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Making Mundane Tasks More Enjoyable

April 30, 2010 By 1 Comment

I came across a post on the Simple Dollar today and I thought it had some valuable advice that I wanted to share here. Trent writes about “slog work” (monotonous work that has to be done) and ways to make it more bearable. I think we all have slog work that we have to do, but that we dread doing because it is time consuming and boring.

I bet this miserable looking man would enjoy his work a lot more if he had some rockin' tunes to listen to.

At my previous job it was prepping  and making patient charts. Now that I am a stay at home mom, it is the dishes. In order to make this mundane task more enjoyable, I will often purposefully leave all the dishes until the end of the day and then I will either listen to music or a podcast or I will call someone and chat with them while I am working. Sometimes I bring my laptop in the kitchen and watch a movie. (By leaving the dishes until the end of the day, I actually have enough work to listen to the entire podcast or have a lengthy conversation.) My slog work gets done and I don’t even notice I am doing it AND I get to listen to something enjoyable or talk to someone I care about. This is a positive situation all around.

So I would encourage you to think about tasks that you put off because you dread doing them. Is there some way that you could make them more enjoyable to do? If you work in an office, it might be enjoyable just to put on some headphones and do your task without interruption. (Even if you don’t have music playing, you can still block out distracting chatter.) If it is housework or yard work, load up your iPod with some of your favorite tunes and get busy. The time seems to go much quicker when you don’t have to only focus on the mundane work at hand.

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The truth about white noise

April 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Scotland

Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland

We currently live in Scotland (though we’re Texans by birth) and we recently traveled to the Scottish west coast through the Cairngorm Mountains and even across to the Isle of Skye.  First, it was a great trip and the view while driving was breathtaking.  I would highly recommend this trip if it’s feasible for anyone.

That said, we had interesting hotel situations.  It was the 4 of us (my husband, myself, and our 2 small children), as well as my mother.  My mom is a huge believer in white noise, too, in that she and my dad work from home and sometimes keep the grandkids.  They don’t want to hush their clients or not be able to make necessary phone calls juts because the babies are sleeping in the next room.  Therefore, they use white noise to cover such sounds in order to be productive and allow the children to sleep peacefully.  As a result, we packed 3 portable white noise generators, one for each room in the lodge we would be staying at.  Several humorous white noise misunderstandings took place that prompted me to write this post.

The truth about white noise

  1. White noise covers most sounds, but not all.  If you were (hypothetically) coughing like a banshee right outside the door of your grandchild’s room, he or she will probably still hear it and possible start crying.  Hypothetically speaking, of course.
  2. When you turn on a white noise generator in 1 room, it does not magically work for other rooms, too.  White noise treats the area immediately around it.  That’s why we brought 3 generators- 1 for each room.  Therefore, to say something like, “I’m sure they won’t hear me banging around in the kitchen or slamming doors because we have 3 white noise generators running” is ludicrous.

So, bottom line- white noise is awesome.  It covers the usual, run-of-the-mill noises and neutralizes many louder sounds so that they are not as intrusive.  This is particularly helpful when trying to focus at work.  However, when implementing white noise for sleep (and especially for children who are apt to feel like they are missing out on all the fun), it’s wise to pair it with less noise on your part, too.  Your goal is to minimize the racket in every way possible, including your own tinkering around. While you should be able to watch TV, have a conversation in a normal voice, or make a phone call, there’s no reason to cough out your lung or a slam a door when common sense says not to.

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Why You Need Portable White Noise

April 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

White Noise Revelation

It's important to get a small, portable generator so it's not a stressful addition.

I have posted several times about using white noise for travel.  I’m not really sure how I ever lived without my trusty, portable white noise generator.  We never actually used white noise until we had children and started getting annoyed at barking dogs or loud neighborhood children waking them prematurely.  The first white noise we used was a fan.  It did the trick of covering problem noises, but presented several new problems:

  1. It was large and heavy, and therefore cumbersome to carry around, let alone pack in the car with all the suit cases and other essentials, such as the actual children and car seats, etc.
  2. It was unsafe.  Even though I trained my daughter not to touch the fan, I was constantly worried about her curious little fingers.  Plus, after reading about how Mike Tyson’s daughter accidentally strangled herself on the cord of an elliptical machine, I was nervous about cords.

Why you Need Portable White Noise, too

So, we invested in good, portable white noise generators.  Here’s what they bring to the table (or a hotel room, for that matter):

  1. They are small and weigh virtually nothing.  Thus, they are easy to pack and hardly take up any precious baggage space (which is important since airlines have severely limited what you can bring for free).
  2. They can be plugged in or can operate on batteries.  So, if you’re worried about safety, you can eliminate any cord use.
  3. Obviously, they cover noise.  So, wherever you are, you are not held captive to ambient noise.  This can be clutch, especially if you’re by the elevator or below partiers in a hotel- or anywhere in a Latin-American or UK or European hotel the night of a soccer game.  Yikes.  Been there and didn’t sleep because it was before my white noise revelation.  Tragedy.

Portable, reliable white noise generators are honestly one of the best investments we’ve ever made.  In fact, we have 3- 1 for each bedroom.  And they are the first things we pack, no matter where we go.  (And we go a LOT of places).

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Tips for productivity

April 26, 2010 By 2 Comments

While it's crucial to clear your mind, ears, and desk of distractions, bottom line is you still have to work.

Step 1: Getting rid of distractions

If you’re a faithful reader, then you know I work from home and how I feel about minimizing distractions.  I can’t exactly tell my kids to quit crying (though I have instituted taking turns on who gets to cry) but I can set up some good boundaries for actually getting work done at home.

But what about when you have writer’s (or worker’s) block?  Even if you do set up a home office conducive to work, cover distracting sounds with white noise, and declutter your work space, that doesn’t mean the muse fairy will hit you over the head with a brilliant idea or plan that will set you on a pedestal for the rest of your life.  While it’s crucial to clear your mind, ears, and desk of distractions, bottom line is you still have to work.

Step 2: Getting rid of writer’s (worker’s) block

So, here are few tips for breaking the barrier when you’re staring at a blank screen:

  • Sit there and think for 10 minutes.  Seriously, before you give yourself (another) break, try to come up with a starting point.  It’s not that I don’t value breaks- in fact I have a lot due to the nature of my work day and kids.  However, I think it’s easy to procrastinate by allowing yourself too many.
  • Make a list of things that need to get done and start doing them- it may be that you have a break-through as you make the list or start checking things off.  Sometimes, the feeling of accomplishment is enough to get your mind going.
  • If you’re writing, do a google search and see what others have written.  Sometimes this is good fodder for a new idea or a response to someone else’s.  I find that I write best (ie not plagiarize) if I read an article and then close it, whether I agree with it or not.
  • Since I do work from home and also have small children still at home, I don’t work 9-5.  So, I have a couple hours a couple times a day.  I push it hard while I have the peace and quiet to do it, then when I’m on with the kids, I keep a pad and paper by me so I can jot down any ideas that come to mind.  That way, I’m not working while the kids are around and I also don’t lose an idea.
  • Take breaks.  See, I do value breaks.  I just think they need to be earned.  ;)
  • Frequently, I work on an idea in the back of my head…maybe it’s a real life experience, maybe it’s not, but either way, I find that my best ideas come when I am not technically working.  I usually, mull them over in the back of my mind as I wash dishes (we live in the UK- no dishwasher, so there’s lots of that) or pick up toys or even play with the kids.  Then, I either work on it the next chance I get, or I at least write it down so I don’t forget.

I think what I’m trying to get across is that it’s important to set up a great work space that offers minimal distractions.  However, once you have done that, it’s your turn to channel the creative juices and discipline yourself to actually work.

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Telecommuting = No More Noisy Coworkers

April 23, 2010 By 1 Comment

Are you tired of your noisy coworkers and trying to think up new ways to keep them from distracting you? Have you ever thought about if your job could be done from home? Could you work from home even a couple days a week? Before you immediately answer ‘no’ ask yourself a few questions.

Questions taken from Telecommute Connecticut.
  • Do you have the right job? Obviously if you are a construction worker or a plumber, telecommuting is not going to work.
  • Do you have a good job performance record? If you are constantly on Facebook or talking on your cell phone, your boss is probably not going to agree to you working from home. If you won’t work when you are at work, then why would you when you are at home? Also, if you are a new employee, you wouldn’t be a good candidate because you are still at a stage where you need to get familiar with office procedure and it is helpful to have other people around to be able to ask a quick question if you need to.
  • Do you have the right home office environment? Will you have access to a quiet place to work that is free from distractions? If the only place you have to work during the day is at your kitchen table right next to your noisy toddler then telecommuting would probably not work for you. Its awfully hard to participate in a conference call when your kid is yelling and throwing food at your computer and you.
  • Do you have the right boss and organizational structure? If your boss is like Michael Scott, then it is probably a no go.
  • Are you an effective communicator? If you can communicate quickly and easily over email and on the phone, then that would be fine. If you are the kind of person that needs to have a face to face conversation, then that might pose a problem for you to work at home.
  • Are you self-disciplined, motivated and organized? Basically, are you going to be able to work when you are supposed to work and get your job done?
  • Do you have social independence skills? As an extrovert, I would fail this question. I am horribly unproductive when I am completely alone and have always been that way. Give me another person working quietly in the same room as me, and I am good to go. I would feel too lonely and isolated if I worked from home full time.
  • Are you susceptible to overwork? If you have trouble leaving your work at your work, then you might not want to bring your work into your home where you would then have no physical separation from it, making it harder to have any mental separation. You need to have time away from work in order to rest and recharge.
  • Do you see telecommuting as a way to balance work and other roles? If you are going to telecommute, you still need to give 100% to your work. You can’t expect to be able to work effectively while caring for a sick relative or trying to take care of your kids. Your family and your work deserve better than that.

If your answers to these questions look promising after you have thoroughly thought them over, then perhaps you should approach your boss and ask if telecommuting would work for you.

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White Noise for Realtors

April 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The McCord Real Estate Team

Taking a Personal Interest in their Clients

My mom and dad are successful realtors in Dallas, TX.  My mom started real estate while my dad was still building houses, so I have watched her top the charts time and again and have marveled at how well she did even solo.  I believe her success is a result of her loyalty, friendliness, and faithfulness.  Each client feels taken care of from looking at the first house to closing day and beyond.  That’s because she takes a personal interest in their needs and wants, and she works hard to ensure they get exactly what they want at a price they can afford.  And now that my dad brings his construction expertise to the team, they are quite the dynamic duo.

Why she left her office

Recently we had an interesting conversation about why she left her real estate office and started officing from home.  The main reason was that she felt she couldn’t serve her clients well from her noisy office for the following reasons:

  • Distraction- too much office noise was distracting while she tried to work or make calls.
  • Overheard Personal Information- she didn’t want other agents or passers-by to overhear her personal information as she made calls.
  • Competing agents- there were times that the agent on the other side of a deal she was negotiating was present in the office.  The last thing she wanted was for that agent to hear her confirming a seller’s bottom price or a buyer’s top price.
  • Lack of professionalism- similar to distraction, ambient office noise in the background does not sound personal and professional to a client on the other end of a call or in a meeting at the office.

As a result, she moved her office home to batter take care of her clients.  However, it may be that you don’t have that luxury.  Perhaps your home is not large enough to house an office, or perhaps you have to work at an office because it’s more convenient for your clients.  Or maybe it’s just too expensive to buy all the equipment you need to work from home successfully, or maybe you simply aren’t productive enough when faced with home distractions.

White Noise

Whatever the case may be, an alternative solution for office noise is white noise.  White noise is basically a low-level background sound that helps your brain block out competing sounds so that it can focus on one task, one conversation, or one person at a time without becoming distracted.  In the case of clients, white noise can help them stay focused and not overwhelmed by all the background clattering while they are trying to negotiate a deal.  Furthermore, when white noise in employed office-wide (like in the case of sound masking) provides security since all parties can talk freely without fear of being overheard.

My mom has received the customer service award office-wide 5 times for a reason- she cares about her clients as if they’re family.  So, whatever it takes to make them feel personally cared for and protected is worth it to her.  Maybe you feel the same way.  Try this free white noise generator to see if it’s a fit for your style of business.

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The Tyranny of the Urgent

April 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

In 1967 a gentleman by the name of Charles Hummel published a pamphlet entitled “The Tyranny of the Urgent.” Over 40 years later his words hold even more truth today then they did back then.With the advent of cell phones, texts, and email, there are more ‘urgent’ things to do than ever before.

“Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important.”

By prioritizing the important over the urgent, you will not end up like this stressed out dude.

There are so many demands on our time everyday. Its difficult to get everything done that we need to. In his short essay, Hummel argues that the urgent things crowd out the important things. For example, constant emails, phone calls, and text messages keep you from what is actually important–finishing projects at work, spending quality time with your family, etc.

Hummel writes, “We live in constant tension between the urgent and the important. The problem is that many important tasks need not be done today, or even this week.” The urgent is prioritized and the important is pushed to the side. My family and I have seen this happen in our lives over the past few years. My husband is in graduate school trying to finish up a PhD and we have two small children. There is constantly something urgent happening in a house with two small children (diaper needs changed, someone needs a drink of water, someone hit someone else). These are important and need to be attended to, but overall, my husband getting out the door and into his office so he can finish his thesis is ultimately more important for our family. (So he can graduate, get a job, etc.) We deal with the tyranny of the urgent every single day in many different situations.

If allowed to continue, it can often lead to a sense of frustration–‘Why can’t I get anything done, even though I feel like I am working or busy all of the time?’ One way to stop this cycle is to stop allowing the urgent to take precedence when you are doing the important things. Get rid of the urgent, if possible. This obviously has to be balanced with each and every situation, but if applied wisely, could help to relieve some of the frustration and allow you to actually do something that is important. For example, if you know you need to work on a project, then don’t leave your inbox up on your computer, don’t answer your phone, find a way to minimize discussions with coworkers, and get to work.  Not only will it take less time if you aren’t constantly being distracted, but you are accomplishing what you need to and that always feels good.

How do you deal with the ‘tyranny of the urgent?’ Any more suggestions for managing this while working with noisy coworkers?

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The New Chuck Norris: White Noise

April 14, 2010 By 2 Comments

What's not to revere?

Chuck Norris’s tears cure cancer.  Too bad he has never cried.

It takes Chuck Norris 20 minutes to watch 60 minutes.

Only Chuck Norris can prevent forest fires.

Chuck Norris Jokes

We’ve all heard them before.  Chuck Norris jokes are so serious, they are Chuck Norris facts.  I’ve never been sure why everyone loves and jokes about Chuck Norris.

A few nights ago, I was lying in bed listening to our house guest thump around.  Our flat is very noisy, with thin carpet and even thinner walls, so every footstep is magnified a thousand times.  Plus, our son is teething and his random through the night crying is keeping my jet-lagged guest awake unnecessarily.  So, as we listened to our nightie symphony of sounds, I said to my husband, “Thank the Lord for white noise and ear plugs.”  He jokingly said, “Until we find out that ear plugs cause cancer.”  In total reverence, I quipped, “or white noise cures it.”

And there it was- I understood Chuck Norris jokes facts.  You revere the things you respect by joking about them.  I’m still not a Chuck Norris fan, but I have found my equivalent: white noise generators and the peace they bring my home at night.

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You go to work to get interrupted

April 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Do you feel like someone calls your name just when you being to focus on a task?

Think about your typical work day.  Then, pretend like you have a virtual highlighter to underline what you relate with from the following excerpt:

Yeah, my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.

Maybe it was working on nights and weekends just to get the job done or maybe it was the idea of distractions and interruptions in general…either way, it sounds like the modern worker isn’t getting a whole lot of work done from 9-5.

So, what can you do?

There are a variety of options for dealing with frustrations at work:

  • Get really mad and pout.
  • Complain to you coworkers and ensure that they, too, have to spend their nights and weekends doing what they should have been doing while they were listening to you.
  • Do something about it.

You might see which way I’m gonna go with this, and you may have thought o it yourself and just been unsure how to be proactive.  So, the first step is always admitting you have a problem: this time it’s realizing that you can’t control the work environment.  The next step is taking control of what you can, which is minimizing distractions and their effects.  Here are a few distraction-minimizing techniques:

  • Set a reasonable limit on how frequently you check your email, especially your personal mail.  It may work for you to check it 3 times: first thing in the morning, around lunch, and end of day.  However, your work may be directly related to checking email, so you will have to be the judge.  It’s still wise to limit personal activity at work.
  • Restrain your socializing.  It’s healthy to take breaks and enjoy water cooler gossip, but hanging around the break room most of the work day is not.  Again, think about being strategic- when you grab your morning coffee, purpose to chat for 5 minutes, but no more.
  • Pair your social breaks with work breaks- to avoid eye strain, it’s wise to frequently blink and focus on something other than the computer screen.  So, take a few minutes every hour to rest your eyes, stretch your back, neck, and shoulders, and get a few minutes of talking in.
  • Try white noise, like this free white noise generator, to block irritating or distracting noises (see above for great examples of typical distractors!).

By experimenting with how you spend your time and what you let distract you, you should be able to reclaim your nights and weekends by actually getting your work done- at work!


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You are your own worst distraction (sometimes)

April 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

As can be seen from the name of our site, Noisy Coworkers, we usually focus on ways to block out or get away from your annoying coworkers. However, we all know that you are not above distracting yourself. Facebook, cell phones, blogs, Twitter, or perhaps even old fashioned things like magazines (which are all your choice to engage in)  can serve as forms of distraction and are ways to keep you from being productive. It seems that the more ‘wired’ we get, the more ways there are to be distracted, or at least to feel pulled in multiple directions so that it is hard to settle down and actually get some work done.

Perhaps this would be appropriate for you to wear on Casual Fridays. Or not.

I came across a blog post this week over at Tweetage Wasteland (don’t you love the word ‘Tweetage’?) that talks about how prevalent cell phone usage and other forms of communication have  become in the past ten to twenty years. Ten years ago when I was working at the now defunct Circuit City and selling cell phones, they were just starting to really take off and integrate into our culture. A Blackberry or Smart Phone was unheard of. Connecting to the internet on a cell phone? Well, that would have just been crazy talk. Trying to explain to the myriad of people interested in this ‘new’ technology how it works, how much it costs, and why it would be useful got pretty old after a while. I appreciated Tweetage Wasteland’s look back  in time as a reminder that it hasn’t always been this way. (Wonder how many times I can use the word ‘Tweetage’ in this post. Tweetage, tweetage, tweetage.) People did function before cell phones became so commonplace. It is okay if you are not always reachable. It is also ok if you cannot Twitter about or update your Facebook status about every single thing that is happening to you.

So, perhaps next time you are wondering why it is taking you so long to get anything done, or why you can’t manage to accomplish anything, instead of taking the easy road and blaming it on your noisy coworkers, you could take a quick second to turn off your cell phone, completely close the Facebook and Twitter page on your browser, hide People magazine, and actually get to work. It’ll be okay. The world will keep going if a call has to go to voicemail or if you wait to update your status about what your annoying coworker is doing right now.

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