The last few months, I’ve been wondering about something. I am self-employed. I work in an office by myself. No one watches me or looks over my shoulder. I work flexible hours.  Do those hours really add up to 40 or more a week? My Productivity Experiment I did an experiment in which I calculated all…

So many people talk about boosting productivity, and making the most of their 40 hour work weeks. And yet, outside of the United States, not every country adheres to the “standard” 40 hour work week…which begs the question: should we be working harder, or working smarter? The History of 40 Hour Work Week (And the…

The keys to going home gracefully It’s a myth that you will one day be able to go home from a clear desk. It’s never going to happen. The plain truth is that there will always be work undone at the end of the day. This gives you three options: 1) Go home, but take the…

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Sudbury psychiatrist, has written a book about the world we live in in regards to information overload and the attention deficit disorder it causes. “They’re juggling deadlines, games, rehearsals, and school meetings,” says Hallowell. “They’re worrying about how the grocery shopping, cooking, and laundry will get done. People want to do all…

As I look back at this week’s postings on Slow Leadership, I notice that most of them were concerned with helping people stop wasting their time and energy on fruitless endeavors. Take the first post, entitled: To Succeed, First Forget About Leadership Technique. In it, I argued that belief that success—in just about any…

You’re driving along the freeway. The traffic is heavy and the weather is bad; there’s water on the road and occasional patches of ice. You’re already late for an appointment and you’re worrying that your boss is going to find out and get mad at you, so you’re driving way too fast for the conditions…

A leader forced to utilize “hamburger management” is like a cordon bleu chef told to work as a short-order cook and produce nothing but hamburgers with french fries every day. Any organization that uses this approach is like a diner who eats nothing else. The first becomes bored, frustrated and disillusioned; the second becomes sick…

This week, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what counts as a “civilized” corporate and workplace culture. That’s because I’m deep into the editing process with my new book, Slow Leadership: How to Civilize Your Workplace, which will be published this Fall. The more I think about it, the more is seems to me that much of corporate America — much of the Western corporate world, if it comes to that — has taken a large step backwards in recent years in providing truly civilized working conditions.

It’s easy to get intense about your work. But it’s a major step from there to treating your job with such intensity it starts to take over nearly all of your life. Don’t just shrug off burnout as superstition or think you’re immune. It’s a serious issue that can wreck lives and produce problems for other people as well.

Anne Fisher, Fortune senior writer has an article talking about why ‘less is more’. The main point to note in the article: when human brain is tired and stressed out, it becomes harder to come up with new ideas. It is suggested that sometimes it is good to spend some time to rewind, and look…