With more of us wanting and expecting our jobs to provide not just a paycheck but also human needs like learning, community, and a sense of purpose, we wanted to know what specifically makes people happy at work. Is it fair pay and benefits? Having a great boss? A clear career path? Opportunities to learn? Working at an organization with a clear sense of purpose? These are all the kinds of things that HR managers and talent developers obsess over, and also the sorts of questions people ask themselves when they’re deciding between job offers: Should I work at Company A, where I’d have better benefits but a worse commute, or Company B, which does important work but doesn’t pay very well?

To figure out what really matters to employees, Happify Inc recently carried out a survey to get a clearer picture using their Happify App. Users engage in various behavioral activities, including gratitude exercises, in which they’re asked to write about things they appreciate and value in their lives. Such exercises have been empirically shown to increase well-being by allowing people to recognize the good things in their lives and the reasons they matter. Their data science team analyzed the anonymized data to uncover elusive measures of work satisfaction.

As a first step, they extracted 200 different topics from the entire text coming from Happify users who were asked to “Jot down three things that happened today or yesterday that made you feel grateful.” Based on the way this question is phrased, they expected to get a glimpse into the things that people recognize and value on a daily basis. Of the 200 topics that were extracted, they identified 14 that prominently featured words that are work-related and were used frequently. The primary themes these topics covered were general job satisfaction, commute and work breaks, positive peer interaction, having time off, achieving high work performance, benefits and compensation, and interviewing and landing a new job.

We noticed that overall job satisfaction followed a U-shaped curve: starting high, dipping in one’s forties and fifties, and then going back up as retirement approaches. The U-shape is expected, and validates prior research. When we zoomed in on different age groups, we noticed that different things are more important at different stages in a person’s career.

• This detailed analysis showed that around ages 25–34 there is a peak of gratitude for topics related to landing a new job, positive work relationships, and external work conditions, such as an easy commute, breaks, or time off.

• For ages 35–44 they saw a decline in gratitude in several areas, particularly work-life balance, time off, and pay. It may be that around this age people are overwhelmed by responsibilities and expenses, and thus aren’t feeling particularly grateful.

• A different pattern emerges starting in one’s late fifties, showing a peak of gratitude for topics related to finances and benefits. We can speculate that at that age people value getting their finances on track for their upcoming retirement, and so are less occupied with new opportunities, their job performance, or having more time off.

Taking a step back to put these findings in perspective, it seems that early on in one’s career, people appreciate a job that will bring future benefits as they continue to perform. The present job may not be ideal, as one tries to balance hard work with enough time to play. In midlife things get generally tougher: It’s harder to balance work and life, and people struggle to make ends meet. But as one gets older, one begins to be more satisfied with one’s present job and also to have more resources to achieve personal aspirations.

The bottom line: Satisfaction at work is influenced by factors such as benefits, pay, relationships, and commute length. But all of this boils down to two things being important, regardless of your circumstances: (1) having a life outside of work, and (2) having the money to afford it. If you have a job that grants you both of these, you might be happier than you realize.

Source: hbr.org

Who hasn’t heard of Warren Buffet? American business magnate, investor and philanthropist. A man considered by many to be one of the most successful investors in the world and as of March 2017, the second wealthiest person in the United States with a total net worth of 78.7 billion dollars. Considering that signing multi-million dollar deals are common place for him, how does Buffet manage to balance family time with the exigencies of running a high profile business…read on.

Buffet has been the chairman and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway since 1970, and his business exploits have had him referred to as the Oracle of Omaha by global media outlets.

Buffet has been considered by many, not just budding entrepreneurs, as a guru. His words of wisdom, as many successful individuals will tell you, have been keys to success in both business and in life. Take for example this gem of a story that came to light in the recent insider trading trial of former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta.

Former Goldman banker Byron Trott, a long time Buffet confidant, was asked to testify in front of a Manhattan federal court jury about a deal between Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffet during the financial crises era of 2008.

This deal was at the height of the 2008 financial crises and was a make or break deal for the world famous and historic Goldman Sachs Group. Nearing bankruptcy, the deal would lead to Buffet making an investment to the tune of 5 billion dollars into the company and would be the key to survival for the company.

Now, considering the stakes and the importance of this deal, you would expect anyone to drop whatever they are doing and work towards making sure that the deal went without hiccups. But Warren Buffet is no ordinary man.

As Trott went on to narrate, on the day that the deal was meant to be finalized, everything had been readied and all parties involved were only waiting for Buffet to join them for the meeting. They had been trying to reach him since the morning to wrap up the deal. However, Buffet was not available till 2:30 in the afternoon. The reason? He was taking his kids out for ice cream.

Yes, Buffet had kept a multi-billion, historic deal on hold so that he could keep a promise made to his grandkids and was enjoying ice cream with them at dairy-queen. Another life lesson on how to manage the perfect harmony between life and work by the Oracle of Omaha.

The following are two true stories of successful entrepreneurs which prove that work-life balance is not a myth. The perfect balance just requires some good old planning and of course extra dollops of enthusiasm…

Can Do Couple – The only thing better than a good work-life balance story is a good work-life balance love story. Enter Brian and Beth Whitfield, an entrepreneurial power couple based in Southern California, for whom work and love are inextricably tied.

The Whitfields are the proud owners of four businesses — two hair salons, a consulting firm and a coin dealership. But long before they became business owners, the Whitfields were learning to juggle their love for each other with a need to pay the bills. Brian, an ex-Marine, worked three part-time jobs while studying to earn his college degree. Beth also worked three part-time jobs, seven days a week, to help support him. You might think these hard-working folks would want to take a break after all that hustle, but the Whitfields are not the type to settle down.

In addition to helping run the couple’s four businesses, Brian teaches part time at Ashford University in Iowa. He also hosts a weekly radio show called “Financial Fortress” and writes a daily blog. Beth works full time at her two salons, is a national beauty educator and also serves as a stylist for fashion shows, special events and photo shoots. Despite their crazy schedules, the couple says they always make sure to reconnect at the end of each workday.

Do-it-all Doctor- When Stephen Schleicher, a doctor at one of Boston’s busiest hospitals, decided to open his own business, he didn’t quit his day job. In fact, he did quite the opposite — he kept working and enrolled as a graduate student in a competitive MBA program.

Schleicher, 31, is the epitome of a fast-paced entrepreneur. When he isn’t covering long shifts at the hospital, he’s attending first-year classes at Harvard Business School or working on building his startup business, Boxxify.

Boxxify is a package-delivery service that caters to people with superbusy schedules. The company delivers packages between 7 p.m. and midnight, so 9-to-5 professionals don’t have to worry about having their packages stolen off the front porch or returned to sender.

But having a full-time job, being a student and owning his own company make up only one side of Schleicher’s awe-inspiring work-life balance story. Not satisfied with just nurturing a burgeoning business, this go-getter also decided to start a family.

Schleicher and his wife, Magda, recently welcomed their first child who, if she’s anything like her father, is likely very hard to keep up with. But the do-it-all doctor isn’t balking at this newest responsibility. In fact, it’s the support of his family — along with the competency and understanding of his many co-workers — that makes his daily juggling act possible, Schleicher said.

Source: businessnewsdaily.com

If you think that the busy life of Silicon Valley superwoman Sheryl Sandberg would hardly have any time for friends, you are mistaken. Nobody close to the COO of Facebook, is surprised to find her running the company that turned friend into a verb, an action verb. She truly epitomizes someone who has found the balance between work and life, ensuring that one does not prevent you from fully enjoying the other.

Sheryl Sandberg remembers birthdays. She texts people seconds before big presentations (“Smile. Talk into the mic. Good luck”). She has a system for answering all her E-mail. Her late husband, Dave Goldberg, once said so many people stay overnight at their house on such a constant basis that they practically run a small hotel. “There’s no such thing as an intimate dinner for six,” he said. “She’s like, ‘I really think our dining room table is too small.’ ” (It seats fourteen.)

With Sandberg at the table, big gatherings run smoothly—which partly explains how, back in the Clinton administration, when she was 29 and fresh from Harvard Business School and the World Bank, she landed the chief-of-staff job in the Treasury Department. An hour after work on a Thursday evening, she can, without a hitch, welcome 40 women into her home for dinner; just before the first guests arrive, she tucks her two pre-schoolers into bed, disappears for ten minutes, then emerges to answer the door in a sleeveless Calvin Klein dress and black Prada ankle boots.

She calls these informal gatherings—a mix of venture capitalists, tech-company execs, moms, book-club friends, and her sister, Michelle—the Women of Silicon Valley, and they meet roughly once a month to listen to notable speakers pulled from Sandberg’s Rolodex (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO turned California Senate hopeful; Eve Ensler, playwright and women’s-rights activist). There’s a high-minded purpose behind the get-togethers—female executives tend to become more isolated the higher they climb in the corporate world, and these meetings help correct that. But Emily White, who replaced Sandberg as Google’s chief of online sales when Sandberg moved on to Facebook, thinks the evenings also help her gregarious ex-boss stay in touch with her inner circle. “No question,” Sandberg says. “I see all my friends in one fell swoop. I’d love to have dinner with all of them separately, but I don’t have the time.”

Her friends don’t object to Sandberg’s multitasking, probably because so many of the tasks on her to-do lists involve them. Marne Levine, who worked with Sandberg at Treasury and is now Larry Summers’s chief of staff at the National Economic Council, remembers arriving in Carefree, Arizona, late at night for Sheryl’s wedding weekend. “I had to take a business-school exam the next day,” Levine says, and in order to download the exam and to hand it in at the appointed hour, she needed a private room with Internet access. “Sheryl had a million things to take care of, but she was worried about whether my test-taking conditions were satisfactory. On the wedding calendar, my test was listed as an event!”

In pictures, the 40-year-old Sandberg looks keen, pretty, petite; but snapshots don’t account for her energy face-to-face. Her oldest friends like to point out—and it’s about the meanest thing they’ll say—that as an undergrad back in the late eighties, when she wore leg warmers and blue eye shadow, she founded and ran the Harvard aerobics program almost singlehandedly. She’s quick and relentlessly upbeat, and she likes to toss her head when a subject changes. In intimate conversation, she tends to lean forward; when addressing a room, of four or 40, she rocks back with an almost ironic air of command. “She has an infectious insistence,” one Harvard friend says. “And she has two kids now, and I see the trait in them. Her four-year-old is very much the same: totally happy, but completely insistent. He will negotiate his way to getting a second dessert.”

Her sister, Michelle, a pediatrician at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and no slouch in the accomplishment department herself knows, probably better than anyone, what it’s like to be the beneficiary of Sandberg’s focus. “I got very sick when I was pregnant,” she says. “And she called every day. She did not miss a day for nine months. She really sets an example for how people should treat each other. I often aim to do 50 percent of what she does. That’s a pretty lofty goal, actually.”

Your inbox has more email than a Nigerian spam ring. Your deadlines are stacking up like a rush hour car wreck. You have more meetings than a track team. In other words, you’re really behind on your work. Sure, everyone’s productivity takes a hit now and then, but tech CEOs aren’t just anybodies. They can’t afford pedestrian productivity problems that set their businesses back. Read on to see how some of the world’s busiest tech executives multitask, like a boss.

Elon Musk: Master Your Email – When Elon Musk isn’t revolutionizing e-commerce, building electric cars, or trying to make self-landing reusable rockets, there’s one sure-fire place you can find the Tesla and SpaceX CEO: on email. “I do a lot of email—very good at email. That’s my core competency,” joked Musk at a 2013 conference. But there’s a lot of truth to Musk’s aside, considering the high amount of delegation the multi-company CEO must administer. According to Musk, staying on top of his inbox even requires pecking out replies during family time, something we’re probably all guilty of. Still, it’s not like his email account is getting pummeled with pitches from everyone under the sun. His inbox is insulated from people looking to go to Mars or even get off the Tesla Model S waitlist. That’s good, because the man has work to do.

Jack Dorsey: Give Your Days a Theme – Now the CEO of both Twitter and Square, Jack Dorsey recently made news for permanently returning to the social network that he helped launch. But running one high-powered technology company can be hard enough, so how will he juggle two? Dorsey has done it before, and he credited organizing his week into “themed days” as part of his success. For instance, on Mondays, Dorsey focuses on management, he revealed while speaking at a 2011 conference. So that meant he would take in a directional meeting at Square and an operations committee at Twitter. Tuesdays are for products—nowadays he might be meeting about Twitter’s new Moments feature and Square’s NFC reader. Wednesdays are for marketing and growth, and so on. And believe it or not, he takes the weekend off—well, sort of. “Sunday is reflection, feedback, and strategy,” he said.

Jeff Bezos: Work Backwards – After buying The Washington Post, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos gave his new employees a great peek inside the mind of one of America’s most daring entrepreneurs. From the “everything store” to the Kindle to the new Echo voice assistant, Bezos has used one simple productivity trick to introduce some of the world’s most innovative products: he starts with his goals and works backwards. Of course, reverse engineering is nothing new — curious children have been rewiring gadgets since the early 20th century. But starting with a dream and walking backwards towards the present day requires dedication and planning.

Mark Zuckerberg: Personal Goals Create Professional Structure – The eccentricities of Facebook’s founder have been well-documented—he often wears the same style gray t-shirt every day, dons his signature hoodie in business meetings, so on and so forth. But there is a method behind his madness, and that’s a relentless pursuit of simplicity to help add structure to a chaotic professional world. Another of Zuckerberg’s quirks are his annual challenges. In 2010, he sought to learn Mandarin. In 2011, he vowed to only eat meat that he slaughtered himself.. These efforts require discipline, the kind of self-regulation that often demands that you say no (or “not now”) to work, so that you can improve yourself personally. And the hope is those refinements will spill over into your professional life.

Source: time.com

What did Steve Jobs, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the century, think about Multitasking? Regardless of how you feel about Apple, Steve Jobs was an incredibly prolific CEO who was more than just the face of the company. Before his death in 2011, he managed to change the face of Apple and provide a unique workplace lauded for its productivity.

Jobs was certainly a complicated person and for every genius idea he had plenty of bad ones. His management style was confrontational, he was rude, and his authoritarian outlook on Apple’s openness is well known. In short, he was a jerk who was tough to work with. Still, he managed to change the face of a company and push for innovation in the marketplace. He helped shape Pixar in the ’90s and brought the failing Apple corporation back to life when he returned in 1997.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he walked into a company struggling to sell its wide variety of products. One of Jobs’ first moves as the new CEO was to reduce the number of products sold by Apple. Jobs condensed Apple’s offerings and made it easy to pick a Mac. From there, it branched out to introduce the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, but has always kept their main product line limited to just a few different choices.

Jobs didn’t just do this with Apple. He’d pass along the advice to just about anyone who asked. He told Nike to cut the crappy stuff as well:”Do you have any advice?” Parker asked Jobs. “Well, just one thing,” said Jobs. “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.” Parker said Jobs paused and Parker filled the quiet with a chuckle. But Jobs didn’t laugh. He was serious. “He was absolutely right,” said Parker. “We had to edit.”

Jobs’ point here can easily be applied to everyday life. If you have too much going on, start saying no more often. Get rid of any activities that aren’t actually helping you in your career and life. If you have too much going on, focus in on what matters.

Of course, focusing on what matters is easier said than done. Jobs had a system for making sure people could do their best work by ensuring that everyone was working on what they should be and nothing else. During meetings Jobs would assign tasks and a person responsible for them. The hope was that with proper delegation, everyone would work on what they’re supposed to and not have to worry about anything else. Wired sums it up:There’s no excuse for employees to have any confusion after a meeting. An effective Apple meeting will include an “action list,” and next to each action item is a “DRI” — a directly responsible individual who must ensure the task is accomplished.

For the rest of us, the lesson here is about delegation. In order to do your best work, you need to stop multitasking and concentrate on one task at a time. The more things you can delegate, the more time you have to work on what matters.

Source: lifehacker.com

So we have read that multi-tasking might not be the most optimal way to function however, are there are any numbers which can peg the harmful effects of the same? Realization, the leading provider of Flow-based Planning and Execution solutions that help organizations complete projects 20 to 50 percent faster, has released a report, “The Effects of Multitasking on Organizations” which reveals that organizational multitasking, a problem that typically goes unnoticed within large companies, annually costs the global economy more than $450 billion in lost productivity.

Job seekers around the world still tout their ability to multitask as a desirable skill, and in many organizations, multitasking is worn as a badge of honor; however, research consistently shows that people who attempt to multitask suffer a wide array of negative effects, from wasting 40 percent of their productive time switching tasks to experiencing a heightened susceptibility to distraction.

The new report from Realization examines a problem that previous researchers have paid little attention to: the effects of multitasking at the organizational level. Just as individual multitasking occurs when a person’s time is split between too many tasks, organizational multitasking occurs when a group is focused on too many things and its overall capacity is adversely affected. The end results are delays and interruptions, reduced quality and rework, peaks and valleys in workflow, and lack of proper preparation before tasks and projects.

To examine the effects of organizational multitasking more rigorously, Realization, a provider of Flow-based Planning and Execution systems for engineering and projects, studied 45 organizations with between 1,000 and 50,000 employees with an average annual revenue of more than $1 billion from a diverse range of industries – including automotive, aerospace and defense, aviation, energy, semiconductors, software and pharmaceuticals – that consciously implemented measures to reduce multitasking in their organizations.

The results speak for themselves. The organizations were much more productive. The mean increase in throughput was 59.8 percent, while the median increase was 38.2 percent. In addition, organizations finished projects faster after organizational multitasking had been reduced. The mean cycle-time reduction was 35.5 percent, while the median cycle-time reduction was 31 percent.

“Our study clearly demonstrates the massive impact that organizational multitasking is having in many different industries, and the real tragedy is that most of the organizations that suffer from it don’t even realize that it’s happening,” said Sanjeev Gupta, CEO of Realization. “Everyone appears to be working very hard, but in fact, they are spending a lot of their time simply spinning their wheels, switching from task to task, without ever having the time to finish something before another ‘urgent’ item is put on their plate. Organizational multitasking can be addressed, but first, managers have to recognize the problem.”

Source: prnewswire.com

So most of us by now agree that multi-tasking is not always the most efficient way to get work done. However, scientific research has proved that there does exist a small number of supertaskers whose ability to multitask improves each time newer tasks are added to their existing list. They comprise a minuscule 2% of the population.

In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone. Over the course of a decade, he and his colleagues had demonstrated that drivers using cell phones—even hands-free devices—were at just as high a risk of accidents as intoxicated ones. Reaction time slowed, attention decreased to the point where they’d miss more than half the things they’d otherwise see—a billboard or a child by the road, it mattered not.

Outside the lab, too, the multitasking deficit held steady. When Strayer and his colleagues observed fifty-six thousand drivers approaching an intersection, they found that those on their cell phones were more than twice as likely to fail to heed the stop signs. In 2010, the National Safety Council estimated that twenty-eight per cent of all deaths and accidents on highways were the result of drivers on their phones.

What, then, was going on here in the London lab? The woman he was looking at—let’s call her Cassie—was an exception to what twenty-five years of research had taught him. As she took on more and more tasks, she didn’t get worse. She got better. There she was, driving, doing complex math, responding to barking prompts through a cell phone, and she wasn’t breaking a sweat. She was, in other words, what Strayer would ultimately decide to call a supertasker.

About five years ago, Strayer recalls, he and his colleagues were sorting through some data, and noticed an anomaly: a participant whose score wasn’t deteriorating with the addition of multiple tasks. “We thought, That can’t be,” he said. “So we spent about a month trying to see an error.” The data looked solid, though, and so Strayer and his colleagues decided to push farther. That’s what he was doing in London: examining individuals who seemed to be the exception to the multitasking rule.

A thousand people from all over the U.K. had taken a multitasking test. Most had fared poorly, as expected. Cassie in particular was the best multitasker he had ever seen. “It’s a really, really hard test,” Strayer recalls. “Some people come out woozy—I have a headache, that really kind of hurts, that sort of thing. But she solved everything. She flew through it like a hot knife through butter.” In her pre-test, Cassie had made only a single math error (even supertaskers usually make more mistakes); when she started to multitask, even that one error went away. “She made zero mistakes,” Strayer says. “And she did even better when she was driving.”

Strayer believes that there is a tiny but persistent subset of the population—about two per cent—whose performance does not deteriorate, and can even improve, when multiple demands are placed on their attention. By 2012, after Cassie and her other supertasking U.K. colleague had been tested, Strayer’s team had identified nineteen supertaskers in a sample of seven hundred.

Source: newyorker.com

Research conducted at Stanford University found that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The researchers found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time. But what if some people have a special gift for multitasking? Read on…

The Stanford researchers compared groups of people based on their tendency to multitask and their belief that it helps their performance. They found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel that it boosts their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time. The frequent multitaskers performed worse because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another. Ouch. Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.

Research also shows that, in addition to slowing you down, multitasking lowers your IQ. A study at the University of London found that participants who multi-tasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score declines that were similar to what they’d expect if they had smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered their scores to the average range of an 8-year-old child. So the next time you’re writing your boss an email during a meeting, remember that your cognitive capacity is being diminished to the point that you might as well let an 8-year-old write it for you.

It was long believed that cognitive impairment from multitasking was temporary, but new research suggests otherwise. Researchers at the University of Sussex in the UK compared the amount of time people spend on multiple devices (such as texting while watching TV) to MRI scans of their brains. They found that high multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control. While more research is needed to determine if multitasking is physically damaging the brain (versus existing brain damage that predisposes people to multitask), it’s clear that multitasking has negative effects.

If you’re prone to multitasking, this is not a habit you’ll want to indulge—it clearly slows you down and decreases the quality of your work. Even if it doesn’t cause brain damage, allowing yourself to multitask will fuel any existing difficulties you have with concentration, organization, and attention to detail. Multitasking in meetings and other social settings indicates low Self and Social Awareness, two emotional intelligence (EQ) skills that are critical to success at work. TalentSmart has tested more than a million people and found that 90% of top performers have high EQs.

Source: talentsmart.com

Not too long ago, multitasking was viewed as a coveted skill among workers. There was a belief that, like computers, employees that could multitask could get more things done in a lesser amount of time. However, what was once viewed as a benefit to workers is now widely seen as harmful to productivity by most experts on the subject.

Recent studies have found that multitasking can negatively affect a worker’s efficiency in performing an assignment. When switching between multiple projects, participants in these studies found it hard to switch mindsets, as each individual project required a different focus area. Participants instead had to spend time readjusting their focus before they could continue on with the new task, or if they could not adjust their mindset their performance in that area would suffer.

The other potentially career-damaging aspect of multitasking is the inability to retain information. According to a study by Stanford University in 2009, workers that “are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention” and are less likely to recall that information soon after.

Generally speaking, the consensus is that multitasking stretches our brain just a little too much in opposing directions. To combat this, workers can find no more than two projects that require a specific mindset to accomplish the tasks at hand. If these employees find that they can maintain focus equally on both projects, they may find that this finely-focused form of dual tasking works perfect for their daily productivity and keeps them interested in the work at hand. This theory was tested by French scientist, Etienne Koechlin, in Scientific American. The results proved that if two tasks were performed at the same time – as long as they interacted with the same ‘side’ of the brain – productivity and motivation were increased among test subjects.

Multitasking can help in other ways too. A constant concern for companies in the modern age is employee dissatisfaction. Ohio University’s Master’s in Business Administration discusses the effect this can have on a company, and the importance of keeping employees engaged, motivated, and productive. Employees that are unhappy or don’t feel ‘fully engaged’ at work can end up causing companies billions of dollars in stolen property, mediocre work, and frequent sick days.

To combat this, some suggest to layer stressful or unsatisfying tasks with more rewarding ones. As one group of researchers found out from a study with students at Ohio State University, students that watched television while studying were actually more productive and happier or “emotionally satisfied.” Although that same scenario of watching television while working can’t be played out in most offices, similar ideas can be applied.

Managers can encourage employees to listen to music, go for a walk while checking emails, or let them spend time at home with their pets and families while they work remotely (not all working parents will find this relaxing, though).

In the end, multitasking can be damaging to productivity, but managers should not discount it completely. Instead, let workers decide for themselves what keeps them engaged at the job and what they feel is the most productive approach for multitasking. Be sure to reiterate the damages of overloading on tasks, but also remember the benefits of dual tasking.

It’s an equation for success: employee engagement + focus = a productive workflow; and happy employees make organizations profitable.

Source: blog.readytomanage.com

A 56-year-old man with dementia was admitted to a medical center. His feeding tube needed to be removed from his stomach. It’s a common enough procedure that went fine. But then things went terribly wrong. The culprit: a smartphone. That’s the harrowing conclusion of a recent case study published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a federal agency, and written by the chief information officer at Harvard Medical School. It’s a nearly deadly example of “distracted doctoring”.

Here, in brief, is a tale of medical multitasking gone wrong:Before the feeding-tube procedure, the doctors increased the patient’s dose of anticoagulation medicine to reduce his risk of stroke. After the procedure, the doctors held a meeting about the case. They decided the patient needed an echocardiogram, a heart image, to determine whether to continue the blood-thinning medication.

During the meeting, the attending doctor instructed the medical resident (a junior doctor) to order the anti-coagulation treatment temporarily stopped. The resident began to enter that order into her phone using a computerized doctor order entry system. These are increasingly common systems that can be used on phones or tablets.

Before the resident could finish the order, her phone beeped with an incoming text. It was from a friend. She got lost in the text and failed to finish the order. The patient continued to get the blood thinner at the elevated dose he was getting before the feeding-tube procedure.

On the patient’s fourth day in the hospital, his heart raced and he was gulping for air. He was rushed into emergency open-heart surgery. Blood had filled the sack around the heart. He’d received too much blood thinner, but he survived.

Dr. John Halamka, who wrote the anonymous case study (name of hospital, patient and doctors withheld), writes that hospitals have to figure a way to balance the benefits of interactive technology with the risks of distraction.“Providers should be ensuring that routine personal issues/interruptions do not impact the delivery of quality care,” he writes.

Source: nytimes.com

In psychology the monochronic assumption is the idea that it’s always better to complete one task before you start on the next. In research conducted over several decades, Allen Bluedorn has found that, unsurprisingly, it’s a matter of personal preference. Some people favour monochronicity and feel happier completing one task before they start the next. Others are polychronic and perform better when they are doing lots of things at once, and can excel in jobs which require them to do just that.

The research on compulsory multi-tasking is at first sight discouraging. Multi-tasking has a bad name. The problem is something known as attention residue. Experiments have demonstrated that when you switch your attention from one task to another, a bit of your mind is still focused on the previous task. Each time you switch back again you have to remind yourself about what it was you were doing, while dealing simultaneously with the slight distraction from the other task. This can increase your cognitive load.

Many studies over the years have found that in general people are slower and less accurate when they do two tasks at once. This might suggest that the answer is to complete every task one at a time, but this isn’t always the case.

Multi-tasking is hardest when the tasks are similar to each other, but a bit easier if they are different. So while chatting on the phone and writing an email is difficult, because they involve similar thinking processes in order to generate meaningful sentences, talking while playing the piano isn’t as hard.

If the tasks are different enough then multi-tasking can even improve your performance. A study conducted in 2015 at the University of Florida surprised even its authors. People were asked to sit on exercise bikes and to cycle for two minutes at a speed they found comfortable. Later they cycled again, this time with a screen in front of them which presented them with 12 different types of cognitive tests, some of them quite hard.

In the easy tests they had to say the word “go” whenever they saw a blue star on the screen; in the harder tasks they had to memorize long lists of numbers and then recite them in reverse order. They completed similar cognitive tests while sitting on a chair in a room and the researchers compared the results.

When people were sitting on an exercise bike they pedaled 25% faster when given mental problems to solve simultaneously, without doing any worse on the problems. This is a case where distraction seems to be useful. The authors speculate that anticipation of the tasks might have increased arousal in the brain, which also made the people more efficient at cycling.

So multi-tasking may have its downsides, but it isn’t always bad. There are certain circumstances under which we are better at multi-tasking – when we feel relaxed and when we’ve been doing a mentally creative exercise which encourages us to think broadly. (In this study it involved thinking of as many uses as possible for a paper clip, a newspaper, some wool and some upholstery foam.) After this kind of activity people became better at multi-tasking. When the experimenters deliberately made them feel stressed, they were worse at it.

Source: www.bbc.com

Let us look at a brief look at the life of Benjamin Franklin. One of the greatest multi-taskers in modern history. His life is proof that multitasking might not be as bad as people say and might even lead to greatness and a legacy that lives on for centuries.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Franklin was a renowned polymath and a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions. He facilitated many civic organizations, including Philadelphia’s fire department and the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution.

Franklin earned the title of “The First American” for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity, initially as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies. As the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, “In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.”

To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin “the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.” Franklin became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette at the age of 23. He became wealthy publishing this and Poor Richard’s Almanack, which he authored under the pseudonym “Richard Saunders”. After 1767, he was associated with the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British policies.

He pioneered and was first president of The Academy and College of Philadelphia which opened in 1751 and later became the University of Pennsylvania. He organized and was the first secretary of the American Philosophical Society and was elected president in 1769. Franklin became a national hero in America as an agent for several colonies when he spearheaded an effort in London to have the Parliament of Great Britain repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. His efforts proved vital for the American Revolution in securing shipments of crucial munitions from France.

He was promoted to deputy postmaster-general for the British colonies in 1753, having been Philadelphia postmaster for many years, and this enabled him to set up the first national communications network. During the Revolution, he became the first US Postmaster General. He was active in community affairs and colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. He initially owned and dealt in slaves but, by the 1750s, he argued against slavery from an economic perspective and became one of the most prominent abolitionists.

His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and his status as one of America’s most influential Founding Fathers have seen Franklin honoured more than two centuries after his death on coinage and the $100 bill, warships, and the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, and corporations, as well as countless cultural references.

Source: Wikipedia.org

Leonardo Da Vinci is arguably history’s greatest multi-tasker. Possessor of a curious mind and keen intellect, Da Vinci studied the laws of science and nature, which greatly informed his work as a painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, military engineer and draftsman.

Young Leonardo received little formal education beyond basic reading, writing and mathematics instruction, but his artistic talents were evident from an early age. Around the age of 14, da Vinci began a lengthy apprenticeship with the noted artist Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. He learned a wide breadth of technical skills including metalworking, leather arts, carpentry, drawing, painting and sculpting. It is thought that Verrocchio was so humbled by the superior talent of his pupil that he never picked up a paintbrush again.

In 1482, Florentine ruler Lorenzo de’ Medici commissioned Da Vinci to create a silver lyre and bring it as a peace gesture to Ludovico Sforza, who ruled Milan as its regent. After doing so, Da Vinci lobbied Ludovico for a job and sent the future Duke of Milan a letter that barely mentioned his considerable talents as an artist and instead touted his more marketable skills as a military engineer. Using his inventive mind, Da Vinci sketched war machines such as a war chariot with scythe blades mounted on the sides, an armored tank propelled by two men cranking a shaft and even an enormous crossbow that required a small army of men to operate. The letter worked, and Ludovico brought Da Vinci to Milan for a tenure that would last 17 years.

Da Vinci began to seriously study anatomy and dissect human and animal bodies during the 1480s. His drawings of a fetus in utero, the heart and vascular system, sex organs and other bone and muscular structures are some of the first on human record. In addition to his anatomical investigations, Da Vinci studied botany, geology, zoology, hydraulics, aeronautics and physics. He filled dozens of notebooks with finely drawn illustrations and scientific observations. A man ahead of his time, da Vinci appeared to prophesize the future with his sketches of machines resembling a bicycle, helicopter and a flying machine based on the physiology of a bat.

Around 1495, Ludovico commissioned Da Vinci to paint “The Last Supper” on the back wall of the dining hall inside the monastery of Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie. The masterpiece, which took approximately three years to complete, captures the drama of the moment when Jesus informs the Twelve Apostles gathered for Passover dinner that one of them would soon betray him.

After brief stays in Mantua and Venice, Da Vinci returned to Florence. In 1502 and 1503, he briefly worked as a military engineer for Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI and commander of the papal army. He traveled outside of Florence to survey military construction projects and sketch city plans and topographical maps. He designed plans to divert the Arno River away from rival Pisa in order to deny its wartime enemy access to the sea.

Da Vinci started working in 1503 on what would become his most well known painting—and arguably the most famous painting in the world—the “Mona Lisa.” The privately commissioned work is characterized by the enigmatic smile of the woman in the half-portrait.

Da Vinci moved to Rome in 1513. Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of newly installed Pope Leo X and son of his former patron, gave Da Vinci a monthly stipend along with a suite of rooms at his residence inside the Vatican. His new patron, however, also gave Da Vinci little work. Lacking large commissions, he devoted most of his time in Rome to mathematical studies and scientific exploration.

After being present at a 1515 meeting between France’s King Francis I and Pope Leo X in Bologna, the new French monarch offered Da Vinci the title “Premier Painter and Engineer and Architect to the King.” Da Vinci did little painting during his time in France. One of his last commissioned works was a mechanical lion that could walk and open its chest to reveal a bouquet of lilies. He continued work on his scientific studies until his death at the age of 67 on May 2, 1519.

It is not a myth – women really are better than men at multitasking, at least in certain cases, a study says. Men were slower and less organised than women when switching rapidly between tasks in tests by UK psychologists. Both sexes struggled to cope with juggling priorities, but men suffered more on average, according to the paper in the journal BMC Psychology.

“If men really are slower than women, it could have serious implications for how workplaces are organised”, says co-author Dr Gijsbert Stoet, of the University of Glasgow. “Multitasking is getting more and more important in the office – but it’s very distracting, all these gadgets interrupting our workflow. It could be that men suffer more from this constant switching,” he told BBC News.

First, they compared 120 women and 120 men in a computer test which involves switching between tasks involving counting and shape-recognition. Men and women were equal when tasks were tackled one at a time. But when the tasks were mixed up there was a clear difference. Both women and men slowed down, and made more mistakes, as the switching became more rapid. But the men were significantly slower – taking 77% longer to respond, whereas women took 69% longer. “This difference may seem small, but it adds up” over a working day or week, said Dr Stoet.

To make the experiment more relevant to everyday life, the researchers tried a second test. A group of women and men were given eight minutes to complete a series of tasks – locating restaurants on a map, doing simple maths problems, answering a phone call, and deciding how they would search for a lost key in a field. Completing all these assignments in eight minutes was impossible – so it forced men and women to prioritize, organize their time, and keep calm under pressure.

In the key search task in particular, women displayed a clear performance advantage over men, says co-author Prof Keith Laws, of the University of Hertfordshire. “Women used methodical search patterns, like going round the field in concentric rectangles. That’s a highly productive strategy for finding a lost object, whereas some men didn’t even search the whole field in any particular manner, which is just bizarre.”

The reason, he observed, was that women were more organised under pressure. “They spent more time thinking at the beginning, whereas men had a slight impulsiveness, they jumped in too quickly,” said Prof Laws. “It suggests that – in a stressed and complex situation – women are more able to stop and think about what’s going on in front of them.”

Altogether, they conclude that women “have an advantage over men” in multitasking, at least in certain situations.

“And of course there are men who are experts. We’d never claim that all men can’t multitask, or that only women can. But we’d argue the average woman is better able to organise her time and switch between tasks than the average man.”

“In a world where people increasingly have to multitask, we need to help individuals adapt their roles to their abilities”, said Prof Laws. “Of course I don’t think we should just assign women to roles where rapid switching is demanded,” he explained. “Instead, employers should consider assessing individuals’ ability in multitasking, as some firms already do. Because the truth is – people don’t seem to be very good at assessing themselves,” Prof Laws told BBC News.

Source: www.bbc.com

To date, there has been a lot of publicity about the detrimental aspects of media multitasking – using more than one form of media or technology simultaneously. Especially prevalent in young people, this could be instant messaging, music, web surfing, e-mail, online videos, computer games or social networking. But does this cognitive style have any advantages?

Our obsession with multiple forms of media is not necessarily all bad news, according to a new study by Kelvin Lui and Alan Wong from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their work shows that those who frequently use different types of media at the same time appear to be better at integrating information from multiple senses – vision and hearing in this instance – when asked to perform a specific task. This may be due to their experience of spreading their attention to different sources of information while media multitasking. Their study is published online in Springer’s Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Research has demonstrated impairments during certain cognitive tasks involving task switching, selective attention and working memory, both in the laboratory and in real-life situations. This type of cognitive impairment may be due to the fact that multitaskers tend to pay attention to various sources of information available in their environment, without sufficient focus on the information most relevant to the task at hand.

Lui and Wong’s study explored the differences between media multitaskers’ tendency and ability to capture information from seemingly irrelevant sources. In particular, they assessed how much two different groups (frequent multitaskers and light multitaskers) could integrate visual and auditory information automatically.

A total of 63 participants, aged 19-28 years, took part in the experiment. They completed questionnaires looking at their media usage – both time spent using various media and the extent to which they used more than one at a time. The participants were then set a visual search task, with and without synchronous sound, i.e. a short auditory pip, which contained no information about the visual target’s location, but indicated the instant it changed colour.

On average, participants regularly received information from at least three media at the same time. Those who media multitasked the most tended to be more efficient at multisensory integration. In other words, they performed better in the task when the tone was present than when it was absent. They also performed worse than light media multitaskers in the tasks without the tone. It appears that their ability to routinely take in information from a number of different sources made it easier for them to use the unexpected auditory signal in the task with tone, leading to a large improvement in performance in the presence of the tone.

The authors conclude: “Although the present findings do not demonstrate any causal effect, they highlight an interesting possibility of the effect of media multitasking on certain cognitive abilities, multisensory integration in particular. Media multitasking may not always be a bad thing.”

Source- Springer.com

The modern world’s dilemma that confronts most people is how to fit in the maximum in a limited hours day. Multi-tasking is touted as the most coveted quality that a professional can possess. But is it really so necessary and more importantly does it really lead to achieving ‘more’ work done or works counter productively?

To get some answers, let’s define multi-tasking and then discover some pros and cons associated with it. A 2013 study that required participants to perform cognitive tasks while sitting in a quiet room and again while cycling found that their cycling speed was faster while performing the cognitive tasks, with the most improvement during the six easiest cognitive tasks. As the cognitive tasks got harder, they started impinging on the amount of attention available to perform both tasks, so participants didn’t cycle quite so fast.

Our point? There are some profits to reap by multi-tasking. Today, it has evolved into different versions too.

• The first one is genuine multitasking: speaking on the phone and checking our bank accounts online; speaking to a colleague and filling out an office form. Genuine multitasking is possible, but at least one of the tasks needs to be so practiced as to be done without thinking.

• Then there’s task switching, needed when you, let’s say, face the challenge of creating a presentation for your boss while also fielding phone calls for your boss and keeping an eye on email in case your boss wants you.

• Task switching is often confused with a third, quite different activity — the guilty pleasure of disappearing down an never-ending click-hole of celebrity gossip and social media updates. “What we’re often calling multitasking is in fact internet addiction,” says Shelley Carson, a psychologist and author of Your Creative Brain. “It’s a compulsive act, not an act of multitasking.”

• A final kind of multitasking isn’t a way of getting things done but simply the condition of having a lot of things to do. The car needs to be taken in for a service. The nanny can’t pick up the kids from school today. Having a lot of things to do is not the same as doing them all at once. It’s just life.

RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits and draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day. The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to research firm Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

So, what are some insights that we can derive from the above data? There are certain conditions in which multi-tasking should be exercised, as it has some short-term benefits.

Pros

1.Simple tasks allow for a fast switch in mental focus.

2.Multitasking provides progression on multiple duties that must be performed.

3.It creates a habit of adaptability.

4.It allows for sanity within a world of chaos.

Cons

1.Multitasking leaves less time for recreation.

2.There is a limited amount of energy every day.

3.It eliminates certain personal skills.

4.It becomes more difficult to accomplish something that is important.

So what is your multitasking style and is it helping or hindering you to get the important things done?

Source: dalecarnegie.in

Finding meaning at work does not always mean social work and doing a dream job. As Mr. Jim Banasik, store director of Rock Island Hy-Vee store will tell you. He loves his job, employees, customers and what the company stands for.

Most people would consider a 40-hour work week normal. For Mr. Banasik, that would be a short week. He said a “typical” work day is 10 to 11 hours, with an occasional “short” day of 6-8 hours. Six days per week. “But I really enjoy it, and that’s not forced; that’s just what I do,” Mr. Banasik said. “We are very hands-on.” Before Mr. Banasik walks through the front door, he already has walked the entire parking lot, looking for trash, weeds and any unfavourable conditions. Once inside, he spends the next three to four hours of his day walking every inch of the store, front to back, every department, saying hello to each employee. But he isn’t just walking by, he’s checking every shelf in the store, looking for empty spots, checking the signage to ensure everything has a price and making out a cleaning list for the employees to work on throughout the day.

“I change my day based on customers’ needs and what is going on in the store,” Mr. Banasik said. “But the weekends are all spent with the customers.” He said the job is never boring, there is very little down time and there is always something to do. “The fun part for me is working on the front end, sacking groceries and checking,” Mr. Banasik said. “I like to get carts and teach the new courtesy (employees), hey when you walk by a piece of trash, pick it up.”

Training new employees and promoting people into management is an “exciting” part of the job for him. “It’s really neat to find that 16-year-old kid and you can groom them and watch them work their way through high school with you, and they become an assistant manager while they are going to school,” Mr. Banasik said. “That’s what’s rewarding to me, is taking that shy person at their first job and watching them become successful.”

Mr. Banasik was born in Chariton, Iowa, about one hour south of Des Moines. He started his career with Hy-Vee in 1998 in Blue Springs, Mo., stocking lunch meats and cheeses. “You know when you are young and don’t know what to do, I went to heating schooling thinking I wanted to go the tech route. I never thought of a grocery store as a career,” Mr. Banasik said. “The assistant store manager at Blue Springs talked me into staying with Hy-Vee and I should try to go the store director route; it’s a good career. He saw a lot of potential in me and thought I would be a good fit for management.”

“You have to keep your drive; you have to be very driven to make it to this point,” Mr. Banasik said. He said he plans on staying at the store level, saying he is “one of those crazy people who loves retail. “I have reached my goal; this is what I wanted to do,” Mr. Banasik said. “I really love the staff I work with every day and the customers. For me, I just always want to work with the customers directly and employees.” The ability to make decisions at the store level on everything from what items to stock to the specific store specials is something Mr. Banasik also enjoys about the job.

Source: qconline.com

It might not always be some great selfless charitable act that makes your job meaningful to you. There are several people who will say they find their work meaningful because they find meaning in them for different reasons. Meaningfulness does not always mean the same thing.

Let’s take Erik Soderberg, a structural engineer, for example. Here he talks about his job and how he finds it meaningful: I have been in my current position for almost ten years. When I was a kid I always built things. My father built little clubhouses in the backyard. At first I would just put nails in the table, and then I started nailing pieces of wood together. I was four or five when I actually nailed something together that resembled something in real life.

I thought I was going to be a carpenter; then I actually worked in construction, and I noticed that the young guys were having a good time but the old guys were looking haggard and worn out. It seemed like it would be more fun to dream [things] up.

When I was first learning math the teacher was always presenting the problem as “This is how you solve for X or Y”—they never explained what use that would be. It was actually when I started learning engineering and physics that I became less ignorant and realized math could be used to solve real problems. I like that you can model something physically and understand how big you need to make a column or beam just using numbers. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it — you can sit down with a piece of paper and design everything before you even build it.

My work is always varied and generally challenging, especially now that I can give tedious work to the people below me. Usually someone will have a problem — they will run a ship into a crane, for example — then the first half of the day, I look at the damage and figure out what needs to be done to define the problem. I wouldn’t say my work is fascinating, because the types of problems I deal with aren’t spectacular. I think it’s meaningful because I facilitate a solution.

I am paid appropriately. I could be making more money in other professions that I wouldn’t like as much, so money is not the top priority. I don’t think that there should be a huge disparity in what people are being paid. This company culture is pretty unique. If I knew that my boss didn’t look out for everyone, then I might have a different attitude. Basically it’s a mutual relationship and not me working hard for my boss to buy his fourth house.

I liked every job I ever had. I worked some jobs that I know other people didn’t like. If I were 35 and still the hot tub guy, I might not have had a good attitude. Some of the work that we do, there’s a risk that people will die if we don’t get it right; that’s probably 10 percent of the time. If I write a report, my name is on it as the author; for that reason, there’s incentive to do a really good job. But I invest enthusiasm, joy, effort into what I do anyway. I have a strong sense of ownership and responsibility for how the work turns out.

Source: onthepage.org

So when you get up each morning and think of the work day ahead, is it with a sense of trepidation or the thought fills you with renewed energy and excitement. The answer could well tell you whether your work adds meaning to your life or is just a means of making a living. Think hard…

If Sanjay’s story doesn’t make you go “Whoa he did what?”, we’d be surprised. A Stats, Maths and Computer Science major, Sanjay started working at Google as an analyst until Facebook lapped him up in their newly opened Hyderabad office. Soon after, Sanjay moved to the USA to work at Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, California, as a Marketing Analyst. His life was as perfect as it gets. A brilliant job in one of the most exciting companies in the world, in picture perfect California, with the love of his life – his wife – with him. But above all the comfort and glory, Sanjay had found a bigger calling.

Sanjay wanted to work on something that was more meaningful to him, and also at the same time had a direct impact on the society. It was then he introspected about the experiences that made him the person he was. “I regularly played volleyball and hockey in school, and also represented the Hyderabad team in Under 19 tournaments. I was in no way the best player, or the best athlete in the teams that I was a part of, but sports have a very special place in my heart. Sports has been the best teacher I’ve ever met. I’ve learnt some of the best life lessons from sports about attitude, team work, and leadership which will stick with me for life”

This introspection led to a conclusion that Sanjay wanted to use the passion he had for sports for a good cause. He came across ProjectKHEL, an NGO that was using sports, games, and other interactive methods to transform the lives of children. Without a second thought, Sanjay bid his coveted job at Facebook goodbye and moved back to India and to Lucknow to join the ProjectKHEL team. ProjectKHEL uses play and interactive methods to transform adolescents into positive agents of change within their communities. One of the main programmes at ProjectKHEL that Sanjay is actively involved is called ‘Made in Maidan’ where sports are used as a medium to impart life skills education to underprivileged children.

“I couldn’t have been happier with where I am right now, working on things I’m passionate about. Personally, although this job is more exhausting than my corporate job, the kind of satisfaction I have been getting is immeasurable. I go to bed with a sense of pride about the work I have done, and also wake up the next morning with double the enthusiasm to do more!”

Source: officechai.com