Lose ten pounds in two weeks by changing how you work

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The last time I wrote about losing weight was right after I had a baby and my agent told me that I would kill my career if I went on speaking engagements. “You look terrible” is what she told me. And I lost forty pounds in two months.

This time, things were not so dramatic. If nothing else, I am tall enough that no one would notice ten pounds up or down on my body. But still, ten pounds is ten pounds. And I lost it by changing how I do my job.

Here are three changes I made in how I work that, in turn, changed how much I weigh:

1. I stopped letting work slip until the last minute.
I know people think they are creative under pressure. But in fact, time pressure stifles creativity. One of the joys of being creative is going up paths that surprise us. But when you are under a tight deadline, the risk of going down an unsure path is too risky because it might not work and then you’ll miss the deadline.

I became acutely aware of this when I started blogging. The immediate feedback one gets from blog traffic made me understand that there was a direct relationship to how much pressure I felt while I was writing and how successful the post was. I also noticed that when I felt pressure to write quickly I ate to cope with the pressure.

Once I stopped writing late at night under intense pressure I ate much less at night.

2. I stopped checking email when I was with my kids.
For the most part, I maintain a schedule where I work seven days a week 8am to 2pm. Then I am with my kids from 2pm to 8pm. And I usually work after they go to bed. Almost everyone is very nice about respecting the schedule.

But still, I was checking email all day. Sometimes because I really needed to, but mostly it was a way to take a break from being with the kids. The kids are hard. Email is easy. Please, don’t send me emails about how I should take the kids to the park. I’m not saying I don’t love my kids. I’m saying that it’s more fun to play email lottery to see if something great came in than to watch kids chasing each other up and down slides.

The worst part about checking email when I am with the kids is that I feel bad ignoring them. But the second worst part is that I sort of check out when I check email and once I check out then my junk-food guard is down, and I find myself watching kids and checking email and eating Cheetos all at the same time.

I instituted the no-checking email so that I could be more present with my kids. But the lucky side benefit was no more junk food.

3. I stopped working late at night.
The first lunch meeting I had with my first publisher was all about book marketing. We talked about how sometimes my editor thinks of a title and then asks an agent to put together a book based on that title.

“Like what?” I asked.

She said, “Like, Sleep Away the Pounds! How To Lose That Last Ten Pounds…. In Your Sleep”

“Ooooh,” I said “That is a good title.”

For the rest of the lunch the editor and the publicist and I all talked about that book. What it could be. The publicist pointed out that he stays up late working but he never really gets anything done except eating. He thought he should just go to bed.

I thought that was probably true for me, too. And I pointed out all the research that says the people who do not get enough sleep are at risk of being fat.

That conversation happened a year ago. And, ironically, I then proceeded to get less sleep than any year of my life because I stayed up all night doing stuff to promote my book.

But recently I decided to make a rule for myself that I have to get the recommended six or seven hours of sleep a night. This means I had to get used to not working as much. I had to decide to simply not do some of the work I had. But the life benefits have been worth it — including giving up that extra meal that slips in between dinner and bed.

So that’s how I lost the weight. And it’s been very easy to keep off because I did exactly what you’re supposed to do to lose weight: I changed how I live my life rather than how I eat my meals.

But here’s what really gets me excited: I learned so much about self-discipline.
There is great research about how if you add self-discipline to your life in one area, self-discipline seeps into other areas of your life as well. This is important because positive psychologists are always saying that self-discipline is a key factor to making ourselves happier.

So I always want more self-discipline in my life. And I absolutely found that when I became more disciplined about how I deal with my sleep and eating, I became more disciplined about working out. For the last year I have had clear goals for regular episodes of running, weights and yoga. But I have generally failed at achieving these goals on a regular basis. Something always interferes.

But over the past two weeks, when I have been very conscious of changing how I conduct myself during the day for work things, my exercise regimen has improved as well, as a sort of unintended side-effect.

So here’s my pitch to you to try something new. Try being just a little more conscious. If you become more conscious in one part of your life, you will be able to affect positive, conscious change in many parts of your life with relative ease.

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Twentysomething: Making time for a blog and a full-time job

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By Ryan Healy – For the past six months I have been maintaining my blog, Employee Evolution. At this point I realize that the decision to start a blog is hard, but writing regularly is harder. So here is a list of tactics I’ve used to maintain a full-time, corporate job along side a full-time blog.

Be Realistic
Before I started Employee Evolution, I did a little research and realized four posts was a minimum. I also realized there was no way in hell I could maintain a 45-hour-a-week job and create a successful blog without completely stressing out.

One night during one of many career conversation with my good friend Ryan Paugh, I had one of those “ah ha” moments. I asked if he wanted to create a joint blog, and he immediately agreed. Now I can write four posts a week, but two is sufficient if it’s a busy week at work. Being realistic before starting has allowed my blog to continue growing six months later. And I am stress free, kind of.

Know when you are the most creative
Coming up with ideas for blog posts takes a good amount of creativity. I have my creative moments, but I would never be mistaken for a creative genius. This lack of creativity has caused me to pinpoint the times when, for whatever reason, I am able to tap into my right brain.

I usually have great ideas in the shower. I’m not sure if it’s the water waking me up or the clear head from a good night sleep, but some of the best ideas seem to come in the shower.

The shower is great, but nothing beats a long run to get my creative juices flowing. The time from when I stop running to when I walk into my apartment is like a one-man brainstorming session. I realized this about two months ago, and ever since I have increased the length of my runs so I can stop about a mile from my apartment. Often I forget half of everything by the time I stop sweating and grab a pen and paper, but half of those interesting ideas are always better than none.

Create deadlines
Creating deadlines is crucial to getting blog posts completed. I have been unbelievably lucky that I have a weekly deadline for Brazen Careerist. But if you aren’t accountable to someone else, it can be easy to slack off. Create your own deadlines and hold yourself accountable. Sure it takes some self control, but it’s good for you. I make sure to have at least one post finished before Monday morning roles around. If it’s not done, I skip Entourage and write until it’s done.

Another option is to ask someone to create a deadline for you. Because I know the value of having a weekly deadline imposed by someone else, I am able to push my partner, Ryan Paugh to complete one post by Sunday night as well. This is a self imposed deadline by him, but he also feels accountable to me. And no matter who you are, it’s much easier to get something done when someone else is relying on you.

Don’t forget why you’re blogging
Everyone starts a blog for a different reason. Some start a blog to share their subject matter expertise on a given topic, some start a blog to share all their crazy ideas with the world and others of us blog about a subject because it could lead to new, exciting opportunities. I fall in the latter group, and I constantly remind myself of this.

It’s okay to skip a day
We all have times we simply cannot write well or are to busy with work to write a good post. Don’t put up a bad post. Quantity is good, but quality is king. Chances are your readers won’t even notice a missed day. Just make sure it doesn’t turn into a pattern.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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5 Ways to avoid being overworked

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In the information age, when almost everyone in every office is a knowledge worker, we’re paid to process information. And since there’s an infinite amount of information, there’s an infinite amount of work. For everyone.

So your boss is probably giving you enough work every week to fill three weeks — if you let it. If you work a certain way, it could also fill only three days.

My point is that people who feel overworked in some respects choose to be overworked. Here are some choices to make instead.

1. Force your boss to prioritize.
Because processing information is not an objective task, you can do a good job or a bad job or any kind of job in between. Which is to say that you don’t have to do a great job with everything. You can’t, right? Because your boss is giving you too much work.

So you have some choices. First, you can try to force your boss to prioritize. Say to him or her, “If you want me to do project z perfectly, then you need to get projects w, x, and y off my plate.”

Maybe your boss will think project z is so important that he or she will clear your plate. But most likely, your boss will say, “Forget it. You need to do everything.” This is an open invitation to start experimenting with cutting corners.

2. If your boss won’t prioritize, do it yourself.
Please don’t tell me you don’t believe in cutting corners. It’s the layman’s term for prioritizing, and you probably perfected it as a way of life in college. In fact, cutting corners is what college teaches best.

Over the course of a semester, you were assigned sixteen 400-page books to read, plus you had to write papers about them. You also had to show up for classes to find out what was going to be on the tests. Of course, there was no way you could read all 6,400 pages you were assigned — that would be impossible in the allotted time.

So you figured out what you could skip. You determined that the best way to get out of the reading was to go to the lectures, because professors lecture about what interests them, and their tests reflect their interests.

Now back to your workplace, where you have too much work to do. Here’s how the losers handle it: They complain about being overworked. They keep accepting more work, and trying to do it perfectly, and complain. And their bosses keep dumping it on them and saying there’s nothing they can do about the workload. Meanwhile, neither of them is prioritizing, neither of them is taking responsibility for the situation, and each is blaming the other.

If you boss insists on giving you more work than you can do, you should start cutting corners. Do everything very quickly, and ignore the idea that it needs to be done perfectly — it can’t all be done perfectly. Your boss refuses to prioritize for you, so you’ll have to do everything as best as you can.

3. Get comfortable with ignoring some tasks.
For some of you, even doing things less than perfectly will take too much time. In this case, you’ll have to blow some stuff off. So experiment and see which things can fall through cracks without anyone noticing.

You already do this. Someone at work sends you an email demanding a response. But before you have time to reply, another recipient does so, so you just delete the original message. Try this approach with work you’re not a central force on and see what happens.

4. Stop complaining before it ruins your life.
I can already imagine the comments flying about this column. Some of you will say that you’d be fired for following the above advice. But what’s your choice? You’ve already told your boss you have more work than you can get done in a day, and he or she didn’t scale back. Do you want to continue to just complain about it every day? Probably not, because complaining is toxic.

Besides, do you really want to work 15 hour days to get extra work done for a company that doesn’t respect its employees’ time? Why should you give up your personal life because your boss can’t prioritize?

Instead, take control of your life and create a situation where you stop complaining about having too much work. If you’re fired for not doing all the work, you probably didn’t want to work at the company anyway. And if you’re not able to scale back, consider that you might over-identify with your job to the point that you’re working harder than you need to because you can’t imagine not being perfect.

5. Take responsibility for being overworked, then change it.
OK, suppose you love your work and you’re happy working 15-hour days. That’s fine. Just don’t complain about it.

What I’m saying is that if you complain about having too much work you should look in the mirror — it’s your own fault, and you can change the situation by drawing boundaries at work. Be an adult by taking responsibility for your time, and complain only when you have a solution.

Star performers don’t talk about being overworked, they talk about time management. The best time managers excel at it because they’re good at figuring out what they don’t have to do. The best time managers have the confidence to say, “I’ll still be a star even if I don’t do that task.”

This reminds me of Gina Trapani, who edits the Lifehacker blog. Gina and three other editors put out a publication that has more readers than just about every local newspaper in this country, and many national magazines. Surely she’s a very busy person. But her productivity tips belie a Zen-like balance in which she isolates the most important things and lets other things languish if need be.

Want an example? In order for Gina to blog every day, she has to keep up with hundreds of other bloggers so she knows who to link to. These blogs come to her via direct feed. What does she do when she’s falling behind and blog posts are piling up? She clears out her in-box and starts over. “If something’s really important,” she said at a panel I attended, “someone will email me about it.”

This is great advice from someone who’s succeeding in an area where most people would succumb to information overload. Clearly, the way to do good work is to know when it’s time to not do it.

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6 Productivity tips to put time on your side

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It’s telling that some of the most popular blogs focus on productivity. I learned this when I interviewed productivity gurus about their best time-management tips last year and it became the post that bloggers link to most often on Brazen Careerist.

How to get more things done is a hot topic for younger workers especially, and one that has seemingly endless angles. That’s because young people are good at multitasking, and yet feel as though true productivity goes a step further than simply working feverishly on more than one task at the same time.

Here are six productivity-blogger tips with some new takes on the old idea of blowing through your to-do list to feel good about your day. What’s interesting to note is that each piece of advice actually encourages people to get more done by slowing down to focus rather than multitasking nonstop:


Having goals is more important than the content of the goals

Productivity should be aimed at meeting goals rather than merely keeping up with one’s to-do list. It’s a question of the big picture versus the little picture, and we need to be sure to have some big-picture ideas about our life or we won’t be able to steer it.

So often, though, we don’t set goals because we’re worried they’ll change. But they’ll change regardless, and we don’t want the same things throughout our whole lives anyway. As Eric Nehrlich says on his blog Unrepentant Generalist, “The particular goals aren’t as important as the process of setting goals and working to meet them.”

Knowing you can meet goals encourages you to set more, and setting more encourages more conscious thinking about what you’re doing. That may well be the very core of productivity.

• Get information at scheduled times

In a world where most of us are knowledge workers, the person who’s best at taking in information and synthesizing it is going to stand out. The last thing you’d want to do, then, is stop taking in information. But there’s limitless information, so you have to set your own limits.

Tiffany Monhollon at Little Red Suit suggests scheduling when precisely you take in your information. This means that it doesn’t interrupt you constantly, which really undermines productivity, but it also doesn’t elude you, which is the sure way to become obsolete in the workforce.

• Make your to-do list doable

A lot of us get stuck because everything on our to-do list is daunting. As Gina Trapani explains at Lifehacker, each of us has two selves — the boss and the assistant. The boss self comes up with things that are cool to do, as well as things that are awful to do but that need to get done anyway. The assistant self has to execute all of it, and sometimes the boss self makes life impossible for the assistant self.

Ideas that have no execution strategy, projects that have 50 (or more) steps, and administrative tasks that aren’t essential all drive your assistant self crazy. Trapani explains how to make sure your boss self and assistant self are working together to create a to-do list that doesn’t stop you in your tracks.

You actually need to put a lot of thought into how you manage yourself. Maybe that’s why the best reader for this column is your philosopher self.

• Do something you’re passionate about

Every Monday, Zen Habits‘ Leo Babauta blogs about productivity and organization. That in itself is a great productivity lesson: If you schedule something important for certain days or certain times each day, you’ll get into the habit of getting the important things done.

Zen Habits’ No. 1 productivity tip is to do something you’re passionate about. Why? Because when you’re enthusiastic about something you’re better at it, and you don’t mind trying harder and putting more time into it. It’s the work you don’t really want to do that you put off or do slowly and without much attention.

• Do important tasks instead of urgent ones

Steve Pavlina shows how to make a distinction between the important tasks and the urgent tasks on your to-do list. Examples of important items on your list could be learning new skills, finding a new relationship (or working on the one you have), or starting a new project. Note that these items are for you, not for someone waiting for a response to your e-mail. Steve calls this paying yourself first.

Ask yourself if it will matter in five years whether you did a particular task or not. Taking that class you’ve always wanted to take passes the test — it’ll surely matter in five years. On the other hand, not answering that e-mail from an impatient coworker right this minute probably won’t matter in five years.

What does this have to do with productivity? You can’t be truly productive if you’re wearing yourself out by taking care of other people’s needs. If you decide that 5 out of 10 things on your to-do list won’t really be important in the long run, then you’ll be much more productive by making time to work on those less-urgent but more-important items first.

• Focus on outcome

Just because you’re getting something done doesn’t mean it matters. In the long run, you’ll feel better about the time you spend if you’re making a difference with the outcome.

We often put things on our to-do list that take much more time to accomplish than they’re worth, but we focus so much on getting them done that we don’t think about if they were worth the time.

Chris Michel has an equation for this on his blog Found|Read: Take the desired outcome (value) and divide it by actions (cost), and you have the return on your investment (time). Michael theorizes that looking at tasks this way will inspire you to come up with ways to get to the outcome with fewer wasted actions.

Timing Is Everything

As you try to implement new productivity tactics in your life, keep in mind a study from the Center for Creative Leadership that says we each have ways of doing things that are hardwired, and if we get stressed out we’ll revert to those ways.

So even though it’s tempting to try new productivity methods when you need them the most, you’ll have more success making the switch if you wait until a relatively calm period of your life.

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Career ideas for a warm summer day

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Here’s an idea: Instead of thinking of your summer vacation as something that detracts from your work, think of it as a way to boost your work performance — or even your business.

The weeklong getaways that run a day or two over, the hour-long siestas that turn into three hours, and the three-day weekends that go on for four can all help your career. You just have to use the time well to take care of your physical and mental health.

Why? A healthy body makes for a healthy, balanced mind, and that’s the chief asset of a truly good worker. It’s not about the hours you spend behind a desk — it’s about what’s going through your head while you’re there.

Here are four ways to ensure that your summer fun in the sun enhances your career success, whether you’re still on vacation or are back from one:

1. Go for a run in the park, or swim in a lake at sunset.
It used to be that working out was optional. Now we know that regular exercise makes you calmer, smarter, happier, and richer. So how can you possibly say that it’s not one of your highest priorities?

It makes sense that if you feel better about yourself and the world you’ll do better in business. Because business is about thinking clearly, acting with confidence, and making good connections.

But don’t work out just because people who work out make more money. Do it because it’ll change your outlook on life. Really. You’ll be less likely to be depressed and more likely to be optimistic.

If you’re younger, join an athletic team. People who play sports do better in their careers. This is true whether you’re on a small liberal arts college fencing team or a Big Ten football squad. The self-confidence, teamwork, and drive that athletes display makes them higher performers at work.

Sure, there are exceptions, but the advantage is so pronounced that some corporate recruiters at colleges ask to see only the athletes.

2. Mentor a summer intern.
Each of us needs mentors to guide us through our careers at different points in time. Sometimes we need help navigating office politics, sometimes we need advice on making a life change. At each point, knowing how to ask for help is essential, and the best way to learn how to ask for help is to give help.

If you mentor someone, you help yourself as well. You’ll find out what a mentoring relationship is like from the other side. For example, you’ll learn what feels useful to the mentor and what’s annoying. You’ll also discover why it’s important to ask good questions, because as a mentor you’re helpless if the person you’re trying to help doesn’t know what he wants.

Summer interns are ripe for this task. They’re there because they want to learn. You can teach them not only about the workplace but about themselves, and how to figure out where they fit. You can be an advisor and a coach and a friend. These are all great ways to mentor, and after the experience you’ll have more confidence in seeking a mentor of your own.

3. Curl up in the sun with a book.

Information overload comes from sifting through ideas all day. In a knowledge-worker environment, with the Internet constantly streaming new ideas, the most successful workers are those who can sort information most efficiently.

Learning top-flight productivity skills is essential in today’s workplace, but that can only get you so far. At some point, you’ll need to read 300 pages on the same topic. For most of you, this means turning off the computer, but luckily summer is a great time for curling up with a good book.

I don’t mean a Tom Clancy novel, either — I’m talking about big ideas. This means that instead of sticking with a subject for the time it takes to scroll down a page, you have to stick with it for an entire weeklong vacation. That might sound dire, but remember the thrill of the rigorous thinking you did in college, when there were no all-department meetings and no memos to read during lunchtime?

Big ideas take time to understand, and they need to grow in your brain so you can make them your own. Take the opportunity to do so this summer, when the world gives you more permission to take long breaks.

4. Differentiate yourself by lying quietly in the grass.

When was the last time you had a grand epiphany in an important company meeting? Probably never. If the meeting is important, then you prepare and you concentrate and you think about what everyone else is doing — all things that keep your mind from being open to something random and profound.

Grand thinking requires space, flexibility, and time. These things are hard to come by if you lead a life that doesn’t allow for stillness. We owe it to ourselves to take time to be alone and do nothing, or almost nothing. Even if no big ideas come to you at that moment, there’s a clear, still moment where your brain gets a rest. And lying in the grass lets your body rest, too.

Career coach Susan Bernstein says that success and fulfillment in a job come when you connect your body and your mind to your work. The first step in acquiring this balance, I believe, is quiet contemplation.

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Letter to new graduates. And how about a braided career?

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Are you switching jobs every two years? Are you draining your savings to start companies with no business plan? Are you hiring a headhunter to find you a spouse? These are things you should be doing to find the success you’re looking for in the new workplace. Sure, they create instability, but what else are you going to do? Work for IBM until you get a gold watch?

The most important thing in your life is the people you love, so you need to figure out how to create a work life that will accommodate that. Do you love your dad? Tell your new boss that before you even start working, you need a week off for your dad’s birthday cruise. If your boss says no then thank goodness you learned ahead of time that you don’t want to work there. Do you love your girlfriend? Pack your sleeping bag and follow her to Costa Rica to save a village. You can get a job saving the rain forest, or, better yet, spend the six months making a plan for how you two are going to do shared-care parenting.

The best way to make sure you will have time and money to create the life you want is to have what I am going to start calling a braided career. Intertwine the needs of the people you love, with the work you are doing, and the work you are planning to do, when it’s time for a switch. This way, when you run out of money you can get a corporate job for a year. If life as a stay-at-home mom is unfulfilling, you can start a side business from the cafe on the corner. If your COBRA runs out, you can get a hard-core job that involves a lot of travel, pick up the free miles and the international experience and once you’ve earned the ability to do COBRA again, take a trip around the world with a backpack and sleeping bag. And don’t forget to use those upgrade miles. Who says you can’t store a sleeping bag in the first-class cabin?

Does this sound unstable to you? It’s not. The voice inside your head that’s screaming about instability is your mom’s. She’s saying, “I lived through the feminist movement so you can quit your job to follow your boyfriend? I didn’t raise you to do that.” The voice inside your head is your dad’s saying, “You want to have fun? You have one minute’s worth of experience. Who’s going to pay you to have fun?” And, unfortunately, the voices might also be at your dinner table, because you might also be living with your mom and dad.

But tune them out. Because you’re on the right track. And really, it’s a track. It feels like you’re all over the place, it feels like you have no plan, it feels like you’re always about to spend your last cent. But you are learning to create stability through transition. You can become a master of transition and you are achieve the thing you want most: A work life that supports the values you hold dear – time, family, friends, community, passion, and fun.

So look, this is what you need to do. You need to stop thinking that the transitions are going to end as soon as you grow up. This is not reality talking, this is your uncle talking — to your dad to console him that you just quit grad school. What is going to end is the bad feeling about transitions. You’re going to get great at them because you are not the first person to have a quarterlife crisis. You’re not the first person to quit a traveling sales job so you’ll be home to have sex when you’re ovulating. You’re not the first person to run out of money and have to take a 70-hour a week corporate job – for awhile, just to catch up on bills. Lots of people are making these sorts of decisions, and they’re great decisions, in the context of good transition skills, and a good understanding of the new, braided career.

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Regular exercise is no longer optional

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Exercise is an essential part of a successful career. It’s an essential part of a good life. I think one problem a lot of us face is that we approach exercise like it’s a choice.

When email first became widely used, I worked for a guy who thought it was optional. At some point, it truly was optional. High-level executives used to be able to say, “Call my secretary. I don’t have email.” I remember thinking that my boss did not understand reality. That times had changed and his career was going to end if he couldn’t manage to take a look at his in box once a day.

Today I am thinking the same thing about exercise. We used to think that it was optional. But today, it is so overwhelmingly clear that regular exercise changes your life and makes you perform better at work, that it is absolutely absurd to think that you can function optimally in your life without regular exercise.

This is not just about good-looking people doing better in life (which is true). It runs deeper than that. Mary Carmichael wrote in Newsweek about the research that shows exercise boosts our IQ. And exercise increases our resilience to difficult times, which is often the difference between success and failure in getting what we want.

I told myself all of this stuff last month when I started going to the gym again. Last year, a few months after I started blogging, I was so totally overwhelmed by the amount of work it took, that I told myself there was nothing to do but stop going to the gym until I caught up with my work.

It took me four months to realize that the extra hour a day that I was able to work because I wasn’t at the gym was not changing my life. Being overwhelmed by the demands of blogging was not about one hour. It was about that I had made a career change and didn’t even realize it.

But going to the gym for an hour does change my life. Regular exercise requires a careful mental shift. First you clearly prioritize what’s important to you, and why. Then you pick a specific time and specific place, and then you convince yourself that going is not negotiable. There is clear evidence to show that people who make one conscious change – such as going to the gym every day – unconsciously change many other positive changes in their life. Making one decision to live consciously has a ripple affect throughout your life.

In an interview with Harvard Magazine, psychology professor Ellen Langer says, “More than 30 years of research has shown that mindfulness is figuratively and literally enlivening.” And while we all say we want to live in the present, Langer points out, “If you’re not in the present, you’re not there to know you’re not there.”

I remind myself of this when I start thinking of exercise as negotiable. And for all the ten million pieces of advice on how to make exercise regular in one’s life, the best advice, I have found, is to realize that I will not get the life I want if I don’t go to the gym when I plan to go to the gym. When I interviewed positive psychologist Senia Maymin, she convinced me that the key to regular exercise is to tell myself that it is not a choice, and to also tell myself stories that encourage me to go to the gym. One of my stories is the one I told you — about how working that extra hour did not help me catch up at work.

So tell me, what stories do you tell yourself to exercise regularly? Do stories work for you?

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New financial data highlights generational rifts

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A group of think tanks, lead by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that for the first time, men in their 30s are earning less than their parents. For the first time ever, this generation will not be more well-off financially than their parents. What should we make of this new finding? Does this mean the American Dream is no longer attainable?

Probably not. Because this statistic is just a magnified section of a much larger picture — of the great generational shift taking place in America since Generation X became adults.

The shift is in the definition of the American Dream. Our dream is about time, not money. No generation wants to live with financial instability. And we are no exception. But finances alone do not define someone’s American Dream. Especially when our dream is about how we spend our time.

Those who are magnifying a different part of the picture of this generational shift will tell you that what defines it is the inability of corporate American to keep generation Y from quitting their jobs.

The best of Generation X and Y are slow to move into the work force and quick to leave it. According to the department of labor, people in their 20s change jobs, on average, every two years. And Generation X is shifting in and out of the workplace in order to spend more time with kids. It’s costing companies a lot of money, and they’re paying millions of dollars a year in consulting fees to figure out how to decrease turnover.

There are many reasons for high turnover, but the most fundamental one is that baby boomers have set up a work place that uses financial bribes to get people to give up their time: Work sixty hours a week and we’ll pay you six figures. Generation Y will not have this. To hold out money as a carrot is insulting to a generation raised to think personal development is the holy grail of time spent well.

Baby boomers are also baffled by women who grow large careers in their 20s and then dump them in order to spend time with kids. Newsflash: Generation X values their family more than their money. Our American Dream is not about buying a big house, our dream is about keeping a family together. You can tell a lot about values by the terms that are coined. When baby boomers were raising kids they invented the term latchkey kid and yuppie we invented the terms shared care and stay-at-home-dad. The divorce rate for baby boomers was higher than any other generation. We can afford to have less money because most of us don’t need to fund two separate households.

The positive psychology movement has taken a large hold among those in generation X and Y. We are convinced that money does not buy happiness, and this conviction is rooted in hard science. More than 150 universities offer courses in positive psychology. It’s the most popular class among Harvard undergrads.

Our dreams are tied to time. So it’s no surprise that many of the most popular blogs offer tips for time management. And topics like productivity are favorites among hipsters who know that “getting things done” (GTD in blog-speak) is the key to having a fulfilling life. And believe me, GTD doesn’t take money, it takes massive respect for one’s time.

The new American dream is that we will have fulfilling work that leaves plenty of time for the other things in life we love. In this respect, Generation X is doing better than our parents: We are spending more time with our kids, and we are keeping our marriages together more than twice as effectively as our parents did. And Generation Y is doing better than their parents, too: They refuse to waste their time on meaningless entry level work because they value their time and their ability to grow more than that.

The new American dream is about time. It’s not a race to earn the most to buy the biggest. It’s a dream of personal growth and quality relationships. And, despite the declarations coming from Pew about unreachable dreams, our dream is not about accumulating money to do what we love at the end. We are hell-bent on doing what we love the whole way. That’s our dream, and we’re doing it better than the baby boomers ever did.

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Book excerpt: Methods for controlling the hours you work

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My book, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, is available now!

Here is tip #37 from the book: A Long List of Ways to Dodge Long Hours

It’s hard to leave the office at a reasonable time of day when your workplace culture centers on long hours. But the cost of not leaving work is high: a half-built life and career burnout. Of course, if you never work long hours, you will never appear committed enough to get to the top ranks. So your job is to work enough hours to look committed but not so many hours that you risk your personal life and your ability to succeed over the long haul.

People cannot work full-speed until they die. Pace yourself so you don’t burn out before you reach your potential. But don’t blame your long hours on your boss, your CEO, or your underlings. Someone who does not make a conscious, organized effort to take responsibility for the number of hours they work can be thrown off course by anyone. But the person who systematically follows the steps below will not be thrown off course, even by a workaholic boss in a workaholic industry:

Concentrate on quality of work over quantity. The person who builds a career on doing the most work commits to living on a treadmill. The work will never be done, and you will become known among your co-workers as someone who never turns down an assignment. Read: dumping ground. Quality is what matters. People don’t lose a job for not working unpaid overtime, they lose a job for not performing well at the most important times; and a resume is not a list of hours worked, it is a list of big accomplishments.

Know the goals of your job. You need to know the equivalent of a home run in your job. Get a list of goals from your boss, and understand how they fit into the big picture. Judge if your work is high quality by what people need from you and how they measure success. Be sure to get goals that are quality oriented and not hours oriented. Suggest replacing, “Devote eight hours a week to cold-calling” to “Find six qualified leads in three months.”

Find the back door. Figure out what criteria people use for promotion. It is never only how many hours you work. In many professions you need to work a lot of hours, but there is always a way to be impressive enough to cut back on hours. In the realm of superstars, achievement is based on quality over quantity. Figure out how to turn out extremely impressive work so that you can get away with fewer hours. For example, if you’re a lawyer, you could pick up one, very important client for the firm, and then cut back a little on your hours.

Refuse bad assignments. Figure out what matters, and spend your time on that. Once you have clear short-term and long-term goals, it’s easy to spot the person you don’t need to impress, the project that will never hit your resume, or the hours worked that no one will notice.

Say no. Constantly. The best way to say no is to tell people what is most important on your plate so they see that, for you, they are a low priority. Prioritizing is a way to help your company, your boss, and yourself. No one can fault your for that.

Go public. Tell people about your schedule ahead of time. For example, “I have Portuguese lessons on Thursdays at 7 p.m. The class is important to me.” When you plan a vacation, announce it early and talk about it a lot. The more people know about how much you have been preparing and anticipating your trip the less likely people will be to ask you to cancel it.

Find a silent mentor. Look for someone who is respected but does not work insane hours. This will take careful hunting because this person is not likely to be obvious about it. Watch him from afar and figure out how he operates. Few people will want to mentor you in the art of dodging work — it’s bad for one’s image. But you could enlist the person to help you in other areas and hope he decides to help you in the workload area as well.

Know your boss’s goals. Your best tool for saying no to a project is reminding your boss what her goals are. If she cannot keep track of her own goals, help her. Because if you worm your way out of work that doesn’t matter to her, so that you can do work that does matter to her, she is more likely to back you up. Also your boss will protect you from assignments from other people if you show her how the other peoples’ work affects your boss’s goals.

Take control of what you can. Even small efforts at control add up to a lot, and best of all, they usually go unnoticed by others. For example, refuse to make meetings on Monday and you are less likely to have to prepare for meetings on the weekend. Refuse meetings after 4:30 p.m. and you are less likely to miss dinner at home. Ignore your phone while you write your weekly report and you’re less likely to stay late to finish it. You don’t need to tell people: “My policy is no meetings at x time.” Just say you’re already booked and suggest another time. You can’t do this every meeting, but you can do it enough to make a difference in your life.

Know your own boundaries. “Wanting to work fewer hours” is too vague a goal because you won’t know which hours to protect. Try getting home by 7 p.m., not working weekends, or leaving for two hours in the middle of the day to lift weights. These are concrete goals for cutting back hours.

Create something important outside of work. If you don’t create a life outside of work that is joyful and engaging then you won’t feel a huge need to leave work. And if you don’t project a passion for life outside of work then no one will think twice about asking you to live at work. So get some passion in your personal life. If you can’t think of anything, start trying stuff: Snowboarding, pottery, speed dating. The only way to discover new aspects of yourself is to give them new opportunities to come out.

Be brave. Brave people can say no when someone is pushing hard, and brave people can go home when other people are working late. The bravery comes from trusting yourself to find the most important work and to do it better than anyone else. But sometimes, the bravest thing to do is leave. Some industries, for example coding video games, or being a low-level analyst at an investment bank, are so entrenched in the idea that workers have no lives that you will find yourself battling constantly to get respect for your personal life. In some cases, you are better off changing industries, or at least changing companies.

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Coachology: Train yourself to be happier

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Advice for getting happier: Instead of focusing on what’s wrong with people, try focusing on what’s right with people -what makes people happy, successful and more productive. This is what the positive psychologists do.

Senia Maymin (pronounced Sen-ya) has a master’s degree in applied positive psychology. What this means is that she uses the science of happiness to help people make their lives better. She divides what we know about happiness into five categories, and she explains how we can make headway in each one of them in order to improve our lives.

1. Increase our positive thinking.
The key to thinking positively is being optimistic. The way you determine if you are optimistic or pessimistic is how you explain things. When the copy machine doesn’t work, is the world out to get you? Do all copy machines never work ever? Or is this something that sometimes happens and you can deal with it by calling a repair person?

You can teach yourself to be more optimistic by teaching yourself to reframe situations by telling different stories. The stories we tell shape how we see the world. If you tell stories about your ability to get what you want then you are more likely to believe you can do it. As super-optimist (and radio host) Karen Salmansohn says, “You can take your story of woe and turn it into a story of wow.”

2. Increase your positive emotions.
When you are feeling good, you can come up with more solutions to your problems. So the world looks more like something you can affect to get what you want. The less positive you are feeling, the fewer possibilities you see for creating success.

Also, if you have practice feeling positive, then when bad things happen you are accustomed to going to a wide solution space, so you will go there reflexively. This means you’ll get out of a bad spot faster and more effectively.

One way to increase positive feelings is to write a list of things you’re grateful for every night before you go to bed. Doing this actually changes how you think.

3. Increase your authenticity and your strength.
It’s very hard to figure out what you’re really good at. And by the time most of us figure out what we are good at we think it’s too late to change what we’re doing. So we just sort of pretend that we are doing what we are really good at.

Don’t do that. You’ll be happier if you are true to your strengths. To figure out what you are best at try taking the strengths assessment at the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center or try taking the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator.

And then believe the results. Act on them. Don’t make excuses for why you can continue doing something you’re not great at.

4. Increase your positive choices and decisions
First of all, having more choices does not make us happier. In fact it makes the decision making process less positive because we spend too much time obsessing over what we should do. An example of this is that you don’t need 15 Chinese restaurants to choose from in order to have a nice night out eating Chinese food.

Another way to think about choices is that if you train yourself how to be at decision points, then you can simplify your life in a way that makes you choose better. Take going to the gym. If you tell yourself there is no choice but go to the gym then there is not a huge process of deciding what is most important each evening after work.

Telling stories helps here, too. If you remind yourself of all the bad things that happened with a bad decision then you will less likely to feel that that is a decision point going forward. Example of what works: The French government puts gruesome photos of car accidents on billboards to get people to wear seatbelts.

5. Increase positive habits.
If you do one positive thing in your life, there is spillover into other aspects of your life. In the big picture, this can explain why if you are living in poverty and you enter into a loving relationship you are likely to get out of poverty.

In a study by Roy Baumeister, college students who were asked to take better care of their finances for a few weeks found that they unexpectedly also found themselves going to the gym more often, eating better, and getting better grades.

But you should remove temptation, because you can only withstand it so many times before it wears you down. This means you should get the m&m’s off your desk.

Creating one positive habit encourages you to live your life more consciously and more positively all around.

I loved talking with Senia about this. At the end of a half-hour conversation, I swear I am living my life more positively because of the tools she was able to give me in so short a time. Fortunately, Senia is doing Coachology this week, so someone is going to get to work with her for free, for 90 minutes.

Here is the best candidate to work with Senia; she focuses on entrepreneurs and career changers: You should be a high-achiever, because the person who is most successful in self-discipline and self-control is the person who is in the best position to apply positive psychology research on their life. You should also be ready to make a big change in your work life in order to increase your happiness. Senia can help you do this.

Send three sentences to me about why you want to work with Senia, and she’ll pick someone. Please send the email by Monday, May 28.

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