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Aaaahhh… Summer vacation. Depending on your fancy it’s time to lie on the beach with a good book, wear out your shoe soles exploring a strange city or scream your head off skydiving or in some other adrenaline-driven pursuit.

But invariably the vacation ends and you go back to work, and that transition can be a little rough.

Do you know that feeling? You come back to work happy and full of energy – but by the end of the first work day, you’re already feeling tired an unhappy. It’s almost like you didn’t have a vacation at all.

So here are a five tips to help you stay happy when you get back to work.

1: While you’re away, get away

Don’t take the company mobile and laptop on vacation. Don’t check your voice mail and email.

The point of a vacation is to get away and go to a different mental space, and if you’re preoccupied with work, chances are you’ll both enjoy your vacation less and get less relaxation out of it.

2: Let yourself get behind

When you get back from your vacation, you will invariably have fallen behind and have a lot of work to catch up on. There will be a ton of voice mails, emails and tasks that need your attention. THAT’S FINE!!! It’s unavoidable and it’s not your fault.

Look at it this way: If you can leave the company for two weeks and there’s no work waiting for you, you’re not really needed there.

So don’t expect to have a clear desk on your first day back – allow yourself to be behind and to catch up steadily.

3: Start with some easy tasks

When you get back to work, don’t immediately throw yourself at the toughest, hairiest most complicated tasks you have. Ease into work by doing something easy and simple – something you know you can do. Once you’re back in full swing you can go at the tough tasks.

4: Don’t overwork to catch up

It can be really tempting to work long hours to catch up after your vacation. DON’T!!! Work regular hours and stick to point 2 above.

5: Ask for help if you need it

If you find it difficult to catch up, don’t be afraid to ask your co-workers or manager for help. It’s important for you to be aware of any outstanding tasks that may have become critically late in your absence, and if you could use some help – it’s your responsibility to ask for it! It also greatly increases the chance that you will actually get help.

If you use these tips, you may find that your vacations feel more like vacations and that you can be even happier at work.

But on a fundamental level, there is something wrong with the idea that work drains you of energy and weekends and vacations recharge you. I know that this is how most people feel – but that’s not how it should be.

If work typically drains you of energy – if every week ends up draining you of life so you barely make it to Friday afternoon where you can finally relax – then something’s wrong. Don’t accept that state of affairs just because everyone else does.

When you’re happy at work, work can actually be a regenerative activity that leaves you with more energy so you leave the workplace with a spring in your step most days!

And THAT is the ultimate way to beat the post-vacation blues: Have a job you actually like!

Your take

Do you ever get the post-vacation blues? What do you do to beat’em? Have you also noticed that vacations these days seem to be more tiring than work (as this article says)?

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We all want to increase productivity and get more done with our working hours.

There’s just one problem: Most people’s view of productivity comes from the industrial age. This leads to some fundamental misconceptions about work, including these:

• If you work more hours, you get more work done.
• Adding more people to a project means you can finish sooner.
• Productivity is more or less constant and can be reliably predicted and scheduled.

For knowledge workers, i.e. anyone who works with information rather than physically producing stuff, these beliefs are not only wrong, they’re actively harmful.

So here is my suggestion for 5 new rules of productivity for knowledge workers.

1: Productivity varies wildly from day to day. This is normal.

In an industrial setting, production and output can be planned in advance barring accidents or equipment failure. Basically you know that if the plant operates for X hours tomorrow you’ll produce Y widgets.

For knowledge workers you can’t possibly know in advance whether tomorrow will be a day where you:

• Reach a brilliant insight that saves you and your team weeks of work.
• Work tirelessly and productively for 12 hours.

Or the day where you:

• Spend 8 hours gazing dejectedly into your screen.
• Introduce a mistake that will take days to find and fix.

This variation is normal – if a little frustrating. It also means that you shouldn’t judge your productivity by the output on any given day but rather by your average productivity over many days.

I have never seen this more clearly than when I was writing my first book. Some days I’d sit myself down in front of my laptop and find myself unable to string two words together. Some mornings I banged out most of a chapter in a few hours. Writing is a creative process. I can do it when I’m in the mood. Trying to write when I’m not, is a frustrating exercise in futility. On the days where I couldn’t write, I’d go do something else. Probably wakeboarding :)

The result: I wrote the book in record time (a couple of months all told), the book turned out really well AND I enjoyed the writing process immensely.

Three things you can do about this:

1. Don’t make project plans based only on your maximum productivity days. Not every day will be like that. Base your schedules on your average productivity.
2. Don’t beat yourself up on the low-productivity days. It’s normal, it’s part of the flow and these days have value too. I like to think that on these days, my subconscious mind is working on some really hairy complicated problem for which the solution will suddenly appear fully formed in my mind.
3. If you do have a day where you get very little done, why not go home early and relax or get some private chores done?

2: Working more hours means getting less done

Whenever we fall behind, it’s tempting to start working overtime to catch up. Don’t! Instead, commit this graph to memory:

It comes from this excellent presentation on productivity. Read it!

Here’s another data point:

In 1991, a client asked me to conduct a study on the effects of work hours on productivity and errors…

My findings were quite simply that mistakes and errors rose by about 10% after an eight-hour day and 28% after a 10-hour day…

I also found that productivity decreased by half after the eighth hour of work. In other words, half of all overtime costs were wasted since it was taking twice as long to complete projects. After the study was done, a concerted effort was made to increase staffing.

(Source)

This may be counter-intuitive but it’s important to grasp: For knowledge workers there is no simple relationship between hours worked and output!

Three things you can do about this:

1. Don’t work permanent overtime. In fact, some studies indicate that knowledge workers are the most productive when they work 35 hours a week.
2. Take breaks during the work day and make sure to take vacations.
3. Experiment to find out what schedule works best for you. Five eight-hour days? Four longer days and a long weekend?

3: Working harder means getting less done

In an industrial environment, you can most often work harder and get more done. An increase in effort means an increase in productivity.

For knowledge workers, the opposite is true. You can’t force creativity, eloquence, good writing, clear thinking or fast learning – in fact, working harder tends to create the opposite effect and you achieve much less.

Three things you can do about this:

1. Take the pressure off yourself and your team. Even if you make a mistake or miss a deadline the world probably isn’t going to end. Less pressure means higher productivity.
2. Schedule a work load equivalent to only 80% of your work week. Trust me, you won’t be wasting your remaining 20% – but you will be more relaxed and more creative.
3. In the words of Fred Gratzon: “If it feels like work, you’re doing it wrong”. If you find that most of what you do is a struggle, this is a sure sign that you are not at your most creative and productive.

4: Procrastination can be good for you

In an industrial setting, any time away from the production line is unproductive time – therefore all procrastination is bad. Search for procrastination on google and you’ll find a massive number of articles on how to stop procrastinating and get stuff done.

They will tell you that there is only one reliable way to get stuff done:

1. Check todo-list for next item
2. Complete item no matter what it is
3. Go to step 1

They’ll tell you that if only you had enough willpower, backbone, self-control and discipline, this is how you would work too.

Well guess what: Knowledge workers don’t work that way. Sometimes you’re in the mood for task X and doing X is ridiculously easy and a lot of fun. Sometimes doing X feels worse than walking barefoot over burning-hot, acid-covered, broken glass and forcing yourself to do it anyway is a frustrating exercise in futility.

Sometimes procrastinating is exactly the right thing to do at a particular moment. This is largely ignored by the procrastination-is-a-sign-of-weakness, the-devil-finds-work-for-idle-hands crowd.

Three things you can do about this:

1. Procrastinate without guilt. Do not beat yourself up for procrastinating. Everybody does it once in a while. It doesn’t make you a lazy bastard or a bad person. If you leave a task for later, but spend all your time obsessing about the task you’re not doing, it does nothing good for you.
2. Take responsibility, so that when you choose to procrastinate, you make sure to update your deadlines and commitments. Let people know, that your project will not be finished on time and give them a new deadline.
3. Remember that “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted” (according to John Lennon).

5: Happiness is the ultimate productivity enhancer

The single most efficient way to increase your productivity is to be happy at work. No system, tool or methodology in the world can beat the productivity boost you get from really, really enjoying your work.

I’m not knocking all the traditional productivity advice out there – it’s not that it’s bad or deficient. It’s just that when you apply it in a job that basically doesn’t make you happy, you’re trying to fix something at a surface level when the problem goes much deeper.

Three things you can do about this:

1. Get happy in the job you have. There are many things you can do to improve your work situation – provided you choose to do something, rather than wait for someone else to come along and do it for you.
2. Remember to appreciate what is already good about your job. Often we forget, and overfocus on all the annoyances, problems and jerks. This is a natural tendency called negativity bias, but it also tends to keep us unhappy because we forget what works.
3. If all else fails, find a new job where you can be happy. If your current job is not fixable, don’t wait – move on now!

The upshot

The industrial age view of productivity has serious limitations when applied to knowledge workers – but it remains the dominant view and still informs much of our thinking and many of our choices at work. Let’s change this!

This is not without it’s challenges. The old view of productivity may no longer apply, but it does give managers an illusion of control and predictability. The new rules are… messy. Less predictable. They rely less on charts and graphs – and more on how people feel on any given day.

It ultimately comes down to this: Do we want to stick with a model that is comforting and predictable but wrong or are we ready to face what REALLY works?

Your take

What about you? When are you the most productive? What is your optimal number of working hours per week? What stimulates or destroys your productivity? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.

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If you’re unhappy at work, I’m sure that the thought “Man, I really should quit!” crosses your mind occasionally.

So why don’t you?

Even if you long desperately to quit, to get away from your horrible workplace, annoying co-workers or abusive managers, you may hesitate to actually do anything about it, because right on the heels of that impulse come a lot of other thoughts that hold you back from quitting.

Each of these excuses may sound to you like the voice of sanity, offering perfectly good reasons why it is in fact better to stay and endure that bad job just a little longer, but look a little closer, and they don’t really hold up. What they do instead is keep you trapped in a job that is slowly but surely wearing you down.

Here are 10 of the most common bad excuses for staying in a bad job.

#1 “Things might get better”

That jerk manager might be promoted out of there. That annoying co-worker could quit.That mound of overwork could suddenly disappear.

On the other hand, things might also get worse. Or they might not change at all. If you’ve already done your best to improve your job situations and nothing’s happened, just waiting around for things to improve by themselves make little sense.

#2 “My boss is such a jerk but if I quit now, he wins.”

Who cares. This is not about winning or losing, this is your life. Move on, already.

#3 “I’m not a quitter.”

Well guess what these somewhat successful people have in common: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Tiger Woods, Reese Witherspoon, John McEnroe and John Steinbeck?

Yep, they all dropped out of Stanford.

The old saying that “Winners never quit and quitters never win” is just plain wrong and leaving a bad job is just common sense.

#4 “I’ll never get another job”

Well not if you stay in your current job while it slowly grinds you down, you won’t! Move on now while you still have some self-confidence, motivation and energy left.

#5 “If I quit I’ll lose my salary, status, company car, the recognition of my peers, etc.”

Yes, quitting a job carries a price and that makes it scary. We all know this intimately.

But few of us ask this question: What is the price of staying in a job that makes you unhappy?

That price can be very high. It can ruin your work life but also your marriage, your family life, your health, your self-esteem and your sanity. Not all at once, but a little bit every day.

#6 “Everywhere else is just as bad”

That’s just nonsense. There are plenty of great workplaces in every industry.

#7 “I’ve invested so much in this job already”

You may have sacrificed a lot of time, energy and dignity already in attempts to make things better. This will make it more difficult for you to call it quits.

I’m reminded of how Nigerian email scammers sucker in people. At first it’s a small investment, but then the amounts grow and grow. At each step the victim is reluctant to stop because that would mean losing all the money he’s spent so far.

Quit anyway. Staying on is just throwing good time after bad.

#8 “I’ll lose my health insurance.”

I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. Where I live (Denmark), everybody gets free health care regardless of their employment situation so I can’t imagine the leverage this must give employers.

One answer: Start looking for another job with similar health benefits.

Also: Ask yourself what good job related health insurance is if your job is actually making your sick – which bad jobs can absolutely do.

#9 “My job pays very well”

I have zero sympathy for this argument. I don’t care how well your job pays; if it makes you unhappy it’s not worth it.

Quite the contrary, if you make a lot of money now, use that financial security to quit and find a job that’ll make you happy.

#10 “Quitting will look bad on my CV”

Whereas staying for years in a job that grinds you down and goes nowhere will look excellent.

The upshot

Many of us would be much happier at work if we quit bad jobs sooner. I’ve talked to many people who have finally managed to quit a bad job and only wished they’d done it sooner. I have yet to meet a single person who quit a crappy job only to wish they’d stayed on longer.

You may have perfectly good reasons to stay in your crappy job – all I’m saying is that it pays to examine those reasons very closely to make sure that they hold up.

‘Cause it may just be the fear talking.

Your take

What do you think? Have you ever been stuck in a lousy workplace? What kept you from leaving? What finally made you quit? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.

Related posts

• Find your quitting point
• Never stay in a bad job. Fix it or leave.
• How to find a job you’ll love
• Top 10 signs you’re unhappy at work