photo credit: Old Sarge
From the Wikipedia entry on Labor Day:
The holiday originated in Canada out of labor disputes (”Nine-Hour Movement”) first in Hamilton, then in Toronto, Canada in the 1870s, which resulted in a Trade Union Act which legalized and protected union activity in 1872 in Canada. The parades held in support of the Nine-Hour Movement and the printers’ strike led to an annual celebration in Canada. In 1882, American labor leader Peter J. McGuire witnessed one of these labor festivals in Toronto. Inspired from Canadian events in Toronto, he returned to New York and organized the first American “labor day” on September 5 of the same year.
People have fought for workers’ rights for many years now so that people who worked in factories and farms and stores and everywhere else wouldn’t have to work overly long days.
Isn’t it a little funny, then, how many of us in offices go right on working overly long days?
If today is a holiday for you, as it is for most of our readers, use this day as you choose. You can even choose to work a bit, to get a leg up on your workload and your competition.
But do remember to take some time for yourself, too. And remember that work is about supporting ourselves and providing for our passions. It’s wonderful when our work happens to be our passion, but it can make it hard to escape and get some much-needed time away and perspective. This is a day perfectly suited for that time and perspective.
Happy Labor Day! Enjoy it. We’ll see you back at work tomorrow.
Regular Corporate Idealist contributor Sam Davidson wrote a post the other day at his blog about how much you can get done on Monday when no one’s looking:
That means that you have a full day on Monday to get things done. Sure – carve out time to grill out, go to the lake, sing a song – but just imagine what you could do in four hours that morning with no one sending you emails. And none that you have to send.
Most people will probably leave the office tomorrow after lunch, too. If you stay until five, you’ll have five more hours to do (nearly) uninterrupted work. Combine that with Monday morning and you get an extra day. One entire day that your competition, your co-workers and your colleagues may ignore. What can you do to get ahead, be remarkable and mark off your list?
This is definitely in my plans. I have every intention of getting some relaxation in, but the extra few hours of organizing what has gotten a bit chaotic, of catching up on projects at a high level, of checking off just one or two extra tasks — all of that will ultimately reduce stress and anxiety and make my work life calmer, so it be as good for me as any R&R could ever be.
What about you? Are you regarding this long weekend as strictly an opportunity to relax, or will you be sneaking some work in? Lay it down for us in the comments.
From the CleanTechies Blog at CleanTechies.com comes this article called Green IT: Buildings Are Now Twittering Their Energy Consumption:
In partnership with smart grid company SmartSynch, Ole Miss has created online feeds (also via RSS) detailing several of its main buildings’ energy use, ostensibly to “alter behavior to reduce electricity consumption and carbon emissions.†The UMiss project will study consumption from lighting, temperature controls, and appliances. The organizations have created an online application to monitor and report the energy draw so that building operators can learn where energy is being wasted and implement new conservation strategies.
Good idea? Too much? What say you?
photo credit: alancleaver_2000
Deadlines are often an effective, if stressful motivator, and countdowns, as a reminder of that deadline, work in all kinds of settings. Once, while working for an e-commerce retailer, I tested a variation of the site’s home page during December with and without a “days ’til Christmas” countdown. You can probably guess the outcome: the variation with the countdown left the other variation in the dust.
But sometimes it isn’t even the specifics of a deadline that motivate me; the generalities of the limitations of time work well, too. I don’t know about you, but when I think about having only 8 hours in a typical workday (well, perhaps more like 10 or 11 or sometimes 12 or 13 — I am starting a business, after all), and how many false starts it sometimes takes to get things done, it really pushes me to focus on the important stuff. And at a more macro level, it’s helpful sometimes to remember there are only 52 weeks in a year, so that each week had better be moving me measurably closer to the goals I have for the year.
What are your time-based tricks to force focus and get yourself moving?
Happy Monday!
