<ul><li>In the U.S., a paid, voluntary break from a job that lasts longer than two weeks is generally considered unusual.</li><li>Sabbaticals seem to help people heal from burnout, but they are not a comprehensive cure</li><li>If sabbaticals can't fix your job, they can nurture your life outside it.</li><li>They let you tend to the wilting plots of your life's garden, the parts that struggle to get enough sunlight in the shadow of work.</li></ul>

Taking A Sabbatical

<ul><li>The business case against sabbaticals is not so clear-cut</li><li>They may be costly, but people who take them seem likely to come back more productive and more efficient</li><li>Many companies find that they are a powerful tool for attracting, and then keeping, talented employees-certainly something worth paying for.</li></ul>

The Cure For Work Weariness

Sabbaticals can give people an invaluable opportunity to rest and reflect on their identity beyond their job.

Stashed ideas

What Is Life Like When We Subtract Work From It?

Have you just accepted a new position at a brand new company? Congratulations, this is an exciting time! Maybe you’re really focused on doing a great job, or the <a href="https://toggl.com/blog/13-brainstorming-techniques-for-kickstarting-projects/">projects</a> you want to start, the organizational processes you want to change. But before you think about any of that, you need to focus on something else first: How to introduce yourself to a new team.

Starting A New Job

First impressions are extremely important. Things get even trickier if you’re introducing yourself to a new team as a manager, or if you’re working remotely and introducing yourself over Slack or email. It’s a well-worn saying that you never get a second chance at a first impression. The statement is true. Your new colleagues and employees will start forming their opinions about you within the first minute of meeting you–opinions that will be hard to sway after they’ve been made.

The First Impression

One of the best ways to create a strong first impression in people’s minds is to greet your new office mates with enthusiasm. Positivity is generally a great way to win people over, but it’s even more important at work where morale may not necessarily be in tip-top shape.So put a smile on your face, show that you’re excited to be a part of the team, and exude enthusiasm. People can read our attitude in our posture, facial expressions and voice–whether in person or through video call. A positive attitude will help endear your new staff to you and help with team development.

Check Your Attitude

There are numerous studies on how clothes influence our performance. What’s equally clear is that clothes also influence the way others view us. In short, the way we look matters. So make sure you look the part when you arrive at the workplace. Does the team wear suits and ties? Do the same. Waltzing in with board shorts and flip flops–even if that’s how everyone dressed at your last job–isn’t a great first look.

Look The Part

You’re the new one in the room. Even if you’re the manager, and you’ve been brought in to lead the team, there’s a status quo that your new team is probably comfortable with. Destroying it completely at the very beginning won’t win you any friends. So, before you make any changes, get the lay of the land first, by being quiet, observing and asking questions when needed.

Read The Room

Don’t just barge into your new office and start making changes. Learn to listen first. Ask questions and get your team’s opinions.This approach has two major benefits, especially if you’re in a managing role. First, your team will appreciate it when you ask for their input. We all want to feel listened to, and when the new boss asks what we think, we feel valued.Secondly, it gives you the chance to learn about your new place of work.  You’ll never know what is going on if you don’t listen, and you could potentially harm your new company if you eliminate crucial processes.

Listen Before You Speak

It’s important that you take the initiative in the beginning and introduce yourself to your new office mates. Don’t wait for them to come to you. This will make you seem much more approachable as well as likeable.  It might seem challenging to say hello when you’re not in the same room together, but it’s not impossible. You might be asked to send out an email introducing yourself. In that case, go a bit further than the basics, such as your name and role. Name a hobby or an interest, and sign off with an indication that you’re willing to talk.

Take Initiative

When taking the initiative and meeting your new team members, do your best to meet everyone. Don’t only focus on the so-called decision-makers at your new company. Lower-rung employees will notice and you may be seen as a shallow ladder-climber.Each person in your new organization, from the highest level executive to the greenest intern, plays a role. Acknowledge them all (or at least try to) and you’ll win a ton of first impression bonus points. And who knows? In a few years, that intern may be running the entire show.

Acknowledge The Entire Staff

Depending on the size of the company you’re now working for, remembering all the names and faces that you just introduced yourself to may be a challenge. That’s where an organization chart (org chart for short) can really come in handy.So don’t be afraid to ask the HR department for this document. It will help you recall names, understand who does what inside the company, and who to contact for specific things.

Get Your Hands On An Org Chart

Stand out from the crowd and really learn how to introduce yourself to a new team by following up via email with each person you’ve just introduced yourself to. If you can’t do this for everyone, at least message the main people you’ll be interacting with on a regular basis.You don’t have to write anything long and complicated. In fact, short and to the point is better. Just tell them that you enjoyed meeting them, you appreciate their time, and that you look forward to working with them in the future. Then invite them to reach out to you if they ever need assistance or have questions.

Prompt Follow Up

Great working environments are built upon strong office relationships.  If you’re the leader, attempt to organize relationship-building opportunities soon after arriving. Just make sure you consider our third tip (“Read the room”) before barreling through with a plan that no one is interested in. Try to get a feel for what your new colleagues like before launching something like this unilaterally.

Create Relationship Building Opportunities

Things at your new workplace will be different from the last. You’ve likely heard the saying, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Some things at the new workplace will probably be better. Others might be worse. But you’re here now, and it’s up to you to adapt.Change what you can when it makes sense. But also realize that you’re starting a new chapter. Keep an open mind and your new colleagues will be much more likely to think favorably of you from the very beginning.

Embrace Change

Learning how to introduce yourself to a new team is all very good and well, but applying what you learned isn’t always easy, especially if you’re not the most outgoing person. But no matter what personality type you have, you can still make a first impression that endears you to your new colleagues.While first impressions are important, there are ways to swing public opinion back in your favour should you screw up an initial meeting. Keeping these tips in mind from the outset should hopefully help make things easier.

The Bottom Line

Knowing how to introduce yourself to a new team–whether you're an intern or a manager, and whether the team is remote or colocated–is key. Here are 10 tips.

How to Introduce Yourself to a New Team: 10 Tips for Success

As a response to the growing global obesity epidemic, the food industry along with the help of the academia, traditionally suggested removing fat, salt, and increasing sugar from products. However, reformulation has it's own limitations:<ol><li>Reformulation can create a "health halo" around food thus prompting people to eat more of it than they otherwise would.</li><li>Consumers increasingly equate healthiness with preserving food's natural properties but not its nutritional profile.</li></ol>

Reformulation's Limits

The most effective way for food marketers to help consumers be mindful about their health is to encourage healthier food choices. Research show that:<ol><li>Cognitive nudges provide information about food product healthiness, often employing a nutrition label or symbol.</li><li>Affective nudges attempt to motivate consumers to eat better using written or oral encouragement.</li><li>Behavioral nudges seek to impact consumers' actions directly be emphasizing convenience by making healthy choices easier than unhealthy choices.</li></ol>

Healthy Eating Nudges Can Work

The wise person does not choose the largest amount of food, but the most pleasurable.

The behavioral epicurean approach attempts to make small food portions seem "normal." The epicurean approach is affective because it favors sensory pleasure. Researchers found that consumers choose cheap supersize portions that are larger than they realize which leads to overeating and food waste.Shoppers don't really notice size decreases more than increases and they don't react negatively when it happens that's why companies won't downsize their products.

Epicurean Food Marketing: Less Size, More Pleasure

Rather than selling food as fuel as if they were in the energy business, food marketers concerned about public health and the obesity epidemic should consider focusing on eating’s pleasure.

Epicurean Food Marketing

<ul><li>Myth #1: A good experience is good for the user. If you control the menu, you control the choices. Pleasant to use doesn’t equal healthful any more than pleasant to eat does.&nbsp;</li><li>Myth #2: A good user experience is good for business. Virgin America. Rdio. Google Reader. Comcast. Which of these offered a good experience? Which of these still exists?</li><li>Myth #3: A good experience is good. A good user experience is only as good as the action it enables. Designing a system that makes it easy to do bad things is bad.</li></ul>

The Three Lies of UXD

Designers are laboring under defective job descriptions and a limiting framing of the field. As a result, the outcomes we claim to be able to accomplish through design—business success by way of understanding and serving real human needs—aren’t happening as much as they should or could.

Design is only as “human-centered” as the business model allows

To the extent that the business takes place in software, designing the software is designing the business. Designers either need to participate in defining the business model or they will simply be its tool.

Design is not separate from business—design is the business

Thinking about design in terms of the exchange of value, is the path to thinking about the whole problem. Even if a designer is making choices about a small part, they should be thinking about the whole.&nbsp;Otherwise, they risk contributing to a beautiful experience that exploits people, or to a beautiful experience that fails.

Evolve from user-centered design to value-centered design

<ul><li>Professional conversations are dominated by low-level arguments about terminology and artifacts rather than outcomes</li><li>There is pressure to turn every piece of information into a measurement and scale it</li><li>Despite everything that is known about the principles of good design, organizations are hiring a lot of skilled designers and making crap</li><li>Attention gravitates towards incremental refinements rather than solving real problems</li><li>Great products and services attract loyal customers while on the venture runway and then go to hell once someone figures out they need to make (more) money.</li></ul>

Arguing about the symptoms exacerbates the condition

Business culture and design culture are planets with different atmospheres. Business suffocates in the absence of positive numbers. Design subsists on subjective human experience.Value to the user is qualitative. Value to the business is quantitative. In order to make holistic decisions, you have to create a representation that makes that translation. Talking about value in the abstract does this. A business gets value and meaning expressed in money (or fungible equivalent). A user gets value expressed in a mental state, in meaning.

Squeezing math from a story

The fundamental challenge we are up against is that doing the right thing well is generally more expensive and time-consuming than doing the least you can get away with and figuring out how to defend it.For example, the Lean methodology and the Minimum Viable Product technique are supposed to help reduce waste and increase the timely flow of useful feedback. In practice, they are used as cover for rushing to a less thoughtful solution without considering the context or the long-term implications.

Cutting corners is good for business until it’s not

Because so much value inheres in a digital intermediary, the interface/interaction design is the business. Any designer only thinking of the customer or user experience is doing at most a third of the job.&nbsp;The interaction not only needs to provide value to the customer, it must return value back to the organization or it doesn’t matter how delightful it is. And it’s much easier to create a sustainable exchange of value if you consider it from the beginning.

Value-centered design works out better for more humans

People who work with complex information use a lot of diagrams and models in their work. Models go wrong when they have a surfeit of detail or stylistic embellishments, both impediments to understanding that arise from their creator’s anxiety about demonstrating expertise.For the purpose of design decisions, if the model serves as a tool for quickly communicating the salient points to help people make the right decision, it’s good. If it draws attention to itself, it’s bad. The map should not be more confusing than the territory.

Models, what are they good for?

“We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing…

Thinking in Triplicate

Functional programming (often abbreviated FP) is the process of building software by composing pure functions, avoiding shared state, mutable data, and side effects. Functional programming is declarative rather than imperative, and application state flows through pure functions. Contrast with object oriented programming, where application state is usually shared and colocated with methods in objects.Functional programming is a programming paradigm, meaning that it is a way of thinking about software construction based on some fundamental, defining principles&nbsp;

Functional Programming

A pure function is a function which:<ul><li>Given the same inputs, always returns the same output, and</li><li>Has no side-effects</li></ul>Pure functions have lots of properties that are important in functional programming.Function composition is the process of combining two or more functions in order to produce a new function or perform some computation.

Functions

Shared state is any variable, object, or memory space that exists in a shared scope, or as the property of an object being passed between scopes.&nbsp;A shared scope can include global scope or closure scopes. Often, in object oriented programming, objects are shared between scopes by adding properties to other objects.

Shared State

An immutable object is an object that can’t be modified after it’s created. Conversely, a mutable object is any object which can be modified after it’s created.Immutability is a central concept of functional programming because, without it, the data flow in your program is lossy.&nbsp;

Immutability

A side effect is any application state change that is observable outside the called function other than its return value. Side effects include:<ul><li>Modifying any external variable or object property (e.g., a global variable, or a variable in the parent function scope chain)</li><li>Logging to the console</li><li>Writing to the screen</li><li>Writing to a file</li><li>Writing to the network</li><li>Triggering any external process</li><li>Calling any other functions with side-effects.</li></ul>

Side Effects

A higher order function is any function that takes a function as an argument, returns a function, or both. Higher order functions are often used to:<ul><li>Abstract or isolate actions, effects, or async flow control using callback functions, promises, monads, etc…</li><li>Create utilities which can act on a wide variety of data types</li><li>Partially apply a function to its arguments or create a curried function for the purpose of reuse or function composition</li><li>Take a list of functions and return some composition of those input functions.</li></ul>

Reusability Through Higher Order Functions

Functional programming is a declarative paradigm, meaning that the program logic is expressed without explicitly describing the flow control.<ul><li>Imperative programs spend lines of code describing the specific steps used to achieve the desired results — the flow control: How to do things.</li><li>Declarative programs abstract the flow control process, and instead spend lines of code describing the data flow: What to do. The how gets abstracted away.</li></ul>

Declarative vs Imperative

Functional programming has become a really hot topic in the JavaScript world. Just a few years ago, few JavaScript programmers even knew what functional programming is, but every large application…

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Rebecca Murray
@rebeccamurra

What Is Life Like When We Subtract Work From It?

How to Introduce Yourself to a New Team: 10 Tips for Success

Epicurean Food Marketing

Thinking in Triplicate

Master the JavaScript Interview: What is Functional Programming?

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Rebecca Murray@rebeccamurra

What Is Life Like When We Subtract Work From It?

How to Introduce Yourself to a New Team: 10 Tips for Success

Epicurean Food Marketing

Thinking in Triplicate

Master the JavaScript Interview: What is Functional Programming?

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Rebecca Murray
@rebeccamurra