The Benefits of Ruthless Collaborative Critique

Communication is difficult. And we’ve all seen reports that needed better peer review, important yet confusing emails, presentations that could have been much, much better, etc. In my experience, many of these situations could have been avoided if the creator had gotten the honest feedback they were asking for. Unfortunately, many people are afraid to […]

4 Steps to Starting a Daily Standup with Your Family During Remote Work/School

Since mid-March, my husband and I have been working from home full time; our two teenagers also began online schooling around that time. Like many households, we suddenly had to figure out how to maintain harmonious relationships while keeping the same levels of productivity. Influenced mostly by having to compete for office space and bandwidth, […]

3 Ideas for Refocusing When Working from Home

I’ve been working from home since mid-March, so I’ve had four months to work on my new routines. One struggle has been learning to stay focused when I’m surrounded by the distractions of my home environment: laundry needing to be washed and folded, cleaning to be done, etc. If you’ve been finding that there are […]

Technical Concepts for Non-Technical People, Part 1 – Infinite Scrolling

Recently, a group of friends and I were lamenting how much time we’d wasted on social media. I mentioned my frustration with the overuse of infinite scrolling, and I was surprised to learn that none of my friends had even heard of it. When I started to explain this pattern of content loading and its […]

A Guide to Surviving Burnout, Part 3 – Learn to Avoid Burnout

In the first two posts of this series, we learned how to identify signs of burnout and how to recover from burnout once we are already experiencing it. This post will focus on proactive steps to take to avoid burnout altogether.

How I’m Getting Comfortable with Uncomfortable Conversations

In recent years, I noticed that I was hesitant to talk about personal or charged topics until I felt “comfortable.” Don’t get this confused with feeling safe. What I wanted was control of the outcome and ensured success. Well, that’s not how it works. This pattern existed in my personal life and at work. If […]

6 Things that Helped Me Adjust to Working from Home

For most of us, working from home has shifted from “exceptional and unique” to “daily into the foreseeable future.” In my former life as an office-inhabiting worker, I was among the most gregarious; now I am the only one in my office. I’ve had a few months to perfect my work-from-home strategies. I hope they […]

A Guide to Surviving Burnout, Part 2 – Learn to Recover from Burnout

Last week, I talked about how to spot the signs of burnout. Today’s post is all about what to do once you’ve identified them in yourself. These three steps will help you leave that feeling of burnout behind. 1. Take Time Off When I am deep in the fiery pits of burnout, the most effective […]

A Guide to Surviving Burnout, Part 1 – Learn to Identify Burnout

As an infinitely curious person with a (sometimes not) healthy dose of perfectionism, I often find myself taking on a bit too much. This eventually leads to a feeling of burnout. Over the years, I’ve learned that I’m not alone. In fact, in a recent Gallup study, 44% of people reported feeling burned out sometimes. […]

How I Learned to Stop Approaching Conversations as Contests

Earlier this year, I had a profound experience at a Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) event hosted by the Center for Positive Organizations. SIYLI’s programs teach neuroscience-backed techniques for practical mindfulness and emotional intelligence. Over two days, I participated in dozens of immersive activities geared toward learning in these domains. The whole experience was […]

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