Publications
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The paradox of hybrid work
At long last, I have Covid. Our family had eluded the plague all this time, largely because we entered lockdown already optimized for isolation: Rob and I both worked from home, and one of our kids is homeschooled. I got Covid the way I expected: speaking to a roomful...
How to foster culture on hybrid teams
At its best, hybrid work not only boosts your employees’ individual effectiveness; it also strengthens your organization and team culture. But “culture” means different things to different people, partly because we tend to be a little fuzzy about defining it (is it...
How to play your way to AI fluency
Can coat hooks level up your AI skills? I’ll admit it sounds like a stretch. But that’s exactly how I boosted my AI literacy over the summer, as an almost accidental by-product of our home improvements. In the course of replacing our entryway closet with coat hooks, I...
The new collegiality
“I have to book a meeting just to get an answer to the simplest question.” “I get so stuck when there’s nobody around to bounce ideas off." “I feel so lonely and isolated when I’m working from home.” So many of our pain points around hybrid work come down to the...
Tune up your remote work skills
Employees who are starting their very first jobs—as remote workers with no direct, on-site supervision. Managers who are leading teams that include people they’ve never met—and need to support remotely. Professionals who have survived the transition from office to...
Inbox overwhelmed? Here’s how I kept mine empty for a year
This week marks my 52nd consecutive week of “Inbox zero”. I’ve been amazed at how regularly getting my inbox to empty has changed not only my relationship to email, but the way I work. In this article, I’ll tell you how I got to zero and how it’s paid off, so you can...
The new hybrid work
The new hybrid work isn’t just about where we work: that is, some combination of home plus office. It’s also about who we are working with: humans, or AIs? Thinking about hybrid work as an intersection of location and collaboration gives us a much better handle on how...
25 ways remote work has changed
25 years ago this month, I moved to Vancouver for love. That meant leaving my graduate-school program and associated work opportunities on the other side of the continent, and the other side of a national border. I needed some kind of income to keep me afloat in my...
The real risks of AI
AI is in headline after headline, most of which focus on the risks that are supposed to be keeping us up at night. The very people who developed these technologies and brought them to market are now warning us that their creations threaten to wreak….well, they can’t...
Nature is your new office
When I was in school, there was an easy way to tell the nice teachers from the mean teachers: The nice teachers moved at least one class meeting outdoors as soon as the weather was good. The mean teachers ignored the end of Canadian winter and kept us at our indoor...
The Harvard Business Review
The paradox of hybrid work
At long last, I have Covid. Our family had eluded the plague all this time, largely because we entered lockdown already optimized for isolation: Rob and I both worked from home, and one of our kids is homeschooled. I got Covid the way I expected: speaking to a roomful...
How to foster culture on hybrid teams
At its best, hybrid work not only boosts your employees’ individual effectiveness; it also strengthens your organization and team culture. But “culture” means different things to different people, partly because we tend to be a little fuzzy about defining it (is it...
How to play your way to AI fluency
Can coat hooks level up your AI skills? I’ll admit it sounds like a stretch. But that’s exactly how I boosted my AI literacy over the summer, as an almost accidental by-product of our home improvements. In the course of replacing our entryway closet with coat hooks, I...
The new collegiality
“I have to book a meeting just to get an answer to the simplest question.” “I get so stuck when there’s nobody around to bounce ideas off." “I feel so lonely and isolated when I’m working from home.” So many of our pain points around hybrid work come down to the...
Tune up your remote work skills
Employees who are starting their very first jobs—as remote workers with no direct, on-site supervision. Managers who are leading teams that include people they’ve never met—and need to support remotely. Professionals who have survived the transition from office to...
Inbox overwhelmed? Here’s how I kept mine empty for a year
This week marks my 52nd consecutive week of “Inbox zero”. I’ve been amazed at how regularly getting my inbox to empty has changed not only my relationship to email, but the way I work. In this article, I’ll tell you how I got to zero and how it’s paid off, so you can...
The new hybrid work
The new hybrid work isn’t just about where we work: that is, some combination of home plus office. It’s also about who we are working with: humans, or AIs? Thinking about hybrid work as an intersection of location and collaboration gives us a much better handle on how...
25 ways remote work has changed
25 years ago this month, I moved to Vancouver for love. That meant leaving my graduate-school program and associated work opportunities on the other side of the continent, and the other side of a national border. I needed some kind of income to keep me afloat in my...
The real risks of AI
AI is in headline after headline, most of which focus on the risks that are supposed to be keeping us up at night. The very people who developed these technologies and brought them to market are now warning us that their creations threaten to wreak….well, they can’t...
Nature is your new office
When I was in school, there was an easy way to tell the nice teachers from the mean teachers: The nice teachers moved at least one class meeting outdoors as soon as the weather was good. The mean teachers ignored the end of Canadian winter and kept us at our indoor...
OneZero
Pssst! Someone put a chip in your head.
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...
How to train your own AI in 15 minutes
The non-geek’s starter guide to building the skillset of the future with a custom GPT Managing 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...
How to plan what you can’t imagine
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...
Collaboration lessons from Die Hard
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...
Meet your new robot cheerleader
The best thing an AI can produce? Better, happier humans. We should expect nothing less. And that means harnessing AI for joy, as well as productivity. That begins with using AI to boost your own professional or personal motivation. Just last week, I stumbled onto a...
Your Cyber Monday gift guide
Our Family Throughout History I created this gift collage from images I made with MyHeritage.com's AI Time Machine. I love Cyber Monday because it combines three of my favorite things: Shopping, gifting, and of course, Cyber. To help you make the most of the...
How to work when your life is a mess
This is the time of year when I often hear from other parents with autistic kids, or kids with other kinds of complex challenges. It’s the same time of year that often found our own family in crisis: Far enough into the school year that classroom meltdowns or calls...
The 3 meetings you need on your calendar
At their core, meetings are about relationship enablement. That’s the argument I make in my piece for the Harvard Business Review, 3 Project Management Strategies for a Hybrid Workplace. As I write in HBR: When so many of us have packed calendars, it’s tempting to...
JSTOR DAILY
Pssst! Someone put a chip in your head.
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...
How to train your own AI in 15 minutes
The non-geek’s starter guide to building the skillset of the future with a custom GPT Managing 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...
How to plan what you can’t imagine
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...
Collaboration lessons from Die Hard
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...
Meet your new robot cheerleader
The best thing an AI can produce? Better, happier humans. We should expect nothing less. And that means harnessing AI for joy, as well as productivity. That begins with using AI to boost your own professional or personal motivation. Just last week, I stumbled onto a...
Your Cyber Monday gift guide
Our Family Throughout History I created this gift collage from images I made with MyHeritage.com's AI Time Machine. I love Cyber Monday because it combines three of my favorite things: Shopping, gifting, and of course, Cyber. To help you make the most of the...
How to work when your life is a mess
This is the time of year when I often hear from other parents with autistic kids, or kids with other kinds of complex challenges. It’s the same time of year that often found our own family in crisis: Far enough into the school year that classroom meltdowns or calls...
The 3 meetings you need on your calendar
At their core, meetings are about relationship enablement. That’s the argument I make in my piece for the Harvard Business Review, 3 Project Management Strategies for a Hybrid Workplace. As I write in HBR: When so many of us have packed calendars, it’s tempting to...
THE VERGE
That’s my kid!
"That's my kid!" These are the words my heart shouted when I saw Gus Walz shouting, "That's my Dad!" Like so many proud parents of hashtag#neurodivergent kids (many of whom are neurodivergent ourselves), I instantly saw my own 18-year-old son in that...
Escape overload with meta-work
7 ways to get better at the meta-work that makes your whole life easier.
How to run your own weekly accountability process with the help of A.I.
Click to download the guide as a PDF.
Inside You There Are Three A.I.s
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...