Tips to Get Out of A Rut at Work

So you have a great job and you love what you do but for some reason the past few days, weeks, or hopefully not, months, you haven’t been finding your feet and biting more than you can chew to compensate for an unproductive day. Sounds like you? Well, recent research conducted by Harvard Business School in January/February 2012  quotes that “happy employees produce more than unhappy ones over the long term” and the key to happiness is more than just being content with your job and loving what you do- it’s about sustainable performance.

So what is exactly is sustainable performance? It’s the process of utilizing high energy (vitality) and new resources (learning) in an efficient way. You can’t have one without the other when it comes to sustainable performance. The Harvard Business School study shows that high energy and low learning resulted in a 54% decrease in health while high levels in both areas resulted in a higher effective rate of 21%. Below are three tips that are essential in being sustainable and productive to get out of a rut at work:

Tip #1: Vitality and The Energy Factor: In order to get out of a rut, you need to decipher the living from the non-living. It’s great to be an expert in your job but doing the same routine to produce good results doesn’t produce great ones or new ideas. Having high energy in the workforce without the burnout is very essential. Try to set new goals for yourself and focus on the parts of your job that gives you joy and make it better. Oh, and lighten up on the coffee breaks and opt-in for a micro-mediation session every once in a while to clear your mind.

Tip #2: The Learning Curve: The world is moving faster today than ever before as technology spearheads and is incorporated into our everyday life. How do you expect to advance your career without learning something new? It’s a never-ending life cycle, even for well-known industry experts. Learning something new allows you to build your resources, enhance your skills, and increases your marketability in this multi-tasking world.

Tip #3: The Work Environment: Everyone talks about teamwork and engagement but it’s another thing to live and breathe it. Make sure you are taking the time to get feedback from fellow teammates as well as give when needed. Our strongest stem is as weak as our weakest stem and encouraging team collaboration is great for any work environment. Be proactive about it if this is missing at your job.

Citations:

• Harvard Business School on Sustainable Performance
• Organize Positively Blog with article that covers as study on fatigue and energy by Charlotte Fritz, Chak Fu Lam, and Gretchen Spreitzer.

This article was written by Yasleen Dates for Institute For Coaching.

 

Megacities and the Scale of the Future

  by Mike Macartney

Demographic trends in society are pointing towardsmegacities, defined as populations of 10 million or more, as the future for how most people on the planet will live. There are 21 such cities today and they include Cairo, Mexico City, Lagos, Los Angeles, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Manila, Moscow, Tehran, London, Paris, and others, growing every day. Tokyo was at 34 million in 2011. These cities and what supports them are at the core issues of scale and sustainability.

• How large will these cities grow?
• How will people in the future supply them with energy, food, water, transportation, jobs, housing, education, health care, and not least of all, entertainment?
• How will these cities fit into national models – will they become city-states like earlier times in human history?

Scientific groups like the Santa Fe Institute are studying that very sustainability. Other, informal web based groups of people like New Geography are also thinking about what cities and human society will become.

The issue of scale may be the defining issue of the 21^st century. The solutions are not simple or even invented yet. For example, it is well known in investment circles that alternative energy does not scale like the Information Age cornerstones of semiconductors, telecommunications, and software. Because of the laws of physics in the universe we live in alternative energy requires large investments in land, labor, and raw materials. These are needed to provide grid energy systems like the current fossil fuel and nuclear powered electrical grids. Innovation in alternative energy is not information or knowledge based. It is execution and implementation based. Even if we think we know how to do it, we still have to get it done. Very large physical scale collection and distribution systems are required to implement alternative energy solutions. Presently, the profit for investment in large-scale energy systems ties to large-scale tax systems. These are linked to government subsidies and government funded infrastructure build-out to solve the scale problem. Will the same go for alternative energy?

The scale needed for alternative energy competes directly with the scale needed for agriculture, housing, environmental preservation, and transportation. One example is the Three Gorges Dam project in China that displaced over 1-million people. Hydroelectric power systems are solar energy systems. The water behind a dam is stored solar energy. Very large amounts of land are required for hydroelectric systems just like for proposed solar, wind, and biomass systems. All the systems require very large solar collectors to operate in a grid power model. Efficiency can never be greater than one. There is no Moore’s Law of exponential growth hidden in the current efficiencies of a few tens-of-a-percent and 100-percent in alternative energy collection components. Are grid power systems the future of alternative energy?

The solutions to the scale problems of megacities with high consumption rates of food, energy, and living space are complex and competing. Complexity is one of the areas of study by scientific think tanks like the Santa Fe Institute and government funded institutions like Harvard University and MIT. How do you think scale will be achieved to support megacities in the future?

About the Author

Mike Macartney

Mike holds a BS and MS in mechanical engineering with emphasis in heat transfer and computational fluid dynamics. As a staff system engineer he developed advanced cooling systems for more than 15 different spacecraft and missiles, ranging from cryogenically cooled sensors and pre-amplifiers to on-orbit problem resolution of failing spacecraft. Mike has managed over 200 proposals for advanced aerospace systems, and terrestrial IT systems and custom code development for corporate customers.

Mike has advised start-up companies and high-tech incubators wishing to “spin-in” technologies from NASA and the National Laboratories as well as helped Russian enterprises do business in Silicon Valley. Mike has been a founder in three start-up companies for enterprise SW and publishing as well as a trade show manager for NASA technology transfer activities, and an executive liaison manager to facilitate business cooperation between aggressive Fortune 500 competitors. Mike has developed reengineered business processes for quality control, proposal development, and lean manufacturing.

He currently operates a small publishing company, Shoot Your Eye Out Publishing

Tags: Science, environment, megacities, alternative energy, technology, society, urban planning, demography,sustainability, New Geography, Santa Fe Institute, Blade Runner