The moment your feet touch the floor each morning, you begin to set the tone for your entire day. So it’s worth asking yourself: Does my morning routine fuel productivity? Or does it just prime my brain for distraction and procrastination? Do I start the morning with intentional practices that energize and motivate me? Or do I scroll mindlessly on social media and create unnecessary anxiety?
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance can be difficult in today’s culture that celebrates being always on. In fact, 94 percent of 1,000 professionals surveyed by the Harvard Business Review said they put in 50 or more hours a week at work. What’s more, nearly half that group clocked in more than 65 hours a week.
In today’s always on workplace culture, where employees are rewarded and oftentimes expected to work long hours and communicate continuously, balance can be hard to find. In fact, more and more people are prioritizing work over their personal lives, tipping the scales toward burnout and stress.
Work-life balance has been around for a lot longer than the Millennial generation. Despite their focus on creating better work-life balance, the term has been in use since the 80’s.
Someone once said “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” Okay, well, it was the sage wisdom of Mrs. Gump, but regardless, it’s a great metaphor for how unpredictable life can be. Sometimes it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, sometimes it’s disappointing, and other times it’s so incredible you need to stop and savor the moment because you know that it’s fleeting. This rings true in every facet of our day-to-day, especially in professional settings. There is so much that is beyond our control, so how we approach life directly impacts our work attitude and how we navigate our workday.
While there are many approaches, there are 4 that have a big impact on success.
Decision fatigue is something everyone experiments in their life, especially during periods of high emotional or intellectual distress. In order to cut out its energy loses, your brain reaches a point where it simply refuses to make decisions. It’s that moment when you start answering most questions with “I don’t care”. That doesn’t really mean that you don’t care, but it is actually a way of saying “I refuse or I simply can’t make a decision about that right now”. The more decisions you need to make, the more likely you are to become tired of deciding. Eventually, you either give up or make hasty decisions.
We all have a work conflict at one point or another. And often heated debates are the way to boost productivity. Often, the feelings we experience can be too much: anger, frustration, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, shame, and anticipation. Yet, sharing how you feel in a work conflict may not be the best strategy.
Teams today are key to organizational success. It’s teams that are the fundamental to any accomplishment or progress. Gone are the days of incredible individual contributions. Making decisions remains, however, the charge of individuals -managers, leaders, supervisor, coordinators. On the other hand, decision-making is costly, and there is even such a thing as decision fatigue.
Work changes occur all the time, in every company committed to making progress. However, one of the biggest obstacles that managers need to overcome along the way is people’s resistance to change. Managers often take it as a given, thinking it’s human nature. Even though there is some truth in that, it’s in their power to implement change in a way that would make it easier for everyone to get on board.
Team decisions are a productivity enhancing process. In short, it enables teams to take on some executive-level decision-making. It’s based on distilling managerial-level challenges. Clearing the decision space for the leader. Allowing the leader to focus on what’s important. Long-term strategy. Or large, tough spontaneous issues. Team decisions might sound like pampering the leader. Like they’re a way to cut down on leadership decisions.
But team decisions are more than treating the leader as a glass canon. They’re a way to offer some head space and focus. Effectively, they enable managers to make headway on strategically important decisions. Meanwhile, the team structure takes care of the rest; to an extent, they’re default decisions.
