At the end of today, I am officially on vacation until Thursday 4/9, and it could not come a moment too soon. Contrary to the doom-and-gloom picture painted for work life flexibility in the recent Washington Post article, we are busy. While I’m very grateful and love what I do, I believe we all need to disconnect and re-energize periodically to continue bringing the best of ourselves to the task at hand.
Unfortunately, as I’ve shared in past posts related to my ongoing “vacation quandary,” I struggle to make the break with work during vacation (here , here and here). So, I will report back how I did in my first post after vacation on April 15th. Appropriately enough, that post will focus on an interesting conversation I had with Maggie Jackson, the author of one of my favorite books from last year, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. We talked about the need to pay attention and build in time to think and concentrate. Should be interesting to see how much more focused, attentive and less distracted I feel when I return. I will let you know.
In the meantime, before I leave for vacation, here are a couple of things to check out:
- Marci Alboher interviewed me for her new blog Working the New Economy on Yahoo! Shine for a post entitled, “Negotiating an Alternative to Layoffs: 5 Questions for Cali Yost.” Then go to my most recent FastCompany.com blog post, “Jobless Claims Rise to Record Levels, 20 Blog Posts Promote Flexible Alternatives to Layoffs” for a snapshot of all the of posts I’ve written over the past year encouraging a more flexible approach to downsizing that minimized layoffs.
- Kathie Lingle, Executive Director of the Alliance for Work Life Progress, wrote a must-read blog post, ‘The News of Our Demise is Much Exaggerated.” In the post she uses her long history in the field and in-depth knowledge of what’s really going on to challenge the validity of the fear-based Washington Post article I mentioned earlier about the demise of work life flexibility in the recession. Yes, there are pockets of “Let’s go back to 1985, because people should feel lucky to have jobs” resistance. But there’s also support for flexibility as a business strategy even more valuable during difficult times.
- Alfred P. Sloan Awards for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility now, for the first time, accepting applications for a national, at-large award to recognize employers across the country that are successfully using flexibility to meet both business and employee goals. This is new. In the past, this award was given out only in local communities around the country, so individual offices of national companies could win but not the company overall. This new award now offers national recognition. Deadline to apply is May 1, 2009.
- Finally, if you haven’t done so already, please consider following me on Twitter.com at http://twitter.com/caliyost. You will find many of your favorite work+life experts on Twitter providing up-to-the-minute real-time commentary on work+life related issues of the day. Go to the list of people I’m following to find them all, and then join in the conversation!
With that, I’m officially signing off from all things Web 2.0 until the week of April 13th. Wish me luck in my quest to disconnect! Please feel free to share any tips that could help.