to go look out any other windows you can find as often as possible.
Walk outside as much as you can, either to and from work, or during your lunch hour or break – an absolute necessity!
Bring plants and anything else alive you’re allowed to bring.
A group where I work “adopted” a small park area where they spend time – mostly outside of regular work hours – gardening together.
Bring landscapes, postcards, calendars with nature photos, and use a nature-scene screensaver.
Play recordings of nature sounds with headphones.
Read nature poetry with your lunch and put a copy of a favorite poem up on your bulletin board.
Get a group of nature-loving coworkers together to go visit local parks, zoos, botanical gardens during lunch.
Spend as much time in nature when you’re not at work as you can: garden, hike, camp, canoe, sail, or sit on your back porch and watch the birds.

These are just a few ideas, and no doubt you can think of others. If so, please share them with us in a comment!

Coming next: Office Lit 101: Melville's "Bartleby"

Are You Climbing the Walls at Work? Dealing with Confinement

2010-02-02T21:17:00.003-05:00

To repeat what I said in a previous post, during winter months, office workers may barely see the sun except on weekends. Being shut up in a building, often a single room or, worse yet, the infamous cubicle is, I believe, for many workers, one of the most depression-inducing aspects of the office situation. For one thing, it puts you more at risk for Seasonal Affective Disorder; for another, if you have a certain type of brain-wiring it
can make you feel claustrophobic and restless; finally, it can make getting along with coworkers more difficult due to “cabin fever,” similar to what happens to families when they’re boxed up during a snowstorm. This is perhaps why so many workers compare their offices to prisons.

Unless you’re telecommuting, you may believe that such feelings are unavoidable. But while it’s true that confinement is a fact of life for many office workers, it doesn’t necessarily have to set you up for depression. The key is to take constructive action to counter its effects. Here are some suggestions:

Next time you pass a construction site, think about what it might be like to do physical labor out of doors all the time. Imagine the discomforts of heat and cold and think about how good it would feel to come inside and sit in front of a computer.
If at all possible, park at least twenty minutes away from your office and walk to and from your vehicle in all but the most severe weather. Do this especially during the winter months. Doing this will not only help you feel less imprisoned when you get to work – there’s nothing like coming in out of cold or snow to transform a prison into a warm sanctuary – it will also help to address the office challenges of inactivity, sensory deprivation, and disconnection from nature and community.
If you can’t walk to and from work, take a walk during your lunch hour or a quick run around the block during a break.
Walk inside your building as much as possible. If you’re not allowed to take breaks, volunteer for errands, meetings, and projects that will take you away from your desk.
Bring posters, calendars, postcards, and other visuals that connect you with the outdoors. Take web-surfing breaks to national park sites or play recordings of forest sounds while using headphones. If you're working in a fascist dictatorship, you may have to be discreet, but do what you can.
Engage in plenty of outdoor activities when you’re not at work. Camping can be especially good – there’s nothing like a few nights in a soggy tent to make you appreciate a warm, dry office after you get back.
Consider talking with your employer about the possibility of doing all or part of your work either from home or from somewhere else. It may be that total confinement isn’t necessary in your case. Bear in mind, though, that working away from the office may involve other challenges.
Talk with coworkers about how they feel about being confined to the office and brainstorm about ways to modify your situation.

If you have other ideas about how to deal with confinement at the office, please share them with us in a comment.

Coming next: “Nature Deficit Disorder” and Office Work

The Responsibilities of Office Workers

2010-01-30T16:32:00.001-05:00

My last post was on the rights of office workers, but along with rights go responsibilities to the people we work for as well as to each other. Thus, I’ve put together a second list of the responsibilities of office workers. As with rights, I welcome other people’s ideas about what should be changed.

As office workers, we have a responsibility . . .

To perform the tasks for which we were hired to the best of our ability.
To work the agreed upon hours whenever possible, clear all schedule adjustments with our supervisors, and refrain from abusing flex-time.
To take care of our own physical and mental health.
To keep personal activities from intruding excessively on work activities.
To keep our workspace, files, and hard disk organized and presentable.
To manage time so as to work as efficiently as possible.
To develop our job-related skills to their full potential.
To interact respectfully with others in the workplace and communicate clearly.
To come to work appropriately dressed and groomed.
To keep others waiting no longer than necessary.
To interrupt coworkers and supervisors no more than necessary to do our jobs.
To share information on policies and procedures with others in our workplaces.
To ask for help when we need it to do our jobs.
To maintain confidentiality when required or ethically correct.
To help new employees adjust to their work situation.
To supervise others justly and kindly.
To handle financial tasks honestly, frugally, and fastidiously.
To admit our own mistakes honestly and do what we can to correct them.
To try to resolve conflicts with the person involved before taking them to a higher level.
To refrain from discriminating against others because of age, race, religion, gender, sexual identity, or other defining characteristics.
To honor any commitments we made when hired to remain at our job for a particular length of time and to give our employers adequate notice when resigning.

Having written these responsibilities out, I have to be honest: There have been times when I’ve been less than perfect in living up to them, though I suspect I’m not the only one. Most of us need reminders sometimes, which is what bosses are for. But whether you have a boss who’s continually on your case or one who lets you get away with murder, if you want to feel good at work, it helps to have a clear set of rules for yourself and at least try stick to them. A guilty conscience can be a major contributor to office blues, but knowing you're living up to your own standards, assuming they're reasonable and not overly harsh, is one of the best antidepressants there is.

Coming next: The challenge of confinement: what to do if you’re climbing the walls at work.

The Rights of Office Workers

2010-01-26T21:29:00.001-05:00

At the risk of being labeled a troublemaker, I believe it’s time we office workers started thinking about our rights. Some people – especially some bosses -- might find this scary. The assumption is that if office workers become aware of their rights, they’ll soon start blowing up filing cabinets and dancing naked around the water cooler. Who can say where it might end?

Rest assured, I’m not advocating revolution, at least not anytime soon. But it seems to me that historically we office workers have not done nearly so good a job as our blue collar brothers and sisters at standing up for ourselves, and that this has led to many of us feeling – and even coming to believe – that we have no rights at all when we’re at work, especially in recent decades. Too often, employers have dealt with economic challenges at the expense of quality of life for their office workers, forcing people to work longer and
faster and in progressively less comfortable conditions. As I said, I believe it’s time we started thinking about our rights.

Everyone, of course, may have a different idea of what these rights are. I’d love to hear your list, but meanwhile, here’s mine:

As office workers, we have the right . . .

To spend enough time outside our jobs to enjoy good health, intimate relationships, and activities that give pleasure and meaning to our lives.
To say no to excessive overtime without fear of retribution.
To take sick time when we need it, including mental health days, as well as adequate vacation time for rest and renewal, without fear of negative consequences.
To bring personal objects to work that give us comfort, decorate our workspaces, and receive ergonomic support so as to create physically and psychologically healthy work environments.
To perform tasks at a reasonable enough pace to do a good job, enjoy the work process, and experience a sense of accomplishment when projects are completed.
To work at an optimal level of challenge for healthy cognitive functioning, experiencing neither excessive multitasking or unhealthy levels of mindless repetition.
To enjoy financial security and pursue financial gain.
To discuss feelings and grievances appropriately with both peers and superiors without fear of negative repercussions.
To communicate with others without being exposed to surveillance.
To enjoy freedom from unjust blame for circumstances and events over which we have no control.
To access the equipment, materials, and information we need to do our jobs.
To ask for clarification of assignments without fear of being humiliated.
To understand how our duties fit into the organization’s overall mission as well as the larger systems of which they are a part.
To develop our knowledge and skills to their full capacities.
To receive regular feedback and performance appraisals that are fair, honest, and respectful, focusing on performance rather than personality and including positive feedback and public recognition when performance merits it.
To schedule, when possible, regular quiet times during which we cannot be interrupted.
To take undisturbed lunch hours away from our workplaces without fear of negative repercussions.
To take frequent enough mini-breaks from the computer screen and office chair to maximize physical and mental health.
To have our talents acknowledged and used and our weaknesses accommodated whenever possible.
To be treated with respect, without bullying, sexual harassment, or discrimination in regard to race, religion, gender, age, appearance, or other personal characteristics.
To receive support in pursuing our career paths and recommendations for other jobs that reflect the true quality of our work.

All of these rights are violated every day in the office workplace, and most of us choose to let this happen sometimes rather than give up our livelihoods. The fact that our rights are frequently trampled on, however, doesn’t make them any less rights. And somehow, it helps to have it clear in your mind what they are.

It’s also important to remember that along with rights always go responsibilities.

Coming next: The Responsibilities of Office Workers.

The Artist in the Office

2010-01-23T15:56:00.003-05:00

Karen is working on her fourth novel. Although her first three novels were published and received good reviews, none of them sold enough copies to allow her to quit her day job. Jack is a fine actor who has played lead roles in community theater productions, but he’s never managed to break into the professional scene. Sam would love to create sculptures for a living, but he has a family to support. All of these people are artists who hold nine-to-five office jobs.

People talented in the arts often end up in office jobs for several reasons. First, the arts are extremely competitive, and while opportunities to earn extra pocket money doing temporary work in the arts are fairly plentiful, those that provide the artist with a decent salary and benefits are rare. Also, achieving excellence in the arts takes lots of time and energy, and office jobs with regular hours and reasonable workloads may leave the worker with more of these than all-consuming professions such as teaching, law, or medicine. And artists, like everyone, need to support themselves and their families.

The artist in the office faces a unique set of challenges, including:

1.   Divided energy: While other workers can throw themselves whole-heartedly into their jobs, the artist always has to hold something back for his or her art. This can be difficult in today’s fast-paced, demanding office world. Many artist-office workers sacrifice sleep to practice their art, staying up until two a.m. playing string quartets or getting up at four a.m. to write poetry before work. This can make sleepiness on the job – or on the road getting to the job – a serious problem.

2.    Bottled intensity: When the words to an actor’s soliloquy are circling around in his/her head all day, waiting to be released on stage, the person may feel like a balloon about to burst. For a singer it can be painful to be silent at work, for the dancer to sit still, for a writer to keep words inside that yearn to be typed or written. People with a strong need to express themselves exist in a perpetual state of tension until they’re allowed to do so. For this reason, some artists – particularly writers -- may find ways of practicing their art on the sly at the office, resulting in two further challenges: guilt and the fear of being found out.

3.   Staying in the closet: Few office employers are likely to knowingly hire or promote a poet or a composer, especially in the corporate sector. (In the 1950s, when corporations gave applicants fake “personality tests” which were really designed to screen out independent thinkers, checking a box saying that you wrote poetry would automatically lead to rejection.) Thus, artists may feel they have to stay in the closet rather than “coming out” and letting anyone in their office know their true passions.

4.   Frustrated visionaries: Artists tend to be big-picture thinkers who are great at making connections. While others can’t see past tomorrow, artists can tell you what’s going to happen for the next five years, and they have a great sense of what’s important and what isn’t. In the office world, they may feel frustrated by the pettiness and short-sightedness of those who can’t see what they see, sometimes playing the role of Cassandra, the Greek maiden who was blessed with the gift of foresight but doomed to perpetual disbelief on the part of others.

5.   Loneliness: Artists in the office may feel they have little in common with coworkers who go home and watch T.V. every night while they head for the rehearsal or the studio to start their real work. Non-artist coworkers may find artists’ emotional honesty and intensity threatening and avoid them, causing them pain, especially as artists tend to be thin-skinned and easily hurt..

6.   Boredom and daydreaming: The only thing the true artist really wants to be doing is his or her art. Many artists find their office tasks tedious and unrewarding even though they understand that the work needs to be done and may be perfectly competent at their jobs. The tendency for artists to daydream, however, can sometimes lead to absent-minded mistakes, shame, and other negative consequences.

7.   Starved for beauty: While non-artists are often oblivious to their surroundings, artists may be more sensitive to them. They may love beauty and hate the sterile, cost-cutting décor of modern workplaces. Literary artists may also be annoyed by the colorless, odorless officespeak in which coworkers communicate, though they may have fun satirizing it.

If you’re an artist/office worker struggling with these challenges, it helps to try to find others who are also dealing with them. Perhaps you think you’re the only one, but you might be surprised. I thought the same thing when I started out in my own office job, but since then I’ve met a photographer, a cartoonist, several musicians, two actors, and a whole group of creative writers among my coworkers. If you can’t find any other artists at work, find out if any of your artist friends do office work and what it’s like for them.

If you’re an office employer, you might think you shouldn’t hire artist-types who have their “heads in the clouds,” but I beg to differ. While you probably wouldn’t want your team composed of nothing but artist types, in today’s fast-changing world, creative thinking has become a lot more important than it used to be. You need someone around who can see the big picture and make the connections no one else makes, and you need to listen to that person. One can easily imagine, for example, that if the CIA had had a few artists working for them in the right office – people capable of imagining someone using airplanes as missiles against high-rises, as any good screenwriter might do – perhaps 9-11 wouldn’t have happened.

Coming next: The rights of office workers.

Delicious Traps: Food in the Office

2010-01-19T19:40:00.009-05:00

I still remember the day I discovered the Ice Cream Machine. It was summer, a few weeks after I was hired for my current job. For my first few days, I’d been more-or-less oblivious to my surroundings, but then one afternoon on my way to the bathroom, I happened to glance down towards the end of the long hallway and there it was, all stainless steel and colorful decals, gleaming and beckoning: the Machine. Falling into a hypnotic state, I glided towards it, money in hand. After flattening a dollar-bill, forcing it into a metal slit, and pressing a button, I watched with amazement as the little vacuum-cleaner gizmo reached out to suck up the Eskimo pie, moved it clumsily forward, then released it down into the grab-bin, from which I eagerly snatched it up. As soon as the last, delicious mouthful of creamy chocolate had slid down my throat, however, I was overwhelmed by guilt and anxiety. How was I, a treatment-resistant compulsive overeater, ever going to resist the temptation of making this a daily habit?

Each of us has different dietary needs, and to those of us whose bodies crave sugar and fat, the typical office workday often consists of encounters with one food-trap after another. If this one doesn’t get you, the next one will. You go to a meeting, and spend the whole hour inwardly arguing with yourself about the plate of doughnuts in the center of the table. A coworker invites you out for lunch, and everything on the menu looks great and has a zillion calories. You go into the kitchen for some coffee and someone has left a plate of homemade cookies. You go down to the business office and there’s a candy dish on the counter. You take a break and somehow wind up at the candy machine – again. To the non-food-addicted worker, all of these potential treats are just a way of making work fun; to the food addict, their constant presence is a major stressor.

In a world of emotional disconnection and sensory deprivation, food may constitute an office worker’s prime source of comfort. Using food in this way, however, carries a high price, especially when combined with inactivity and stress. Excessive weight gain is one of the most serious health risks of office life and a silent killer of countless workers. This is most likely to be a problem for those at the bottom of the status hierarchy, who, unlike their superiors, can’t take off to go play racket-ball in the middle of the day. Also, within organizations, food is often treated as a class issue, with healthier foods being served to those at the top of the pyramid than to those at the bottom, executives receiving gourmet salads at their lunch meetings while their underlings get pizza at theirs.

I’m not a food expert, but based purely on personal experience, I’ve come to believe there are three types of eating people do that involve successively higher centers of the brain: reptilian eating, mammalian eating, and homo sapiens eating. Reptilian eating involves mostly reflexes – you see the food item and your hand shoots out like a lizard’s tongue to grab it and stuff it in your mouth, with little involvement from the brain.

Mammalian eating involves the brain’s limbic system, the center of emotions and attachment, particularly of child to parent. For adults, “comfort foods” serve as emotional substitutes for mother’s milk, foods which we obsessively crave, getting a vision of a ham-and-cheese sandwich during a lecture which causes the mouth to begin to water until we finally succumb.

Homo sapiens eating involves the highest, planning-and-reasoning parts of the brain that only humans have. It’s what we do when we think about the long-term consequences of our food choices, plan a nutritious but tasty menu, stick to it, and slow down enough to enjoy what we eat rather than wolfing it down. Most of us do some of all three types of eating, but the more homo sapiens rational eating we can do, as opposed to the other two types, the less likely we are to be overweight.

If you’re struggling with food issues at work, here are few suggestions:

1.    For a few days, write down everything you eat at the office in your Work Companion. Was each eating episode a result of reptilian, mammalian, or rational thinking? How could you have responded differently to the situation?

2.    Bring healthy snacks – fruits, vegetables, low-fat cheese or meat, high-fiber cereals or nutrition bars -- to work with you and keep them in a lunch bucket with ice at the bottom so they’ll always be readily available. If you go to a meeting, take them with you.

3.    Make a list of the food-traps that you routinely encounter and make a realistic plan for dealing with each of them.

4.    Swear off reptilian “lizard eating” at the office. When you feel your hand reaching out towards a plate of cookies, think the word “lizard” and ask yourself if that’s really what you want to be.

5.    When you start to experience a mammalian craving that may end you up at the candy machine, ask yourself what the craving is really about. What do you feel and what do you need? Are you feeling stressed? Bored? Procrastinating? Hurting? What, besides, eating, would help you to feel better? If you feel stressed, close the door and spend a few minutes listening to quiet music. If you’re bored, surf the Net for a few minutes. If you’re procrastinating, face up to the job you’re putting off and get busy. If you’re hurting, take care of yourself.

6.    Some workers feel a strong need to eat in group situations as a way of joining. If this is you, consider allowing yourself a token “joining bite,” a very small amount of what others are eating, but never more than this.

7.    Talk to your co-workers and boss about the issue of foods in the office environment, and find out how they feel. Let them know how difficult you find it to have to work around fattening foods all day. If your floor has a snack machine, ask if nuts or granola bars can be substituted for some of the items. Could popcorn or fruit be served at meetings instead of cookies, or at least as an alternative? In my own workplace, certain foods in the vending machine are labeled as healthy choices.

8.    Whether you go out or bring your lunch, eat as much protein as possible, which may help decrease sugar cravings.

9.    Drink skim milk with your lunch and again with your afternoon snack, which will both fill you up and give you more protein.

10.    If you overeat at lunch, plan to have a light dinner or, if you really overate, skip it altogether.

11.    If, upon occasion, you experience a lizard or mammalian eating episode at work, don’t sit at your desk beating yourself up for the next four hours. Instead, try to learn what you can from the episode and make a rational plan about what you’ll eat for the rest of the day.

12.    Talk with coworkers and boss about starting a group weight-loss program at work or bringing in “Weight-watchers at Work.”

A word to the employer: Food in the workplace is a complex issue for those in charge. While you may feel you’re doing something nice for your employees by ordering cookies for a meeting or a pizza lunch during a special event, this may actually create stress for those struggling with dietary issues. You may be tempted to try to build cameradie in your office by giving workers access to food-treats, but by dulling workers’ brains with food, you lose the benefits of clear thinking on their part and put their health at risk. Invite discussion from employees on this issue and develop policies about what kinds of foods are appropriate for meetings, social gatherings, and vending machines. If workers are interested in starting weight-loss groups, encourage this.

Coming next: The Artist in the Office

Is Working in an Office Good or Bad for You? Part II. The Benefits

2010-01-16T15:15:00.004-05:00

If you’re an office misfit like me, it may be hard for you to believe this, but hand-in-hand with the challenges that the typical office job poses to the worker’s health and well-being go aspects of the situation that can actually enhance them. Here are some of the benefits of having a job like yours:

Security: True, in today’s economy nobody’s job is completely secure. Nevertheless, having at least some degree of confidence that a given amount of money will arrive in the mail or appear on your bank statement at regular intervals can be beneficial, for however long it lasts. And having health insurance is a huge plus, not only because it reduces worry about what will happen if you get sick, but also because of the regular checkups it may pay for, not to mention appointments with a therapist or psychiatrist if you need them. Finally, as you head towards the retirement years, it’s good to know that the dollars are piling up in your pension fund. While the stresses and deprivations of office employment may be formidable, those of having no paycheck or benefits are likely to be even greater.

Structure: If you’ve ever been self-employed or worked as a homemaker, you know how difficult it can be to structure your own time. Although at the office, you may still have to prioritize tasks on your own, chances are other people may sometimes help you with this, if only by giving you deadlines. Knowing what you're to do when frees you from the stress of deciding on your own. And if nothing else, an office job with regular hours gives you a reason to get up in the morning, which is good for all of us.

Safety and Comfort: You’re not straddling a steel beam hundreds of feet above the ground or crawling around at the bottom of a mine. Unless your building’s heating system has serious problems, you’re probably not in danger of frost-bite or heatstroke. Nor is your spine being slowly rearranged by hours of shoveling or vacuuming. Now think about how it would feel to get this job after years of dealing with such challenges. Imagine coming in out of the cold, sitting down in your nice comfy chair, safe and warm. Enjoy!

Order: In working with clients with clutter problems, I’ve often witnessed the positive effects that creating more order can have on people’s moods. The human mind is wired to respond positively to order. Although your own work area may be overwhelmed by a sea of papers, getting the piles under control can be empowering, and you may feel reassured by order in your workplace as a whole. The message of all those neatly labeled file drawers and alphabetized rows of procedure manuals is that in this crazy, chaotic world, there are at least some small pockets of order.

Connection: Although some workers feel lonely or abused in the office, this is by no means universal. Many, in fact, find soul mates whose company makes their workdays happier. Assistants with empathic bosses often come to love them, and workers may also enjoy feeling part of their work teams. Positive connections at work are enormously beneficial to individuals as well as organizations and may make all the difference in how effectively you deal with the challenges.

Learning: Are you taking full advantage of whatever learning opportunities your workplace affords? Even in what may seem like a tedious, dead end job there are always new things to be learned. You can learn about how to do your work better and how to use new tools and technologies. You can learn about your organization, its inner workings, and its place in the universe. You can learn about the people around you and their variations in language, culture, neurochemistry, and personality. Finally, you can always learn new things about yourself. If you’re lucky, you might even be able to take trainings, workshops, or even classes at your employer’s expense. To learn is to keep your mind alive.

Achievement: Nothing is better for your health and well-being than the satisfaction of a job well-done. It’s especially empowering to succeed at something you didn’t think you could do. (Creating this blog made me, a confirmed technophobe, for example, feel like a million dollars!) What’s important is to make sure you let yourself experience a sense of accomplishment as often as possible. While an unrealistic workload may tempt you to just jump right into the next task as soon as you’ve sent the report off that you worked so hard on, don’t. Instead, take a breath and let yourself enjoy what you’ve achieved. And of course it goes without saying that promotions, awards, and merit raises can feel great.

Opportunities: Although you may think your job is a blind alley, you might be surprised. You never know when a new opportunity might appear from around the corner. It might arise from a new project that allows you to shine, a coworker going on leave, a new supervisor appearing on the scene, an idea that pops into your head. It’s all a matter of keeping your eyes open and being willing to step forward when something inside you shouts, “Go for it!!!”

Flow: Most of us have had a few workdays when time went much faster than it normally does. When this happened, you may have been experiencing what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” This is when you become so caught up in what you’re doing that you feel at one with the task and forget all about everything else. While it might be easier to achieve this dancing, cooking, or writing poetry than it is doing routine office work, it’s not impossible, and when flow happens, it’s the greatest feeling there is.

These are just some of the benefits of working in an office – you may be able to think of others. If you want to feel better at work, do yourself a favor: make a personal list of office benefits and tape it to your wall. Then, when a particularly formidable challenge closes in on you, look up and remind yourself of why you took this job in the first place.

Coming next: Food in the Office.

Is Working in an Office Good or Bad for You? Part I. The Challenges

2010-01-12T21:37:00.005-05:00

As a mental health professional doing office work, I've been in a good position to assess the ways in which having an office job can be good for your health and well being and the ways it put them at risk. This post is to share my conclusions. It's actually one of two that go together. Here I’ll talk about the challenges, and in the next post, the benefits (yes, all you office misfits, there really ARE some!). So, without further ado, let me give you my list of all the challenges I can think of that the typical office job – especially at the bottom of the pyramid – poses to mind, body and soul (you may be able to think of others and, if so, please comment):

Confinement: Being shut up in a building, often a single room or, worse yet, the infamous cubicle is, I believe, for many workers, one of the most depression-inducing aspects of the office situation. For one thing, it puts you more at risk for Seasonal Affective Disorder due to lack of sunlight; for another, if you have a certain type of brain-wiring it can make you feel claustrophobic and restless; finally, “cabin fever,” similar to what happens to families when they’re boxed up during a snowstorm, may put a strain on all office interactions. Thus, is it any wonder that so many workers compare their office jobs to doing time in a penitentiary?

Inactivity: Not getting enough exercise is hazardous to your life and also to your mood, not to mention your ability to concentrate. Sitting in the same position all day while typing things into a computer can damage your neck, shoulders, arms, hands, back, or eyes -- though it helps to have good, ergonomic equipment -- and dealing with pain day after day gets old -- and stressful -- very fast.

Deprivation: Neural networks need stimulation to stay active. Without it they stop working. In sterile, colorless, odorless office environments, they often don’t get enough, which can make the worker feel dulled out and dead. In addition, gifted minds may become less gifted over time due to an absence of stimulating conversation, interesting ideas, or mental challenges. As for emotions, workers are supposed to check those at the door when they pick up their smile masks.

Disconnection: Office buildings are often located far away from residential areas, separating workers from loved ones, communities, cultural groups, religious practices, hobbies, and interests. At the same time, workers are discouraged by various taboos from becoming too intimately involved with one another. Finally, they may feel disconnected from the work itself if it doesn’t make best use of their talents. Expecting workers to be productive in such circumstances makes about as much sense as expecting babies to grow and thrive without ever being touched or held.

Frustration: When you try to accomplish a task and obstacles continually block your progress, this can be a major source of stress, anxiety, and anger. In the office world, efforts are blocked by technological breakdowns, interruptions, the unavailability of information or authorization, communication problems, lack of proper training, lack of aptitude for a task, and rigid rules and regulations.

Overwhelm: Due downsizing, economic recession, and gross overestimates of the amount of the amount of time technology really saves, many office workers now struggle with unrealistic workloads. Along with too much work, they may also be trying to do too many different kinds of work after taking on duties of others who have been let go. And most office tasks now require electronic trainings that continually have to be updated. Meanwhile, e-mails and papers pile up.

Toxicity: While bosses and coworkers can often be supportive in the face of all these challenges, they can sometimes also be the exact opposite. Bullying is a serious problem in all types of workplaces, as are discrimination and sexual harassment. Furthermore, groups of workers anywhere may often get caught in dysfunctional patterns comparable to those of unhealthy families. The fact that office workers are confined together for many hours doing work that provides no physical outlet may, however, intensify the negative effects of toxicity on the well-being of workers.

Powerlessness: It’s a known fact that the more control you have over your situation the less likely you are to feel depressed. In today’s office world, even a CEO may feel powerless in the face of social, economic, and political forces impacting their organizations, and those at the bottom of the pyramid may easily feel victimized. People in assistantship positions who have to jump every time someone snaps his or her fingers may be particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of powerlessness.

Uncertainty: In a harsh economic climate, getting fired is a serious possibility for huge numbers of people, many of whom work in offices. In addition, workers may feel unsure about whether to call someone by his/her first name, what’s appropriate to wear, whether it’s okay to take a lunch break, and a host of other issues in a world in which change is continual and rules are rarely spelled out.

These challenges may seem formidable, but take heart. As my next post will show, they’re to some extent offset by psychological benefits, ways that office work can actually be good for you. Furthermore, there are all sorts of ways one can cope with them or – better yet – try to convince management to reduce them. That’s what this blog is about.

Coming next: Is Working in an Office Good or Bad for You? Part II. The Psychological Benefits of Office Life

Music in the Office

2010-01-08T09:35:00.013-05:00

“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,” writes Walt Whitman, whose mechanics and carpenters, shoemakers and housewives all sing as they work.Yet Whitman fails to mention the clerks, bookkeepers, or secretaries who occupied the offices of his day. Even then, apparently, music was taboo in the office.

I’m a person who loves to sing. I take voice lessons and sing in various choral groups. At home or in the car or even walking down the street I’m always singing -- everywhere except in the office. Sometimes I even warble out a few soprano bars from an oratorio in the parking structure on my way into work. Yet the minute I pass through the glass doors of our building, it’s as if someone clamped a hand over my mouth. I’m not exactly sure what would happen if I stood in the hallway and sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow” at the top of my lungs, but something tells me it wouldn’t be good. Singing in the office world is a thing one simply doesn’t do.

While singing or playing an instrument may be taboo, probably for good reason, listening has often – though not always – been considered more acceptable. In the 1980’s, my teenage son showed up at my office one day with a small “FM radio” in a wooden cabinet – one of the originals from the 1960s -- that we'd brought back when my mother moved into a retirement place. From then on, my job was a whole new ballgame. Instead of working in silence, I typed and filed to Brahms quartets and Stravinsky tone poems, listening to Detroit’s classical music station, DQRS. This was fine. I had a private office, the walls were reasonably thick, and no one ever complained. Sometimes people who came in to ask me for a research report would stop and try to guess what piece was being played, which would act as a conversation-starter.

Remembering how music had enlivened my last office job, when I assumed my present post in 2005, I purchased a homey, art-deco-style clock-radio at Best Buy and brought it to work with me, only to discover that the walls of our building were so thick that I could get only one station: the university’s own, which plays nothing but news. Next, I brought a boom-box in and a pile of CD's, but my boss, whose office was next door to mine and who was trying to write grant proposal narratives, complained. After that I endured several years of sterile silence, though it was during this time that I started singing outside of work, perhaps because, as an assistant, I felt I had no “voice” in my job. This helped. If I couldn’t have music around me at work, at least I could come to work filled with it.

Then one day I went downstairs to see another worker, whom I’ll call Doris. When I walked into Doris's office, I realized that she had headphones on and was listening to music as she worked. It was so loud that it rattled the headphones. It took me a few moments to get Doris’s attention, and meanwhile, I was kicking myself for being so foolish and behind the times. Of course, I thought, no one listens to music on a radio anymore, and no one listens so anyone else can hear. I could listen to music online --Duh!

The next day, I brought headphones to work and googled “Classical Music.” I was soon happily infatuated with WRCJ, a station sponsored by the Detroit Public Schools that plays "classical by day and jazz by night." Now I printed out reports to Puccini arias and got to hear all about local Detroit-area music events. But the classics WRCJ plays are on the light side, and I began to crave more serious classics. After some more googling, I wound up a devotee of Portland Public Radio, which suits my musical tastes a little better. And I’ve gotten to know a lot about Portland, though, where I have relatives to whom this makes me feel connected.

This “music therapy” has had a bigger effect on how I feel about coming to work than almost any other adaptation I’ve made to office life. One of the biggest challenges for me at work has always been sensory, intellectual, and emotional deprivation. The sterility of the office situation can make me feel as though I’m stranded in a desert dying of thirst. When I hear music, it feels as though water is flowing in all around me from which I can drink and drink.

Now when I’m typing numbers into an online spreadsheet, music rushes in to fill the cracks and crevices, providing beauty for my senses, a badly needed emotional connection with composers, performers, and announcers, as well as food for my starved intellect. I can literally feel my dying neurons wake up and reconnect. Thanks to WRCJ and Portland Public Radio, I’m no longer brain dead at work.

Of course there are times when I still opt for silence. If I’m having to do a task that requires complex thinking, I usually turn the sound down on the speaker to which my headphones are connected. When the task is finished, I turn it up again and enjoy my reward.

While the flexible culture of my workplace allows me to listen to music with headphones, alas, not all office workers are so fortunate. This is where change is needed. As a mental health professional, I consider it an act of cruelty as well as an organizationally self-destructive act to withhold the benefits of listening to music from office workers. Not only is music emotionally healing, it can also make workers more productive. It is a known fact that not everyone concentrates best in silence. But if your boss is an unimaginative office natural who refuses to believe that anyone's mind works differently from his or hers, one option is to tell your boss that the headphones help you to block out chatter and other extraneous noises that distract you from your work. This should work.

The only downside of listening to music with headphones is that it can make workers feel more cut off from one another. For this reason, I’ve always had a policy of taking them off any time a person approaches me to talk, even though I can still hear over the music.

Coming Next: The Psychological Challenges of Office Life.

Is Your Boss a Bully? How to Know and How to Survive

2010-01-03T14:40:00.009-05:00

One of the blessings of my current office job is a non-bully boss with a heart as big as China. Alas, I have not always been so lucky: personally, I have known what it means to feel bullied at work, and from clients and friends I have also heard stories of outrageous abuses of managerial power.

I define “bullying” as any behavior that is meant to hurt, frighten, or humiliate someone who’s in a weaker position than one’s own. While schoolyard bullies typically use physical strength to bully weaker children, in the office, only the crassest bullies are likely to use muscle-power to terrorize their employees. Instead, their weapons are likely to consist of high voice volume, rapier-like wit, devious strategizing skills, or simply the authority to hire, fire, and promote.

I believe that bullying in the office situation can be particularly toxic relative to other types of workplaces for the simple reason that office employees spend many hours each week boxed up together, often seeing more of their coworkers than they see of their families, sometimes with few visitors from outside. Such circumstances are ideal for cult-like interactions to develop. Confinement plus isolation intensify the effects of attack behaviors, sometimes to deadly levels. Hurtful remarks that most of us could shrug off when made only once become increasingly toxic when repeated on a daily basis.

Here are just some of the behaviors that a bullying boss – or, in some cases, a bullying coworker -- may engage in:

yelling
name calling
using profanity
making offensive jokes
threatening, which can be just a matter of voice tone
talking down to someone, as if to a child or someone very stupid
lecturing
non-constructive criticism that focuses on the person, not the process
belittling a person’s opinions
public shaming
micromanaging
comparing the employee unfavorably to others
withholding necessary information and refusing to answer questions
intruding on someone’s privacy, spying, or stalking
deliberately assigning unrealistic workloads or deadlines
blocking applications for training, leaves, promotions
breaking promises
threatening to give a bad reference if an employee leaves

How do you know if your boss is bullying you? Your best guide is your own feelings. If you consistently walk away from an encounter with your manager feeling hurt, scared, enraged, or humiliated, you’re probably being bullied. If, when you go back to your desk, you waste the next half hour thinking of all the insults you’re going to hurl at your boss on your last day in this job, you’re probably bullied. If you’re also suffering from insomnia, changes in appetite, anxiety, depression, crying spells, or psychosomatic symptoms, it’s even more likely you’re being bullied.

Although this might seem obvious, people who are being bullied often are only half-aware that this is the case. Office taboos against “whining” and the almost infinite capacity humans have to adapt to hostile environments may result in denial on the part of bullying victims, not unlike the denial experienced by victims of domestic violence. Thus, it’s extremely important, if you’re experiencing any of the symptoms described, to ask yourself if bullying could be what’s going on.

Once you’ve named the bullying problem for what it is, it’s important to try to determine the type of bullying you’re experiencing. I can think of four possibilities:

Bullying moments: An otherwise nice person occasionally succumbs to the temptation to take things out on a weaker party. Most of us have probably done this at one time or another, after which we felt bad and apologized to the victim. A few bullying moments does not a bully make, but if the moments become frequent, a bullying pattern is developing – watch out. If this is what’s happening, you may be able to reverse the trend by taking a strong stand NOW.
Frustration bullying: I see this pattern a lot with my clients. An otherwise-decent boss becomes frustrated at an employee’s inability to accomplish a task for which he or she has no aptitude. Instead of recognizing that people have different strengths and weaknesses and either rethinking task assignments or helping the employee to rethink his/her career path, the boss tries to bully the employee into doing something he or she can’t do. The more the boss bullies, the more anxious the employee becomes, causing his/her performance to deteriorate further, resulting in even more bullying from the boss. Boss and employee thus become caught in a vicious circle that has harmful effects on all concerned. If you’re caught in such a circle, you need to act now to break out of it. Next time your boss berates you, you may want to acknowledge your lack of aptitude for the task, but also remind him/her forcefully of your strengths. Your boss may be able to think of better ways to use your strengths by changing the way tasks are distributed, but if not, he or she may be willing to help you find a job that suits your talents better.
Conformist bullying: Many bosses bully because they’re caught in a bullying workplace culture, where oppressing those who can’t fight back is the name of the game. They may even have been pressured by emotionally ignorant superiors to bully their employees. In such cultures, bullying tends to start at the top and work it’s way down through the chain of command. This is unlikely to change, and your best bet is to look for another job if you don’t want to turn into a bully yourself, which is the only other way to survive. Meanwhile, do everything you can to strengthen yourself and increase your options.
Psychopathic bullying: This is hard-core, cold-hearted bullying by a person with anti-social personality disorder, a person who is unable to empathize with others or experience guilt. Prisons are filled with such people, but unfortunately, that’s not the only place they’re found. Since they love power and can be extremely seductive and manipulative, they can often wind up with corner offices, destroying the souls of their employees and, ultimately, the long-term health of their organizations. These people actually experience pleasant neurological effects when they bully, and they also lack the brain chemistry needed to monitor their own behavior. They are incapable of changing without years and years of therapy and/or medication, and they’re not people you can negotiate with. All you can do with them is survive, and you’re lucky if you can do that. If you’re working for a psychopathic bully, get out of the situation as soon as you possibly can. Your sanity and maybe even your life are in danger.

The keyword in dealing with all types of bullying is strength. Remember that bullies are generally also cowards and tend to pick on those whose relative weakness they can sense. Thus, anything you can do to make yourself look, act, or feel stronger in any way will translate to your dealing more effectively with the bully. Here are some suggestions:

Never lose your cool with a bully. No matter how he or she behaves, remain calm.
Work to improve your performance in your job any way you can. The true bully won’t appreciate your efforts, of course, but if you feel confident about the quality of your work, you’ll be able to deal with him or her from a stronger position.
Find someone outside of your work situation in whom you can confide about the bullying and who can help you keep things in perspective.
Document every bullying incident.
Get your resume in order and find out what other employment options you have, which will make you stronger in this situation as well as help you to move on to a healthier workplace.
Engage in ego-boosting activities outside of work. Performing arts or sports are great for getting applause. Publishing an article or chairing a committee can make you feel like somebody, which will make you harder for a bully to demolish.
Join an employees’ committee in your organization that may bring you into contact with the higher-ups. If possible, get to know your boss’s boss.
Visit the Healthy Workplace Bill website to find out about anti-bullying legislation, an exciting new cause that is currently in its infancy. One of the main reasons bullies bully is that the law allows this, and we need to change this. Jump on the bandwagon: NO WORKER DESERVES TO BE BULLIED!!

Coming next: Music in the Office

Office Blues and Office Battleshock: Two Occupational Hazards

2009-12-30T17:00:00.016-05:00

Every profession has its occupational hazards. Construction workers have to worry about falling, miners about being buried alive; chefs run the risk of burning or cutting themselves. You might think that people who sit and stare at a screen all day have no occupational hazards, but this is not the case. Office work carries with it, first of all, the risk of muscular-skeletal problems such as back and neck pain and carpal-tunnel syndrome. But the occupation hazards for office workers are not just physical. As a mental health professional, I’ve come to believe that the psychological hazards for office workers, especially those at the bottom of the pecking order, are formidable, largely because workers and employers alike tend to ignore their existence and thus do little to address them.

Without appropriate protective measures, workers in contemporary offices may fall prey to either or both of two psychiatric conditions which I call office blues and office battleshock. In DSM-IV terms, these conditions translate into “adjustment disorder with depressed mood.” “adjustment disorder with anxious mood” or “adjustment disorder with depressed and anxious mood.” Adjustment disorders are caused by environmental conditions or events, not merely by differences in brain wiring. A single painful event such as a death or a divorce may cause an adjustment disorder, but so may an ongoing, toxic situation such as a bad marriage - or a bad job. I believe many office workers suffer from eight-to-five adjustment disorders that they experience as a result of multiple psychological challenges, including confinement, inactivity, deprivation, disconnection, frustration, overwhelm, toxicity, and uncertainty. These people may be fine outside of the workplace, but when they’re at the office, they become symptomatic.

People with office blues are depressed when they’re at work, though they may be fine when they're not. They dread coming to the office and experience a sinking feeling when they walk in the door. They often feel tired, sad, hopeless, restless, or bored, and they watch the clock a lot. Nothing at work seems real to them -- they just have to “get through the day.” They often feel isolated from others and unable to relate to coworkers. Employees with office blues typically find the work they do unfulfilling and sometimes also unchallenging. Workers who don’t have enough to do may be at greater risk for office blues, though those who’ve been beaten down by bullies or unrealistic workloads may also fall prey to it. They may experience crying spells or rage episodes during their workdays and may try to comfort themselves by snacking or overeating and gain weight or by having an affair with a coworker that gets them into trouble.

I believe that the primary cause of office blues is not stress – though ongoing stress can also lead to blues – but deprivation, which may be sensory, emotional, or intellectual. Quite simply, the brain needs stimulation that it’s not getting and without which neurons begin to die. Many office workers spend their days in “sensory deprivation chambers” – to quote Dilbert – where walls and other surfaces are virtually colorless, decorations minimal, and nature – with its health-giving benefits – totally absent. Those who feel disconnected from coworkers as well as distant loved ones may suffer some of the same effects of emotional deprivation as babies who are never held or touched. Finally, intellectually gifted workers may also be at risk for depression if their hungry minds are given no substantive food to chew on. Thus, it’s not surprising that many office employees wind up with the blues.

To guard against office blues, ask yourself what types of stimulation are lacking during your workday and do anything you can to fill the gap. If you’re suffering from sensory deprivation, bring pictures, personal items, or plants to work and spend time outside whenever you can. If emotional deprivation is the problem, start looking for a soul-mate at work, try to connect with loved ones by phone or e-mail as often as possible, and keep a stuffed animal friend in an empty file drawer for emergency comfort. If your intellect feels starved, read poetry during your bathroom breaks, learn languages from ESL coworkers, attend lectures during your lunch hour, and talk to your boss about how you might best use your talents in your job. These are just a few ideas, but you get the gist of it.

While office blues has been around for centuries, office battleshock seems to have arisen – or at least dramatically worsened – in the last decades of the twentieth century as a result of downsizing, outsourcing, and the electronic revolution. People with office battleshock feel that bullets are raining down on them all the time they’re at work. They race through their days, unable to keep up. Unlike those with office blues, they rarely look at the clock, and when they do, it’s always later than they think. Overwhelmed by e-mails, frustrated by interruptions, constantly multitasking, and thrown into a panic by technological breakdowns, they’re never able to step off the treadmill long enough to get organized. Instead they try to solve everything by working faster and longer in a world that feels ever more nightmarish and unreal. Eventually, assuming they manage to keep their jobs, they may become either physically or mentally sick and wind up on medical leave.

Most people with office battleshock have unrealistic workloads while lacking the support or equipment they need to cope with them effectively. They may also be targets of bullying, discrimination, or sexual harassment and be terrified of losing their jobs. This makes it extremely difficult for them to concentrate on the task at hand, resulting in negative feedback, which makes concentration even more difficult.

Protecting yourself from office battleshock requires a dual approach: on the one hand, you need to optimize your organization, time management, and stress management skills; on the other, you need to communicate assertively with those in charge about your needs and start looking for another job if things don’t change. If your office life is completely out of control, it may be worth taking a few days off to rethink things even if it means you get more behind. It can also be helpful to keep a special type of work log called a Work Companion, which you can learn about in my new book, Making Peace with Your Office Life. The keyword here is “proactive.” People with office battleshock often react to whatever hits them at the moment rather than retaining control over their schedules using a planner and take whatever their bosses or coworkers dish out rather than standing up for themselves.

If you’re suffering from either office blues or office battleshock, it’s important to remember that these are environmentally induced conditions into which any of us can fall. You’re not crazy or stupid or lazy: you’re just in a tough situation, though you always have a choice about how you’ll deal with it.

Coming Next: Is Your Boss a Bully? How to know and how to survive

Welcome, Fellow Office Misfits!

2009-12-27T13:52:00.005-05:00

Do you feel that your office job isn’t “you”?

Do you find it hard to relate to coworkers who love talking about “best practices” and seem to find updates to online systems fascinating?

Do some of the challenges of office life – confinement, inactivity, sensory/emotional/intellectual deprivation, disconnection, frustration, overwhelm, toxicity, uncertainty – seem to bother you more than they do other people?

Do you resent having to flush away hours and hours typing nonsense into a plastic box when your real passion is playing the piano, climbing rocks, writing novels, studying Greek, making quilts, or taking care of your own kids?

Do you dread coming to work every day even though you know millions of unemployed would love to have your job?

If so, you’re in the right place. These days, there are lots of us office misfits out there, and this blog is to be a place where we can congregate and share war stories as well as suggestions for coping with an office world that is at once unnatural, undemocratic, ungenerous, and unrelenting. While to our coworkers, a routine office job may represent success, to many of us it represents either failure to succeed at something else we’d rather be doing or dreams being sacrificed for the sake of loved ones who need our support. Consequently, we may feel lonely and isolated at work, which is why we need each other!

I am a person with a long, though intermittent, career as an office misfit. Altogether, between bouts of following my bliss -- writing, music, social work -- since 1970 I’ve spent over fifteen years working off and on as a clerk, secretary, administrative assistant, and editorial assistant for professors and researchers in a major university. The people I’ve worked for have been lovely, universities are fabulous employers, and I’ve always gotten good performance reviews. The only problem was that, until recently, I could barely stand being at the office.

Partly, this was because I had no desire to like my job. Liking office work, I reasoned, might mean I’d forget all my dreams of greener, non-office pastures and stay stuck in a dead-end job forever. In addition, it might mean giving up my creative, nonconformist, freedom-loving personality and morphing into an unimaginative cog-in-the-wheel, and why on earth would I want to do that? So instead of actively creating an office life that felt good to me, I emotionally checked out every time I walked in the door, shifting into a twilight state in which time at the office wasn’t “real,” just something I had to “get through” until I could get back to “life,” which was everything outside of work.

Thus I flushed away huge chunks of quality time through several long tours of office duty. Only in 2006, after I’d spent about a year in my current job as an administrative assistant, did I begin to question my habitual attitude towards office work. This was because I now had an MSW, ten years’ experience as a psychotherapist, and an understanding that attitude is a matter of choice. (I took the administrative job because my husband I could no longer afford private health insurance, the premiums for which had become astronomical, and university benefits are great.) As a trained mental health professional, I knew how unhealthy it was to shut down your feelings for whole days at a time. Thus, I began to do a kind of abbreviated journaling at work to try to pinpoint, for the first time, the specific causes of my dissatisfaction so I could do something about them. As I began to address problems one-by-one, I started feeling better and better, and although I’m still not crazy about office work, I do feel that my work time is now a full-fledged, sometimes even enjoyable part of my life, not just something I have to get through.

Meanwhile, I began to realize that I wasn’t the only person in the world who disliked office work, as evidenced by the popularity of Scott Adams’s Dilbert, the T.V. show “The Office,” and movies like “Office Space.” What was it about the office experience, I wondered, that made it such a downer for so many people? Having already published several books as an MSW, I made it a project to research this question and try to come up with some ideas on how to feel better at work. This made my job a lot more fun, as I could now consider it research! It also resulted in a new book, Making Peace with Your Office Life, which will be released March 16, 2010.

Now the book is finished, and I've realized that it's just a starting point. A book is one-way communication, and what I'd like now is something back: I'd like to know more about how others experience the challenges of office life. Which is why I’m starting this blog, a place where people who define themselves as “office misfits” -- i.e., beautiful swans who are often regarded as ugly ducklings by less imaginative workplace geese -- can share suggestions about how to cope with the challenging realities of the modern workplace. If you’re one of these people, welcome. I look forward to reading your comments, and I can promise you that no one here will be allowed to accuse you of “whining.”

A word of warning: It hasn’t happened much, but a few times someone has actually been fired because of what he or she wrote on a blog. For that reason, I suggest you use only fictitious names for individuals or organizations in your comments. Also, if your employer uses fascistic management methods, you may want to write your comments from home rather than at work.

Coming Next: Office Blues and Office Battleshock – What they are and how to counter them.