Career Tips

Surviving the heat at work; it's a recurring theme. Ideally, you would simply leave your work for what it is with these temperatures and sit on the beach. But the work has to be done anyway and you don't have many days off. Then get on with it. If you find the heat at your workplace unbearable, can you actually just decide to work from home? Or in another place? First of all, it really matters what kind of work you do. If you have a job in healthcare, construction or if you work with certain equipment, then working elsewhere will of course be a difficult story. But if you have work that you can do from anywhere, it is often up to you and your employer to make mutual agreements about working from home.   Your employment contract may contain agreements about work locations and working from home. In principle, what it says there is binding and you have to stick to what you and your employer have agreed upon. But if the work...

There are so many stimuli coming at you today that it is sometimes very difficult to fully concentrate on your work. Recognizable? This means that you are easily distracted and so you can regain your focus. We get much less done than in the past, says neuropsychologist Mark Tigchelaar in his book On/Off. According to him, we lose more than two hours of working time per day due to a lack of focus.  How come? Tigchelaar, who has been dealing with the theme of focus for fifteen years, points out four main reasons for this in his book: 1. You get too few incentives Hey, what? Don't we get too many incentives? This may seem contradictory, but by nature people are open to many stimuli. In prehistoric times you had to be constantly on the lookout for, for example, approaching predators. As a result, your brain is focused on a multitude of stimuli and we are not used to focusing on one task. Instead, we look for stimuli ourselves. These can be ext...