Making Peace with Your Office Life: End the Battles, Shake the Blues, Get Organized, and Be Happier at Work - Softcover

Glovinsky, Cindy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312576021 ISBN 13: 9780312576028

Verlag: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Do you feel disconnected and disorganized on the job? Do you feel powerless in the face of multiple office challenges, from organizing your desk to dealing with office bullies? Are you sick of it all and ready to be happy at work?  Help is on the way! Cindy Glovinsky, licensed psychotherapist and expert on organizing and mental health, is uniquely qualified to offer solutions to your office blues, including:- Dozens of anecdotes and insightful exercises- Simple, effective organizing tips- Hundreds of easy ways to connect with colleagues- Great ways to make positive changes in the workplace Whether you dread coming to work every day or you're just looking for a new way to deal with office issues, Making Peace With Your Office Life offers a fresh, liberating view of the office world and practical ways to cope with its day-to-day challenges.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cindy Glovinsky, M.S.W., A.C.S.W., is the author of Making Peace with the Things in Your Life, One Thing At a Time, and Making Peace with Your Office Life. She is a licensed psychotherapist and professional organizer. A frequent lecturer and expert in the fields of chronic disorganization and attention deficit disorders, she is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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Making Peace with Your Office Life

End the Battles, Shake the Blues, Get Organized, and Be Happier at WorkBy Glovinsky, Cindy

St. Martin's Griffin

Copyright © 2010 Glovinsky, Cindy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312576028

Introduction
We gotta get out of this place . . . if it’s the last thing we ever do!” The words of the old Animals song wail through your mind after a particularly unpleasant conversation with one of your co­workers. Retreating to your cubicle, you imagine yourself magically entering the green pastures of your screen saver and dancing off to­ward the bright blue sky, away from  here, imprisoned in a job that suits you about as well as a dog house suits a canary. But instead, you start clicking your way through the forty- odd e-mails that accumu­lated while you were having the unpleasant conversation.
Meanwhile, you brace yourself for the next attack. What will it be? Someone from Accounting calling to say you did your expense report wrong and must do the whole thing over? Your boss’s partner demanding information ASAP for a project that  doesn’t have to be done for at least another six months? Or that neat- freak colleague making sardonic remarks about the piles of papers on your desk?
You glance around your cubicle for comfort, but your eyes meet only an inorganic desert of gray, white, and beige— they yearn for something green, natural hardwood floors, or a colorful painting. Machines beep and arguments buzz beyond the flimsy half walls. There’s a crick in your neck that refuses to go away no matter what you do, your legs itch for a good run in the park, and you can feel your brain cells dying in your head. Why did you bother to go to col­lege if this was where you were going to end up? Most of all, you long for good old unconditional love, for someone in your workplace with whom you can share your joys, gripes, and great ideas who won’t ever give you that I-can’t-believe- how- unprofessional- you’re- being look.
Oh, yes, you know you’re lucky to have work at all in today’s economy, that millions of unemployed would love to have your job, but the fact remains: You’d give anything not to have to fl ush away enormous chunks of your life typing nonsense into a plastic box when your real passion is playing the saxaphone, quilting, writing novels, climbing rocks, or taking care of your own kids. So far, you’ve man­aged to survive by telling yourself that you just have to “get through the day,” but you wonder how much longer you can go on this way, living always for fi ve  o’clock, for Friday night, for the day when you can go back to school, marry someone rich, retire, or do what ever  else will take you out of the offi ce world once and for all.
The weird thing is, everyone around you seems perfectly happy. Your coworkers smile and make squeaky- clean small talk, never say no to the boss, rarely take lunch breaks, and seem to fi nd fi lling out forms in an online system that constantly spits out error messages fascinating. At times you suspect that you’re working with some new, updated brand of Stepford wives who’ve been adjusted to fit the of­fice scene rather than the home and come in both genders. Don’t they realize that there’s a  whole wonderful world out there that they’re missing? Is there something the matter with them, or something the matter with you?
In truth, it’s probably neither. Human beings are an extremely variable species, and just as some people are made healthier and oth­ers sick by eating shellfish, individuals have different levels of toler­ance for an office world that was not designed for human health or happiness but for productivity. That world has never been ideal for Homo sapiens, who didn’t start out in cubicles. And in the early twenty- first century, twisted out of shape by the unregulated, runaway market forces of what former secretary of labor Robert B. Reich calls supercapitalism, that world has become increasingly hazardous to the mental and physical health of all of us, sometimes in ways  we’re not even aware of.
While some folks love their jobs, countless others experience the office situation as unnatural, undemo cratic, ungenerous, and unre­lenting. Unnatural because office work involves confinement to a closed, mostly inorganic environment; the wearing of neckties and high heels instead of clothes made for human comfort; and superfi ­cial interchanges instead of genuine conversations. Undemo cratic be­cause there are no elections for those in charge, and exercising any of the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights may put one’s “pur­suit of happiness” in jeopardy. Ungenerous because today’s lower- status office job provides the employee with only mediocre pay and benefits, minimal job security, insufficient vacation time, and little genuine food for the senses, intellect, emotions, or ego. Unrelenting because demands on office workers have become ever more unrealis­tic as organizations have downsized personnel without downsizing their missions. In such formidable circumstances, how you feel about your own office job may depend mostly on how well you’re able to tolerate artifi ciality, tyranny, deprivation, and stress.
For as long as offices have existed, some folks have fit more com­fortably into them than others. Some people are naturally orderly, compliant, attentive, goal- driven, detail- oriented, uncritical, even- tempered, and conforming. Office work, especially clerical or admin­istrative work, suits these people pretty well, though some aspects may still affect them more negatively than they realize. Others are pro­grammed to think for themselves, daydream, feel feelings, look at the big picture, question authority, empathize, love the outdoors, and cre­ate big paper piles and big ideas. These people are almost guaranteed to hate office work. Still others— probably most of us— have some traits of both types.
As professional or ga niz er Julie Morgenstern points out in Never Check E-mail in the Morning, when problems occur, workers tend to ask themselves, “Is it me or is it them?” In many cases, I believe that it’s neither. Instead, the problem is it— the bizarre fun  house of distort­ing mirrors that I call the office world, though they, most of whom are unaware of it, will often try to make you think it’s you. Don’t let them succeed. If you dread coming to work every day, it’s most likely because present- day offices can be tough places for human beings to be, especially sensitive, intelligent, creative, freedom- loving people like you.
While the obvious solution if you’re an offi ce misfit is to get your­self onto a different career track, this may not always be possible, at least not right now, when the economy is hurting and unemployment rates are high. During hard times, along with unemployment goes “misemployment,” people having to take what ever jobs they can get even if they don’t suit their par tic u lar talents, interests, education, or experience. Some misemployed office workers may be just starting out, waiting for their “real” careers to begin, while others may be grieving the loss of a more rewarding profession or a business they owned and loved. While unemployment causes pain, so does misem­ployment, though workers lucky enough to have a decent-...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St. Martin's Griffin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312576021
• ISBN 13: 9780312576028
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland