Search results for: “overwork”

The Employee Factor blog has a great post about the Japanese word Karoshi:

“Death by overwork” or karoshi (Kah-roe-she) is killing the Japanese Manager in his prime. How? Marathon hours at work lead to heart failure and brain bleeds.
…
We’re talking a lot of overtime. Maybe 100 hours of overtime as estimated by an expert on karoshi.

Take a moment to take that in.

Imagine death from overwork being so common in Japan, that there is actually a word for it. From the Wikipedia entry on Karoshi:

The first case of kar?shi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29-year-old male worker in the shipping department of Japan’s largest newspaper company.

It was not until the latter part of the 1980s, during the Bubble Economy, however, when several high-ranking business executives who were still in their prime years suddenly died without any previous sign of illness, that the media began picking up on what appeared to be a new phenomenon.

This new phenomenon was quickly labeled kar?shi and was immediately seen as a new and serious menace for people in the work force. In 1987, as public concern increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on kar?shi.

As you may know I’m Danish, and I take pride in the fact that there is no word for Karoshi in Danish. Instead we have a very different word: arbejdsglæde. Arbejde means work, glæde means happiness so arbejdsglæde simply means happiness at work.

And in case you’re wondering how that little sucker of a tongue-twister is pronounced, you can hear me explain it a little more here:
The word arbejdsglæde and how to pronounce it. (2 Mb mp3 file, 2 minutes).

This word exists only in the Scandinavian languages (I’ve checked!) and this is not a coincidence. Nordic business culture has a decades-long tradition of focusing on the well-being of employees.

UPDATE: Apparently it exists in Dutch as well. Thank you to Virgil for pointing that out.

Vocabulary matters. It says something about Japanese vs. Scandinavian business cultures that we have arbejdsglæde and they have karoshi.

And I have absolutely no doubt which culture is more likely to make people happy and to create great workplaces.

Related posts

• The Cult of Overwork
• Get your Karoshi T-shirts here

What do you do about co-workers or employees who don’t pull their weight? Sheila Norman-Culp has taken a look at that situation and interviewed a few experts, including yours truly.

In the American workplace these days, teams are the hot commodity. And where there’s a team, there’s always one person whom others feel is not pulling their own weight.

So should the lazy worker be put on notice? Get more training? Be promoted? Be fired? Don’t laugh — experts say every one of those solutions could work.

I’m quoted as saying that the only cure for lazy employees is to fire a few of them, to put the fear of God into the rest. Or something like that – it’s been a while I since I talked to Sheila, I honestly can’t remember.

Read Sheila’s article here.

Related posts:

• How to procrastinate effectively
• The cult of overwork
• The cult of overwork revisited
• Book review: The Lazy Way to Success by Fred Gratzon
• My lazy life – how laziness made me a better student, developer and leader

So – as I blogged about yesterday, emails have been piling up in my inbox to the tune of 200 unanswered emails, some of them – I kid you not – from way back in Februrary.

I really wanted to get down to an empty inbox, but lately when I sat down at my computer to get it done… I didn’t. I looked at that mountain of mail, many of which I really should’ve responded to long ago and felt really bad about, and kinda gave up in advance.

And this is where I could choose between two approaches. There’s the “Just get it done” approach. This means ignoring how much it sucks and just doing it anyway. Knuckling under, putting my nose to the grindstone and my shoulder to the wheel and some other body part to some other part of machinery and answer those darn emails.

Or I could ask myself the following question: How can I make it fun? How can I answer those emails in a way that feels effortless and makes me happy?

Being the Chief Happiness Officer, I couldn’t really go for the former option so I was forced to try to make it fun. I asked for advice on the blog yesterday and got some really good input.

After thinking about it I designed a strategy – and got all of my emails answered in less than a day. That also includes the 50 or so emails that came in during the day.

So without further ado, here’s the strategy that worked for me:
1: Accept myself
First of all, I stopped wasting time berating myself for getting into this situation. If there’s one thing experience has taught me it’s that I’m the kinda person who lets a mess build and then cleans it all up at once.

I know that other people ar way more organized and get stuff done as they go (the bastards!) – but I’m just not one of them and I’m not going to waste time beating myself up over it.

I’m a lazy person – and this is not a problem, it’s a huge advantage.

2: Track and publish the number of unanswered emails
I published the number of unanswered emails and kept updating it during the day. This meant that I could see progress all the time. Your inbox looks pretty much the same with 100 emails in it as with 200. Keeping track of the number meant I knew I was getting results.

Also publishing the number kept me going a few times when I felt like quitting because I reminded myself how cool it would be to end the day with 0 unanswered emails – AND brag about it here :o)

3: Move tasks to my todo-list
But possibly the single most important thing I did was use my todo-list. If answering an email required me to perform a more serious task, I’d put the task on my todo-list and answer the email saying when I would get back with the actual information.

This allowed me to stay in the flow of answering emails, without getting sidetracked by writing documents etc.

4: Get out of the house

And of course I went to my favorite café. But I always do that when I need to get work done.

5: Use snippets
I also used a tip from Michiel Trimpe who suggested using email snippets that can easily be inserted into an email. Specifically, I used the following text a lot:

I apologize for taking so long to reply to your mail – I’ve been drowning in email lately :o)

6: Don’t be afraid to say no (Updated)
I almost forgot this one: Making sure to say no, when no is the answer. I get a lot of invitations, links, ideas, proposals, etc. Most of them are very good, but some are just not suitable for me.

I’ve been training myself to “just say no”. In a polite way, of course :o)

One tactic I considered, but didn’t use
I did think about declaring email bankruptcy as George suggested but I decided that would be cheating :o)

The upshot

The result of all of this was that I spent a nice, fun, productive day doing a task that I’d been dreading. A lot. For a long time.

The key, for me at least, is that I didn’t ask myself how I could get the job done the fastest or the most efficiently – my focus was on making it fun and pleasant. If I can do that, I know I can get the job done and I think that aspect is missing from most of the productivity systems and advice out there, which is focused entirely too much on the mechanics of productivity.

Make a task fun four yourself and you will be productive.

Your take

What about you? How do you take tasks you’ve been putting of for way too long and make them fun? I’m not talking about how you get them done – but how you do it so that you enjoy yourself? Got any great ideas? Please write a comment!

Related:

• How to procrastinate effectively
• The cult of overwork
• Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster

I think we’ve all experienced how getting too little sleep makes us tired and crabby. So it can hardly be a good thing that:

• 8 out of 10 Americans report at least one negative professional side-effect of getting a poor night’s sleep
• Only 27 percent of Americans get the recommended eight hours of sleep each work night
• 17 percent of Americans only get 5 hours of sleep Monday through Friday (Studies show that getting only 5 hours of sleep per night for a week induces an impairment level equal to a blood alcohol level of 0.1 percent.)
• Of the overwhelming majority of workers suffering from sleep deprivation, 44 percent say they experience bad moods and unfriendliness

It’s a classic dilemma: We want to get more work done, so we work longer hours and sleep less. This in turn makes us less efficient at work, so we work even longer hours and sleep even less and, boom, you have a negative spiral going.

Also, spending your work day being tired and irritable is not exactly the recipe for happiness at work :o) What good is it to make your day an hour or two longer by sleeping less, if losing that sleep means you can’t really enjoy your day?

The Better Sleep Council has some very specific tips on how you can increase productivity by getting the sleep you need, including:

1. Pay your sleep debt. It’s important to schedule 8 hours of sleep each night (7.5 to 8.5 is optimal) and maintain a regular sleep and wake schedule, even on the weekend.
2. Bedroom business. Use your bedroom for sleep and sex only.
3. Kick the caffeine habit. Avoid tea, coffee and soft drinks close to bedtime.

Or maybe the solution is different for you. According to a new movement called the B-Society, some people are just not made to function optimally early in the morning. Even if they do get 8 hours of sleep, they only really kick into gear around 10 in the morning, and businesses should cater to these people also.

The first Danish company has just been b-certified, meaning they acknowledge that this is how some people work, and structure their jobs accordingly.

To me this is just common sense. Few business really need every employee to show op around the same time and could they just as easily leave this up to the individual employee, so they can decide what works best for them.

That will certainly make them happier at work!

Related:

• The Cult of Overwork
• The top 5 myths about workplace stress