When I was a kid, lots of teachers played soft classical music in the room while we took tests to calm us down. Many of us can personally attest to the power of music to uplift, energize, soothe, or invoke any other emotion. So why has your boss not caught on?
Dr. Russ Riendau, a behavioral scientist, explains that music releases endorphins and thus makes people feel good. And when employees are happy, they do better work. Here are some ways he suggests incorporating music into the office:
- Mount speakers in the parking lot to begin and end the workday with music. Change the tunes each day or week to reflect different tastes and generations
- Create a “Jam Room” in your facility for all employees. Fill it with instruments of all kinds and some percussion instruments as well
- Hire a band for your next company event
- Replace those old motivational posters with some hip rock ’n’ roll signs
How is it that you manage to get eight hours of shut eye and still be exhausted and groggy all day at work? It turns out it’s not enough to sleep–you need to get the right sleep. The term “junk sleep” means any kind of sleep that isn’t deep and blissful. It could be the half-asleep state you’re in when you read a book or think about your ongoing stresses. It could be sleep where you get interrupted or wake up to adjust temperature, steal the sheets back from your significant other, or go to the bathroom.
What to do? This article gives tips on how to create a sleep routine, which gets your body used to going to sleep at the same time every day.
And this one gives feng shui tips to make your bedroom more rest-friendly.
Phil Drabble, a beloved UK TV host (or, in British terminology, “TV presenter”) of the show One Man and His Dog, passed away last July. He died at the age of 93, about 18 months after his wife, Jessie. The couple had no children, and Drabble’s will named the couple’s longtime assistant, Ruth Froggatt, as the primary heir to his fortune. Froggatt had spent more than 25 years working as their PA. Drabble was also a naturalist and maintained a nature preserve, which Froggatt will now continue managing.
It’s really cool to see an assistant get her due after a lifetime of service. And I’m willing to bet that Phil and Jessie Drabble were pretty great bosses.
Denise Richards reportedly gets $60,000 a month from Charlie Sheen in child support and alimony, so basically she never needs to work again. But because 60K just isn’t enough, Ms. Christmas Jones now has a reality show on E called Denise Richards: It’s Complicated. The show is a heavily edited version of Denise’s life with her two young daughters. And because she’s rich and useless she, of course, has an assistant. Not only that, but her assistant has an assistant. I might actually have to sit through this show in order to catch a glimpse of one of the assistants, particularly since Charlie claims Denise had her assistant follow him and fill in when the nanny wasn’t around.
One of the great sadnesses of my life is that I did not learn about the Eurovision Song Contest until about a year ago because…well…I don’t live in Europe. To fill you in, Eurovision is kind of like American Idol, except that every country gets to submit a song and they all compete against each other. The contest is a beautiful mix of camp, pastiche, satire, and a couple of people who can actually sing. Thankfully, the invention of YouTube now means that Americans can enjoy the hilarity as well. The contest wrapped up last night, but here are a few of my favorites:
Latvia, “Wolves of the Sea” (it has pirates!)
Ireland, “Irelande Douze Pointe” (it has a turkey puppet!)
Azerbaijan, “Day After Day,” (it has gender-ambiguous angels!)
Oh, and the dude who actually won the whole thing, Dima Bilan of Russia. He’s cute and a good singer and everything, but the guy could really benefit from a singing puppet counterpart. Also, try imagining your boss’ latest dumb speech turned into couplets by Latvian pirates. I promise that meeting will go a whole lot faster.
As promised earlier, STA has three copies of Megan Hustad’s book How to Be Useful to give away. In order to throw your name into the hat, send an email to contact@savetheassistants.com with “How to Be Useful” as the subject line. You have until noon EST on Friday, May 30 to enter.
It’s the Friday before a holiday weekend, so naturally all I can think about is when I get to bail from the office and have a beer. That’s why my new favorite website is BeerMenus.com. The website lets me go through the beer list at places near my office so I can already decide what I want and find a place my picky coworkers will be cool with. I mean, to be honest, I’m a Bud Light kind of girl, but other people keep telling me they have standards or whatever. Right now, BeerMenus only serves the New York City area, but those of you in other locales should check in periodically for updates.
In yet another Sex and the City-related interview (wait, there’s a movie coming out? I had no idea!), Sarah Jessica Parker makes yet another reference to her assistant. Answering a question about the Jennifer Hudson assistant character, SJP said:
I have a very young assistant, and she’s very young. She’s been with me 5 years, and she’s still in her twenties, and she’s exceptional and brilliant and at this point probably, this job is beneath her. But she became an Associate Producer on the movie because people were so taken with her. I feel that kind of relationship; I understand what it means to you. She came to New York with a dream, my assistant, and a lot had to do with the idea of NYC and what this city symbolizes for people.
Wait, does anyone know her assistant’s name? Is there a way we can verify this? Anyone? Bueller?
Update: Readers Rachel and Anna emailed me within seconds of each other. There are two associate producers listed for the movie. One is Melinda Relyea, who was SJP’s assistant for Failure to Launch and The Family Stone. Nice work, ladies.
I love Zappos–they have a ton of cute shoes, and if you get buyer’s remorse they also have an excellent return policty. (Not that that, uh, has ever happened to me or anything…) Well, it seems Zappos is so committed to customer service that they’re offering employees a chance to quit after going through their four week intensive customer service training class. If you go through the whole class and then realize it’s not the right job for you, Zappos will still pay you time earned for all the training and give you a thousand dollar bonus. This was like in college when I managed two weeks of Marine Biology before realizing getting up at 8 AM was not worth the science credit, except that the only cash I got was from returning my books to the campus bookstore.
Megan Hustad’s new book How to Be Useful does a great service to all job-seekers. A fan of “success literature” and self-help books, she goes through fifty years’ worth of job advice and pulls out the most useful parts. In addition to giving you tips you can actually use, Hustad analyzes the genre of career advice books and looks at what these books tell us about our lives, our culture, and the way we percieve ourselves as workers. She agreed (politely, of course) to answer a couple of questions from us. (She also agreed to donate some copies that we can give away to you guys, so stay tuned for an upcoming contest.)
STA: How long were you an assistant?
MH: I was an editorial assistant at Vintage Books (and the Knopf Group, more generally) for two plus years. No promotion prospects there, so I made a lateral move to another company, where I toiled as an “assistant editor” for another year plus before becoming full editor.
STA: What mistakes do you see assistants make?
MH: A lot of assistants know, deep down, that they’re the hamsters of the organization. By which I mean, management’s attitude is often “Well, if this one doesn’t work out, or dies — no worries. We’ll get another one and no one will know the difference.” Assistants are eminently replaceable. Say I walked off the Vintage job during my lunch hour — they could have filled my spot with someone equally capable, if not more so, by the end of the day.
The problem for assistants then becomes: How to deal with this cold, hard fact? When people are lined up around the block for your job? That’s where the big mistakes come in. It’s a mistake to try to gain advantage by making sure your superiors feel how unique and brilliant you are. Trying to dazzle the boss…just rarely works out well.
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