Here is a layout with a map of the world that you can customize (this is something I definitely would have appreciated at my previous job):

Here is a layout of a newspaper that you can customize:

Here is an animated film countdown (I don’t know how you might use it in a professional setting, but it’s definitely unique):

And here are a few new designs available from GraphicRiver:

Where does it begin?

It starts small. A group of smart, capable people are discussing a new idea or a new product and they come to a stumble in the conversation. They need to describe this new thing (for the first time in human history!) and they realize that none of them can really think of the right word for it. For example, they want to talk about “the process of turning an idea into a product for sale.”

So there’s some muttering and stammering until someone manages to fumble out the completely made-up term “productize.” Everyone blinks, frowns, and then slowly nods. Sure. Productize. The English language is flexible enough that anyone who hears the word “productize” will basically understand the idea, so the group heaves a sigh of relief that their word problem is solved and they move on with their conversation, using the word “productize.”

But they’re going to have more meetings so they need their teams to do research, write reports, and present their findings about “productizing” so the teams are all forced to use the new word. The team members mention the word to friends and peers, and by the end of the week everyone in the business world is “executing an actionable productization process to maximize concept potential as a market deliverable to realize significant profits within the minimum allowable ROI period persuant to line item fifteen of the Statement of Work.”

Strunk and White are sobbing in their graves.

The English language is a brilliant thing. Much like the US Constitution or a willow tree, the English language’s greatest strength is its flexibility, its adaptability, its potential for endless growth. However, our lovely language has been seriously abused in recent decades by some very smart and successful people who were just too darn lazy to bother thinking of the right word or using a perfectly clear phrase instead of a bizarre new term.

This laziness resulted in countless new words and phrases that are completely unnecessary, and this new business dialect grew out of control throughout industry and government around the English-speaking world. Fortunately, human beings are smart and eventually some of them realized that this horrible corporate language was, in fact, horrible.

To combat business language, these smart people coined the term “Plain English,” which became “Plain Language.” The idea was simple: Write things so that they are easy to understand and easy to use. To that end, various plain language associations and societies formed to establish standards for business and government communciations, and eventually these efforts resulted in a series of US executive orders mandating that government documents be written in plain language.

How much better is plain language? Let’s look at a few examples (source).

Example 1, before:

[Name] informed you of the procedures for calculating interest for insufficient estimates. If the enclosed invoice(s) include charges for insufficient estimates, a detailed insufficient estimated [sic] used to calculate these charges is also enclosed.

Example 1, after:

How to pay your bill: To avoid penalties as well as further interest, you must pay this bill by its due date.

Example 2, before:

Make sure that the account holder’s name on the account is the same as the name of the customer to whose account the transaction should be attributed.

Example 2, after:

Make sure that this account is for the right customer.

Hooray! This means that when the government wants us to fill out a census or pay taxes or fight in a war, we will have no trouble understanding the paperwork.

(Note that the Braley Plain Language Act has been approved by the House of Representatives twice, but not yet approved by the Senate, so it’s not a law. Yet.)

But what does this mean for you? For your job? For your company?

If you’re lucky, your company has already discovered and embraced plain language. Good for you. But it’s more likely that your company hasn’t bothered to fix their language, and they continue to make up words and write documents that are more and more confusing.

Plain language will make your life easier. It will make it easier for you to read materials you are given, and it will make it easier for you to write company-approved materials. What can you do to make this happen?

1. Google “plain language.”
2. Gather some feedback from your clients, your software users, your website visitors, and find out if they think your written materials are confusing.
3. Rewrite some of your company materials in plain language to use as an example.
4. Demonstrate that plain language is usually briefer than business language.
5. Demonstrate that plain language improves user satisfaction.
6. Show it all to your boss, and cross your fingers.

So if you’re tired of actionablizing the deliveration of systematicified contenticity, then I strongly encourage you to support plain language.

And then I had to figure out what to do with an English degree.

Of course I had a plan. Sort of.

Plan A: Stay in school

I could have gotten my master’s degree, and my PhD, and become a professor of English literature and spent the rest of my life in college, around college-aged people, playing college politics, and trying not to go crazy. But as much as I truly enjoy teaching, the thought of being in college forever made me deathly ill. So I proceeded to…

Plan B: Get rich quick

My back-up plan was simple – write the Great American Novel and make a bajillion dollars, thus retiring at age 23 with more money than God. This was a solid plan, however roughly no one ever succeeds at it. And I had bills to pay. So that left…

Plan C: Get a real job

No problem, there must be jobs for English majors, right? I’ll just become an editorial assistant at one of the many large, prosperous publishing firms… oh. Right, well, uhm, executive assistant is a good job too.

Luckily, I translated my success as an assistant into an editorial role and spent many years publishing books, articles, and journals for some very interesting people.

Unfortunately, that job trained me for a fairly specific role, and not many companies publish their own books, so I then had to reinvent myself as a technical writer with expertise in computer science and health care. More or less. (Note: computer science and health care are super easy to master after a few hours on wikipedia.)

Plan D: Get more jobs

I learned from my first job transition that any position for a person with my background is going to be pretty narrow, and probably won’t help me smoothly transition to other positions in the future. So instead of waiting for my next job to get a little more experience, I started taking other jobs now.

There are tons of freelance opportunities for writers and editors, and if you can’t figure out how to Google “freelance writer jobs” then you have bigger problems than general career planning. Here’s what I landed, mostly by accident and without really trying:

• Editing clinical research proposal responses. Sound like a mouthful? It is, but the work was straightforward and I learned a lot about cancer studies. I think my cousin arranged that one for me.
• Editing books for local authors. I have no memory of how this one came about, but the publisher started sending authors to me to review their memoirs and local histories. I met some great people and helped to produce several books that I’m very proud of.
• Editing books for a university institute. A friend from high school put me in touch with these folks, and I’ve gotten to read about finance, politics, war, and social issues for some very clever experts.
• Writing articles for, well, this site. My wife mentioned this site to me and I decided to submit an article on a whim, and the editor liked it, and this is now my 18th article.
• Writing business books. My article editor connected me to my new book editor, and my articles led to my book, and you get the picture. (The book comes out later this spring!)

Anyway, the point is that a degree in English does not necessarily offer the same sort of clear-cut career paths that accountants and doctors can look forward to. (Reminder: your career could range from 30 to 189 years in length, depending upon the state of the economy and frequency of zombie attacks. Plan accordingly.) But that doesn’t mean you are doomed to the life of a barista.

For some of you, the idea of freelancing as a way of life seems very obvious, but for some of us, it’s an alien landscape. When I was young, all the adults I knew worked for companies, in offices or shops, so I had no concept of what a freelancing career might look like, or even that it was an option for me. And that ignorance was a significant barrier at first.

But now I know exactly what you can do with an English degree, and I think I have a much brighter future than most Jedi. (Have you seen Episode III? It does not end well!)

These are signs that your big company is less concerned about running a tight ship and more concerned about staying a big company. The more sloppiness and waste your company tolerates, the less it cares about actual work. That’s a bad thing. But there are other ways to measure how much common sense your company has sacrificed on the altar of bureaucratic nonsense.

Cleanliness

An office is just like any other place inhabited by homo sapiens. We track in dirt, mud, snow, salt, and anything else we step in. We spill food and drinks at our desks or in the halls. But we also break coffee makers, spill toner cartridges, and make messes from all manners of industrial chemicals. This results in all manners of stains on the carpet, on chairs, on the one lonely table in the break room, on the kitchen counter, on the supply cabinet, and in the conference room. We even get mysterious stains on those foam tiles in the ceiling. Don’t get me started on the interior of the refrigerator and microwave.

So, have a stain in mind? How long has it been there? Is it a minor stain in an obvious place where your night-time cleaning crew is likely to take care of it, or no?  Maybe it’s been there for days, or weeks. In small offices, I’ve noticed that people are more likely to lend a hand to clean up their own messes as well as those made by others. But as the business grows, the mentality of “that’s not my job” kicks in and the messes sit until the cleaning crew arrives. But what if the cleaners don’t take care of it (because they don’t do windows, or something)?

The longer that filth sits and festers in your office, the more your co-workers have abandoned their senses and succumbed to the idea that magical bureaucrat fairies will swoop in and fix things. Most messes, no matter how unpleasant, can be cleaned in less than five minutes with a fist full of paper towels and a little water. Is your company all out of paper and water?

Breakdowns

Offices are full of machines, from your slow-poke laptop to the cursed copier to the chairs in the conference room that slowly sink toward the floor while you sit in them. Now, fixing these problems requires a bit more effort and cost than just scrubbing a stain, but these are still very straightforward problems. The question is: How much red tape is there between you and the office supply store?

For example, when the microwave blows its fuse and no one can heat up their lunch, does your company (A) send someone with a company credit card across the street to the mall to buy a new one, or (B) submit a requisition form to the central office in another time zone to approve the purchase of a small appliance, and then order said appliance on the company-approved vendor Web site, and then wait 3-14 days for delivery?

The irony (and yes, this is a proper use of the word “irony”) is that as a company grows, acquiring more human capital and cash reserves, it becomes more rigid and more dysfunctional. (The irony is that acquiring more resources makes them less able to use those resources.) Small companies retain the flexibility and common sense to recognize problems and fix them quickly and effectively, while large companies (with all the resources in the world) are so conservative that they can’t make simple decisions without wasting huge amounts of time and effort in “decision-making” processes.

Human Resources

At small companies, there may not even be a director of human resources. You may have outsourced this role to a team somewhere else in town. But if your company has a couple dozen employees, there is a good chance you have someone in the office in charge of hiring, firing, insurance, and… well, actually, I have no idea what else they do.

Anyway, at a small and sensible company, it is likely (though not guaranteed) that your HR manager is someone with strong people skills who cares about keeping the office running smoothly. This may mean resolving interpersonal conflicts, organizing parties, encouraging people to help other teams or step into unfamiliar roles as needed, and helping employees deal with work-life issues by championing causes like telecommuting to the president.

But, as the staff grows (and you acquire a legal department), it becomes more likely that HR begins to care less about the people in the cubes and more about the people sitting in the board room. Instead of solving problems, they sweep them under the rug. Instead of organizing events, they prevent others from doing so (don’t want to risk offending someone by not inviting them, or not being diverse enough). Instead of helping employees to deal with management, they protect management from helpless employees.

I’m sure they think this makes sound financial sense. After all, it’s easier to replace a programmer or an accountant than a vice president… I guess. But, on the other hand, bad policies or leadership by one vice president can disgruntle dozens if not hundreds of people who do “real” work. So where’s the sense in that?

Paper Trails

This one is easy. Go through your email (and your paper mail, if you have any) and see how much correspondence you’ve received from management about the company (not about work, about the company). How often is there an announcement about new policies or new organizations, or even just name changes or “re-branding”? How often do they change your reports, or forms, or standard operation procedures to accomplish simple tasks?

If it’s more than once a year, you’re living in a bureaucracy!  Sensible companies have better things to do than rearrange patio furniture and experiment with the font on your name plate. Sensible companies work. Bureaucracies organize.

Summary

Well, what does it really matter how bureaucratic your company is? I mean, really, aren’t most companies fairly ensnared in red tape spiderwebs and papery snowdrifts? First, I can’t speak for most companies, but certainly not all are hopeless bureaucracies. Second, and far more important, the more bureaucratic and the less sensible your company becomes, the more likely it is that you, your career, and your future will begin to suffer.

Bureaucracies lose sight of reality as they struggle to control details. They invent systems and procedures to handle simple tasks so they no longer need to think clearly about those tasks. They build enormous, unwieldy organizations to accomplish tasks, and then invest more and more in justifying their own existence, rather than doing useful work. In the end, employees become casualties of systems that don’t respond to questions, that don’t solve problems, that don’t reward success, but always punish failure (even just perceived failure). And in the worst cases, the companies find themselves with too many people, too few ideas, too little money, and the handful of executives with enormous fortunes simply “retire,” leaving you to wonder what happened to your job.

So, to preserve your sanity, and your future, you may want to consult your bureaucratic bellwethers and barometers. It may not be too late to keep your company in sensible waters, but if you’re steaming toward the Big Pointy Rocks of Self Destruction, then you may want to quietly find yourself a lifeboat. After all, the Titanic was big and powerful too, and we all know how well that turned out.

I feel we’ve strayed off topic. The point is, it is impossible to accurately predict how your career will play out, what choices will present themselves, and what random twists of fate will guide you to this promotion or that investment. So let’s not waste time seriously thinking about this question.

Instead, let’s consider the future in general! Well, what do we know about the future? It all depends on which science fiction movie paradigm you subscribe to. We should examine the classics.

Star Wars

Job options: evil corporate empire with a rigid bureacracy and a strict dress code or rag tag fleet of rebel freelancers who are pretty informal and accepting of diversity. Either way, you may win the genetic lottery and get magic powers, conveniently catapulting you to the leading ranks of the organization despite your complete  lack of experience or training.

Terminator

Computers take over, build killer robots that look like Austrian weight-lifters, and start sending assassins back in time. In this instance, your career will probably swerve suddenly into hunting, gathering, and hiding from SkyNet. But don’t worry! As a survivor in the wasteland, you won’t have many other cubicle-dwellers competing for company resources or promotions.

Back to the Future

Cars can fly, we use thumb-prints instead of credit cards, and energy comes from tiny appliances that run on old banana peels. Your career has probably continued on track, climbing the corporate ladder, wearing two-tailed neckties, and bullying your subordinates into doing your work for you. Just remember to get the assignments early so you have time to re-type them, and try not to work for anyone named “Needles.”

Blade Runner

Humans have colonized the solar system using android slaves, most animals are extinct, and the Los Angeles is really, really smoggy. You’ve worked hard, but unfortunately you’ve been replaced by a robot and now you’re forced to make a living as a street vendor peddling black market Furbies and Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls. Things may look grim, but relocating to the suburbs should make life easier. Assuming, that is, that you’re really human.

Planet of the Apes

Nuclear war has destroyed all civilization, leaving super-intelligent chimps in charge. You’ll do well as long as you refrain from speaking to your simian overseer and focus on blue sky thinking to maximize the synergy among the other people trapped in bamboo cubicles. Recommendation: Legally change your name to “Bright Eyes” now to save time.

Total Recall

Governments are out, mega-corporations are in, and you can go on vacation without leaving home by having fake memories implanted in your head. Accept the herd mentality and keep playing office politics as usual and you’ll be fine, as long as you don’t ever visit Mars or marry Sharon Stone.

The Matrix

The entire world is really an elaborate computer simulation. Don’t worry, you’ll probably never find any proof that you’re living in the Matrix anyway, so just keep your nose to the grindstone and your drab cubcile-bound existence will continue uninterrupted, as long as Agent Smith doesn’t ever appropriate your body to fight Neo in the subway.

Starship Troopers

The world’s gone authoritarian, and just in time! Because who better to fight giant alien bugs than a fascist Doogie Howser, MD? If you’re at all mechanically inclined, it’s time to start designing military-grade prosthetic limbs and industrial-strength flyswatters. Memo to self: Don’t move to Buenas Aires. Ever.

Robocop

Crime has gotten so bad that the police have resorted to turning dead cops into robotic zombies. Memo to self: Don’t move to Detroit. Ever.

Wall-E

Reckless corporate greed and poor government management has rendered our planet too disgusting to live on anymore, so you’ve been relocated to a giant spaceship for the rest of your life. Yahtzee! You get to spend eternity in a hovering barcalounger, drinking giant milkshakes, and playing video games. Every day is casual Friday!

Minority Report

Psychic cops ensure that no one is ever murdered again, while most business is conducted using retina scans. So get to work designing your new line of sunglasses, eyepatches, contact lenses, and glass eyeballs for all the people accidentally blinded while ringing up their purchases.

Fahrenheit 451

Firefighters burn books and most people spend their time in virtual-reality rooms. Clearly, it is time to get out of the publishing business and learn how to program video games. Or if you enjoy playing with flamethrowers, you may have a future in uniform.

Children of Men

Humans have mysteriously lost the ability to have children. Thus freed from the expenses of raising kids, you can focus on paying off that mortgage and saving for retirement. If you save aggressively, you might be living in the Bahamas five years from now.

Star Trek

Humanity has evolved beyond war, beyond racism and classism, beyond basic economics, so… everyone is out of business. The good news is that you can get three hundred kinds of cheeseburger from a machine in the wall and you can download all the music you want for free.

So there you have it, a vast array of possible career options and paths you might find yourself stumbling down in a post-apocalyptic horrorscape… in five years.

So what is a career today? And do you even want one?

Some people define their career as working in the same role / industry / field for their entire life. For instance, a person might get a degree in electrical engineering and then spend the next forty years working in electrical engineering types of jobs for various companies, and all the while introducing himself at cocktail parties as “an electrical engineer.” That seems pretty straightforward.

But as many of us know, technology is evolving at a frightening pace today. The skills you learned in college were obsolete by the time you graduated, and the industry you’re in today might not even exist in 5 years (thanks internet, email, iTunes, ebooks, and hovercars!).

What is your plan for the present? To work hard and hope for the best?

What is your plan for the future? To still be doing what you’re doing in forty years?

The idealist in all of us is thinking the same thing: I just want to work my 8 hours a day in a nice, climate-controlled office and slowly work my way up the corporate ladder until I can retire at a ripe old age.

But that’s just not realistic anymore. In fact, we may be entering a period of economic history in which that sort of career is increasingly rare, if not impossible (outside of government work, of course). We may be entering an era of continuous change, of continuous re-education and self-re-invention. The concept of a career itself may be becoming obsolete.

So what should you be doing right now? If you’re a software programmer, maybe you should be writing your own applications in your spare time. If you’re an artist, maybe you should be creating works to sell online, or offering freelance services. If you’re a business analyst or manager, maybe you should be partnering up with old friends to start side businesses, or investments. The point is that it is no longer enough to just spend 8 hours a day in one job. That’s not a career. That’s just a job.

And the scary thing today is how fragile a job can be. A few Americans take out mortgages they cannot afford and everyone in Europe loses their savings, and the economy of Iceland collapses. Some kids in Silicon Valley invent email and suddenly the postal service is doubling the price of stamps just to make ends meet.

Everyday, new technologies are invented that make old technologies, or old industries, completely unnecessary. The invention of the automobile destroyed the horse-driven carriage world, but replaced it with a new industry. But now, telecommuting could one day make personal transport irrelevant. Imagine a world full of people who work from home, order groceries online, take classes online, go shopping online… hmm. It seems that world is nearly here already. In that world, we wouldn’t need cars, or car makers, or garages. We’d only need a few trucks to deliver our food and giant TVs, and maybe a doctor from time to time.

Or what about home-made movies? Digital animating and editing software could one day allow a skilled director to make an entire movie, complete with original music, sound effects, and actor performances without leaving the basement, and then distribute it online for pennies. If Hollywood went out of business, think of all the artists and technicians (and accountants and agents) who would lose their livelihoods, forever.

This isn’t an exaggeration. It’s not techno-hysteria. Consider your own high-tech life. Do you shop online? If so, you don’t need cashiers or bagboys or sales reps. Do you bank online? If so, you don’t need bank tellers or mortgage reps. And once we don’t need brick-and-mortar stores, then we don’t need bricks, mortar, engineers, architects, inspectors, contractors, or anything else needed to build physical things. And this is before we start talking about the world of outsourcing technical work to other countries.

But what about you? High school and college kept you very busy for 8 years. Your master’s program or medical school probably kept you pretty busy as well. But now you’re adrift in the working world and your fate is in the hands of several executives who can afford to retire whenever they want, and managers who probably have enough contacts to jump ship and get a new position whenever they want. Which leaves you, O intrepid young professional, out in the cold, wondering what happened to your career, what happened to working hard and hoping for the best?

Which is why you need to have more irons in the fire, more projects in the evening, on the weekend, on the side. Your day-job is just that, your day-job. It’s not your career. Your career is the sum of all your professional endeavors, and if your only professional endeavor is to spend 8 hours a day at a desk shuffling papers for someone who is ready to retire, then your career is already in trouble.

The good news, however, is that you can start bulding your personal empire right now, through the magic of the internet. If you make anything that can be sold, start making some more: artwork, articles, designs, applications, jewelry, clothing, investments. If you can freelance, do it, in your spare time. And if your day-job doesn’t translate into anything you can do in your spare time, then take a look at your hobbies. What do you like to do? Cook? Garden? Teach? I’ll bet you could find a way to turn your passion into something worth putting on a resume if you tried.

The bottom line here is that life is very long, and it can be very expensive, and you cannot rely on any company, or even any industry, to continue to support you over the next several decades. Your best bet is to invest more time and effort in yourself, and while education seems like a smart investment, your own lines of business could prove far more profitable, and far more reliable, in the long term.

Both are undesirable. And both demand that you raise the bar.

When You Are Bored

We all have periods of “down time”  while we wait for a colleague to provide information, or for a contract to start, or for supplies to arrive, or for a decision to come down from the executives. Some of us have more down time than others. And most of us use this time to surf the internet, because frankly, the internet is just too gosh darn fun to ignore.

However, this is not fantastically productive and if it happens too often for too long, someone above you is bound to notice.

Some people might advise you to spend this time organizing your work space, clearing out your inbox, catching up on corporate memos and training, or developing new skills using online courses or those big paper things…books.

And that’s good advice, but I’m going to suggest you do something a bit more aggressive. Assess your company, its products, its processes, anything you have genuine insight into, and figure out how to fix or improve it.

For example:

• How would you redesign the company Web site? Document templates? Reports?
• How would you change your team’s meetings or calendar use?
• What communications technologies could help your company? Instant messaging, file sharing?

Once you identify an issue that you fully understand, and identify a few solid alternatives, develop your idea. Research your alternatives, including cost, implementation, training, and any other measurable aspects of your ideas. Don’t hand your idea off to the head of IT or Strategy or whoever you think should be responsible for it. Take responsibility for it yourself.

Compose a full technical proposal of how you would implement your changes and what impacts you think it might have across your organization. Would it make work easier, faster, or more precise? Would it lower costs or increase capabilities, or both? Would it make life better for some departments, but not affect others?

When you feel you’ve thoroughly explored your ideas in your proposal, start to circulate it and collect feedback. Start with your own team or department and then proceed to discuss your proposal with others. With each iteration, take the time to incorporate feedback into the proposal. This way, by the time it reaches a senior decision-maker, it has been vetted and refined by a broad group of people.

If your idea is solid, then it may actually be approved, in which case you’ll get a nugget of credit for having helped to improve the company. You may even be placed in charge of implementing your idea, in which case you’ll get a lot of credit and plenty of work to fill up that free time. Win-win.

(Even if your idea is shot down, management may still recognize that you are more than just a paper-pushing drone.)

This may not be as much fun as the internet, but it’s more fun than cleaning out your inbox, and it will actually help your career.

When You Are Drowning

There are times when we have more work to do than ten people could handle. We’re putting in long hours, and logging in on the weekend, and every five minutes someone sends us a whole new project that we’ve never heard of before and it’s “Top Priority” (at least until the next one comes along).

If you can say with certainty that the flood season will end at the end of the month, or the end of the quarter, or the end of the contract, then don’t muddy the waters. Just keep treading until things setting down.

But, if this is the status quo, if things are always raging out of control, if you are always behind and that’s just the way things are, then nothing is going to change unless you make an extra effort. So, on top of the sky falling and your hair on fire, you need to raise the bar.

It can be hard to find things that are wrong with your organization when you’re bored and disconnected from operations, but when you’re caught in a storm of meetings, presentations, research, analysis, overlapping projects, and bureaucratic madness, it should be much easier. You’ve probably already got a list a mile long in the back your mind of things that are wrong with your office and how you think they should be fixed.

So do something about it.

Yes, it will take even more time out of your life. But the bottom line is that when everyone is dog-paddling around just trying to keep their heads above water, then no one is investing any time in the future. And if things are out of control right now, and no one is working on fixing that, then things will always be out of control.

And “always” is a long, long time.

There is always time for a five minute meeting with your boss to say, “We need to have fewer meetings” or “We should upgrade our accounting software” or “We need to fix the current product before we spend any more time on the next product.”

Raising the Bar

Raising the bar is about setting higher standards for yourself and your team. It’s about worker smarter, not harder. It’s about really competing with your competition, acknowledging your weaknesses, and focusing on fixing problems instead of just managing them. All too often, we become complacent with the mentality that “This is just how things work at this company” or “It’s just always been like this in our industry.”

I think the folks at Apple and Google might disagree with that mentality.

When you raise the bar, you place an extra burden on everyone’s shoulders to go through a process of transition from the old ways to the new ways. Change is extra work. But at the end of the day, when you’ve sailed high over that bar, something (or maybe everything) about your work should be better.

And better is good.

But this also means it is time to make the dreaded New Year’s Resolution, a solemn promise to yourself to completely change who and what you are, to be a better human being, just because it’s time to buy a new calendar. Unfortunately, most people have trouble with the follow-through, and the whole fix-your-life-right-now program falls apart.

Here’s how to make it work.

First, don’t make a vague Resolution. Don’t say you want to be a better person, be nicer, lose weight, save money, or anything a beauty contestant might say. You need to be specific. Who are you going to help? How will you help them? How much weight will you lose? How much money will you save?

Modern business wisdom says it is easier to succeed at something if it is measurable, so plug some numbers or dates into your Resolution.

Second, don’t make one big Resolution; make a lot of little ones. If you only have one Resolution, and it falls apart for whatever reason, then you’re back to square one. But if you have several Resolutions, then even if some of them fall through, you may still succeed at the others.

What should your Resolution look like, then? Let’s start with the classic “Lose Weight.” (Note: Yes, this is work-related. Your health impacts everything that you do. And your appearance impacts your self-esteem, general happiness, and how others see you and act toward you.)

So instead of saying, “This year I’m going to lose weight” or even “I’m going to lose 20 pounds,” trying saying that this year you are going to:

1. Replace soda with water.
2. Replace coffee with tea.
3. Use the stairs at work instead of the elevator.
4. Eat oatmeal for breakfast.
5. Stop getting fast food for lunch.
6. Stop keeping candy in your desk.
7. Snack on dry pretzels / popcorn instead of delicious chocolate.
8. No donuts.
9. Bring lunch from home instead of buying it.
10. Go to bed earlier. (Apparently, increased sleep can aid weight loss.)

This way, even if you only stick to only two or three items, you can still make some progress toward your ultimate goal of “losing weight.” And better yet, your Resolution list is actually a detailed game plan, which is much better than signing up at a gym to take $50 a month so you can hang out with a bunch of strangers in spandex.

Which is not ideal.

Now, let’s try something more work-focused: “Make more money.” The first thing you need to do is get some information:

1. Check your performance goals for the year.
2. Research whether your company offers bonuses for helping to find new employees, or landing new clients, or anything else specific.
3. Research what the average salary is for a person with your job title.
4. Research what your company’s full salary range is for your position.
5. Look at job postings to see whether there are similar jobs being offered with higher salaries.

You can try to earn more within your current position.

1. Earn your full performance bonus.
2. Earn a supplemental bonus.
3. Request a raise. (It may help to get technical certifications or a Master’s degree, too.)

You can try to earn more by getting promoted.

1. Find out what positions your company has that you might reasonably be promoted into.
2. Learn what responsibilities that job involves.
3. Demonstrate to your bosses that you can do that job.

You can try to earn more by getting another job.

1. Get a new job with a higher salary. (You’re familiar with this process, right? Resume, interview? You know the drill.)

This way, when you make your Resolution, you can focus on a specific goal with a specific plan for making it happen. And that’s the whole point of the Resolution, isn’t it? Making it happen?

But there are probably a lot of other useful things you could resolve to do. You could focus on your education, or your relationships with your coworkers, or just on your organizational skills. But don’t forget that half of “work life” is “life.” So you could also think about many other things outside of the office.

How about your commute? Is it too long? Too slow? Too expensive? It might surprise you how much it improves your day when you have a shorter, less stressful drive every morning and evening. You can spend a few days trying to leave home at different times, or taking different roads. You could also experiment with the buses, the metro, or riding your bike.

Maybe you’re working too many hours, long evenings, and coming in on weekends. Why is that? Is your company short-staffed? Or maybe you’re just not planning well enough, leaving you to scramble to meet deadlines on nights and weekends. Whatever the reason, I doubt it’s making you happy. Once you find the cause, you may be able to find a solution, even if the solution is for you to cut the slow-pokes out of the picture and do a little extra work during the day. Remember, more work does not necessarily mean more time.

When you take stock of your life or your job and you think about what you’d like to change, focus on the specifics, on the details. It’s unlikely that there is one Big Bad Evil Force that’s making your life difficult or unpleasant. It’s more likely that there are many Little Yet Still Annoying Forces that are chipping away at your happiness or success. So the best plan is to chip back, one little problem at a time.

But should you take it?

The arguments in favor of taking vacation time off are rather strong:

• Sleeping as much as you like.
• Eating whenever you like.
• Wearing whatever you like.
• Going away wherever you like.

And of course,

• Not doing any work.

However, because I have to write quite a bit more in order to be paid for this article, I’m going to spend the next thousand words or so explaining to you why you should stay at your desk instead of going someplace pleasant, or visiting family, or even just relaxing around the house.

The Calendar Year

For whatever reason, quite a lot of the business world cares a great deal about the date January 1. This is because many, many things start on that poor hung-over date, such as health insurance plans (in America) and government contracts (everywhere). This means that certain types of people, including salesmen, contractors, and calendar printers, are actually doing more work as the year winds down.

This feels contradictory in some ways because the fiscal year for many companies revolves around October 1 (for arcane governmental reasons that can only be understood using statistics and astrology). So some folks are gearing up for the fourth quarter crunch just as everyone else is wrapping up their third quarter projects.

Why should this impact your holiday plans? Well, an awful lot of very important decisions can be made during the fourth quarter by very tired, stressed people who are trying to cover all the bases while their coworkers are off on a tropical beach (or visiting their parents, if that sort of thing amuses you). What sorts of decisions, you ask? Budgets, staffing, assignments to projects, work plans, schedules, and many other mundane things that could make or break your year.

Those weary decision makers are going to wander the halls and ask for input from whoever has the time. So, do you want extra money to go to a conference? Do you want to be included on the boring government contract or on the exciting private contract? Do you think you can finish a project in one month or three?

You might want to stick around to answer those questions.

Peace of Mind

What do you suppose goes on at work while you’re not there?

Some say that the entire office turns into an exciting night club where everyone is drunk and much more physically attractive, and they are all having entirely too much fun, which is why it seems that nothing has been accomplished in your absence.

Others theorize that all of your office enemies coalesce into an unholy alliance to take credit for your achievements while blaming you for their failures, which is why everyone either ignores you or gives you dirty looks when you get back.

The truth of the matter is that everything goes plunging forward right on schedule as you knew it would. Unfortunately, this is a very bad thing. Because, despite the fact that most of our holidays have been around for several centuries, most of our work plans don’t take those holidays into proper consideration.

So your week with the family may just cross a critical deadline. Which is not ideal.

You Can Do Better

The end of the year is a terrible time to go away. To be more precise, the end of the year is a terrible time to arrive anywhere.

Why?

Is it because the tourist season is over? Is it because the weather is miserable? Is it because the Mayan calendar predicts horror and disaster?

No, it’s because it’s the holidays, and much of the world has major holidays near the end of the calendar year, and much of the world would like to take some time off. So your destinations are closed, or understaffed, or all be-decked for the holidays instead of for skiing or surfing or whatever it is you want to be doing.

So you will have escaped your work world only to plunge into someone else’s work world. And now the people who weren’t able to get any time off are taking care of your vacation, during their holiday. Which is also not ideal.

You’re Cheating Yourself

You say you want to take time off during the holidays. Why? To sit in horrid traffic, to board crowded planes, to sleep in filthy hotels, and all to be with distant family for one large meal that will be charged with family stress and drama.

Thank you, no.

But what is the alternative? Well, obviously, stay at work.

“Work?” you exclaim in despair. “But work is stressful and unpleasant, with no feasting or presents!”

But you’d be wrong. Because all the bigwigs at your company, who are terribly important, are quite comfortable going away during the holidays. Which means they aren’t at work. Which means they’re not around to stress you out.

So if you stay at work, you might find yourself quite alone on any given day. Your entire team might be away. In fact, you could deliberately volunteer to stay at work, to mind the shop, so to speak. They might even thank you for it.

With no one around, there’s no one to give you new work to do. And there’s no one to answer your questions, so you can’t be blamed if your work comes to a standstill until your boss returns.

Which means you may find yourself puttering about the internet, reading articles about why you should stay at work instead of taking time off during the holidays. And that sounds rather nice.

So When to Get Away?

If you shouldn’t take your vacation during the holidays, when should you?

Not during the summer, because that is the height of the tourist season when prices are high and popular destinations are crowded with (shudder) other people.

Not during the winter, because the weather is wretched and there’s nothing to do.

Spring is a decent choice, because the world is decently priced and fairly pretty to go traveling about in. September is equally decent, for the same reasons.

But I wouldn’t have any of them. I would take off Monday and Friday. Lots of them, throughout the year, each carefully timed to not ruin my work or give me anything to worry about. Granted, 3-day weekends don’t really give you time to go anywhere, but it does give you plenty of time to do nothing.

And isn’t that the ideal vacation?

ThinkGeek Giveaway: The Cubicle Doorbell

The office may be empty at this time of year, but that’s no reason not to prepare for one everyone’s back in! ThinkGeek’s Cubicle Doorbell helps you deal with that guy who usually sneaks up behind you and watches you work for a moment before announcing his presence. Now you can train him to enter the cubicle in a more civilized way!

“Q: Why would anyone possibly want a doorbell on their cubicle? Typically, visitors knock loudly on the cubicle partion, shuffle/stamp their feet, or clear their throat repeatedly to get your attention. The Cubicle Doorbell provides a fun way for visitors to announce their arrival.”

To win this prize, take a funny office photograph and post it on Photobucket or something like that, leaving a link to it in the comments here. Use your creativity. Make me laugh. The photo that makes me laugh loudest wins. Make sure the email address you leave with your comment is correct–it’s only visible to Envato staff, and we need it to tell you if you win. See this post for terms and conditions.

Because this is such an important issue for the people it affects, I think it deserves a little more discussion.

In a perfect world, we’d never need to have this conversation. All bosses should be honest and decent and kind, and no worker should ever find herself in an uncomfortable, unprofessional, or potentially illegal situation. But this is the real world, and it is populated mostly by people, who can be anything from very nice to very cruel. And you need to recognize that birds of a feather flock together.

Angelic Offices

Some companies are founded by ethical, hard-working, moral, liberal, open-minded humanitarians. And they tend to surround themselves with similar people with similarly high standards and work styles. So if you are lucky enough to work in such a place, you’ll probably never find yourself in a compromising position. You won’t have enemies. No one will be trying to take advantage of you.

But in the off chance that a bad egg shows up at your heavenly office, everyone will quickly recognize that person as a problem, and everyone will band together to fix that person or remove them. So even if you are the one to start the ball rolling, you will probably have a good sense that you will have support and that you will succeed in correcting the problem.

However, if you’re in one of these wonderful places, I’m guessing you don’t deal with a lot of office conflicts and so you don’t need to be here reading my advice. So go back to work! (Unless you want to learn how the other half lives…)

Demonic Offices

At the other end of the spectrum are the terrible offices. These companies are run by old-fashioned, racist, sexist monsters. (Yes, they really do exist in the modern age.) And they also surround themselves with like-minded people. So your entire senior leadership could consist of people who are comfortable taking advantage of subordinates, and who will support each other if anyone tries to discipline them for it.

In these environments, how do you defend your rights, or even just your sanity? Common sense says to document infractions, save emails, and get everything in writing to present to a senior manager or to Human Resources in the hope that this person will take action on your behalf. The problem is that at these companies, there may not be a manager willing to take your complaints seriously. Which leaves HR.

Remember on Star Trek when the captain would get possessed by an alien and the doctor would step in and relieve him of command? It would be fantastic if HR could be as powerful as that doctor, but they aren’t. HR works for the boss, just like you. And the odds are fair that either HR is run by more of these like-minded ruffians, or HR is nice but unwilling to risk their job to take up your cause.

Want proof?

What really happens when you fight back?

I won’t bother telling you about situations that go well. (Spoiler Alert: They go well.) So here are a few examples of how they can go wrong.

I knew a man who was a member of a team of consultants who worked at a major corporation. The consultants worked with the senior managers to identify ways to improve performance throughout the company, and they met with the managers every month to report their recommendations. After 18 months of making various improvements to the company, the consultants reported to the managers that the largest remaining area for improvement was with the managers themselves. The following day, all of the consultants were fired.

I knew a young woman who was routinely insulted by her boss, forced to work nights and weekends to recover the boss’s fumbles, and publicly blamed for her boss’s failures. She documented these events and presented them to HR. HR said that starting an investigation into the problem would only make the senior partners mad at her and would never impact her boss’s job.

I knew a woman in a mid-level management position who launched a full-scale investigation into her boss, the senior director. This boss routinely and publicly insulted the staff, lied about contracts, lied about salaries, lied about promotions and raises, and made countless decisions that visibly damaged the organization financially. The campaign against him involved lengthy testimonials from two dozen current and former employees. It even involved aggressive support from someone who outranked the boss. After two years of proceedings (long after my friend left), the evil boss finally retired.

I knew a Human Resources manager who blatantly sexually harassed one of her administrative assistants. When he came forward with mountains of explicit emails and succeeded in suing the company, was she fired? No. She was a member of the inner circle, making her bulletproof despite getting the company sued. So her responsibilities were shifted onto other people and she maintained her six-figure salary, unpunished. (Note: After this event, most of the “good” managers left the company, leaving things even worse for the junior staff.)

Are you really risking your job?

I have personally witnessed employees fired after only 6 months, after only 3 months, and on their first day at work. People are fired for all sorts of reasons, some of them quite reasonable and some of them quite ridiculous. If you’re in a bad situation, then it probably involves bad people, which means you could be at risk for a ridiculously bad outcome.

So when I advise you to not fight back, I’m simply encouraging you to find the path of least resistance at that moment. But by no means am I suggesting that you stay and suffer forever. Get out! Find one of those angelic offices I mentioned earlier! Jazz up that resume, cruise the interwebs, and get your dream job.

Will that take time? Of course, maybe months. Will you have to suffer in the interim? Yes. But if you need that paycheck, then there’s probably nothing to be gained by risking your current job before you find a better one.

The Bottom Line

This advice may sound fairly cynical, because it is. But you are more than just a professional or a worker, you are a human being. You have other priorities and responsibilities outside of work. And the best advice I can give you is to carefully consider all of the repercussions of your actions before you do anything.