All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 413 in total
We Can't Quit Turning Leisure Into More Work
I'm pretty sure The New York Times is trolling me.Footnotes:Read the written version of this episode."Hobbies Too Relaxing? Try 'Leisure Crafting'" by Lora Kelley in T...
The Spectacle of Competence
"Competence porn" is an indistinct genre of media that showcases people doing their jobs (loosely defined) exceptionally well, often using niche skills or uncommon exp...
3 Ways I Make Sense of the Unexpected & Perplexing
In the last episode (written version), we talked about how "sensemaking starts with chaos" and that chaos arises when our expectations don't match reality. That mismat...
Make It Make Sense
"Sensemaking starts with chaos," says organizational theorist Karl Weick. Chaos is the confusion and frustration we feel when things don't turn out the way we expect t...
EP 500: What if you're not off track... and never have been?
If you're like me, you often think about what you would have done to prepare for... this job, this economy, this political climate, this financial situation, etc... if...
EP 499: Reduction in Force
No job is safer than a government job, right? Well, not anymore. At least not in the US. I’m paying special attention to the fight over government jobs (or, as the adm...
INTERLUDE: The Pleasure & Promise of Re-Reading
I wanted to drop in with a quiet interlude about re-reading (or re-watching, or re-listening) and its value in a world obsessed with new and different.Footnotes:Read t...
EP 498: Breaking The Validation Spiral
Why is it that it seems like no amount of work, accolades, or achievement is enough? Why do we keep signing up for more, even as our capacity becomes ever more deplete...
EP 497: Please Support My Work
If you subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on YouTube, I've no doubt that you’ve been asked to support the person or people who created them....
EP 496: What to Do When Things Get Messy
No matter how fastidious you are about creating and executing a plan, working toward any big goal will require adjustments. No matter how diligent you are about docume...
EP 495: Ann Leckie vs. The "Well, Actually" Bros
Is an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, a search engine? Does it scour the internet for helpful information so that it can respond to user queries? These questions were at the...
EP 494: How Structure Transforms Ideas
"I have so many thoughts and not enough time to think them," I recently blurted out to my husband. For me, "thinking thoughts" means scribbling notes or writing messy ...
EP 493: The Prescription Economy
"No one is ever completely safe from the critical gaze of a culture steeped in the makeover ethos." —Micki McGeeI have a theory that you can measure the decline of any...
EP 492: How We Realize Higher Values Through Enabling Structures
Intractable challenges are often the result of a lack of imagination. That is, our solutions are constrained by existing systems and structures that likely created the...
EP 491: Meet Your Tiny Capitalists
Many of us (most?) have an inner voice that loves to remind us that "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean" or that "Coffee is for closers." We nag ourselves ...
EP 490: Standardize Me
Standardization is one of those ideas that, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's a mental model that can explain, at least in part, many of our social, political,...
EP 489: Temporal Bandwidth
This episode is about the long term—the commitments, projects, and relationships we can work on when our "temporal bandwidth" widens. How we perceive time and our abil...
EP 488: Honeydew (Or, 3 Biases That Derail Remarkable Projects)
Most of the work I do that's not this revolves around coaching, editing, and/or thinking with people who have meaningful ideas they want to better express to the world...
EP 487: Rethinking Our Tech Mythology
The tech industry has a central role in shaping our work, our communication, and even our identities. Its mythology is woven into the products and services we use on a...
EP 486: How Knowledge Really Does Become Power
What does my new website, the TikTok "ban," and the ongoing purge of "woke" from government websites have in common?The power to decide what content counts and what do...