Team Taskmaster

Are you trying to cut costs by bringing, rather than buying, your workday lunch? Kudos to you. It’s definitely a money-saver — in fact, you could save over $1,000 per year just by brown-bagging it three times a week. You can even calculate the cost of your homemade sandwich to prove the savings to yourself.

But let’s face it: Bringing your own lunch can get boring, not to mention tedious. After all, you have to do the grocery shopping, engineer your meal every morning (or night before, if you’re a planner), and hope your goodies don’t get squashed on the commute.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some ideas on how to hack your DIY lunch so your meal is a daily treat, not a trial.

Start a lunch pool. Find four other colleagues willing to participate, and have each one pick a day to make lunch for the group. It’s a great way to add some variety to the mix and skip four out of five days of prep work.

Spice up your spreads. If a sandwich is your stand-by, add a little sizzle with gourmet mustard, cilantro mayonnaise, sun-dried tomato spread, horseradish, hummus, spreadable cheese, or even salad dressing.

Up the crunch factor. Add seeds or nuts to your soups, salads, and pastas — even to your sandwiches. The texture will make your food more satisfying and seem more filling.

Warm up to the microwave. Even a boring sandwich takes on more personality when it’s got warm, melted cheese inside. And toasty leftovers beats cold sliced chicken any day.

Banish the sog. Wilted salads? Not any more. Just separate your ingredients into plastic containers (or plastic baggies) and assemble your salad at the office. Or invest in a special container, like the Fit & Fresh Salad Shaker, that lets you keep the dressing separate and the salad nicely chilled.

Recycle your dinners. Cook a little extra in the evening and voila — you’ll have tasty leftovers to bring to work in the morning.

Don’t skip the soup. A hearty soup can be incredibly satisfying on a cold (or tough) day in the office. Homemade rocks, but there are plenty of “just add water” packaged versions out there that’ll do the trick, too.

Go gourmet. If you can cook, there’s no reason not to make your bagged lunch a fine-dining experience. Build a panini, create a gorgeous pesto pasta, or grill up some seasoned veggies. Need inspiration? Check out these recipes for a better brown bag lunch from three New York chefs.

Think outside the (sandwich) box. Tired of two slices of whole wheat, mayo, mustard, ham, cheese, and tomato? Sandwiches come in infinite varieties. Try a different kind of bread - baguette, sourdough roll, ciabbata, focaccia, pita, tortilla. Swap out your American cheese for some brie, Havarti, or goat’s cheese. How about sun-dried tomatoes instead of fresh? Or turn to the doyenne of food for ideas: Martha Stewart offers 25 great sandwich ideas, plus new takes on salads and lunchbox treats.

If you’ve got other ideas for improving your brown-bag lunch, share them with the Team Taskmaster readers in the comments section.

(image by Melyviz via Flickr, CC 2.0)

If you see a co-worker in a neighboring cubicle contorting into a strange pose, relax. She’s probably not having a convulsion. Rather, it’s more likely that she has embraced the latest workplace stressbuster: yoga.

A pilot study published in the journal Health Education & Behavior found that 20 minutes per day of guided workplace meditation and yoga, combined with six weekly group sessions, can lower feelings of stress by more than 10 percent in sedentary office employees.

Researchers from Ohio State found that yoga and meditation combined reduced participants’ stress, improved their awareness of external stressors, and helped them sleep better. In addition to 20 minutes of practice at their desks, participants attended a weekly, one-hour session during their lunch breaks.

Since lowering stress can increase productivity, adding yoga to the mix can be a win-win for the workplace. Want to put this into practice in your office? Learn some simple yoga moves you can do at your desk or in your office, try a little meditation — the approach used in the study was mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR, but any type can help — and try to attend a weekly yoga class.

(image by enfad via Flickr, CC 2.0)

If you productivity hounds didn’t have enough to worry about already, here’s a new factor to take into consideration: Your favorite organization tool might be harmful to your health.

The Environmental Working Group has released a list ranking more than 1,000 cell phones and smartphones by the amount of radiation emitted. According to the organization’s research, the BlackBerry Curve (8300 and 8330 models) and the BlackBerry Bold 9000 were among the smartphones emitting the highest amount of radiation.

Why is this a concern? Although there’s still debate about whether cell-phone radiation is truly harmful, the EWG says studies find significantly higher risks for brain and salivary gland tumors among people using cell phones for 10 years or longer.

Well, you’re probably not going to ditch your smartphone, but here are 5 ways to reduce your risks from cell-phone radiation.

1. Choose a device that emits less radiation. Happily for BlackBerry aficionados, another model — the Storm (9530 and 9500) — is among the lowest-radiation choices.
2. Use a headset or speaker. If you use a wireless headset, take it off your ear if you’re not on a call (some models emit continuous, low-level radiation).
3. Talk less. Your phone doesn’t emit radiation when you’re checking messages, only when you’re chatting.
4. Text more. Texting uses less power (and thus, less radiation) than voice calling and also keeps the phone away from your head.
5. Call only when you’ve got strong signal bars. Using your phone in a weak-signal area requires more radiation to get the signal to the tower.

You know that all work and no play makes you a dull leader. But what happens if you habitually mix work and play? Too many managers make a habit of staying closely connected to the office during vacation, when they instead they really should be recharging their batteries.

I’m not immune to the siren song of connectivity. In fact, while at Disneyland recently, I caught myself killing time in the Space Mountain line by checking my e-mail, sending a couple of text messages, and reviewing some of my blog traffic stats.

And that’s definitely not the right mindset for what’s supposed to be a relaxing day at the park.

Robert Bruner, writing in the Washington Post, describes how work addiction can keep people from enjoying the benefits of time off. Effective leaders thrive on daily routines of connectedness, but that sense of being in touch can become compulsive. If you regularly divert your attention from meetings and conversations by sending e-mails or text messsages, or if you feel irritable if you’re out of touch, could be you’re addicted to the rush of that connectivity.

But healthy leaders know when to say when, says Bruner. Although emergencies might arise while you’re out of the office, you need to strike a balance between the fires and the fire drills you’ll respond to.

Here are six rules for leaders who want to vacation more wisely:

1. Commit to vacation as a time for rest, relaxation, and recharging. Consider it a time to “say when.”
2. Tell your staff, assistants, or anyone else who needs to be looped in that you will be offline except in cases of true emergency. For bosses and other stakeholders, plan ahead: Give plenty of notice about your vacation, tell them you’re serious about taking a real break, but assure them you’ll respond if issues arise.
3. Fight the lure of your electronics. Check e-mail — at most — once or twice a day. Concentrate on staying in the moment with your family and friends.
4. Get active. If you’re work-addicted, lounging poolside (within range of the free Wi-Fi) isn’t a great environment for you. Instead, go hiking, swimming, fishing, or horseback riding; play tennis, go kayaking, or explore on a bike.
5. Get away. You can bolster your mission by vacationing in a cellular and Wi-Fi dead zone. In an emergency, you can still be reached the old-fashioned way: by land line.
6. If the smoke from a work fire reaches you anyway, pause before you react. Can you delegate? Would there be consequences if you delayed until you returned? Can you limit the amount of time you spend on this fire?

And if you really have to spend some of your time off handling work issues, says Bruner, make sure you block out some additional vacation time to make up for it.

You can read the full blog post for more details, or check out more thoughts on leadership by Robert Bruner.

(image by epSos.de via Flickr, CC 2.0)

I’ve decided that pain can’t possibly be good for productivity.

How did I arrive at this shocking conclusion, you ask? Simple. My back is killing me and it’s making it really hard for me to sit at my desk and work — a prerequisite for productivity when you’re a writer.

My chiropractor is helping, but he’s made it clear that he won’t tolerate any more of my whining until I invest in a good chair. See, he believes that where and how I sit for eight hours a day (or more) has a lot to do with my aches.

So it’s time for me to retire the bought-on-sale, Office-Depot-clearance-item chair I picked up about six years ago. But let me tell you, there are a LOT of choices out there. And I don’t know where to start, or what’s hype and what isn’t.

Of course the Aeron chair comes highly recommended, but have you seen the price tag? $629 for the basic model would pay for a lot of chiropractic adjustments.

The kneeling chair is supposedly good for taking pressure of your back, but it looks kind of silly. And I imagine getting up and down several times an hour, which I do, would be a little annoying if I had to extricate myself every time.

I have a great exercise ball at home and suggested to my chiropractor that I just perch on that. But while he said it would be fine for short stints at my desk, he insisted I should still alternate that with sitting in a proper chair. (Drat. There goes my no-cost solution.)

There’s the Swopper, a colorful stool on a spring. Seems like it’d be fun, albeit possibly distracting; I have a tendency to jiggle my leg when I’m writing under deadline, and I can imagine the effect that’d have (boing boing boing). But $499 is a pretty penny to pay for a souped-up toadstool.

One other option might be to change to a stand-up workstation. I consult with Cisco, and some of the folks there swear by them. They have high swivel chairs as a backup but spend most of their time working on their feet. I’ll bet it’s good for their backs (not to mention it must help combat that 3 p.m. urge to doze off). But I’m afraid my feet would hurt after a while.

Sigh.

So I’m stumped! And I’m turning this one over to you, my loyal readers. I’m sure many of you have been through this yourselves and have recommendations galore. So share your vote in the poll, and please add any detailed suggestions or warnings in the comments section. Thanks!

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How much more would you get done in your day if you didn’t feel sluggish and out of sorts when the alarm went off?

Optimizing your wake time seems to be the new fad lately. I just read a piece by David Pogue in the New York Times in which he reviews the Sleeptracker Pro Elite sleep monitor, a $180 gizmo intended to help you avoid sleep inertia — that groggy feeling you get when you first wake up.

Instead of going off at a certain set time (say, 7 a.m.), the watch tracks your movements through the night and when your “wake window” approaches, chooses to rouse you when it senses activity. The idea is that your movement indicates you’re having a natural nearly-awake moment already, so this is an optimal time to bring you to full consciousness.

Does it work? Pogue says in the two weeks he wore the watch, he never woke up groggy — but then again, he admits it’s hard to say whether he would have felt fine on those days anyway. Amazon.com reviewers give the Sleeptracker Pro, an earlier model, an average of three stars; some say it’s great, while a nearly equal number disagree.

But sleep tracking in general is definitely a trend. Pogue mentions another couple of gadgets, the Zeo and the Axbo, that are also intended to help people wake up refreshed. Who knows? Might be worth trying.

Then again, climbing into the sack a few minutes earlier might work just as well — and it’s a much cheaper solution.

Plenty of managers (you included?) are starting to pay more heed to workplace wellness, given its impact on employee happiness and productivity. (I wrote about improving employee fitness through workplace changes just last week.)

But what if you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot by offering your employees easy access to Sprite, Coke, or root beer?

That’s the concern voiced by Tanya Barham, writing about work wellness on the Benefits Buzz blog. Barham cites a recent study, conducted by researchers from the University of California, Davis, which found that people who downed fructose-sweetened drinks showed an increase in a type of fat that embeds itself in the tissue between organs.

This isn’t completely unexpected news, of course; a couple of years ago, researchers discovered that fructose can lead to more body fat than sugar.

But it’s not good news. That “belly fat” around organs, also known as visceral fat or intra-abdominal fat, can increase the risks of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer. Which is definitely at odds with your goal of keeping your workforce healthy and productive.

So you might want to reconsider that employee perk of providing free or discounted sodas, or even convenient vending machines down the hall. Better options would be bottled water, tea, or even a bowl of fruit.

What do you think?

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(image by sankarshan via Flickr, CC 2.0)