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In a powerful speech before the Minneapolis City Council, a nurse broke down as she shed light on the fear so many in her profession are feeling as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have stormed the city. “In Minneapolis, I feel like I’m a sitting duck,” the speaker began in a January 15 address. “I don’t feel safe at home. I don’t feel safe at work. Kids aren’t safe at school,” she said through sobs. “I was born in Minneapolis and I am scared out of my mind because I have skin that is not white and that is not fair.” The speaker went on to contend that ICE’s presence and the aggressive tactics agents have increasingly been using has created a “public health emergency” in the city. She said nurses now fear for their own safety and the safety of their patients of color, many of whom may be too afraid to leave home and seek medical help when they need it, regardless of their immigration status. “What happens when ICE comes into our hospitals?” she said. “Where is our moral code?” The speech was delivered a week after Renee Nicole Good, an American citizen and mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in her own Minneapolis neighborhood. Since Good’s death, ICE’s actions have seemed to grow even more extreme. Just hours after the killing, reports of agents tear-gassing students outside a school began circulating. Following the incident, Minneapolis Public Schools canceled classes for the rest of the week, citing safety concerns. In another recent incident, ICE agents dragged multiple workers out of a Target store. Videos of the incident have been circulating online, prompting outrage. But even as workplaces are being disrupted by violent altercations at the hands of immigration enforcement agents and employees are left feeling unsafe at work (or are too afraid to go to work at all), major companies are remaining silent. Fast Company reached out to Target, General Mills, Best Buy, Carhartt, and others to find out their stance on ICE’s presence, yet not a single business responded. Fear is impacting a number of business sectors, particularly those that employ a large number of undocumented individuals, including restaurants, farming, and construction. On January 19, Minnesota state Senator Aric Putnam was joined by agriculture leaders at a press conference to discuss the growing fears. Putnam said both documented and undocumented people are staying home because they are too terrified to go to work. “People are genuinely experiencing this anxiety and this fear. This is about fear,” Putnam said. “Real cops don’t wear masks. That’s just the way it works.” Gary Wertish, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union, warned that deportation fears are bound to impact food deliveries. “We work with restaurants in the Minneapolis area and other parts of the state,” he said. “They’re closing because their workers, even though they’re legal, they’re afraid to go out of their house. They’re afraid to go to work.” While the economic toll on Minnesota isn’t yet known, when ICE showed up on farms in California, the impact was crushing. A 2025 case study looking at the economic impact of ICE on California’s agricultural industry estimated that it drove a crop loss of anywhere from $3 billion to $7 billion and a 5% to 12% increase in the price of produce. Likewise, according to recent reporting from The Minnesota Star Tribune, roughly 80% of immigrant-owned businesses along main drags in both Minneapolis and St. Paul had closed as of January 13 as employees stayed home in droves. GoFundMe pages are popping up to support employees and their families. Right before Christmas, a lot of businesses were telling us sales were down 50%, 70%, or 80%,” Allison Sharkey, president of Lake Street Council, told the outlet. “Now this week? For a lot of business, its down to zero.
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E-Commerce
Spend an hour talking to 37signals CEO Jason Fried, and youll find yourself drawn into his fixation on three frustrating facts about productivity tools today: They’re boring. They’re complicated. They’re overpacked with overhyped AI features that fail to do what they promise and end up providing little in the way of practical value. Those same realities are the reason Fried decided to launch Fizzya new app that aims to reinvent organization software by undoing everything that’s happened to it over the past several years. Challenging current standards is nothing new to 37signals, of course. Fried and his fellow face-of-the-company David Heinemeier Hansson have made a name for themselves as gadflies who aren’t afraid to take on conventional wisdom and criticize both Big Tech tendencies and general workplace politics across any and all mediums. Their software, too, has often hinted at a decidedly rebellious streak that suggests the way we’ve been trained to do things is ripe for rethinkingsomething that’s apparent both with the company’s venerable project management product Basecamp and with its more recent email service Hey, which emphasizes privacy and control to give Gmail a run for its money. Take a peek at the Fizzy homepage, and you’ll instantly see a sense of that same sort of us-against-them mentality in this newest projectwith pointed jabs at the current states of Trello, Jira, Asana, and even GitHub Issues. On the surface, interestingly enough, Fizzy actually seems a lot like Trellothe kanban-style cards-and-boards app that’s been through pivot after pivot and, in many views beyond just 37signals’ own assertions, gotten so bogged down in superfluous features that it’s lost sight of why people once loved it. Fizzy, then, is “a return to the fundamentals,” Fried says”with some changes.” And, fitting with the at-times contrarian philosophy of 37signals, the entire project started on a whim. Fizzy’s bubbled-up beginnings Two years ago, Fried and his team were sitting around at a company meetup and talking about bugsthe buzzing, leg-biting variety, not the virtual ones we sometimes see in software. “Someone said something about bugs hitting a windshield,” Fried recalls. “And I said, ‘Waitthat’s interesting.'” Fried had been wanting to create a simple app for tracking software bugs for ages, but he’d never quite landed on the right approach or angle to make it unique. The visual of literal insects splatting onto a windshield struck him as the metaphor he’d been missing. “The [computer] screen would be a windshield, with the splatters all over itand the splatters would be like bugs,” he explains. “Bigger splats would be like bigger issues, and smaller splats would be smaller issues.” This led to the creation of an internal tool called, fittingly enough, Splat. Eventually, the bugs-on-a-windshield concept evolved into bubbles representing different bugsbubbles that, notably, looked fizzyand from there, the interface became a simpler and less cartoony series of boards and cards. And then, another light bulb went off in Fried’s busy brain. Basecamp has had a feature in it called Card Tables for a while nowessentially a form of Trello-like kanban boards for organizing info within the service. The same sort of setup exists as a feature or an optional view in lots of other productivity suites, too, ranging from Notion to ClickUp, Asana, Any.do, and beyond. But Fried suddenly realized that with Trello’s seemingly endless identity crisis, no simple, stand-alone option for easy kanban-style organization existed as a de facto default anymore. And while that sort of interface worked well as one feature within a broader service like Basecampas well as an element in Jira, Asana, and the other productivity tools Fizzys web marketing calls out as having grown stale and sluggishthere was also a demand for it to be its own isolated entity, without an entire ecosystem of features around it. “I’ve always been fanatically obsessed with ‘what’s the simplest good version of this idea,'” Fried says. “We didn’t build this to compete with anybody. . . . We build things that we want to exist.” And thus, Fizzy was borna freemium and open source app that’s “Kanban as it should be,” as its homepage declares, and not (ahem) “as it has been.” The Fizzy kanban experience When you first sign into Fizzy and start a new board, you’re greeted with three default columns: “Not Now,” “Maybe,” and “Done.” And, interestingly, only one of those columns is open and fully visible at a time. Every Fizzy board begins with the same three columns, two of which are collapsed at any given time. You can always add more columns beyond those, of course, but that opening trio is intended to serve as a simple starting point and way to remain focusedwith an approach that Fried believes will work for a surprising number of organizational needs. That’s the main Fizzy framework. Within any column in any board, then, you can create a card and fill it in with any manner of text, lists, or images. You might create cards to track bugs, for instance, following Fizzy’s original vision. Or you might use cards to represent work tasks, household chores, customer feedbackalmost anything imaginable. A Fizzy card is a flexible canvas for practically any kind of information. From there, you can easily move cards between columns or even to different boards to represent their status at any given moment. You can add steps, leave comments, and assign cards to collaborators as well as place tags on cards to group related items together. And you can pin cards, too, to put them in an easily visible stack in the lower-left corner of the screena possibility I’ve found myself especially enamored with as I’ve explored Fizzy and figured out how it might work for me. Another particularly fun and helpful touch is Fizzy’s feature for labeling a card as urgent: You just click a ticket icon in the card’s corner, and that turns it into a “Golden Ticket”which causes the card to both appear golden in color and move to the top of its column. One struggle I’ve absolutely experienced with Trello and other organizational apps is what I think of as “the graveyard problem,” or the tendency to start seeing these systems as dumping grounds for info that you never end up revisiting. Fizzy helps you avoid that dump-and-jump mentality by automatically moving any card you create into the “Not Now” column if there’s no activity on it after 30 daysthough you can opt to change that timing on an account-wide basis or specifically for any individual board. “The idea [is] that you cannot just keep adding things that you’re never going to do,” Fried says. “These things are ephemeral. You don’t get to just have something on a list forever.” Fizzy doesn’t want you to keep cards around forever, and it actively works to help you avoid it. That’s all well and good, and it helps Fizzy feel like a fresher version of a familiar environment. What’s most striking about using the app, though, is its simplicityfor better or, sometimes, for worseand, alongside that, its unabashed boldness in what it wants to be. The pros and cons of simplicity More than anything, what I noticed within seconds of trying Fizzy was the absence of overwhelming menus, buried options, and integrations I never asked for. At the same time, I was struck by the presence of a distinctive design and sense of whimsy that’s largely faded from the greater software universe. That feeling is palpable in everything from Fizzy’s large, playful fonts to the splashes of color throughout its interfaceall subtle-seeming touches on paper but noticeable contrasts in practice, coming from the largely gray-on-gray world that’s become commonplace in what Fried considers the “Notionization” of software design. “Software’s become boringcorporate,” he says. “It’s lost a lot of personality over the years. We wanted to bring some of that back in.” Design aside, the relatively small number of feature-oriented bells and whistles acts as both an asset and a liability for Fizzy, especially now in its early form. As someone who spends hours a week inside Trello, not having Fizzy feel slow and bloated and larded up with awkwardly tacked-on options really is refreshing. But at the same time, for me, there are certain elements missing that make Fizzy difficult to fully embrace. To wit: At this point, I use Trello primarly for organizing my writingand that means I’m constantly saving stuff I see on the web for later revisiting. I rely heavily on both an unofficial Trello browser extension and the official Trello mobile app for being able to beam anything I see on any device I’m using into a specific Trello spot with a single swift click on my computer or a couple quick taps on my phone. It’s integral to my workflow. Fizzy, as of this moment, exists only as a progressive web appsomething you install from your browser, without any platform-native form. And for the most part, that approach works admirably. But when it comes to a use case like mine, where I need a native presence that makes link-saving easy, it’s a limitation that would keep me from being able to leap to Fizzy today. Weighing out cases like that and deciding what’s worth adding versus when it’s more important to prioritize the product’s purity is high on Fried’s mind, particularly as someone who’s watched so many other apps get weighted down, overly complicated, and increasingly unpleasant to use over time. “Software slides downhillthat’s how it evolves, unfortunately,” he says. “What was once good is now complicated. It’s now harder than it used to be and unnecessarily so, for most cases.” Fried readily concedes that there are always instances where someone needs something more in a piece of software. For what it’s worth, he says his team would like to make mobile apps for Fizzy eventually. (37signals offers a full complement of native versions of Basecamp and Hey.) And he seemed intrigued by my browser extension use case as well. But by failing to maintain a strong vision for what a product should and shouldn’t beand what specific needs it should and, equally important, shouldn’t servean app can try to be everything for everyone and end up being nothing of consequence for anyone. “What ends up happening is . . . almost everyone lose[s] the charm in the beauty of the simple thing, argues Fried. AI, source code, and beyond One feature I’ve found myself pleased not to find in Fizzy is any manner of AIas in, the large-language-model-powered generative-AI fiddliness that’s being crammed into every nook and cranny of so many other services and serving as the entire raison d’tre for countless new tools. Fried says his team experimented with bringing AI into Fizzy in a few different forms but ultimately determined it wasn’t useful enoughand good enough, for nowto release. “When it exists, people tend to lean on it in a way where it’s considered to be the be-all, end-all truth,” he says. “In our testing, it was not that at all. It was a bit of a mirage.” One early experiment involved a system that’d let you ask your account questions in natural language and receive summarized info about your data. Given how new the product was, though, 37signals found it was often failing to provide any meaningful insightsand decided not to present an opportunity for users to ask questions that the service couldn’t effectively answer. Another AI experiment offered a weekly newsletter-style overview of all the activity across your Fizzy boards, with five headlines of things that happened in the previous week. Fried says it was fine, but he found that reading it didn’t make him feel any more informedso the feature didn’t really need to exist, unless it was there solely for buzzword bragging. “I don’t want to put software out in the world that’s checking a box if it’s not really doing its job,” he says. To be clear, Fried doesn’t see his present stance on AI within Fizzy to be any sort of dogma. If and when the technology serves a clear and effective goal with genuine practical benefit, he says, he’ll consider it. But until then, he sees no reason to indulge an industry obsession and add to the hype only to leave folks disappointed when they actually experience it. Another area where Fizzy is breaking the productivity app mold is in 37signals’ decision to share the softwares source code, with the option for anyone to host it themselves and use itheck, even customize and modify itfor free. The only limitation, according to 37signals, is not being able to run it as a hosted commercial service for other users, a right the company reserves for itself. If you use the app in its more standard 37signals-hosted setup, you can create up to 1,000 cards across 1GB of storage without having to paya threshold Fried expects will be more than enough for most people to embrace the service for years before having to shell out a dime. Once you cross the 1,000-card threshold, it costs $20 per month for unlimited cards and up to 5GB of storage, with additional space available for an extra fee. Fried says there’s no sweeping strategic vision behind this or any grand plan for Fizzy to act as a gateway toward Basecamp or other 37signals products. It’s just an app he and his team wanted to see exist and so decided to create, as its own stand-alone thing, for anyone else who might benefit from using it. “This is not going to be our breadwinner,” he says. “We’re at the point in our careers . . . [where] we can do stuff we just want to try to do because we think it’s the right thing.” Fried even goes as far as to say that if current 37signals customers find they can accomplish everything they need with Fizzy and no longer require the much more ambitious Basecamp subscription, he considers that a company win. In fact, he says that’s happened numerous times alreadyand in each instance, he’s done nothing but celebrate it. “If you don’t need [Basecamp], now we have something else for you,” he says. More than anything, Fried’s hope is that Fizzy can not only serve its direct users but also serve the tech industry by setting an example ofand maybe even creating expectations forhow satisfying software can be when it deliberately tries to be different and doesn’t just blindly mimic trends. “Our products don’t look like anybody else’s,” he says. “They don’t work like anybody else’s. And I’d like to see more companies do that versus just follow the established patterns.”
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E-Commerce
As wealth inequality widens and billionaires become increasingly enmeshed with politics, the public is growing more and more disillusioned with the ultra-wealthy, and the role they play in society. Its not just those with low or median incomes who feel that way. A majority of millionaires now say that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy; that the ultra-rich buy political influence; and that political leaders should do more to tackle extreme wealth, like increasing taxes. Thats according to a new poll from Patriotic Millionaires, a collection of high-net-worth individuals who advocate for more progressive taxes in order to close the wealth gap. The poll surveyed 3,900 people from G20 countries who have more than $1 million in assets, excluding their homes. The G20 is a group of 19 of the worlds largest economies plus the European Union that meets to coordinate on global economic stability, trade, and financial policy.Sixty two percent of millionaires polled say that extreme wealth is a threat to democracyan increase from the 54% who thought so in last years poll. More than three quarters say that ultra-wealthy individuals buy political influence. Extreme wealth hurts media, social progress, and ordinary people The polls findings come as billionaires and political leaders convene at the World Economic Forum in Davos to address the worlds major issues. But what if the ultra-wealthy themselves are at the center of those problems? Thats the consensus of poll respondents: 74% say the extremely wealthy leverage the law in their own favor, and 69% say the influence of the superrich over politicians prevents action to address inequality. A majority also agreed that the concentration of extreme wealth is harmful to a fair and factual media; sets back social progress; prevents ordinary people from having a decent standard of living; and even keeps people from making deeper societal connections. A report this week from Oxfam backs those claims. The level of billionaire wealth is higher than at any time in history, Oxfam says, with the 12 richest billionaires holding more wealth than the poorest half of humanitywhich includes more than four billion people. Economically unequal countries are up to seven times more likely to experience democratic erosion than more equal countries, that report found. Oxfam also estimates that billionaires are over 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people, an example of political inequality. It should be obvious to anyone, no matter how wealthy, that extreme wealth inequality is destabilizing democracies, economies, and societies around the world. You dont need a crystal ball, Claire Trottier, chair of the Board of Patriotic Millionaires Canada, said in a statement released with the Patriotic Millionaires poll. Billionaires and politics The growing role of billionaires in politics is more than just perception: It is a fact. In 2000, the countrys wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1% of the total cost of federal elections, according to the Washington Post; by 2024, they covered 7.5%, even as elections got more expensive. That means about 1 in every 13 dollars spent in 2024s national elections was donated by a handful of the countrys richest people, the outlet wrote. This week alone, Elon Musk donated $10 million to a pro-Trump candidate running in the Kentucky senators race. Even millionaires want to see this influence reigned in. According to the Patriotic Millionaires poll, a vast majority82%of respondents say that there should be a limit to how much money politicians and political parties can receive from individuals. Sixty five percent of respondents also said they were in favor of an increased tax on the very wealthy in order to reduce inequality, fund public services, and address the cost of living crisis. An open letter to leaders at Davos to tax the rich The Patriotic Millionaires poll also comes as nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires have signed an open letter calling on world leaders at Davos to tax the super rich. When even millionaires, like us, recognise that extreme wealth has cost everyone else everything else, there can be no doubt that society is dangerously teetering off the edge of a precipice, the letter reads. You already have a simple and effective solution, supported by millionaires and the public alike, it continues. Stop squandering the time we havetax the super rich. That letter was an effort by Patriotic Millionaires, Millionaires for Humanity, and Oxfam International, and has been signed by prominent names including Mark Ruffalo, Abigail Disney, Brian Cox, and Brian Eno. Ruffalo in particular has been vocal about criticising Trump and the actions of his administration, including the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis. But Donald Trump and the unique threat that he poses to American democracy did not come about overnight, Ruffalo said in a statement. Extreme wealth inequality enabled his every step, and is the root cause of the trend towards authoritarianism were witnessing in the U.S. and around the world. If leaders at Davos are serious about the threat to democracy and the rule of law, he continued, they must get serious about combatting extreme wealth concentration. That includes taxing wealthy people like me too.
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E-Commerce
Below, Chris Bailey shares five key insights from his new book, Intentional: How to Finish What You Start. Chris is an author and lecturer who explores the science behind living a more productive and intentional life. He has written hundreds of articles on the subject and garnered coverage in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, and Harvard Business Review, among many other outlets. Whats the big idea? Most of us struggle with follow-through, not because we lack discipline, but because we dont understand whats driving us and accommodate that which holds us back. When you clarify your core values, lower the friction to getting started, and align small intentions with bigger goals, action becomes more natural and meaningful. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Chris himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Know your 12 values. To be honest, whenever Ive heard the term values in the past, I kind of tuned it out, especially with personal values. What would always come to mind for me were those cheesy corporate exercises where some management consultant comes in and lays down a list in front of you with a hundred values on it, and they say, Pick the 10 that mean the most to you. Most of those are not rooted in science. Theyre not rooted in the psychology of values. But in researching this book, I found that there is real science to be found on the topic of values. There exists science on values that has not only been proven in research but also validated cross-culturally in more than 80 countries across thousands of studies with hundreds of thousands of participants. The latest research shows that there are 12 fundamental human values that we all share in varying amounts. To give you a lay of the land, there are essentially two fundamental motivations we all havetwo axes upon which our motivations fit within. In any moment, were either focused on enriching ourselves or enriching others. Thats the first axis. And the second one is were either motivated to conserve things as they are or we want to change or improve the way that things are. All 12 values fit within these fundamental motivations. Values are, in this way, motivations in and of themselves. As I list them, reflect on which connect most with you. Some might even repel you, and that can be informative as well. Here are the top 12 values: Self-direction cultivating your own thoughts, ideas, and actions. Stimulation seeking novelty. Hedonism pursuing (usually sensory) pleasure. Achievement striving for success through demonstrating competence. Power prestige and control over resources or people. Face preserving your image and avoiding humiliation. Security valuing personal and societal safety and stability. Tradition respect and commitment to customs. Conformity fitting in with rules, obligations, and expectations of others. Humility recognizing your insignificance in the grand scheme. Universalism understanding and protecting the welfare of all people and nature. Benevolence being a devoted and reliable member of the groups you occupy. We are all a different combination of these values. Reflecting on this can let you connect with your motivational core. 2. Shrink your resistance level to getting something done. The science of intention is quite beautiful and powerful, but it shows as well that there are reasons that we procrastinate on the things that we intend to do. Just as there are 12 values, there are essentially six main things that lead us to procrastinate tasks. We often procrastinate a task if it is at least one of the following: Boring Frustrating Unpleasant Far off in the future Unstructured Meaningless The reason for procrastination is usually some combination of these. These reasons are not connected with our 12 values. When something is unstructured and also a bit frustrating and unpleasant, there are a lot of different tactics that we can deploy. One of my favorites is shrinking our resistance level. This comes up often with meditation, but it can work for writing, working out, or finally cleaning up that ugly closet in your basement. What you do is essentially feel out your resistance level to doing that thing. You might think, Hey, do I want to meditate for 40 minutes today? No, no, no, no, no. No way. No way do I want to meditate for 40 minutes. Okay. What about 30? No. Okay. What about 25? No. 20 to 15? I can probably do 15. In this way, you accommodate the resistance level you have toward doing something. There will still be a little bit of resistance, but you gain control. You reconnect with that value of self-direction, which is a very common value overall. You just get a grip over the intentions that you set and begin to shape. 3. Build self-reflective capacity. Buddhist monks observe intentionality but from the direction of the causes and effects that happen within our own minds. After a Buddhist Dharma talk, I asked one of the monks, Where does intention come from? He listed off a lot of sources that were mapped on top of the research. It comes from our biology, right? We set an intention to go to the bathroom on a road trip. It comes from social environments, right? We adopt the intentions of others through phenomenon like social contagion. It comes from conditioning by family and culture, and intentions come from our desire to avoid pain and find happiness. Intention also comes from the lessons we have learned, which shape how we think about and view the world. But the final source that he mentioned was not in the research and it was our self-reflective capacity. Self-reflective capacity is our ability to look within ourselves and reflect on what we would want to do differently and where we truly wish to go. Its where our deepest intentions come from because we can ask questions of our inner world. I have a challenge for you: stop reading for a moment, and set an intention for what you will do next after finishing this Book Bite. Its where our deepest intentions come from because we can ask questions of our inner world. What do you want to do? What do you want to listen to? What do you want to engage with? Who do you want to talk to? An intention will arise when you ask a question of your inner world. What do I want to do next? What do I truly want to get out of doing this current thing? It can come from a question like that, but it can coe from journaling too. These intentions can come from going on long walks and just letting the mind wander. It can come from meditation, which leads us to become more intentional and connect with this self-reflective capacity. It turns out there is actually a lot of research behind this self-reflective capacity, but this frame for looking inward is sometimes where our deepest intentions come from. When you find these intentions, when they arise in your mind, you can go back to the 12 values and think, Oh, this actually does align with what I want to do most or what I value most in my life. Its wild how that naturally happens. 4. Get to know the intention stack. There is a shape to the intentions in our life. Every intention we set is different. Some differ in where they come from, as discussed in the previous insight. Some differ in how long they arewe have an intention to get a promotion in our career, but also an intention to take a morning run. They differ in how strong they arethe strength of an intention is how much we desire doing it. They vary in how deep they are, which is how connected they are with our values, but they can also be nested within one another. We all have these things that were intending to do, these grand goals that we want to achieve, but we dont always make them happen. Why dont we make those happen? Because goals are an intention. An intention is just a plan that were going to do something. There are smaller and larger intentions relative to the goals in our life. Smaller intentions might include our plans for following through on a goal. Even smaller still are the intentions we have at this moment, like finishing reading this Book Bite. You can work your way up in terms of how long the intentions in our life take place. We have the present intentionsthe things that were doing today. We have broader plans, then you work your way up to goals, which are the broader stories of change that were making in our life. And broader than that are our priorities in life, like our health, fitness, and relationships. Above our priorities are (our ultimate intentions) our values. Theyre what were ultimately after in life. An intention is just a plan that were going to do something. Lets say you have a goal right now, like the next intention youre going to do after this Book Bite: dial into a conference call. But many intentions take place over a longer period of time than this. Maybe dialing into a conference call fits with your plan of developing relationships with three new partners in your business, which might fit into your business goal of finding an expansion partner, which might fit into your priority to expand into a new market, which might fit into your ultimate value of accomplishment through work and benevolence through helping others grow, too. 5. Anticipate obstacles. Desire and aversion fluctuate over the timeline of goal attainment, across the various goals that we have. But research shows that from the outset of your next goal, one of the best things that you can do in your head is something called mental contrasting. Essentially, you ask yourself, what obstacles are going to get in the way of me achieving this goal? If you want to work out more, do you have travel coming up? If you want to write a book, are you going to find it difficult to find the time? So maybe you need to wake up earlier. What obstacles will get in the way of you being intentional about the goals that you set? Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
Its simple to accidentally become entranced by an endless loop of videos on Instagram or TikTok. But sometimes, that mindless scroll is interrupted by a reminder that what you thought was a 10-minute break spent on your phone was closer to 30 minutes. Olivia Yokubonis, armed with a kind voice and scientific research, often pops up in feeds on social platforms, gently reminding viewers that they might not remember the video they saw two videos before she appeared on the screen. Yokubonis is a content creator who goes by the name Olivia Unplugged online, making videos to combat overuse or mindless use of social media. For the most part, people who view her videos welcome the disruption from the endless loop of content, treating it as a wake-up call to get off their phones. Other times, they are snarky. People will comment and theyll be like, Oh, (its) ironic that youre posting. And Im like, Where else am I supposed to find you, Kyle? Outside? Youre not outside. You are here, sitting here, she said. For us to actually be seen, we have to be where people are. Yokubonis content responds to the feeling many people have: that they spend too much time on social media or apps. Most people have no clue how much time they spend on social media, said Ofir Turel, a professor of information systems management at the University of Melbourne who has been studying social media use for years. Through his research, Turel found that when he presented people with their screen time information, they were practically in a state of shock and many people voluntarily reduced their usage afterwards. Yokubonis is part of a growing group of content creators who make videos encouraging viewers to close out the app theyre on. Some are aggressive in their approach, some more tame; some only occasionally post about social media overuse, and some, like Yokubonis, devote their accounts to it. She works for Opal, a screen time app designed to help users reclaim their focus, she said, but those who engage with her content might not have any idea she is working for the company. Brand logos, constant plugs to download the app and other signs of branding are almost entirely absent from her page. People love hearing from people, she said. Millions of views on her videos point to that being true. Its a fine line and a balance of finding a way to be able to cut through that noise but also not adding to the noise, she added. Ian A. Anderson, a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology, said he finds this kind of content interesting, but is curious whether it’s disruptive enough to prompt action. He also said he wonders whether those with the strongest scrolling habits are thoughtless about the way (they’re) intaking information. If they’re paying full attention, I feel like it could be an effective disruption, but I also think there is a degree to which, if you are really a habitual scroller, maybe you arent fully engaging with it, he said. I can think of all sorts of different variables that could change the effectiveness, but it does sound like an interesting way to intervene from the inside. With billions of active users across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms, talk of cutting down on screen time is perennial, as is the idea of addiction to social platforms. But theres tremendous disagreement over whether social media addiction actually exists. Is social media addiction real? Researchers, psychologists and other experts agree some people spend too much time on social media, but the agreement tends to stop there. Some researchers question whether addiction is the appropriate term to describe heavy use of social media, arguing that a person must be experiencing identifiable symptoms, like strong, sometimes uncontrollable urges and withdrawal, to qualify as addiction. Others, like Turel, acknowledge the term seems to resonate with more people and is often used colloquially. Anderson said he recognized the prevalence of casual mentions of being addicted to phones and was curious to see if that talk was benign. A recent study of his suggests the debate extends further than academic discourse. In a representative sample of active Instagram users, Anderson found that people often overestimate whether they are addicted to the app. On a self-report scale, 18% of participants agreed that they were at least somewhat addicted to Instagram and 5% indicated substantial agreement, but only 2% of participants were deemed at risk of addiction based on their symptoms. Believing you are addicted also impacts how you address that issue, Anderson said. If you perceive yourself as more addicted, it actually hurts your ability to control your use or your perception of that ability and makes you kind of blame yourself more for overuse, Anderson said. There are these negative consequences to addiction perception. Cutting down on screen time For those looking to curb their social media habits, Anderson suggests making small, meaningful, changes to stop from opening your social media app of choice. Moving the apps place on your phone or turning off notifications are light touch interventions, but more involved options, like not bringing your phone into the bedroom or other places where you often use it could also help. Plenty of intervention methods have been offered to consumers in the form of products or services. But those interventions require self-awareness and a desire to cut down on use. Content creators who infiltrate social media feeds with information about the psychology behind why people scroll for hours a day can plant those early seeds. Cat Goetze, who goes by CatGPT online, makes non-pretentious, non-patronizing content about artificial intelligence, building off her experience in the tech industry. But shes also been on a lengthy road to cut down her own screen time. She often makes videos about why the platforms are so compelling and why we tend to spend longer than we anticipate on them. Theres a whole infrastructure theres an army of nerds whose only job is to get you to increase your time spent on that platform, she said. Theres a whole machine thats trying to get you to be that way and its not your fault and youre not going to win this just (through) willpower. Goetze also founded the business Physical Phones, which makes Bluetooth landline phones that connect to smartphones, encouraging people to spend less time on their devices. The inside of the packaging reads offline is the new luxury. She was able to build the business at an accelerated pace thanks to her social media audience. But the early success of Physical Phones also demonstrates the demand for solutions to high screen time, she said. Social media will always play a part in our lives. I dont necessarily think thats a bad thing. If we can get the average sceen time down from, if its 10 hours for a person to one hour, or from three hours to 30 minutes, that is going to be a net positive benefit for that individual and for society, Goetze said. That being said, Id love to be the person that theyre watching for those 30 minutes. Kaitlyn Huamani, AP technology writer
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