Consultancy Matters

Wasting time is one of the biggest reasons you aren't more successful right now. Review how you've spent your time today, and you'll likely find plenty of unproductive time that you may not have even spent relaxing or preparing to be productive later.

Simply planning your day can make a big difference. Science has a lot to say about this. For example, it turns out that our willpower may be better earlier in the day and we need to take advantage of that.

The idea is that planning creates a guideline the brain wants to stick to. Here's more on how that helps create success, as well as some other approaches that can help.

According to a seven-year study on workers’ performance, an inability to make this break between professional and personal time ranked among the top-10 stressful situations that people were least effective at handling. Technology has, of course, exacerbated the problem, offering both convenience and imposition, by putting our workplaces just a touch screen away. How can we all do a better job of leaving work at work, so our home lives become more pleasurable and less stressful?

Before leaving the office…

Do one more small task. Make a short phone call, sign a document, or respond to an email. This way you end your day on a positive note of completion. There’s gratification in knowing that you elected to push yourself and now have one less thing to do the following morning. And, as research from Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle, has shown even “small wins” can enhance your mood.

Write a to-do list. On paper or digitally, make a record of all the tasks you need to accomplish, ideally in order of importance. When my organization worked with the New York Presbyterian Hospital Cornell Medical Center to survey more than 1,000 workers living in the northeast we found that the practice of building such lists was among the top three most effective skills for enhancing work performance and positively redirecting stress.

When we find our work meaningful and worthwhile, we are more likely to enjoy it, to be more productive, and feel committed to our employers and satisfied with our jobs. For obvious reasons, then, work psychologists have been trying to find out what factors contribute to people finding more meaning in their work.

Top of the list is what they call “task significance”, which in plain English means believing that the work you do is of benefit to others. However, to date, most of the evidence for the importance of task significance has been correlational – workers who see how their work is beneficial to others are more likely to find it meaningful, but that doesn’t mean that task significance is causing the feelings of meaningfulness.

Now Blake Allan at Purdue University has provided some of the first longitudinal evidence that seeing our work as benefiting others really does lead to an increase in our finding it meaningful. “These results are important both for the wellbeing of individual workers and as a potential avenue to increase productivity,” he concludes in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour.

Too many companies bet on having a cut-throat, high-pressure, take-no-prisoners culture to drive their financial success.

But a large and growing body of research on positive organizational psychology demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, but that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line.

Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.

First, health care expenditures at high-pressure companies are nearly 50% greater than at other organizations. The American Psychological Association estimates that more than $500 billion is siphoned off from the U.S. economy because of workplace stress, and 550 million workdays are lost each year due to stress on the job. Sixty percent to 80% of workplace accidents are attributed to stress, and it’s estimated that more than 80% of doctor visits are due to stress. Workplace stress has been linked to health problems ranging from metabolic syndrome to cardiovascular disease and mortality.