Corporate life

A view on corporate life from someone that’s on the other side (retired, not dead).

(This was from a letter to the Economist Editor).

Herman Miller — not just chairs!

Interesting little battery packs from Herman Miller for the office. And I just thought of them for chairs! 🤣

Wasted time at work

For those that know me, know that I’m a big fan of productivity hacks at work. e.g. shortcuts to get things done faster, keyboard usage vs. mouse, apps to help you switch faster etc.

So it was with great pleasure that I saw an article in the Economist about how much time we actually waste on non-value adding things. e.g.

• We waste ~180 days in a typical career correcting typos
• ~145 days wasted in logging into things
• Deleting emails takes up ~6 weeks
• Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in the time that an average office worker spend changing font sizes in their career

The solution is to have a bag of tricks to go faster. (If you have any of your favorites, I would love to hear about them).

Humor: Office rivalries?

Office rivalries? Admit it, we’ve all been there! (Courtesy: New Yorker)

Parkinson’s law update for Covid

Funny article in the Economist about an update proposal to Parkinson’s law (“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”).

• For the unconcerned, when unobserved, work shrinks to fill the time required
• For anxious home workers, work expands to fill all their waking hours
• In lockdown, Zoom expands to fill all of the manager’s available time

So true!

Humor: How was your day?

Another good one from the classics at the New Yorker. Notice the premise in the question.

Humor: Office temperature

So true! It’s amazing how we all talk about smart everything, but can’t even get the temperature right. Courtesy of the New Yorker.

Office theft doubles

Roughly half of employees admit to stealing company property. The rate apparently jumped from ~10% of corporate-theft losses to around 20% between 2002 and 2018. Interestingly, office managers order 20% more than they need to account for this. More at the full article in the Atlantic.

Co-working

Another reason why people hate work (from the NewYorker)

FOMO vs JOMO

Funny article in the Economist that compares the two dominant tribes in offices – those who “Fear of Missing Out” vs. those that ok with the “Joy of Missing Out”.  My favorite quote

But while FOMOS are racing from meeting to networking event, you need a few JOMOS to be doing actual work