When I was in business school, we joked that cleaning the bathroom never sounds as good as when you have an exam to study for. Usually cleaning the bathroom sounds tedious and dirty, but compared to feeling confused or overwhelmed by difficult material, scrubbing the toilet feels like safe harbor.
If you work full time, a Mayo Clinic study suggests you might lower your stress level by spending the equivalent of just one day a week doing work you find meaningful. So four days a week can still be filled with tedious meetings and administrative bureaucracy for you to feel good about your work.
Is wanting to change our behavior any more phony than wearing glasses, getting braces or going to the gym? What’s wrong with deciding you’d like to be a happier, healthier version of yourself who treats people better?
Imagine a coach talking to a losing team in the locker room at halftime. Is it more motivating if he says, “You’re a bunch of no-talent losers and it’s no wonder you’re getting killed out there!” or “I know you can win this, so let’s turn it around and show them what you’re made of!”
How can you prioritize making and maintaining friendships? Is there something you’re doing that you could ditch to make room for friendships, or could you make better use of downtime? Can you combine socializing with something else that’s already on your calendar?
Marie Kondo is the author of the cultishly popular book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” which has sold nearly 6 million copies and seems to have taken on an even larger cultural footprint. I’ve asked friends to share their perspectives on clutter in their lives.
I am far from having all of life’s answers — in fact, as I get older, I think my list of questions keeps growing — but I do think there’s value in acknowledging what life experience has taught me. Shortly after I turned 40, I kicked off a blog series here called “Things I Have Learned.” I started with 40 things I…
If your workplace doesn’t have a culture of truly letting people leave their cares behind when they take vacation — or if it’s frowned upon to even take vacation — maybe you can tell your boss that you need some task-negative time in order to tap into your best problem-solving insights?
I recently returned from South by Southwest Interactive, a massive technology conference that takes over seemingly every square inch of Austin with growing numbers each year. While the marketing spending seems more pervasive — both Oreos and Game of Thrones sponsored pedicabs, as one small example — there’s still plenty of good content, ranging from 3D printing to the relationship…
At a fantastic New Year’s Day party, I talked to another guest about how smart we were in college, how our 20-year-old selves had it all figured out. Then we laughed, making affectionate fun of the cockiness of youth and the perspective we now have that our youthful selves had oh so much to learn. But here’s the thing: apparently…
The New York Times recently ran an interesting article headlined The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage. Tara Parker-Pope wrote about not what makes a marriage last but what makes it meaningful, including the ways your partner makes your life better: Dr. Aron and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, have studied how individuals…
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently ran an interesting amateur sociology experiment: he solicited what he called “life reports” from people 70 years old and up, sharing what they had done well and poorly, then he combed them for lessons. With the giant caveats that: these are people who read the New York Times and opted in to sharing…
Timed to Cirque du Soleil bringing its new show, Zarkana, to New York this summer, the New York Times offers up a lengthy profile of its creative force, who is described as a “very nice bulldozer.” With the caveat “analyzing his character is challenging since he has few close friends, and even his longtime associates say they hardly know him,”…
Lately I’ve read a number of articles that discuss the difference between happiness and life satisfaction. In my market research role, I often discussed with people the importance of words in survey questions — asking someone if they are satisfied with a product is different from asking if they’re happy with it, for example. I’m satisfied with my light bulbs…
Food writer Mark Bittman recently ended his long-running Minimalist column in the New York Times to shift into a new role as an opinion writer for the Times. This change of perspective, that food is about so much more than filling our bellies, is apparent in his book “Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating.” Bittman wrote in the announcement…
When I was a kid, Saturday mornings meant cartoons and cartoons meant Bugs Bunny. Looney Tunes anchored Saturday viewing, with a whole wonderful cast of characters including Daffy Duck, Roadrunner, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian … but the star was Bugs. Bugs taught me about pop culture, including gangster movies and hillbilly music, and of course, about opera. It was…
Typically I love summer. I love going to the beach and eating at outdoor cafes and wearing little sundresses. This summer was rough on me, though. It was so stinkin’ hot for so long that I felt like I was melting. But even if this summer hadn’t served up week after week of sweltering heat, there’s something cozy about fall’s…
In my fantasy world, someone from the New York Times read my blog post about the challenges some couples face trying to share a bed and thought, “That’s brilliant! We should write about that!” It could have happened.* My friend Lisa Gauchey pointed out a recent Times story headlined Married, but Sleeping Alone. The marital bed, once the symbol of…
My coworker, Ted, recently posted a link on Facebook. It was a New York Times article about social interactions in real life and online. That Ted and I work in the same building but converse more electronically than face to face is probably relevant here somehow. Charles Blow wrote in his op-ed for the Times: A report issued Wednesday by…
