Crackberry

While exercising at the gym, I feel this strange urge come over me to check my Blackberry....about every five minutes. The urge really seems more like a sensation of missing something. It’s kind of like that feeling of still rocking on waves in a boat after already making the transfer back to land. As I look around, I see about a fourth of the people exercising with a cell phone or other PDA near them. Some even answer their phones and try to talk while running on a treadmill, and yet others make calls between sets when lifting weights. They are the ones that make me feel better about my Blackberry habit. At least I am not one of them, I reason. At least I do not have Crackberry syndrome. Although the urge to have it at my side at all times is there, I cannot really be suffering from Crackberry, because I am able to set limits. I do not use it in the bathroom (yes, I know people who do), and I do not use it while exercising in the gym.

Being organized and efficient is not a standard to aspire to when pursuing stufessionalism; it is a requirement. My Blackberry 8830 keeps my life in order. In one place, I can utilize my five different email accounts, send text messages, make and receive phone calls, keep a master calendar with alarms and reminders, create to-do lists, use the Internet, access a GPS navigation system, store all my personal contacts including emails, phone numbers and addresses....the list of tools to empower me in my pursuit to shove as much into my life at one time is endless. I think if I ever lost my Crackberry....oh wait, I mean my Blackberry.... I might need a grief counselor. Without it, I could never multi-task at the pace of Generation Y while hiding the fact that I am really Generation X.

So today’s blog message is-- if you feel like you have ADD but you know you don’t, run right out and get yourself one of these little miracles. You will never forget anything, or be late for anything ever again—-unless you just want to.

--Lynn Johnson
Stufessional and advid Blackberry user

Work Time Work Out

What relieves stress? Aside from chucking it all, cashing out your retirement plan and heading to a tropical isle, experts agree that the best stress reliever is exercise. “[Exercise] affects the biology in the brain in the same way that anti-depressant drugs do,” says Andrea Dunn, exercise psychologist at the Cooper Institute. As we jog, bike or lift weights the stress hormone cortisol decreases and endorphins increase. Voilà, we feel better.

How does a stufessional squeeze in an exercise routine while studying, writing papers, reading, excelling at work, keeping up with friends, fulfilling family obligations, running errands and eating well? If hitting the gym before, after or during work is not feasible, consider chair exercising.

Chair exercising may not be as intense as an hour at the gym, but any exercise is better than none, and the positive effects are cumulative. Here are a few of the best chair exercises:

• Sitting in your chair, lift one leg off the seat, extend it out straight, hold for 2 seconds; then lower your foot (stop short of the floor) and hold for several seconds. Switch; do each leg 15 times.


• Place a small pillow between your feet. Try to lift the item off the ground and squeeze your legs together at the same time. You can also place the pillow or other soft object between your knees and squeeze. Repeat 15 times.


• While seated, pump both arms over your head for 30 seconds, then rapidly tap your feet on the floor, football-drill style, for 30 seconds. Repeat 3-5 times.


• Isometric contractions are easily performed in a seated position. Squeezing your muscle, hold the contraction for a few seconds, then release. Repeat each muscle 15 times.

Make every minute count. "Stand rather than sit. Walk rather than stand," says Joan Price, author of "The Anytime, Anywhere Exercise Book." Make the trek to a colleague's office instead of instant messaging. When you take the stairs, give your legs a workout by consciously employing every muscle. Park in the furthest space and enjoy a brisk walk. Take every opportunity you can to decrease cortisol, increase endorphins and de-stress.

--Susan

Sources:
WebMD's "Exercise at Your Desk"
eHow's "How to Exercise at Your Office"
Associated Content's "Top 10 Ways to Relieve Stress"
Mayo Clinic's "Exercise: Rev Up Your Routine to Reduce Stress"
The Cooper Institute

The information provided on this site is not intended nor recommended as a substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care professional regarding any exercise program.

To do, or not to do: that is the question…

To do, or not to do: that is the question
Whether it is more expedient to worry about
The countless "to do’s" that one has to do
The work-work, the homework, the housework, the patchwork
Or, procrastinate another day and let time pass away

To enjoy love and life
To consider, remember, and deliver despite
The time, the obstacles, the missing pieces and more
To rest one’s eyes after all the day’s chores

To sacrifice
To direct
The attention
Of one’s life

To move
In a vain
That has no purpose
Or light

The stress in a mess with no happy ending
To offer a ghost solution with no beginning

No more
Not today
This, too, shall past

I will write the list
Do the last task
And, toast the glass

The pangs, the churn, the buzz, the drive
The mountain, the calamity, the river, the tide
The shuffle, the bustle, the hustle, the toil
The spoil, the boil, the coil, the royal
Piece of happiness that is the reason for it all.

Is it the journey, the practice or the rise and the fall?
The up and the down
And, the up that stays up?
Or, is it the “to do” that we “did” because we never gave up?

[Shrita]

Use The Force Wisely, Young Jedi

Visual aids enhance stufessional presentations. A stufessional in a business meeting may employ PowerPoint presentations to swing executive favor, while in the classroom, a stufessional can add zest static slides with photography and even audio.

Perhaps this is no surprise. Stufessionals are savvy after all. Yet merely selecting a image to spice up drab bullet points is not the answer. Visual aids are not a quick fix. They require forethought and care. Consider reading the U.S. Department of Labor's article, "Presenting Effective Presentations with Visual Aids."

Let's isolate the Microsoft PowerPoint visual aid for this discussion. In a typical work-flow, the stufessional labors over the content -- the written content. Text is written and rewritten to be clear, concise, and attractive. During the presentation, the stufessional speaker most likely references the PowerPoint in the background. The speaker is the focus, while the projection is wallpaper.

I argue that the same attention to grammar ought to be applied to visual content. One is not dependent on the other. The presentation is a package where each element must be strong. A weakened corner of a box will most likely cause the contents inside to spill.

Presentation Helper, an online resource for sharing ideas with respect to professional presentations posits "Seven Deadly Sins" of visual presentations:

1. Still using bullet points?

While bullet points are fast and easy to use, they are a poor way of getting your message across. According to research at carried out at UCLA a visual presentation is five times more likely to be remembered after three days than a presentation using just bullet points.

2. Corny images.

Visual images obtained from the royalty free photo database often have actors showing emotions such as surprise or happiness. The difficulty is that they can look very corny, and if the photos are a few years old, the fashions can look very dated. As with most things in life, taking a little extra time to select that right visual appearance will make all of the difference.

3. Using Clip Art.

Clip Art used to be a great way of making a presentation visual. The problem is that clip art now looks very dated compared to a color photograph.

4. Grainy pictures.

A lot of visual presentations are let down by the use of grainy images. It could be a picture or it could be a logo. Generally these images are taken from a web page and increased in size. The problem is that since they were saved as small files to make them load quickly, they do not enlarge well.

5. Copyright theft.

You must obtain the permission of the copyright owner before you can use any image. Often this is obtained simply by sending an email to the web master. If you don’t, you could easily end up with legal proceedings against you. How will they ever know? Well you never know who might be in your audience, and if the presentation gets distributed electronically you may find that the image that you have taken has an invisible digital water mark hidden in it. A grainy image (see above) is perhaps the biggest sign that it has been taken off a web site.

6. Images purely for decoration.

A picture is worth a thousand words. So why would you slap down any old image just to fill up a bit of space? The image should help to tell your story. One technology company had a slide entitled “Our stable of products.” Instead of an image showing how their products could suit a wide range of businesses, their graphic design agency had added in a picture of a horse! Relevance is everything.

7. Video clips that are too long.

It is very tempting to add in a video clip into a visual presentation. The difficulty is that an audience’s attention span when watching a video is very short. On the other hand the standard company video is often between three and ten minutes long. The audience will typically start to get twitchy after around 60 seconds and start to switch off after two minutes. If you are going to show a video, get it cut down into bite size chunks.

Stufessionals looking to add flavor and edge to professional or student presentations may benefit from visiting Slide Share, an online database providing inspiring PowerPoint designs and secrets.

Stufessionals looking to branch out to DVD video, online video, and doctored photographs may benefit from visiting the digital media labs at their university. At American University, the New Media Center provides online tutorials for software programs like iMovie.

- Jared

"The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."
- Oscar Wilde

Unplanned Landing

In aviation accidents, there’s something called a “chain of errors.” A chain of errors is a string of seemingly innocuous missteps that lead to and add up to an accident that, in aviation, is rarely innocuous. An “unplanned landing” is not a slight error.

I cheated on myself this week. As a stufessional, I promised myself (and the entire Stufessional Society) that I would not do any class assignments on work time. Well, yesterday, I did just that. How did I get here? How did this happen? How can I prevent it from happening again?

My chain of errors began on Monday night when, after finishing the bulk of my assignments, I decided to leave the last one to Tuesday. The first misstep was the blatant procrastination. The second misstep was that I had a previous commitment on Tuesday night that would not allow me to put in time on homework. So, on to Wednesday. I couldn’t do homework on Wednesday night either because I had work work to take care of. Another mistake, even if it was unplanned.

Thursday rolls around and, after the kids went to be, I buckled down. “I’m going to bang this assignment out right now!” I said to myself. Read the assignment, analyze, start planning my approach. Uh-oh, The Office is on. I know I’m recording it, so I’ll just watch this first segment then get back to work. It’s now ten o’clock and I’ve just watched all of The Office and sat right into 30 Rock. (Did I mention that I was recording these so I could watch them later? I did mention that, right?)

No worries, I’ll just finish this up by eleven and call it a night. Now it’s 10:30 and I can’t keep my eyes open. Damn.

So, there I am on Friday afternoon, just got out of a meeting at three, I have lots of office work to do, but that last assignment is staring me in the face. OK, just this once…

And there it is. One excursion from my plan on Monday night led to my doing homework in my office. One small misstep started my very own chain of errors that ended in my unplanned landing.

What have I learned and what can I pass on to the other stufessionals of the world? Make a plan and stick to it. If you don’t, you may have your very own unplanned landing.

(I hope no one at work is reading this.)

- Jim

Leadership for Dummies and Otherwise Busy People

This week I attended a conference on leadership for new managers and supervisors in Washington, DC. The various seminars were produced by National Seminars Group, a division of Rockhurst University Continuing Education Center, Inc. I have learned that continuing my professional education and training through seminars and conferences is one of the most important (and relaxing) things I can do for myself as a stufessional. It is nice to meet and mix with professionals from across the country with whom you share common experiences, ideas and concerns. The food is generally pretty good and it is also an excuse to turn off your blackberry or cell phone and activate that well-beloved "out of office" message.

Many organizations budget external training into your benefits package already (and may or may not tell you that) so find out what your company has to offer and take advantage of it. It looks great on a resume and should be a question all of us ask during job interviews. "What sorts of continuing education opportunities are available to me if I choose Company X or Non-Profit Y?"

As a part of a seminar on assertiveness, I learned that there are four ways to manage people; as a dominator (Executive Ed), a Persuador (Socializer Sally), a Stabalizer (Loyal Lou) or an Analyzer (Factual Fred). Which style are you? I also learned that assertiveness is being able to state what I see, what I think, what I am, what I want and what I intend without making any statements about you. Other things I learned include how to develop my own mission statement, create "liftscripts" or templates for dealing with tough personal and professional dialogues, that my body language matters more than my words, that I should offer a recommendation for solution when I task an employee because expectations should always be defined and finally, that habits form after a mere 21 days of repeating a behaviour.

Perhaps there is nothing in the above paragraph that you did not already know. Perhaps you think, wow, what a waste of three days, Anna. Well, to that I say: you may be right but it was free, it was empowering, I met some really cool people and they served a strawberry layer cake that was to die for!

Washington DC is a hub for professional conferences and seminars. Talk to your employer today about continuing your education through training and watch the stress melt away for at least a few hours or a couple of days.

- Anna

Traffic

Nothing really happens on my way to work in the mornings. Monday's are usually boring as there are fewer cars on the road. The excitment (yipee) really starts on Tuesday's as it seems the whole of Virginia gets abandoned for DC exactly at 7:30 every morning. Since everyone heads to the same direction, I try in my own little way to frustrate other drivers.....you see, I never go over 35 miles per hour on the George Washington parkway, and sometimes, I could hear some of these wonderful drivers cursing my mother!!!.

I have been driving on this parkway for so long now that I know every little corner a police cruzer is awaiting the next victim - like a spider eyeing it's next meal (a fly). Although, sometimes I have seen them munching on donuts...heh heh! You've got to love them...

At work in the morning is a whole new story....