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How to be Productive: Stop Working

Posted by ianprice on Wed, 11/08/2010 - 08:49
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This excellent post on BNET by Margaret Hefferman asserts what some of us have been saying for a while - that there are limits to our working hours beyond which we start to become less productive. I noticed this in the 1980s when working for my first employer, a strategy consulting house with a bizarre over-the-top work ethic. We were contracted to work 50 hour weeks but the norm was to do much more with many people in the office late at night and through the weekend. I noticed at the time that every hour above the 50 was increasingly likely to produce a mistake of some sort that would take me ages to correct later...

 

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The Activity Illusion with Ian Price

A blog by ianprice

I am an organisational behaviour specialist and author of The Activity Illusion. Formerly a corporate man, I have switched careers and was recently awarded a MSc in Occupational Psychology at Birkbeck College. Part of the reason I did this is because I was finding it increasingly hard to find work I could enjoy in corporate life. Everyone I worked with was frantically busy and yet so little was being achieved; this appeared to me to be the case the more senior the manager. I worked with people who were "too busy" to perform the basic functions of leadership - too busy to have team meetings, too busy to delegate, too busy to give feedback.

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Editor's Welcome

 

Hello! I'm a great believer in the power of stories, whether they be folk tales, novels, films or TV dramas.
 
They have a wonderful ability to get complex moral or social issues over to us in a palatable, easy-to-understand way and can provide many lessons if only we care to look just a little bit below the surface.
 
But they can also act as a fun starting point for discussion and debate on rather more serious topics that are all too often brushed under the carpet and ignored.
 

Hence our decision to start up a Review slot on the site to look at those everyday stories that are all around us from an HR perspective.

Although we've been publishing book reviews (take a look at our Book Club list of suggested possible non-fiction works for evaluation here) for some time, you may also have noticed that we've been running a weekly home page blog on The Apprentice courtesy of The Chemistry Group for a while now.

And Pauline Wood, managing director at specialist retail headhunter, court & spark consulting, was likewise kind enough to write our first film review on the Headhunters movie.

But the big question is, why don't you give it a go yourself? There's a world of choice out there and I, like the rest of the community, would love to hear your thoughts and insights.

So next time you watch a movie, see a TV drama or read a novel that you think has an HR message worth sharing, send your review to me at cath.everett@siftmedia.co.uk or post it directly to our blogs section at www.hrzone.co.uk/blogs.

So get critiquing and look forward to hearing from you very soon.....

Cath Everett
HRZone Editor 
 
 
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