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Anne Frank’s checkered diary is sitting on a desk. Trinkets are scattered on the shelf above itsome pencils, black-and-white photos, and a pair of metal scissors. Postcards and photos of 1920s celebrities like Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer are pasted on the yellowed wallpaper behind it. The room looks almost as though Anne was just there, picking photos to put up on the wall. But nothing actually happened here. Because here is in a room, in a museum, in Manhattan. And the room is not the secret annex where Anne spent two years in hidingit is an exact replica. Opening on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Anne Frank the Exhibition was created by the Anne Frank House inside the Center for Jewish History. The exhibition offers the first opportunity outside of Amsterdam for visitors to see how Anne, her family, and four other Jewish people lived in an 800-square foot space, in hiding from the Nazis. [Photo: John Halpern] Anyone who has visited the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam knows that the original secret annex is eerily empty. That’s by design. After the family was arrested, the apartment was pillaged by the Nazis and left bare. Anne’s father, Otto, who was the only survivor among the people who lived there, wanted to keep it that way to symbolize the emptiness he felt when he returned from the Auschwitz concentration camp. By comparison, the New York annex looks lived in. Visitors are getting a completely different experience, says Tom Brink, the head of collections and presentations at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and the exhibitions curator. The New York annex portrays Anne less as a victim and more as a young girl who liked collecting postcards and dreamed of becoming a journalist. A young girl whose life was cut short by the Holocaust. Anne Franks poetry book [Photo: Ray van der Bas] From Amsterdam to New York At the Manhattan museum, the story of Anne Frank feels both timely and suspended in time thanks to the exhibition design, which splits the show into two parts. There’s the exhibition, which begins in the 1920s and ends in the present day with 79 editions of Anne Franks The Diary of a Young Girl displayed in different languages. Then there is the replica of the secret annex, which appears somewhere in the middle (both physically and temporally), from behind a giant bookcase. Designer Eric Goossens was responsible for the exhibition, while set designers Annemiek Swinkels and Willem Claassena couple based in Amsterdamfocused on the replica of the secret annex. [Photo: John Halpern] The Frank family had ties to New York, which is why the Anne Frank House chose New York City as the first location for this exhibition. (Otto worked as an intern in the Macy’s department store, then tried emigrating to the U.S. before going into hiding.) But Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, says the team is not excluding the possibility of a traveling exhibition, so the set designers had to build the show like a kit of parts that could be assembled and reassembledlike a Lego set, Swinkels says. The set designers spent months building the annex in the Netherlands, then sent it across the Atlantic in one giant shipping container. [We] used lots and lots of security straps, says Swinkels, noting that when the set finally arrived in New York, the team spent three weeks dressing it with various artifacts and furniture. The Anne Frank Foundation wanted it to look like the people in hiding were living there, and that’s hard if you don’t go for details, she says. The annex looks artificial and authentic at oncealmost like a life-size doll house where eight people played house for two years until the real world caught up to them. But visitors who can move past this dissonance will be rewarded with a poignant story that was made all the richer by the designers’ painstaking re-creation, which includes peeling wallpaper, and pencil marks chronicling Anne’s and her sister Margot’s heights. [Photo: John Halpern] Turning a set into a lived-in house Swinkels and Claassen are no strangers to Anne Frank’s life. In 2020, they built the set for a local TV show called Anne Frank Video Diary. They pored over Anne’s diary looking for details about layout and furnishings. They spent one whole night measuring and documenting every inch of the actual annex in Amsterdam. They scoured antique shops and local secondhand markets for replica furniture that matched the aesthetic of the annex, like wooden light switches, old light bulbs, and a Delft-tile ceramic toilet. They also referenced a scale model Otto had built in 1961 that hinted at the decor and furniture layout inside the annex, as well as a VR tour that the Anne Frank House launched in 2018. By the time they were invited to design the New York replica, the designers had amassed a wealth of knowledge, but because they had broken down the set after the TV series wrapped, they had to source new pieces from scratch. Otto Franks chair [Photo: Ray van der Bas] The designers met various people from all over the Netherlands to source the furniture. Anne’s replica desk, for example, came from an 85-year-old Dutch gentleman who was just 5 when Allied soldiers drove through his street. He felt really proud when he saw the table in the set, Swinkels recalls. Otto’s replica bed came from an elderly woman named Jutta; it had belonged to her grandparents who lived in Germany. We tried our best to collect real antique props and not copies, says Swinkels. But what mattered more wasn’t buying the exact chair, or getting right the exact corner on which Otto would’ve left his spectacles. It was getting Anne’s story right. In the kitchen, visitors will notice two objects. One is a board game about the stock market. The other is a partly darned sock tangled in sewing tape. The board game is the same one that Anne and Peter van Pels (Anne’s boyfriend and one of the seven people she lived with) played while in hiding. The sock is imaginary. But both objects paint the portrait of a family trying to live a normal lifein horrendously abnormal circumstances. Past and present collide The exhibition focuses on the past, but it is also about the present. This story tells us something about who we are, who we can be, and who we want to be as human beings, says Leopold. Indeed, the show opens just days after billionaire Elon Musk, celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States, threw his arm out into what many interpreted as a Nazi salute. It comes at a time when far-right extremism is rising all over the world. A time when antisemitism is skyrocketing alongside hate crimes against muslims, Asian Americans, and the LGBTQ+ community, most recently reeling from Trump’s executive order stating that there are only two genders. The exhibition is a reminder to stand against discrimination and prejudice, whether its in Israel or Gaza, Sudan or Ukraine, the U.S. or Mexico. Its a beacon of remembrance, says Leopold. Of the past. But of the present, too.
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E-Commerce
Its 6:14 a.m. and you, the middle manager, wake up to the rumbling of your phone on your nightstand. You know you should have notifications silenced but your VPs time zone is three hours ahead and when they want an update, everyone is expected to drop everything. Seven unread Slack messages. Your stomach drops. The Q1 goals check-in was this morning and your direct report didnt update the slides with the latest metrics. You throw off the sheets, hit brew on the coffee maker, and open your laptop. Im on it! you respond and jump into the deck to make the changes. Your day was already slammed with meetings, but now you have to come up with time to give your team member feedback on missing those updates. Getting your 5-year-old out the door with matching shoes on is a piece of cake compared to the day you have ahead of you: 9:30 a.m.: Smooth things over with your VP after they got to the meeting with an incomplete deck. 10 a.m.: Team meeting to relay the plan ratified in the Q1 goals meeting, discussing each team members priorities and load balancing where necessary. 11 a.m.: Interview a new project coordinator candidate. 11:30 a.m.: Lead a cross-functional project kickoff meeting. 12:30 p.m.: Squeeze in the feedback meeting with your team who put the wrong updates in the deck. Listen to their counter feedback that its actually your fault because you didnt remind them the day before. 12:55 p.m.: Scarf down a sandwich at your desk. 1 p.m.: Talent review meeting with HR. 2 p.m.: 1:1 with a direct report to brainstorm the next steps on a project. 2:30 p.m.: Work on the project strategy deck for tomorrows review. 3 p.m.: Attend a meeting that four of your team members are also in 3:30 p.m.: Quick chat with a team member giving their two-week notice. 3:45 p.m.: Silently scream in a bathroom stall while rocking yourself, thinking about the mountain of work that the team member is leaving behind. 4 p.m.: The manager stops by to brief you on a new project to take on. 4:30 p.m.: Jump back onto the deck for tomorrows meeting. 5 p.m.: Race to the car to get to school in time for 5:30 p.m. daycare pickup. . . . and youll do it all again tomorrow. This is just a peek into the day in the life of a middle manager. Sounds like a little much? Research on context switching says it takes about 23 minutes to regain focus once weve stopped doing something, making the rapid-fire 30-minute back-to-back-to-backs a problem in and of itself. But these wouldnt be such an issue if the nature of the meetings were the same. Its not the volume of things thats the kicker, its the continual “altitude shifting” from strategic partner leading kickoff meetings with senior leaders to presentation designer building slides that someone else will present that makes the job of a manager so exhausting. As a former corporate middle manager myself, now a consultant and trainer of managers across companies big and small, the shift from big picture to granular over and over throughout the day prevents you from really feeling like you can contribute in a meaningful way. We might be sick of hearing about burnout, but people are still feeling it, big time. As recently as recently as 2023, according to Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index Report, 53% of managers reported feeling burned out, 5% more than their non-manager counterparts. No wonder some have resorted to ghosting their teams. So what do we do about it? Here are three simple ways to reduce the pain caused by altitude shifting. Group similar meetings Group together similar kinds of meetings on the same days, for example having all of your 1:1 meetings on Mondays to kick off the week or project meetings on Tuesdays when folks are in othe ffice together. When our calendar looks like Swiss cheese, we can get in the habit of slotting in meetings whenever we have a free moment, but this reinforces the overwhelm of having to operate at so many different levels in one day. You might not be able to make this change today, or even this week, but make it a goal to look two to three weeks ahead and start grouping similar meetings on the same days. Plan and schedule heads down time One of the biggest challenges created by meetings overload, something that pretty much every manager Ive ever worked with experiences, is that theres virtually no time for project work. This often means project work is left to the hours of 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. before you finally pass out from exhaustion (and we wonder why were burning out). Instead of fitting work in where you can, plan for it. Find and schedule one to two hours every week for project time, during working hours, that you dont schedule over. This will allow you to get stuff done without incurring the cost of the 23 minutes lost from context switching. Delegate the small stuff Managers hate when I talk about delegating in the context of time management, but Im sorry, my friend, because it is your secret weapon for getting more time back. More than that, its going to get you to the right level of altitude you should be focused at, instead of dropping into the details all of the time. Look across all of the meetings you have each week and tasks on your plate, and identify what meaningful things you could hand off to a team member that will help you scale better. For example, invite a team member to do a first-round interview with a potential candidate, skip the meeting your team members are also in, and ask them to email you a recap, give that team member another chance on the slide updates, and let them own the deck. Handing these off (while setting clear expectations and defining what success looks like) allows you to spend more of your limited time actually leading your team. Ultimately, the middle manager’s role is to empower their teams to grow. Its impossible to do this when were too stuck in all the details and barely able to come up for air. Get ahead of this by actively managing your calendar, planning your work, and delegating effectively; you will not only have a team that rises to the challenge of taking more on, but your job will get a lot easier as a middle manager.
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E-Commerce
As you establish your career, you want to find a way to be seen as reliable. That means developing habits that enable you to be a consistent performer so that you are recognized as someone who will complete what you are asked to do, on time and with high quality. I used the word “habits” here on purpose. Being consistent is not something that is easy to do if you have to think about what to do in every situation. Instead, you need to have behaviors that you engage automatically each day that enable you to perform day in and day out. Here are a few ways to develop the critical habits that support your consistency: Have a solid routine One of the most significant factors that can hold you back from being consistent is the way you live your life overall. Being consistent at work means showing up on time and being able to concentrate effectively throughout the day. If you are consistently running late on the way to work, you will feel like youre playing catch-up all day. If your energy levels get low at key parts of the day, you are not going to be as productive. Perhaps the most important thing you can do to develop more consistency is to get regular sleep. There are individual differences in how much sleep people need, but most people need about eight hours of good sleep a night. As boring as it may seem, getting to bed at a consistent time each night is important. Avoid substances like caffeine or alcohol that can disrupt your sleep patterns. Regular exercise helps as well. The state of your body also influences the state of your mind. When your body is functioning well, your concentration is also improved. Good sleep has lots of benefits. It helps to create more even energy levels throughout the day. Sleep also helps to remove toxins from the brain that promotes long-term health. In addition, sleep allows you to maintain your emotional resilience. Sleep lessens the persistent impact of events that lead to negative emotions. A regular routine also helps you to arrive at work on time. When you wake up at the same time each day, you can plan to be ready to work on time. This is particularly important if you have to commute to an office. Slow and steady wins the race Consistency is about ensuring that you get high-quality work done every day. Bringing your best self to work requires you to understand your own work style. Everyone has an optimal amount of effort they can put in daily and still be ready to come back to work the next day. When you put in a lot more effort than that on a given day, you are likely to come back the following day with a decreased ability to concentrate, which can lead to a lot of wasted time. Structure your workday to find that optimal marathon pace that will allow you to be ready to work effectively each day. Avoid prolonged sprints. Work with your supervisor to prioritize tasks so that you are not putting in long hours that make you less effective as time goes on. Start working on long-term projects in advance so that you are not pressed against deadlines in ways that lead you to late nights. Pay attention to negative feedback Often, when something at work goes badly, you want to avoid thinking about it. After all, rehashing a mistake or failure is painful to do. It brings back feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy that are physically uncomfortable to experience. Yet, there is a lot of important information in the errors and failures you experience at work. You may not be able to delve into those details on the day you experience a failure, but after a few days (and nights of sleep), you will be better able to think about those bad outcomes. Use those experiences to identify places where things went wrong. If you have a hard time figuring that out for yourself, talk to your supervisor or a trusted mentor to get feedback. Consistency requires learning from mistakesyou dont want to be consistent in the errors you make. The more that you practice doing your own postmortem analyses of errors, the easier it becomes to do them in the future. When you recognize the benefits of changing your behavior as a result of mistakes, you will start to see the opportunities in errors rather than just the consequences of tasks that went wrong. That can lessen the impact of negative feelings that come along with failures.
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E-Commerce
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