Clickhole: 8 Ways Your Ordinary Office Job is Slowly Killing You

Serious advice here. Including:

Sitting too long and holding your breath the entire time

According to all recent findings, sitting in one place too long can lead to hypertension, blood clots, and heart disease, while holding your breath for an extended period of time reduces the flow of oxygen to your brain and slowly shuts down your circulatory system. Avoid this by standing up every few hours at work and occasionally breathing.

8 Ways Your Ordinary Office Job Is Slowly Killing… (no author listed) ClickHole (22 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

Lifehacker: 10 Unusual Ways to make your To Do List Work

Unless the first way is to hire someone else to do the other nine, I’m suspicious. But Lifehacker’s Melanie Pinola writes persuasively about methods of getting stuff down onto a list and then doing it. I don’t agree with them all but it’d be boring if I did. Here’s one unfair sample from her ten ways: she doesn’t claim it’s the best and I don’t think it’s representative of the rest but I just liked it as a dramatist:

Turn Your To-Do List into a Story

Visualise and map out your to-dos into a story, a narrative for your day. This storytelling technique can not only help motivate you to complete the tasks, it could boost your memory and help you make better sense of your days. There are other ways to visualise your to-do list that can prompt you to act more.

Top 10 Unusual Ways to Make Your To-Do List Actually Doable – Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker (22 Jun 2015).

Read the full piece.

Enough with introvert vs extrovert

Shyness and being outgoing don’t have anything to do with it; it’s more about where we get our energy from. In fact, the differences are pretty simple:

Introverts get exhausted by social interaction and need solitude to recharge.
Extroverts get anxious when left alone and get energy from social interaction.
That’s it. There’s nothing about shyness, being a homebody, or how adventurous you are. Both types can be social, both can creative, both can be leaders, and so on.

Let’s Quit It with the Introvert/Extrovert Nonsense – Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker UK (26 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

Man Just Needs To Power Through Another Day Of Not Being Broke And Unemployed

From The Onion:

CHICAGO—After listing off a litany of reasons why he cannot stand his current job, local 27-year-old Don Rutland told reporters Friday that he just needs to power through another day of not being broke and unemployed. “It’s so unbearable right now, but I’m just going to buckle down and make it to the end of the day,” said the man who is not in the midst of an agonizing nine-month job search and can pay all of his bills on time with the money from the paycheck he receives every other week.

News In Brief – The Onion (25 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

Caring for your partner with technology

Over on MacNN.com there is a quietly remarkable article about using and being required to use technology when caring for someone. In the last few days, Managing Editor Mike Wuerthele’s wife had a stroke. Naturally you know where he is now both physically – constantly in hospital with her – and emotionally. During these especially hard first days, he’s finding that technology and particularly iPads are a recurring feature. Reading his piece, you feel that sometimes this is aggravating as it’s another form on another iPad but other times that it’s a help, that these devices and others are helping the recovery process.

It’s a fascinatingly personal article despite his efforts to avoid being personal at all: he doesn’t name his wife, he doesn’t say which hospital they’re in. He’s written it and will be back writing more specifically to bring some attention to medical aid and hopefully let others know what is available and what it all achieves. His article does exactly that but read it to see how a partner and a carer’s pain trembles just under the surface.

Read Technology in Recovery: Out of the ER, into the fire on MacNN.

Video: Don’t Follow Your Passion, Not Exactly

Not everyone has a passion for something, not everyone has found what they could be so passionate about. But even if you have, this fella argues that you shouldn’t pursue it as your life’s career. Rather than look for the thing that fires you up the most, look for the thing that you’re best at. That either sounds like defeatism or hair-splitting but I suppose if you’re great at something and you do it for a living and it goes well, you can fake the passion.

Ben Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz – it’s a venture capital firm and you know what crazy creative bastards venture capitalists are – just gave a commencement speech at his old university and boiled this idea down.

Ben Horowitz, cofounder and partner of famed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, delivered the commencement address at his alma mater Columbia University last month and offered up some pretty unconventional career advice. The gist: don’t follow your passion. 

Via 99U

Blowing bubbles before your next meeting

Not you. Your calendar. You can’t actually buy it, I’m afraid, but there is a concept device called monYay: Notifly – and that’s a really hard thing to type because autocorrect goes crazy trying to fix that cap Y and change the second word into notify – which sits on your desk until it’s time to go to your next meeting. Then:

Ideo_Notifly2_620px1

The monYay bit of the name comes from wanting to change Mondays into Mon-yays! and I can get behind that even though I quite like Mondays. Read a little more on the official website, along with lots of other excellent ideas.

Via Swiss Miss.

Increase your energy by resting

Nobody ever said that productivity advice had to be deep or clever. Unfortunately someone may have said it has to go on at length:

Schedule rest time first. I know that it sounds counterintuitive but if you want to increase your energy, you need to have adequate recovery from the stresses and strains of daily life. This requires rest. Identify the amount of rest that you require and block that time out of your calendar. Nothing short of an emergency should interfere with this time.

When you are well rested, you are more energetic and ready to take on the world. You can give your all to every task because you know that you will have sufficient opportunity to recover from your efforts. Prioritise your rest time.

5 Habits which increase your energy and productivity – Carthage Buckley, Coaching Positive Performance (undated, probably 22 June 2015)

Read the full piece for the five habits and to find out that Carthage Buckley is a real name.