Shortcuts: Planning for a Needed Break From Work

JOSEPH BUBMAN took six months off his job as a management consultant two years ago to work with a charity in Kenya and Guatemala. It was something he had dreamed of doing and he spent almost a year planning it.

“It exceeded my expectations,” he said. “I was able to have a unique life experience and it afforded me opportunities I wouldn’t have once I returned to my employer. I would absolutely do it again if I could.”

It may seem unwise, in these economically shaky times, to request time off, even without pay. Some people fear that the mere act of asking will make them look less committed than their colleagues. Or send a signal that they are thinking of leaving their current job. Or hurt their chances for promotion or a raise.

While none of that is necessarily so, it’s more important than ever to plan how you will approach your employer and to think in terms of a mini-sabbatical — a month or two to do something you have always dreamed of doing — rather than six months to a year.

First, find out if your company has a sabbatical program and what kind. According to an overview of employee benefits this year by the Society for Human Resource Management, 5 percent of about 500 companies surveyed offered paid sabbatical programs in 2009. That dropped to 4 percent in 2013. But unpaid sabbatical leave grew to 16 percent from 12 percent during that time period.

That reflects a trend that Barbara Pagano, co-founder of YourSabbatical, which helps companies and individuals develop sabbatical programs, has observed.

“Companies are slowing down the activation” of such programs, she said, while “I see more employees trying to create their own sabbaticals.”

If your workplace has a program, you are in luck. If not, start researching.

First of all, said Pat Katepoo, founder of WorkOptions, which is aimed at helping employees negotiate for flexible work time, you would be wise to not even ask for a sabbatical unless you have been at a place four or five years.

“A one- or two-year employee is not in a strong negotiating position,” she said.

And make sure you are considered a valuable employee, as well as have some sense of how supportive your boss might be.

“How does she react if you say you need to pick up your kid or bring your mother to an appointment?” Ms. Katepoo said. That might indicate how receptive she is to the concept of a mini-sabbatical.

Six weeks is a good time period to keep in mind for a mini or short-term sabbatical because it allows a full month to go overseas or immerse yourself in a program, with one week at either end to get ready and decompress.

But don’t just shoot off an email to your supervisor asking her to consider the idea. It takes a lot more work than that.

“A sabbatical takes a good deal of research,” Ms. Pagano said. “I would suggest a year to prepare.”

Mr. Bubman would agree. He started working for Vantage Partners, a management consulting company, in 2007 and in 2011 took a six-month sabbatical doing conflict-management work in Guatemala and Kenya with a nonprofit.

He laid the groundwork for his proposal early, first by letting it be known he had an interest in international work and “that if I didn’t have the opportunity to do it, I wouldn’t be around much longer.”

This might not work for everyone. First of all, Mr. Bubman was in his 20s, without a family or a mortgage, and could afford to be flexible. More important, he said, he worked for a company “with a unique culture where being transparent about long-term plans is valued.”

Nonetheless, he knew just expressing an interest wasn’t enough. He tried to be a model employee, even going so far as to volunteer for less glamorous assignments. Once he proposed the sabbatical in March 2010, he agreed not to leave until the following year.

Mr. Bubman’s sabbatical had some unusual aspects. His company had a relationship with Mercy Corps, the international development charity he worked for during his sabbatical, and it donated money to the nonprofit to help pay his stipend.

Shortcuts: A Special Purchase to Curb Behavior Could, Just as Easily, Terrify a Pet

We thought we had solved the problem by installing a new door that opens by radio frequency emitted from the tags on our cats’ collars. The only problem was that the cats hated the noise the door made and refused to use it.

We hoped they’d get used to it.

But six months later, Archie and Lily still view it with the same petrified stare as they did in the beginning.

That made me wonder about other pet problems and the products that owners buy to solve them.

There’s a caveat. What works for one pet may prove disastrous for another: different pets, different temperaments and different owners. Nonetheless, it can be useful to hear what some animal behavior experts and longtime pet owners suggest — or don’t — and why.

After all, Americans spent $53.3 billion on pet products last year, more than $12 billion of that for supplies and over-the-counter medicine, according to the American Pet Products Association.

First, what about sprays that are supposed to stop your cat from scratching your furniture? I’ve bought several bottles of different brands and spritzed them on the arms of the living room chairs. The cats walk up, sniff and then proceed to shred the chair as usual.

“I haven’t had much luck with sprays,” said Stephen L. Zawistowski, a science adviser to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He suggested putting double-sided tape, aluminum foil or Bubble Wrap on the places the cats like to scratch, while offering them a scratching post nearby.

That strategy has worked for me. I put catnip on a flat, corrugated cardboard box, and the cats claw away. It is the Trader Joe’s Double Wide Cat Scratcher and costs about $7.

Other sprays that promise to get rid of urine smells rarely do. Almost everyone I spoke to, including a friend who is down to five cats from eight, said none of them seemed to truly work.

The idea behind all these products, such as the most common, Nature’s Miracle, is not only to dispel the unpleasant odor for humans, but to discourage the pets from urinating in the same spot again.

“I no longer buy any of them,” my friend said. “I mix together half vinegar and half water with three to four drops of Dawn liquid dishwashing detergent and use it.” It seems to work, she said, even though it sometimes makes her house smell like salad dressing.

Automatic litter boxes don’t seem to have a lot of fans. They work this way: Sometime after the cat has done its business, a rake runs through the litter and deposits the excrement into a bag.

Besides being expensive — $100 and up — Mr. Zawistowski said that if the automatic cleaner started while the cats were in the box, it could frighten them so much they would avoid it altogether. If you own multiple cats, one can jump in after the first and “you have to make sure it doesn’t operate while the second cat is in the box,” he said.

A cat behavior that most of us find rather distasteful is the inclination to drink from toilets. One solution is to lower the toilet seat, but with two teenage boys in the house, it might be easier to train the cats to shut the lid.

Some suggest buying drinking fountains, but Megan Lynch, a cat owner, reported, “Our cat was terrified of the sound it made and didn’t want to go near it. We kept it for a month or so to see if he’d warm up to it, but he continued to regard it as an alien being that we had inexplicably brought into our home.”

Cats may drink from toilet bowls because the water can be fresher and cooler than water that’s been sitting in a bowl all day, Mr. Zawistowski said. That’s why he suggested refilling the bowl several times a day, wiping it out each time with a paper towel and then giving it a good scrubbing every few days.

Now on to dogs. One common product — retractable leashes — provoked the ire of several experts.

Shortcuts: Taking an Invention From Idea to the Store Shelf

None of us have ever gotten past the talking phase. But a lot of other people have.

Last year, the United States Patent and Trademark Office reported that 1.5 million patent applications were pending, compared with around 269,000 in 1992.

And the office issued around 270,000 patents in 2012, about 160,000 more than two decades before.

It’s very easy to believe that a multimillion-dollar invention is just a twist of a screwdriver away. Listen to the seductive radio and television ads that promise to help your invention fly off the shelves. Watch reality television shows like “Shark Tank,” where contestants vie to get businesses to invest in their idea.

While they all portray making millions off your invention as easy, it’s not, said Mark Reyland, executive director of the United Inventors Association of America, a nonprofit education organization. “It’s a business of failure.” That doesn’t mean you won’t be the next Thomas Edison, who was granted around a thousand United States patents. But just bring a little caution and a lot of skepticism to the table.

First, do some preliminary research. Google allows you to research patents at google.com/patents. You can also look at the United States Patent and Trademark Office site to see if your crazy idea has already been patented.

If it looks as if you have a unique product, file a provisional patent application with the patent office. That costs $65 to $260, depending on how many pages your patent needs, and is far simpler to do on your own than filing a formal patent claim.

A provisional patent application is good for one year and essentially protects you from someone else claiming your invention. So you have time to develop and see if there’s a market for it before going through the more onerous full patenting process.

That’s what Micaéla Birmingham of Brooklyn did when she came up with the idea of a sun shade for her baby’s stroller, fashioned out of a dish towel in her kitchen.

“That’s the great thing about a provisional patent,” said Ms. Birmingham, an urban planner. “It gives you a chance to get it off the ground.”

Filing a patent, including the necessary research, can easily run $4,000 to $10,000 — or more, said Michael Neustel, a patent lawyer in Fargo, N.D.

Do you need a lawyer? While you can make your way through the complicated and time-consuming process yourself, the patent office strongly suggests using one.

“This is not an area where people should do it themselves,” said Jonathan Putnam, a New York patent lawyer. “You need to understand prior patents and prior inventions. You need to explain how you’ve advanced the product. You need a dedicated adviser who has only your interest at heart.”

Patent agents are another option — they don’t have a law degree, but, like a patent lawyer, must pass an exam administered by the United State Patent and Trademark Office.

Ms. Birmingham said she used a friend who was a patent lawyer, spent about $5,000 on legal and filing fees and just recently received the patent for CityShade — two years after filing. The average wait between filing and receiving a patent is 29 months, according to the patent office.

While the patent was pending, she got her Web site, citymum.com, up and running and has sold 2,500 covers at $68 each ($78 for organic cotton).

The high cost of such lawyers is one reason companies advertise free or inexpensive invention help. But those services might just end up costing you more than you planned.

Nancy Tedeschi found that out. She came up with the idea of a snap-on screw to repair eyeglasses when the earpieces come off.

She filed a provisional patent application by herself and started manufacturing SnapIt Screw. But then she discovered that “the invention was the easy part,” she said. “Marketing and getting it out is horrible.”

Shortcuts: Unemployed and Older, and Facing a Jobless Future

She wonders how to support him in his continued quest to find a job in his field of marketing and financial services while at the same time encouraging him to think about what his life would be like if he never worked in that field or had a full-time job again.

“I wanted to move to what I thought was a healthier place. I wanted to turn the page,” said my friend, who asked to be identified by her middle name, Shelley, since she didn’t want to publicize her family’s situation. “He saw it as vote of no confidence.”

For those over 50 and unemployed, the statistics are grim. While unemployment rates for Americans nearing retirement are lower than for young people who are recently out of school, once out of a job, older workers have a much harder time finding work. Over the last year, according to the Department of Labor, the average duration of unemployment for older people was 53 weeks, compared with 19 weeks for teenagers.

There are numerous reasons — older workers have been hit both by the recession and globalization. They’re more likely to have been laid off from industries that are downsizing, and since their salaries tend to be higher than those of younger workers, they’re attractive targets if layoffs are needed.

Even as they do all the things they’re told to do — network, improve those computer skills, find a new passion and turn it into a job — many struggle with the question of whether their working life as they once knew it is essentially over.

This is something professionals who work with and research the older unemployed say needs to be addressed better than it is now. Helping people figure out how to cope with a future that may not include work, while at the same time encouraging them in their job searches, is a difficult balance, said Nadya Fouad, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Psychologists and others who counsel this cohort need to help them face the grief of losing a job, and also to understand that jobs and job-hunting are far different now from how they used to be.

“The contract used to be, ‘I am a loyal employee and you are a loyal employer. I promise to work for you my entire career and you train, promote, give benefits and a pension when I retire.’ Now you can’t count on any of that,” she said. “The onus is all on the employee to have a portfolio of skills that can be transferable.”

People in their 20s and 30s know that they need to market themselves and always be on the lookout for better opportunities, she said, something that may seem foreign to those in their 50s and 60s.

If a counselor or psychologist “doesn’t understand how the world of work has changed, they’re not helping at all,” she said. “You can’t just talk about how it feels.”

In response to this concern, Professor Fouad and her colleagues have drawn up guidelines for the American Psychological Association to help psychotherapists better assist their clients with workplace issues and unemployment. It is wending its way through the association’s committees.

Of course, not everyone who is unemployed and over 50 is equal. For some, the reality is that they need to find another job – any job – to survive. Others have resources that can allow them to spend more time looking for a job that might have the salary or status of their former position.

In the first case, Professor Fouad said, “You need to decide what is the minimum amount of money you can make and how to go about finding it.” In the second case, she said, it’s necessary to examine what work means to you and how that may have to change.

Is it the high social status? The identity? The relationship with co-workers?

It is important to examine these areas, perhaps with the help of a professional counselor, Professor Fouad said, to discover how to find such meaning or relationships in other areas of life.

Sometimes simply changing the way you look at your situation can help.

Shortcuts: What It Takes to Make New College Graduates Employable

It’s that last part of the equation that I’m going to focus on. My heart sinks every time I read a news story or opinion piece quoting employers who charge that four-year colleges and universities are failing to provide graduates with the skills they need to become and remain employable.

Of course, in many ways, this isn’t a new story.

“A four-year liberal arts education doesn’t prepare kids for work and it never has,” said Alec R. Levenson a senior research scientist for the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California.

Mara Swan, the executive vice president of global strategy and talent at Manpower Group, agreed.

“There’s always been a gap between what colleges produce and what employers want,” she said. “But now it’s widening.” That’s because workplaces are more complex and globalized, profit margins are slimmer, companies are leaner and managers expect their workers to get up to speed much faster than in the past.

“Employers are under pressure to do more with less,” Ms. Swan said.

Unemployment rates for those with bachelor’s degrees or higher are still much better — at 3.8 percent in May — than those with only a high school diploma, which was 7.4 percent in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nonetheless, a special report by The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace published in March found that about half of 704 employers who participated in the study said they had trouble finding recent college graduates qualified to fill positions at their company.

But, surprisingly, it wasn’t necessarily specific technical skills that were lacking.

“When it comes to the skills most needed by employers, job candidates are lacking most in written and oral communication skills, adaptability and managing multiple priorities, and making decisions and problem solving,” the report said.

Jaime S. Fall, a vice president at the HR Policy Association, an organization of chief human resources managers from large employers, said these findings backed up what his organization was hearing over and over from employers.

Young employees “are very good at finding information, but not as good at putting that information into context,” Mr. Fall said. “They’re really good at technology, but not at how to take those skills and resolve specific business problems.”

This isn’t a dilemma just in this country, but around the world, Ms. Swan said. A global study conducted last year of interviews with 25,000 employers found that nine out of 10 employees believed that colleges were not fully preparing students for the workplace.

“There were the same problems,” she said. “Problems with collaboration, interpersonal skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity, flexibility and professionalism.”

But it’s easy for the issue to degenerate into finger-pointing.

“If you sat down with a committee of professors, and told them students are not coming out with the skills they need, they would say, ‘you’re smoking something,’ ” Mr. Levenson said. “The trouble is, those skills are applied in a college context, not a workplace context.”

But, he added, “you can’t create a school-based curriculum that can help someone transition to being highly productive on the job in 10 days.”

In other words, the onus shouldn’t just be on universities; employers also need to step up to the plate.

The in-depth training programs and apprenticeships of the past are unlikely to come back, so companies must become more innovative in helping young employees come up to speed, according to a report released in May by Accenture, a management consulting and outsourcing company.

“Rather than simply bemoaning the inability to find employees with the skills required for available jobs, organizations must step up with new and more comprehensive enterprise learning strategies,” Accenture stated in a summary of The Accenture 2013 College Graduate Employment Survey, which queried 1,010 students graduating from college in 2013 and 1,005 who graduated in 2011 and 2012.

The problem, it said, is that most recent college graduates expect employers to provide on-the-ground training, but most of them don’t actually receive it.

Shortcuts: A Call for a Movement to Redefine the Successful Life

EVERY day, news releases and books cross my desk that promise success in all sorts of areas — getting a job, getting a better job, managing your employees, managing your boss, managing your relationships.

Some are interesting, some are ridiculous and many are repetitive takes on the same theme. But recently, I came across two items that, separately, talked about an issue I’ve tackled before in one of my columns — questioning what we actually mean by success.

That column, which appeared almost a year ago to the day, discussed how we shouldn’t always aim for the extraordinary, but celebrate the ordinary. It was one of my most popular articles ever.

So I was intrigued when I was told that a conference was being held on the very issue of redefining success. And, separately, that American Express had recently released a study showing that Americans were thinking of success in different ways than in the past.

“The Third Metric: Redefining Success Beyond Money & Power” was the conference presented last week by Mika Brzezinski, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of the Huffington Post, at Ms. Huffington’s new apartment in TriBeCa (some 200 people squeezed into her living room).

Panels, covering topics ranging from “Managing a Frenetic Life” to “Wellness and the Bottom Line,” featured a number of prominent people, among them the actress Candice Bergen and Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama.

The message, one that Ms. Huffington is promoting in her publication and in speeches, is particularly aimed at women. “The way we define success isn’t working,” Ms. Huffington said at the conference. “More, bigger, better — we can’t do that anymore.”

The concepts seem a little fuzzy at times, but the overarching thesis is that it is time to rethink the common wisdom of how to achieve success: sleep four hours a night, work 20 hours a day, see your family rarely and never admit the need for downtime.

That system is wearing us down, Ms. Huffington said. In her commencement speech this year at Smith College, she told students, “If we don’t redefine success, the personal price we pay will get higher and higher. And as the data shows, the price is even higher for women than for men. Already women in stressful jobs have a nearly 40 percent increased risk of heart disease and a 60 percent greater risk for diabetes.

“Right now, America’s workplace culture is practically fueled by stress, sleep deprivation and burnout,” she said.

The answer? To create a movement that embraces the idea that physical and spiritual wellness — from meditation to exercise to good nutrition — are integral to, not separate from, a successful life.

She cited as one example the two nap rooms available for Huffington Post employees, which employees were at first afraid to use because they feared it looked as if they were shirking their duties. Now they are always booked.

Another answer: To build workplaces where empathy and kindness are rewarded, in the somewhat corny terminology of the speakers, where a go-giver is as desirable as a go-getter.

It all sounds wonderful, of course, but how does this fit into our society? Many people are working harder for less money, are concerned less about spiritual wholeness than basic health care, and find it hard to carve out time for a short coffee break, let alone a nap.

“This is well-intentioned and important,” Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said to me after she spoke at the conference, while acknowledging that “it’s luxurious to have the ability to rethink time in your life.”

It is easy to dismiss these ideas as the privileges available only to those who no longer have to worry about money or power. But perhaps a better reaction would be to find a way to incorporate them into public policy and to ensure that such ideas find their way from the bosses to the workers.

“The whole issue of overwork cuts across class,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the nonprofit Families and Work Institute. “We consistently find that one out of three employees feel overwhelmed by everything they have to do at work.”

Shortcuts: The Satisfaction, and Annoyance, of Complaining

I RECENTLY had a mundane exchange with an acquaintance that took an odd twist.

Me: “How’re you doing?”

Her: “Can’t complain. And you?”

Me: “Can’t complain either. But I still do.”

Typically, we would chuckle knowingly and move on. But instead, she pointed to a purple rubber bracelet on her arm, like the once-ubiquitous yellow Livestrong ones, and asked if I knew about AComplaintFreeWorld.org — the words etched on the bracelet.

The idea, she said, is that every time you complain, you switch the bracelet from one wrist to another. The goal is to go 21 days without complaining.

She recommended I visit Complaint Free World’s Web site, and then offered me her bracelet.

I took it, both intrigued and repelled by the idea.

Like many people, I have a love-hate relationship with complaining. There is little that is more satisfying than chewing over a meaty complaint about an idiotic service person or the really annoying thing that friend does or how unbelievably rude a teenager can be.

On the other hand, I really dislike people who constantly whine about the same thing. Or those who come to me seemingly wanting advice but then ignore my suggestions and continue grumbling about the same grievance.

So do I want a complaint-free world? Or just one free of the kind of complaints I don’t like?

It depends. Not many people believe we will ever have a world devoid of complaints. Nor should we.

“Psychologically, it’s really unhealthy to squelch complaints,” said Guy Winch, a psychologist and author of “The Squeaky Wheel.” “By not complaining aloud, it doesn’t mean the dissatisfaction has gone away. You’re just not voicing it.”

Some complaints serve as an icebreaker or a bonding experience. Grousing about the weather or traffic is an easy way to start a conversation or simply to avoid standing silently next to each other in an elevator.

“It’s one way to create rapport,” said Joanna Wolfe, a professor of English at Carnegie-Mellon University whose research focuses on communication styles. Complaining about a late bus with other riders, for instance, “creates kind of a solidarity,” she said. “I’ve made friends that way.”

So in my ideal world, I would not do away with those kinds of complaints, although Will Bowen, founder of A Complaint Free World, disagrees.

“A lot of research has been done that shows complaining is damaging to health, relationships and careers,” he said. “When people go 21 days without a complaint, they say they are happier.”

Instead of using a complaint as a conversation opener, he suggested, “talk to them about something good or positive.”

But, he said, his message should not be misunderstood.

He is not arguing that you can’t note when something is wrong. He says you should just do it directly in a neutral manner to the person responsible, not to everyone around you and not with a voice of outrage.

“Say, ‘The soup is cold, and could you warm it up,’ ” said Mr. Bowen, who is an ordained minister and has written the book “A Complaint Free World.” “Not, ‘How dare you serve me cold soup!’ ” Lose the whiny entitled air.

I agree with that. Too often people’s annoyance at a mishap or something they disagree with ratchets up to fury in a nanosecond, as if everyone and everything is out to get them.

I also agree with Mr. Bowen’s point that we often do not speak frankly to the person doing us wrong. I was in a class where everyone was annoyed at the teacher for regularly failing to show up on time. It was an easily fixable problem, but all of us — about a dozen — complained in whispers to one another for weeks.

A few grumbled to other teachers and even spoke to the head of the entire program. But nothing changed. Finally, one brave soul broached the subject directly with our teacher.

He responded graciously and started showing up promptly.

Shortcuts: Mindfulness Requires Practice and Purpose

LIKE most people, I have my share of tension and anxiety. And I’m happy to find ways to cope that don’t involve illegal drugs. So when the term mindfulness began cropping up everywhere, I became intrigued.

Elementary school students practice it. Doctors practice it — and their patients. Prisoners practice it. There’s mindful eating that promises a healthier way of eating. And scans show mindfulness may change the way our brains function and help us improve attention, reduce stress hormones and even bounce back faster from negative information.

But, skeptic that I am, I wondered if it was being oversold as a panacea that is simple, safe and involves no heavy objects.

First, I had to figure out what exactly it is. I had an understanding that mindfulness went hand-in-hand with meditation, but also that it was more than that.

“Intentionally paying attention to the present nonjudgmentally” is the way that Janice Marturano explains it. Ms. Marturano is a former deputy general counsel and vice president for public responsibility at General Mills, and helped start its Mindful Leadership Forum in 2004. She left a few years ago to start the nonprofit Institute for Mindful Leadership.

What it’s not, she said, is only about reducing stress. Or about emptying our minds of all thoughts. Or about religion.

“People have the sense that mindfulness is something they can do by focusing on a raisin for five minutes,” said Michael Baime, director of the Penn Program for Mindfulness at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. “That is mindful practice, but it takes more than that.”

So here’s what I learned about the basic techniques. First, find a quiet place to focus your attention — on your breath or perhaps on an object. It’s not deep breathing, but rather experiencing “when the breath enters and leaves,” Ms. Marturano said. “Feel the stretch in the rib cage, without me doing anything. Can I notice when the mind takes a hike and redirect it? That redirection is the exercise.”

Perhaps you start at 10 minutes and work your way up to half an hour or 40 minutes a day. But that’s only part of the whole practice.

There’s also what Ms. Marturano calls “purposeful pauses.” Deciding that instead of thinking of a coming meeting while brushing your teeth you really focus on the taste of the toothpaste and the bristles and the water.

“Take yourself out of autopilot,” she said. And eventually expand that “being in the moment” to other parts of your life.

The idea is that over time you’ll feel more focused and more connected to yourself and others.

It sounds simple, but it’s not, because it so goes against the grain of how most of us think and operate. We want to get things done, to identify and fix problems. And that’s the opposite of what mindfulness is all about.

“The way it’s presented in the media, people begin to believe it’s a magic pill,” said Christy Matta, author of the book “The Stress Response” (2012, New Harbinger Publications). “I’ll clear my mind and I’ll be peaceful and stress-free. If that’s what people think, they’ll be disappointed.”

Rather, she said, “it takes time and sustained practice to experience the benefits.”

And, she said, if you go into it with the idea of reducing stress, you’re working against the very thing you’re trying to attain, because you’re aiming toward a goal.

Mindfulness, “is about being present,” she said. “You have to do it just to do it. You can’t strive for things.”

While being aware of your feelings may be nice when drinking a lovely cup of tea or relaxing in a garden, Ms. Matta said, part of mindfulness is also uncomfortable feelings — not trying to change or judge them, but being aware of them. And that may not feel so pleasant.

Dr. Baime said another common misconception is that mindfulness is about learning to be happy. It’s not. Nor is it about eliminating stress.

“Stress doesn’t go away, ever. That’s why we call it stress management rather than stress elimination,” he said. Rather, he said, mindfulness can “create a world where you experience depth, meaning and connectedness. You see joy and sadness more fully and settle more deeply into an authentic way of being.”

If that’s a bit tough to wrap one’s mind around, that’s O.K. Just go with it.

Eventually, mindfulness is supposed to help us spend less time worrying about the future or fretting about the past. We’ll gain perspective, listen better and step back to consider more choices and make decisions more clearly and intentionally, rather than reactively, Ms. Marturano said.

But you shouldn’t assume that mindfulness is the one answer to everything.

For instance, while it has been used to good effect in classrooms, it shouldn’t be used in isolation, said Linda Lantieri, director of the nonprofit group the Inner Resilience Program.

Shortcuts: Advice for Keeping Holiday Parties and Guests Safe

LAST Thanksgiving, I learned a valuable safety tip: be careful when using a foil roasting pan. It can puncture and fat can drip in the oven, resulting in a fire.

All this caused quite some excitement because 22 people were waiting to be fed. We managed to save the turkey, though, and the oven suffered no long-term harm. But the incident reminded me that when we prepare meals and our homes for the holidays, most of us tend to concentrate on how nice everything will look and taste. We don’t really think about keeping our guests safe.

Cynthia Weber, a decorator in Ontario, remembers a similar situation.

She was at her aunt’s house for Christmas. “Boughs of pine were elegantly draped over the crystal chandelier above a stunning centerpiece of candles.” Everyone was seated at a formal dinner, complete with Waterford crystal and Limoges plates. Then, a candle lighted the pine on fire. Alarms went off and the security system started calling.

“We couldn’t swat at it because it was in midair attached to a crystal chandelier,” Ms. Weber said.

Her aunt, thinking quickly, went to get wet tea towels and smothered the flames.

“But everybody felt a little singed,” Ms. Weber said.

As the holidays approach, people start poring over decorating magazines and online sites and “get completely fixated on everything looking beautiful even if it’s completely impractical,” she said.

Most of us think first of beauty, then comfort, then safety, said David Mauldin, owner of the home repair company House Medic, based in Austin, Tex.

“That order should be reversed,” he said.

It may not be a Hallmark saying, but I strongly believe that a good holiday is one where you avoid the emergency room.

Start with the first impression your house will make. Is there adequate lighting, even in rain and fog? Is there a loose step?

As for beauty, take a hard look at your front door. Last year, my colleague Bob Tedeschi wrote a great article on how to spruce up your front door for the holidays, taking on everything from picking out a new doormat to installing new door handles and locks.

If you don’t want to do it yourself, Mr. Mauldin said his company, which is a franchise of HouseDoctors.com, can make a front door look almost like new in a few hours.

Although garlands draped over banisters can be festive, don’t forget that handrails serve an important practical function, Ms. Weber said.

“People are sometimes afraid to touch the banisters if they’re decorated,” she said. Securing a decoration to the outside of the rails allows people to still use them.

When your guests enter your house, make sure they’re not assaulted with an overload of smells. Hold back on the scented candles, Ms. Weber said, because the combination of food and perfume can become overwhelming.

We often entertain more people than usual at holidays and drag out card tables or folding chairs that we use only annually. Check to be sure that they’re in good operating order. At another Thanksgiving my family attended years ago, the beautifully laid table collapsed just as the turkey was placed on it.

And while dishes of colorful candies can be attractive, they can also be a choking hazard for toddlers, Ms. Weber said. Place them high enough so that children can reach them only with an adult’s help.

The bathroom may not be the first place you think of when entertaining, but it is a room a lot of guests will visit while in your house. Always make sure there’s a fairly full roll of toilet paper and if necessary, an extra one in easy sight. Finding the host to inquire about more toilet paper is never enjoyable.

Speaking of places to escape to, it’s not a bad idea, if possible, to set up a “quiet room” with no music or decorations for someone who needs to nurse a baby or recover from a headache, Ms. Weber said.

If you’re having houseguests stay over a night or more, the bathroom becomes even more important. Wet hair, steam and an unfamiliar shower can be a recipe for disaster.

“Most accidents happen when people are stepping from one wet surface to another,” Mr. Mauldin said. So make sure there’s a nonslip mat outside your shower.

Sometimes people want to go the extra distance to ensure their older guests’ safety in the bath and buy grab bars that stick to the walls with suction.

Shortcuts: Advice for Keeping Holiday Parties and Guests Safe

LAST Thanksgiving, I learned a valuable safety tip: be careful when using a foil roasting pan. It can puncture and fat can drip in the oven, resulting in a fire.

All this caused quite some excitement because 22 people were waiting to be fed. We managed to save the turkey, though, and the oven suffered no long-term harm. But the incident reminded me that when we prepare meals and our homes for the holidays, most of us tend to concentrate on how nice everything will look and taste. We don’t really think about keeping our guests safe.

Cynthia Weber, a decorator in Ontario, remembers a similar situation.

She was at her aunt’s house for Christmas. “Boughs of pine were elegantly draped over the crystal chandelier above a stunning centerpiece of candles.” Everyone was seated at a formal dinner, complete with Waterford crystal and Limoges plates. Then, a candle lighted the pine on fire. Alarms went off and the security system started calling.

“We couldn’t swat at it because it was in midair attached to a crystal chandelier,” Ms. Weber said.

Her aunt, thinking quickly, went to get wet tea towels and smothered the flames.

“But everybody felt a little singed,” Ms. Weber said.

As the holidays approach, people start poring over decorating magazines and online sites and “get completely fixated on everything looking beautiful even if it’s completely impractical,” she said.

Most of us think first of beauty, then comfort, then safety, said David Mauldin, owner of the home repair company House Medic, based in Austin, Tex.

“That order should be reversed,” he said.

It may not be a Hallmark saying, but I strongly believe that a good holiday is one where you avoid the emergency room.

Start with the first impression your house will make. Is there adequate lighting, even in rain and fog? Is there a loose step?

As for beauty, take a hard look at your front door. Last year, my colleague Bob Tedeschi wrote a great article on how to spruce up your front door for the holidays, taking on everything from picking out a new doormat to installing new door handles and locks.

If you don’t want to do it yourself, Mr. Mauldin said his company, which is a franchise of HouseDoctors.com, can make a front door look almost like new in a few hours.

Although garlands draped over banisters can be festive, don’t forget that handrails serve an important practical function, Ms. Weber said.

“People are sometimes afraid to touch the banisters if they’re decorated,” she said. Securing a decoration to the outside of the rails allows people to still use them.

When your guests enter your house, make sure they’re not assaulted with an overload of smells. Hold back on the scented candles, Ms. Weber said, because the combination of food and perfume can become overwhelming.

We often entertain more people than usual at holidays and drag out card tables or folding chairs that we use only annually. Check to be sure that they’re in good operating order. At another Thanksgiving my family attended years ago, the beautifully laid table collapsed just as the turkey was placed on it.

And while dishes of colorful candies can be attractive, they can also be a choking hazard for toddlers, Ms. Weber said. Place them high enough so that children can reach them only with an adult’s help.

The bathroom may not be the first place you think of when entertaining, but it is a room a lot of guests will visit while in your house. Always make sure there’s a fairly full roll of toilet paper and if necessary, an extra one in easy sight. Finding the host to inquire about more toilet paper is never enjoyable.

Speaking of places to escape to, it’s not a bad idea, if possible, to set up a “quiet room” with no music or decorations for someone who needs to nurse a baby or recover from a headache, Ms. Weber said.

If you’re having houseguests stay over a night or more, the bathroom becomes even more important. Wet hair, steam and an unfamiliar shower can be a recipe for disaster.

“Most accidents happen when people are stepping from one wet surface to another,” Mr. Mauldin said. So make sure there’s a nonslip mat outside your shower.

Sometimes people want to go the extra distance to ensure their older guests’ safety in the bath and buy grab bars that stick to the walls with suction.

Shortcuts: The Meaning in a Drawer Full of Old Family Snapshots

But as I began my research, I came across a Facebook page where lost photos from the storm were posted. Called “Union Beach — Photos and Misplaced Items,” the page shows photos of newborns and birthday parties, weddings and family gatherings.

Starting the morning after the storm devastated her community of Union Beach, N.J., Jeanette Van Houten and her niece have collected over a thousand photos and some photo albums. She is making it her mission to scan and post to Facebook as many as possible, including those turned into the fire department, police station and borough hall.

In addition, she was handed a drawerful of over a thousand family photos that must have been wrenched from a dresser.

About 60 photos have been claimed so far, and some professionals have offered to restore damaged photos free.

“These photos were passed down through families and they survived Sandy, even if the structures they were in didn’t,” Ms. Van Houten said. “They tell our story.”

With the Facebook page, Ms. Van Houten uses newer technology to help people reconnect with their old-fashioned snapshots. And seeing the photographs of mundane scenes and milestones on Facebook, along with the grateful comments from people who got back a bit of their lives, reminded me of both the fragility and strength of photos and their continuing importance in our lives. Judith Dupré, author of “Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory” (Random House, 2007), and other books, teaches a class at her local library in Mamaroneck, N.Y., called “Stories from My Life,” for older residents. They use photos and stories to write about their lives.

“They bring in a basketful of photos,” Ms. Dupré said. “Each one of these photos contains a story — they’re like a key that opens the door to a life.”

And a printed photo “is a different species than a digital photo,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s figured out the place of digital photos in terms of memory keeping.”

When an elderly aunt of hers died and left behind lots of photographs, Ms. Dupré said the family took them to the memorial service.

“We had a table and people could select and take what they wanted,” she said. “It was a very moving part of the memorial.”

Of course, even prints can lose their meaning and poignancy through the generations.

And in some cases, as with Hurricane Sandy, photos may be safer in cyberspace than in an album on a bookshelf — as long as you remember to upload them to a site like Flickr, Shutterfly, Snapfish or countless other photo sites available. (And make sure you know how long a site will keep your photos. Some, for example, require you to show some activity at least once a year.) That way, if you lose your hard drive, you don’t lose your photos.

But Ms. Dupré said she worried that photos that existed only online somewhere might die with the photographer.

“I don’t even know what my parents have in terms of digital photography,” she said. She said she put the password to her photos safely away with her will and other documents, so her children can access them.

Now I’m not trying to say that the old-fashioned way is the only way. Photography has constantly evolved. The Brownie camera, first sold by Kodak for $1 in 1900, radicalized photography by making it available to just about everyone.

But, and I know this largely a generational thing, I can’t help but wonder about the ubiquity of the cellphone photo. As Ms. Dupré said, “The infinite number of digital photos that can be taken has devalued the single image and made one-of-a-kind prints that much more precious.”

Shortcuts: Grappling With a New Economic Reality

I’M finding myself having the same conversation over and over with friends whose children are applying to college. We want them to be able to go to the best institution they can get into, but we may not be able to afford it.

And we’re having a hard time pairing our expectations with the reality.

It’s not that we’ve been immune from the economic turmoil that has troubled the country. The magazine my husband worked at folded in 2009, and though we were luckier than most and he eventually found other work, it was a scary time.

We dealt with it by paring back on eating out, vacations and other nonessentials. But it wasn’t until we faced the reality of a college tuition bill that we realized how difficult it was to let go of the assumptions we’d had all our lives.

And we’re not the only ones. Consider the students graduating from college who expected the same kind of lifestyle — or better — than their parents had and the 60-somethings who anticipated a comfortable, if not luxurious, retirement.

“We have made an upper-middle-class income and are living an upper-middle-class life, but with how the economy has played out, we need to make more middle-class decisions, and we refuse to do it,” said a friend of mine, who asked that her name not be used because she didn’t want her friends to know her financial situation. “We live paycheck to paycheck. We’re in debt, but we can’t wrap our heads around not being able to” allow their son to apply to an expensive private university.

“When we had these kids 18 years ago, we started saving for college,” she said. “We moved to an expensive town so they could soar and achieve and go as high as they could.” Then, her husband lost his job and took a while to find a new one.

“The economic landscape has changed, but we’re still rooted in our attitude that we had when we had these kids 18 years ago,” she said. “It’s so hard to realign our attitudes with the economic reality.”

And she knows that she and her husband are not doing their children any favors if they end up heavily in debt and have no money for retirement.

My friend is not alone in grappling with this dichotomy. Findings from the 14th quarterly Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor Polls released in October, which explored perceptions about upward mobility among Americans, found that nearly half of those surveyed say they had more opportunity to get ahead than their parents did.

But only about one-third said they believed there would be more opportunity for their children than in the past. The poll surveyed 1,000 to 1,250 people, depending on the question, by phone.

“The majority believe they will get ahead and live the American dream in their lifetime,” said Joan Walker, executive vice president for corporate relations at Allstate. “But they worry whether that dream will be available for their children. Americans understand that risk has been transferred from institutions to individuals and the future is very uncertain. Now, it’s not so much about getting ahead, but holding steady.”

Jennifer Turner, who lives outside Harrisburg, Pa., has younger children — 6 and 8 years old — so the tuition dilemma is still distant on the horizon. But ever since her husband lost his job at a stone quarry in 2009 and started his own auto body repair and refinishing shop, times have been tough.

“I grew up on a dairy farm and money was always tight,” she said. “We had secondhand clothes and didn’t eat out. Those things aren’t bad, but I thought we would be able to do more.”

She attended a four-year college and foresaw an easier life than her parents had.

“But we’re living paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “We’re trying to stretch it and sometimes it doesn’t stretch.” After-school activities like dance for her daughter and wrestling and gymnastics for her son are a thing of the past.

Will her daughter be able to attend college?

“If she does really good in school and gets scholarships and works,” Ms. Turner said.

But after resisting the idea for a long time, she said she was finally coming to terms with the reality of her life.

“We may not be able to do what other people do. I see commercials for Disney and would love to be able to give that to my kids,” she said. “But I need to accept that I can’t, instead of fighting it and being resentful.”

The expectation that life will just continue improving generation by generation is also part of the thinking of those now in college and in their 20s.

Shortcuts: Recycling Helps, but It’s Not All You Can Do for the Environment

LIKE most households, we recycle pretty religiously. It’s easy, though, because our town in suburban New York allows us to throw pretty much everything into one bin, and it gets picked up at the curb.

Recycling has become so automatic that if we’re out and there’s no place to recycle that soda can or bottle, it feels slightly illicit to just drop it in the trash. It’s like littering. You just don’t do it.

Lately, however, I started wondering — are we really doing anything with all this recycling besides feeling better about the stuff we buy?

Much of the discussion has focused on the economic impact. That issue has been batted back and forth with mixed results, although most experts now agree that cities have become more experienced and more effective — and therefore made it more cost-efficient — to recycle most products rather than dump them in landfills.

I’m more curious about what impact it has on other environmental behavior. And when I started looking at that more closely, I discovered that there’s an intense debate going on about this issue.

Recycling “is good civic behavior,” said Samantha MacBride, an assistant professor of public affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York, but it’s oversold as a panacea to a whole host of environmental ills, from overflowing landfills to global warming. “I wouldn’t say that people who do recycling feel they’ve done everything they can by participating, but they think there’s a lot more being achieved than there actually is,” she said. Nationally, said Professor MacBride, who is the author of “Recycling Reconsidered” (MIT Press, 2011), recycling prevents only about one-third of all trash from ending up in landfills.

Partly, she said, that is because people are not recycling everything they can. Partly it’s because the recycling model in most municipalities of picking up a bin with all the recyclables mixed together, especially the plastics, doesn’t work well.

“There’s a huge range of plastic materials and hundreds of different resins,” Professor MacBride said. “We need markets and processes to route them back into production and for the most part, those processes don’t exist.”

So some plastics are sent in bales to China and developing countries, and some are disposed of in landfills.

The emphasis, she said, has to be much more on regulating and recycling waste from manufacturers rather than consumer waste.

The other problem is that while “recycling is a wonderful thing to do if we’re comparing it to throwing stuff away, it has become a reward for consumption,” said Michael Maniates, a professor of environmental science at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

Gernot Wagner, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund and author of “But Will the Planet Notice: How Smart Economics Can Save the World,” (Hill and Wang, 2011), agrees. “There’s a well-documented phenomenon known as single-action bias, where people do one thing and move on,” he said. “People don’t explicitly think, ‘I’ve recycled a cup and solved global warming,’ but rather once they’ve done an action like recycling, they feel consciously or subconsciously like they’ve done their part.”

Or as the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, which is affiliated with the Earth Institute at Columbia University, says on its Web site: “Although recycling is important, it should be but one activity in a series of behavior changes aimed at reducing climate change. Switching to wind or other renewable energies, consuming less meat, conserving daily energy use and eating locally grown food are other effective ways to mitigate climate change, to name but a few. However, if individuals and institutions participate in recycling programs, they may be prone to the single-action bias and feel like they are already doing enough to protect the environment.”

Hold on there, said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist and director of the solid waste project at the environmental organization the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I’ve never dealt with a person or company who said, ‘We recycle so we don’t have to do anything else.’ It’s, ‘We recycle, what else can we do?’ ”

Shortcuts: The Perils of Setting Goals

Whether it be swimming with dolphins (an oddly common choice), writing a book, trekking through Nepal or all three, it’s not that the ideas are inherently bad. Rather, it is already too easy to reduce lives to a series of goals that we aim for, reach and then move on.

But goals are good, right? Aren’t we always told they’re the best way to get to where we want to be?

It turns out that that’s not necessarily true, personally and professionally.

I’ll get back to the bucket lists in a bit. But first, let’s look at what some of the research tells us about goals.

“We know goal-setting is a very powerful motivating force,” said Maurice E. Schweitzer, a professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Whether it’s a runner who wants to set a certain time or a salesperson aiming for a number of sales, goals give us meaning, purpose and guidance.”

But, said Professor Schweitzer, who co-wrote a paper in 2009 “Goals Gone Wild,” which appeared in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives, things got a little out of hand.

“The proponents of goals focused on the benefits of the goals, not the harm, and too many businesses went too far, saying ‘Here’s what we want you to accomplish,’ and implicitly saying, ‘We don’t care how you got there.’ ”

And that, he said, can lead to, among other things, unethical behavior.

Lisa D. Ordóñez, a professor of management and organizations at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, described experiments that proved this point. In one, participants were asked to create as many words as possible using letters — sort of like the game Boggle. In one group, the participants were given a goal of nine words, and if met, they would receive some money. In a second group, they were given a goal but no financial incentive. And those in the third group were simply told to try their best.

The students who participated were given a chance to check their words in a dictionary to make sure they were true English words. They threw out the worksheets, and turned in the answer sheet that only stated how many words they had finished.

But the academic researchers running the experiment had a code to match the worksheets with the answer sheets and discovered that both groups that had been given a goal of creating a certain number of words — whether or not money was involved — cheated 8 to 13 percent of the time. Those in the third group rarely did.

“It’s not that goals are bad,” said Professor Ordóñez, who was also a co-author of the “Goals Gone Wild” article. “We’re just saying be careful.”

For example, a lot has been written about tying teachers’ merit pay or jobs to how well their students do on standardized tests. The goal is to find a way to evaluate teachers’ abilities. But this has led to a number of problems, including, in some cases, teachers cheating to raise students’ scores.

“Part of the larger problem is, How do we measure performance?” she said. “We want to put our money where we are better served — I get that. But what we end up measuring is not always the most important thing but the easiest to measure.”

Gary P. Latham, a professor of organizational effectiveness at the University of Toronto, has long studied the positive effects of goals. It’s not that goals are bad, he said, but that problems arise when the values that underlie them and the process to achieve them are skewed.

“If you’re going to be overly reductionist, then you’re behaving stupidly,” he said. “You can have multiple goals for complex behavior.”

Professor Schweitzer agreed that it’s a problem when goals become too narrowly focused.