“Would you expect someone to get a good night’s sleep if they were interrupted all night? Then how can you expect someone to get a good day’s work if they are interrupted all day?” - Jason F.

Here’s an interesting quirk of mine. Whenever I schedule a phone meeting with someone, I always offer to be the one who calls the other person. Most people tend to want it the other way because they don’t have the responsible to remember to call, they just have to pick up their phone when the other person calls. I get that. For me it’s about focus.

Being the meeting initiator allows me to set the mental on and off ramps between tasks on my own terms instead of the other person. That way if I’m mentally crunching right up to the meeting time on something I know they won’t call early. The other advantage is not needing to wait around for the other party to call me. Not knowing if they are running one minute or five minutes late. With me as the initiator, I know the meeting will start on time.

I enjoying collecting stories of people who love what they do. It makes me happy, it makes me love what I do more, and I hope it makes others find the joy out of the work they do. Here’s my latest hero:

Apparently the web has taken it upon themselves to create a meme out of remixing the video with various songs. Here’s a favorite of mine:

The building we work out of has 44 floors with countless number of people going up and down the elevators all day long. To speed efficiency, the elevators are programmed to only stop at certain floors. One set is for the lowest floors, another set is for the middle floors, and the last set is for the highest floors. 

Before our big office move to the 42nd and 43rd floors, we used to be on the 23rd floor and used the middle set of elevators. Now we use the highest running elevators and it’s amazing to see the difference in etiquette between the two even though they are both within the same company, within the same building. 

For the highest running elevators it’s a first come first serve to enter, but getting off is a whole different game. As soon as the doors open, all the men move to the side and allow the women to exit first, even if you are clearly the first person who should logically get off. Then once the women are off, the men file off in ascending age with the oldest male patiently smiling until the elevator is totally empty.

As amazingly structured as the exit system is for the highest elevators, no such system exists for the middle or lower elevators and is much more based on logical standing order of first person in front gets off first, person in back gets off last. 

Chivalry lives on!

For six years I worked from home and thought it was perfect to be able to stroll from the kitchen to "work" with my oatmeal in hand. For the past ten months I've been working, for the first time in my life, out of an office and now I know I'll never go back to working from home.

It's not that working from home doesn't have its positives, it's just that I didn't realize how much the negatives actually out weigh the positives until I wasn't working from home.

The biggest advantage I've discovered in "office life" is the separation of work and life. While working at home, I was never good at setting boundaries between when I was working and when I wasn't. The computer was always just an arms length away.

Now I've physically forced myself to have boundaries, and mentally I get excited for both. While eating my oatmeal in the morning, I mentally get excited for work. Like a basketball player prepping for a game. Then as my day winds down, usually around six, I mentally get excited to head home and not be working. In both situations, I'm more present than I've ever been before.

Another advantage of "office life" is in valuing my work. When I worked from home, work time was always a bit flexible. If something came up (family call, store run, mail, tv show, etc) I would easily be able to pause my work and go do it. Even more so than Annie, who also worked from home, because she had a boss she contracted for. I am my boss. Now my work hours are more defined and everyone around me treats them as such. It allows me to be more focused and present while at work.

On travel days, I tend to stay home before heading off to the airport, but I find it really hard to get into the work zone while there because I've trained myself so well over the past ten months to disassociate my home from my work.

I know some people work from home with great success, I realized I'm not one of them. All I want to do at home is spend quality time with family and friends.

Discovered on my brother's (founder of goaltribe.com and programmer for goalmafia.com) office wall. For sale here.

My normal commute to work is 15 minutes via the F-train uptown to Rockefeller Center. Today, an F-train broke down somewhere up-line causing a mass scramble for alternative routes.

My alternative route took me south, then west, then north, then back to Rockefeller Center. Besides the additional 40 minutes, I lost at least 10 pounds through perspiration because MTA thinks it’s ok to forgo A/C, or even ventilation, in its subways. Some stations are so hot they create a sauna like burning sensation on my skin.

While waiting for one of my alternative trains, I looked around and everyone was sweating, often to the point of showing through their dress shirts and pants (see picture). I was no exception. I had to laugh at the chaotic scene of business people sweating like school kids at recess. I tend to find humor at helplessly chaotic scenes when humans are knocked off their normal means of operation.

If you’re ever so lucky to ride the MTA in summer, make sure to bring a sweat towel. You’ll need it.