Work Elevated

Remember seven weeks ago when the words “new normal” were in everyone’s vocabulary? When we all found ourselves facing unforeseen circumstances, including but not limited to working from home, social distancing, wearing face masks, washing our hands exponentially more than we ever have before? SEVEN WEEKS AGO! Doesn’t seem real that it’s been that long, right? Here we are, heading into a new month, and the new normal has become, well, normal . Today’s tip gives us obstacles in the way of remaining vigilant with our vital public health behaviors, especially with the influx of plans and reports of phased reopenings. In order to maintain the good behaviors we have been practicing, we must acknowledge our own cognitive biases , as well as the strategies we can employ to overcome them. As physician-researcher Donald A. Redelmeier and behavioral scientist Eldar Shafir explain, the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has gone on for so long can lead some of us to assume that the worst of the ...

Have you ever wondered why an animal’s first movement after a well-deserved nap is to stretch ?  According to livescience.com, the stretching improves the animal’s blood flow to the body and helps keep their muscles limber to elude unexpected prey.  I hope that we are not having to escape an attacker, but stretching our bodies on a daily basis offers a variety of health-related benefits. Incorporating stretching into your daily routine improves blood flow and circulation, range of motion in the joints, body posture, reduces risk of injuries, increasing nutrient supply to muscles and helps to manage mental stress. Whenever we stretch, we must keep a few tips in mind in order to receive the most benefits.  First stretching is NOT a warm up activity.  Stretching is most effective when the muscles and soft tissues are warm.  Try taking a 5 minute short walk or mild jog before stretching the muscles you’re about to use.  Next, avoid bouncing whenever stretch...

One of my all time favorite quotes comes from Jim Rohn, the famous entrepreneur and motivational speaker: "Either you run the day or the day runs you". This quote has become something of a mantra for me during this time, a phrase I find myself repeating when I need to get my mind back on track. In the time management workshops last week, I shared strategies, tools, and techniques to help you stay focused. I ran across another one today that might be worth looking into. It's called having a "Zero-based" calendar. This strategy means that you essentially schedule all of the activities in your day and leave yourself with as little open space as possible. This prevents you from putting off the tasks you don't particularly love doing and helps keep you from getting distracted. By adding specific time blocks to your calendar, you can also get an idea of how long things actually take. It can also help you reduce the wasted "in-between" time that you m...

And give yourself one too! Dan Pink is a well-known author who wrote a book entitled  When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing . When  examines research about how we make our decisions about when to do things. It focuses specifically on the timing of our work day.  Pink says that we make the erroneous assumption that our energy levels are static throughout the day. The science says otherwise: our energy levels wax and wane depending on our morning/night person orientation and the tasks we need to do. He encourages us to pay attention to how the "flow" of our day moves depending on whether we are morning people, what he calls "larks" or evening people, what he calls "owls", and to choose the right tasks to do based on our energy levels. He also discusses the science behind taking breaks. He discusses his formula for a great break in this video , but here's the short version. Breaks taken with other people are more restorative. Research sho...

This week's webinars focused on work-life balance, motivation, focus, and time management. One of the things I hope I stressed enough, and will share with you today, is that we need to give ourselves grace and compassion to cope with what we are going through now. My encouragement today is to practice self-compassion. Dr. Kristen Neff is a recognized expert in self-compassion. She defines it this way: "Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now,” how can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?". Many of us are very good at having compassion for others but often forget to share that same compassion with ourselves. One way to get better at this is to practice . You can access this article for 10 Self-Compassion Practices ...

The challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented and will shape the future of our world and institutions for years to come. You can manage the present and prepare yourself for the future by continuing to develop your knowledge, skills, and abilities. One way to do that is to utilize our Educational Assistance program. If you sign up for courses within the UNC system, you can utilize up to three tuition waivers per academic year. We have updated our previous tuition waiver policy, so please review the following steps: Complete the tuition waiver application as you normally would, then email to your supervisor for review and approval. Once the waiver has been approved, your supervisor will electronically sign the waiver, then email to Blair Berry in Human Resources (berrybm@appstate.edu). If your courses are at Appalachian State, Blair will submit to Student Accounts. If the courses are at another UNC-system institution, Blair will send you the completed forms, a...

Last week on the "Stay Connected" Lunch and Learn our guest presenter, Dr. Tandrea Carter, shared a grounding technique that can be used to help ease your mind in times of stress and anxiety. The infographic below and this article describe the technique. It is a coping technique that can be used to calm the mind. Your first step should be to take some long, slow, deep breaths. Then turn your mind to these 5 things to help ground you in the present moment. Image credit: destressmonday.org Comment below and let me know if you have ever tried this yourself or if you have helped an anxious friend, child, family member move through these steps.  Here's to a Hump Day with less stress and positive coping strategies! 

Working from home, or #WFH to those utilizing hashtags, has presented several unforeseen opportunities and challenges for all of us. While I, personally, have learned to love this new telework situation, there have still been moments of debilitating loneliness in which I have found myself. Turns out, I am not alone. Last year, online brand development agency Buffer conducted a study of 2,500 remote workers, and found that loneliness was the second-most reported challenge , one experienced by 19% of respondents. Loneliness can make people feel less motivated and less productive .  How can we combat this? Be creative in your social connection! Due to this current pandemic, it is not clear how long people will be at home; however, think outside the box on ways to connect to your office mates and colleagues. Try a virtual pizza party, or even a video happy hour (outside of your designated working hours, of course). Trying social gatherings virtually will feel weird at first, but...

This week's workshop schedule is full of opportunities to work on your productivity and work-life balance from home. We start off the week with a workshop on Journaling for Productivity . If you have spent any time around me, you will know that keeping my journal is the fine line between sanity and a complete loss of order. I love sharing the tips and tricks that help me manage my time, the benefits of journaling, and how you can easily set it up. It is absolutely fundamental for me. (The image below is my actual journal from one our first weeks home.) I am excited about sharing it this week because I think it will feel different this time. See, my journal serves me well in good times, but it has become even more instrumental to my life and work during this time. It is the number one thing that helps keep me grounded and provides a sense of direction, continuity, and dare I say, normalcy. Sitting with it provides me a sense of calm. It has also been one of the most difficult th...

Many essential workers are especially worried about bringing COVID-19 home with them after working. If you fall in to this category, there are certain things you can do to lessen the chance of bringing the virus in to your home. Below are some of the effective practices that have been implemented by essential workers; Leave all non-essential Items, like backpacks or suitcases, at home. Bring only what you need to the workplace to decrease the risk of transmitting the virus when you return home. Take a shower as soon as you get home from work. Just as hand washing with soap prevents transmission via touch, scrubbing in a hot shower will help get the virus off your body. Disinfect phones, pens, credit cards, or anything else that you brought to work. For disinfection, diluted household bleach solutions, alcohol solutions with at least 70% alcohol, and most common EPA-registered household disinfectants should be effective. Put a clothes hamper lined with a garbage bag just insid...

If you are like me, your inbox is flooded with work from home productivity resources. I get at least 5 new articles a day talking about how to stay productive while working from home. I've been asked to provide some professional development for staff on this topic, and there is workshop scheduled next week on time management and focus. It is obviously a struggle, for myself included. How do we wade through the deluge of resources and come out with something practical and usable? How do we separate out what will work for us versus what is wishful (or even harmful) advice on maintaining the same level of productivity we had before? My humble suggestion, based on my own experience, is to start with the most basic step. Maintain the same schedule every day . Not the same schedule you had when you were waking up early enough to shower, dress in business clothes, and commute in Boone traffic. Enjoy the fact that your commute is 15 seconds, relish in the flexibility this gives you. But...

Everywhere I look, I see the same two descriptors for our current situation: unprecedented and uncertain . I think I have heard the former more times that I need to in my lifetime, and I am ready to let it have a rest. The latter word will be in our vocabulary for a while. There are many things about our current challenges that will remain unclear. No one can predict the future and know what the ultimate outcome of these events will be. It will continue to be uncertain. There are ways to cope with this uncertainty. This article from the American Psychological Association provides a list of 10 tips. We will focus on these in more detail over the coming weeks, including strategies that you can use to put these to work for you. The one that I find the most difficult, but also the most effective, is to avoid dwelling on the things we cannot control. It is much more helpful to focus our efforts on the things that we can control, like the personal choices we make. Things like what we e...

The world is weird right now. I keep saying this, because I feel like it is the only blanket descriptor that covers all of the bases. It captures the fact that the world feels scary for some and safe for others. It captures that some people are struggling and some are not. It captures the essence of the world being more out of balance than normal. So, it is my chosen descriptor. My passion has been, and will continue to be, to help others work and live better. I have been lucky enough to do this for a living for more than 5 years and that is the spirit of this blog. I want to provide a new nugget of professional and personal development every day while we are all experiencing the weirdness of the world. These will be on various topics: some productivity based, some personal development or self-care based. Who knows where this will take us? Overall, I hope it's just a chance to you to learn something that can help you with adjusting to our current reality and perhaps, at some po...