Give Yourself a Gift – Take Time Off!

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With the holiday season fully upon us, no doubt you have made a gift list for the loved ones in your life. However, what do you plan to gift yourself? While new clothes and fancy toys are always fun, why not give yourself a gift that improves your health and leads to greater connection opportunities. It is the simple act of taking time off.

In an article for Psychology Today titled, The Importance of Taking a Break from Work, clinical psychologist Monica Vermani explores the reasons why taking time off of work is a health care prescription. She starts the article with the sad fact that most Americans fail to take their allotted vacation time.

According to a recent Pew Research survey, 46 percent of employees take less time off than their employer offers. In 2022, according to Qualtrics research, American workers left an average of 9.5 vacation days unused. Recent Canadian statistics paint an even bleaker picture, with just 29 percent of employees taking full advantage of paid time off.

That’s not all. In a 2023 ELVTR poll of 2,300 North American employees, most reported working while on vacation. Many also reported that weekends and nonworking hours are far from off-limits.

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This failure to disconnect from work can lead to burn-out and other health issues. Therefore, Vermani advocates for taking a true and complete break from work. She points out that doing this is vital to your mental health.

The value of taking that postponed vacation and setting reasonable boundaries around minimizing communication with work colleagues outside of working hours are many, including stress and burnout prevention, gaining new perspectives on workplace stressors, improving mental and physical health, and improved sleep. Furthermore, vacations can be especially effective at raising levels of happiness, making time to reconnect with family and friends, and exploring locations and activities that foster joy and inspiration. Vacation time is also known to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. Time away from the daily grind also expands our creative abilities.

She then shares why setting heathy boundaries is important to everyone.

Our time and energy are valuable—and finite—assets. At the end of the day, it is our responsibility to build healthy boundaries around our finite resources. Building healthy boundaries is all about prioritizing our mental and physical health, well-being, and needs, and building awareness of the causes and signs of workplace burnout, including trouble concentrating, exhaustion, irritability, a decrease in productivity, and physical symptoms, like headaches, muscle aches, gastrointestinal issues, and changes in sleep routines.

To learn more, including her six steps to creating a healthier work/life balance, please read the rest of the article. In the meantime, it is not too late to schedule that holiday vacation. Whether it is a trip out of town or staying home, either way make sure you enjoy some much-needed downtime.

How to be a Great Gift Giver

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It’s the holiday season once again!

While it is time to enjoy seasonal delicious food and the sparkling lights, there is one thing that many people dread: picking out the perfect gift. With a wide range of options, it is easy to get overwhelmed and default to boring gift cards. If you have experienced this problem, have you ever tried to figure out of there a way to become a great gift giver?

An article in Vox may resolve this yuletide tension. In a piece titled How to become a truly excellent gift giver, journalist Eliza Brooke shares insights from several gift giving experts. The first piece of advice is simple. Not every gift has to be life-changing, and a meaningful gift doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

“We often give ourselves this challenge of being like, ‘What is the gift that only I could give them? What is the gift that proves I know them so well?’ And that’s kind of impossible,” says Erica Cerulo, who runs the recommendation-filled A Thing or Two podcast and newsletter with her business partner, Claire Mazur. (Cerulo and Mazur previously co-founded the retail destination Of A Kind, which shut down in 2019.) A great gift doesn’t have to change someone’s life, Cerulo says: It can just be something that’s fun and nice and comforting.

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The experts Brooke speaks with also provide a simple three-point strategy on gift selection that helps narrow down options quickly.

Because creativity thrives with constraints, Cerulo offered the following three-point framework for thinking about gift-giving: “Can I introduce someone to something they might not otherwise know about? Can I get them a nicer version of something than they would buy for themselves? Or can I make them feel seen?” If you can check one of those three boxes, you’ve probably got a good present on your hands.

Also, Brooke points out that gift giving doesn’t have to be an end of year cram. Identifying potential gifts across the entire year rather than just in December is a useful stress reliever.

Almost universally, great gift-givers are doing legwork throughout the year, not just in the weeks leading up to a birthday or major holiday. Many keep lists of potential gifts for their friends and loved ones, which they update every time someone mentions an item they’d love or when their internet travels turn up a particularly great present idea. You can do this in any way that suits you: Cerulo has a single note in her phone dedicated to gift ideas, Mazur keeps individual notes for individual people, and Rosner uses friends’ contacts as a place to log food preferences, birthdays, and present ideas.

Learn more useful tips on how to be a great gift giver by reading the rest of the article on the Vox website.

The Important Thing That Kind People Do Differently

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In case you missed it, November 13 was World Kindness Day. It is a special time to remind everyone that being kind does not cost you a penny. In fact, when people perform an act of kindness, they not only benefit the person who receives it, but they themselves and everyone who sees it happen all feel better as a result.

Of course, you can, and should, be kind every day. Yet, people often underestimate the power of kindness. They believe that in this cruel world only pure self-interest will make a person successful. Therefore, is kindness a form of weakness?

The Kindness Extremist Shola Richards would say firmly that kindness is a strength. In a recent blog post, Shola shared the main thing that kind people contribute to the world.

Here’s something that kind people do, that the rest of the world does not:

They give a damn about issues that don’t affect them personally.

In our increasingly polarized world, this kind of expansive empathy has become not just uncommon, it’s damn near revolutionary. he shared the main difference that kind people have over others.

Why is this important? Shola starts by pointing out why selfish people offer very little to the world.

When we only care about issues that directly affect us, we create a world where problems persist because the people with the power to solve them don’t experience the pain of those problems personally. (Please re-read that sentence).

He then shares why approaching the world through the lens of kindness makes a huge difference not only to others, but to yourself as well.

Here’s what I know for sure: kindness isn’t about creating a world that works just for me and people like me. It’s about creating a world that works for everyone.

And to be painfully clear, this isn’t about unnecessary guilt or performative activism.

This is about recognizing that our individual wellbeing is connected to the collective wellbeing of our communities and our world.

Read the full blog post on Shola’s Kindness Extremist website.

FLA Needs Your Input and Support

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Below is an important message from the Florida Library Association. Whether you are an FLA member or not, your input and support are most appreciated.

The Florida Library Association (FLA) is in the process of updating the Florida Public Library Standards. This document is used to help guide public library service across Florida.

Work in a Florida library? Please take a few moments to fill out this survey to help us in the process. Your feedback will help identify items to update and change to keep our standards relevant.

The survey is open from Monday, November 3 to Sunday, November 30, and we are seeking feedback from all Florida library workers, not just FLA members.

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

FLA STILL NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT

Your donations support the work of the Florida Library Association, a 501(c)(3) organization. Gifts to FLA are deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.

Support FLA by making a donation toward its general operating expenses. Donating to the General Fund allows FLA the most discretion and flexibility in allocating your contribution to our greatest financial needs.

The healthier FLA is financially, the better able we are able to support and advocate for Florida libraries and library staff.

DONATE HERE

Thank you for your generous donation!

The Winner’s Curse

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Can you win and yet still lose?

It is a common assumption that winning is a positive thing and most of the time that is true. However, are their situations when being the winner is actually a net negative experience? According to Nobel Prize winning Behavioral Economist Richard Thaler, this happens more often than you think.

In a recent Planet Money episode, host Greg Rosalsky, explores Thaler’s concept of “The Winner’s Curse.” This idea arose from Thaler’s pushback against traditional economics.

In column after column, Thaler shined a spotlight on anomalies that didn’t fit with the tidy, mathematical portrayal of humans in popular economic models (“Anomalies” was actually the title of the column.)

One anomaly Thaler highlighted was what he called “The Winner’s Curse.” The winner’s curse refers to the winners of auctions. That includes the classic auction with auctioneers speaking really fast, selling antiques or paintings or whatever. But it also applies to markets where people competitively bid against each other to buy something, which includes things like bidding wars over buying a house, companies competing to acquire other companies, and sports teams fighting to sign star rookies in a draft.

Richard Thaler

What Thaler challenged was the idea that winning is everything. In his view, sometimes it was better not to win because the economic benefit of the item in question is outweighed by the cost of acquiring it in the auction.

In the standard economic way of seeing auctions, the winner is someone who values it the most after a careful cost-benefit analysis of what they’re bidding on, using the best available information. Presumably, the winner is, well, the winner. But what if the winner is, more often than not, actually the loser? What if winners, systematically, are the ones who pay too much for what they’re buying?

In one of his columns, Thaler suggested exactly that. That, actually, in competitive auctions, the winner is often the one who makes a mistake and overpays. That is, the winner is someone who — perhaps irrationally — buys something for more than it’s worth. Hence the curse.

The Winner’s Curse is not limited to auctions. Think about the number of times you have rushed to buy the last item on sale and later discovered it wasn’t worth the money. Or consider the game show contest who wins a prize yet is now required to pay high taxes afterwards in order to claim it. We see it in professional sports teams who trade away too many players and draft picks in order to claim on supposed superstar who then flops.

So how does one avoid The Winner’s Curse? Thaler has a simple answer.

Thaler told us: “The way you have to think about bidding in an auction is: if I win the auction, will I be happy?”

To read more about The Winner’s Curse and how to avoid it, please read the rest of the Planet Money article.

Boundary Intelligence: The New Smart

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Have you ever misplaced an important document and felt less smart because of it?

Whether it is a computer file or a piece of paper, items that we have to invest time searching for limit our ability to make effective use of that information. Contrast this to files that are readily available at our fingertips or through an easy computer search. That information can be retrieved at a moment’s notice and is therefore much more useful. This distinction forms the basis of a new approach to understanding how we process information, known as boundary intelligence.

In a recent article on his website called Boundary Intelligence: Why What You Can Access Matters More Than What You Know, Tiago explores why boundary intelligence is a vital concept to understand, especially in the age of AI. He starts by referencing another writer, Venkatesh Rao.

Rao proposes a new definition of intelligence in the age of AI: intelligence is defined by what information can be accessed under constraints of cost, availability, and time.

The reality is that storage is now cheap. Computation is even cheaper. What’s expensive is short-term memory access – the ability to keep the relevant details “in mind” for a given problem.

You might think that the amazing computational power of AI would render this a meaningless problem. However, Tiago believes even the fastest computers run into trouble with deciding what information is important to keep close at hand.

Thus, a computer’s “intelligence” is now constrained not by the power of its processor, but by its ability to keep the right fragments of the past (and the imagined future) close enough to inform the present. In other words, the bottleneck of a system’s intelligence is how cheaply it can remember.

If you look at how modern computers perform, you can see this principle at work. A CPU can perform billions of operations per second, but is often stuck waiting for the right information to arrive from memory. Storage is cheap and computing is abundant, but what remains tremendously expensive is getting the right data to the right place at the right time.

It’s not the price of knowing that limits intelligence now, but the price of remembering.

This brings Tiago to the definition of boundary intelligence.

Rao calls this “boundary intelligence” – the ability to make good decisions at the boundary about what information becomes “knowable” at any given time.

How does this end up working practice, whether it is a person or AI model? In the end, it often comes down to practicality.

They are not retrieving the ideal memory; they’re retrieving the affordable one. Intelligence in this view isn’t about optimizing across all known information, but optimizing for accessible information under constraints.

A deeper study of boundary intelligence leads Tiago to an interesting understanding. He believes intelligence is no longer about what one single person or computers knows or has in storage. Instead, it is about knowing where to get the information at in the right time, no matter if you are a person or an AI model.

This means that boundary intelligence is fundamentally social. It isn’t just about what to retrieve, but from where and from whom. You have to know who to trust, what information or resources they possess, on what terms you can acquire it, and what is expected of you in return.

How can one use the power of social intelligence to improve their boundary intelligence? Read the full article at the Forte Labs website to learn more.

Surviving vs Thriving

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Are you only surviving at your job or are you thriving at work?

Every year the folks at O.C. Tanner release their Global Culture Report. This is an insightful look across the world at how organizations of all types are holding up in terms of developing strong cultures. In last year’s report, one element that O.C. Tanner explored was whether employees are thriving at work or merely surviving. How do they define the difference between the two states? Below is an excerpt from the report’s introduction.

People who are merely surviving feel anxious, financially uncertain, doubtful of growth opportunities, and pessimistic about the future. Their struggles at work impact their ability to survive outside of work. As an employee in one focus group said, “Not surviving at work will affect everything to a point where it’s scary.”

Contrast that with people who are thriving. They feel their organization cares about their mental health, they work in a cooperative workplace, and they have opportunities for growth and mentorship along a clearly defined career advancement path. They have hope.

How does an organization move its employees from a survival situation to a thriving state? O.C. Tanner suggests using what it calls a Total Rewards strategy.

The modern workplace requires a Total Rewards strategy designed to help employees survive and thrive. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of offerings, organizations should prioritize meeting employees’ basic needs, and the goal of Total Rewards should be to demonstrate how the organization cares and wants everyone to thrive at work.

Categorically speaking, offerings like competitive compensation and health benefits are considered basic, help provide financial stability, and meet survival needs. Offerings such as career development and skill building move beyond the required to provide long-term growth and satisfy other criteria to thrive. Interestingly, recognition is a practice that provides a bridge to help employees feel seen and valued at any stage of surviving or thriving. Keeping these distinctions top of mind helps Total Rewards leaders prioritize care at the core of their compensation and benefits mix.

To learn more about the Total Rewards strategy, please read the rest of the O.C. Tanner Culture Report Introduction.

Declutter Your Digital Life

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Are you digitally cluttered?

It is very easy to see when our physical items are getting too messy. Whether it is paperwork piling up on a desk, or a storeroom full of overflowing boxes, this clutter we can see with our eyes. However, the most insidious form of mess is the type made up of bits and bytes. If we are not mindful, digital clutter can get out of control very fast.

Over at the Strange & Charmed website, Alexis, also known as @MissTrenchcoat, is very much aware of the negative impact of digital clutter. In her article called, 7 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life, Alexis starts out by addressing an important question: In an age when we have almost unlimited storage, is cleaning up our virtual mess even necessary?

You’re right, we do have nearly unlimited storage space for all our digital information, however, when was the last time you truly went back and reviewed older files? I know for me, I occasionally scroll through files looking for something I know I saved and because of all the other digital clutter, it’s hard for me to find that one single thing I’m looking for. Even when I use the search function in an app like my email to find something I know I saved, I find it hard to locate that specific email. I’ve frequently lost digital files on my devices, and so, perhaps we give that seemingly unlimited storage capacity and search functionality too much credit. 

Alexis then brings her reader’s attention to easy areas to declutter, such as our subscriptions.

I know you’ll find emails from subscription lists you no longer enjoy. So, to cut down on future email clutter, let’s just take a minute, before deleting those old emails, to locate and use the unsubscribe function to prevent future email clutter.

She moves on to electronic data we don’t normally consider being cluttered, such as apps.

As I am completely integrated into the Apple ecosystem, whenever I get a new device, like a new iPhone for instance, it automatically downloads all the apps from every other device I own. Ugh! This is such a pain because I use certain apps on my iPad and not on my iPhone, and I end up with pages of apps I need to organize or remove. Let’s save ourselves the hassle and just purge all the old apps we no longer use. So check your phone, tablet and even your computer for old apps or software you can remove to save space and processing power for other things.

To learn the other five areas to declutter, please read the full article on the Strange & Charmed website.

Libraries are at the Heart of the Reading Ecosystem

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When I say libraries, what is the first thing to come to mind?

It was probably books.

The purpose of libraries for thousands of years was to collect and preserve the written word. Of course, having books alone is not enough without people who know how to read them. That is why libraries have always strived to expand literacy. This is especially true today, even in the digital age.

Brooks Rainwater, CEO of the Urban Libraries Council, understands the important role that public libraries play in expanding literacy. In a recent article on the EdTrust website called Libraries are at the Heart of the Reading Ecosystem, Rainwater shares how libraries are important to literacy while at the same time facing a very challenging environment.

Without public libraries, it is much harder to solve the problem of illiteracy. At a time when only 31% of U.S. fourth graders are reading proficiently, a continuing downward trend from previous years, it is especially worrying that public libraries — critical to helping children and their families begin the important process of reading and writing fluently to gain on-grade skills — are under attack.

Rainwater stresses how libraries play a bigger role in our communities beyond just acquiring books.

Libraries are more than just passive repositories of books; they are indispensable neighborhood resources. Libraries are learning hubs at the very heart of community literacy, anchor spaces providing essential support to our youngest readers and their families, teachers, and other literacy providers, helping to build out a strong “literacy ecosystem” across communities.

From his leadership position at one of the largest library organizations in North America, Rainwater understands the challenges and knows how libraries are making a difference in their communities.

I am the president and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council (ULC), an organization dedicated to strengthening and advancing the essential role of public libraries as dynamic, accessible places for opportunity, learning and innovation. I’m proud to say that, despite the challenging environment we are in, our member libraries are still stepping up to meet the needs of our developing readers and their families in numerous ways that are aligned to all that we know about how young brains learn to read. 

To learn more about how libraries support literacy, please read the full article.