Hello desk dozers, cubicle catnaps, open space snoozers, corner office conscious, home den dreamers and coffee shop slumbers. My name is Brock Armstrong and I am… not the Workplace Hero. That’s you! The point of creating this podcast was to make you into a Workplace Hero. I am merely along for the ride. You can think of me as a helpful hitchhiker. If you tend to suffer a sleepiness attack in the mid-afternoon, well it’s not all that odd. Many people experience a noticeable dip in their alertness, attention, creativity, energy level, and ability to concentrate in the afternoon. It’s true, the majority of us have been there: after an awesomely kick-ass, productive morning of finishing projects and heading for inbox zero, the clock strikes two and well, hell… you might as well pull down the blinds, slip on your jammies, and slide under your desk The good (and bad news is) that it’s completely normal to feel super-tired once the afternoon rolls around. Circadian rhythms, which affect our sleep patterns, may be to blame for the midday slump. In fact, our “sleep signals” peak at night and during the afternoon, which completely explains the phenomenon of the siesta. Secretly aren’t we all a little jealous of a culture that embraces an afternoon nap instead of scheduling another meeting through it? What happens is, your body releases your brain's natural sleep chemical, melatonin, telling your body that it's time to go to hit the hay, sometime between 2 and 4 in the afternoon. WebMD's sleep expert, Michael J. Breus, PhD, (who we will talk about more later) explains that the exhaustion you feel in the middle of the day is just like the tiredness you feel before bedtime at night as it has to do with a dip in your core body temperature. Right before you go to sleep at night, your core temperature begins to drop, which is a signal to the brain to release melatonin. The exact same thing happens on a smaller scale between 2 and 4 in the afternoon. It's a mini-signal to your brain to get sleepy. Basically, because we wake up super early for work, our body wants to go to bed in the afternoon because our natural clock is telling us to do so. Is all this talk about sleep making you tired? It's definitely making me nod off. *shakes it off* But other factors, like what we eat, hydration levels, and how much time we spend staring at a screen can also affect those droopy eyeballs. There is a great book called The Power of When by Michael Breus (who I mentioned in the WebMD article earlier) that explains something else that is very cool. It’s a thing called a chronotype and I will explain more about that in a second. Right now, if you are near an internet connected device, I want you to type this into a browser: workplacehero.me/getfitguy that will take you to the Quick and Dirty Tips network website where I just became the host of the Get-Fit Guy podcast. If you are listening to this episode when it first comes out, you will see that my friend Ben Greenfield was the Get-Fit Guy before me and the latest episode if actually him handing me the keys… so to speak. I gotta say that am grateful, thrilled and more than a little intimidated to be taking over for Ben. But that aside, if you are a fan of the short, snappy and information packed type of podcast like Workplace Hero is, you will likely love the Get-Fit Guy (and the other Quick and Dirty Tips podcasts). The goal of the Get-Fit Guy podcast it to help you enhance your energy, lose weight, boost your performance, and get your body looking better than ever without spending a tonne of time at the gym (or a lot of money on equipment). If you want to begin an exercise routine and don’t know where to start, or if you’ve been working out for a while and aren’t getting the results you want, I will give you the tips you need to reach all of your fitness goals. So head over to workplacehero.me/getfitguy or just search for Get-Fit Guy and check it out. Ok, now back to whatever...

Why We Get Sleepy in the Afternoon

I know I am not the first one to make this joke but… work can be a real pain in the freakin’ neck! Sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen for eight-plus hours, driving through downtown traffic to get to the office, and even sleeping in a funky position, can all accumulate into one hell of a stiff and tense neck. As we learned at workplacehero.me/ergonomics, creating an ergonomically correct workstation can help but it is not the be all end all. And although I have a standing workstation, take regular breaks to go move around and even do breathing exercises and meditation (by which I mean nap) many afternoons, I still get a stiff neck by the end of most work days. Neck pain can be caused by well really any activity that strains your neck. You might feel pain at the base of your skull and down into your shoulders, or you might feel a knot in your neck. You may also develop a headache. Serious neck pain can limit your ability to move your head and become severe enough to limit your ability to do your job. I got it so bad once that I couldn't ride my bike to work and that was a real bummer. I mean, you have to be able to shoulder check, right? If your neck pain is worse at the end of the work day, it might be related to stress placed on your neck while working. Repeated, prolonged activities that affect muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints cause most neck pain. Examples of these types of activities include: Holding your head forward to read a computer screen; research shows that just using a computer for a prolonged period of time can cause or aggravate neck pain. Repetitive movements of your arms and upper body. Poor lifting techniques — if you do any heavy lifting at work, your neck is at risk for damage almost as much as your back. In most jobs (not all as my nurse have pointed out to me), ergonomics can help you protect your neck. If you don’t remember from the previous podcast episode, Ergonomics is the science of fitting your work environment to your job in a way that is best for your well-being if you simply can’t change your position, get up and move around or simply say no to stay in one location for 8 hours a day. If your work is focussed around sitting at a computer station (as many of our jobs are), well then ergonomics takes into consideration how your desk, chair, and computer monitor can be placed to lessen the stress on your neck. If you work in an industrial setting (or a hospital, retail or other mobile type jobs), ergonomics may involve training you in proper techniques for lifting, standing and using heavy equipment. Get-Fit Guy Ok… pardon me for a second but right now, if you are near an internet connected device, I want you to type this into a browser: workplacehero.me/getfitguy that will take you to the Quick and Dirty Tips network website where I just became the host of the Get-Fit Guy podcast. If you are a fan of the short, snappy and information packed type of podcast like Workplace Hero is, you will likely love the Get-Fit Guy (and the other Quick and Dirty Tips podcasts). The goal of the Get-Fit Guy podcast it to help you enhance your energy, lose weight, boost your performance, and get your body looking better than ever without spending a ton of time at the gym (or a lot of money on equipment). If you want to begin an exercise routine and don’t know where to start, or if you’ve been working out for a while and aren’t getting the results you want, I will give you the tips you need to reach all of your fitness goals. So head over to workplacehero.me/getfitguy or just search for Get-Fit Guy and check it out. Ok, back to how we can avoid being a real pain in the neck. I mean having! Having a real pain in the neck. Some Help Everything from keyboard height, to computer type, to chair type should be considered when making your workspace neck and back friendly. Here are some simple fixes from SpineHealth.com that will go a long way in helping your back, neck and other joints...

A Pain in the Neck - Literally!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker currently holds ten different jobs before age forty, and this number is projected to grow. Forrester Research predicts that today's youngest workers (that might be you) will hold twelve to fifteen jobs in their lifetime! Hello, desk displeased, cubicle crestfallen, open space sorrowful, corner office objectors, home den defeated and coffee shop sullen. My name is Brock Armstrong and I am… not the Workplace Hero. You are the real hero here. Well, at least until the end of this episode. Things may change after you hear this one. It’s odd. In school, we spend a lot of time and give tons of attention to putting together a resume, building a CV, and generally how we should go about getting a job – but we give pretty much no air time to how to leave a job, quit a position or walk away from a contract. Personally, as a member of the first generation to not do as well as their parents (GenX) I think this is pretty “meh.” Gone are the days of choosing a career, climbing the corporate ladder, and retiring at 65 with a comfy pension and a gold watch. Many of my friends have had more than 5 jobs in their adult lives. Some jobs ended, some never really got rolling, some we were fired from and some… gasp… we actually quit! According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker currently holds ten different jobs before age forty, and this number is projected to grow. Forrester Research predicts that today's youngest workers (that might be you) will hold twelve to fifteen jobs in their lifetime! In 2005, I had been working for the Alberta Provincial Government for nearly 5 years. I was comfortable. I had a pension. I had a great team a decent enough office with big windows and my coworker was also one of my closest friends. We actually planned activities together out side of work! But then, one day it happened. One of the cool, young firms in town not so subtly dropped the hint that there would be a spot for me if I were to become available. The pay would be less and the responsibility would be higher but the projects would be cooler, there was more room for upward growth (unlike my government job where without going back to school, I was already nearing the top of my surprisingly low pay grade) and to top it off I would rarely ever have to wear a tie again. It didn’t take much for me to draft my letter of resignation, cash in my vacation days (which overlapped nicely with my new job’s starting date - talk about double dipping) and make the move. I have been accused before of not having the gene responsible for the feeling known as nostalgia (by my mother no-less) so you may want to take this with a grain of salt but I never looked back. Not only that, I have quit at least 5 more jobs since then. How did I do it? How should you do it? Should you do it? Well, that is what we are going to talk about today. But first, I want you to write down this URL: workplacehero.me/getfitguy that will take you to the Quick and Dirty Tips network website where I recently became the host of the Get-Fit Guy podcast. If you are a fan of these short, snappy and information packed podcasts, you will dig the Get-Fit Guy (and the other Quick and Dirty Tips podcasts). If you want to begin an exercise routine and don’t know where to start, or if you’ve been working out for a while and aren’t getting the results you want, I will give you the tips you need to reach all of your fitness goals. So head over to workplacehero.me/getfitguy or just search for Get-Fit Guy and check it out. Ok, back to quitting your job without leaving a trail of destruction in your wake. Before we get to some good strategies and graceful exits, let’s talk about some not so graceful moves. Quitting the job I told you about earlier was smooth for a few reasons (not including my emotionless heart). The biggest reason was that I had a job all lined up. I also knew and liked the people I was going...

Keep Calm and Quit Your Job

I am currently coming to you live from my childhood bedroom at my mom’s house. Yeah, I am taking the week off to visit my mom, sister, niece, nephew, some in-laws and friends. But I didn’t want to break my streak of not missing a week of this podcast since its inception, so here I am churning one out for you while I am “on vacation.” The fact that I am talking into this mic while I am out of office, brings up something that deserves a proper episode one day but today I am going to cover it as quickly as possible (so I can get back to the rollicking game of “boot the ball as hard as you can” that I have been having with my sister’s kids). And the topic I am going to cover today is: working on vacation. I am sure that you have read all the articles about “unplugging” on vacation - but I know you and I know you aren’t going to do it. Because of leaps in technology and the nature of our jobs these days, it’s not like the old days when you put your hat on, left the office and that was that - we can work whenever and wherever we like (or our employers like). But here’s the thing: If you don’t chill out and enjoy your hard-earned vacation, odds are that you’re going to burn out, and that helps no one. So here are a few slightly goofy, not so hard-and-fast dos and don’ts of working on vacation that I found over at FastCompany.com. If you follow at least some of them, you’ll come back to work feeling refreshed and ready to breeze through every item on your to-do list: DO - find a number two for your out of office email reply. Don’t leave ‘em hanging with a generic “Thanks for your email! I’m currently out of the office and you’re screwed until I get back.” The best OOO message includes someone, someone reliable, to field urgent or easy-to-fulfill requests. Find a buddy, with the intention that you’ll return the favour one day, and you’ll come back to work with happier clients and a much less voluminous inbox. DON’T - get super personal about why you’re out of office. A quick “I’m enjoying a sunshine getaway!” is fine, but “I’mma gettin’ crunk on piña coladas with my hot bae #speedo #tequila” is better left unsaid. DO - pick a check-in time and tell your boss. Pick one window when you’re game to check your work email (I like first thing in the morning since I generally get up before my partner), and stick to it. Your boss will appreciate knowing when she can plan to hear back from you and therefore you will be unlikely to get bothered outside of that time. DON’T - check your email 24/7 and answer incoming messages anyway. If you cave once, you’re screwed. It sets the precedent that your coworkers can bother you at any time during your precious, hard-earned vacation. And they will. Believe me. They will… those vultures. DO - jump on a project if you have to. If you check your email at 4 p.m. and they really do need you to jump on something, by all means, take action. Go find a quiet spot where you won’t feel distracted and you can get through the task as efficiently as possible. I did this once while I was on vacation in Japan and I swear it bought me more brownie points with my team than anything I had ever done before or since. DON’T - complain out it to your fellow travellers. It ruins the vibe, man. It harshes the mellow, dude. Finish your work, and then put it out of sight and out of mind. A cold one isn’t a bad idea right now. Don’t mind if I do! DO - post a crap load of photos on social media. It’s your vacation, and you can post yourself swimming with manta rays if you want to. But . . . DON’T - add captions of how happy you are not to be at work right now! That’s just bad form. And you do have to go back to work and face your coworkers again… someday. DO - write down any great ideas that come to you while you are chill. You are relaxed, after all, and that is often when you get creative and might just feel a burst of inspiration while...

Working on Vacation: The Worcation

Experts agree that your email behaviour has the potential to sabotage your reputation both personally and professionally. Inc.com wrote a story with some of the industry's most seasoned email experts which had them weigh in on how to perfect your email etiquette. We'll take a look at their suggestions in a minute but right now, I want to clear something up.

Re: Fwd: Write Good Email

For a good percentage of us work-a-day-grumblers, three little words habitually accompany our entrance to work, a meeting, a luncheon or even getting home from work: “Sorry, I’m late.” Does this sound like you? Hello cubicle cutoff, open space overdue, corner office out of luck, home den delayed and coffee shop sluggish. My name is Brock Armstrong and I am… not the Workplace Hero. We’re on that trajectory together, you and I. You can think of me as your very chatty co-pilot. Before we get started, if you enjoy this podcast and the tips and strategies it contains, I encourage you to visit SkywalkerFitness.ca. That is the wellness coaching business that I run. Whether you are wanting to slim down, run a 10k or a marathon, race in a triathlon, pack on some muscle, clean up your diet, or get ripped, I will create a plan for you. No cookie cutter programs allowed. Just 100% tailored programs that fit around your life’s commitments. And for being a Workplace Hero, I will give you a special deal on your first 3 months of coaching. Head over to SkywalkerFitness.ca and send me a note mentioning this podcast episode so I can start building you the perfect program to meet your wellness goals. Let me set the stage for you - It’s Monday morning. In a surprise turn of events, you wake up feeling great! You had a fun weekend of good sleep, good food, fresh air and exercise, and aside from the one drink-drink you had with dinner on Saturday night, you adhered to your long term plan extremely well. Sadly, something goes wonky with the kids, or you take a little too long chatting with that cute barista, or doing your morning journalling, or spacing out on your coffee cup, and you find yourself running late. “Not again!” you think to yourself. “I hate being late!” For a good percentage of us work-a-day-grumblers, three little words habitually accompany our entrance to work, a meeting, a luncheon or even getting home from work: “Sorry, I’m late.” Does this sound like you? A ton of studies have looked into why some of us are chronically late. The truth is that there are many reasons why people just can’t get somewhere on time. But there seems to be one common thread running through the behaviour of chronically late individuals that may be a universal reason for their perpetual tardiness—and it is a surprising one: People are late because they don’t want to be early. Most of us know people who are always on time because they hate being late. I fall smack dab into this category; in fact, I’m freakishly scared of being late. I often arrive places embarrassingly early, which sometimes prompts me to hide out somewhere around the corner, playing with my phone, just so people don’t notice just how early I actually got there. Because people like me hate to be tardy, we always appear to be on time (even if it is because we hid in a stairwell playing Kwazy Kupcakes on our phone for 20 minutes). But just as we hate to be late, another cohort hates to be early. And if you ask them, these anti-early birds say that they really want to be punctual—they just prefer to be right on time than to be early. Wanting to avoid being early, then, is a strong motivation for why many people who are chronically late and honestly it is hard to reconcile these two competing ideals. So why does this second group hate to be early? There are many reasons but here are a few that I found at PsychologyToday.com: 1. It’s inefficient. Being early requires having to sit around with nothing to do (or play with your phone). The waiting time is just short enough that you can’t get into any other project; as soon as you do, the time is up. 2. They hate the uneasiness of being early. They feel awkward and uncomfortable waiting. They might even feel as if others are watching and judging them, whether this is true or not. Arriving a few minutes early makes you feel proud and confident, but arriving too early can make you feel foolish. You fear...

The Frustration of Chronic Lateness

Close your eyes for a second and dig deep into your psyche. I want you to be truly honest with yourself. Can you do that for me? Ok. Do you truly believe that one day you will actually go home from work with a completely clear desk? No projects left incomplete, no phone calls left to make, no emails to follow up on, no documents to edit, and no meetings to book? &nbsp; The honest to dog truth is that there will always be work left undone at the end of your busy day. Admitting this gives us three options:  We can go home, but take the work with us and then spend our evening doing it (or actively suppressing the urge to do it). This ensures maximum tension at home, unrestful rest, and then returning to work the next day tired and resentful. Drag your ass home, leave the work on your desk, then spend the evening fretting over what you left behind. Same results ensue involving the tension and fitful sleep. And when you get back to work next day, you’ll be tired and resentful—and the work will not have been done either. Take a deep cleansing breath, leave the work behind gracefully, truly forget about it, and enjoy a relaxing evening. No tension, lots of rejuvenating rest, plus you return the next day ready to tackle what’s waiting for you.  Newsletter Before we dive deeper down this magical list of alternatives, I want encourage you to sign up for the Workplace Hero email newsletter over at workplacehero.me. The sign up form is on the righthand side of the page. Please know that because I believe strongly in the idea of Inbox Zero, you will only receive an email once per week, and it will be short, to the point and easy to delete. Best of all, just for signing up, you will receive a coupon code for 10% off at the online health and fitness store, GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com. Over there they have a huge array of supplements, gear, plans, coaches and clothing that will help keep you healthy and fit. So sign up for the newsletter at workplacehero.me and get your discount code for GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com now. Now back to leaving it all behind OR what happens at work, stays at work. Here are some techniques that I found at Lifehacker.com and crew.co that will help you achieve the last and best of the three options I mentioned. Like a cool down after a hard workout, treat your trip home as positive time to wind down and start the process of relaxation. Play some of your favourite music, or listen to your favourite podcast. I would suggest not catching up on the news or scrolling through social media. Choose something you really like and enjoy and that won’t remind you of work or bum you out about how truly crappy humans can be to each other. There’s a perception that more work equals more productivity, but that’s not always the case. So you never take a sick day, or a vacation, and you are always ‘on-call.’ You also put in about 70 hours a week, so that will pay off eventually I’m sure…oh wait, except it doesn’t. The Economist looked at the data from OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries found that the more productive workers were actually those that spent less time in the office. Lifehacker takes it one step further and puts an actual number on how many hours we work before we begin to see diminished results (hint: it’s about 30 hours a week). If there was ever a reason to leave work at work, this data should be it. You are actually making yourself more productive! This one is more of a psychological one - match your journey time with the time you need to relax. If that means taking the long, scenic route, so be it. If it means stopping at a park on along the way, that’s just fine. Your family and friends will prefer you half an hour later but in a calm and pleasant mood rather than half an hour earlier but in a foul one. Never be in a hurry to get home. If you do, every hold-up, every traffic jam, every pedestrian trying to cross the street in front of you, every late...

What Happens at Work Stays at Work

Society tells us that working harder and working more hours is good, but if you have listened to this podcast for a while you know that it is actually damaging you, hard on your fellow employees and even detrimental your company's success. So, let me ask you this. “What is the difference between a hard worker and a workaholic?"

Are You Addicted to Workohol?

Top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in most fields all set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation and it helps you to organize your time and your resources. -- Goal Setting Hello my cubicle convictions, open space schemers, corner office objectives, home den dutiful and coffee shop schemas. My name is Brock Armstrong and I am not the workplace hero. If there is a Workplace Hero around these parts, it is you my friend. And I will explain why, in a few minutes. Right now, I want to give you some data. The first Workplace Hero podcast episode was released on March 5, 2017. Here is a snippet of the Facebook live video I did to celebrate. Since then, I have released 30 episodes (including this one) which have received a total of about 12,000 downloads, ranging between 647 downloads for Katy Bowman’s “To Sit or Not To Sit” episode and 250 downloads for the “What Happens at Work Stays at Work” episode. When I started the podcast, I of course had high hopes of thousands of downloads and advertiser’s banging down my virtual door but at the same time I really had no idea if anyone would listen or care (aside from my mom). And as you can see, this podcast is by no means a wild, runaway success but it is also by some measures and stats I have seen passed around on the podcast forums, performing better than 95% of the podcasts on the Apple Podcasts app. Even more important than that though, this podcast has been a blast to produce. It really has scratched an itch that I have had for a while. I have worked as a tech and/or producer on 13 different podcasts and all but two or three of them have been interview style podcasts. You know, where two people sit down and have an organic conversation (usually over Skype) and then it was my job to try to make it sound good and make sense. Well, I have always been more interested in creating a more produced, scripted, researched and polished podcast. This is likely due to my background in music and my occasional dips into broadcast radio. Workplace Hero is that podcast. I love the artistry that I can bring to it. The time I take to add sound effects and drum beats and music soothes my soul. Truly. Now, I know I am rambling a bit but I do have a point here… so let me get to it. When I decided to commit to this podcast, I was worried that it would be harder, more time consuming, slower to take off than I had anticipated and I didn’t want to prematurely pull the plug on it before I had a chance to really experience what it was like to be a solo podcaster. I didn’t want to get 5 episodes in, realize that my mom is the only one commenting on the blog posts (which she kinda is) and that I am only getting 200 downloads per episode (remember that I have worked on shows that get 100,000 + downloads per episode so that is my frame of reference) and end the adventure before the podcast really had a chance to grow, build an audience and become part of my daily life. So I remembered (incorrectly, I might add) something I had read that Tim Ferriss said when he started his podcast. I incorrectly remembered him writing that he decided to do 30 episodes to see if he liked liked podcasting. What he actually wrote was “ I decided to try long-form audio for six episodes. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would throw in the towel and walk.” https://tim.blog/2016/04/11/tim-ferriss-podcast-business/ Well, despite what Tim actually wrote, I decided my number was 30. I was not allowed to stop, pull the plug, take a week off or break stride for 30 episodes. Once I reached 30, then I had a decision to make. Until then, it was business as usual. A business that is losing me money and time every week but also a business that I enjoy and hope is helping people in some small way, each week. Today, I am happy to say that I made it to 30. Six months later, here I am sitting down to write the 30th episode. —Fan Fare— It literally says in my script the...

Goal Setting and the End of Season 1

Parkinson's Law is a book by C. Northcote Parkinson. And this book is best known for its opening line: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Now, do you recognise it? I bet you do. Honestly, I didn’t know it had a name until I started writing this episode.&nbsp;

Work Expands (or contracts) to the Time Allowed

A podcast about taking charge of your deskjob!

Workplace Hero

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