Wtco

Thanks to HBR, when i’ve read the article below i open my eyes…

Then i’m start to think about how i can take time to relax, because i recognize myself in the description of an workaholics person, but you know, how you can relax when your work is your hobby and your sport and you can have fun in what you do everyday?!

have a nice reading…

Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure

Shawn AchorMichelle Gielan

As constant travelers and parents of a 2-year-old, we sometimes fantasize about how much work we can do when one of us gets on a plane, undistracted by phones, friends, and Finding Nemo. We race to get all our ground work done: packing, going through TSA, doing a last-minute work call, calling each other, then boarding the plane. Then, when we try to have that amazing work session in flight, we get nothing done. Even worse, after refreshing our email or reading the same studies over and over, we are too exhausted when we land to soldier on with the emails that have inevitably still piled up.

Why should flying deplete us? We’re just sitting there doing nothing. Why can’t we be tougher — more resilient and determined in our work – so we can accomplish all of the goals we set for ourselves? Based on our current research, we have come to realize that the problem is not our hectic schedule or the plane travel itself; the problem comes from a misunderstanding of what it means to be resilient, and the resulting impact of overworking.

We often take a militaristic, “tough” approach to resilience and grit. We imagine a Marine slogging through the mud, a boxer going one more round, or a football player picking himself up off the turf for one more play. We believe that longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. However, this entire conception is scientifically inaccurate.

The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient and successful. Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems. And lack of recovery — whether by disrupting sleep with thoughts of work or having continuous cognitive arousal by watching our phones — is costing our companies $62 billion a year (that’s billion, not million) in lost productivity.

And just because work stops, it doesn’t mean we are recovering. We “stop” work sometimes at 5PM, but then we spend the night wrestling with solutions to work problems, talking about our work over dinner, and falling asleep thinking about how much work we’ll do tomorrow. In a study released last month, researchers from Norway found that 7.8% of Norwegians have become workaholics. The scientists cite a definition of “workaholism” as “being overly concerned about work, driven by an uncontrollable work motivation, and investing so much time and effort to work that it impairs other important life areas.”

We believe that the number of people who fit that definition includes the majority of American workers, including those who read HBR, which prompted us to begin a study of workaholism in the U.S. Our study will use a large corporate dataset from a major medical company to examine how technology extends our working hours and thus interferes with necessary cognitive recovery, resulting in huge health care costs and turnover costs for employers.

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The misconception of resilience is often bred from an early age. Parents trying to teach their children resilience might celebrate a high school student staying up until 3AM to finish a science fair project. What a distortion of resilience! A resilient child is a well-rested one. When an exhausted student goes to school, he risks hurting everyone on the road with his impaired driving; he doesn’t have the cognitive resources to do well on his English test; he has lower self-control with his friends; and at home, he is moody with his parents. Overwork and exhaustion are the opposite of resilience. And the bad habits we learn when we’re young only magnify when we hit the workforce.

In her excellent book, The Sleep Revolution, Arianna Huffington wrote, “We sacrifice sleep in the name of productivity, but ironically our loss of sleep, despite the extra hours we spend at work, adds up to 11 days of lost productivity per year per worker, or about $2,280.”

The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again. This conclusion is based on biology. Homeostasis is a fundamental biological concept describing the ability of the brain to continuously restore and sustain well-being. Positive neuroscientist Brent Furl from Texas A&M University coined the term “homeostatic value” to describe the value that certain actions have for creating equilibrium, and thus wellbeing, in the body. When the body is out of alignment from overworking, we waste a vast amount of mental and physical resources trying to return to balance before we can move forward.

As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have written, if you have too much time in the performance zone, you need more time in the recovery zone, otherwise you risk burnout. Mustering your resources to “try hard” requires burning energy in order to overcome your currently low arousal level. This is called upregulation. It also exacerbates exhaustion. Thus the more imbalanced we become due to overworking, the more value there is in activities that allow us to return to a state of balance. The value of a recovery period rises in proportion to the amount of work required of us.

So how do we recover and build resilience? Most people assume that if you stop doing a task like answering emails or writing a paper, that your brain will naturally recover, such that when you start again later in the day or the next morning, you’ll have your energy back. But surely everyone reading this has had times where you lie in bed for hours, unable to fall asleep because your brain is thinking about work. If you lie in bed for eight hours, you may have rested, but you can still feel exhausted the next day. That’s because rest and recovery are not the same thing. Stopping does not equal recovering.
If you’re trying to build resilience at work, you need adequate internal and external recovery periods. As researchers Zijlstra, Cropley and Rydstedt write in their 2014 paper: “Internal recovery refers to the shorter periods of relaxation that take place within the frames of the workday or the work setting in the form of short scheduled or unscheduled breaks, by shifting attention or changing to other work tasks when the mental or physical resources required for the initial task are temporarily depleted or exhausted. External recovery refers to actions that take place outside of work—e.g. in the free time between the workdays, and during weekends, holidays or vacations.” If after work you lie around on your bed and get riled up by political commentary on your phone or get stressed thinking about decisions about how to renovate your home, your brain has not received a break from high mental arousal states. Our brains need a rest as much as our bodies do.

If you really want to build resilience, you can start by strategically stopping. Give yourself the resources to be tough by creating internal and external recovery periods. In her upcoming book The Future of Happiness, based on her work at Yale Business School, Amy Blankson describes how to strategically stop during the day by using technology to control overworking. She suggests downloading the Instant or Moment apps to see how many times you turn on your phone each day. The average person turns on their phone 150 times every day. If every distraction took only 1 minute (which would be seriously optimistic), that would account for 2.5 hours of every day.

You can use apps like Offtime or Unplugged to create tech free zones by strategically scheduling automatic airplane modes. In addition, you can take a cognitive break every 90 minutes to recharge your batteries. Try to not have lunch at your desk, but instead spend time outside or with your friends — not talking about work. Take all of your paid time off, which not only gives you recovery periods, but raises your productivity and likelihood of promotion.

As for us, we’ve started using our plane time as a work-free zone, and thus time to dip into the recovery phase. The results have been fantastic. We are usually tired already by the time we get on a plane, and the cramped space and spotty internet connection make work more challenging. Now, instead of swimming upstream, we relax, meditate, sleep, watch movies, journal, or listen to entertaining podcasts. And when we get off the plane, instead of being depleted, we feel rejuvenated and ready to return to the performance zone

the Email in my opinion are the BIGGEST WASTE inside the business, doesn’t matter the size of the business ,the email always occupy a biggest part of the working time and most of the time do not add value.

Define Rules and the policy and respect that it can reduce the number of unnecessary email of 30% to 50%, because the problem coming from the unnecessary email or the email where you in CC when is not necessary

Below and interesting article about the reduction of email.

Please let us your feedback

Email fills up a lot of time and often results in little real work getting done. It’s not just me that thinks so, many enterprises are finding the less it’s used for office communication, the less time gets wasted. Productivity goes up and stress goes down.

I’ve been on an email diet for two years now, where I only check my email three times a day. All other times Outlook remains closed. No pings or pop-ups means no distractions.

When we tuck away email, we stop reacting to it, and are able to focus on the project in front of us. I found I got more done; rather than reacting to every email ping of a new message, I was engaging in the conversation when I was ready.

Harvard Business Review highlighted a “zero email” policy put in place by Thierry Breton, CEO of the information technology firm Atos Origin. Back in 2011, his company of 70,000 employees were averaging 100 messages per week per person. “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” Breton said in a press release.

Since the policy, the average has gone down to 40 emails per employee per week. The results from the move seems positive, but it’s difficult to say whether a reduction in email use is the cause. However, a number of internet experts and studies would say it has a major affect on the bottom line.

Email can be a great productivity tool, but when it’s always on, it messes with our heads. Study, after study has found this to be the case. By rethinking how we prioritize our work day (i.e. limiting email use), we may find ourselves less stressed from having had a more fulfilled work day.

Good Morning

By taking inspiration from HBR – below an article of Fernando Fernandez – i would like to share some thoughts:

• What’s up next?
• The BREXIT is a fault or is an opportunity?

In my personal opinion, in the next few month nobody will talk again and the UK will continue to leave and growth without any problem; right now there’s so much interest in Financial and taxes level in UK that nobody in EU are able to sustain, only Netherland can offer the same level.

About Germany as indicated to Mr Fernandez, is  ore in trouble then what they show and say they have:

• Greece debit on their back – Bailout Greece=bailout of Germany and France
• Deuthbank – billions of debit
• the level of the debit of the people are very high.

Then, i would to invite some Expert to evaluate and make a simulation of the new Scenario.

have good day
For the first time ever, a member state of the European Union has decided to leave. Beyond Brexit’s dire implications for the British economy – a prolonged recession is a good bet, and London’s future as a global financial center is uncertain — four main questions puzzle investors and politicians around the world:

What will Europe look like?
The first question involves both political and economic risks. The European Union is a fundamental ingredient of the institutional framework put in place after World War II. The Union has unquestionably been instrumental in a very long period of peace, stability, and growth grounded in economic interdependence, open markets, and international cooperation.

But now there is a chance that nationalism, isolation, and confrontation will replace the existing world order. Brexit may only be a sign of more to come. Europe is clearly having a hard time dealing with the consequences of globalization and the loss of its exceptionalism. Anti-establishment political parties seem to thrive everywhere, from supposedly stable and successful states like Germany and the Netherlands, to countries facing economic difficulties, like Italy and Spain. In this context, there are plenty of other candidates who might leave the Union. And the United States has its own problems with populism and isolation.

Can the euro survive?
Although the United Kingdom did not use the euro, the viability of the currency is still affected by Britain’s vote to leave the EU. Brexit reopens the possibility of a euro breakup, because it highlights the loss of sovereignty implied by European Monetary Union (EMU) and the remaining requirements on monetary, fiscal, and financial union. In the current political climate, with German and French leaders struggling for popularity, it is difficult to envisage a renewed commitment to deepen economic and political integration within the EMU. And without this deepening, market doubts on the sustainability of the euro can only grow.

The idea of a “two-speed Europe” is lethal to the economic recovery and growth of periphery countries, where any doubt about the continued support of the European Central Bank — and an eventual resolution to the debt crisis through an Euro Area fiscal backstop– can only bring further difficulties.

Will this uncertainty bring an abrupt end to the mild economic recovery?
The short answer is that Brexit has made recession in the UK and in Europe both more likely. The two-year period to negotiate a new agreement with a departing country stipulated in Article 50 of the European Treaty makes no sense to financial markets. They will not wait for European leaders to make up their minds — as we already witnessed Friday, where stock markets in periphery countries fell more than any day in the 2008 crisis. The thought that such uncertainty may not affect the U.S. or the global economy is pure fiction; after all, Europe amounts to about a third of global GDP.

If recession is now in the cards, how can policy makers react?
Central bankers around the world are monitoring events closely, and their policy tools — swaps, liquidity, further quantitative easing — are ready to be implemented. It seems likely that the Federal Reserve may put its rate hike on hold.

But there is only a limited impact monetary policy can have in the current circumstances. The problem is political, the uncertainty is fundamentally political, and the solutions need to be political. Postponing hard choices does not appear a reasonable strategy.