Ryan Stephens Marketing

If you’re doing important work, work that matters, stress is inevitable. No matter how cool, calm and collective you are invariably there will be days where your workload, deadlines, work-life balance, etc. gets all up around you.

You can hyperventilate and complain all day or you can take a deep breath and leverage these 5 ways to de-stress in the office.

1.) Attack the Most Impactful Work First

Your projects aren’t going to complete themselves. Most of us breathe a sigh of relief when we mark something off of our to-do lists so determine what will add the most value to your company, your life, etc. and do that today.

Big projects are intimidating. It’s easy to get paralyzed by fear or overwhelmed by a big project. Break it into manageable tasks and complete one each day.

2.) Put Things in Perspective

You have a job. A lot of people don’t. But seriously, what is your worst case scenario? There’s a lot of people less fortunate than you and it’s often helpful to remember that.

3.) Cut up with a Co-Worker

“People with one friend at work are much more likely to find their work interesting. And people with three friends at work are virtually guaranteed to be very satisfied with their life,” writes Penelope Trunk citing Tom Rath’s book Vital Friends.

The ‘woe is me’ approach gets old really fast, but good co-workers will let you get it off your chest for a few minutes. Especially if you buy them a drink after work. And if you’re having trouble making friends at work here’s 6 ways to build better relationships with your co-workers.

4.) Take Lunch *Away* From Your Desk

(via @KerryGuard)

For at least a half hour everyday escape your office/desk/cube. Some days you feel like there’s no time, but I assure you that a half hour to break up the day goes a long way in preventing burn out. I used to take a quick drive to a parking lot and eat on my tailgate. Now I find a quiet place and read a bit while I eat.

5.) Step Away From Your Desk and Take a Walk

(via @JasMollica)

This is one of the most common recommendations, most likely because it’s simple and works for most people. Sometimes you just need 5-10 minutes to realign and catch your breath. Go get a honey bun or some hot Cheetos out of the vending machine. Call your Mom. Walk outside and watch a squirrel.

It really doesn’t matter what you do. If you get stuck or overwhelmed, don’t try to push through. Allow yourself a few minutes to get your feet underneath you. You’re not being productive when you’re flustered anyway. Work in surges when you’re at peak efficiency.

What about you? What tactics to do you employ when you’re stressed at the office? What about people that work from home? What do you do differently?

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Fellow neuroscientists might claim that this book is derivative and vague, but David Eagleman’s “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain“is not written for them – it’s written for the layman.

And while the first few chapters might feel a little dense, the book builds momentum as Eagleman begins to tie the ideas together in later chapters.

Here’s some of my highlights from the book.

On how your brain interrogates the world:

Brains reach out into the world and actively extract the type of information they need. The brain does not need to see everything at once. it does not need to store everything internally; it only needs to know where to go find the information.

When getting a friend to solve a problem:

Flip a coin. If they feel a subtle sense of relief at being “told” what to do by the coin, that’s the right choice for her. If, instead, they conclude that it’s ludicrous for them to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option.

On the democracy of your mind:

There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior.

On the two-party system: reason and emotion:

The brain contains two separate systems: one is fast, automatic, and below the surface of conscious awareness, while the other is slow, cognitive, and conscious. The first system can be labeled automatic, implicit, heuristic, intuitive, holistic, reactive, and impulsive, while the second system is cognitive, systematic, explicit, analytic, rule-based, and reflective. These two processes are always battling it out.

On the *best* way to solve a problem:

The team-of-rivals framework suggests that the best approach is to abandon the question “What’s the most clever way to solve that problem?” in favor of “Are there multiple, overlapping ways to solve that problem?”

On intuition vs. numbers:

When you compare the predictive power of the actuarial approach to that of the parole boards and psychiatrists, there is no contest: numbers win over intuitions.

As it stands now, ugly people receive longer sentences than attractive people; psychiatrists have no capacity to guess which sex offenders will reoffend; and our prisons are overcrowded with drug addicts who could be more usefully dealt with by rehabilitation rather than incarceration. So is current sentencing really better than a scientific, evidence-based approach?

On appropriate punishments:

The concept and word to replace blameworthiness is modifiability, a foward-looking term that asks, What can we do from here? Is rehabilitation available? If so, great. If not, will the punishment of a prison sentence modify future behavior? If so, send him to prison. If punishment won’t help, then take the person under state control for the purposes of incapacitation, not retribution.

Maybe at first glance this book doesn’t have much to do with business or marketing, but what better way to tap into the mind of your customer than learning more about the circuitry of their brain.

And just how much value would understanding your own brain provide you in your job search? Education? Career? Relationships?

I’m going to try and stimy my own desire for re-tweets and comments in 2012 by straying away from the social media 101 type-posts and focus on creating higher quality stimuli.

What books are you reading in 2012 that will make you think? What should I add to my reading list?

Popularity: 2% [?]

“Enterprise Social Technology” is a book that flew under the radar in 2011.

The book aims to be “a how-to manual that will teach you a process for implementing social technology in its most powerful form.” It wants to give you and your organization a leg up on leveraging social media, social networking and social relevance to change how your business operates and give you a leg up on the competition.

And I genuinely feel like it does just that. There’s 12 steps (chapters) in the book and I’m confident that if you read and take action on each step your organization will be more social and better off as a result.

Here are some things I especially appreciated:

• The emphasis on ensuring social tech goals are intertwined with your organizations’ overall goals and that social tech isn’t a magic bullet
• Building a cross-discipline team approach and ensuring each team member has specific responsibilities they’re held accountable for
• The notion that policy documents should be updated every 6 months or so in such a fast-paced and fluid environment
• Embedding sales professionals into online communities where socially facilitated selling can enhance a company’s profitability
• Establishing measurement baselines, measuring results and then comparing results to overall business objectives while continuously adapting accordingly. I also like the idea of creating and sharing a metrics dashboard organization-wide.
• The importance of pilot projects and the application of consequential thinking during the development of said projects.
• The “key points” at the end of each chapter. This makes it very easy to go back and review the over-arching points when you actively try to implement the book’s advice.
• A fair amount of relevant case studies littered throughout.

And a few things I didn’t love:

• The fact that this book was crowd-sourced (different authors wrote each chapter) likely ensured that the book got finished quicker than an ordinary one-author book and it enabled the reader to get some different perspectives from various professionals. However, I do think at times it hurt the continuity of the book, created a bit overlap (not to be confused with reinforcement of key ideas) and some chapters were definitely stronger than others.
• I believe that there are some limitations to crowd-sourcing, especially for bigger companies and organizations and I wish some of those concerns would’ve been disputed or at least mentioned.
• The ROI chapter had some solid takeaways (see above), but not all measurement is ROI and I think the author of that chapter could’ve benefited from Olivier Blanchard’s Basics of Social Media ROI presentation.

Bottom Line: An underrated guidebook for implementing social technology in your organization and a resource that you can come back to after the initial reading.

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