Leadership

Lunchtime Links: Why the Boss is Smiling

According to a new study, bosses generally tend to be happier than their employees—despite the extra stress that comes with the bigger paycheck. Also: The highly regarded iOS calendar app Sunrise gets an update.

According to a new study, bosses generally tend to be happier than their employees—despite the extra stress that comes with the bigger paycheck. Also: The highly regarded iOS calendar app Sunrise gets an update.

Perhaps this doesn’t come as a surprise, but there’s a good chance everything’s going pretty OK for you if you’re the boss: good family life, good job, and your financial situation might actually be looking pretty solid.

According to a new study, you’re not alone. More on that in today’s Lunchtime Links.

Happy like a boss: Sure, your job comes with a lot of extra stress that the rank-and-files don’t have to deal with, but if you’re the boss, you’ve got a lot going for you. That’s according to a new Pew Research Center survey that finds 83 percent of bosses are “very satisfied” with family life, 69 percent enjoy their current job, and 40 percent are happy about their financial situation. Those numbers top the comparable levels for workers in all three categories—particularly in being “very satisfied” with their current job. “Not only do bosses earn more money,” Pew’s Rich Morin writes, “they are significantly more likely than workers to think of their job as a career (78 percent vs. 44 percent) and less likely to say it’s just a job to get them by (13 percent vs. 36 percent).” How are you feeling about your job these days?

Titles and perception: Tying into the Pew study findings is this insight that Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog breaks down from its own 2014 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report: The kinds of issues that people working at nonprofits report facing tend to vary by their position in the organization. “If you are an executive director, you are more likely to pick lack of budget for direct expenses as one of your top three challenges,” Kivi LeRoux Miller writes. “If you are at the director or manager level in either marketing or fundraising, you are more likely to say that your biggest challenge is lack of time to produce quality content. If your job title includes assistant or coordinator in either marketing or fundraising, you are more likely to say that lack of clear strategy is a top challenge.” Miller ponders whether these differences speak to bigger trends.

A better calendar? If you’re on the hunt for a new way to schedule all things big and small in your life, keep an eye on the calendar app Sunrise, which just received a big update this week. The iOS app, now available for iPad, offers up an intelligent feed of what’s happening next in your calendar. Part of the appeal is the interface designed to reduce the amount of user input needed and help you intelligently find free time, according to TechCrunch—which named the iPhone version one of its best apps of 2013. “When it comes to calendar apps, most of the time you have to fight with your calendar to add information and see what you want,” TechCrunch explains. “But it’s the opposite with Sunrise.” The new version utilizes background updates to ensure that whenever you open your app, your busy calendar is up to date.

Have a favorite calendar app of your own, or are you still a pen-and-paper person? Let us know in the comments.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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