All About Working

If you have ever wondered if you are a workaholic or a person who works hard, why not find out?  The Wall Street Journal online published a 25 question test that you can take to find out.

The test takes about 10 minutes and the results come back instantly.  Workaholics will enjoy that!  My own results showed that I am a hard worker but not a workaholic.  It took a long time for me to achieve that status.  But the benefits of having a life besides working have been worth it.

What happens when the workaholic status becomes company culture badge of honor?  Can people maintain that pace and still be productive?  Comments on this are appreciated.

Here’s an article that was published on examiner.com by Jennifer L. Taylor that discusses “10 Tips for Successful Tweeting” to help you become a more successful tweeter.  Some of the ideas include:

• Completing your profile
• Getting to know your audience
• Working with Twitter on smartphones

After my own experience yesterday with not being able to access Twitter, I realize how dependent I am becoming on this new tool.  So these tips are coming at the right time!

What happens when you walk into work one day and you’re told “thanks for all your hard work, but we have to let you go.” You might be given time to pack up your possessions, but what about all the things you have on your computer that the company owns?

In a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Wiped Out: Along with Jobs, Laid-Off Lose Photos, Emails,” Joseph DeAvila addresses this issue:

Michele Wallace had worked for Medialink Worldwide Inc. for 18 years when the New York video-distribution company laid her off last May. When the company’s information-technology staff quickly shut down her computer and her BlackBerry, the senior vice president of client services lost family photos and every personal and business contact on her cellphone and computer.

“I couldn’t even call my sister because I don’t know her number off the top of my head,” says Ms. Wallace, now a 47-year-old managing director at Mega Media Worldwide and living in Asbury Park, N.J. “I know you shouldn’t even have that stuff on the computer,” she says. But in the course of working 10- to 12-hour days for several years, “you don’t pay as much attention as to how much is personal on your computer.”

We normally don’t cover articles about being laid off on this blog, but we covering this one, because it involves work practices that can be followed when someone is employed that will help avoid the scenario described above.

This article can be found here and it is well worth a few minutes of your time to read.

Looking for techniques and methods to get more done? If you can invest 3.04 minutes of time to watch a video by the Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Rivera, you’ll get some good ideas.

The video focuses on two main approaches to productivity improvement. One, called “life-hacking,” emphasizes technology and encourages the use of gadgets and software. The second, sometimes called GTD for “Getting Things Done,” emphasizes to-do lists and focusing on one task at a time.

Click here to find the article and the video.

There is a terrific article this morning on the New York Times online entitled LinkedIn Privacy Settings: What You Need to Know .

Since LinkedIn doesn’t require you to share the same types of personal information as you do on Facebook, the service’s privacy settings appear to be much more straightforward than its less business-oriented competitor. But if you leave the default settings in place, you might be surprised to know what information you make public on LinkedIn.

If you are a LinkedIn user, be sure to take a couple of minutes and read this. You can find it right here.

Twitter is adding a search feature to its site. According to e-Week.com:

The company has had a search function for some time at search.twitter.com, but only began putting a search box on a growing number of users’ pages starting March 6. Twitter has also included a “Trends” menu where users can see the subjects currently generating the most online traffic (such as “Watchmen movie”).

The move promises to increase competition with Facebook and Google, which have been trying to strengthen their search and social networking capabilities.

This article is being added not only to the Technology category here on this blog, but also to Working Smarter. Why? Because the ability to search from a center where messaging is occurring is good time saver and a concise way to work.

Doesn’t that look good? I have to thank the wonderful people over at Life Hacker for this one. I thank them for the link to the Simple Dollar and for this picture that made me want to go to the kitchen immediately and start cooking.

This is a little off the beaten path from what is usually written on this blog. But I thought the idea behind it was so good, I wanted to share it.

I know how difficult it can be in the morning to have a decent breakfast when you’re trying to run out the door to get to work. So this might help. And besides, in these tight times, it’s a great way to save money and get a good meal.

Here’s how the post begins:

My solution to all of these problems is pretty simple: just make a big batch of healthy breakfast burritos during the weekend and freeze them up. Not only are the burritos really healthy, they’re also very cheap to prepare, and they’re very convenient in the morning since you can microwave them as you’re getting ready and eat them on the go.

You can make a big pile of healthy, tasty breakfast burritos for less than seventy five cents a pop in less than an hour. In fact, I recently did it myself and I’ll walk you through the whole process.

Click here to go to the Simple Dollar online and read what you need to have to make these breakfast goodies and how to handle the freezing process.

Bon Appetit!

Zappos, the company that began on the internet selling shoes and now has 1,500 employees and sells shoes, accessories and more, recently debuted No. 23 on Fortune magazines 2009 list of Best Companies to Work For. From an article online – Las Vegas Sun:

A Dance Dance Revolution machine, free popcorn and free books greet visitors in the lobby.

However, the online retailer’s relaxed, fun-loving and close-knit family atmosphere that has won over employees, investors and industry watchers alike runs far deeper than that. The appeal becomes clearer when approaching CEO Tony Hsieh working at his desk.

Hsieh doesn’t have a corner office. He doesn’t even have a full cubicle. His workstation, in fact, is indistinguishable from any of the other hundreds of employees in the building — except maybe for the rainforest decorations hanging from the ceiling and the giant inflatable monkey.

“The best way to have an open-door policy is not to have a door in the first place,” Hsieh said.

Hsieh is determined to have a corporate culture that is warm and people oriented:

Hsieh adopted 10 Core Values to create a corporate culture, ranging from No. 1, “Deliver WOW through service,” to No. 10, “Be humble.”

And how often do you hear a CEO say this?

To truly live by those values, Hsieh said, employees have to be free to be themselves.

All leading to this:

Really, at the end of the day, it’s about alignment — everyone moving the same direction and working toward the same goal. For us, that goal is to have the absolute best customer service.”

The entire article from the Las Vegas Sun online can be found here.

Some of the must-have features for 2009 in so-called “smart” phones — think mobile computers that make calls — include touch screens with “clickability,” sophisticated accelerometers (which can sense when the phone is changed from portrait to landscape view and adjust the screen accordingly), full QWERTY keyboards, GPS capability, high-resolution cameras with flash, 3G networking and WiFi connectivity.

That quote comes from a terrific article published online by photonics.com.

It’s well worth taking a few minutes out to read this and see see what the big cell phone winners from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas were earlier this month.

Of special note is the Palm Pre which won Best Cell phone, Best of CES (the first cell phone to receive the award) and the People’s Voice.

Also take note that Sony is using one of its tried and true winning names with The W508 Walkman from Sony Ericsson. Can they duplicate the success they had with the Walkmans?

Other phones are mentioned but I was also impressed with the mention of the new Blackberry especially about its new thinness.

Here’s an article that ran in the StarTribune.com Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota online newspaper last night. It really got me thinking about my current state of avoiding exercise. The price to be paid is very high.

Sheila Kromer doesn’t want any help.

She enjoys smoking and she doesn’t want to quit.

Nor does she want advice on how to eat right. Or how to exercise. “I’m smart enough to take care of myself,” she says.

As a chemist at 3M, she’s had plenty of chances to join health and fitness programs on the job. But like many Minnesotans, she’s simply chosen not to.

Now, that choice is starting to get costly.

At a growing number of workplaces, employees are paying a price for refusing to take part in wellness programs. Some face hundreds of dollars a year in higher costs for health insurance. Some are missing out on cash and gifts used to reward their colleagues — not for their work, but for the way they eat, exercise and conduct their lives.

And then, more:

Experts say that upwards of 40 percent of U.S. medical costs are linked to obesity, smoking and other lifestyle factors — a statistic not lost on the nation’s employers. As a result, more than half of large corporations now use incentives to get employees to shape up, a 2008 survey found.

Read the rest of the article here.

I’m self-employed – no one to turn to for help with these kinds of expenses. It really raised a red flag to me about how I should start paying more attention to this.