Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

If you’re still using Google Calendar like it’s 2009—just punching in appointments and letting it ride—you’re leaving productivity on the table. While we’re all drowning in digital noise, the single best thing you can do is carve out some actual, useful time. These five tricks are simple to implement, and they turn your basic calendar into a surprisingly effective time-management copilot. So, stop scheduling and start planning. The shortcut-iest shortcutsYou know what’s less efficient than a two-hour conference call? Constantly clicking the “Create” button or dragging your mouse to the next available time slot. Instead, just hit the C key on your keyboard. The event creat…

As Meta has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into outpacing its competition in the AI arms race, employees have been forced to get on board with its big bet. Meta employees have been asked to enthusiastically adopt AI and are now evaluated on their AI use in performance reviews. Recurring layoffs have reportedly stoked discontent: According to a recent New York Times report, employees have built websites to count down to another round of rumored job cuts next week. Now the company is also using mouse-tracking software to collect employee data that will help train Meta’s AI models—and employees are not having it. A Reuters report today revealed that an online pet…

As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) returns to Las Vegas from Jan. 6 to 9, the tech industry is gearing up for its annual spectacle of prototypes, silicon benchmarks and AI-branded gadgets. But one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise technology over the coming year will unfold far from the keynote stages and demo floors. HP, the 85-year-old Silicon Valley company long defined by PCs, printers, and enterprise hardware, is repositioning itself as a work-intelligence platform—where devices learn continuously, services anticipate needs, and AI dissolves the traditional boundaries between hardware, software, and the cloud. Under Jim Nottingham, senior vice pres…

There is a deeply unsettling paradox in how aging women are represented today. The louder the discourse on inclusion and diversity becomes, the fewer women we see who actually look like women over 45. Women who age “normally”—who live in their bodies, with their features, their lines, their visible age—have almost vanished from public view. When women in their 50s or 60s do gain visibility, it is often with a body and a face that belong to the strange category of Forever 35: perfectly smooth, ageless, suspended in time. This is not a trivial aesthetic issue because it has major consequences for work, careers, and power. When women disappear from view as they age, they lo…

In November, Apple laid off dozens of sales employees in a rather unexpected move for the tech giant. Apple is the rare tech company that has steered clear of mass layoffs, particularly among its peers in the trillion-dollar club. The layoffs “came as a surprise” for those who lost their jobs, according to a Bloomberg report—and they impacted some employees who had been with the company for decades. The post-pandemic job market has come to be defined by layoffs, in tech and beyond: A Glassdoor analysis finds that there was a peak in 2023, but layoffs have since continued at a more frequent cadence relative to the years prior. A variety of sectors have been hit hard—and …

UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty is stepping down for personal reasons and the nation’s largest health insurer suspended its full-year financial outlook due to higher-than-expected medical costs. Chairman Stephen Hemsley will become CEO, effective immediately, the Minnesota company said. Hemsley was UnitedHealth Group CEO from 2006 to 2017. He will remain chairman of the company’s board. Witty will serve as a senior adviser to Hemsley. “Leading the people of UnitedHealth Group has been a tremendous honor as they work every day to improve the health system, and they will continue to inspire me,” Witty said. Witty joined the company in 2018 after serving about nine years a…

Quantum computing stocks got pummeled yesterday, with the four most prominent public quantum computing companies—IonQ, Rigetti Computing, Quantum Computing Inc., and D-Wave Quantum Inc.—falling anywhere from over 9% to over 18%. The reason? It has to do with AI chip giant Nvidia. Again. Stocks crash yesterday on Nvidia quantum news Yesterday was a bit of a bloodbath on the stock market for the four most prominent publicly traded quantum computing companies. Here’s a breakdown of how they performed, according to data from Yahoo Finance: IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ): down 9.27% to $21.14 per share Rigetti Computing, Inc. (Nasdaq RGTI): down 9.24% to $8.99 per shar…

When Katie Hammel arrived at her company’s offsite in Cabo San Lucas, she expected the usual formula: long meetings, awkward icebreakers, and a packed agenda that left little room to breathe. What she experienced instead was something different—a thoughtfully curated, empowering, and inclusive retreat. “There was a little wrap-up at the end of each day,” says Hammel, director of content at travel rewards booking platform Point.me. “At first I thought it was going to be kind of corny, and I actually ended up really loving it. Hearing what surprised people, what they learned—it just really crystallized the day.” Hammel, who’s attended nine retreats while working at four d…

Bose is rethinking its approach to smart speakers. While the company has released plenty of Wi-Fi-connected speakers over the years, its new Lifestyle Ultra line is a strategic reset, with a new platform that Bose spent the last few years building. (The name is also a nod to Bose’s original Lifestyle systems from the 1990s.) The new Bose offerings include a $299 standalone speaker, a $1,099 soundbar, and an $899 subwoofer, which can also be combined into a surround system. Raza Haider, Bose’s president of premium consumer audio, says these are the first of many speakers that it will launch on the new technology stack. “It’s a completely brand new platform, whe…

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the provision that protects tech platforms from legal liability for content posted by their users—has long been a point of contention among lawmakers. Since its passage in 1996, it has fueled frustration across the political spectrum, with critics arguing that it enables Big Tech to dodge accountability. Now, nearly three decades later, a bipartisan group of senators is making a renewed push to dismantle it, with Senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin crossing party lines to draft a bill aimed at repealing Section 230, according to The Information. For years, Section 230 has been a scapegoat not just for politicians eager t…

A quiet shift is reshaping the trajectory of wealth in America, but it isn’t happening in the boardrooms of Wall Street or the halls of Silicon Valley. It’s unfolding in neighborhoods, driveways, and home offices across the country, powered by teachers, software engineers, nurses, military families, and small-business owners who never expected to become real estate investors at all. As the cofounder and CEO of a rental technology company that supports independent property owners (and as an investor myself), I see this transformation every day. What starts as an unexpected ownership moment often turns into a thoughtful plan for long-term financial stability. Many i…

Disney’s 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland taught audiences that “you can learn a lot of things from the flowers.” But the movie never mentioned the full moon named after those springtime sensations. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, a celestial phenomenon called the “Flower Moon” occurs today, and despite being “micro,” it is still a sight to behold. Let’s take a deeper look into what all these names mean, and when you can see this “full flower micromoon.” Why is the May full moon tonight called the ‘Flower Moon’? The Old Farmer’s Almanac shares popular names given to each month’s full moons. Many of these monikers are based in Native American tradit…

Below, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein shares five key insights from her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of 10 books of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction and has held various visiting professorships and fellowships at elite academic institutions. Her first novel was The Mind-Body Problem. What’s the big idea? We all want to feel connected to others and know that we matter. The ways we go about making our lives matter shape who we are, the meaning we find, and the mark we leave on the world. Listen to the audio version of this Book…

There is a nationwide talent war for frontline, skilled workers, and unfortunately, too many companies are losing. Turnover among deskless workers, who account for about 80% of the workforce globally, is high, and they are notoriously difficult to train through traditional training programs. Corporate training solutions that work for someone sitting behind a desk rarely work for someone on a job site or factory floor. HR professionals cited employee engagement, retention, and recruitment as the top management challenges within the deskless workforce, according to a Society for Human Resource Management study. Unlike office workers with predictable schedules and easy …

Psychologist: “Design influences behavior.” Neuroscientist: “Design influences behavior.” Uncivil engineer: “It’s not like my road design influences driver behavior.” Every day, preventable crashes are destroying lives because transportation planners and engineers don’t understand that design influences behavior. (I’m being charitable by assuming they don’t understand.) Drivers respond to the built environment much the same way water responds to a riverbed. The shape, width, and surface conditions of the riverbed determine the water’s speed, turbulence, and direction. Likewise, the width of a road, presence of visual cues, curvature, intersections, and sur…

After losing a boardroom power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley, Steve Jobs was exiled to a small building across the street from Apple’s headquarters. It was May 1985. He and his colleagues called his new office “Siberia.” Corporate reports stopped flowing to his desk, and executives stopped calling, leaving him bored and lonely. “It was amazing to see how ostracized he was in the Valley,” recalled Susan Barnes, a Macintosh financial controller who had previously reported to him. “It was really cruel.” Jobs is remembered as the visionary who returned to Apple, the company he cofounded, in 1997, and saved it from near-bankruptcy. But before the comeback, he ma…

Some places are simply nicer to walk through than others. Compare a tree-lined path along the Seine in Paris to the side of a six-lane highway in Tallahassee, Florida, and the differences are obvious. But what exactly makes a place walkable is a matter of some debate. Those of the urbanist persuasion might point to a place’s density or mix of land uses. Platforms like Walk Score might favor accessibility, proximity, and travel times. One person might want to have a café within walking distance, while another might want the safety of working streetlights. Conditions are varied, and uneven. To better understand what exactly makes a place walkable, the architecture firm P…

From his first moments on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo XIV gave three important clues about what kind of leader of the 1.4-billion-member Catholic Church he will be. Leo, formerly U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost, was elected by the world’s cardinals on Thursday as the new pope on the second day of the conclave to choose a successor to Pope Francis, who died last month. He is the first pope from the United States, but holds dual citizenship in Peru, where he was a missionary for decades before becoming a cardinal. Leo’s first clue was his choice of name. Popes often use this choice to send their first major signal about the priorities of their new…

Much like how the character Jack Dawson proudly proclaims to be king of the world after boarding the Titanic, film director James Cameron could claim to be king of the box office. Cameron chooses to take a mellower approach, letting the numbers do the talking. His latest film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, hits theaters this Friday and is primed to break even more box office records. Let’s take a look at the history of this franchise before we discuss industry projections. A brief history of the ‘Avatar’ films The first Avatar film came out in 2009 and received generally positive reviews. “Cameron and his artists have so lovingly imagined the moon of Pandora that…

At a recent fundraising event, I stood backstage with a young woman waiting to give a speech in front of 550 people to honor her alma mater. She was visibly nervous; I watched as she paced, taking deep breaths to calm the adrenaline that was flooding her body, twisting her hands, and looking toward the stage door as if she might try to make a run for it. As a charity auctioneer who has spent more than two decades on stages around the world commanding rooms filled with thousands of people, I know that feeling. There were so many nights in the beginning of my career when I felt the same way. But spending 1,000-plus nights onstage has given me plenty of practice to learn…

AI may be attracting billions in venture capital, but money is not flowing to every founder with a chatbot demo and a slick deck. In fact, as AI makes building a great product faster and more accessible, founder behavior, judgment, and credibility become even more important. In a crowded market where every pitch claims “category-defining AI,” red flags can surface fast. Founders must recognize that most investors are not just underwriting your product. They are underwriting you as a person for the next seven to ten years. If they sense weak leadership, poor decision-making, or shaky ethics early on, the meeting or any next steps is often over before diligence even beg…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. There’s a Japanese proverb that perfectly captures what resilience means to me: “Fall seven times, get up eight.” Not just bouncing back after setbacks, but actually finding ways to advance despite them. Resilience has been on my mind a lot lately. Between the inevitable aging parent health concerns, making sure “the kids are all right,” and navigating the constantly shifting business lands…