Office Headaches

Headaches seem to be a regular feature of office life for many people and in the stress workshops I do I hear them mentioned frequently. Headaches in the office can be caused by:

Dehydration

Many health experts recommend drinking 8 glasses (4 pints) of water a day and minimising alcohol and caffeine intake to stay hydrated. This will also ensure you have plenty of breaks :-)

Computer Screens

Staring at a close-range light source for hours at a time is not what we evolved for. Information on avoiding eye strain related headaches here and office headaches related to monitors here.

Stress

Stress related illness is the leading cause of work absenteeism in the UK and many office headaches are stress related. Either directly or through lack of sleep and overwork. Good stress management is a HSE requirement for UK employers.

Posture
Bad computer posture can lead to office headaches. I recommend this book by Paul Linden for those interested in computer posture.

Office Headache Cures
While not medical advice in my experience addressing one of the problems above will help with most office headaches (there are of course a host of other causes such as food allergies and serious illnesses). Killing your boss is another useful measure to relive office headaches...joke. Painkillers just mask symptoms so if you're needing to use them repeatedly it may worth looking for underlying causes. An alternative somatic approach to dealing with office headaches is here.

If in doubt about headaches ask a doctor. This is not medical advice.

Confidence and Assertiveness Training Courses

We've added a new page to the Integration Training site - Confidence and Assertiveness Training Courses. Here is the ever popular confidence tips page too.

Stress Research

I have updated Integration Training's stress management research page.

From the HSE Stress Research:

"Why tackle work-related stress?

To reduce sickness absence

- Work-related stress accounts for over a third of all new incidences of ill health and this is on the increase.
- Each case of work-related stress, depression or anxiety related ill health leads to an average of 30.2 working days lost
- A total of 13.8 million working days were lost to work-related stress, depression and anxiety in 2006/07
- Mental health problems (most of which are stress related) cost employers an average of £600 per employee per year - 2009 figure)

To benefit your business

As well as reducing sickness absence costs to an organisation, tackling stress can have a positive effect on:
- Employee commitment to work
- Staff performance and productivity
- Staff turnover or intention to leave
- Staff recruitment and retention
- Customer satisfaction
- Organisational image and reputation..."

How to Manage E-Mails

Often on my time management courses I'm asked, "How do I manage e-mails?" or "My e-mail inbox is overflowing, how do I empty it?!?" It seems like we all have too many e-mails to handle and trying to manage e-mail takes up a good part of most office-workers days.

Here are a few considerations and e-mail tips influenced by Getting Things Done (GTD) and other time management systems:

Pick-Up Time and Breaks
No, not how quickly you can get lucky in a bar but how long it takes to stop doing an activity and then start again because of an interruption. It is much more efficient to e-mail in blocks than continuously throughout the day. It is not efficient to multi-task.

The counter balance to minimising pick-up time is that too long doing anyone activity will lead to a decrease in efficiency and an increase in mistakes, so regular breaks are essential. Even micro breaks where you look out of the window for a moment or sip a drink and savour it will save your heath and increase your productivity.

Tip - Turn off signals that new mails have arrived like Outlook's pop-up notice

Is a new mail actionable?
If not it is either an FYI, junk or reference material. Delete junk immediately (blocking the sender if a reoccurring), read FYI and delete if you are comfortable to or move to storage with reference. Storage areas should be mutually exclusive to make ease of reference later (i.e. a mail couldn't be in either "Clients" or "UK Clients").

Tip - The @ symbol will be above ABC etc in your folders for categories you use often. E.g. @ Important Client

Can you do it in less than two minutes
If you can responds to a mail instantly in less than two minutes you might as well do it now rather than put it off. Two minutes is a shorter period of time than most e-mailer think - it may amount to two lines or less.

Tip: Look out for the crucial request in long e-mails -what does the sender want?

Can you delegate it?
Self explanatory. Declines and requests can also be made upwards ("no I won't buy your wife flowers boss", "I can do X or Y, what is your priority?" and sideways "Bob, would you mind doing this my workload is crazy today) - depending upon company culture (I would suggest the ability to both decline and make requests is a sign of healthy individuals and companies).

Can you put it aside for later?
Putting e-mails that require a response that may take a little while aside to specific "project" folders is useful. You may also want to put a note to respond after a particular time (in your diary) or after something you are waiting for (on a "waiting for" section of a to-do list)

!!!Urgent!!!Mails!!!
Who says, the sender or you? Do you have an ongoing commitment to respond to mails within a certain time frame? Are you working on assumptions in this regard (you might be surprised how long people are happy to wait for a response). Often it is e-mail addiction rather than any real commitment that keeps people checking their Blackberries 100's of times a day (also bad for work-life boundaries and stress management).

Using this method you can empty your in-box. It will take an average of two minutes per mail so book aside as much time as you need to do this uninterrupted. If this amounts to days and you don't have time accept that you may have just dropped some balls and move all e-mails received after a certain date into an @old folder (this just neatens up what you are effectively doing anyway).

New Year's Resolutions That Work

Guest blogger and coach Natalie Korris write about New Year's resolutions that works. See also this article on how to change.

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New Year Resolutions that Work

It’s this time of the year when a lot of people take time out to reflect on what they’ve achieved and commit to projects or lifestyle changes for the new coming year.

According to previous surveys, many will have broken their resolutions by the end of January.

As a life coach, I recommend to my clients not to wait for the beginning of the year to make resolutions but to decide to live a happy and fulfilling life every month, every day and every minute of the year.

If you have decided to make a New Year resolution, here are my

10 Steps to Keep your New Year Resolutions:

1 - Start something that you know YOU want to do.

2 - Concentrate on one thing for now.

3 - Treat your resolution as a goal and make it SMART:

Make it Specific: Describe what would you like to achieve in detail and be specific. How much weight do you want to lose? Why do you want to achieve this? What it will give you?

Make it Measurable: Imagine you have achieved your resolution. What difference will that make to your life? How will you know you have achieved it?

Make it Achievable: How far is achieving this goal under your control? Do you have enough time to achieve it?

Make it Realistic: Do you have the skills and resources to achieve your goal?

Make it Time-framed: When do you want to have achieved your goal by?

4 - Visualize the end result.
Write down what you want to achieve, make a vision board of it and place it where you can see it every day. This is classic law of attraction theory. Imagine what it will feel like when you have achieved it.

5 - Write down the steps.
What do you need to do in order to achieve your goal? List all your options and tasks and set yourself deadlines. What are you going to commit to do in the next few weeks?

6 - Tell the important people in your life about your New Year resolution.
This will make it more real.

7 - Keep track of your progress.
If you see that you are progressing, it will encourage you to continue.

8 - Be positive and forgiving.
If things are difficult and you have setbacks, be positive towards yourself. Ask yourself this: if you beat yourself up, will that help you to achieve your goals? Be kind to yourself. It’s OK to have a bad day.

9 - Reward yourself.

10 - Enjoy the process!

Training Interview

I was recently interviewed by my friend Jonathan Senior of Sharp End Training and we talked training. It starts with me being called weird and we go on to discuss embodied training, how war-zones are like the boardrooms, stress, time management, peer support, how trainers are human and how martial arts influences what I do.

CSR - Benefits to Business

The following article from the ever great Mindtools highlights some of the benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

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"Today's societies often ask more from major corporations than simply making a profit and paying taxes. There's a general expectation that companies should do their best to trade fairly, uphold human rights, and protect the environment. And the focus is not just on big corporations: small companies are often asked to support local causes and play their part in community development.

How can a business manage these expectations, but benefit its bottom line as well? A successful Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy can help."...

Clearly, CSR programs cost money and take some staff attention away from the organization's business. However, a good CSR program can bring you multiple business benefits, including the following:

• Improving your company's reputation, and its ability to manage reputational risks.
  
  
• Helping to promote your brand and image in an increasingly socially-aware and perceptive market place (this may be particularly important if your clients are public entities).
  
  
• Allowing you to create the right environment for your particular business to succeed.
  
  
• Giving you an effective way to manage the pressures on your organization for charitable giving. CSR allows you to make sure any charitable expenditure is effective and linked to business objectives, and that it can be properly accounted for, measured, and advertised.
  
  
• Improving your staff's motivation and retention rates, or broaden skill sets – for example, where your staff are directly involved in volunteering in the local community, or in other sponsorship activities. "

Time Management Mind Map

Here's a good Time Management Mind Map