On Tuesday, we talked a bit about how there will be numerous times in a person’s life that you realize that you are, perhaps, a bit off track from where you would like to be. Maybe you wake up one day and realize you own nothing beyond dowdy suits, Mom jeans, and pajamas — a wardrobe revamp is in order. Other times you wake up and realize it’s your attitude that needs an adjustment. There are different varieties of this. The two big ones that I’ve seen involve a realization that perhaps you’ve been phoning it in for far too long, either because you were dealing with a personal issue (planning a wedding, having a baby, dealing with a sick parent, etc, etc) or because you just aren’t engaged in your job anymore. Other times, you realize that it’s your job that makes you unhappy; you may suddenly feel that you’ve been beaten down for so long that you don’t even remember the last time you felt calm, fulfilled, and at peace with the world. This is a type of burnout that can happen with any job, but I’ve seen it especially with those professions — BigLaw, I’m looking at you — that consume most or all of your waking hours for years at a time. Sometimes the right answer might be to just suck it up, deal with it, recognize the commitments you’ve made and the value of what you’ve got. Other times, a vacation can help — but you can’t solve every problem by a week or two in a tropical locale. (Pictured: fiji birthday drink, originally uploaded to Flickr by mjecker.)
For my $.02, the first situation is the better of the two — you still intrinsically like what you do and where you are, but you just need to reengage with the job. Some ideas for that:
- Revamp your routine. If the first thing you do every day at the office is surf the web for two hours, stop that — don’t even turn on your computer if possible. I recently read about someone who “turned the mouse off” during work time to cut down on distracted browsing; you can also just put your mouse out of reach, turn it on its back, or unplug it.
- Restyle your office (or move offices, if possible). It’ll make you feel like you’re at a new job again.
- Reengage with your profession again. Attend a thinky seminar or conference, and really listen — take notes as if your life depended on it. Take some time to apply what you’ve learned to your current job (and, perhaps, to your boss’s job). Set up a meeting or write a memo if you come up with tangible ideas as a result.
The other main kind of “attitude revamp” I’ve seen people need is when your job makes you miserable — perhaps even your profession — and you can’t easily get a new job (or a new profession). The only thing, in my experience, that I’ve seen work for this is to reconnect with some older, core version of yourself from the time before The Job. For example, maybe you were on the swim team in your youth — and you can just rejoin an adult swim club that does drills and the like. For me, I found myself in this situation a few years ago, right after I’d missed my best friend’s wedding to do a doc review — and the only thing I could think to do to reconnect with ME again was to take a humor writing class, which I hadn’t done since I was 17. I signed up at Gotham (with the very excellent teacher Sara Barron) and realized in pretty short order that a) I could write something other than a law brief, and b) I was kind of good at writing, as well as giving other people in my class useful feedback on how their own stories could be better. As soon as I reconnected with the “me” I’d been when I was 17 — full of hope and ambition and sarcasm — weirdly enough, good things started to happen. I met my future husband later that month. I got on a much better project at the job, working closely with a lawyer I truly admired, about two months later. I decided to start this blog about four months later. None of those things had anything to do with my rediscovered humor writing skills — but so much to do with my rediscovery of me, the person I’d been before I’d spent nearly 15 years throwing myself into school and work.
Readers, what are your tips for getting your groove back? What other major attitude revamps have you been through?
We’re normally not fans of pricey beauty products — the drugstore is more of our vibe. However, we were talked into buying this YSL highlighter as part of our wedding makeup, and we are absolutely addicted now, because it’s the perfect way to “look alive” after a long day of staring at the computer screen. (We use it so often we even keep it in our purse, so we always have it with us.) Before we head out for a night on the town, we’ll add a bit under the eyelids, alongside our nose beneath our brows, and up over the brow bones to perk up without getting that startled look that plain concealer can bring. Brilliant. It’s available at Sephora for $40. Yves Saint Laurent TOUCHE ÉCLATRadiant Touch 1 Luminous Radiance
Tagged as:
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Yves Saint Laurent
Today’s question comes from a reader curious about lunching etiquette…
I have a question for you guys: what’s the opinion on eating lunch at one’s desk? There are some projects I need (and want) to stay in the office for but I have to eat! It’s incredibly hard to look professional mid-bite of a taco and even salads can get interesting. Not to mention, with an open office plan, not everyone is in lunch mode, so while they’re having a meeting, I’m scarfing down a sandwich. Dinner isn’t so much an issue, as its afterhours but lunch is still a conundrum for me. Is this an issue for anyone else? Do you avoid certain foods? Curious…
For our $.02, if we haven’t planned lunch with someone, then we tend to prefer to lunch at our desk. We don’t mean to be antisocial, but it helps us to continue whatever thought we were in the midst of before hunger pangs overtook us, or to surf the web and read blogs that we wouldn’t have time for otherwise. (In fact, we hate taking breaks in the middle of the day, and tend to bring snacks like yogurt and raw almonds so we don’t have to leave the office at all.) Some people really do not like the smell of pungent food — we worked in one place where, allegedly, the microwave had been banished to a back room on a middle floor because one of the bigwigs did not like the smell of cooking food. And to that end, it might make sense to avoid really smelly lunches or snacks. It might also pay to be considerate, smellwise, of folks who are dieting — avoid bringing in McDonald’s fries or heating up that brownie.
If you’re eating in an open space, there may be other considerations, such as what people can see and here. You may want to avoid things that are difficult bites to eat — long spaghetti, really large pieces of sushi — or things that fall apart randomly (e.g., hard-shell tacos). This doesn’t mean you’re left with nothing to eat — ask for them to chop your salad. Choose tortellini rather than angel hair. Soup and sandwiches are lunch hits for a reason. If you prefer to adopt our approach of eating really small meals between breakfast and dinner, it does seem (to us at least) pretty unobtrusive to eat things like an apple, a carton of yogurt, a few raw almonds, a skim latte, and so forth, throughout the day.
Readers, what are your thoughts? Do you lunch at your desk frequently? If you’re working in an open space, what do you eat?
Pictured above: Flickr has an amazing pool of photos snapped by folks who bring their own bento lunches to work, many of them using the Zojirushi Mr. Bento
system. (Specifically, above: Tuesday Bento (28) – Zojirushi, originally uploaded to Flickr by devlyn.) If this isn’t quite your thing, check out Amazon’s fairly extensive collection of really cute lunch bags
.
Tagged as:
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Liking these posts? Follow Corporette on Twitter — this is the edited version of what we’re reading! (We also Tweet if we hear about a good sale.)
- Women aren’t necessarily leaving the work force for different reasons than men. [The Women's DISH] But they are fleeing legal careers faster than men! [Vancouver Sun via Ms. JD]
- Ooh, a profile on Carly Fiorina… and her support of McCain. [WSJ]
- What you eat affects your mood (we knew that) as well as your cognitive abilities (didn’t know that). Salmon and beets, anyone? [iVillage]
- If you’re thinking of getting a dog, you may want to consider a mutt rather than a designer dog like a puggle, which can have massive (and expensive) health problems. [ChiTrib]
- Investing idea: buy a foreclosed home. [WSJ]
- Amusing: an article from Law.com on the evolution of lunch from summer camp through to partnership. [Law.com]
- Randomly: A cool website we just found: a Yale-educated former lawyer is blogging (and writing a book) about a year spent making all efforts to be happy. [The Happiness Project]
Amazingly, everyone we know right now is either trying to get their eating under control (the Fourth of July was apparently a very happy one for everyone!) or outright diet. This can seem like a nearly impossible task if you’ve got cocktail parties, catered dinners, and three-course lunches on a daily basis — especially since so many diet programs require you to cook (or at least eat specific foods that can take a ton of time to prepare). What’s a working girl to do? Here are our tips…
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In this feature, we’ll explore one tool that makes the busy woman’s life easier in some small way.
Every busy woman’s got a growing pile of things to do — immediate things to do at home and at the office. Things to do at some point in the future (update the resume, congratulate Theresa and Ben on their 5-year anniversary, get vacation photos printed). It helps to corral these things into a list. Really! We’ve unfortunately left our copy of Getting Things Done, by David Allen, at home, but there’s a lovely passage in it where he talks about how all these tiny things that must be done nag at your brain, tugging at your conscious (and subconscious) mind until you’re exhausted, worrying about all the things that need to be done. His solution (which we’ve found really does help) is to write EVERYTHING down. Build a system, and trust the system.
We’ve been fine with using Outlook for office tasks, but we truly love using Remember The Milk for personal tasks. Some great things about it:
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