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Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure?
Flatline5150 writes "The New York Times has a good article on why some people thrive under stress while others crack under pressure. Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers..."
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"When people start feeling that what they're doing is not meaningful, then they take more sick days, begin looking for another job, and complain of health problems."
This should be required reading for all managers.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
I've noticed that people (including myself) who enjoy working under massive amounts of pressure don't work really well when there is no pressure at all. Go figure, huh?
Definately. This is the key to good management. Most people respond to some pressure - too much and you just piss them off. Some people put too much pressure on themselves and you need to help them take some off to get the best out of them
I like pressure. If there's no pressure, it's not a challenge. If it's not a challenge there's no joy in doing a good job
As someone that needs to manage techs daily this is probably the skill I'd like to be a master of - giving each my staff the right pressure for them to perform at their best.
Oh, and I wish my manager would become a master of this!
Chronic stress has been linked to an array of illnesses, including heart disease and depression. But people who cope successfully, studies have found, punch in at work with normal levels of stress hormones that climb during the day and drop sharply at night. Their coworkers who complain of being too stressed have consistently higher levels of hormones that rarely dip very far, trapping them in a constant state of anxiety.
That means being able to "decompress" or forget about work after you leave. When I leave work my thoughts about it remain there. It's easy to do when you lead a completely seperate home-life than work-life.
Personally the way I do it is to not maintain any post-work social contact w/my co-workers. This keeps job talk to a minimum when I am out and about. It keeps workplace drama to a minimum because no one knows what I do when I leave (this might not be a problem where other people work but in an institution full of females I do notice a lot of petty bitching going on).
I don't work my hobby. I have several hobbies that I take part in that aren't work related at all. It gives me something to further seperate my life from work.
I really do feel for people that can't let go of their problems once they leave the job. Might want to try something different to get out of that rut. No one wants to die thinking about how much they hate their job.
In college, I wavered between procrastination and being insanely ahead of schedule.
I find that my life is better when I beat my deadlines way ahead of time. I'd write papers as soon as they were assigned... I was taking a self-directed course where I was teaching myself some new (to me) programming languages. It was Spring semester, and in the first week I finished my entire semester's worth of work.
Which meant that I spent a lot of time studing how fast I could beat NES Super Mario Bros. Level 1-1... with varying levels of intoxication.
Seriously, though - in the working world, I find that the more ahead of schedule, the more work my bosses will pile on me. The faster I perform, the less they will quote next time. Which boils down to the better I am, the less I am paid. So now I just work slow and take my sweet ass time or get it done fast and lie about how long it's taking.
Oh, and I'm starting my own company so I won't have to put up with this shit anymore.
People who need stress put on them are the reason managers create unrealistic deadlines and tell employees they're not good enough. Put another way, these people are not self-motivating. They can't maintain a steady pace of work on their own. Their work ethic is too weak.
The article blurs the difference between what people do under occasional, warranted stress like a death in the family and continual artificial stress. People who need the latter kind need to re-evaluate themselves, people who can cope with the former are simply healthy.
Thug with a baseball bat trying to kill you? Crush his throat. Firetruck 20 feet away going 70km/h? floor it. Lying in the street with broken bones? Get out of traffic, do (minimal) self first-aid, and make sure someone's called an ambulance.
Most of the real emergency things that have happened to me, I was too busy dealing with the situation to notice stress. What gets to me is the things that I can't do anything about.
I spend a good chunk of several weeks of the year sitting on my ass doing not much of anything at work, which would suck ass if I didn't have linux to learn.
:P
:P
Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?
Fortunately, the variety of things I do adds up nicely- they'd need three different people to replace just me, so I'm cheaper. And I'm not the only one with occasional VAST GULFS of slack time. And I don't get training or any kind of tuition incentives. So I use that time to learn stuff, since it's the only way I'll be able to leverage myself out of this place.
Am I a Workaholic? Yes. Just not for the day job.
I think this kind of thing is also useful for many kinds of computer programming, especially in high-reliability areas like operating systems and compilers. I've had to fix an awful lot of bugs in programs written by optimists.
Have you read my blog lately?
I think you can get anyone to do anything provided they know they're appreciated at the end of it. I usually get paid, so that's appreciation enough!
The first sentence is very true. The second one, well, I guess that is true if and only if your pay is appropriate to your job's risks/required skill level/experience.
Me, I don't know how much my work really matters at the end of the day. But the fact that my bosses go out of their way to tell (and show) me that they appreciate the job I do, plus admiring remarks from colleagues who also do what I do (Web designer/Webmaster), make it worthwhile to me to get my ass out of bed in the morning.
I think one of the most fundamental needs of the human animal is to be appreciated.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
What a surprise. Who would have thought that the mouthpiece of the corporate world would turn out an article like this that essentially glorifies the Velvet Sweatshop that America have become. The article here subtly hints that if you do not thrive under pressure, and accept the sweatshop environment, well, then there must be something just a bit wrong with you.
People, when are you going to open your eyes and see the grave looming in front of you a sparse few decades ahead?
When are you going to take a look at the workplace environment and rules and social safety net that many European countries have created, thus ensuring that their citizens are somewhat shielded from overwork and sweatshop environments?
PLease consider the perspective taken by this article. Could it have been written another way? Why was it written with the particular perspective it took?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Situations aren't stressful when you're completely out of control or your task and responsability is clearly defined. For something to be really stressful, you have to be missing part of the picture.
When you insert a bunch of unknowns, like oh... The main database server is unreachable, the CEO is unreachable, and you can't even start to work on the problem until the guys on-site respond... It's 12:00pm, you're low on sleep, and you have to meet with the customer at 7:00am... which they're on the other side of the country and not responding! Nothing to do but sleep... yep. Sleep well.
...or maybe someone cut the fiber to this block, we gotta move from one colo to the next in 17 hours, and the police have taped off the area as a murder scene... it could open up in the next three minutes or next 30 hours, it's anyone's guess.... it's a shame the I.T. was out of your hands and you can't reach the customer database to notify everyone or provide a status update before they call.
Here's one... your car breaks down on a highway with no shoulders in the middle of the night, your electrical system fails, you've got no flares, and your handicapped mother is in the car... I hope nobody's doing 130MPH when you step out onto the ashphalt.
I clearly stated that I was comparing America to Europe. Yet you ignored that, and compared America to Indonesia, a third world country. I find it very telling that you chose that comparison. So I guess as long as we are better off than the 3rd world, then everything is hunkydory?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Let's take a look at some of the language used in this article, in order to see what connotations are associated with people who thrive on a stressful environment (i.e., a sweatshop, as opposed to those who do not thrive. Tell me what message this article gives us.
Here are some selected excerpts from the article:
"juggling multiple projects and running on four hours of sleep is business as usual."
So that is the Brave New Workplacein America. But that is not the workplace in France, and many other countries in Europe, where 35 hours per week is the mandated maximum work week, and where everyone gets 4 to 6 weeks of time off.
"But for Mr. Jones, the stress is worth it, if only because every now and then he can gaze at the Manhattan skyline and spot a product of his labor: the soaring profile of the Chatham apartment building on East 65th Street,"
Teaching us to accept our place in the sweatshop. Slavery is Freedom, dontcha know, and sweatshop workplaces are heaven.
"Mr. Jones belongs to a rare breed of worker"
Oooh. I wanna be a "rare breed", too. How about you?!
Let's take a look at some of the words used to describe our stress-loving heroes:
"they grapple
Wow! If only I could just be like them!
"People who are high in hardiness enjoy ongoing changes and difficulties,"
OK, Slashdotters, did you get the memo on our Brave New Sweatshop Economy. No, it is not a Velvet Sweatshop that we are headed for, it is just "changes and difficulties". Now get back to work!
But what about the rest of us non-heroic types? How does this article describe us?
"Their coworkers who complain of being too stressed have consistently higher levels of hormones that rarely dip very far, trapping them in a constant state of anxiety.
Oh. OK. We are "complainers" trapped in our anxiety. Gotcha!
"Some people will say 'No, I don't like a lot of stress,' but they find themselves in one stressful job after another, so there must be something that's pulling them.""
Hmm, or maybe, just maybe, it is because our government has sold us out to the corporations and the wealthy, thus creating a sweatshop environment where nearly EVERY job is becoming more and more stressful. Naw, that couldn't be it. Could it?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I'd like to hear what these people's spouses and kids think of their "resilience". They'd probably use a different word, probably one like "selfishness".
Yes. It will require legislation, but so will anything else.
With outsourcing, you're job can go to someone who can live on pennies per-day. Do you possibly think you can make that up by working harder? Unless you've been completely useless up to this point, there's no way you can work an order of magnitude harder... So working harder isn't even a real option.
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