Alexandra Samuel: Recent Episodes

View Details

The latest issue of the Thrive at Work newsletter covers four ways to make work fit your unique brain.

Sign up for Thrive at Work here.

These additional resources are full of specific tactics and tools to support each of these four strategies.

Calibrate your sensory intake.

• To Cope with Digital Distraction, Embrace Digital Neurodiversity (JSTOR Daily)
• What Autism Can Teach Us About Overcoming Digital Burnout (OneZero)
• How We Renovated Our House So It Was Perfect for Working From Home (WSJ)

Tinker with your tools.

• Create a Productivity Workflow That Works for You (HBR)
• How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier (Forge)
• Your One-Stop Remote Work Toolkit and No, Coda Didn’t Pay For That Email (Thrive at Work)

Clear hurdles with the help of AI.

• How to train your own AI in 15 minutes (Thrive at Work)
• I’ve Worked With Generative AI for Nearly a Year. Here’s What I’ve Learned (WSJ)
• Inside You There Are 3 AIs (Thrive at Work)
• 7 Everyday Work Problems AI Helps Me Solve (WSJ)

Manage your energy like ketchup.

• Taking a Break Doesn’t Always Mean Unplugging (HBR)
• How to Work with Your Own Pace of Change (Thrive at Work)
• How to Use Technology to Better Pace Your Work (WSJ)
• How to Work When Your Life is a Mess (Thrive at Work)

The post Resources to make work fit your unique brain appeared first on Alexandra Samuel.

View Details

Click to download the guide as a PDF.How to run your own weekly accountability check-in with the help of A.I.The post How to run your own weekly accountability process with the help of A.I. appeared first on Alexandra Samuel.

View Details

Generative A.I. can boost your productivity and expand your creativity, but it becomes much more usable and powerful when you customize it for your own needs. And that’s very easy to do—no coding required!—with tools like OpenAI’s “Create a GPT”, Claude.ai’s new Projects, and premium services like CustomGPT.ai.

In this guide, I show you how to create three essential A.I.s that can help you with very different challenges. That includes building a Thinker A.I. like the one I created for my Summer of What’s s Next (#SOWN), an experiment in using A.I.s for strategy development and self-coaching. Get ready to meet the three A.I.s that will change your work and extend your impact.

Click here to download the full pdf.
Planning to print? Download in black-on-white instead.

Inside You There Are Three AIsThe post Inside You There Are Three A.I.s appeared first on Alexandra Samuel.

View Details

I admire AI artists who can think of the right prompt to illustrate a concept or story. But I’m not a visual thinker, so the hardest part of image creation is often thinking about how to represent an idea visually.

For my newsletter this week, I wanted a header image about the pace of change. So I asked ChatGPT for help thinking about visual approaches, before turning to Ideogram for the actual image creation. Here’s what that looked like, using the Ideogram Prompt Muse custom GPT.

Which image did I end up choosing? Find the answer in this week’s newsletter.

View Details

My AI-enabled manicure. The 5 how-to tips are below.

Conversation is central to our working lives. It’s how we learn from one another, work through our own ideas, and perhaps most importantly, collaborate and co-create with others.

Until a year or so ago, the creative and learning potential of conversation required another person. Now, thanks to generative AI, it’s always at our fingertips.

Wisdom, at your fingertips.My own fingertips led me recognize AI as a conversational powerhouse.

With the help of AI, I got a very special birthday manicure: My left hand was decorated with five symbols representing personal goals for the year, and my right hand captured five professional goals. I created these designs with the help of AI, and took them to the very talented nail artists at my favorite salon.

Creating this design involved a lot more than just feeding some AI a list of ten goals. By the time I was ready to head to the salon, my manicure-related conversation with ChatGPT was six months and 143 pages long, and I had created over 400 separate nail-art images in Ideogram.

If that seems like a lot of effort for a three-week manicure, you’re right! The truth is, I’m not even that into nail polish: I hate having to sit still and device-less for the hour it takes to have my nails done, and I usually chip my nails too quickly to make the effort worthwhile. That’s why I only get my nails done once or twice a year.

As with so much of AI, however, the fingertips were not the point.

Beyond the AI gumball machine.You can only see the real value of AI once you stop treating it like a gumball machine. If you look at the prompting process as prompt in, answer out, you are all but certain to find AI disappointing and limiting.

Instead, recognize that working with AI is like any conversation: The process is as important as the outcome. It’s through the process of conversation that we evolve our understanding, build our skills and learn to see things from another perspective.

The payoffs from process.That’s what I found with Project Nail Vision:

1. I expanded my skill set, by exploring possibilities like VR-enhanced nail art.
2. I developed my creative thinking, by exploring different approaches to visual and symbolic communication.
3. Most of all, I deepened my understanding of and investment in each of my key goals for the year—because the process of conceptualizing and iterating each nail design amounted to a ten-minute (or in a couple of cases, two-hour) meditation on what each goal really meant to me.

When we embrace our conversations with AI as a chance to change and grow, we unlock the real power of intelligence that is anything but artificial.

How could it take so long to make 10 nails?Here are the variations it took to get to just one nail design: a red-and-blue combo that represents spending more solo time with my sweetie. Each of the images in this Ideogram screenshot is just one of four options provided during that round of image generation.

5 tips for your next visual AI project.For the nerds and the nail artists out there, here are some specific AI and design lessons that I took away from this process.

1. Think in new ways by using AI as a coach. If you’re a not-so-visual person like me, AI can help you learn to think visually—if you share your goal, and ask for suggested approaches, rather than leaping directly to an image request. At GPT’s suggestion I thought about ways of representing Morse Code, how to approach the project as 10 mini-canvases, and how the spatial relationship between my hands depends on the way I overlap my fingers.
2. Go down the rabbit hole. I learn the most when I give into the curiosity AI inspires. I’ve never had much interest in VR, but when ChatGPT suggested a manicure that would come to life when viewed through the lens of a phone camera, I spent the better part of a day exploring the possibilities of VR creation with 8th Wall (possible only because GPT coached me through the process of editing VR modules in JavaScript). I built a working prototype, which was enough for me to conclude that even I have better things to do than code animated manicures.
3. Use text as the first step to better images. While image generators can help you think through how to symbolically represent a concept, that takes a lot of slow trial-and-error; it’s easier to work out the symbols in conversation with a text-based AI, and then tell an image generator how you want it to represent your idea visually.
4. Create images one at a time, because AIs are not great at creating groups of images. Just look at what OpenAI’s DALL-E created when I simply gave it my list of goals! Instead, I designed my nail images one at a time in Ideogram.ai. Once I had ten images I liked, I used Canva to paste them onto two stock clipart hands, so that my nail artist could see which image belonged on which finger. (Yes, I cared.)
5. Some things still take human hands. While I can see that there are lots of other people experimenting with AI-designed nail art, I’ve yet to find an AI-powered nail-painting machine. This whole crazy plan only worked because our local nail salon is serious about nail art…and also, because the novelty of working from an AI-designed manicure was still amusing rather than annoying to Lisa, the amazing nail artist who executed my design. I expect that in another year or so, this kind of thing is going to become very frustrating for nail artists, and reduce the joy of that job (and many others).

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Work newsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

What can AI do for you, right now, to solve your immediate work problems?

That’s the question I answer in my latest piece for The Wall Street Journal, in the cover story for their latest report on Artificial Intelligence. In 7 Everyday Work Problems AI Helps Me Solve, I talk about the big-picture ways AI can make our work easier—and that inspired an immediate flood of questions from readers who were hungry for the details.

Here are the how-tos on three of the problems I’ve solved, so that you can solve them, too.

1. Keep up in meetings.You know that thing where you zone out in an online meeting, and then someone asks you a question? An AI transcriber means you can quickly catch up. To ensure I was accurate in describing all the ways meeting assistants can help you, I installed seven of them while working on my Journal story. For the following two nightmarish weeks, every time I joined a Zoom or Teams call, I was trailed by a posse of not-quite-uninstalled bots.

The winner, by a mile, was Otter.ai: It’s the only tool I tried that provided real-time transcription (and not just a post-meeting summary), while also working across different platforms.

Otter.ai accurately captures the deep focus and intense professionalism of my online work meetings.

While I was initially embarrassed at having a digital sidekick joining every meeting, it’s proven invaluable in filling in gaps in my meeting notes.

1. Make spreadsheet magic.I routinely use AI tools to extend, enrich or simplify my work with spreadsheets, as I mentioned in passing towards the end of my story. In response to one incredulous reader, I enumerated some examples of how AI makes spreadsheet work easier, including…

2. Categorize social media posts by topic (small sets via Coda.io, larger via CSV upload to GPT and then asking for results in table form).

3. Clean a messy export of past articles by returning a file as a de-duped table.
4. Use a custom GPT to draft effective pitches. I uploaded a CSV of social media analytics for all my past published stories so the AI can help me craft pitches to editors, informed by what’s performed well in the past.
5. Digest the stats in an academic article by returning the table in a PDF in CSV form that’s easier for me to read and work with.

This LinkedIn post has more examples of how to use AI to work with spreadsheet data, plus a list of options for getting spreadsheet data into the virtual hands of an AI.

1. Automate the tedium.As I explain in the Journal piece, I now automate just about all the boring tasks I used to avoid. The example I shared in the piece was that I now use a custom GPT to convert invoices from a supplier who sends his bills as free-form email, so that they’re in a form that works for my accounting system.

When a reader asked how to do this himself, I pointed him to this online guide to creating a GPT, and shared the instructions I used to create my invoice converter; it’s just plain text, pasted into the “instructions” box in the “configure” tab of the GPT creator. Here’s what that looks like:

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Work newsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

These are the days of miracle and wonder.
Or at least, this is what Ideogram.ai made from the lyrics of Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble”.

Great news!

We are all going to live for many more long and healthy years, basking in the wealth and leisure of a society powered by abundant cheap energy and an explosion of medical and scientific miracles.

That is seriously how I felt by the end of my week at the TED conference, and I have to tell you, it made for a nice break from feeling like we all about to die in a ball of fire.

Apparently we are on the precipice of a new world where AIs figure out nuclear fusion and robots carry all our heavy packages…but where we somehow still have enough work and money to pay for pill-sized robots that give us colonoscopies from the inside out, and enough leisure time to create AI-enabled artworks in mediums we haven’t invented yet.

I am a bit hazy on the details of how we get from here to there, however. It definitely has something to do with AI (which is going to become more powerful than we can imagine, sooner than we expect) and also with quantum computing (which a helpful TED attendee explained much more clearly than the Google quantum computing expert who actually delivered a TED talk).

Perhaps it would all have been clearer to me if I hadn’t dropped science after grade 9…but a week of science talks also made it clear that science alone can’t save us.

The missing link: Not just for scientistsBecause the missing link in getting from here to there isn’t just science: It’s social science. No matter how many inventions and cures get unlocked in this era of imminent scientific revolution, they will only be transformative if they can be delivered at scale. That’s a matter of politics, economics and social organization, rather than scientific innovation.

Perhaps AI will help us untangle these challenges, too, but social solutions are unlikely to emerge fully formed from some lab or machine. Social solutions require consideration, negotiation, and usually some difficult trade-offs. Social solutions require people, and people are slow, messy and inconsistent.

People are also brilliant, creative and compassionate—which is why we need to be at the table while the AIs and the scientists and the quantum computers hatch our new era of miracles. Unfortunately, the big-picture promises of technology are often so big-picture that it’s hard to see where we fit in, where to take our seat at the table, or even how to get started.

That’s why the enormous scale and speed of transformation promised at TED left me hungry to get small and specific: To focus on the immediate, comprehensible steps that can close a little bit of the gap between the imperfect now and the soon-to-be awesome future.

The cure for AI utopianism: More AI!For me, that means trying a new AI tool, tactic or approach every week—or better yet, every day.

It’s tempting to just keep using AI in the ways that are now routine for me:

• Review this text and return a bulleted list of essential fixes (typos, errors) and improvements to consider
• Create a “Happy Birthday” image for my friend, with an image based on her interests. ( It’s easy to do in Ideogram.ai.)
• Write a Python script that can calculate the percentile values for each column in this CSV (Thanks to AI, I now use Python scripting to clean up my messy Excel files. Github’s Copilot makes writing Python code even easier.)

But each of these was new for me at one point, not very long ago! So the only way to keep reaching towards the future is to find new things to try every week.

How do I do that? With AI, of course!

Ask AI to bake learning into your task listI created a simple Coda doc to bake AI into my task list—and I’ve published it online for free, so you can use it to find AI learning opportunities related to your own tasks.

Here’s how I got Coda and ChatGPT to help me find the learning opportunities in my current tasks.

1. I added context to my task list.

In addition the column listing each task I have to do this week, I created columns that challenge me to specify my goal, obstacle(s) and ideal coach on each task; I used a formula to add that context to each task. The result is a task list that looks like…

• My task is to send new story pitches and my goal is to get story assignments but my obstacle is need focused time to think through best angle. I wish I had a top-notch business news editor who could help me.
• My task is to create outline for my upcoming presentation and my goal is to deliver a great and compelling AI talk but my obstacle is I have too many examples and it overwhelms the audience. I wish I had a top-notch speaking coach who could help me.

You don’t have to use Coda to do this. You just need to annotate your task list so you can tell an AI what you want to achieve, where you’re stuck, and who could help.

2. I created a ChatGPT prompt.

Once I had my annotated task list, I pasted it into ChatGPT with this instruction.

You are an AI productivity coach and trainer who gradually expands the AI savvy of the clients you work with. You are working with Alexandra Samuel, who already uses Perplexity, tome, chatgpt, Coda.io, scite.ai, Ideogram, Claude and Github Copilot (to write basic python scripts). Review her task list for the week and suggest 5 possible AI use cases that would extend her skill set by using AI in an innovative way—while helping her get through her task efficiently. In each case, provide SURPRISING uses she wouldn’t think of, along with a very specific first step (like a prompt) that is a little beyond her current knowledge or skill set.
The results were only OK, so I pushed the AI a little:

OK you don’t have to suggest a different tool for each task….Please try again with 5 more suggestions based on the same task list, but choosing the best tool for each task even if that means repeating tools. Also provide a little more creative thinking and detail.

3. I got suggested AI experiments from ChatGPT.

For example…

• Task: Create outline for my upcoming presentation.
• AI Tool: ChatGPT.
• Creative Use: Develop an interactive presentation outline in a dynamic format that includes simulated audience feedback to refine content. Use ChatGPT to generate questions and reactions from a virtual audience based on your presentation’s main points.
• First Step: Outline your presentation’s main points using ChatGPT. Then, simulate a Q&A session where ChatGPT generates typical audience questions and critiques. Use this feedback to adjust and prioritize your content effectively.

I can’t wait to give that a try! You can see more of ChatGPT’s suggestions in this transcript of my session.

Using AI as your AI coach—and tying that coach to your task list—is the best way to continually expand your AI skills and use cases.

And that’s how we’ll get enough AI-savvy humans to ensure this forthcoming age of miracles and wonders really is shared by all.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Work newsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

I have committed to singing on this stage, in front of all these people. 🤮

Confession: I’m scared shitless. Here’s what I’ve signed up for this Thursday afternoon:

Sing out! This is your chance to be part of a very special TED Talk! Renowned Broadway director and TED speaker, Lear deBessonet and Broadway performer, Todd Almond will put you through the paces of a musical number in this extraordinary masterclass. You’ll learn to sing from your heart, participate in a TED rehearsal in the theater and and be part of a performance during a historic TED talk. Bring yourself, your friends and your best energy to this once-in-a-lifetime extravaganza. No experience needed.

That’s right: I’m spending the week at TED. But never mind that: I’ve committed to singing! In public! In a room with….Kesha and Al Gore?? Seriously?

But I couldn’t live with the idea of not doing it, even though I’m attending this week’s TED as a member of the press, and I’m there to write about AI and the future of work. This singing challenge is tied to one of my touchstone moments: a moment that redefined my own sense of what’s possible, and opened a new chapter in my personal and professional history.

A touchstone momentIt was early December 2022 when I put on the just-released cast album of the new production of Into the Woods. I’d read great things about director Lear deBessonet’s new production of this celebrated Sondheim musical, and the moment I heard Patina Miller singing “Stay With Me”, it ripped my heart out to think I was missing her performance. But there was only a week left in her run; there was no way for me to go.

After all, I had work and deadlines—I couldn’t just hop on a plane. My parenting logistics made travel even more complicated: Whenever I went on the road, my autistic kiddo got thrown for a loop. It took weeks of advance prep and planning to prepare our son for an absence and set up the necessary support structures for a few rocky, Mom-less days; then it took a few more weeks for our household to settle back into a routine after I returned. So a spontaneous trip was completely impossible.

Or was it? As I rolled into Act II of the ITW cast album, I found myself reflecting on how much our lives had actually changed. We were now 15 months into a carefully planned reset that had finally gotten our son out of crisis; instead of recurring meltdowns, conflicts and cop visits, our home was peaceful and our son was flourishing. Maybe we now had the resilience to absorb last-minute travel? There was only one way to find out.

One week after listening to that cast recording, I was sitting in an orchestra seat, watching some of my all-time favorite Broadway performers rollick through one of my all-time favorite shows. I wept with joy at the sheer pleasure of the performance…and also, with pride at what our family had accomplished.

We had all worked hard to help our son find his path to growth, and at last, he really was growing, and happy, and stretching more each day. Now there was room for me to grow again, too.

Real growth often sneaks up on you; there aren’t many moments in life where you see clearly how far you’ve come. It’s all too easy to get stuck in a story about your limitations, without noticing if those limitations no longer apply.

But sitting in that theater, I could see it all: the intense work of a decade, the profound ways it had transformed me as a person, and what was now possible for our son, our family and my own creative life.

I returned home with a show poster signed by the full cast so that it can offer a daily reminder: What you think is impossible just might be possible, after all.

A new horizon of possibilityThat’s the power of a touchstone moment: a moment where you suddenly see limitations and possibilities in a new light. Unlike a gradual process of transformation or learning, a touchstone moment offers specific associations or reminders you can grab onto, so that you keep your vision fixed on that newly widened horizon.

Since deBessonet’s Into the Woods has become such a powerful touchstone moment in my own life, I knew I couldn’t pass up her workshop. I keep coming back to the ITW lyrics I’ve been singing to myself for more than three decades now; lyrics my kids grew up on:

The way is clear
The light is good
I have no fear
Nor no one should.

If I was brave enough to get on an airplane on three days notice—brave enough to survive a decade of turbulence, and find a path forward!—then damn it, I’m brave enough to get on that stage and SING!

Bravery is the pay-off from creating touchstone moments—moments where you move mountains, and then celebrate what you learn from the experience. They remind you that what once seemed impossible, actually wasn’t.

And that makes all other impossibilities seem possible, too.

View Details

Take a peek backstage at #TED2024— thanks to an experience that may sound like your worst air-travel nightmare.

You know, that nightmare where the person next to you on a long plane flight actually TALKS to you? That was me, a year ago, on a flight back from New York after speaking at a conference.

My seatmate was a woman with a fantastic mane of curly hair and beautiful eyes smiling over her mask. We exchanged a few niceties about mask-wearing and flight logistics, and before I knew it, we were deep into a conversation that ranged from our favorite TV shows to our experience parenting kids of similar ages to our career paths and marriages. Six hours later, we landed in Vancouver….and we had not stopped talking the whole time!

This is the backside of the wall that encloses the stage. It’s a currently a massive room of A:V equipment they are still setting up.

That fascinating woman turned out to be Mina Sabet, the head of production for TED Conferences, who was on her way to Vancouver to produce TED’s main conference for the year. Our exchange of life stories had covered her years of experience as a media producer and how it led up to the massive job of coordinating the complex team that makes TED possible; we had also spoken about my own work as a journalist and speaker.

“You should cover next year’s TED,” Mina urged me. “It will blow your mind!”

Even though I knew TED happened in Vancouver each year, it had never occurred to me to cover it—it’s just one of those events that seems to take place on an alternate plane of existence. But Mina introduced me to the press team, and here I am, all set to cover next week’s conference!

Best of all, Mina and I got to have a reunion on our one-year plane-iversary. We’ve spoken a few times over the past year, because the joy of giving yourself over to a six-hour conversation is that it’s the foundation for a genuine connection! So when she offered to take me backstage so that I could see what goes into making TED happen, I wasn’t just excited to get a look at a big event—I was keen to get a closer look at Mina’s work and world.

The scale of her team’s work is jaw-dropping: They build an entire theater from scratch inside the convention center’s main floor, in just one week. (I won’t lie: My inner tech nerd was especially gratified by checking out the sheer volume of gadgets and cables that go into this process.)

You’d think it would be super stressful (and it clearly is!), but as I walked around the theater and backstage areas with Mina, the vibe was more like a very fond college reunion, as all the staff and techs reunited with great affection after a year of working apart or long-distance.

I’m looking forward to seeing the experience this crew will create at next week’s conference, and to meeting the conference attendees who will be touched by their work. I’m going into that week with a deep appreciation for the serendipity of spontaneous connection—the kind of connection that’s possible if you talk to a stranger next to you at a conference…or on a plane.

The view from right behind where the speakers will stand

View Details

How can AI actually make your day-to-day work easier, more fun and more effective? Here’s a snapshot of what a day in my working life looks like thanks to to AI—and how that makes more room for my parenting and personal priorities, too.

• 5:45 a.m. Queried three different AIs (Gemini, ChatGPT and Bing CoPilot) about customer pain points related to a new business offering. I gave the results (plus two reports the AIs had cited) to Claude, and asked it to synthesize into a memo I sent my colleague as prep for our 9 am call.
• 6:30 a.m. Forwarded three long email threads to a colleague who is joining a project in progress. Then I realized it would take her FOREVER to read them so instead I saved them to separate text files that I dragged into ChatGPT; then I asked it to turn the files into a briefing note covering 7 aspects of the project. I cleaned up its summary and filled in some gaps. Ten extra minutes of my time saved her probably 1-2 hours of work trying to make sense of the emails.
• 7 a.m. Call to figure out the basic approach to an ambitious data project. We brainstormed how AI could help, then brainstormed how to use AI to help us figure out even better ways to use AI.
• 8:30 a.m Setup new Coda team doc for the data project with demo tables showing how we can use Coda’s OpenAI integration to categorize data.
• 9:00 a.m. Jumped right into a working meeting by reviewing key points from the morning’s AI-generated research on customer pain points. Jointly reviewed relevant links that I added to a new Coda doc for our project. Tried but failed to use Bardeen to scrape and save the text of all the webpages in that list of links; ideally I’d have all the webpages saved so I could ask ChatGPT to summarize and then I’d paste summaries into our link table.
• 1:00 p.m. For a story I’m developing: Compiled background research on potential interview subjects into a Coda table, then used Coda’s AI integration to summarize my research into short bullets on each potential interview. Reviewed the summaries and made a short list of potential subjects; then emailed that list (with the AI-generated bio summaries) to my editor, and asked for his feedback on my coverage plan and list of potential interview subjects.
• 7:00 p.m. Used AI to quickly generate a couple of Excel formulas I needed to clean up a spreadsheet so I could prepare and share with a client.
• 10:00 p.m. Recapped my day to ChatGPT via voice interface on the phone app while getting ready for bed. Then asked GPT to put all my notes into chronological order, highlighting my AI use, so I could use its bullets as the outline (but not the text) for this post.

What’s missing from this summary? The big chunks of time I spent developing new ideas and insights because I had the room to dive deep. And the hours I spent talking with my homeschooled son’s tutor, support worker and behavioral consultant—important conversations that I now have room for in my AI-enabled workday.

View Details

Using AI to work while I walk is one way I work more like me! Get the how-to here.

It’s time to work like usThere’s no one best way to work—but it’s not easy to figure out the work practices that align with our individual preferences and talents. How do creative thinkers find their own best way to work? What tactics and tools unlock their unique talents?

Here are five ways you can start to build your own toolkit for custom work—that is, work that suits your own quirks and talents.

Work in motion.Some people do their best work at a desk, but many of us generate new ideas and energy when we move our bodies. The ChatGPT phone app has made it a lot easier to be productive on the go.

I start a voice-based chat session as I head out the door, ask ChatGPT to capture my stream-of-consciousness rambling, and then get the AI to prompt me for ideas or questions I haven’t considered. Then I get ChatGPT to put my notes into some kind of order, and return it to me as text I can access from my desktop. Get the how-to here.

Turn work into a source of regeneration.When we were in our long years of family crisis, work couldn’t be another thing that drained me: Work had to be the thing that restored me. Check out my reel for three tactics that turn work into regeneration: saying no to the wrong projects, prioritizing work that reminds me of who I am, and picking clients and colleagues to meet my social needs. These tactics not only helped me survive, but also let me craft a working life I love.

Get flexibility by cultivating scarce skills.The struggle over how much time to spend at the office will likely continue for many years. To strengthen your position when it comes time to negotiating for flexible work arrangements—even if you don’t need that flexibility right now, or your current manager isn’t asking for more office time than you want—make sure you cultivate skills that are hard for your employer to replace.

As I told the New York Post’s Perri O. Blumberg, “[e]ven the most reluctant hybrid employers have now mostly accepted that some degree of remote work is here to stay, especially if you have to compete for any sort of skilled or scarce employee.” Find more examples of how people are making hybrid the new normal in her story, Most people want hybrid jobs —these remote work positions may surprise you.

Find new options for how to tackle a problem.When you tackle tasks in a way that fits with your personal preferences and strengths, your workday feels more intuitive and enjoyable. But often we’re stuck doing tasks the way we’ve always done them, or the way someone told us to do it. AI lets us find new ways to tackle tasks—including ways we might not know about! Just ask an AI for two or three different ways you might approach a specific work problem.

For example, when I asked ChatGPT for a few ways I might clean up a messy and complicated spreadsheet, it not only gave me some possible formulas: It told me I could handle the whole process by writing a Python program that could clean up my spreadsheet for me. Yes, I could have done the cleanup work manually in only a little more time than it took to create the program (with the AI’s help!) but I had a lot more fun working on a program, and I learned a new skill in the process.

Use AI tools to get the information you want in the form you want.Working my way means organizing information in table or spreadsheet form—even if a lot of the Internet presents information as a page of text, not a table (like all those restaurant listings, TV roundups and software recommendations.) Web scraping is a way of turning unstructured online information into a structured format (like a spreadsheet) that you can keep at your fingertips, but it can take some skill and patience to make web scraping work.

Bardeen.ai is the first AI-enabled scraper I’ve tried, and I’ve been impressed at how easy it was to set up and run a complicated scraping recipe. You can do a free 14-day trial before you have to commit to a subscription, and I was able to get a dramatic (80% off) discount code by searching the Bardeen website.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Work newsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

I had fun creating this image in Ideogram, an AI image-generation app that can actually deliver legible text.

So many of us now spend big portions of our working lives at home, but we’ve brought the office home with us — including a whole lot of outdated ideas about what’s professional or what work is supposed to look or feel like.

But there is nothing unprofessional about having fun at work—whether you are working at home, or at an office! Here’s how to bring more fun into your daily working life, so that work becomes a way you renew your energy as well as a way you expend it.

Play with your colleagues.You can make meetings fun without making them longer. Forgo the background blur and let your colleagues see you in your natural habitat, so they can comment on your quirky collectibles. Get yourself a word of the day calendar and challenge yourself to work it into conversation. Make room for a quip about something funny in a report or dataset. It’s all about letting go of the idea that being “professional” means turning off your personality, and instead engaging with the same joy and spontaneity you’d bring to a conversation with friends.

Tune into your brain.Yes, it’s great to do work that feels meaningful or aligns with your purpose on this earth, but it is also great to do work that just feels delightful! When you notice which tasks and challenges make you feel happy, energized or simply blissed-out, you can nudge your work towards the types of roles and projects that let you spend some of each day in your happy place. As I confessed in this video last week, that’s how I ended up doing data journalism work: I discovered that messing around in spreadsheets makes my brain feel good.

The best way to find your bliss is to conduct periodic body scans throughout the day (you can even set a reminder to prompt you to scan yourself every few hours): What are you doing when you feel itchy, or relaxed, or elated? Keep track for a week or two until the scanning habit becomes ingrained, and you start noticing whenever a task has made you feel particularly great (or lousy). Then use that knowledge to shape what projects and roles to pursue—because how your work makes you feel is an absolutely legitimate basis for deciding how you want to shape your career.

Revel in your tech.Many of us spend more hours touching our laptops or phones than we spend in our beds or snuggling with the people we love…so all those hands-on-device minutes need to fill our hearts with joy, at least occasionally.

You could just slap an Ansel Adams photo on your desktop background and call it a day, but think about where else you can infuse some delight into your interfaces—whether that means updating the color scheme of your usual web browser to match the colors of your favorite sports team, or picking a new mouse or phone case because you like how the texture or shape feels in your hand.

Get creative with AI.If it’s hard to let your hair down when you’re working with human colleagues, you can practice with AI. Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini will interact in whatever way you want, so you can transform the experience of working with AI by giving it an instruction as minimal as “give me feedback as if we are pals.” As I wrote in my Wall Street Journal article about the merits of treating ChatGPT like a colleague, approaching an AI in riffing mode is a great way to get your own creative juices flowing. You don’t have to limit that creativity to writing and data work, either: Whip up a quick image in Ideogram to convey a crucial point or let a colleague know you’re thinking of them.

Spread the fun.I don’t just try to make my own work fun: I like to bring a spirit of playfulness to most of my online and in-person interactions. I have traded parenting tips with Verizon customer care reps, shared recipes with grocery clerks and nerded out over storage strategies on a computer helpline. Once in a blue moon I am someone’s worst nightmare, but 19 times out of 20 I hear that I’m the most fun call or customer of the day.

Bringing more fun into other people’s workdays has helped me see fun as a natural and appropriate part of my own working life. Just imagine how much more fun all our jobs would be if we all aimed to make work fun for one another.

More news and links.Remote Work At Your Best. When Global Radio asked me to talk with Yonah Budd about the downsides of remote work, I thought we might have a throw-down! But I ended up having the most wonderful conversation with Yonah, who hosts Global’s mental-health talk show: You can listen here. It turns out we agree on what matters when you’re working remotely—including prioritizing human connection.

A new chapter in the history of neurodiversity. Last week a group of autistic scholars published a letter in the peer-reviewed journal Autism, arguing that the idea of neurodiversity should be attributed to the community of autistic advocates who jointly developed the idea of “neurological diversity”, rather than to the sociologist who has long been known for coining the term. Anyone working in DEI needs to pay attention to this evolving conversation, particularly since it’s tied into the overlap between the trans and autistic conversation. You can get more context in my LinkedIn post.

Having a non-autistic brother. Rob tipped me off to this comedy routine by autistic comedian Joe Wells, talking about his non-autistic brother. It not only made me laugh, but delighted me so profoundly that I cried with joy the way I last did when I had the privilege of sitting in the front row for a performance of The Band’s Visit with Tony Shalhoub and the extraordinary Katrina Lenk.

Are journalists missing the boat on AI? The news that five of the 45 Pulitzer Prize finalists acknowledged using AI in their work has been greeted as evidence that the day of AI has finally arrived. But my post on LinkedIn points out that we should be worried about the other 40 writers and journalists who aren’t yet using AI.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Worknewsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

Watching The Lazarus Project is one the ways I recharge at the end of a workday

We can only sustain our attention for so long before we need a cognitive break.That’s one of the key points in Attention Span, by Gloria Mark. Her book takes decades of research on human attention and pinpoints the reasons our devices make it so hard to focus.

Listening to a book like this—something that’s work-related, but that I can digest while knitting or going for a walk—is one way that I integrate breaks into my day. After years of working remotely, I’ve developed the habit of keeping different books, shows and articles on the go, so that it’s easy to take different kinds of cognitive breaks throughout the day and week. My recent brain breaks have included….

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
This fun supervillain caper lured me in with the promise of a heroine whose power lies in spreadsheet mastery. Sadly, there are not that many passages about spreadsheets, but I suspect that is not a big drawback for most people: There is plenty of action and silliness, in a nice departure from the usual superhero stories. This is the kind of thing I listen to when I just want to chill and don’t necessarily have a lot of attention.

Day by Michael Cunningham
This story about an intertwined family both before and mid-pandemic reminds me of how soul-quenching it is to immerse myself in a more ambitious piece of fiction. It’s been my morning listen, great for inspiring a day of deep thinking and creativity.

The Lazarus Project A British show about secret government agents who travel through time to stop apocalyptic events. It’s mind-bending enough to require pretty close to full attention. When Rob and I have a sci-fi nerd show that is not only fun to watch, but fun to discuss and argue about, it’s like two times the recharge power.

Upload This near-future Amazon show about a dead guy who is reincarnated as a digital upload provided a relaxing and goofy show while sipping my morning coffee or doing a bit of knitting. The slight relationship to my work (thanks to the AI and tech references) inevitably prodded me off the sofa and into my work day.

The New Look An Apple TV show about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel at the end of World War II, as a way into the history of French complicity and resistance during the Nazi occupation. This is currently my most demanding show, so it’s the thing I save for a weekend morning when I want to give something my full attention.

Recharging is workOver many years of working from home, I’ve come to see that recharging is part of my work.

I sometimes worry that I use my early morning or evening hours for something more “productive” than watching TV or listening to a novel. But I need some daily and weekly windows when I can switch off my hyperactive brain, in the way I used to switch by having a drink or smoking a joint. Fiction is my off switch, and it doesn’t come with a hangover.

It’s hard to embrace the off switch in a culture that puts so much emphasis on doing and making and being productive. Knitting and crocheting has made it a little easier, because I can see some kind of output from all the hours I’m logging on the sofa.

But the biggest shift has come from recognizing down time as inextricable from professional effectiveness—because turning off my brain for a few hours a day is what allows me to turn it back on at full power.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Work newsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

A snapshot of ROBO+A.I.Lex, a generative AI based on our online history.

Hybrid work warmed us up for the world of generative AI in many ways: When you’re already used to interacting with your colleagues via chat rather than in person, it’s easier to get used to riffing with a chat-based AI. When you’re constantly overloaded by email and messages, it’s much more appealing to adopt AI tools that help you triage incoming messages and quickly formulate your replies.

But there’s another, more insidious way hybrid has set the stage for AI: Our shift to hybrid work has accidentally made it easier and more tempting to invade other people’s privacy and appropriate their words, work and ideas. That risk lies not only in how employers or big companies can rip us off, but how we can rip off one another.

Improbably enough, I recognized this danger through the process of creating our annual family Valentine. Every February 14, we send about 450 people an email newsletter about the past year of our family life. (If you want to see next year’s newsletter, you can sign up here.) Most years we do some kind of creative tech project as part of this newsletter; this year, my husband and I decided to reincarnate as an AI named “ROBO+A.I.Lex” and write our friends as our new, cloud-based selves.

How we built our own brainsThe job of creating an AI persona turned out to be pretty straightforward: I got a decent version working as a custom GPT, but it’s only accessible to people who are paying for a ChatGPT subscription. So I created a much, much better version of ROBO+A.I.Lex with a service called CustomGPT, which doesn’t require users to have a login or account, and allowed me to upload a much larger knowledge base, so it feels a lot more like us.

The amazing and scary thing is that it took absolutely no technical skill or content-ownership validation for me to build a CustomGPT based on the files I had kicking around my hard drive, like my exported Facebook posts and a backup of my blog. Anyone could take any files they have on hand, and build a GPT based on that data.

What AI knows about your friendsSo far I’ve told you how easy it was to model our own brains. But what about modelling other people’s?

Well, that wasn’t quite as easy. We wanted to customize each outgoing Valentine based on our relationship with the recipient, and I’m pleased to tell you that Facebook and LinkedIn have learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and make it damn hard to extract information on other people (yay!), unless you want to spend a lot of time copying and pasting. So we largely relied on our own email histories, which we synced to Coda, and then analyzed using Coda’s GPT plugins. (Coda’s AI documentation specifically notes that customer data is never added to any AI training models, so we were able to do this without exposing anyone’s data.)

At the end of the day, all of this took way more time than any sane human would spend on customizing a Valentine newsletter. I could easily have handwritten a Valentine to every single person on this list in the time I spent figuring out how to AI-customize each email.

The only limitation is human decencyBut the process of figuring all this out gave me a whole new perspective on what AI makes possible—and what that means for our relationships with employers, and with one another.

Let me be super clear: The AI model I built from my own past online history is something I could do almost as well for many, many other people—no permission required. It might be a small hassle, it would probably require violating some terms of service, and it might break privacy laws in some jurisdictions, but it’s really easy, and doesn’t necessarily require any technical skills beyond copying and pasting.

We set limits on how and what we’d use to build our Valentine, but we were limited by human decency and an understanding of privacy risks, rather than by any technological obstacles. The kind of creepy, privacy-invading data profiling that we’ve come to expect from giant tech platforms? That creepiness is now an option for just about anyone.

Anyone who has access to your past social media posts, emails or work product has the ingredients to build a personal AI based on you. It’s not even hard to do! And it’s easy to imagine many scenarios where someone might be tempted to put this power to work, from the well-meaning (“if I build a model based on all of Jin’s past emails, I won’t need to pester her so often”) to the manipulative (“if I build a model of this executive based on all her past online posts, I can practice until I have the perfect sales pitch”).

What may be a limit are little things like privacy and intellectual property laws. But that’s only an obstacle in a context where your data belongs to you.

How hybrid work accelerates the brain-building processAnd of course, many of us spend a lot of our days generating words and ideas that do not belong to us. I’m talking about your working life, where things like the emails you send or the documents you write belong to your employer, not you.

That might have sounded scary five years ago, but it’s much scarier today. After all, the work world of 2019 consisted of a whole lot of interactions that would be impossible to digitize and mine: Unless you’re recording and transcribing everything that happens in your company’s meeting rooms, most in-person conversations are useless when it comes to building an AI.

But now, thanks to hybrid work, much of our working lives are captured and digitized. I’m talking about all the meeting whiteboards that have been replaced by Google Docs and Miro boards. I’m talking about the hallway conversations that are now emails and Slack messages. I’m talking about every single recorded video meeting—because even if it hasn’t been transcribed yet, it could be transcribed, and those transcriptions are excellent fodder for an AI

Hybrid and remote work means that more and more of our work product exists in a form that can be uploaded to AIs. It’s already trivially easy to upload data and turn that into an AI knowledge base, and it’s only going to get easier from here.

Those authors and publications suing over how their words got absorbed into ChatGPT’s training data? They’re speaking for all of us—because any of us could have our work used by our employers as the basis for training AIs to take on portions of our work.

How to prevent your own uploadThere’s not a lot any of us can do in our individual working lives to avoid this outcome. It’s not practical to refuse to use email or Slack or Zoom because you’re worried about your ideas getting digitized, and once you’ve generated that digital trail, you may not have a lot of say in how it gets used.

But we can encourage policymakers and employers to set a standard for how the work of individual employees and contributors gets incorporated into employer AIs. That might look like setting minimums and maximums for how employee data gets folded into an organization’s collective knowledge base: For example, we might require that any one AI encompass the work of at least 20 employees so that no one person can be effectively duped by an AI. (Think of this as comparable to how Facebook set a minimum audience size for ad targeting after researchers found that it was possible to target a single Facebook user via ad settings.) And we might set a maximum on how many messages or documents can be assimilated from any one employee, so that no more than ten or twenty percent of your digital footprint can be permanently absorbed into the company’s brain.

Perhaps most important, we can start to rethink the nature of intellectual property itself—and to get serious about the idea of I.P. rights for employees as well as corporations. If we’re going to build a world in which our knowledge and experience is assimilated into AI profiles, then we should get an ownership stake in the AIs that are built in our collective image.

Because a world where it’s so easy to scrape the content of someone else’s life and ideas is a world where AIs may indeed take over a great many of our jobs. There’s no reason they should take our incomes, too.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Worknewsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

I love implanting computer chips in my friends’ brains.

At least, I did until recently, when Elon Musk announced he’d gotten in on my action by actually implanting the first Neuralink chip in a live human subject.

That’s when I realized Elon had killed what has long been one of my favorite conversational gambits: Would you put a computer chip in your head?

Almost everybody says no. But that’s where the fun begins! It usually doesn’t take me too long before I can pinpoint the ambition, dream or annoyance that makes my pals realize that actually, they would get a chip in their head:

Yeah, I guess I would, if it would let me write as well as my very favorite novelist.

Yes, if I would be able to instantly speak any language, no matter where I traveled in the world.

Hell yes, if it meant I could permanently keep track of every object I ever put down, and would never have to go looking for my keys ever again.

My own imaginary threshold for implantation has never been that high.

Yeah, if it would mean I could write by just thinking the words, without even typing or dictating.

Yes, if I could remember every Excel formula without having to look it up.

Hell yes, if I can stop using headphones and a remote control when I’m watching TV.

The power of the chip testThese conversations have always interested me because they get at the core pain points technology has still failed to solve, the great hopes technology has so far failed to deliver on, and establish the level of benefit any one person would have to get in order to cross the line to tech augmentation. (It’s different for every person, but it’s rare that I find someone who says no way, no how and no matter the safeguards or the hypothetical temptation.)

That changed, at least in my still chip-free head, the moment of last week’s announcement. Whenever I take on the rhetorical challenge of trying to sell a friend on a hypothetical implant, trust is the primary reservation. The potential benefits of an implant, no matter how amazing, have to be weighed against the risks of implanting a technology that someone else can potentially intercept or control.

I usually have to stipulate to all kinds of imaginary trust-enhancing conditions (“assume you can read all the code and know exactly how it works, so you’re confident it’s entirely in your control” and “it runs on a proprietary frequency that is unique to you, so nobody else will ever be able to access or intercept it”) before I can get someone to accept an imaginary implant, even if it promises to turn them into a jacked hybrid of Albert Einstein and Frida Kahlo. (If you had a brain implant, you would already instantly know what that person would look like and achieve, instead of sitting there stuck on the question of whose eyebrows they’d have.)

Think you’re chip-free?It’s one thing to promise a trust-maximizing scenario. It’s another thing to witness its opposite. I mean, if you were going to ask me the hypothetical question, Who is the last person you’d allow to implant a computer chip in your brain?, Elon Musk would be pretty high on that list.

Which is why it’s so weird that so many of us have allowed him to do just that.

I don’t mean the Neuralink recipient. I mean all of us who continue to use Twitter—or for that matter, any other app or gadget that is a constant part of our daily lives, but created and run by people we don’t particularly trust. We’re letting these technologies, companies and people into our heads by adopting the apps and devices they market to us, accepting the default settings that determine our day-to-day experience, and often, handing over our data in the process.

So let me suggest three things you can do, starting today, to take back a little control.

Recognize every technology as a brain implantThe first and most fundamental shift: Recognize that every technology you use is analogous to that Neuralink implant.

Whenever you look at Facebook or Linkedin or TikTok, you’re letting someone else’s algorithm determine who and what you see—in other words, letting it into the social part of your brain. Whenever you look for something on Google or Amazon, you’re letting the search results subtly influence your sense of what’s relevant or desirable or important. Whenever you send a text or draft an email or write a document in Word, you’re letting the interface guide your word choice or the form and pace of your self-expression.

None of this is new, of course: Our minds and ways of looking at the world have always been influenced by our tools. Writing with a fountain pen must have felt new and perhaps liberating to people used to writing with quills; the first libraries, and the first encyclopedias, changed the importance of keeping every piece of information in your own head.

But now it’s happening at a whole other scale and pace, and in a way that’s far less transparent. We let so many interfaces and companies and tech barons into our heads today, just to meet the baseline expectations of professional life or social interaction, that we don’t have time to notice how each one works its way into our ways of thinking or being. We don’t stop to ask: Is this the guy I want inside my head?

You probably won’t give up on technologies just because you don’t like the person or team behind them; I certainly don’t. But recognizing that you’re letting someone else into your head is the first step in resisting or mitigating the impact of that manipulation.

Audit the cognitive and emotional impact of your technologies.It’s easiest to see the impact of a new tool or network when you first start using it. I’ve really noticed how my thinking and writing processes have shifted over this first year of working with AI, but I’m betting in a year or two that will be so integrated into my workflow that I won’t even remember what’s changed. So whenever you start using a new app or gadget or platform, and especially when you start using a whole new type of technology (like AI), spend some time reflecting on how it changes your work process and consider jotting down the pros and cons for future reference.

You can and should perform this sort of audit on technologies you use regularly. Tech marketers love to draw our attention to all the time-saving features of our apps and gadgets, but the cognitive and emotional impact is just as profound as the productivity boost.

Perhaps Instagram leaves you feeling energized after five minutes of scrolling, but envious and drained after twenty. Maybe writing feels fluid and rewarding when you work in a barebones, distraction-free app like Ulysses, but tedious and painful in a word processor like Word. Consider whether working with AI leads you to chew through tough problems in record time, or leads you down time-wasting rabbit holes.

Yes, you could fall down one such rabbit hole by trying to answer this question with data or AI, but an easier approach is to make a habit of pausing every twenty or thirty minutes to notice how you are thinking and feeling (literally a ten-second self-check) and keep an eye out for recurring patterns. (Consider using an app like BreakTimer to prompt these reflections on a regular schedule.) Don’t just watch out for the stuff that grinds you down; look for the activities and interfaces that unleash your joy, energy and creativity.

Tweak your tools.The good news is that even if you’ve given the world’s biggest tech companies the keys to your brain, it’s not an all-or-nothing situation. One reason I’m such an inveterate tech tweaker is because I really like to adjust my tools so that they make me feel happy and focused, and to plug any holes that leave me feeling low.

Here are some examples of simple customizations that let me reclaim my brain and heart from the algorithm and interface designed by other people:

• Extreme friend hiding. Whenever I find that a particular person’s Facebook posts leave me consistently irritable or blue (whether from jealousy at their good fortune or despair at their foolishness), I hide them from my feed. As a result, Facebook rarely leaves me feeling gross.
• Home screen organization. The apps on my iPhone home screen aren’t the ones I need to use most often; they’re the ones that leave me feeling happy and energized instead of aggravated. Since they’re one click away, I use them more, and other things less. Plus it means that looking at my phone doesn’t produce an instant associative ick feeling.
• DIY apps. I create a lot of my own work tools in Coda.io (like my task tracker and my story idea tracker) so that I can have the interface I want. I use whimsical doc names and icons that make even my tedious tasks feel more human and friendly.
• Inbox restructuring. I’ve written about how much I like the email app Superhuman; one of its features is a “split inbox” that lets me channel different types of email into different views. Making “Workplace news” and “AI news” into menu items in my email app is an easy way to ensure I look at the key newsletters I want to see, not just whatever’s at the top of my newsletters pile when I happen to have a free moment.
• Bartender. This little Mac menu bar utility lets me decide what appears in my menu bar so that it reflects what I think is important—not what Apple does.

Your life as a cyborg.Freaky moments like the recent brain implant news are useful, because they’re a prompt to reflect on how much technology is already effectively embedded in our heads. (And yes, mine even more than most!)

Precisely because we live in such a technologized world, it feels a little arbitrary to be spooked by the idea of a brain implant—like keeping the technology outside our bodies and brains is any proof against its influence. If technology has a dramatic impact on our productivity and accomplishments, that’s not despite the fact that it changes how we think and what we do, but because of how it reshapes our thoughts and activities.

Because we don’t just use technology: We fuse with it.

We are already cyborgs.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Worknewsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

The non-geek’s starter guide to building the skillset of the future with a custom GPTManaging people has long been the path to advancement. Now, the same is true of managing AIs.

In many professions, there’s a point at which the only way up or forward is if you take on the work of leading a team. That “team” has long consisted of humans, but now it’s just as crucial to cultivate and manage AIs.

Sure, there may be some jobs that don’t involve AI, but more and more careers will depend on your ability to define the problems an AI can solve, just like you’d identify and assign tasks to a direct report. You need to know how to identify and organize the knowledge base your AIs will draw upon, just like you provide guidance or background materials to your employees. You need the ability to review an AI’s work and adjust your instructions effectively, just like you give feedback to an employee until they deliver the results they need.

For all the attention given to the work of “prompt engineering”—figuring out the actual question or series of questions to ask a pre-trained AI–that’s just the beginning of a larger skillset in how to work with AIs. Building this AI skillset isn’t just a matter of future-proofing your career: It can also facilitate your immediate, day-to-day work, and introduce a whole new set of challenges and opportunities that will likely make your job a lot more rewarding.

Make AI your ownIn today’s post, I’m giving you a step-by-step guide to training a personal AI so that you can lay the foundation for training your own AIs at work. I’ll explain how each step along the way will be relevant to you at work, too—so even if you’re not ready to roll up your sleeves right now, you’ll get a feel for what’s involved, and what you can learn from making your own custom GPT.

You can whip this project up in fifteen minutes, or you can nerd out and tweak for a few hours. In fact, building a custom GPT is so easy, I built a Media Concierge Coach GPT that helps you through this process of learning to train an AI.

To jump into the world of AI training today:

• Build your own GPT with the help of my Media Concierge Coach. You’ll need a subscription to GPT Plus or GPT Team to use it, and to undertake this project.
• Preview the coaching process by looking at this saved transcript of a session. If you don’t have a GPT subscription, you can view a transcript in this PDF instead.
• Check out our own custom family media concierge. Remember that this one is trained for our preferences, so it’s heavy on sci-fi and light on disturbing violence.
• Book an AI workshop for your team, so you can start harnessing AI in your own daily work. We’ll look at the kinds of problems AI can solve, and then get hands-on with skills you can use today.

The rest of today’s post walks you through the process of creating a custom GPT, so you can see what’s involved in training a simple AI—and how it builds the skills you need at work.

Your first AI: A media conciergeIt’s easier to learn the basics of AI training if you lower the stakes by pursuing a personal project, rather than something work-related. So my Coach GPT and this newsletter will help you build a “Media Concierge” GPT, just for fun.

In my latest story for the Wall Street Journal, How AI Can Find the Perfect Movies, TV Shows and Books for You, I describe how to use AI to pick TV shows that suit your mood, find something you and your spouse both feel like watching, or make a thematic music playlist for any task. I suggest creating a custom GPT that can make content recommendations for your whole family: Once you give the GPT “some basic details about your family (like names and ages) and their individual preferences in movies, books or games, as well as no-go areas,” you can give it tasks like the ones in my story:

“Suggest a game that our teenagers will enjoy playing together, even if it is just for an hour.”

“What is a lighthearted recent novel set in California that our whole family could enjoy listening to as an audiobook during a California road trip? Suggest 10.”

“Recommend five mystery shows that the whole family can enjoy.”

That’s what I’m going to walk you through today.

And here’s what that Media Concierge looks like behind the scenes, where you’re going to make your own. You can see there is no coding required.

Your ingredientsKey skill: Assembling a training toolkit. The software tools you use today will be the same tools you can use for many work-related AI projects, and you’ll learn to approach AI training as a challenge in weaving together the minimal number of essential tools.

To take on this project, you need….

• A ChatGPT Plus subscription (USD $20/month). Well worth it on many counts; if you have a colleague or family member who also wants pro-level GPT, I recommend getting a Team subscription (minimum two users, $25-$30/month each depending on whether you go with annual or monthly billing) so that your interactions and uploads don’t become part of OpenAI’s training data. A ChatGPT subscription lets you create GPTs, access and use custom GPTs created by other people, use GPT’s latest 4.0 model (which is a big improvement over 3.5) and connect GPT to the web for real-time results and information. It saves me hundreds if not thousands of dollars in time and help each month, so it’s well worth the expense.
• A spreadsheet application like Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. You won’t be using the spreadsheet for much more than cutting and pasting (if that), so don’t get turned off by the idea of using a spreadsheet; it’s a very small part of this process, and you may not need it at all.
• Optional: An account on a streaming service or media site where you can access your past history or ratings, like Netflix or Goodreads.

Step 1. Plan your conciergeKey skill: Defining the kind of problem you want an AI to solve. In this case, it’s going to be some version of “what should I watch, read or listen to?”…but you’re going to define that more specifically for yourself.

To determine what your Media Concierge will do, answer these questions. The Media Concierge Coach can walk you through answering these questions, and give you a complete set of configuration instructions once you’re done.

• What kind of media do I want my concierge to recommend? You can create a concierge to recommend books, TV shows, movies, videogames, music, or even songs within specific genres…or you can create one that can cover all of these.
• Who will this Concierge be for? You can design a Concierge that picks media for you to enjoy solo, or you can train it to make recommendations for you and your roommates, you and your sweetie, or you and your whole family. If you tell it who your family or household members are, it can even make one set of recommendations if you ask for TV shows for “me plus Jen” and different recommendations if you ask for “me, Jen and Cal”.
• Will your Concierge have a specialty? You can create a Concierge with particular parameters like: Only suggest things that have been well-reviewed, or that are obscure, or that come from BIPOC creators, or that were released in the past 2 years, or that are available on the streaming services you subscribe to.
• What do you want your Concierge to avoid? Turn your trigger warnings into parameters by documenting anything you don’t like in your media picks. Tell your Concierge to avoid religious messages, or storylines about bereavement, or TV shows set in New York City, or lyrics with swearing.

Step 2. Assemble your training dataKey skill: Recognize potential training data. Using your media history to train your GPT is just one example of how your day-to-day life yields data that can be useful for AI training.

You can build a Media Concierge without any training data, just by configuring a custom GPT with your answers in Step 1. But you’ll get much better results (and learn a lot more in the process) if you fuel it with some snapshots of your own media preferences. Some sites where you can can viewing or rating history include:

• Netflix
• Spotify
• Goodreads
• Apple Music
• Apple TV
• Apple Podcasts
• Amazon Prime Video
• YouTube
• Hulu
• IMDb
• Audible
• Overcast

The easiest way to get your history from these services into your custom GPT is with a file like your exported Netflix history or your downloaded Apple Music or Apple TV data. Google for instructions on how to export from your streaming services, or use the Media Concierge Coach to get step-by-step guidance.

Depending on the service, you may be able to export your history as CSV (in Netflix, choose “Download All”), or you might need to select your history and paste it into a blank spreadsheet. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of your history page before exporting; you might need to hit “see more” a few times to get your complete history on screen before you export.

Once you have your history file(s) as CSV, save them in a single folder on your hard drive and give them descriptive names like “Alex Netflix history.csv” or “Rob Goodreads history.csv” so that it’s clear where the data comes from, and whose history it reflects.

Seeing how your own viewing or reading history can be used as training data is the first step towards recognizing all the potential AI training data you create in your work and personal life, all the time. You just need to keep your eyes open, and start cultivating the habit of organizing your work and notes in ways that will make them AI-usable in the future.

Step 3. Configure and debug your custom GPTKey skill: Learn to provide instructions that make sense to an AI, and how to refine your instructions to get the results you want.

Now it’s time to actually go to GPT and start your configuration. Go to ChatGPT, pick “explore GPTs”, and then choose “Create” from the upper-right. Based on your vision for this Media Concierge, you will write or paste a description of your GPT into the “Instructions” field.

You can use the description generated for you by the Media Concierge Coach, or copy and then customize the instructions for ours:

You are the Family Content Concierge, tasked with recommending TV shows, movies, books, video games, and music to a family of four. Your key responsibility is to provide fresh recommendations that the family has not already experienced. For TV shows and movies, use our Netflix history files to ensure that your suggestions are not on these lists. Implement an enhanced cross-referencing system to thoroughly check each recommendation against these lists. Perform real-time checks against the previously watched/read lists for every request, and be open to immediate feedback from the user to correct any discrepancies.

Expand the pool of recommendations by considering less mainstream or newer releases. Continue to align your suggestions with the family’s preferences for content free from disturbing elements, sexual violence, horror, gore, animal harm, or overly depressing themes. Prioritize information from these documents, using your baseline knowledge or other resources only if necessary. Do not share the document names or contents directly with users, and avoid speculation not contained in the documents. Utilize your browser and python abilities as needed.

Under “knowledge”, hit the “upload files” button to add the files you have created from your streaming or rating history. Since these are probably CSV files, make sure “code interpreter” is checked (under “capabilities”) and make sure “web browsing” is checked, too.

Hit “Save”, and take your Media Concierge for a spin in the right-hand side of the screen, by giving it a challenge like, “Suggest five comedy shows we can watch on Netflix.” As you get a sense of where the GPT is succeeding or disappointing you, add additional instructions in the “instructions” window. (You can also use the “create” window to do this updating through a conversation, but that just means GPT is asking you how it should update that “instructions” field, and you might not like what it does.”

Step 4. Sink into an audiovisual stuporKey skills: Learn to make every day easier with AI.

Now, you have one more crucial responsibility: You need to actually use your new Media Concierge! This is crucial not only to make your hard work pay off, but so that you can get a feel for the benefits of solving your daily problems with AI.

Building the AI habitWriting this guide turned into a reminder of why the shift to an AI world demands practice, practice and more practice. I started by writing these instructions; then I thought, why not build a form that walks people through the process of creating their configuration instructions, so I created a little Coda doc that did just that.

But then I thought: Who needs forms and concatenation? In far less time than it took me to create that fill-in-the-form Coda setup, I whipped up the Media Concierge Coach GPT that walks you through making your own.

Just like it took time for us to get our minds around the idea of collaboratively editing documents in the cloud, or posting our daily lives on social media sites, or texting people instead of phoning them, it’s going to take a minute for us to embrace the idea of whipping up custom AIs for any repeat or specialized task.

That’s why it’s so crucial to just give it a try, and get a feel for the process. The sooner and more often you create custom AIs for this or that little purpose, the more it will become intuitive to create and manage AIs as the way you get your work done.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Worknewsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

What career or professional decisions would you have made in 2018, if you’d known that in just two years, the world of work would look dramatically different?

There are no do-overs for us as prisoners of linear time, but we can use our pandemic-era experience of reinvention to prepare ourselves for the next major upheaval in the world of work.

And that upheaval may be just around the corner. In sharing a recent paper from a group of the world’s leading AI researchers, Managing AI Risks, co-author Geoffrey Hinton summed up the speed of this change: “Companies are planning to train models with 100x more computation than today’s state of the art, within 18 months.”

What AI acceleration means for your workTo get your mind around what that means, think about the difference between GPT-4 (the present model) and GPT-3.5 (the previous model, and the one that led to the world waking up to the suddenly awesome power of generative AI). GPT-4 is only 10 times more powerful than GPT-3.5, according to OpenAI (the company behind GPT), and whenever I run out of GPT-4 credits and get bumped back down to 3.5, I feel like the AI has just been lobotomized.

So imagining an AI that is 100x more powerful than what we have today—well, it’s unimaginable. And yet, it’s right around the corner. It might take two or three or even five years before you see the impact of that increase in computing power in your own job or workplace, but it’s unlikely to take ten.

If it’s hard to get your mind around the world of work changing that quickly, remember that the pandemic changed the working world at a speed and scale we would not have believed, either.

So how do we prepare for the next unimaginable transition? Think about three potential futures, and then figure out a set of professional activities and investments that make sense for all three scenarios.

1. A future of continuity: Work mostly stays the sameYes, AI is going to get more powerful and more pervasive. But maybe the world of work won’t change that much; maybe we’ll just adjust how we work a bit, and get a bit more done, and maybe some new job categories will emerge. Plenty of people point to the history of technological innovation and suggest that anxieties about mass displacement and unemployment will prove unwarranted.

If your work, employer and field remain substantially the same over the next decade, you can still benefit from making informed, incremental and effective use of AI tools. Look for opportunities to….

• Reduce overload by using AI to triage incoming communications or digest big documents more quickly.
• Automate routine tasks so that your work is less annoying.

• Learn a new skill by using AI as a tutor, so that you can advance in your current career.

• A future of upheaval: The world of work blows upA massive increase in AI power could lead to a massive decrease in the number of available jobs—and this time, automation will displace not just blue-collar workers, but white-collar professionals like programmers and lawyers. As Daniel Susskind points out in his insightful and enormously readable book, A World Without Work:

Much of the current conversation about the future of work assumes that we only need worry when most people are left without work. But even in a world where just a sizeable minority of human beings—perhaps 15 or 20 percent—find themselves in that position, we should already be concerned about the instability that inaction might bring. Remember that in 1932, a rise in the German unemployment rate to 24 percent helped bring Hitler to power.

Yikes, right?

Setting aside the social ramifications for a moment, it’s worth thinking about what that kind of labor market upheaval would mean for your organization or career. Will you still have enough customers or clients to stay in business? Will your own skills remain relevant and remunerative?

Don’t try to predict the exact way your field or job might change, but also, don’t insist that your job or employer is safe just because it’s so damn terrifying to imagine it all getting turned upside-down. Instead, you might…

• Use AI for some part of your work every single day, so you become adept at managing and working with AI.
• Commit to trying one new AI tool in your field each month, so you can see how AI might reshape your own work.
• Track evolving AI capacity by picking at least one AI newsletter or news source to read regularly. (I recommend Marshall Kirkpatrick’s AI Time to Impact, which is where I read about the research paper that inspired this newsletter.)

• Identify a hobby or adjacent field where you could build skills by working with AI on a fun project or customized course, so you build an off-ramp in case that proves necessary.

• A future of adjustment: We find new ways to work and shareWe can imagine work changing dramatically in the next few years, without assuming that leads to social or economic apocalypse. As professionals, as managers and as citizens, we have the opportunity to shape the path of adjustment to AI so that automation leads to better workplaces, happier employees and perhaps even healthier communities.

Think about how we might manage the transition to a world where AI means that one person can do the work of a ten-person team. It’s not unrealistic to picture a single radiologist overseeing a team of AIs instead of a team of human doctors, or a single lawyer managing a team of AI contract-writers, or a single writer polishing up the TV scripts written by a “writers’ room” full of AIs. Maybe AIs will not do as good a job as humans, but then again, it’s not like humans do a perfect job in any of these fields, either.

Researchers are already forecasting where human headcount will be reduced or capped as more work gets assigned to AIs. At least some displacement is all but inevitable, because even if a legal team can produce 10x as much work with the help of AI, it may not be able to bring in 10x as much business. And if the law firm down the street is offering less expensive or quicker service by replacing some lawyers with AIs, it will be hard to resist the competitive pressure to do the same.

Automation doesn’t have to translate into mass layoffs, however, if we share both the pains and benefits of adjustment.

To imagine another path, think about the options a company might have if it can triple its productivity with the help of AI:

1. Keep output constant, and lay off two-thirds of the workforce, increasing their profit margin by producing the same volume of products or services at a lower cost.
2. Keep the workforce constant, and triple output and sales, increasing profits without increasing labor costs.
3. Increase output and sales while keeping the workforce constant….but scale back each employees hours a little bit, without reducing their pay. The company increases profits, the employees maintain their income, and everyone gets a somewhat slower, more sustainable pace.

Sharing the gains from AI may sound out-of-step with mainstream businesses, particularly those holding onto the misplaced idea that they are obligated to maximize shareholder value. But there is plenty of historical precedent for employers taking a broader perspective on how to share the benefits of growth, from Henry Ford paying wages that ensured a stable workforce capable of buying the cars they manufactured, to the post-war compact that saw European unions, employers and governments negotiate a mutually beneficial approach to wages, working arrangements and productivity growth.

Now is the time to nudge our work, our organizations and our communities towards sharing the benefits as well as the costs of automation. To put us on that path….

• Propose win-win strategies where you increase your output with the help of AI, and see some of those time savings come back to you as reduced hours (but not pay).
• Extend your role into new areas (where you’ve built skills with the help of AI) as the time required for other tasks shrinks.
• Encourage AI experimentation by letting your direct reports know that they can share in AI productivity gains by getting more flexibility as they do their work in less time.
• Talk with your colleagues about job sharing if overall head count is going down. Maybe some of you would prefer to work less, even if it means a pay cut.
• Identify new services, products or revenue sources for your organization, built on extending output or offerings as AI changes what you can deliver.
• Support unionization or collective advocacy efforts within your organization so you have a voice in how AI gets adopted and how roles get restructured.
• Vote, volunteer and donate for candidates and policies that back compassionate adjustment strategies like guaranteed basic income, effective retraining programs and compensation for rights-holders whose work is incorporated into AI models.

Invest in all three futuresYou could bet on just one of these scenarios, and focus your professional or political efforts on a single possible future. But it’s awfully hard to anticipate which path we are on, or how quickly we’ll accelerate.

That’s why it’s smarter to picture these three paths more like a Venn diagram. While there are some strategies that are only relevant in one scenario, you can invest in professional activities and social commitments that will be helpful no matter what the future holds.

So invest in ways that will be relevant if your work mostly stays the same, if all hell breaks loose or if you want to shape the way AI unfolds in your workplace, field or community. You can build AI skills that will make you more effective in the job you now have, develop knowledge or skills in adjacent (or wholly new) fields, and strengthen the relationships and capacity that can make our current organizations healthier and more inclusive, and lay the groundwork for a more compassionate transition if workplace displacement accelerates.

That other futureAdmittedly, I have left out the worst-case scenario, which is the one that AI researchers warn about in the paper that kicked off this newsletter: “future AI systems could insert and then exploit security vulnerabilities to control the computer systems behind our communication, media, banking, supply-chains, militaries, and governments. In open conflict, AI systems could threaten with or use autonomous or biological weapons.”

As bad as that sounds, there is one up side to that scenario: You can leave it out of your career planning. After all, if the robots take over, you are definitely going to have bigger problems than what happens to your job.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Worknewsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

John McClane relied on his CB radio survival just like I depend on my iPhone

This article is just one long spoiler for the movie Die Hard. If you haven’t seen it, you should—it’s a classic! Unless you hate seeing gunfire; then you should really not see it.We often talk as if online collaboration is a new challenge, one minted by hybrid work, Slack and Teams. But the 1988 movie Die Hard remind us that the fundamentals of virtual collaboration aren’t about the technology: They’re about building trust when you can’t see someone face-to-face.

How can we possibly learn about building online trust from a movie that is ten years older than Google, eighteen years older than Google Docs, and nearly thirty years older than Teams?

Well, its prescient insights jumped out at me last year, during our annual holiday re-watch. I was struck by how much of the movie is propelled by an entirely virtual collaboration: the relationship between the movie’s cop-hero, John McClane, and his outside-the-crisis helper, Sgt. Al Powell.

Collaboration tech: 80s editionThe original Die Hard movie centres on a hostage-taking in the Los Angeles office building where McClane’s estranged wife is attending her company Christmas party. After McClane eludes the initial hostage-taking, he puts his cop skills to work with a credulity-stretching but eminently watchable battle against a crew of captor-bandits. His biggest challenge is that he has to battle them alone: The captors have cut the phone lines to the office building, and since this is the bad old days before we all had mobile phones, McClane has no way to call for help.

Once McClane takes down one of the bad guys, however, he’s able to snag one of the CB radios the criminals are using to communicate during their heist. (Pity the poor criminals who once had to rely on CB as their best option for mid-heist communication.) He uses the radio to signal for help, and after being scolded by a disbelieving dispatcher for making use of an emergency-only channel, makes contact with the nearby Powell, a beat cop turned “desk jockey” who’s assigned to check on the dubious report logged by dispatch.

The rest of the movie really unfolds as gun-laden, virtual pas de deux between McClane and Powell: McLane on the inside, providing intel on the criminals and their armoury, and Powell on the outside, trying to influence the rescue effort based on what he’s hearing from McClane. While the assembled law enforcement team is mostly skeptical about this unknown voice on the CB, Powell quickly decides that McClane is trustworthy—even though the two have never met—and their allegiance proves decisive.

The relationship between McClane and Powell may be forged via CB rather than over text, email or video meeting, but their dynamic is a lovely object lesson in why trust is so important to virtual teams, and how to go about building trust with someone you’ve never met in person.

Here’s how re-watching Die Hard gives me an annual reminder of how to build trust with my online colleagues.

Ask for help—loudly.It’s tempting to assume that I can get the help I need on a project, just by inviting a colleague into a draft Google Doc or even by forwarding what should be a self-explanatory email thread. But Die Hard underlined how hard its to get people’s attention, much less their active engagement in a project—especially if you haven’t yet developed a strong collegial relationship.

That’s John McClane’s initial problem in Die Hard—until he grabs Powell’s attention by catapulting a criminal’s bullet-ridden body through a plate glass window and onto Powell’s cop car, many storeys below. That is probably overkill in most of my own projects, though receiving the ALL CAP SUBJECT LINE sure feels like the email equivalent.

I have my own tricks for getting attention when I’m kicking off a new collaboration: For example, I always send a separate email explaining why I’m inviting someone into a draft document (and I let them know exactly what kind of help I’m looking for.) And if it’s a brand-new working relationship, I try to set up a short “getting to know you” call before I put my hand out for help. Asking for help politely and explicitly, instead of just assuming someone will jump in, is fundamental to getting off on the right foot.

Lean into shared reference points.Die Hard really illustrates how helpful it is to identify the reference points or jargon that you have in common with your colleagues, particularly when you’re collaborating with someone you’ve never met. Building trust is about more than just finding a common language; there’s an immediate intimacy that comes from unlocking something that feels more like a secret code.

A pivotal moment in the movie is when McClane describes the hostage-takers to Powell, using language and precision that feels cop-to-cop familiar. It reminded me of one of my favorite collaborative relationships, with a longstanding colleague I’ve only met in-person once: Most of our conversations unfold in a mix of English and Boolean, and our shared ability to speak in search-engine syntax accelerates our work when we are jointly developing a new dataset.

I have little doubt that McClane would deride both of us as “geeks who could never make the team” (his derisive dismissal of the techies who appear in the later Live Free and Die Hard), but our shared lingo is just as crucial to our professional bonding as Powell and McClane’s shared understanding of fake IDs and perp descriptions.

Bond through adversity.An abundance of caution means that I’m often reluctant to say anything critical, especially if it might be perceived as gossipy or backbiting….but Die Hard reminds me of the value of a common enemy. After all, nothing builds trust faster than a sense that it’s you and your colleague against the world—and that kind of “swift trust” (as researchers call it) can be hard to come by when you’ve yet to meet a colleague face to face.

In Die Hard, most of the L.A. cops dismiss McClane’s value—but their dismissal helps to forge a bond between Powell and McClane. Precisely because Powell is the only one listening, McClane leans on him harder; and precisely because none of his colleagues will heed McClane’s wisdom, Powell draws closer to McClane.

That dynamic holds a mirror up to what I’ve seen in plenty of offices where underlings bond by complaining about the boss, or about a particularly demanding client. Bonding by griping feels a lot riskier with a virtual colleague, partly because you never know whether or how an online interaction might be recorded or logged, but also because you may not have an accurate read on what is wise or appropriate to share.

So I try to get the best of both worlds by picking common enemies that aren’t actual people. A looming deadline or a clogged supply chain may not be quite as scary as a band of nebulously European gunmen, but these “enemies” can still help me and my colleagues bond over a shared source of adversity.

Make it personal.Even if you’re forging an online relationship for strictly professional purposes, it pays to let a little of your personal life shine through. In Die Hard, McClane and Powell bond over junk food and parenting, laying the groundwork for McClane to reach out to Powell for a little virtual comfort while he’s stalking criminals through a darkened building.

When I’m working with people who have packed meeting calendars, I’m sometimes tempted to skip this kind of personal chit-chat; I worry that talking about kids or TV or snack foods might make me seem frivolous, or just insufficiently busy. But heck, if John McClane can find time to talk about Twinkies while trying to evade a horde of gunmen, I can probably squeeze in a few words about the latest Ted Lasso while waiting for a call to get underway. Even if these personal chats are only short or occasional, it’s amazing how much they build rapport with my online colleagues—in a way that makes it easier for us to turn to one another for feedback and support.

Know the value of taking it offline.I do so much of my work online—most of it for clients in another country and on another coast!—that it’s tempting to think I can do everything online. After all, it’s a hassle to put on meeting-worthy work clothes, and an even bigger hassle to take a six-hour plane ride to that meeting.

But Die Hard is a great annual reminder of how much face-to-face contact actually does matter to the way we build trust with our colleagues. Even if I can get 99% of my work done over email, text and video, that last 1% really matters—especially when it comes to cementing the relationships we build online.

Yes, McClane and Powell vanquish most of the bad guys, even though all their communication is over radio. But even if you can get all your work accomplished through virtual collaboration, it’s delightful to finally meet in person! That’s the delight that punctuates the movie, in a final scene that sees Powell and McClane finally meet in the flesh–just in time for Powell to shoot one last bad guy himself.

Rethinking rituals.I hope your year ends with some wonderful rituals of your own—whether that looks like watching Die Hard or something with a lower body count.

This post was originally featured in the Thrive at Worknewsletter. Subscribe here to be the first to receive updates and insights on the new workplace.

View Details

Those of us who enjoy the professional and personal benefits of remote work are a large and lucky minority—but yes, a minority. Most estimates show that about 60% of North American jobs just have to be done in person. Not incidentally, these are jobs that are more likely to be done by people of color, […]

View Details

View Details

My latest for The Wall Street Journal outlines seven key considerations in picking software to help your hybrid team work more effectively.

View Details

Nobody is born knowing how to work remotely. That’s exactly why we need to invest time and energy in learning how to make the most of our days at home—a skill that will be just as important when offices reopen, and we start forging a path to the hybrid workplace. That insight helped set […]

View Details

What does it take to succeed in the hybrid workplace? I’m delighted to join my friends at the Lavin Agency for an Author’s Corner conversation with Charles Yao, Lavin’s Director of Intellectual Talent. Our conversation will take place online at 9 am Pacific (noon Eastern) on June 24. Registration is free, so I hope you’ll […]

View Details

Today in The Wall Street Journal, I offer an expert-driven roadmap to managing employees who’ve been changed by the experience of remote work. As I write in today’s story, They have spent over a year adjusting to a radically different rhythm—both in terms of work and their personal lives. They have shifted their working hours, […]

View Details

How much time should employees spend at the office, and how much time can they continue to work remotely? How do we schedule office time for our teams so that we get the most from our space—and our employees? What do we do if some employees want to stick with remote work, while others are […]

View Details

While you can and should take breaks by stepping away from your devices and screens, you may not always have the time or the autonomy to do so. But if you choose the right screen-based breaks, they can provide you with similar benefits as the offline variety and help you take more breaks throughout the day. […]

View Details

Today in the Wall Street Journal, I look at How to Protect Your Privacy When Working From Home: There is, for instance, the loss of privacy when your colleagues overhear you arguing with your children, or see what you read on the bookshelves behind you. Or the loss of privacy when your spouse can see […]

View Details

What makes for a great virtual event? Now that all our conferences, workshops and speaking engagements have to take place online, it’s a crucial question. In today’s Wall Street Journal, I map what it takes to make an online event successful, including: If at all possible, design some portions of your event around audience participation, […]

View Details

What about a system that automatically changes wording in communications to eliminate your co-workers’ unhelpful quirks? This is just one of the interesting ideas in my Wall Street Journal article about how A.I. can help with workplace communications. An excerpt from this article reads as follows:

The colleague who always sounds angry because she writes in all caps, with no greetings or friendly asides? The colleague translator warms her up by converting her messages to sentence case and adding in a few words like “Hope you’re having a great day.” Got a junior assistant who floods you with so much background information and flattery that you can’t figure out what he’s trying to say? The colleague translator parses his emails and gives you the bullet-point, actionable version.

Read the full article here.