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Summertime can present an interesting tension for many of us.
On the one hand, we spend more time enjoying the world and the people we love, away from screens. On the other hand, those screens are how we often capture the gazillion ideas running through our heads.
For what it’s worth, many clients and readers have told me that part of their anxiety about going without a device for a few days (or longer) is they don’t know where they’re going to capture ideas and to-dos. Even when I remind them about notecards and little notebooks, they feel overwhelmed at the prospect of getting all of those ideas and to-dos from analog into whatever digital tool they use to capture and track them.
In a post for another day, I’ll tackle what’s really going on with this “capture everything” anxiety, but, for today, I’m going to focus on toolsets rather than mindsets.
What you’ve probably experienced is that the problem with loose tasks and ideas isn’t how much time they’re going to take to do, but that a) they don’t have a default home and b) they keep nagging you to remember them. By “default home,” I don’t mean the 82 sticky notes all over the place. Those sometimes cause more swirl because you have to remember which ideas are on what stickies and where those stickies are.
Being away from your default home (and toolsets) is what makes the summertime especially spacy and ball-droppy for so many people. Per the usual, whenever you have a major change in context, you probably need to update your habits and tools to compensate.
Here are some tools that will help you find a home for those loose tasks and ideas:
When in doubt, go with the simpler option.
Printing out the Action Item Catcher so that you have a default home for those loose ideas and tasks may be more inefficient than 2 and 3 above, but it’s far more effective at making time and space than opening your phone, in most cases. Opening our devices is far more likely to lead to being sucked into work when you’re out or accidentally falling into social media scrolling when you just meant to drop off a task or deliverable.
Whichever tools or methods you choose, focus on the capture aspect and save the sifting and sorting of those ideas for when you’re really back at work. The purpose here is to ease that “capture everything” anxiety in the moment, and get back to enjoying your time away.
The post How to Tame Those Gazillion Ideas appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]
Skynet. HAL 9000. Ultron. The Matrix. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligences have played a major role in Western pop culture for decades. While nowhere near that nefarious or powerful, real AI has been making incredible strides and, in 2023, has been a big topic of conversation in the news with the rapid development of new technologies, the use of AI generated images, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT becoming freely accessible to the general public.
On today’s episode, we welcomed Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage, editors of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, and then Dr Kanta Dihal, co-editor of Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, to discuss how AI can be influenced by culture, feminism, and Western narratives defined by popular TV shows and films. Should AI be accessible to all? How does gender influence the way AI is made? And most importantly, what are the hopes and fears for the future of AI?
Check out Episode 82 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.
Look out for Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, which publishes in the UK in August 2023 and in the US in October 2023.
If you want to hear more from Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney, you can listen to their podcast: The Good Robot Podcast on Gender, Feminism and Technology.
In May 2023, the Open Access title, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal publishes in the UK; it publishes in the US in July 2023.
You may also be interested in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, which looks both at classic AI to the modern age, and contemporary narratives.
You can read the following two chapters from AI Narratives for free until 31 May:
Other relevant book titles include:
You may also be interested in the following journal articles:
Featured image: ChatGPT homepage by Jonathan Kemper, CC0 via Unsplash.
Much like the mid-month review is a great time to assess progress and reconfigure your plans for the remaining weeks of the month, doing a mid-week reassessment has many of the same benefits for the remainder of your week.
Let’s say you made your weekly plan as you closed out last week. Or perhaps you did your planning first thing Monday.
But now it’s Wednesday morning (or maybe Tuesday evening), and you’re starting to get that feeling: I’m behind, I’m not going to get all this done, I haven’t gotten to my important projects yet, and the days are getting away from me…
That exact moment is a great time to see how you’re doing with your projects, observe what else popped up in the first couple days of the week, and determine what you might need to do to reassess and redistribute your projects. (Real-life examples of emergent projects might be: enduring a stomach bug, dealing with a visiting sister whose return travel was delayed, or multiple Slack tag-ins requiring your attention.)
You may already know that because of everything else going on, those lovely focus blocks you’d set aside Monday and Tuesday for moving your top two or three projects forward got eaten up. Now you’re looking at the remaining three days of the week and wondering how you’re going to get everything on your weekly plan done.
First hard truth: you probably aren’t. At least not without some extra hours, Dunkirk spirit, or pushing yourself beyond your regular limits. Which may be necessary once in a while, but in the long term is a recipe for burnout.
So instead of just buckling down and “doing more,” now’s the time to reassess and replan your week.
Step 1: Review your week. Here’s a quick list of questions you can ask yourself as you’re reviewing your previous weekly plan and retooling it for the days you have remaining:
Step 2: Revise your plan. Now that you’ve taken stock of what has happened so far, you can look forward and make any necessary revisions to your weekly plan.
1⃣What needs to get done first? Remember first in priority doesn’t always mean first in sequence.
Step 3: Renegotiate. Chances are there is going to be some level of negotiation (with yourself or others) needed in order to clear space in your schedule.
For the projects or tasks that need to get deferred, remember to leave yourself breadcrumbs (be kind to your future self). Leave yourself notes that will help you easily get back into the work later without spending time figuring out what you were doing, where you were, or why you were doing it in the first place.
Didn’t do your weekly plan yet? Then today’s the perfect day to create one. This way you’ll make sure you’re not running around the next three days chasing the urgent and missing the important.
Both Wednesday morning and Tuesday evening are good opportunities to do your weekly reassessment. Reinstitute your 10/15 split, do your check-out or check-in, and use that time to reconfigure the rest of your week to make sure your priority projects are getting the love they need.
And lastly, if your plans change, don’t beat yourself up. As Charlie says, that’s the nature of planning: if you’re planning effectively, you’ll always be changing your plans.
The post Reboot Your Week with a Mid-Week Reassessment appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Thought of this one after witnessing a grown man have a tantrum in public. There but for the grace…
Most daily stand-up meetings make whatever they’re trying to solve worse as a result of eating up team time and focus.
First, let’s look at real meeting math. The daily stand-up isn’t just the 15-30 minutes of the stand-up — when we talk about meetings, we also need to include the prep, post, and slack time. That stand-up meeting eats up at least one hour of teammate time — so if you have five teammates, that’s at least 5 hours of team time.
Five hours of team time per day per week adds up; given that the average knowledge worker makes ~$30 per hour, that’s $3,000 per month in wages for just this meeting, for five people.
Should you still decide to do daily stand-ups, despite knowing this, here’s what not to do:
Here’s what TO do:
As I write in Team Habits, most bad or counterproductive meetings are a result of other poor team habits. If your team’s habits around decision-making, prioritization, and collaboration aren’t working, you’ll end up having a lot of crutch meetings to address those issues.
But crutch meetings cost your team’s most precious resources: their time and their attention.
This means that often, the best way to fix bad meeting culture isn’t just to work on improving meetings, and adding new ones. It’s by starting with the root issue with your team habits, that is, working on decision-making, planning, communication, so that the endless unproductive meetings won’t need to keep happening.
I’ll turn it over to you: if you’re doing daily stand-ups, what are the root challenges or (bad) team habits that are creating the need for the daily stand-ups?
The post Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Enlarge / Sometimes, building better Wordles means building the same Wordles... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO—When The New York Times acquired daily puzzle mega-hit Wordle at the beginning of 2022, there were plenty of skeptics who were sure it signaled the end of the game's incredible viral rise. Apparently, those skeptics included some of the people at the Times itself.
At a presentation at the Game Developers Conference Thursday, Times game producer and industry veteran Zoe Bell said the new owners expected Wordle's daily users "would just immediately decline" after the acquisition. Partly that was out of fear that some players would recoil from the "huge corporate behemoth" that now owned the indie hit. But it was also a simple recognition of the usual cycle for viral "zeitgeist" games: "How long can exponential growth go on?"
Just over a year after the acquisition, though, Bell said the company's efforts at "preserving Wordle as an Internet treasure" have paid off. That's largely thanks to a patient, "first do no harm" strategy that didn't seek to directly monetize the game or introduce a lot of half-baked changes to the game's successful formula, she said.
In the comments of my “spring bouquet” newsletter, Ann Collins, writer of the newsletter Microseasons, wrote:
At certain times of the year, I feel like time is both— linear and circular! And that is what has sparked my fascination with the ancient idea of 72 microseasons —each lasting just 5 days. Five days seems like a linear, human-sized, tangible amount of time. Yet the small linear segments are part of a larger Circle of an entire year, which is, in turn, part of a larger Spiral made of many years.
I really like this. (I follow @smallseasonsbot on twitter to remind me of these seasons.)
On this image of circular vs. linear time: It made me think about how if you draw a circle in Photoshop and keep zooming in, eventually the circle will look something like a straight line or (depending on the resolution) a series of steps:
Ann also sent me Tomas Tranströmer’s poem, “Answers to Letters”:
Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years may be passed in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past there on the other side.
I could probably talk about moving in a straight line in curved spacetime, but I wouldn’t really know what I was talking about. (Think of the way the earth seems pretty darned flat when you’re driving across Texas.)
Ann’s great point remains: In the micro sense, time usually feels linear — like a line of weekdays on a calendar. But in the macro sense, say, revisiting your notebooks over many years, it often feels circular.
This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)
He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”
I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today’s date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)
Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)
Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.
(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)
Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.
This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:
Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work, all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.
I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.
Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.
Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.
I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.
Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.
Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.
How much time do you spend each week working through the important, deep, and future-building work? How much time could have been spent on the significant, strategic change work that often gets lost — either in routines or in the swirl of urgent items that seem to appear out of nowhere?
Take a minute to look back at your schedule over the last few weeks if you really want to get a clear picture.
Chances are you’ve been caught up in a strategic-routine-urgent logjam.
If you’re seeing this play out on your schedule, consider the compound effect of this playing out across your team – those four to eight people you spend 80% of your working time with.
When you look at teamwork, you’ll find that collaboration mostly falls into one of three buckets:
Strategic work: work that is longer term and catalytic for an important objective or issue
Routine work: tasks that pop up regularly, such as weekly reports
Urgent work: time-sensitive and important tasks
We can’t control the urgent things that come up, and hopefully the routines we have in place are set up to support those moments when they arise. Where things tend to get slippery though is how we spend the time we have (or think we have) for that important, future-building strategic work.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father of flow,” once wrote about how, if you look at your schedule from two weeks ago, unless you make specific, instrumental changes during your week, your schedule two weeks from now is probably going to look the same.
We have this myth in our brains that two weeks from now is wide open. That we don’t have to worry about it now because in the future we’ll have the time.
Except… it’s not really that open, not when you think about it.
At the team level, you’re rolling in routine stuff, things you know are just gonna happen, but they still take up time to do. And there’s probably going to be something that’s urgent, right?
And that’s not even counting meetings, which usually fall into the routine bucket, but require urgency every so often.
So how much time do you actually have for the future building work? Time to:
When I’m consulting on strategic planning with a client, one of the first things I’ll come in and say is, “What’s our actual capacity for change here?”
I’m not talking about the emotional capacity, which is also important, but what is the actual capacity on schedules?
This is where the disconnect often comes in on teams. Managers and leaders expect a lot more of the strategic future building work to happen. That’s natural — we (hopefully) take pride in our roles and company vision, aiming to elevate what we stand for, and push our boundaries beyond the limits of success.
However, most managers and leaders don’t have a firm grasp of how the routine tasks and the urgent stuff dominates the team structure.
If the routine tasks and urgent work items are taking up 110% of people’s time, we have to do something different.
We can’t just assume that we’re going to put more units of stuff in a bag that’s already overfilled.
I was recently talking to a CEO who was frustrated that an important project didn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserved. I pointed out that prioritizing the project meant there is work that will need to live on someone’s schedule.
Which led me to ask “Is there any room for this to go on their schedule?”
And followed by:
Are there enough focus blocks to move this strategic work forward?
And if not, what are we gonna do about that?
This is where on the individual side, the five projects rule is super helpful. It’s the sort of thing that it’s really a gauge for what you can fit in and what your capacity really equals out to be. Projects have to move out before new ones can be moved in.
And at a team level, it’s especially important for managers and leaders, but it’s really all of us at a certain point. You have to honor that you’re not going to get everything done, and that something either has to be dropped or pushed forward in an imperfect state.
Understanding your capacity for change starts with understanding how much room in your (your team’s) schedule there is to take on strategic work. If it’s just filled with urgent and recurring work, take a look at all the routine tasks and projects and ask yourself the following:
From here, you’ll be able to build in space for strategic thinking that will expand you, your company, your team and more, to the next level of success — without compromising the essence of what makes you flow.
Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
The post Change Work Is Strategic Work appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
A client recently wanted to problem-solve for working four days a week, but when she started explaining the problem, it wasn’t about the load of her days or how many days a week she worked. Deep down it was about work intensity, or how stressful it was for her to be working “at 100% efficiency” for 5-6 hours a day.
I pointed out that a really common pattern and a byproduct of efficiency crankers are they’re exhausted no matter how much actual work is on their plate. Even if/when we remove 25% of the work from their plate, the typical move among these folks is to then cut the amount of time they give themselves to do the work by 25%.
This has the net result of them being just as stressed about the work, no matter how much work is removed from their plate.
An additional part about this client’s scenario is that, partially because of the work we’ve done together, everything is great for her right now. Her business is working well, she’s getting the right clients, and she loves the work that she does. She has a new perfect-for-her romantic partner. Her health is great and far improved than when we started. She’s happy and doesn’t want much, which itself has become a challenge for her. (We’re working through the way her upper limit responses have gone guerrilla.)
So, in her circumstances, cutting an additional day of work wouldn’t make her better off and would create a lot of stress to get there. She’d work four days, just as intensely, and end up just as worn out.
Instead of cutting work, I asked her “what would you do if I asked you to be 15% slower?” We brainstormed a few “slow practices,” she might do in 5-10 minutes, like:
She’s still exploring whether it’ll be best for her personally to set a timer to initiate her slow practices and self-care or to sense when she’s needing to do one of these practices between tasks. The latter is better for most people after they have been practicing slow productivity for a while, but when folks are addicted to checking off tasks, it’s typically better to start with timers.
On the subject of timers, I happen to know she uses timers for her work. I chose to remind her that if she could use her timers to work, she could use timers to not work.
The obvious difference is that, in the latter case, she’d have to give herself permission to stop working, and that, weirdly, is going to take more discipline for her to do (to use her slow practices) than to work. (I’ve had A LOT of practice coaching folks on this topic, as it turns out, not the least because Angela struggles with this, too.)
This is one of those cases where the normal go-tos of subtraction do not work well. Adding some recovery practices to her day will create more vitality, joy, creativity, and richness in her work and life. Working an hour or day less at the same pace would not get her there.
We see many organizations who fumble this, too. Their response to burnt-out, overloaded workers is to switch to 4 days a week, but for many workers, that amounts to having to do the same amount of work in less time — it increases intensity without really addressing the workways and team habits creating more work than people can do in their compensated time. What really needs to be solved for is the load of work, not just the amount of days people work.
A 4-day work week boiled down to 10 hours of work a day can in some cases be a good solution for companies. For example, if someone commutes for an hour or ninety minutes per day, the additional day off makes a real difference.
These same companies would likely see a better result if they encouraged workers to do admin or remote work from home on Friday, or, better yet, to let teams decide when they need to work remotely and when they need to be co-located. No one wants to commute to do the same things they can do from home, and many people wouldn’t mind the commute as much if the work they were driving to do really got done better face-to-face or co-located.
What we really need to consider, though, is the mindset that causes people to work so intensely in the first place. Sometimes it’s what it takes to get the job done but other times there are more insidious things at play. The following are two more common reasons for the intensity, though:
Here’s the takeaway: if no matter how much work you do throughout the day, you feel like you’re panting and rushed, perhaps it’s not the amount of work you’re doing, but the pace you’re working at.
Consider ways in which, rather than just subtracting or decreasing the amount of hours or days you’re working, you can slow yourself down in order to be more intentional and calm about the ways you’re moving forward on your workload. Chances are with less anxiety produced by the high work intensity and overload, you might be more productive anyway.
Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
The post What to Do When Work Intensity Is the Problem appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
TSMC continues to improve its capacity utilization for 3nm process technology, which is expected to approach 50% at the end of March, the sources said. The foundry will also grow the process output to 50,000-55,000 wafers monthly in March, with Apple being the main customer.Apple's upcoming iPhone 15 Pro models are expected to feature the A17 Bionic processor, Apple's first iPhone chip based on TSMC's first-generation 3nm process, also known as N3E.
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