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Nuggets of wisdom re jobs, careers and business

Yesterday, in between other meetings, I attended some sessions at the CIPD Festival of Work Conference – online of course, and focusing very much on the current situation, Covid-related.

The keynote address contained some real nuggets that have stuck with me since then – with regard to:

Disrupted lives – what next?

Our lives and our world have been well and truly disrupted by coronavirus and all that it entails.

We have each been living our own ‘temporary normal’ in order to survive and cope.

Many are already talking about what our ‘new normal’ will look like afterwards.

All we do know, for sure, is that no-one is unaffected and that we can’t go back – we can only go forward. Continue reading “Disrupted lives – what next?” →

use, re-use, recycle or mend…

single-use

Very pleased to hear Sir David Attenborough and others speaking out at the UN climate summit in Poland last week.

I’m also glad to see ‘single-use’ as the Collins Word of the Year, highlighting our throwaway mentality which needs challenging for the sake of our planet – aimed, particularly, at our use of plastics. Continue reading “use, re-use, recycle or mend…” →

“A few years ago I would have been admiring the view – now I’m on my phone…”

smartphonesThis was a quote from a member of the public broadcast on BBC Breakfast this morning in a report about our seemingly ever-increasing addiction to smartphones in the UK.

Another interviewee said that she thought smartphones had: “made my life better but children’s lives worse.”

According to the latest report from telecoms regulator Ofcom, and about which there’s a good article at bbc.co.uk:

  • 78% of all adults in the UK now own a smartphone
  • 40% of us look at them within five minutes of waking
  • the average Brit checks their phone every 12 minutes while awake and uses it for about 2½ hours each day
  • a third of us check them just before falling asleep

This last one isn’t a great habit if we want to sleep well, by the way – see my blog last month re our use of apps and the effects of blue light.

How we use our phones may also have changed – the report says the total volume of calls fell in 2017.

But maybe that’s not quite the whole story – what the report didn’t track were the calls made using apps such as Skype, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger instead.

So where are we headed? Continue reading ““A few years ago I would have been admiring the view – now I’m on my phone…”” →

Waste Not, Want Not, Tie The Knot!

I just want to share another great example of frugality and recycling that I read about in the Express recently – and all done without losing any of the joy and celebration in life:

wedding-rings-150300_1280.pngA couple, Cherie Harris and James Mainwaring, approached their wedding arrangements in a rather different and heartening way.

Instead of paying the usual cost of a wedding breakfast for their 140 guests, they spent a mere £6 a head by sourcing a delicious meal from food that would otherwise have gone to landfill via The Real Junk Food Project.

Other eco-friendly touches included home-made invitations and decorations, a wedding dress lined with bamboo pulp and gifts of seeds as wedding favours which their guests could then plant afterwards…

Doesn’t this just show what can be achieved with a touch of imagination, ingenuity and co-operation. winking-face_1f609

Appy Days & Restful Nights

apps

I’ve written previously about the negative effects of technology on our lives – but there is good in there, too.

This was highlighted by the ‘Tech4Good’ awards for which Anna Bawden was a judge and about which she wrote recently in theguardian.com.

Amongst these are apps helping people to:

  • communicate and navigate – taking account of particular impairments such as deafness, blindness and partial sight
  • call emergency services if in distress or danger and unable to speak – particularly useful in instances of breathing difficulties, allergies or domestic abuse
  • manage neurological and physical physiotherapy
  • identify and express feelings
  • support mental health recovery

Continue reading “Appy Days & Restful Nights” →

Wonky Winners

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I’ve written about food waste before (War on Waste and Hugh’s War on Waste: The Battle Continues) because I think it matters.

These days it’s so easy to be drawn into buying only the fruit and veg that look ‘pretty’, that conform to a standardised idea of what they ‘should’ look like.

So I was really pleased to read at theguardian.com this week, that sales of wonky fruit and veg have been an important element in the current success of the UK supermarket, Morrisons.

Continue reading “Wonky Winners” →

In 2018 I want to…

paper-3042645_1920.jpg

Continuing one of the themes from my last blog and, particularly, some of the sentiments in ‘the Hot Chocolate Story’ at the end. I’m inviting you to take a slightly different route into planning your goals for 2018 than what you might have done before.

Instead of starting with a list what you haven’t got or achieved, how about starting the process with a list of what you have got, what you have achieved in 2017 (or earlier) and what you like or love about your life right now? Continue reading “In 2018 I want to…” →

Following the Herd

I was at a CIPD Sussex Branch Conference on the Future of Work yesterday which was excellent.

One of the speakers, Leatham Green (whose session I really enjoyed) showed a couple of short, very funny and thought-provoking YouTube clips about how we copy other people’s behaviour even if we don’t know why or it doesn’t make any sense. I’ve written about this phenomenon before in my post: ‘The Psychology of Unwritten Rules’.

I thought I’d share these clips with you now because I really like them and hope that you will, too – the first is just under 4 minutes and the second just 2½ minutes – and I think both are well worth taking the time to watch for the entertainment value alone.

The first one is a social experiment:

Continue reading “Following the Herd” →

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