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I love finding new ways to use apps to make my life easier, but sometimes, I find that I'm using so much tech in my real life that I get a little bogged down. That's been true with my workouts and health for a while: I weigh myself in the morning on a smart scale, which distributes the data to a nutrition app, Apple Health, and Peloton. I go to the gym and use my Apple Watch's Workouts feature to track my cardio, then open up Strong to track my lifting. At home, I use Peloton to track my cycling workouts, stretching, yoga, and much more. It all gets to be a little much! That's why I was pumped when I found an overlooked feature on my Peloton app recently: I can track my non-Peloton workouts with it, meaning I don't have to fiddle as much with some of my other apps. I can keep more of what I'm doing in one place, easy to reference, and streamlined. How to track independent workouts with PelotonWhen you open your Peloton app, you'll see a bottom menu with five options: Home, Classes, Track, Community, and You. Most of these are pretty obvious and I'm guessing that the majority of the time, you're hitting Classes to follow along with one of the thousands of guided workouts the app offers for up to $44 per month. But a few weeks ago, I decided to hit Track just to see what it was all about. Credit: Lindsey Ellefson/Peloton Tapping Track brings up a screen that says Track an activity. You have options and those will depend on what types of classes or workouts you use the app for most often. For me at this very moment, the app suggests Outdoor Walking, Cycling, and Strength, but you can hit More options to see a whole slate of choices that include running, yoga, cardio, meditation, and more. When you select one of these, they'll be filed as "Just" classes in your Peloton history, like Just Ride or Just Walk. If that reminds you of the Apple Watch's built-in Workouts app, that's because it's basically the same thing. If you select one of those choices on Peloton, a screen pops up with a timer, start and pause buttons, a prompt to share your location "for accurate metrics," a calorie counter, and a heart rate tracker. Basically, the same stuff the Workouts app monitors, too. This is most useful if you've paired a heart rate tracker or wearable to your Peloton app, which is something I think everyone should do, since that will help the app better estimate your calorie burn and heart rate. Why I love thisFirst and foremost, I like to keep data in one place. I ride my Peloton bike frequently, for instance, but I also teach in-person spin classes, and I want to know how those two instances of cycling match up in terms of output, not only for my fitness goals, but for my continued success and employment as a teacher. Tracking my in-person classes with the Peloton app makes these two categories of cardio much easier to compare. Plus, I get better data this way. I tracked a lift the other day using the Peloton app, trusting it to monitor my heart rate and effort. I got a detailed graphic showing my heart rate over the two-hour span of my workout, a "strive score" (a Peloton-specific metric that measures your output), and a breakdown of how long I spent in each heart rate zone. You get different kinds of data depending on what you do, too. If you do a Just Walk, for instance, you get a little map of your route and can even see what your pace and elevation were at every point along it. Moreover, the strength workout was automatically added to my Workouts and Apple Health data, helping me satisfy the (admittedly arbitrary) goals I set within those apps for daily active minutes and daily burned calories. Credit: Lindsey Ellefson/Peloton That leads to another reason I like this setup: I use apps not just because it's important to track what I'm doing and monitor my progress, but because they force me into some accountability. As I mentioned, I try to meet my pre-set Apple Health goals every day by "closing my rings," but I also am dedicated to continuing my Peloton "streak" of active days. Do these things really matter? No, but doing them motivates me—and the threat of failing to do them on a given day forces me to action when I might otherwise choose to remain sedentary. View the full article

In 2023, Apple introduced the Double Tap feature for Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. This allows a user to perform common actions, like answering or starting a song, simply by quickly tapping their thumb and index finger together twice. It was an intuitive way to confirm when you wanted to do something on your watch without tapping a tiny touchscreen button, but what if you wanted to dismiss something? Now, with the release of watchOS 26, Wrist Flick is here to solve that problem. Also available on Apple Watch Series 9 (and higher) as well as Apple Watch Ultra 2 (and higher), Wrist Flick is kind of like Double Tap’s evil twin. If you get a notification you don’t like, or a call you want to mute, now you can quickly twist your wrist to dismiss it, like you’re tossing it into a garbage bin. To try it out, first install watchOS 26 on your Apple Watch. Using a paired iPhone with iOS 26 installed, open the Apple Watch app, navigate to General > Software Update, and start the upgrade to the new version of watchOS. Alternatively, you can simply ensure Automatic Updates are enabled, and so long as your iPhone has iOS 26, your watch will simply choose a time to update on its own while charging (likely overnight). Then, once watchOS 26 is installed, put on your watch and navigate to Settings > Gestures. Toggle on Wrist Flick. That’s it. You’ll simply need to wait for a notification or call to come in, or for a timer you want to silence to go off, and you’ll be able to turn it off with a quick flick of the wrist. It might take some practice, but essentially, you want to quickly rotate your wrist away from your body, as seen on this page on Apple’s website. Used together with Double Tap, the goal is that you won’t need to fiddle with your watch’s touchscreen for most basic activities anymore, so you won’t have to interrupt your workout (or, if you’re like me, you’re leisurely sit on the subway) by tapping away at it. The only limitation is that, while Double Tap has some basic mapping functions that let you customize what exactly it does, Wrist Flick currently doesn’t offer that level of control, instead sticking to Apple’s default “dismissing” behavior. That means you won’t be able to use it to, say, go back one tile in your Smart Stack, like how you can set Double Tap to advance you by one tile. Here’s hoping Apple expands its functionality soon. View the full article

We’re just 7 days away from the first official day of fall, and I’m almost giddy with excitement. I’m embracing my favorite cool-weather rituals and finding comfort in the fact that this seasonal shift is providing a greater sense of predictability. After a busy and chaotic summer, fall is when I once again find my The post Team productivity peaks in fall when you set the stage now appeared first on RescueTime Blog. View the full article

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source. Spotify is finally giving its free-tier customers a feature that’s been requested since the music streaming platform launched nearly 20 years ago: the ability to listen to any song they choose. That's right: The days of searching for a song, then hitting “skip” until it rolls around on a Spotify-generated playlist are over. Free-tier users can choose songs in three ways: through the search function, by clicking on any song from the Spotify interface, or by clicking on a link shared by other users. Free-tier users can also listen to podcasts through Spotify, and create and listen to playlists too. Spotify's previous "six skips per hour" rule also appears to be no more. There are still limitations to Spotify’s free accounts, of course. The most obvious is that you still have to listen to ads. Free users will also face a cap on how many minutes of music they can listen to on demand, won’t be able to queue tracks, and won’t be able to access Spotify’s “AI DJ” feature. (No great loss; trust me.) They also won't have access to another new Spotify feature exclusive to paid accounts: lossless audio. Premium Spotify customers to get lossless audio"Premium" Spotify perks are improving too. The first, most important upgrade in the long-awaited launch of lossless audio on the service. Lossless audio (streaming files that are bit-for-bit copies of the source material) is rolling out to over 50 Spotify markets from now through October. Premium users will also be able to send private messaging, to make music-sharing easier, and add and customize transitions between songs within a playlist. The changes make Spotify more competitive The upgrades to both levels of Spotify’s service aren’t really about making life better for users; they’re about staying relevant and profitable in a crowded and ever-changing marketplace. The hope from Spotify is to increase ad revenue by increasing the number of ears listening to ads, entice more free users to upgrade to pay services, and shed fewer customers who leave for other services. Until the change, Spotify’s free tier was close to a radio service—you could listen to music that you kind of wanted to hear, maybe, if you also put up with frequent ads. This model may have made sense when streaming was newer, but more and more younger users are turning to YouTube, where you can listen to whatever song you want (and see a video for it) on demand, and for free. And young people are discovering music on TikTok, not on Spotify. Changes to Spotify’s premium service are aimed at the more “mature” listener. Lossless audio doesn’t make a ton of difference without decent headphones or speakers. But “our music is lossless” has long been a selling point for Apple Music and Tidal, but it won’t be anymore. View the full article

Apple’s iOS 26 drops today, and with it comes a bunch of small tweaks and improvements to how your iPhone works. The catch? A lot of them are opt-in, so you need to turn them on before you can reap their benefits. Here are the settings you should turn on after updating your iPhone to Apple’s latest operating system, although note that some of them require an iPhone 15 Pro or later, as they rely on Apple Intelligence. Adaptive battery modeIf you’re like me, you can never decide whether it’s worth it to swap your phone over to Battery Saver mode. Now, if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or above, your iPhone can make the decision for you. Apple’s new Adaptive Power mode uses Apple Intelligence to intelligently determine when your battery usage is running higher than usual, and makes small tweaks to bring it back under control. These might include slightly dimming your display or slowing down less important tasks, like those that are running in the background or are particularly intensive. Then, once your phone’s been on an even keel for a while, it’ll start turning things back to normal. Think of it as a less aggressive “low power” mode that only affects certain processes, and can make adjustments based on more than your phone’s remaining charge. To try it out, simply navigate to Settings > Battery > Power Mode. Just don’t forget to turn it back off if you find its compromises aren’t worth the extra battery life. Turn on call screening Credit: Apple I’ll be honest—I barely pick up phone calls anymore. Instead, I usually prefer to wait until after the call, and then call back if the caller was someone I knew or if it was important enough to leave a message. This usually works out for me, but I’ll admit, sometimes I do feel a bit bad for leaving people who call me in the lurch, especially if it turns out they had a good reason to dial me up. That’s where Apple’s new Call Screening feature comes in. This one doesn’t require Apple Intelligence, so it’ll work on any iPhone running iOS 26. Simply open your Settings, then under Apps, tap Phone and look for the Screen Unknown Callers option. You’ll have three choices. Never will work just like before, with calls ringing for a bit before they go to your Recents list. But now, you’ve got two additional options you can choose instead. First is Silence, which will turn off your ringer for calls from unsaved numbers, then send them to Voicemail and display them in the Recents list. Essentially, it just cuts out the middle-man of having to wait for the caller to give up before you move on with figuring out what they wanted. But the more exciting addition is Ask Reason for Calling. Choose this, and your iPhone will pick up calls from unsaved numbers for you, then ask the caller a few questions about their reason for calling. You’ll see a transcript of their answers on screen, and then you’ll be able to choose whether you want to pick up. It’s a clever trick, and should make me feel a little less bad for anyone who tries to chat with me over the phone. I do wish it worked for Contacts as well, to be honest, but I can understand why my family might not be enthused to call me and get a robot secretary instead. Try out the new ringtonesWith iOS 26, Apple’s added a few new default ringtones to pick from. Six are variations of the classic “Reflection” ringtone, but there’s also a new one called “Little Bird.” You can find them all under Settings > Sound & Haptics > Ringtone, or check out the embeds below to hear them for yourself. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Personally, “Bouyant” is probably my favorite, although my colleague Jake Peterson likes “Dreamer” the most. I’ll probably still stick with my custom ringtone, but if you’d rather not bother downloading a ringtone manually, you now have more choice than ever. Fix Liquid GlassThis next one is technically about turning a feature off instead of turning it on, but I couldn’t ignore it. With iOS 26, Apple’s redesigned its design language to focus on transparency, and not everyone’s a fan. If you remember the transparent bezels Microsoft added to app windows in Windows Vista, it’s a lot like that, but more aggressive. Essentially, instead of showing a solid background, many buttons and overlays will now appear clear, allowing a blurred version of whatever is underneath them to bleed through. Luckily, there’s a pre-existing accessibility control that essentially sets your iPhone back to how it was before. Simply navigate to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size, then toggle on Reduce Transparency. This will bring back solid background across your entire iPhone, which you can see in effect here. Notice how the play button no longer allows blurred album artwork to bleed into it? If you prefer that flatter, more contrast-y look, this could be for you. Custom backgrounds in iMessageThis one’s just fun. Now, in iMessage, you set custom backgrounds for your conversations and group chats on a per-chat basis. These include presets, like Water and Sky, but you can also pick solid colors, choose a photo from your library, or if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or above, generate a background using Apple Intelligence. To get started, open a chat, click its title towards the top of the page, then choose Backgrounds. Note that your chosen background will appear for everyone in the chat, but if you don’t like a background someone else set, you don’t have to live with it. Go to Settings > Apps > Messages and disable Conversation Backgrounds to turn the feature off. Notification summaries for newsIf you have an iPhone 15 Pro or above, Apple is actually bringing back a previously deleted feature with iOS 26: Notification summaries for news and entertainment apps. These initially launched in the iOS 18.3 beta, but were quickly pulled after Apple’s AI had misrepresented some major BBC headlines, including one about United Healthcare shooting suspect Luigi Mangione. Now, Apple is confident enough to bring these notification summaries back, although with a new warning that says “Summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines. Verify information.” If you’re comfortable with that, according to my colleagues over at CNET, you don’t have to do much to turn them on. Apple will actually greet you with a splash screen once you download the iOS 26 update, which will ask your preferences for which apps will get notification summaries. You’ll have three options, and you can select as many as you wish. All other apps will summarize notifications from non-social apps, like Maps, while Communication & Social will throw in notification summaries for apps like TikTok and Mail. These were available already. What’s new (again) is the News & Entertainment option, which will add notification summaries for apps including BBC or Netflix. Simply make your choices, and you’re good to go. If you change your mind later, you can adjust your summaries under Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications. You can also adjust notification summaries on a per-app basis here, which isn’t available in the splash screen you get after installing iOS 26. Get clear icons in iOS 26 Credit: Apple Let’s say you actually like Liquid Glass, but think it doesn’t go far enough. In that case, you might want to turn your icons clear too, so you can see your background through them. I promise I won’t judge. To turn your app icons clear in iOS 26, simply long press on your home screen’s background until your apps start jiggling. Then, tap Edit in the top-left corner, followed by Customize. Then, choose Clear. You can also choose between Clear Light or Clear Dark, with the dark mode opting for a more subdued tint. This will make your app icons look like frosted glass, similar to iOS 26’s new lock screen clock. You do you. (If you’re like me, you might prefer the new Tinted Light Mode option instead, which finally allows you to set a custom color for your app icons’ graphical elements alongside a bright background. You can find it in the Tinted option next to Clear while selecting your app icon appearance). New ways to customize your lock screeniOS 26 gives you more control over how your phone looks while locked than ever before. To get started, lock your phone, then press the power button, tap and hold on the lock screen, and tap Customize. First off, you can now adjust the size of your clock by grabbing one of its corners and dragging it down, although this will only work with certain fonts. Second, you can now justify your widgets box to the bottom of the lock screen, as well as add an Apple Music search widget to it, if you like. If you actually start playing something, you’ll notice it’ll enable a large Now Playing interface that shows album art. Finally, there’s support for Spatial Scenes. When selecting a Photo wallpaper, you can now tap on a small icon of a mountain and a sun to separate the photo’s subject from the background. Now, when moving your iPhone, the subject will move with it, to help them pop. Your clock might also move to fill up space in the photo, including slightly behind the subject, to help give an illusion of depth. Or, your widgets might automatically shift to the bottom of the screen if placed elsewhere, to better frame the photo subject. Other settings you can enableThere’s plenty more you can do to make iOS 26 truly yours. If the above changes aren’t enough for you, here are 36 other tweaks you can make to get the most out of your iPhone’s new operating system. View the full article

Many of you have been asking me about the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this week during a campus event at Utah Valley University. At the time of this writing, little is yet known about the shooter’s motives, but there have been enough cases of political violence over the past year that I think I can say what I’m about to with conviction… Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, “Twitter is not real life.” But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter (and Bluesky, and TikTok) do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, the results are often horrific. This should tell us all we need to know about these platforms: they are toxic and dehumanizing. They are responsible, as much as any other force, for the unravelling of civil society that seems to be accelerating. We know these platforms are bad for us, so why are they still so widely used? They tell a compelling story: that all of your frantic tapping and swiping makes you a key part of a political revolution, or a fearless investigator, or a righteous protestor – that when you’re online, you’re someone important, doing important things during an important time. But this, for the most part, is an illusion. In reality, you’re toiling anonymously in an attention factory, while billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths. After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world. To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on. Enough is enough. The post On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

Last fall, a Norwegian psychology professor named Lars Dehli was asked to give a lecture on intelligence. It had been a while since he had taught the topic, so he looked forward to revisiting it. As he explained in ​an essay​ about the experience, he decided to start the lecture by discussing the so-called Flynn Effect—the well-known phenomenon, first observed by James Flynn, whereby measured IQ scores have been steadily increasing since World War II. “It’s always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who have ever lived,” Dehli wrote. But as he gathered data to build an up-to-date chart, he was “very surprised” by what he discovered: “IQ has actually started to fall.” Dehli was not the first person to notice this decline. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have been documenting what has become known as the Reverse Flynn Effect. Consider, for example, ​a recent paper​ published in the journal Intelligence that studied IQ scores over time in an American population. It found a steady decline in almost every intelligence metric studied as part of a 35-item assessment. Here’s a chart that shows these declines broken out by education level: There’s no consensus on the causes of the Reverse Flynn Effect. But in a ​recent podcast appearance​, James Mariott, a critic and columnist for The Times of London, summarized a hypothesis that has been gaining traction: as we switch our information consumption from print to digital devices, our ability to think deeply degrades. As Marriott explains: “Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube…print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging. If you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it’s not surprising that people are getting stupider…and that we seem to find that IQ is declining.” The data on the Reverse Flynn Effect includes several pieces of evidence that support Marriott’s claims. The IQ reversal, for example, seems to begin right around 2010—the point at which smartphones began their rapid ascent to ubiquity. In addition, according to the Northwestern study, the demographic suffering the steepest declines is 18 to 22-year-olds, who also happen to be the heaviest users of smartphones. As with most psychological findings, it is unlikely that we will ever fully attribute this effect to a single, specific cause. But based on common sense and lived experience, there’s certainly a ring of truth to this device hypothesis. It’s grown standard to say things like, “my phone is making me so dumb!”, but this is often intended to be a figure of speech; a self-deprecating shorthand for the reality that the things we do on our phone are dumb, or that we spend less time doing “smart” activities than we used to. If these technological interpretations of the Reverse Flynn Effect hold up, it might turn out that this quip is way more literal than we may have originally assumed. The post On the Reverse Flynn Effect appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

Fall feels like productivity’s new year. The summer haze fades, the air sharpens, and suddenly you remember what sharpened pencils smell like and spend far too much time shopping for the perfect bullet journal. But here’s the problem: motivation lasts about as long as the caffeine buzz from a venti pumpkin spice latte. You might The post The Fall Focus Challenge: one month to reclaim your workday appeared first on RescueTime Blog. View the full article

Subscribe to Work LifeGet stories like this in your inbox Subscribe 5-second summary Divergent thinking is a creative process that generates new ideas through free-flowing, unstructured brainstorming. It encourages exploring any and all possibilities, rather than taking the fastest, straightest path to one answer. Divergent thinking is most effective when the people doing it feel safe, have the time and space to get inspired, collaborate with others, set expectations as a group, and warm up first. Using divergent thinking exercises can help you get started by providing a little structure and inspiration to a purposely unstructured process. If you’ve ever come up with a name for a child, pet, or even a beloved plant or car, you’ve already engaged in divergent thinking. As you were thinking of names, you let your mind wander, imagining all the possibilities. You might have compared ideas with a loved one too. Perhaps one person was thinking of popular names like Emma and Ava, while the other wanted a more unique moniker like Eowyn or Aurelia. Eventually, you converged on a name for your bundle of joy – something perfectly unique, yet easy to say and spell – but only after you diverged and brainstormed without boundaries. That’s the power of divergent thinking. What is divergent thinking? Introduced by psychologist J.P. Guilford in 1956, divergent thinking is a creative thought process used to generate new ideas through free-flowing, unstructured brainstorming. In a typical problem-solving or brainstorming session, people are often trying to find the most direct path to one “right” solution, often channeling “convergent” or “lateral” thinking. Divergent thinking, on the other hand, is unrestricted, judgment-free, and takes a meandering path to explore all viable (and some not-so-viable) options. There’s no right way to do it, and there are no wrong answers. This approach offers a number of advantages: It allows you to see a problem or concept from many perspectives and angles. It produces more ideas to choose from. It encourages creativity and open-mindedness, which often lead to even better solutions. Paving the way for creative collaboration Divergent thinking unlocks new ideas and even better solutions at work – but only if the team and environment support it. These tips can help prepare your group for a successful session. Foster a sense of psychological safety Related Article What does psychological safety mean, anyway? By Katie Taylor In Teamwork Psychological safety, a term coined by Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson, is a shared belief held by members of a team that it’s safe to take risks. When people feel psychologically safe and know it’s ok to make mistakes, they’re more comfortable, more open to exploring new ideas, and more inclined to work together to find the best solution. Set aside time and a new space It can be hard for teams to be strategic and creative when they’re busy with day-to-day execution. Reserving a designated time for divergent thinking and changing up the environment – another conference room or even an off-site location – helps everyone get in the right mental and physical space to think differently. Include 5 – 7 diverse collaborators Approaching your attendee list like Goldilocks will help make sure the group isn’t too big or too small, but rather, juuuuust right. Research shows brainstorming sessions are most efficient when they include five to seven people: big enough to generate enough ideas, but not so big that it becomes unwieldy. Inviting people with diverse perspectives can also help ward off groupthink, when people abandon their own beliefs to conform with the group. Diversity could be represented in the form of different disciplines (e.g., design or development), departments (e.g., Sales or Product), critical thinking perspectives (e.g., front-line, functional expertise, or creative/innovator), identities (e.g., culture or gender), etc. Related Article How team agreements help you navigate the brave new world of hybrid work By Sarah Goff-Dupont In Teamwork Set expectations for the team with mutual agreements Divergent thinking is most effective when participants are focused, open, and collaborative. Creating mutual team agreements and expectations (e.g., put devices aside, share all ideas that come to mind, suspend judgment, and build on others’ suggestions) can support the group in being efficient and effective. Start with a warmup Like warming up your body before exercising, warming up your mind before brainstorming gets you in the right headspace and primes your brain for creativity. Warmups can be more structured, like these icebreaker activities, or more free-form, like listening to music or drawing. where does ai fit in? To maximize the benefits of divergent thinking, start without AI, so those initial ideas are truly yours – unanchored, a little weird, and definitively human. By keeping this early divergence tool-free, you’ll avoid bringing in model bias or sensitive info; build creative confidence; and keep everyone in “quantity over quality” mode when it really counts. Then, when you’re ready to narrow, call on AI to group similar ideas, identify recurring themes, spot duplicates or gaps, write a short recap of what you explored, and draft a first-pass plan of action. 6 divergent thinking exercises for brilliant brainstorming Now that the team feels safe, focused, and warmed up, it’s time to let their creativity loose! Here are a few exercises to help get started. We’ll use the following example to see how each divergent thinking exercise would be applied in a problem-solving brainstorm. Problem statement: “Registrations for our new grocery shopping app have plateaued. We want to increase registrations by 25% within one year.” 1. Freewriting Freewriting is the ultimate free-association activity – you simply write words, phrases, sentences, diagrams, doodles, whatever without stopping, and without worrying about spelling, mechanics, drawing skills, or the feasibility of an idea. There are no wrong answers and no constraints (aside from time, if you choose to set a timer). If your team works best with a bit more structure, you can try 6-3-5 Brainwriting, where six people each write three ideas on a sheet of paper as many times as they can during a five-minute round. Then, they pass their sheets to the next teammate, who spends the next five minutes adding to the other person’s ideas. Freewriting in action: Each team member starts with the word “registration” and writes any words that come to mind, such as: Sign upHappinessSmilesSignsSurprisesRewardsLooking upExcitementIncentivesOptimismDelightPositive reinforcement The team could then expand on certain ideas or themes for more specific solutions, such as ways you can add delight to the registration process or rewards you could offer for signing up. Learn more and try it! 2. Mind mapping A mind map builds new ideas off one central concept or subject. After writing down the primary concept, teams brainstorm supporting ideas, tasks, and questions around it. Then, they repeat the process for each of the secondary concepts, then the tertiary concepts, etc. The result is an organized diagram that shows lots of new ideas and how all of them are linked. Mind mapping in action: With all of these ideas mapped out, the group could then converge and narrow down which ones should be prioritized based on the impact they could have on registrations vs. the effort they would take to implement. Learn more and try it! 3. Disruptive brainstorming Disruptive brainstorming reveals new solutions by introducing hypothetical constraints. After brainstorming one set of ideas, teams use Disrupt Cards to look at the same problem or question from a new perspective. After diverging, each group converges on the ideas that are most achievable, supportable, and relevant, then assigns owners to investigate how to bring each one to life. Disruptive brainstorming in action: The team brainstorms one set of ideas for increasing registrations. Then, they pick the “Scarcity” Disrupt Card and brainstorm how they might apply scarcity to boost registrations even more, such as limiting signups to 100 per day and displaying the number available in real time next to the “Register” button. Once the brainstorming session comes to a close, they cut the ideas that aren’t doable or aligned with the product strategy, and assign owners to the rest to begin the planning process. Learn more and try it! 4. Alternate Uses Designed by J.P. Guilford in the 1960s, the Alternative Uses Test is a way to generate creative ideas and solutions from a single concept or piece of information. This approach can help look at something familiar from a new perspective. Alternative Uses Test in action: What might be alternative ways to learn about our grocery shopping app and sign up for it? (Wacky ideas welcome!) Sample answers: Scanning a QR code in the grocery store Mail a welcome kit to new parents with a promo code to try the app App mascot hands out flyers outside dorms during college move-in days Guerilla marketing campaign where we put stickers on grocery store doors that say, ”We could have saved you this trip.” Professional skydivers spell out the app name above the Super Bowl (we meant what we said: no bad ideas) Then, the team could either build on a few of the most promising ideas or filter some of the more granular concepts that might be more feasible. 5. Collaborative drawing and storytelling Collaborative drawing and storytelling (also known as a “one-word story”) expand on others’ ideas spontaneously. One person writes one word or starts a drawing. Then they pass it to another person, who adds the first word or drawing that comes to mind, and so on. The team repeats this process until there are enough potentially viable ideas to begin narrowing down and planning next steps for the best concepts. Collaborative storytelling in action: We could increase registrations by… Person 1’s answersharing Person 2’s answer3DPerson 3’s answervideoPerson 4’s answerwalkthroughsPerson 5’s answeronPerson 6’s answerTikTok (Sounds silly, but hey, we’ve seen stranger things go viral!) Even if the team ends up moving forward with a scaled-down concept or alternative plan, going through the exercise is a great way to uncover outside-the-box ideas. Learn more and try it! 6. Yes, and… A core tenet of improv comedy, “Yes, and…” encourages open-mindedness and exploration by accepting any scenario that is presented, then adding to it. When one person shares an idea, another person immediately embraces it and adds something that takes it to the next level. “Yes, and…” in action: Person #1: “We could show the average time the whole process takes on the first screen so users see it’s fast.” Person #2: “Yes, and we could put a completion tracker at the top of each registration screen so they see where they are in the process.” Person #3: “Yes, and we remove any unnecessary steps from each screen to make the process even faster.” Learn more and try it! From naming babies with your partner at home to developing new ideas and solutions with your team at work, divergent thinking is a powerful way to stimulate creativity and uncover new possibilities. Like any new thought process or method, your team may feel a bit unsure about how to do it or where to begin. But just because divergent thinking is free-form doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. With a little preparation and a few exercises to get the momentum going, you can add just enough structure to a purposely unstructured process and set your team up for a brilliant brainstorm. Ready to try it? Yes, and…let’s get started! Subscribe to Work LifeGet stories like this in your inbox Subscribe The post Use divergent thinking to generate fresh ideas in your next brainstorm appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian. View the full article

August really is the Sunday of summer. It’s the moment we realize the easy days are slipping away and we’re about to jump headfirst into the busy routines of fall. There’s a drop in temperature (finally), but there’s an uptick in commitments. All of a sudden, your Google Calendar is a rainbow of colors with The post Collaboration without chaos: How to fix overloaded fall calendars appeared first on RescueTime Blog. View the full article

Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title:​ “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.”​ He opens with a spicy take: “I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million…When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.” As Barr elaborates, when starting his first company, he slept only three and a half hours per night. “The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety,” he writes. “But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.” He ends the piece with a wonderfully cringe-inducing flourish. “I plan to become a billionaire by age 30,” he writes. “Then I will have the time and resources to tackle problems close to my heart like climate change, species extinction and economic inequality.” (Hold for applause.) It’s easy to mock Barr’s twenty-something bravado, even if I do have to be careful not to be the pot calling the kettle black (​ahem​). Yet, some of this knee-jerk mockery might stem from the uncomfortable realization that beneath this performative busyness, there may lie a kernel of truth. Are we forfeiting our opportunity to make a meaningful impact with our work if we prioritize balance too much? As NYU professor Suzy Welch noted, “I do give [Barr] points for saying something I only mutter to my M.B.A. students …You cannot well-being yourself to wealth.” To help address these fears, let’s turn to the advice of another twenty-something: me. In ​an essay I published when I was all of 27​—around the time I was finishing my doctoral dissertation at MIT—I wrote the following: “I found writing my thesis to be similar to writing my books. It’s an exercise in grit: You have to apply hard focus, almost every day, over a long period of time. To me, this is the definition of what I call hard work. The important point, however, is that the regular blocks of hard focus that comprise hard work do not have to be excessively long. That is, there’s nothing painful or unsustainable about hard work. With only a few exceptions, for example, I was easily able to maintain my fixed 9 to 5:30 schedule while writing my thesis. By contrast, the work schedule [followed by many graduate students] meets the definition of what I call hard to do work. Working 14 hours a day, with no break, for months on end, is very hard to do! It exhausts you. It’s painful. It’s impossible to sustain. I’m increasingly convinced that a lot of student stress is caused by a failure to recognize the difference between these two work types. Students feel that big projects should be hard, so hard to do habits seem a natural fit. I am hoping that by explicitly describing the alternative of doing plain hard work, I can help convince you that the hard to do strategy is a terrible way to tackle large…challenges.” I gave that article a simple, declarative title: ​Focus Hard. In Reasonable Bursts. One Day at a Time.​ This strategy has continued to serve me well. I’m now 43 years old and, I suppose, still managing to avoid mediocrity—all while continuing to rarely work past 5:30 p.m. I’m not willing to sacrifice all the other things I care about in order to grind. Barr is still young, and his body is resilient enough to get away with his hustle for a while longer. I hope, however, that those who found his message appealing might also hear mine. Deep results require disciplined, relentless action over a long period of time, and this is a very different commitment than the type of unfocused freneticism lionized by Barr. I work hard almost every day. But those days are rarely hard to get through. This distinction matters. The post Does Work-Life Balance Make You Mediocre? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

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