Blog Posts by BNET

By Peter Greenberg

Travelers have plenty of reasons to be angry at the airlines these days. Airlines are piling on ancillary fees, even while flying has become an ordeal, with delays leaving fliers stuck on the tarmac or stranded in airports.

But often overlooked are the airline employees who quietly go out of their way-sometimes against official policy- to help customers.

Case in point:the Southwest Airlines pilot who recently held a plane at the gate for a man rushing to be with his daughter after her 3-year-old son was murdered. My friend Chris Elliott, travel consumer advocate and reporter, shared this dramatic story on his site, Elliott.org.

In an email to Chris, the man's wife explained they had received the tragic news that his 3-year-old grandson (and her step grandson) in Denver had been murdered by their daughter's live-in boyfriend. Her husband, along with his employer, made last minute flight arrangements to get to Denver via Tucson on Southwest. Though he

By Melanie Warner

Many fast food restaurants are planning a pig-out for 2011, introducing indulgent, high-calorie menu items, like a six-cheese, double bacon pizza from Papa John's (PZZA) and an "ultimate breakfast platter" from Burger King, which has 1,300 calories and could feed an entire family.

At a time when many people say they want to lose weight, these new additions to the extreme dining trend call our collective bluff and reveal that Americans don't actually want to eat healthier, at least when it comes to restaurants. It's a gaping dietary double standard - we care about healthy choices at the grocery store, but throw caution to the wind when eating out, somehow acquiescing to the idea that pizza benefits from a double helping of bacon.

According to an LA Times article, here are a few other gut busting items that will be hitting the menu boards soon:

• Taco Bell's (YUM) double ham and cheddar melt and a sausage skillet burrito. And breakfast items that involve

By Joanne Cleaver

Yes, Virginia, there is (still) a pay gap. And, gals, this is your fault! Just in time to open the new year on a note of intellectual dishonesty, here's a hit parade of recently reiterated alleged facts about why women make less than men in most circumstances:

• Women choose to make less and not get promoted - women just aren't ambitious enough. And aren't they smart to sidestep the rat race!
• When faced with a choice between career and family, women always choose family
• If you take advantage of programs like flexwork and telecommuting, it's only fair that you trade away greater pay.
• Women work fewer hours, so of course should get paid less (notice that this charge is always divorced from productivity measures).
• Women lose momentum when they ramp in and out of the workforce to attend to family responsibilities, which obviously should be penalized.
• Yup, it's all about that cushy lifestyle that lulls so many women into economic dependency,

By Jessica Stillman

If you're young and low on the career ladder, your first few jobs out of college may not be immediately scintillating. Sure, you're building skills, learning how to get on in the corporate world and expanding your resume, but let's face it, on the day-to-day level making photocopies, routine paperwork or unboxing computers can be plain old boring. You're not a job hopper and aren't ready to move on yet, so how can you improve the gig you've got now?

Writing on blog Productivity 501, Mark Shead answers a bored reader's prayers for suggestions on how to make his routine IT support job more interesting, offering four suggestions that might be helpful to anyone who is less than challenged by their current gig:

• Ask for more responsibility. When I was in college I took a summer job at a hospital where they needed someone to unbox computers and set them up. It was pretty simple stuff and I was in a position where computers weren't coming in all the time. So I'd

By Laura Vanderkam

After assessing the damage the holidays have done to our waistlines, many of us start the new year vowing to lose weight. Those who are serious about it will soon encounter this nutritionist commandment: keep a food journal. Writing down everything we eat is a sobering exercise - sometimes literally, when you see how many calories alcohol contains - but it also works. The act of observing something changes the thing being observed, and makes you think twice about grabbing a miniature Snickers bar every time you walk past the receptionist's desk.

That's why, when people ask me how they can start to spend their time better, I tell them to act like dieters. But instead of keeping a food journal, they should log their time.

Here's how: For a week, write down everything you do and when you do it (you can use this time management spreadsheet). You can also see public examples of my own time logs here and here.

After a week, break your activities into

By Joanne Cleaver

FacebookCOO Sheryl Sandberg created a stir by urging women to get ahead by staying the course and by getting braver about self-promotion.

At December's TEDWomen conference, she outlined three changes that women should make to position themselves for top leadership jobs.

• Have a truly supportive spouse
• Trumpet your successes
• Don't coast in anticipation of the mommy track

Sandberg proved herself a masterful communicator connecting with the audience with an anecdote about an internal Facebook meeting in which she'd given a presentation and then told the group that she'd only answer two questions. But after the two questions, the men kept their hands up and Sandberg continued to answer their questions. She only realized what had happened later that day when a young woman in the company commented that her own takeaway from the meeting was to "keep her hand up."

Yes, but.

Here is the problem with Sandberg's argument:

By Steve Tobak

We used to complain about all the useless back-to-back meetings and being copied on hundreds of unnecessary emails. Who knew it could get so much worse. We used to say there's no such thing as over-communication. Now we'd do anything to make it stop.

Communication is out of control and it's taking all the fun - and productivity - out of work.

Don't get me wrong, communication is as important to business success and organizational effectiveness as it used to be. There's just too much of it. For whatever reason, the old problem of protecting domains by limiting the flow of information has morphed into a new problem of hyper-collaboration where everybody's included in everything.

If you ask me, the communication pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, although I'm not really sure why:

• Is it simply the umpteenth fad, an overemphasis on communication, collaboration, and teamwork because that's the way we're supposed to do things now?
• Is it an

By Laura Vanderkam

A few years ago, Alisa Bowman was sure her marriage was falling apart. She fantasized about divorce (or her husband's untimely death) several times a day. But rather than call a lawyer, this Pennsylvania-based journalist decided to test drive marriage advice from multiple self-help books, learning how to voice concerns, argue fairly, and invest time in her relationship. She found the process so effective that she and her husband renewed their vows.

Her memoir about the saga, Project: Happily Ever After, is out later this month. As I was reading a galley, I realized that her advice applies to any long-term commitment, including the relationship we have with our jobs. In an interview, Bowman shares how marriage advice can help you at work, too.

Q. You managed to turn around your marriage in four months. Could someone could use the same process to salvage a bad job situation?

A. Yes. I've now used the project approach to improve nearly every area of my life: