nathan bentley's personal playground...

Having only recently changed jobs, it occurred to me that now would be an ideal time to post about a topic that’s been on my mind for a long time - stress in the workplace.

After 10 years of working in the web-industry, I’ve come to realise that a lot of factors can contribute to stress levels.  From personal experience, I’ve worked the 80 - 120 hours a week to get projects live, sat in offices that are almost arctic (once in a datacentre where the manager would turn the air con to polar settings, and once for a company that worked in a warehouse with no real heating), and have even experienced stress being caused by not having enough work to do (boredom can be a surprising stress inducer).

I thought long and hard about how I could distill the above down to a concise point…  Thankfully, it turns out I didn’t have to.  About 3 months ago, during a conversation with Paul Lomax about the stresses and strains of daily life, he came out with a line that struck a perfect chord.

“Stress for me is caused by the inability for one to change their environment.”

I’m paraphrasing the above by the way.  My poor stress addled brain wasn’t up to much on that day (hence the conversation), but you get the gist.  The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.  If I was cold, I’d turn the heating on - problem solved.  Of course, if I couldn’t, then my concerns about one day being excavated out of a block of ice would have added to my daily stress.

The theory works well in almost any situation.  Today for instance, I spent hours trying to get a DNS change sorted - something that I once would have done myself in minutes, now has to be handled by another part of the company, emails sent, red tape ploughed through, taking time, effort and having a knock on effect to my working day.  By lunchtime, I was ready to stab someone with a fork.

Stress affects us all in different ways - I’ve seen numerous people (including myself) have stress manifest itself in rashes, IBS, heart palpitations, all the way through to full blown rage attacks and nervous breakdowns.  It’s not a pretty sight - and is a situation that could so easily be prevented.

Empower your staff to change the environment they work in - whether it be something little like decorating the office so they feel comfortable, or something major, like letting them have a say in how the business is run.  After all, few people actively want to make life harder for themselves - you may find that the recommendation someone makes about how to make their life easier makes your life easier too - it might even make you more profitable.

In the course of writing this post, I was interrupted a stack of times by the ringing of my phone, and numerous times by people asking me “a quick question”.  Tomorrow, I’ll be turning off my phone for lunch, and enjoying the park, weather permitting.

Today I finally signed up for a pro Flickr account. Why hadn’t I done this sooner? Well, up until now, I’ve managed to convince myself that, because I own my own servers, I should probably just use of of them. Of course, as a developer, it shouldn’t be too hard to write some kind of flickr like gallery system, and I’d be up and running in no time.

In reality of course, this just didn’t happen. After losing my ipod (which doubled up as portable storage for a number of my photo albums) over the weekend, and realising that I’d be pretty distraught if I lost my photos, I decided that it’d be a good time to invest in a flickr account.

Once I did this though, I suddenly realised that I’d need to get uploading. It’s taken my roughly 12 hours, but I’ve almost managed to scrape together around 10gb of photos dating back to ‘98 (no easy task considering that they were scattered over 8 harddisks, some of which hadn’t been used in a long time…).

The realisation that I should have a) named my images in a sensible fashion, and b) removed a lot of the badly composed, badly lit, duplicates and frankly just utter shit photos has finally dawned on me. Looks like I’ll be spending another weekend doing just that soon.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly end without plugging the new flickr account, so here it is in all its shiny web 2.0 glory.

I’ve been bloody terrible about updating my blog of reason, and by way of lame excuse, here’s why…

After 2 1/2 long years at Pod1, I’ve decided to move on. Aside from the general craziness caused by my resignation, I also thought it best to make sure that the information about my departure was disseminated in an official capacity before I blurted it out online for all to read. Thankfully, that time has come…

In a little over 3 weeks I’ll be donning a new cap for Publicis Modem (of the world-wide Publicis Groupe). It’s a big move, and I’ll be flexing my technical muscles for one of the biggest agencies in the world - hopefully in a way that will assist their growth in the digital market.

Of course, my decision to leave Pod1 wasn’t an easy one - having spent 2 1/2 years eating, sleeping and breathing Pod1 (I kid you not, the sofa’s are damned comfortable), I was reluctant to leave its comfortable bosom. I’ll also be leaving a great number of friends behind - although thankfully I’m only a 15 minute tube ride away, so will no doubt be back on a Friday night.

At this point, I’ll leave with the email I wrote come the official announcement of my departure - hopefully supplying some insight to my daily workings…

A few things you may not know about me and my time spent at the pod:

• I moved to London to work at Pod1 on the sole merit that Fadi made me a cracking cup of tea (a first… and last?).
• I’ll have been at pod1 for 926 days (79945200 seconds!) when I finally get booted out the door.
• In that time, I’ve written over 100,000 lines of code.
• My longest working week was a whopping 122 hours, my shortest just a measly 4h.
• I’ve managed to go 24 hours without leaving the second floor of the building, and 36 hours without leaving the studios.
• I’ve discovered that the red sofas make awesome beds. Conversely, the old designers couch (which I believe has now left the pod) is way too small for me, and covered in spray mount - not a good sleeping experience.
• By rough calculation, I’ve drunk around 1,400 pints of flat Japanese lager, Guinness and mojitos from the bar downstairs (OK, maybe from the surrounding pubs too).
• By rough calculation, I’ve drunk a ludicrous 4,820 cups of tea. (Milk and two sugars please)
• I’ve “broken” 6 contractors - including the “ginger magician” and “moon-thunder river” (his real name, I kid you not.)
• I’ve helped in the launch of over 25 sites, and had my sticky fingers in dozens more.
• I’ve made many good friends in my time here, and thankfully, not lost any.

Bye for now…