What Obama means for the workplace

flagmedium-border.jpgBarack Obama is dissing the baby boomers. But he’s doing it tactfully. So he’s got a wide range of people talking about generational issues in politics, and I’m eagerly anticipating spillover into the workplace, which also needs this frank discussion.

One of the companies I founded was an online marketplace for city governments. My business partner was a fiftysomething guy who had been dealing with city governments forever.

Our investors in the first round were all his friends, most were over 50, and some assumed I was dating my partner because why else would he start a company with someone so young.

Investors treated me like it was an impossibility that I could have learned things fast enough to get into a room with them. And one investor asked me to leave a meeting at such an inappropriate moment that even my partner was shocked.

Then, about a year later, when I was looking for a job, the guy I interviewed with said, “Kids now think they can learn on the job and they don’t need an MBA. What do you think of that?”

I couldn’t believe it: He was calling me a kid in my job interview, even though I had already launched two companies.

He did this because he thinks it’s culturally acceptable to treat someone like they don’t know anything just because they’re young.

I’ve been holding off writing about Obama because the first (and last) time I took a leap into politics with my column was when I campaigned for Howard Dean, the week before he imploded. I told myself I learned my lesson: Politics is too volatile for a workplace writer to forge a path through.

But here I am again. Writing about politics. Writing about Obama and hoping he doesn’t implode next week. I have to write about him because while this is not an official endorsement, when he talks about leading a new generation I get giddy over the idea that we could be wrestling ourselves out from under the clutch of the baby boomers.

Obama talks about teamwork and community and the end of the me-me-me in-fighting that has characterized the recent history of baby boomer politics. A report in Newsday says:

“Obama represents the transition from the Baby Boom to Generation X… He spoke of a post-boomer sensibility, of moving beyond the divisions exacerbated by undue self-focus.”

I have this conversation with my (baby boomer) agent, and she says, “Everything to you is about generations.” And okay, there’s truth to that, but there’s also some hot air, because the baby-boomer generation is so huge that everything has been about them by default.

I am from a generation that had very limited power to do anything, anywhere, except live in the wake of the boomers. Even when it came to the Internet revolution in the 90’s, most of the people who got rich were the baby boomers who invested in companies that Gen-Xers operated.

This is why I get excited about Generation Y. It’s amazing to see this group, with all their demographic power, open up the world to change.

For the most part, I focus on change in the workplace. There were a lot of things that my generation wanted at work — for example, flexible hours, personal growth and the abandonment of competitive, ego-focused hierarchy in favor of team work. But we had trouble pushing through these workplace values because there were too few of us. The baby boomers could always just say no.

But generation Y wants so many of those gen-X things, and generation Y has the demographic power to make it real. It excites me to see this happen at work.

Obama is the political corollary. Finally there are enough voters, maybe, to vote for someone who is not a baby boomer. I don’t know if it will happen. But just that we’re talking about it is exciting. Because once we talk about baby boomers giving up control of politics, the talk of baby boomers giving up control of corporate life cannot be far behind.

But there’s a workplace lesson from Obama as well. He’s very tactful as he disses the boomers. He makes it clear that he is a bridge builder. That he is respectful of the fact that everyone has a place in history. And he is, above all, someone who has empathy for diverse backgrounds. These are all the same kinds of skills we need in the workplace today.

We are all engaging in a generational discussion at work, even if it is not as overt as an interviewer calling you a kid. We all come to the table with preconceptions and biases, but we all have to work together. So, in the near future, at lest, it’s the people who are best at building generational bridges who will succeed. This is something I personally work on every day, and Obama is a great role model.

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4 new ideas for becoming more effective at work

It used to be your workplace identity was tied to your company. “An IBM man” is a phrase that comes to mind. Companies kept track of best practices, hot management ideas, and recent innovations in the business world.

Today our identity is separate from our company. We manage ourselves with the care that used to be reserved for special product lines. We realize if we don’t care for our career no one else will. And we cannot depend on a corporation to keep up to speed on ideas. We have to stay on top of new ideas for ourselves.

So, here are four ideas that you should consider using to guide yourself:

Pick a pace that’s right for you.
Today waiting the typical three to five business days for a package to arrive seems like an unbearable amount of time to some people, and news travels in real time — text-messages sent from parties to bloggers at home, ready to post.

Alexander Kjerulf self-published his book, Happy Hour is 9 to 5, because he thought the typical publishing cycle was too long. “I’m an impatient sort of guy,” he says. The book sells well on his blog, and he feels certain he did the right thing, for him.

Fast all the time isn’t right for everyone all the time. Adrian Savage, author of the book, Slow Leadership, writes daily on his blog urging people to accept that often workplace success comes from downshifting into a slow gear for a while.

Sloppy networking leads to sloppy results.
The founders of the professional networking site LinkedIn tell people in no uncertain terms that building a network has to be about people you know well. Yet every day thousands of LinkedIn users invite near-strangers into their network.

Newsflash: People you don’t know cannot vouch for you. People you have not connected with in an authentic way will not be move to help you when you need it. It doesn’t matter how full your LinkedIn account is, or how heavy your Rolodex is, if you haven’t really connected with these people, it’s not a network.

The opposite is true as well. If you build a strong network, its effects will ripple. Josh Boltuch, Elliott Breece and Elias Roman spent their last semester at Brown University launching Amie Street, a new model for selling music online. They had no marketing budget to get the word out, but they did have their network.

“We sent a few hundred emails to friends and family.” The crux of the marketing pitch? “We told everyone that a requirement for being our friend is to sign up for our site.” A few weeks later, without saying anything to the founders, someone told Mike Arrington about Amie Street.

Arrington has one of the strongest networks in startup America. Getting your startup on his blog TechCrunch is like getting your book on Oprah. And there was Amie Street, right there on Mike’s blog one day.

The next day, Amie Street had thousands of registered users.
What can we learn from this? That solid networks make solid results.
The Amie Street founders had a network that cared deeply for them — their friends and family. Mike Arrington’s network is truly dedicated to helping him find the best new startups. Amie Street is a success today because it started with a truly meaningful network.

Get away from jerks or become one.
If you want to enjoy your work, surround yourself with people who are enjoyable. Most people can tell an obnoxious person right away. But even in light of one of those horrible interviews, candidates often tell themselves they can work with jerks and not be affected.

“If you think you are going to change them, it won’t happen. It’s easy to resist at the beginning, but if you work with an asshole you’re going to become one” too, says Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford University, and author of the book, The No Asshole Rule.

Rude interactions have five times the impact on your mood that
positive interactions do. Sometimes you can encourage rude co-workers and bosses to be more positive. But not if you’re dealing with the worst cases.

How can you recognize those types you need to get away from? Sutton says they are addicted to subtle putdowns, interruptions and they use sarcasm as a way to make a (supposed) joke.

Respect your unconscious decision-making skills.
When you try to make a well-formed, thought-out decision, you will probably do a bad job unless the information in front of you is very limited, according to Ap Dijksterhuis, professor of psychology at Radboud University Nimengen in the Netherlands.

He found that in situations with a lot of variables, like which soccer team will win the World Cup, people consider too much irrelevant information–which city the game is in, for example–at the expense of more important information–such as the track records of the teams.

The good news is that our unconscious minds are very good at processing lots of information. We have known for a while that trusting our gut is a good idea. But Diksterhuis’s research (subscription required) shows that sleeping on a problem gives your unconscious time to sift through information and actually makes our gut decision better.

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New design for Brazen Careerist

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New Blog DesignTa-da! It’s my new blog design. This is a big moment for me because when I started blogging, I never dreamed that it would matter so much to me that I would actually pay to have a custom blog design.

There is an important lesson here about starting something new. Many people who have successful businesses say that if they had known how much work it was going to be they never would have started. I found this was true with the companies I’ve started. And at Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog that has grown astronomically in the last year, JD has a nice description of this process of growing in unexpected but exciting ways.

Meeting our goals might depend on being ignorant of how much work it will really take. If I had thought I was going to post six days a week I would have procrastinated every day forever because the amount of work would have seemed unbearable. But in fact, once you fall in love with what you’re doing, like any small business, the long hours don’t feel so long.

In some cases, though, you cannot help but know that you are about to start something that will be a lot of work. That’s how I feel about adding photos to the blog. I never expected to have photos, but my designer, (Rob Brown, who I really liked working with), showed me that the photos add a lot.

The only way I could get myself to agree to make the photo leap is to live in denial — a tactic I used for starting many clearly difficult projects. This means that we are launching a new design, but I have still not learned the ins and outs of photos. So this photo of workers at a desk is what Rob picked as a demo. But it looks good, doesn’t it?

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Friday smorgasbord: 4 how-to’s

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I just want to tell you about these links. Each of them made me really happy to find. Maybe one, or all four, will make you happy:

1. How to ruin your image with your signature file.
This is a great post about the stupid fonts people use in their signature file and what those fonts mean about the person. The bottom line: Don’t use a special font. Express yourself through your ideas, not your font choice.

http://lmnop.blogs.com/lauren/2006/10/americas_most_f.html

2. How to survive high school
This would not be notable except that it’s part of Wikipedia’s how to section. First, I didn’t know there was a how to section. (Okay. Update. Daniel, at Om Strategy, sets me straight on the wiki world. Wikihow is not Wikipedia.) But then I was charmed to see that this topic is listed. Although I am pretty sure that all the how-tos in the world would not have gotten me through high school unscarred…

http://www.wikihow.com/Survive-High-School

3. How to find a synonym, or just do something cool on your computer
When I taught creative writing, I told my upstart students at Boston University that they should never use a thesaurus because you should write like you talk and if you can’t come up with the word on your own, you can be pretty sure you don’t use it when you talk.

So, putting that advice aside, I went hunting for a synonym for spark. And I found this amazing site that doesn’t just find synonyms. It literally makes language come alive. Words slide and gyrate and bump into place. I found myself looking for synonyms I didn’t need just to watch what happens.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

4. How to force companies to be socially responsible with just one click
via TechCrunch:

“DoTheRightThing is a Digg-like site where people submit stories about companies acting in ways that can be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Other users then vote on the goodness or badness of those actions and add comments. The site calculates an overall ‘goodness’ score, ranging from ‘severe’ on the negative end to ‘pioneer’ on the positive end.”

It’s interesting to read what companies are doing and see how they score. Also, it’s fun to harbor a fantasy that this site will get influential enough that companies will have to respond to accusations that get voted to the top.

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Manager’s guide to growing happy employees

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At a point when I didn’t have the money to hire an assistant, I ran an ad for an unpaid intern. I ran it on a lark, thinking I’d be lucky if anyone in the world would want to work for free.

The number of responses I received was incredible, not just in quantity, but also in quality.

Losing the Management Crutches

The intern I chose was smart, talented, and fun — all the things I want in a coworker. And I was nervous she would leave. So every day, I thought to myself, “Am I doing everything I can to keep her? Am I teaching her enough? Is she getting enough out of this job?”

People aren’t managers because they have the title. They’re managers because they make the people they lead feel good about themselves and what they’re doing. I knew this before, from books, but I really learned it with my unpaid intern.

Most managers have a title and pay their employees. These are management crutches. If you want to be a really good manager, ignore those formalities and make people believe that they’re getting something even more important out of the manager/employee deal; that way, you’ll help them to grow personally.

Six Ways for Everyone to Win

Each person is at your company for a reason, and believe me, it’s not for the gold watch at the end of 40 years of service. They want to get something from your company so that they can grow personally and professionally.

Find out what they want to get, because if you’re helping them to get it, they’ll want to do the work you need them to do. People like to help each other.

Otherwise, they’ll do the work to get paid, but they won’t do it well. And managers who have people underperforming are not really managers — they’re figureheads, and people aren’t doing work for them.

A real manager gives employees what they need so that the employees deliver what the manager needs. Here are six ways to make that happen.

  1. Manage people first, do your own work second.Your job is to make sure the people on your team perform well. They can’t do that if you’re not managing them, so most of your day will be spent helping them to develop their skills.Your own work is something that comes after you’ve taken care of everyone else. This means you have to get very fast at doing your own work so that you can be available when direct reports need you.
  2. Delegate your best work.A great way to make more time to help people grow is to delegate your own work. But don’t delegate your grunt work — who wants to do that? Delegate your best stuff and the person you give it to will feel really lucky to be getting more work to do. You get more time no matter which kind of work you delegate, so you might as well be popular.
  3. Help people get recognized.You have more access to the world outside your team than the people reporting to you do. Use that access to make sure people know the strengths of your various team members.If you help people get recognition, they’ll be more likely to pick up a mentor. And while a boss is not always the best mentor, they can certainly help locate a mentor, and someone with mentor will stay longer and care more about work.
  4. Make projects relevant to people, not companies.If you’re giving a new assignment to a team member, don’t focus on what it will do for you, or the company. Focus on how it will help that person to grow in ways she’s hoping to grow. Show her the skills she’ll develop on this project and how they’ll change her.If you can’t do this, the only way to get her to care about the project is to offer other means for personal growth in exchange for her effort on the project. It’s not enough to say how something helps the company — it has to help the employee as well.
  5. Align yourself with your boss.People are much more likely to follow someone who seems to have support from the rest of the organization. You look like you can do more for your team if you have good relationships with people higher up.If you don’t look well-connected in the organization, people won’t work as hard for you because they don’t think you’ll be able to meet their needs.
  6. Work reasonable hours.If you work all the time, you look like you don’t have a grip on your workload and maybe even a little imbalanced. This doesn’t inspire confidence.It’s fine for high-profile people who have built up trust. But in general, the hardest worker looks the most scared. Otherwise, why would that person have to work so much harder than everyone else? Why wouldn’t they want to go home and be with family and friends?

Getting the Right Answer

The best way to think about management is to treat everyone like an unpaid intern.

Each day, your employees ask themselves, “Am I getting enough out of this job to keep doing it?” And each day, you need to give them a reason to say, “Yes.”

 

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Job hopping: How much is too much?

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Between the ages of 20 and 30, most people have more than 8 jobs. This is a positive thing for a number of reasons. First of all, Daniel Gilbert, psychologist at Harvard, says that we really don’t know what we’ll like until we try it. So having a lot of jobs when you start your adult life is a good way to figure out what to do with your adult life.

But, job hopping is a good thing for everyone to do – not just twentysomethings – because it’s a way to maintain passion in your work. Frequent changes keep your learning curve high and your challenges fresh. Finally, frequent job hopping, coupled with high performance allows you to build a professional network much faster than someone who stays in one position over a long period of time. And a vibrant network will make finding jobs easier, so job hopping will not be a difficult path.

Human resource people complain a lot about job hopping. They say companies would rather hire someone who stays a long time at companies because that will mean the person will stay a long time at their company. Of course this is true.

It’s clear that job hopping benefits the employee, not the employer. But when the majority of young people are job hopping, and companies are having a hard time attracting young people to work recruiters don’t have the luxury of writing people off just because they job hopped. Recruiters write people off because their resume looks like they won’t contribute enough to the company.

So, the trick with job hopping is to make sure your resume always shows that you make a huge contribution wherever you go. That can be independent of job duration. You can show that you are loyal to a company by exceeding their expectations with your outstanding performance. Loyalty is about delivery. Show that on your resume, the same place you show job hopping.

A resume is not a laundry list of job and duties. It’s a document about a story. You resume needs to show the story of a person who contributes in large ways wherever you go.

Think about this. Someone wrote a great SuperBowl ad, then six months later went to Nike and launched a new shoe that’s a success, and a year later went to Google and rebranded some of their software to increase user base 50%. Most people would not care that this person was job hopping. Most people would want to hire this person, even if he only stayed a little bit.

Of course, most of you don’t have such enormous accomplishments, but you probably do have accomplishments. And you do have a story about how you chose to leave when you did. When I explained my own job hopping, I talked about how I went to companies, launched great, successful software products, and then moved on. I never felt the job hopping held me back, though I always had to explain it in interviews.

That’s the thing about job hopping. People want to hear an explanation that makes sense. They don’t want to hear you failed, or didn’t get along with people, or have no attention span. Not every job will be the pinnacle of success, but a good resume writer can make every job look like it was some sort of success, and that your level of success increased with each hop, because with each hop you got more responsibility.

I know that a lot of you hop because you don’t know what to do with yourself. But you’ll probably be able to find some consistent string running throughout all your jobs. Maybe it was customer service, maybe all your jobs were sports-related, you’ll have to figure out the story. But a good story weaves everything together into something linear, and, if you’re lucky, it’ll point you toward what you should do next.

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Don’t be an annoying white person at work

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One of the most dangerous ideas in the workplace today is that racism is gone. Because it’s not.

Jesse Rothstein, professor of economics at Princeton University, shows the prevalance of racist thinking, even today. “Some people think racial discrimination is something that ended in 1972 or something. Some people think that segregation persists because minorities cannot afford the neighborhoods.”

But in fact, Rothstein found that there is a threshold for the percentage of people living in a city who are minorites. And once a city crosses that threshold, white people start leaving. In terms of white flight, Rothstein says, “There’s a real difference between a school with 5% minorities and a school with 6%.”

These are the people you work with. The white people who would leave a school district if it wasn’t white enough. No one wears a percentage sign on their shirt to let you know where they fall on the continuum of racist thinking, but we all fall somewhere.

I have written before about how subtle discrimination is. It’s not okay to be racist in an overt way. There is wide cultural agreement on this. Which means that the racism goes to places that are hard to pinpoint. For example, I reported that when we read resumes, we judge people who might be African American more harshly.

The advertising industry is so suspect in its hiring practices that the New York City Commission on Human Rights recently issued subpoenas in an investigation of systemic discrimination against African Americans. And an interview in CareerJournal unveils a long list of excuses the advertising industry uses to explain the lack of African Americans in high level positions.

In a new twist to an old story, Miriam Jordan reports in CareerJournal that employers are coming up with new reasons to discriminate against African Americans: “There is a perception that Latinos closer to the immigrant experience might work harder than black persons,” says Joe Hicks, who is African-American and vice president of Community Advocates, a nonpartisan group that aims to advance interracial dialogue.

So what can a white person do to improve the situation? Start with herself, of course. The more you understand your racial prejudices, the less they will show up at work. In the mean time, I polled a few people, and here are a some annoying things that white people say that African Americans wish they wouldn’t.

1. Don’t praise someone as articulate, as if you’re surprised. There has been a lot of dicusssion about Joe Biden calling Barak Obama articulate. My friend says he has experienced this problem many times in his life, but would never come out an say anything because he’d be labeled “too sensitive.” He quotes Michael Dyson, professor at the University of Pennsylvania: “Historically, articulate was meant to signal the exceptional Negro. The implication is that most black people do not have the capacity to engage in articulate speech, when white people are automatically assumed to be articulate.”

2. Don’t discuss politics. It is a mine field of offensive and inappropriate comments. The number of political issues that have underlying race issues makes politics too risky to contend with at work.

3. Don’t make racial jokes or comments against any race. Often whites think it’s okay to joke with a black coworker about Asian, Latinos, etc. This makes most people of color uncomfortable and also think “If whites joke with me about Asians/Latinos, etc. what are they doing when they’re with Asians/Latinos?”

4. Don’t say “you people” when referring to people of another ethnicity. It creates a division between you and the other person where a division is not necessary.

And finally, here’s a story someone sent me to illustrate how careless white people are at the office: “I recently changed positions within the same organization and willingly took a job in an office in a predominately black neighborhood. Whenever we have joint office meetings or we are in the main office only my white counterparts ask, “How are things going over there (code for “I wouldn’t be caught dead over there, do you feel safe, has your car been stolen?”) This question comes from people who never spoke to me before, and it was an every-meeting type question. In one meeting I responded with, “I don’t have a problem working around or with black people.” No one has asked since.

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The ill-advised but often-sought business-trip tryst

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When I was younger and traveled more for business, I got hit on by just about every man I traveled with. This is not uncommon among women I know.

Of course, most times it’s not that bad. The guy usually looks a little silly, and the next day the girl usually feels a little more powerful in the client meeting because her counterpart showed such pathetic judgment the night before.

Please do not write to me about how this situation is sex harassment and can get very bad and whatever. I know. But let’s be real, men hit on their travel partners all the time and it’s mostly just a fumbling bunch of absurdities like, “I’ve never asked anyone this before….” Or “I’m so attracted to you I can’t help myself…” Lines the men think are original but actually are standard fare for dark corners of hotel lobbies.

Last week, I was in New York City to talk to editors about my book (coming out in May, hooray). Each day, I looked really good for the meetings, and I had a swanky hotel room and an expense account to boot.

Now I can see why affairs happen so often on business trips. If you are single, a business trip is just an extension of your single life, and if you don’t sleep with random guys in real life, it’s unappealing to do it on a business trip.

But if you’re married with children, a business trip is like an escape to Disney Land. There are no kids to feed and bathe. There’s no husband for annoying talks about checkbook balances and the next day’s school lunch. There is only freedom and fun. And what does anyone want to do with freedom and fun except have sex?

I wish I could tell you that I’m too busy with my great career and big ideas to think about a little one-night stand. But really, I was consumed with the idea.

A lot of people send emails to me to ask about issues related to marriage. Mostly because people who have a career and young kids don’t really have time for the marriage. And they think that because I have career advice I have marriage advice. And I do, sort of: It’s very hard to do kids, career and marriage. And be on guard that often the easiest thing to let go is the marriage.

I know what you’ll tell me: The best thing to do to save the marriage is date night. But the thing about date night is that the best time to do it is on a business trip. When there are only inappropriate dates.

Instead of acting on my fantasies and destroying my marriage, I did what all good journalists do: buried myself in data gathering.

This cheating issue is widespread: Sixty percent of men and forty percent of women have an affair during marriage. And these are not long-term events. Ten percent don’t even last twenty-four hours. This screams business trip to me, but maybe because I was just on one.

The Des Moines Register reported, in an article that I can’t link to, that thirty-two percent of people feel like they are married to their co-workers, and in fact, people do better work when they have this sort of relationship with a co-worker. So it’s not that big a leap to cross the great divide and suggest a rendez-vous while you’re in a grand hotel.

Oprah’s in-house therapist has addressed this situation — where you feel very close to someone you work with all the time. And, in a shocking turn of events, she recommends that you don’t act on it. (For you pragmatists, the increase in workplace performance you get from feeling very close to a co-worker dissolves when you start swapping spit.)

Of course people ignore this advice in droves, and forty percent of workers actually have an on-going relationship with someone at work. (Considering that? Here are some tips to do it without killing your career.)

Based on my experience and my research, I am declaring that it’s normal to think about having a one-night stand with a co-worker, and it’s normal for your mind to travel to fantasy land on a business trip. I used to think it wasn’t. But it is. I think if we all admit this, we can all get good at having the feelings and not considering the option of acting on them – which would not only help save marriages but also help stop sex harassment at work.

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Strategies for a sleep-deprived workday

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Chances are half of your colleagues at work are desperate for a nap. Many adults don’t get enough sleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation, the problem particularly ”acute” among younger workers: one in three struggle to get out of bed each morning.

What’s keeping them up at night? Not work worries. Marie Gagnon, 24, is a regular at Rumor, a nightclub in Boston. Though she’s employed in a 9-to-5 job at an insurance company, she can’t imagine staying home every weeknight: ”I don’t want to be bored,” she says. ”I love the energy of Rumor.”

What time does it get rolling? Midnight. Gagnon says clubgoers with jobs go home at 2 a.m. and the college kids stay later. Maybe they’d all get to bed earlier if they knew that research shows lack of sleep can make you dumb and fat.

Those who get fewer than six hours of sleep a night might as well be drunk. The Sleep Foundation determined that people who remain awake for 18 hours straight function similar to drinkers with a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent, the level states use to determine whether someone is legally impaired to operate a car.

And, when you don’t get enough sleep your brain starts thinking it needs to store food, according to Eve Van Cauter, a researcher at the University of Chicago. Leptin, a hormone that helps regulate hunger and body fat, drops from lack of sleep, triggering hunger.

What to do about sleepiness? The most obvious solution is to change your lifestyle. ”I used to try to go out every night in college,” says Gagnon, ”but now that I’m in the real world, I’ve cut back.” Her job as a claims representative starts at 9 a.m. She says as long as she’s home by 2 a.m., she can get to work on time. This leaves her short of sleep — most people need seven hours a night. To compensate, Gagnon sometimes puts in longer hours and drinks coffee — ”five or six cups at a minimum.”

But this is a risky strategy; after so much caffeine, the body’s response to the stimulating effects of coffee can become dulled. Which is why even after six cups, she still feels a slump in the afternoon: ”I usually have to go in early the next day or stay later to manage my workload.”

Sleep researchers advocate alternatives to Gagnon’s strategy. ”A bright light will keep you awake,” says Daniel Kripke, professor of psychiatry at University of California San Diego. For those of you in the light bulb market, look for ”a bright white or bluish light. Fluorescent without ultraviolet.” Administer the light to yourself in the morning, when it is most effective in the battle against sleepiness. But ”it probably has some benefits if you use it later in the day, too,” he says.

Napping works. However, napping is considered an office disruption, so you might have to book a windowless conference room to get away with this one. But a nap is well worth the risk. It will rescue your lagging performance, according to Sara Mednick, sleep researcher at the Salk Institute.

Mednick currently is studying two groups of people in her lab. Those in one group do not get a nap, and their performances decreased as the day progresses. The other group napped and their performance not only did not go down, but it sometimes goes up after the nap. Mednick, not surprisingly, is gung-ho for naps, and in fact, she says, you can actually train yourself to be the kind of napper who can shut your eyes for 10 minutes and wake up refreshed.

”You only need to practice for a couple of weeks,” says Mednick. Alas, the chronic under-sleeper probably does not have the discipline to nap efficiently and so risks waking up feeling more tired than before.

Luckily, there’s the caffeine nap. Caffeine can clear your body of the chemical adenosine, which makes us want to sleep. Researchers at the Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University in England were investigating ways to prevent drivers from falling asleep at the wheel and causing car crashes. They found that the best way to regain alertness if you feel like you’re falling asleep is to chug a cup of coffee and then immediately take a 15-minute nap. The idea is to get the sleep in before the caffeine takes effect. So you have to start napping right after that cup of coffee — or a can of caffeinated soda — goes down. Not a bad solution, but certainly not long term.

The only long-term solution is to get a regular seven hours of sleep. So among all this research, the advice that stands out as the best is from Kripke: ”If you don’t like how you feel the next day, then don’t stay up too late.”

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