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Even if you love your job, it’s common to feel burnt out from time to time. Perhaps you just wrapped up a big project and are having trouble mustering motivation for the next one. It could be that your home life is taking up more of your energy than usual. Or maybe you’re just bored. What’s the best way to recharge? Are some forms of rejuvenation better than others? How do you know if what you’re feeling is ordinary burnout or something else, like chronic dissatisfaction?

What the Experts Say
Burnout — the mental and physical exhaustion you experience when the demands of your work consistently exceed the amount of energy you have available — has been called the epidemic of the modern workplace. “There’s no question that we’re at greater risk of burnout today than we were 10 years ago,” says Ron Friedman, the founder of ignite80, the consulting firm, and the author of the book, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. “In large part, it’s because we’re surrounded by devices that are designed to grab our attention and make everything feel urgent.” Heidi Grant Halvorson, a social psychologist and the author of No One Understands You and What to Do About It, agrees. “There’s a lot of pressure in this 24/7 cycle,” she says. “It can lead you to feel lethargic, stressed, and depleted — literally spent.” So you need to find ways to “put gas back in your tank.” Here are some ideas for how to do that:

Take breaks during the workday
Burnout often stems from a “lack of understanding about what it takes to achieve peak workplace performance,” says Friedman. “We tend to assume that [it] requires trying harder or outworking others, [which] may get you short-term results but [is] physiologically unsustainable.” To perform at your best over the long term, you need regular “opportunities for restocking your mental energy,” says Friedman. Take a walk or go for a run. Have lunch away from your desk. “Stepping away from your computer gets you out of the weeds and prompts you to reexamine the big picture,” he advises. “It’s often in the intervals between thinking really hard about a problem and then stepping away that solutions becomes apparent.”  But take your breaks at the right time, Halvorson says. When your energy is highest – often in the morning – you should focus on work and maximize your productivity.  “Tackle your toughest challenges at those times,” she says. Then step away for a rest.

Put away your digital devices
Before the Blackberry era, leaving your work at the office was the default. “If you wanted to take work home with you, that required effort and planning,” says Friedman.  That’s no longer the case. “Today we’re all carrying around an office in our pocket in the form of a smartphone,” so we’re both psychologically and physiologically still attached. The remedy, he says, is to actively limit your use of digital devices after hours. Place your smartphone in a basket or drawer when you arrive home so you’re not tempted to pick it up and check your email; or you might devise a rule for yourself about turning it off past 8pm. “Put away your phone,” says Halvorson. “Whatever it is, it can wait until tomorrow.”

Further Reading

Do something interesting
Instead of concentrating on limiting or avoiding work in your off-hours, Friedman recommends scheduling “restorative experiences that you look forward to.” Making plans to play tennis with a friend or cook a meal with your spouse compels you to “focus on an approach goal — doing something pleasurable — instead of an avoidance goal — not checking email,” he says. “Research shows that approach goals are easier and more enjoyable to achieve.” Studies also indicate that doing an activity you find interesting — even if that activity is taxing — is better for you than simply relaxing. “What you do with your downtime matters,” says Halvorson. Sure, it’s appealing to laze on your couch with a tub of popcorn and a Netflix, but she recommends engaging in something more challenging — like a crossword or game of chess. “Even though it’s difficult, it will give you more energy.”

Take long weekends
Feeling mentally and physically exhausted may also be a sign that “you need to take some time off,” says Halvorson. The break need not be a two-week vacation; rather, she says, when it comes to stress-reduction, “you get a much greater benefit from regularly taking three- and four-day weekends.” While you’re away, though, don’t call the office or check your email. “You need to let go,” she says. “Each of us is a little less vital than we’d like to believe.”

Focus on meaning
If your job responsibilities preclude immediate time off, Halvorson suggests “focusing on why the work matters to you.” Connecting your current assignment to a larger personal goal — completing this project will help you score that next promotion, for instance — will “help you fight the temptation to slack off” and will provide a “jolt of energy that will give you what you need to barrel through that day or the next couple of days,” she says. Be aware, however, that this may provide only temporary relief. “If you’re burnt out from working too hard, you need to stop and take a real break.”

Make sure it’s really burnout
If none of these strategies work, you could be dealing with something more serious. If you’re listless and fatigued but still feel effective on the whole, then it’s probably just burnout. “But if you feel as though you’re not making progress and that the work you do doesn’t seem to matter,” it’s a different problem, Halvorson says. Is your manager giving you what you need to work at your best? If not, you may need a different position. Is the very nature of your work sapping your energy? If so, you may need to rethink your career.

Principles to Remember

Do

• Set boundaries around your use of digital devices during off-hours
• Incorporate regular breaks into your workday
• Focus on why the work matters to you if professional obligations preclude a vacation

Don’t

• Check your email when you’re taking a vacation or long weekend
• Spend all your downtime vegging; engage in activities that challenge and interest you
• Mistake constant fatigue and apathy for a temporary case of burnout; if you feel ineffective on a daily basis, it might be time to look for a new job

Case study #1: Reflect on why your work matters
As the co-founder, creative director, and CEO of Miss Jessie’s, the New York-based hair care line, Miko Branch has a busy and demanding job. The workday is a constant blur of team meetings and calls, appointments with clients, and product planning sessions. “When I am in town, people are in and out of my office all day long,” she says. “And when I’m travelling, I always check in by email at least every couple of hours.”

Her secret to avoiding burnout had always been daily nap breaks.  “Naps are just what I need to get my bearings,” she explains. “Sometimes they last only 10 minutes; other times it’s 30 minutes. Sometimes I use the couch in my office; other times I just lie on the floor with a blanket or jacket over me.” But recently her naps weren’t doing the trick. Facing multiple product launches and a looming deadline for a book about the genesis of Miss Jessie’s, she was feeling extremely stressed.  So she booked herself a three-day weekend in Miami to concentrate only on writing and editing. She was still working, of course, but she escaped the constant distractions of the office. And she inspired herself to keep at it by reminding herself why her business and this book meant so much to her both personally and professionally. “My sister and I created a business with no money,” she says. “We’re also female and we’re women of color.  I wanted to tell our story to inspire others and contribute in that way.”

She completed the draft and she was back at work on Monday. “I felt refreshed,” she says.

Case study #2: Be prepared to change careers if your burnout symptoms linger
Nicole Skogg, an optical engineer, felt tired and burnt out by her job at a small lighting manufacturer near Los Angeles. “I was doing a lot of mundane tasks — putting together a bunch of research data in a spreadsheet and organizing training sessions,” she recalls. “The tasks felt repetitive and unchallenging.” Even worse, a proposal she’d be working on — a business plan for an LED technology project that could drive long-term value for her company — had been rejected.

After the setback, her motivation flagged. Nicole, who had always been a go-getter found herself hitting the snooze button when her alarm went off each morning. She realized that she missed the strategic thinking she’d been doing on the new business plan. “It got me excited to come into work every day,” she says. “I realized how you should always want to feel about your job.” She was back to just “punching the clock.”

A couple of months later, she left her job and struck out on her own. Today, she is the founder and CEO of SpyderLynk, a mobile marketing and technology company based in in Denver. In retrospect, her case of burnout was a turning point. “I am really excited about what I’m doing and I’m so thankful that all those years ago, that manager told me no,” she says.

While a bunch of the hype surrounding the Destiny beta is how great developer Bungie's latest shooter looks running on the PlayStation 4, gamers on last-gen hardware have been playing through the weekend too. Based on the video that Digital Foundry put together (embedded below), the PlayStation 3 version expectedly doesn't stack up next to its current-gen counterpart, but it doesn't look terrible, either. If I were to describe it in one word, it'd be "softer." The tech-centric outlet notes that while the levels themselves remain the same the overall shape and size, set dressing like foliage and rocks are less dense (and in some cases, completely missing), and lighting is less complex as well. Most impactful, possibly, is the PS3 game's native resolution. While the PS4 version runs at a native 1920x1080, or 1080p, Destiny on Sony's previous console is running at 1024x624 (sub-720p) -- roughly 30 percent the total pixel count of its current-gen cousin.

The biggest victim? Shadow detail, as evidenced in this thread on NeoGAF. The amount of enemies onscreen, however, apparently doesn't drop so there should be parity between the two versions in terms of how the game actually plays.

Considering that the PS3 is almost eight years old at this point, however, it's kind of a miracle that it's even capable of playing something like Destiny to begin with. And given that there are likely well over 80 million PS3s in the wild at this point and, as of April, only seven million PS4s, it makes sense for developers to continue supporting previous hardware. Take this April's Watch Dogs and next year's Mortal Kombat X, for example.

What about you: is Destiny the game you're upgrading to a new console for (maybe even a white PS4), or hasn't anything on Sony's latest or the Xbox One caught your eye yet? The beta is down for maintenance now anyway, so you should have plenty of time to leave us a note!

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD

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Via: Eurogamer

Source: YouTube

Seinfeld, which turned 25 in 2014, is now available to stream online, in its entirety, thanks to Hulu. The series is self-evidently one of the most influential television programs ever made; when it debuted in 1989 it entered a sitcom landscape that was still shaking off the last cobwebs of the 1970s sitcom revolution, and it suggested, boldly, that sitcoms didn't need to be about important issues or even use traditional storytelling methods to be great. Instead, they could just focus on the minutiae of life, the little bits and pieces of larger things that add up to form our points of view. It was a show that reveled in detritus.

Easy to miss in all of that, however, were all of the ways that Seinfeld influenced TV via its underpinnings. Jerry Seinfeld's observational humor affected many other shows of the era (as well as many that premiered long after the series had ended). The "single people living in the big city" premise became the centerpiece of seemingly every other sitcom. But Seinfeld was so huge that it influenced television in many smaller ways, too. Here are five of them.

1) Seinfeld changed the way sitcom stories are written

It's not terribly exciting to think about television in terms of its story structure — the storylines, scenes, and raw dramatic beats that make up any given episode of TV — but Seinfeld's impact on television comedy is actually most pronounced in this arena. The famous "show about nothing" pitch obscured just how much structural work was going on beneath the show's hood. Prior to Seinfeld, most sitcoms broke down into an A-story and a B-story, and the surrounding material could take the form of a so-called "runner," a joke that continued throughout the episode and told a very loose story but didn't do much more than that.

Particularly in its best episodes, Seinfeld blew all of that up. Even in an episode like the famous "The Contest" (the one with the competition to see which of the central foursome can go the longest without masturbating), each of the four characters has their own storyline, all four of which converge in the final moments to create a whole that's larger than its parts. The best Seinfeld episodes are marvels of story structure, with jokes and storylines dovetailing and tucking into each other in ways that can be as thrilling as any twist in a plot-heavy drama.

This approach has become incredibly common since Seinfeld left the air. In particular, it's useful to look at Arrested Development, one of the show's most obvious heirs and one where individual episodes could contain up to nine stories (one for each regular character) that collided by the time the episode ended. Not every show uses the Seinfeld structure (and some, like Everybody Loves Raymond, used structures that were deliberately as little like Seinfeld as possible), but the series gave other shows the option of pursuing far more than the typical two stories per episode.

2) It made us want to watch self-involved jerks

Matt Zoller Seitz made this point ably over at Vulture last week: while much of the credit for the age of antiheroes — which TV is just exiting — often gets placed at the feet of The Sopranos, Seinfeld was just as much of an influence. Writes Seitz:

Seinfeld's impact resonated beyond comedy. Its serene belief that characters did not have to be likable as long as they were interesting foreshadowed a change in TV drama that wouldn't settle until the late '90s, when HBO turned a show about violent gangsters into an award-winning hit. We tend to forget that the first coldly expedient hero to anchor an influential, long-running series named after him wasn't Tony Soprano. It was Jerry Seinfeld.

Yet look beyond just Jerry, and you see that Seinfeld is filled with the sorts of self-involved jerks who would drive many of the best TV shows of the last decade. Seinfeld is perhaps the earliest series to essentially dare the audience to identify with its characters by seeing their own worst traits reflected in them. It believed it could do this simply by crafting characters who were as interesting and funny as possible. It was mostly right.

Take the character of George, perhaps the show's most compelling, most loathsome figure. We empathize with George because we recognize in his character all of the times we've been unable to escape our own limitations and weaknesses. But look at him from another perspective, and he's a ‘90s riff on what we might now call "nice guy syndrome." And the show endlessly mocks him for it!

George essentially believes he deserves to have sex with a beautiful woman because he's a white guy living in modern America, and when he doesn't succeed (but Jerry or Kramer does), he grows ever more petulant. He doesn't particularly want to strive to succeed. He just wants life handed to him on a silver platter. That was the kind of character TV hadn't really seen before Seinfeld hit the air, but it's also the kind of character who's everywhere now, and often on shows that don't realize Seinfeld worked because the joke was much more often on George (or Jerry or Kramer or Elaine) than it was on anybody else.

3) Elaine Benes is a tremendously influential female character

Funny women in control of their own destinies existed on television before Elaine, but Elaine was the first one who was simply allowed to unapologetically be whatever she wanted to be. Even a short year before Seinfeld debuted, a show like Murphy Brown had to essentially center everything on the fact that its protagonist was a single woman making her way through her life and work. Also worth considering is the Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis vehicle Anything But Love, which debuted a few months before Seinfeld and had much in common with it (including a large number of scenes set in diners during which Curtis and Lewis discussed the oddities of modern life), but constantly felt the need to make Curtis's arc largely about her romantic prospects or lack thereof.

Elaine was different. Many of her stories were about her love life, but she also had weird jobs and got just as involved in the shenanigans of a given episode as any of the male characters. Thanks to the work of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one of the great comedic actresses of American television, Elaine could be both deeply weird and deeply feminine. TV hadn't known a character like her before, and she paved the way for everyone from Leslie Knope to Hannah Horvath.

4) It predicted the growing whiteness of network television

Little of this is Seinfeld's fault; television's whiteness has far more to do with the Clinton-era repeal of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (a subject for another time). But it's worth pointing out that the centerpiece of NBC's very diverse 1980s Thursday sitcom lineup was The Cosby Show, while Seinfeld was the centerpiece of its very white 1990s Thursday sitcom lineup. It more or less made sense for Seinfeld to be as white as it was. The show was, after all, famously rejected by audience testers, and NBC's Brandon Tartikoff worried it was "too New York, too Jewish." It was, to a real degree, about four people who were incredibly limited in their perceptions and worldviews, so a certain amount of tunnel vision made sense.

But Seinfeld was also the unlikely beneficiary of the fact that the television landscape was changing. By its final season, the series was a mega-hit, watched by large numbers of people in all demographics. However, in its early years, it struggled in the ratings, kept alive by critical acclaim and awards attention, sure, but also because the people who were watching it were more demographically desirable to advertisers. And what that usually means is young white people with lots of money who live in cities.

As that demographic was targeted with more and more focus in years to come, it would lead to shows with fewer and fewer people of color, shows that could be good (Friends or Girls) or bad (the many, many Seinfeld clones of the mid-'90s) but still shows that were overwhelmingly about a bunch of white, affluent people who never had to worry about anything but the trivial details of life. What felt revolutionary on Seinfeld quickly curdled into something harder and harder to stomach on the many shows it inspired.

5) It heralded the death of the multi-camera sitcom

When television experts talk about a "multi-camera" sitcom, what they mean is a sitcom that functions almost as a filmed play, with multiple cameras (usually four) in fixed positions capturing the action of a sitcom taping, usually in front of a live audience. Think of the difference in presentation between Cheers (a very classical multi-camera sitcom) and Modern Family (which is what is usually called a "single-camera" sitcom and is presented much more cinematically than theatrically). The evolutionary history of the sitcom format can be split into two periods, with Seinfeld as a rough dividing line.

NBC actually forced creators Seinfeld and Larry David to make the show a multi-camera, but once the two were committed to doing so, they essentially broke all of the established rules of how multi-camera sitcoms worked, twisting and bending them so far that the multi-camera sitcom had essentially nowhere else to go if writers wanted to continue to innovate.

The longer the show ran, the more single-camera sequences it inserted into the action. (Think, for instance, of all of those scenes with characters walking down city streets, which were pre-taped and aired for the studio audience, instead of being presented live on stage.) And the longer it ran, the more it broke those stories up into smaller and smaller pieces, presaging the joke-a-second pace most single-camera sitcoms run at today.

And yet Seinfeld stands as a testament to how good multi-camera sitcoms can be at their best. Several of the show's sequences would only work in the more theatrical trappings of the multi-cam, and the performers' broadness was also given greater latitude by the format.

Think of the famous story George tells about removing a golf ball from a whale's blowhole. On a single-camera sitcom, that might be presented to the audience as it happened. On Seinfeld, which was limited in how much location filming it could do, the story becomes a yarn for Jason Alexander to spin, and that makes all the difference in terms of humor.

Seinfeld left big shoes for the sitcom to fill. Some (like Raymond) might have returned to a more deliberately classical vibe. But others pushed past it and found that the only territory left to explore involved finding new ways to film these sorts of shows. Seinfeld might have been something of an endpoint for lots of different sitcom techniques, but it was also the beginning of many, many others.

somethingplayfullywicked:

Life in Gaza

Daily Overview is an amazing project that shares one satellite photo from Digital Globes a day in an attempt to change the way we see our planet Earth.

The project was inspired by the Overview Effect, which first described by author Frank White in 1987 as an experience that transforms astronauts’ perspective of Earth and mankind’s place upon it. They’re having a feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.

You can find out more about it in the video below. You can also follow the project via Instagram, Facebook or Tumblr.

All images © Satellite imagery courtesy of Digital Globe | Via: Bored Panda

Established in 1067, Minsk is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Belarus with nearly 2 million people — about 20 percent of the population of the country. Today, as described by the Minsk City Executive Committee, Minsk is "a modern, dynamic city, the largest transport and logistics center, a cultural and scientific center of the country" with high education standards, positive diversity, clean and green (as in parks and stuff), and mostly as a city on the rise. "Minsk," however, share London- and Moscow-based agency INSTID, who have been working with the city on its new identity since August 2012, "lacks a clear identity. Its residents define themselves mostly by nationality, and admit that Minsk does not have a particular culture or tradition of its own." Commissioned by the city's tourist information agency, INSTID's task was to "help improve international recognition of Minsk to help it attract foreign investment, visitors, and talent" and "help residents feel proud of Minsk and develop a unique city culture based on their distinct character, and create a powerful platform for city's future development." The new identity will begin to be implemented this summer.

Instead of reflecting on multitude dimensions of the city's life, the brand strategy captured Minsk's essential quality, the ability to rationalise, engineer, and create effective practical solutions to complex technological and scientific problems. This quality is deeply ingrained in Minsk residents, many of whom are third generations engineers. It manifests itself in the user-friendly layout of the city and the rhythmical and reliable work of its services. It also propels a burgeoning industry of software programming, engineering, and high precision manufacturing that has emerged in Minsk over the last two decades. The core idea of Minsk as a city of intellect is expressed in the slogan Think Minsk. It sends a clear message to foreign investors, tourists and talent that Minsk welcomes and fosters knowledge-based production and exchange of ideas. It gives a direction for the city development and propels Minsk towards becoming a new growth place in the world economy.
— Provided text

A graphic expression of this archetypal quality of Minsk is delivered by the combination of the light blue colour (the colour of communication, abstract thinking, and intellect), and the line (as a most flexible and effective shape). Given the lack of any common symbols for the city at present, we decided against creating a defined decorative graphic symbol. Rather, we created a platform for fostering and channeling the creative energy of Minsk residents by defining very clear, laconic, and abstract tenets of the Minsk visual style. In other words, we designated alternating blue and white stripes of equal width as the key and only imperative for the city visuals and opened them to the Minsk residents, businesses and public bodies to interpret and use. Below are some illustrations how the city visual style can be effectively and powerfully implemented in a variety of contexts and applications.
— Provided text

Clearly, a lot of this project so far is pie-in-the-sky thinking: whether it's the boots above or the colored steps photograph, most of the images shown here are simply to paint a picture of what could be achieved if everything goes right, from concept approval to vendor alignment to citizens embracing the city as much as that cute little girl is embracing her cat. The identity, built around blue-and-white, thick lines and not a more distinct set of icons or visuals seems like an interesting way of building a destination brand. The main problem is that this could apply to any number of metropolitan destinations around the world. There doesn't seem to be any real specificity to Minsk — the strongest message I get, and I guess it's a good one, is that Minsk is a contemporary, young, edgy city but that's about it. On the identity itself, there are good moments and bad. The weaved "M" monograms are quite fetching (and at least carry an "M" for Minsk) and the patterns certainly have potential, but no more than any other set of decent patterns we've seen before. Where it fails, badly, is in the typography, briefly seen in a couple of the images towards the top where there is red on blue making it nearly impossible to read, or there is also the zero-leading treatment on the diagonal lines followed by awkwardly line-spaced text. It's almost as if two different firms did each part. I'm willing to Think Minsk, but not with that type.

A few more images of the identity can be found here.

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Many tunnels in Sydney, Australia aren't tall enough to permit tractor trailers to move through safely. This animated gif shows a warning system that informs truck drivers when they're about to crash into a tunnel entrance. When sensors detect a vehicle that is too tall, the system pours water across the entrance to the tunnel and projects a stop sign onto that water curtain.

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