What's on Your Mind?

The modern workplace is designed for early risers. But only about 30% of people are true morning types. The rest fall somewhere in between—or toward the later end of the spectrum (those who think, create, and perform best later in the day). Through my work implementing circadian health and performance in organizations in 17 countries, I’ve discovered three strategies to help night owls create workdays that protect their energy, creativity, and well-being so they can perform better and share their true talents. 1. Give yourself a slow start As a night owl, your day simply starts later—and that’s by design. Give your body time to wake naturally and ease into the …

AI slop seems to be everywhere. Low-quality digital content made with artificial intelligence has flooded our feeds, screens and speakers. Is there anything we can do about it? If you want fewer cartoonish videos of dead celebrities, creepy or absurd images or fake bands playing synthetic tunes, a few platforms have rolled out settings and features to help minimize AI-generated content. Here is a guide on how to use them. But first, a caveat from Henry Ajder, who advises businesses and governments on AI and has been studying deepfakes since 2018. He warned that it’s “incredibly difficult” to entirely remove AI slop content entirely from all your feeds. He comp…

If you’d like to do a thorough review of your portfolio and plan, here are the key steps to take. I recommend doing them over a series of sessions, not all at once. Step 1: Gather your documentation This could be your current investment statements, plus Social Security and pension. Pro tip: Set up a My Social Security account to get an overview of your benefits and earnings history. Step 2: Ask and answer: How am I doing? To find out if you’re on track to reach your financial goals, review your current portfolio balance, combined with your savings rate. Tally your contributions across all accounts. A decent baseline savings rate is 15%, but higher-income fol…

In today’s turbulent economic climate, there’s an intense pressure to perform. Organizations are exploring new business models and ways of working to accelerate growth and stay competitive. Boards and shareholders demand results, which pushes leadership teams to dial up their expectations. The term “accountability” has become a buzzword in discussions, but far too many misunderstand and misapply it. When leaders talk about creating a culture of accountability, they often rely on “shame and blame” tactics. This approach might seem effective in the short term, but it ultimately undermines the culture leaders seek to build. Instead of motivating individuals to do more, i…

Two powerful forces are dramatically reshaping the current world of work—artificial intelligence and an aging workforce. While we can see that the way we work is changing, we need to move quickly to effectively cope with both. Currently, AI, machine learning, digitization, automation, and other technology shifts are continuing to drive big changes in how we work and evolving the skills we need. In fact, new Workday research into the AI skills revolution shows that 81% of workers globally recognize that AI is changing the skills needed for their jobs. At the same time, throughout most countries, midcareer and older workers (people aged 45-64) make up a growing po…

In large organizations, HR usually has a process for documenting concerns about employees’ effectiveness that can be used either to help fix those problems—or to provide a basis for later termination. One of the central records used for this purpose is the dreaded performance improvement plan, or PIP. If you get called in to see your supervisor and get hit with a PIP, you’re likely to experience a range of emotions. Understanding your emotional reaction and how to cope with it is an important part of moving forward successfully. Let’s consider a range of emotions you might be experiencing and what you should do: Feeling Grief One possibility is that the PIP com…

Using AI in the workplace promises significant productivity gains. And using chatbots may make you feel productive, because it they designed to create engagement from users. But, you need to be more explicit about calculating the costs (and opportunity costs) and tangible benefits to your work. That will help you determine whether the AI juice is worth the LLM squeeze. Here are three key considerations. 1. Calculate your time spent using AI When people first started analyzing the downside of smart phones, one of the big data points that got trotted out was how long someone would remain off-task once they picked up their phone. Because apps on your phone are so …

AI fluency is quickly becoming the new leadership divide: Some executives are already embedding it into strategy, while others are still asking what it means. The gap is widening—and it’s shaping who gets hired to lead. That’s why AI fluency is becoming a top priority in leadership searches. Not deep technical mastery, but a practical understanding of how these tools work and where they apply. Companies want leaders who aren’t just talking about transformation but are actively engaged in it. People who’ve run pilots, evaluated risks, collaborated with product and tech, or led adoption efforts in their function. They don’t need to be engineers. But they do need to …

If you’re job searching right now, it can feel like your efforts and outcomes aren’t lining up. The job search is changing, and competition isn’t easing. The result: nearly 80% of job seekers say they feel unprepared to find a new job this year. At the same time, two-thirds of recruiters say it’s become harder to find qualified talent over the last year. This tension has become a defining feature of the job hunt. There’s no denying that AI is reshaping how work gets done, and in the new year, both recruiters and job seekers are planning to use the technology to gain a competitive edge. The good news is that the fundamentals of what makes for a good hire haven’t change…

Over the years, I’ve likely wasted thousands of dollars on forgotten subscriptions—and I’m not alone. A 2022 survey by research firm C+R found that 42% of Americans had paid for subscriptions they’d forgotten about. It’s easy to lose track, especially when payments are scattered across credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, and app store accounts. Here’s how to track down and cancel those forgotten charges. Subscription management apps: Rocket Money, Hiatus, Trim Dedicated services are among the most effective tools for finding and canceling forgotten subscriptions—and potentially switching to cheaper or free alternatives. But they come with a trade-off: To work, t…

Not long ago, much of the business world still ran on Rolodexes, fax machines and file cabinets. Today, most of those once indispensable tools have been rendered obsolete and replaced by modern technology that has redefined the way we work. This integration of technology into all facets of business operations is widely known as Digital Transformation (DX), and it’s happening across nearly every industry today. In fact, 74% of organizations now consider DX initiatives a top priority, with global spending projected to hit $3.9 trillion by 2027. While modern tech solutions offer significant benefits, the race to keep up with emerging trends can overwhelm decision-makers …

Running a solo business can feel like operating without a map at times. Sometimes you can stumble along the path, figuring things out as you go. Other days, you look around and realize that you’ve wandered pretty far off course. One of the hardest parts is not having anyone to rely on for guidance. That’s why community matters so much for solopreneurs. Rather than operating in a vacuum, you can bounce ideas off other people. Or you may find that community reduces your feelings of loneliness and isolation. The sooner you find (or build!) a community, the easier it becomes to navigate the inevitable ups and downs of being a solopreneur. The connections that …

We’ve been sold a lie. Somewhere between “go to school” and “get a job,” work became the central node of our lives—the very thing that defines us. We measure our worth by our output, our identity by our title, and our health by how much we can endure. The hours. The travel. The back-to-back meetings. The busyness. That’s not the picture we painted for ourselves when we chose our major in college and envisioned what we thought would be a fulfilling career; that’s conditioning. The result of which has shaped our meaning of work and how we see ourselves in it. But meaning isn’t found in the busyness of the grind—rather, it’s found in alignment. And when our work has gre…

Human beings are obsessed with change. As large scale scientific studies show, most of us would like to change at least some aspects of our personality, defined as consistent patterns of behaviors or habits that make us who we are and different from others. For example, I’d love to be less impulsive, excitable, or cynical, which is why I have been working on not being myself for many years. Likewise, most individuals want to grow, to develop new adaptations that make them a better version of themselves, and organizations are equally interested in transforming, which typically depends on their people’s ability to grow and evolve. At its core, change is not about becomi…

Have you ever tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces? That’s what it’s like to run a business with siloed systems. Business data is critical in every industry, but if it’s siloed across departments, teams, and people—that is, if your puzzle pieces are scattered across your home—you may never figure out how to make that information work for you. Left unaddressed, this fragmentation can eventually undermine customer trust, brand integrity, and employee retention, severely impacting your business goals. True integration isn’t just about building more efficient systems: It’s about centering the entirety of your customer’s needs in every system you bu…

If you were to establish an electric truck company today, would the trucks be built in America? In April 2025, the answer is yes. In 2022, even after the pandemic, the answer might have been different. That was the year I initially founded Chang Robotics, a company that manufactures what we believe to be one of the world’s most powerful battery-operated commercial rigs. Its first commercial use will be for fast snow removal in airports and other mission-critical facilities. At the time, advisors, investors, and partners all said “Let’s take this to China. I’ll bet we could get this done in six months.” I declined. New Manufacturing Should Focus on Bei…

Below, Zelana Montminy shares five key insights from her new book, Finding Focus: Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction. Zelana is a behavioral scientist who is pioneering a transformative approach to mental health and resilience. She has built a career advising and speaking for Fortune 500 companies, global organizations, and academic institutions. Her recent clients include American Express, Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, Bank of America, UCLA, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She appears regularly on The Doctors, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and Access Hollywood. What’s the big idea? We live in a world that is quietly, relentlessly unraveling our atten…

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. The famous computer scientist Bill Joy once said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” If you want to build something on the bleeding edge, you must have an open ecosystem that can pull in as many ideas as possible, skills and talents that exist beyond the four walls of your office building. This is the ethos of open source, the idea that the world is open …

As tech companies shell out millions for top AI talent—even reportedly billions—regular rank-and-file employees are left wondering how to get in on the action and land a job in artificial intelligence. One report found that job postings that mention needing at least one AI skill had salaries 28% higher than other jobs, which translates to $18,000 more. Jobs that required two AI skills had a 43% salary jump. To begin with, it’s worth considering where the AI jobs are and how this intersects with your interests and existing skills. Many jobs in AI can roughly be divided into five different categories: researchers engineers business strategists doma…

In business and sports, team dynamics impact outcomes. Whether you’re pursuing profits or championships, knowing what triggers your teammates can help you avoid conflict and stay on task. The problem is that taking time to better understand each other isn’t always our default setting, say John Eliot and Jim Guinn, authors of How To Get Along with Anyone: The Playbook for Predicting and Preventing Conflict at Work and at Home. “Blowups appear to be substance-driven, but they’re actually people-driven,” says Eliot. “The first step toward preventing and resolving conflict is to focus on figuring out the people participating in it not the underlying ‘problem.’” To wor…

Olivia Walch is an investigator in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan and CEO of a tech start-up called Arcascope. Her research has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in The Atlantic, among other outlets. Beyond sleep research, she coedited Political Geometry, a book on the mathematics of gerrymandering, and published comics with The Nib and Silver Sprocket. She is also the cartoonist of Imogen Quest, a webcomic that won her the “America’s Next Great Cartoonist” prize from the Washington Post. What’s the big idea? If you are dancing and can’t catch the beat, you are not dancing well. In this way, if your sleep doesn’t follow a regular pattern tha…

Raising venture capital for a physical-world company can feel harder than getting struck by lightning. You could be standing on a mountain for months, holding a metal pole in a storm, waiting. And you probably still wouldn’t get hit. Meanwhile, it can seem like founders in San Francisco announce a new AI round every other week. Capital moves quickly when you’re building software that rides the current hype cycle. If you’re building something that touches atoms instead of code, like manufacturing, energy, agriculture, or materials, you’re often grinding quietly. The timelines are longer. The checks are fewer. The rejections stack up. And pardon my French, but you get y…

If you handle hiring, generic AI-generated cover letters are probably a familiar foe by now. Nearly two-thirds of job seekers are using AI to help craft their applications. It’s understandable. In a world where some job seekers are having to send up to 50 applications to land a role, tools like ChatGPT enable them to cast their net wide and increase their chances. But this spray-and-pray approach to job hunting is a headache for hiring managers. It’s driving the volume of applications up and the quality down, making it harder to spot great candidates. The natural knee-jerk reaction from HR is to start playing a game of “I spy AI.” If we can just root out the …