Quotes About Workplace

The problem, as I see it, isn't what you're working on, it's whom you're working with. You can't feel in love with your life if you hate your work; and more times than not, people don't love their work because they work with people they don't like.

For a manager to be perceived as a positive manager, they need a four to one positive to negative contact ratio.

The corporate woman has been defined as the 'liberated woman' and I see that as the exact opposite. I think she now is more enslaved, maybe even more than the housewife was because she's so out of her power, and imitating male power is not female power.

You know why men make more money than women? Because, in the unlikely event that we're both on the Titanic and it starts to sink, for some reason, you get to leave with the kids and I have to stay -- that's why I get the dollar more an hour.

You know what a cubicle basically says? It basically says, like, "You know what? We don't think you're smart enough for an office, but we don't want you to look at anybody."

With these rough categorizations established, the strategy works as follows: Schedule in advance when you'll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you're allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.

The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value.

I get an extra 20 IQ points from being in that office,

In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.

While email use certainly saves people time and effort in communicating," the authors of the 2016 study conclude, "it also comes at a cost." Their recommendation? "[We] suggest that organizations make a concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.

As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it's not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.

constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line—forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.

These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes.

When he ran a review of his team's Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.

There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc'ing everybody, like 'Look at all the work I'm doing.' It's annoying

In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, "Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?," Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

The rise of professional instant messaging, mentioned earlier in this chapter, can be seen as this mind-set pushed toward an extreme. If receiving an e-mail reply within an hour makes your day easier, then getting an answer via instant message in under a minute would improve this gain by an order of magnitude.

When she leveraged her value to obtain a thirty-hour schedule at her first job, for example, her employer couldn't say no (she was saving them too much money), but they didn't like it. It took nerve on Lulu's part to push through that demand.

The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools.

big trends in business today actively decrease people's ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).

If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short).

network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.