Publications
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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...
To Write Better, Use AI to Write Faster
What’s more valuable: Writing fast, or writing well? Thanks to GPT and other generative AI tools, you don’t have to choose. In fact, you may find that writing more quickly (with the help of Al) lets you produce much better writing. Turning speed into quality...
Hybrid work is up for negotiation
More and more organizations are forcing workers back to the office, imagining that economic pressure and a loosening job market mean employees will have to accept whatever job schedules or flexibility they’re offered. These remote-skeptical employers need to pay close...
Will artificial intellegience make collaboration better—or much, much worse?
The workplace impact of AI isn’t just a matter of whether, but when and which jobs get replaced or reinvented by artificial intelligence. AI is already rewriting the rules of how we work together—by reshaping our interactions with other humans. That’s the flip side of...
How GPT Clears Hybrid Work’s Top 3 Roadblocks
With all the big-picture discussions about how AI is going to change the future of work, it’s easy to lose sight of how AI could change our working lives right now. But the more time I spend using ChatGPT, and honing the skill of coaxing really useful responses...
Variety is the spice of work
From social media bios that declare expertise in a specific niche, to the way search engines reward us for “owning” particular topics or keywords, the modern professional world loves to signal that depth matters more than breadth. But breadth and variety are essential...
The robots are coming
If you think your working life changed a lot in the past three years, buckle up: It’s going to change even more in the next three. That’s because artificial intelligence is now mature enough to dramatically change the way many of us do our work. And while it may be...
TV that works harder
I watch a lot of TV. My TV habit often surprises people, because I seem like a pretty productive person—and it’s true, I get a lot done in a day! But I also watch a lot of TV: four or five hours a day, according to both subjective experience and hard data. If those...
The Harvard Business Review
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...
To Write Better, Use AI to Write Faster
What’s more valuable: Writing fast, or writing well? Thanks to GPT and other generative AI tools, you don’t have to choose. In fact, you may find that writing more quickly (with the help of Al) lets you produce much better writing. Turning speed into quality...
Hybrid work is up for negotiation
More and more organizations are forcing workers back to the office, imagining that economic pressure and a loosening job market mean employees will have to accept whatever job schedules or flexibility they’re offered. These remote-skeptical employers need to pay close...
Will artificial intellegience make collaboration better—or much, much worse?
The workplace impact of AI isn’t just a matter of whether, but when and which jobs get replaced or reinvented by artificial intelligence. AI is already rewriting the rules of how we work together—by reshaping our interactions with other humans. That’s the flip side of...
How GPT Clears Hybrid Work’s Top 3 Roadblocks
With all the big-picture discussions about how AI is going to change the future of work, it’s easy to lose sight of how AI could change our working lives right now. But the more time I spend using ChatGPT, and honing the skill of coaxing really useful responses...
Variety is the spice of work
From social media bios that declare expertise in a specific niche, to the way search engines reward us for “owning” particular topics or keywords, the modern professional world loves to signal that depth matters more than breadth. But breadth and variety are essential...
The robots are coming
If you think your working life changed a lot in the past three years, buckle up: It’s going to change even more in the next three. That’s because artificial intelligence is now mature enough to dramatically change the way many of us do our work. And while it may be...
TV that works harder
I watch a lot of TV. My TV habit often surprises people, because I seem like a pretty productive person—and it’s true, I get a lot done in a day! But I also watch a lot of TV: four or five hours a day, according to both subjective experience and hard data. If those...
OneZero
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 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...
JSTOR DAILY
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 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...
THE VERGE
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...
Learn to think visually with ChatGPT
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...