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Businessinsider. So. Many. Words.Peter Macdiarmid / Staff / Getty Images The good thing about getting to read a lot of books for work is that I'm constantly challenged to rethink my conceptions of happiness, productivity, and success. The bad thing is that one time a stack of said books collapsed on my desk neighbor. Without a doubt, the books that moved me most this year focused on psychology and behavioral science — and as 2016 draws to a close, I'm reflecting on everything I learned. Below, I've rounded up the most meaningful insights from all that reading.

Amazon Money isn't enough to motivate us to do good work In "Payoff," Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely argues that human motivation is a lot more complex than we might be inclined to believe. Managers especially should look to harness the power of intrinsic motivation — or the desire to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. Emotions always matter Plain old practice doesn't make perfect Compromise isn't all that great.

Quello che i bravi ragazzi non dicono. “Il bravo ragazzo ha imparato a non dire tutto, è per questo che sembra così gentile”, spiega Alain de Botton. “Essere gentili non significa non provare pensieri cattivi, ma essere capaci di metterli a tacere. E naturalmente c’è un prezzo da pagare per tutta questa gentilezza”. Alain de Botton è uno scrittore, filosofo e conduttore televisivo. Ha fondato The school of life. Si occupa di cultura e storia del pensiero sottolineando il loro valore per la vita quotidiana. Guarda gli altri video della serie School of life. Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir on cognitive biases. You can be super-smart and hopelessly fallible at the same time. Wikimedia Commons There are tons of cognitive biases that affect our daily decision-making. There's the halo effect, which explains why we think physically attractive people are generally wonderful. And there's the endowment effect, which explains why we value something we're selling more highly than the person who's buying it from us.

But if you believe, as I did but a few weeks ago, that the purpose of studying these psychological phenomena is to build up your immunity to them, well, you're wrong. In fact, you can know everything there is to know about human decision-making and still fall prey to those biases. I recently spoke with Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, after sitting in on a course he taught, called "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision-Making. " When we met after class, I asked Shafir if most people are aware when they're exhibiting symptoms of the endowment effect. Uk.businessinsider.

Yu Han/Business Insider Perhaps you spend the last 10 minutes of your workday staring at the clock, counting down the seconds until you're free. Or, maybe you bury yourself in your work until the very last minute — then you grab your stuff and go without saying goodbye to your colleagues. If either of the above scenarios sounds familiar, it may be time to reassess your end-of-day routine. "How you finish the workday is very important," says Michael Kerr, an international business speakerand author of "The Humor Advantage. " Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job," says the most successful people typically have a routine in which they try to mitigate tasks that will linger and deter them from being completely focused for the next morning's events — expected or unexpected.

Mike Nudelman/Business Insider 1. 2. Your projects take much longer to complete when you're not organized. Uk.businessinsider. Getty Images With the onslaught of emails we receive every day, it's hard to imagine how anyone could keep up professional email habits at all times. To make this task a little less daunting, we asked experts to highlight some of the least professional behaviors you could demonstrate when sending an email. While mastering the art of good email etiquette doesn't mean sending out beautifully crafted prose each time — that would take forever — if you can avoid these bad habits, you'll be off to a great start.

Sending 'urgent' emails that aren't urgent "Like the boy who cried wolf, if you abuse the urgent marker, it won't be long until no one will pay any attention to it," Rosemary Haefner, chief human-resources officer for CareerBuilder, tells Business Insider. And when you finally do send a truly urgent email, no one will pay attention, she says. Being too casual She advises being judicious in your use of exclamation points, emoticons, colored text, fancy fonts, and SMS shorthand. Replying all. Recommended reading: how to get things done. How your smartphone addiction is hurting you - INSIDER. Maybe try resisting the urge to grab your phone the next time you're bored.m01229/flickr Who doesn't hate being bored? In fact, it turns out that we hate boredom so much that a surprising amount of people said they would rather be shocked with electricity than sit there quietly and think. But thanks to the invention of smartphones, all we need to do to keep ourselves occupied these days is turn our eyes and fingers to our screens.

Tons of people do it. A Gallup study from last year reports the majority of US smartphone owners check their phones at least a few times an hour. Unfortunately for most of us, research suggests that we could be missing out on a lot by turning to our smartphones whenever we feel the pangs of boredom. Here's why it might be a good idea to unplug and get back to being bored for a while: 13 things mentally strong people avoid. Uk.businessinsider. Uk.businessinsider. Career Happiness Index 2012. City & Guilds launches its Career Happiness Index 2012 13 November 2012 / City & Guilds has released the Career Happiness Index 2012, which offers broad insights into what people in the UK consider to be the most important factors contributing to their happiness at work.

Of the 2,200 workers surveyed, gardeners and florists topped the list of happiest workers, followed by hairdressers and plumbers. Meanwhile, bankers, IT professionals and HR workers are the least happy. Overall, the Career Happiness Index shows that people in vocationally-trained and skills-based jobs, such as hairdressers, gardeners, plumbers and electricians, were happiest - 65% compared to 58% of those in largely academically trained, office-based jobs. Learn more about the range of apprenticeships we have on offer > The report also looks at employment status and personal circumstances in order to understand how these can affect a person's well-being and satisfaction levels at work.

Infographic PDFs for download: Recreation effect. Stanford professor: Eliminate 2 phrases to be more successful. The way you speak not only affects how others perceive you; it also has the potential to shape your behavior. Swapping one word for another could make all the difference in how you approach your goals. That's according to Bernard Roth, a professor of engineering at Stanford and the academic director of Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, the d.school. In his new book, "The Achievement Habit," Roth suggests several linguistic tweaks that can make you more successful. Here are two of the easiest: 1. Swap 'but' for 'and' You might be tempted to say, "I want to go to the movies, but I have work to do. " Instead, Roth suggests saying, "I want to go to the movies, and I have work to do.

" He writes: "When you use the word but, you create a conflict (and sometimes a reason) for yourself that does not really exist. " Meanwhile, when you use the word and, "your brain gets to consider how it can deal with both parts of the sentence," Roth writes. 2. Science-backed exercise to reduce anxiety. Shutterstock If your strategy for calming down before a job interview or big presentation is to pace up and down, muttering, "You got this! " until you almost, sort of believe it, then we've got good news. There's a simpler and more effective way to beat anxiety.

The trick? Remind yourself of what you value most. In her new book "Presence," Amy Cuddy, the Harvard psychologist who popularized the idea of "power posing" to increase confidence, offers a simple exercise to get over your nerves. Take a few moments to write about a core value that's meaningful to you — e.g., family, creativity, career success — and a time when that value was important. The exercise might seem unrelated to the task at hand, but hopefully it will help you remember what you as a unique individual have to bring to the table. A growing body of research supports the idea that reflecting on your personal values — what researchers call "self-affirmation" — can help you deal with challenging situations.

Uk.businessinsider. 21 signs you're mentally strong - Business Insider. Burning out avoidance. Uk.businessinsider. 6 Things You Absolutely Must Say Today | Inc.com. I know this has happened to you. You leave a company. (Hopefully to start your own business.) Years pass. Then you run into former colleagues, and invariably the ensuing conversation involves something along the lines of, "Hey, did you hear about the [latest management decision I think is really stupid] they made at work?

" To them it's important; to you it's "meh. " But sometimes the conversation goes differently. "You worked there for almost 20 years," my ex-coworker said. That was a great question. I don't really regret strategic errors or poor tactical decisions or career missteps (I've made plenty of those). Instead I most regret the things I didn't say -- to employees who reported to me, to some of my peers, and to at least one person I worked for. Those are the moments I'd really like to have back.

It's too late for me, but it's not too late for you. 1. No one receives enough praise. Feel free to go back in time. 2. We've all screwed up. Say you're sorry. 3. 4. Then flip it around. 5. 7 bad speaking habits to break today. Uk.businessinsider. At some point in your career, you’ve likely dealt with a stressful situation. Frazzled, freaked out, and frayed-at-the-ends are just some ways to describe the experience of emotional and psychological strain we call stress. It is known to cause health problems and can contribute to poor performance at work. But sometimes seeking to eliminate stress completely can actually become its own form of strain. Often, stress becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when we double down on efforts to make our lives completely serene, only to become frustrated when external conditions don’t seem to comply with our demands to slow down. While there are certainly steps we can take to manage stress and avoid burnout, we’ll likely still need to have a job, commute to work, deal with irritating people, and check our ever growing queue of emails.

Beyond just gritting our teeth and baring it, taking the perspective that certain kinds of stress can be helpful is actually supported by science. Dr. Email etiquette. Uk.businessinsider. Uk.businessinsider. 80 hour per week work and still habe a life? Cluelessness of managers about millennials. Dont tell relax... Soccer game vs meeting.

The One Lie Deceptive Leaders Tell | Brian de Haaff. Why I Won't Accept Your Linkedin Invitation | Michael O'Donnell. Sought after leadership qualities. Separati in Casa: ICT e Digital Marketing (una provocazione…) | Antonio Maraglino. Business etiquette. How to perform better under stress. Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg. A computer is a clock with benefits. They all work the same, doing second-grade math, one step at a time: Tick, take a number and put it in box one. Tick, take another number, put it in box two. Tick, operate (an operation might be addition or subtraction) on those two numbers and put the resulting number in box one.

Tick, check if the result is zero, and if it is, go to some other box and follow a new set of instructions. You, using a pen and paper, can do anything a computer can; you just can’t do those things billions of times per second. And those billions of tiny operations add up. Apple has always made computers; Microsoft used to make only software (and occasional accessory hardware, such as mice and keyboards), but now it’s in the hardware business, with Xbox game consoles, Surface tablets, and Lumia phones. So many things are computers, or will be. When you “batch” process a thousand images in Photoshop or sum numbers in Excel, you’re programming, at least a little. Or maybe: What to do when the users are watching Nazi dwarf smut at work? On-call (a bit NSFW) Welcome to On-call, our fortnightly look at readers' experiences when called off-site.

In our last instalment, we recounted the tale of the reader who sprung a colleague pleasuring herself with cutlery. Which of course prompted readers to send tales about similar indiscretions. Reader Nigel wrote to tell us of his experiences working at an advertising agency, when he “ ... was asked by one of the business owners to identify why there was an excessive bandwidth bill. “After digging through the router logs and correlating the IP addresses to individual computers I went to him with my report. I explained that it was his constant browsing of transexual and midget porn sites that was blowing out the bandwidth allowance.

“Strangely enough, no more was said of the matter.” In Nigel's previous gig, “ ... one of the employees ordered a subscription to a bestiality site using his work email.” “The receipt and a photo of a kitten with the words 'Please don't hurt me! ' Tactics to read body language. Capture attention with body language. What-type-of-procrastinator-are-you-V2.png (PNG Image, 720 × 4398 pixels) - Scaled (22%) Paying off but hard to learn skills. Bad habit making less effective leaders. Alessandro Gandini. Being freelance. L'infinita valutazione. La scorsa settimana Tiziano Bonini, in un bellissimo articolo su queste pagine, ha immaginato un futuro nel quale il lavoro dei freelance sarà oggetto di valutazione proprio come un titolo di stato, sottolineando che il valore dei lavori comunemente detti “creativi” oggi è dato non da ciò che il creativo produce, ma dalla reputazione attorno ad esso.

Che certamente ha, almeno in parte, a che fare con ciò che si produce – ma molto di più ha a che vedere con i processi di generazione di un capitale simbolico personale, che diviene fonte di fiducia. Quando ho iniziato ad approcciarmi al lavoro freelance come oggetto diretto del mio lavoro di ricerca, con l’idea di osservare in che modo la reputazione fosse centrale nelle dinamiche di ricerca di lavoro e successo professionale tra le reti di professionisti indipendenti, il termine “rating” era di uso comune nei telegiornali.

Nel libro Status Update, la studiosa dei media Alice Marwick definisce la reputazione come il. How to win arguments. Lo stress da lavoro in italia costa 3 miliardi l’anno e colpisce una persona su quattro - Cronache. Stress da lavoro (ANSA) - Recuperare 30 milioni di giornate lavorative perse per malattia e 3 miliardi di euro l'anno, una cifra addirittura maggiore di quanto chiesto alla sanità per contribuire al risanamento dei conti pubblici con la manovra al vaglio di Governo e Regioni. Un obiettivo possibile mettendo in atto misure ad hoc contro la causa del fenomeno: lo stress lavoro-correlato, definito da molti il nuovo male del secolo, che all'Europa costa 20 mld l'anno e che in Italia colpisce un lavoratore su quattro.

A dimostrarlo è uno studio della Federazione italiana aziende sanitarie e ospedaliere (Fiaso). La stima si realizzerebbe, precisa la Fiaso, qualora fossero adottate in tutti i settori lavorativi le misure anti-stress che nelle Asl e negli Ospedali campione dello studio hanno portato a una riduzione del 30% delle giornate di malattia. businessmen stressati work stress. Were You Made To Become A Manager?