As shifting to renewable energy has become ever more imperative in the face of the indelible link between coal and fossil fuels and climate change, wind power has run into a bit of an image problem. Solar, with its ability to scale to both large farm installations and residential rooftops, has attracted the bulk of Silicon Valley buzz. Wind turbines, on the other hand, are less adaptable; they’re seen as a necessity in the renewable landscape, but a large and cumbersome one.

But advances in offshore developments are reigniting interest in wind energy’s potential. That trend, combined with collaboration from Tesla, is gearing up to make Revolution Wind Farm–an offshore project proposed for 12 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts–a development that signals a significant turning point for wind energy.

On July 31, Deepwater Wind–the company behind both a 90 MW project proposed for 30 miles off the coast of Montauk and the 30 MW Block Island Wind Farm near Rhode Island, the U.S.’s first successful offshore venture–announced plans for Revolution Wind Farm. The 144 MW project would generate enough energy to power 80,000 homes, and attach to a 40 megawatt-hour battery storage system provided by Tesla.

Offshore wind may be mainstream in Europe, where pressure from the European Union to move away from fossil fuels and toward renewables sparked an offshore boom that began in 2011 and has helped bring the share of wind energy in Europe’s energy portfolio up to 12% from 2% just six years ago (one out of every three wind turbines installed in Europe now is offshore; in 2011, it was just around 5%). In the U.S., however, high costs, regulatory hurdles, and objections from those who have paid a hefty sum for their seaside views and would rather them not be interrupted by rows of turbines, have hindered a similar boom.

But both Massachusetts and New York have implemented aggressive renewable energy portfolio standards that set steep goals for switching to renewable sources–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has mandated that 50% of the state’s energy come from renewables by 2030, and Massachusetts legislators are agitating for 100% renewable by 2035–driving more investment in alternative energy sources. For small coastal states like Massachusetts, with little land to devote to massive onshore wind farms, offshore developments are just common sense.

The buy-in of Tesla both lends further appeal to the project, and also tackles the longstanding problem of renewable energy storage. One of the biggest questions in switching to clean energy is how to ensure the supply remains constant. Without viable storage, solar power is ineffective at night, and wind is useless on a still day. Linking the generating mechanism to large batteries would solve that problem, but so far, batteries have mostly been connected just to solar panels. Tesla has developed batteries to facilitate both residential and large-scale energy storage (the Tesla PowerPack, for instance, is composed of 16 pods and measures around 7 feet tall), but Revolution Wind will be Elon Musk’s first foray into wind-energy storage.

Because the project has yet to be approved by the state of Massachusetts, Tesla declined to comment. But should it get a green light and begin operations in 2023, Deepwater claims Revolution Wind will help the state accomplish two things. Firstly, the addition of battery storage will even out the reliability of the energy, eliminating the need to construct other generating facilities to fill the gaps in wind energy supply. And secondly, showing proof-of-concept with this relatively small, battery connected offshore development will pave the way for larger projects to take off–which will eventually drive down manufacturing and implementation costs.

Tesla shares are up over 4% in after-hours trading today, thanks to stellar earnings for the second quarter of 2017. The electric carmaker pulled in revenue of $2.78 billion, high above estimates of $2.55 billion. Earnings were similarly rosy. Tesla took a loss of $1.33 per share, but estimates foreshadowed a loss of $1.80 per share. The better-than-expected earnings show Tesla is tidying up its losses, which have gone down over the last two quarters.

One of the nice little surprises in Apple’s earnings report yesterday was that Apple Watch sales were up 50% over the June-ending quarter last year.

But as usual, Apple provided no actual numbers–unit sales or revenues–to show how well the product is actually being accepted by mainstream consumers. We’re left to piece the rest of the story together.

Apple Watch sales are reported as part of a larger Apple category called “other products,” which includes things like AirPods, Apple TV, iPods, Beats gear, and Apple accessories. The whole category brought in $2.74 billion in the June-ending quarter, up 23% from last year.

Growth in Apple Watch sales is very likely the key driver of the growth of the category.

Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin estimates that Watch sales were between 2 million and 3 million units during April, May, and June. Neil Cybart, an analyst for Above Avalon, says Tim Cook’s commentary implies that Apple sold approximately 2.7 million Apple Watches in the quarter.

Cybart also derives an average selling price for Apple Watch by estimating the sales breakdown by Watch series. That, he says, suggests around $1 billion in Watch revenue for the quarter.

Related:With Its New OS, The Apple Watch Might Finally Free Us From Our Phones

The Watch has begun to move up the mainstream adoption curve since Apple began to position it as a health and fitness device last year. It also may have helped that the first-edition Watch can now be had for $269. (The most expensive Watch goes for $1,500.)

Cook hinted at future developments when he recapped the company’s recent announcement about watchOS 4, which includes, said Cook, “a proactive Siri Watch face, personalized activity coaching, and an entirely new music experience. watchOS 4 also introduces GymKit, a groundbreaking technology platform to connect workouts with cardio equipment.”

Here’s hoping that as the Watch moves toward the mainstream, Apple will begin to give investors (and journalists) a better idea of the actual market penetration of the product. It’s about time. The numbers suggest the Watch is no longer a novelty or an accessory, but a real product that may someday soon be a “can’t-leave-home-without-it” accessory.

Last Friday, we learned that e-commerce startup Stitch Fix has reportedly confidentially filed for an IPO. With CEO Katrina Lake at the helm, Stitch Fix’s public offering will be the rare female-led exit, and a significant one at that: The company is seeking a valuation of $3 billion to $4 billion in what could be one of the biggest e-commerce IPOs since Etsy went public two years ago.

But 2017 has seen its share of lackluster IPOs, namely Snap and Blue Apron, so the news that Stitch Fix wants to go public might have you scratching your head. The five-year-old company’s shtick is to send users a personalized box each month—a “Fix,” if you will—filled with five items of clothing, shoes, or accessories that they can either return or keep. The boxes are curated by way of both algorithms—Stitch Fix has a formidable data team—and human stylists. Customers are charged a styling fee of $20 for each box, which goes toward their purchases if they choose to keep any of the items; they get 25% off if they opt to buy the entire box.

Of course, subscription e-commerce is a crowded market. Stitch Fix counts among its competitors Rent the Runway, Le Tote, and MM.LaFleur, though each has a slightly different model or clientele. A service like Stitch Fix offers more flexibility, allowing its customers to schedule boxes as frequently or infrequently as they would like, which means they’re not locked into a month-to-month subscription.

A major problem for many companies with a subscription model, however, is customer retention, which in turns affects their revenue forecasts. (Stitch Fix has never shared customer numbers, likely for this reason. When reached for comment, a Stitch Fix spokeswoman told Fast Company, “We don’t comment publicly on financing matters and we don’t share client or Fix metrics.”) With the looming threat of Amazon—which recently launched its own try-on clothing service, Prime Wardrobe—and the underwhelming performance of Snap and Blue Apron, you might wonder whether Stitch Fix stands a chance as a public company.

We think it does, and here’s why.

Run, don’t walk! Hands up if you’ve got a Fix on the way that you can’t wait to open. ????

A post shared by Stitch Fix (@stitchfix) on Jul 14, 2017 at 9:08am PDT

It’s Great At Data

Stitch Fix may be an e-commerce outfit (see what we did there?), but it has solid data on its customers’ preferences, along with a team that knows what to do with it. Human stylists pick out the items that go into a Fix, but they lean on data that Stitch Fix aggregates through an array of algorithms that can, say, match products to customers or figure out how Stitch Fix should update its inventory. One algorithm reportedly even analyzes a customer’s Pinterest activity to appraise their styling preferences.

Stitch Fix’s data team is led by chief algorithms officer Eric Colson, who was previously the VP of data science and engineering at Netflix. A team of more than 80 data scientists isn’t what you might expect from a company like Stitch Fix: More than half the team has PhDs from a variety of disciplines, including astrophysics and computational neuroscience. Stitch Fix claims that 80% of people who try the service get another box within 90 days.

Stitch Fix’s data can only get better as its customer base expands. For years, the startup exclusively catered to women; then, last September, Stitch Fix expanded to include men’s clothing as well. In February this year, the company introduced plus sizes, partnering with a number of brands that had previously not even offered plus sizes. And according to Recode, Stitch Fix is particularly popular in parts of middle America where women might have fewer retailers available to them.

TFW when you win $2,000 in Stitch Fix! Schedule a Fix for delivery by the 4th of July & you’ll be entered to win a new summer wardrobe in our Stylin’ Summer Sweepstakes. See more details at the link in bio.

A post shared by Stitch Fix (@stitchfix) on Jun 19, 2017 at 6:14pm PDT

It’s Actually Profitable

For a private company, part of the appeal of an IPO is getting more cash. You might imagine the same is true for Stitch Fix, and perhaps it is: Stitch Fix hasn’t scored new funding since 2014, when it received $25 million. (In total, Stitch Fix has about $42 million in capital.) But unlike other companies that go public, Stitch Fix has been profitable in terms of net income since 2015. In 2016, Stitch Fix earned $730 million in revenue.

Since Stitch Fix’s fiscal year ends in July, Recode notes that one reason the company may have filed when it did is because its projected revenue for this year is $1 billion or higher. Until last month, the SEC only allowed companies with revenue under $1 billion in their most recent fiscal year to confidentially file for an IPO.

Spice up your summer! See the sun, sand & SPF-approved accessories to top off your outfits at the link in bio.

A post shared by Stitch Fix (@stitchfix) on Jul 7, 2017 at 5:23pm PDT

It Might Have An Edge Over Amazon

As I said earlier, Stitch Fix isn’t the only subscription box clothing startup in the ring. Le Tote and Rent the Runway are primarily rental services, but both give customers the option of purchasing items; MM.LaFleur offers a similar service, but at a steeper price point and with a focus on work clothes. And then there’s Amazon’s Prime Wardrobe, which now allows customers to pick clothes and try them out free of charge.

But what is most attractive about Stitch Fix and companies in that vein is that you don’t have to wade through the endless scroll of online retailers. Prime Wardrobe lets you try on clothes without buying them, sure, but it doesn’t curate the box for you. With that in mind, Stitch Fix overshadows its competition in terms of revenue: MM.LaFleur reportedly earned $30 million in revenue during 2016, while Rent the Runway brought in $100 million.

Even otherwise, Stitch Fix is up there with Amazon when it comes to online clothing retailers dominating the market. According to market research firm NPD Group, both companies rank among the top 10 most popular retailers for online clothing purchases. And that’s true among the millennial set as well: e-commerce research firm Slice Intelligence reports that Stitch Fix is the eighth most popular online retailer for millennials, with Amazon leading the charge. Stitch Fix might just be able to hold its own in a market puppeteered by the Amazonian powers that be—at least for the time being.

We reported in July that Apple had a stressful June getting all the bells and whistles in the 10th Anniversary iPhone working right before taking the phone into mass production. Based on the numbers we heard from Apple on Tuesday, it sounds like Apple engineers got their work done.

In June, Apple engineers were working feverishly to get a variety of new features on Apple’s forthcoming 10th Anniversary iPhone (likely called iPhone 8 or iPhone X) working, a knowledgeable source told me. The problematic features included the wireless (inductive) charging in the new phone, and the 3D sensor on the front of the phone that will be used to identify and authenticate the user. Apple is also said to have been struggling to build a home button underneath the new edge-to-edge OLED screen on the front of the phone.

Numerous reports said that the release of the 10th Anniversary phone could be delayed until much later in the year if the problems persisted. If that were the case, no sales of that device could have been factored into Apple’s September quarter revenue forecast. But it appears they were.

Apple said it expects revenues of between $49 billion and $52 billion for the September quarter. Those are very big numbers. Wall Street was happy; Apple stock price went up after hours.

The music ringing in analysts’ ears said, “An iPhone supercycle is about to begin.” In other words, the magical days of the iPhone 6 are about to return, with lots of consumers throwing down the plastic to get in on the next chapter of the iPhone. Indeed, Apple’s estimate approached the $51.5 billion in quarterly earnings reached at the height of those heady days in September 2015.

More specifically, Apple’s forecast meant two things to Wall Street analysts: Apple will deliver all three of its new phones on time (that is, in September), and demand for the new phones will be really high. Apple believes lots of people have held off on upgrading their phones until they have a chance to buy one of the new phones announced this fall. The phones will (very likely) include the iPhone 7s and 7s Plus, and the fancy (and expensive) new 10th Anniversary iPhone.

Morgan Stanley released an analyst note this morning, saying:

Following strong results and guidance at AAPL last night, MS Research IT Hardware Analyst Katy Huberty sees a clear the path for AAPL shares to outperform in the early innings of the iPhone supercycle. Her FY18 estimates remain well ahead of consensus as she sees faster upgrades, increased switchers, and ecosystem benefits like accelerating services growth.

Other analysts released similar notes. Analysts at RBC, Guggenheim, J.P. Morgan, UBS, Rosenblatt Securities, and Wells Fargo moved their stock price targets for Apple upwards, according to Apple Insider.

But there’s a caveat (there’s always a caveat). Even if Apple delivers all of the new iPhones on time in September, that doesn’t necessarily mean it worked out all the technical problems it struggled with in June. It’s possible (not probable) that Apple would build significant features into the hardware of the 10th Anniversary phone, but leave them disabled until it has the software working reliably. 

Nobody was thinking about that Tuesday. On earnings day, all the attention is usually on the actual sales numbers for the quarter. But Apple’s June-ending quarterly numbers seemed like an aside. The company had an okay quarter, with solid iPhone sales and some some surprisingly good results in the iPad, Watch, Mac, and Services businesses.

The forecast for next quarter has set the stage for a big iPhone launch coming up this fall. Don’t expect any easing of the iPhone hype before then.

Publishers that depend on Facebook for page views know that anything that deters users from clicking can be a disaster. Facebook’s Instant Articles can be a solution to that, but many publishers don’t want to hand over control of their content to Zuck and Co.

That apathy may be why Facebook didn’t even mention Instant Articles in a blog post today announcing an update to News Feed that will prioritize stories in mobile users’ feeds that load faster. “We’ll soon take into account the estimated load time of a webpage that someone clicks to from any link in News Feed on the mobile app,” Facebook wrote. “If signals indicate the webpage will load quickly, the link to that webpage might appear higher in your feed.”

In other words, publishers, you know where to go.

Tesla has started installing its first solar roofs. The initial customers are employees, so the company can closely monitor any problems in its premier products. The company is likely eager to prove the value of its acquisition of Solar City last year for $2 billion.

“This is version one,” cofounder Elon Musk said during today’s second quarter earnings call. “I think this roof is going to look really knockout as we keep iterating.” Earlier this year, he told Fast Company he believed that good aesthetics were key to selling Solar City’s rooftops. In May the company started allowing interested customers to put a $1,000 downpayment on its glass tiled sunlight powered rooftops via an online store, in what has been described as an Apple Store strategy for solar power.

“I have it on my house, [Tesla co-founder] JB [Straubel] has it on his house,” Musk said, adding that the first installations were already generating energy. The company released cellphone photos of one house with the newly-installed tiles.

Tesla also said that production of the tiles would not enter mass production at its Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo, New York until the end of 2017, later than its January announcement that mass production would begin mid-year. At the moment, small-scale production of the tiles is being carried out at the former SolarCity pilot production line in Fremont, California.

The news comes a week after Musk announced that the company is entering “production hell” on its much-anticipated Model 3 sedan, and a day after it emerged that longtime Tesla battery technology director Kurt Kelty had left the company.

There’s so much that gets judged in a job interview. From what you wear to how you shake the interviewer’s hand, to how confident you appear and sound when you introduce yourself. Almost everything you do during a job interview will be under the microscope, including all of your idiosyncrasies.

Unfortunately, whether you like it or not–recruiters are humans with biases, and sometimes those biases include behaviors that we might think are no big deal, but for reasons unknown, they just absolutely can’t stand. Every recruiter is different, but here are a few habits that can have a big influence in terms of how they perceive you as a job candidate.

1. Fidgeting

Too much movement shows that you’re nervous. And while recruiters expect some of that, it can be extremely distracting for hiring managers when they see you constantly shifting. In a previous Fast Company article, Michael Plummer, CEO of direct marketing mail firm Our Town America, told Stephanie Vozza, “I have seen some folks so nervous that it overshadows the rest of their body language.”

He went on to say, “Body language is only relevant within the context of the specific interview. I do notice if someone is noticeably shifty and things don’t seem to be adding up. In those cases, I simply follow up further on references.”

Related:Former Recruiters Reveal The Industry’s Dark Secrets That Can Cost You Job Offers

2. Not Smiling

Yes, it’s important to appear serious, but recruiters are human beings who still respond to visual cues, and that includes smiles. Imagine you’re meeting someone for the first time, and while they shake your hand, their mouth remains in a neutral expression. It can come across as a little rude right? A job interview is no different.

Denise Dudley, professional trainer and author of Work it!: Get In, Get Noticed, Get Promoted previously told Fast Company that smiling makes someone appear more attractive, intelligent, relaxed, and sincere compared to those who didn’t smile. She went on to say that seeing someone smile activates the reward centers in our brain, releasing those feel-good neurotransmitters.

3. Stumbling On The Interviewer’s Name

Some people have difficult names, and while it might be socially acceptable at a cocktail party to stumble across someone’s difficult name and then casually say “sorry, I’m really really terrible with names!”, a job interview is a place where you want to avoid this from happening. In a previous article for Fast Company, emotional intelligence expert Harvey Deutschendorf suggested that if we’re not sure how to pronounce someone’s name when they introduce themselves to us, we should ask them to clarify and repeat it back to them until we get it right.

Deutschendorf wrote, “This may feel a little awkward but it shows you actually care–and it’s better than mishearing a name, not bothering to correct it, and bungling (repeatedly) later.”

4. Writing Terrible Thank-You Notes

Perhaps the interview went well, and you avoided making any blunders. But you can still ruin the great first impression they had of you by doing the wrong thing after the interview.

First, it’s important to point out that not sending a thank-you note is a no-no. But so is sending overly long notes that make the recruiter go, “I’ll read this later” or notes that rehash your entire conversation. As HR executive search firm partner Mathilde Primula wrote in a 2016 Fast Company article, “hiring managers and recruiters are always looking for reasons to push one candidate toward the front of the pack and disqualify others–that’s their job. So that means that what you may think of as a simple convention of thank-you note writing is actually a blunder that your interviewer sees multiple times a day. That’s bad.”

Related:What I Learned From My Nightmare Job Interview

5. Overusing “We” When Talking About Past Successes

A job interview is a sales pitch for yourself, not anyone else. Yes, you do want to brag about huge achievements that you were part of–even if you didn’t do all the work. However, it’s important to highlight the specific part you played so that the hiring manager can determine how your experiences might translate to the role that you’re interviewing for. As James Sudakow previously wrote for Fast Company, “Most interviewers want to know what you accomplished, even as part of a team.”

6. Speaking With Sloppy Grammar

You’ve meticulously checked your cover letter and resume to make sure that they’re grammatically error-free, but you should also make sure that those errors don’t creep into your speech. As Samantha Cole wrote in a 2014 Fast Company article, your use of things like double negatives can hamper your credibility with the recruiter. Of course, it’s important to be yourself, but just like there is an appropriate etiquette to communicating professionally via email, there’s also an appropriate etiquette for verbal communication in the workplace.

7. Using Too Many Filler Words

Unfortunately, saying certain words too often can make you seem less competent, and this is definitely not the impression you want to give when you’re in a job interview. Using filler words such as “like”, “actually”, “really”, or “you know” might come second nature in casual conversations, but you should do your best to stay away from them when you’re speaking to a recruiter or hiring manager.

Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of Talking From 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work, previously told Fast Companythat this habit probably comes from our impulse to fill space when we’re thinking about what we want to say. The result, Tannen says, is that the recruiter or hiring manager might think you’re not confident in what you’re saying.

So what should you do instead? Tannen suggests pausing when you find that you need some time to gather your thoughts. After all, a few seconds of silence sound a whole lot better than a sentence full of “like.”

There are few franchises better suited to helping a nascent medium get off the ground than Star Wars.

So the news, announced today, that there will be Star Wars-themed installations of the location-based virtual reality experience The Void outside Disneyland and Disney World couldn’t have been better news for the young company.

Starting this holiday season, visitors will have the chance to immerse themselves in Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, a social, multi-sensory, untethered “hyper-reality” experience designed in a collaboration between The Void, Lucasfilm, and ILMxLab, and featuring audio from Skywalker Sound.

The Void is one of a number of new location-based VR companies. Their approach is to build experience centers around entertainment and commerce hubs, like malls, movie theaters, and amusement parks. Visitors strap on a set of self-contained VR gear and walk through a physical space that can be as big as a small warehouse. Players collaborate on a mission of some sort, such as defeating ghosts in The Void’s Ghostbusters: Dimension installation in New York City.

Some analysts believe that businesses like The Void or Nomadic can help revitalize the struggling retail and cinema industries by bringing in more foot traffic and giving people something to do with friends and family away from the home.

It’s notable that The Void is launching a Star Wars property, but shouldn’t come as a major surprise to observers of ILMxLab’s work in VR. First launched in 2015, the immersive entertainment division of Lucasfilm subsequently produced Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine, a short VR project for the HTC Vive that brings users into the middle of a scene that takes place after the events of Return of the Jedi. Players take “the role of an aspiring Padawan hoping to join Luke Skywalker in his effort to rebuild the Jedi Order,” according to Wookieepedia.

ILMxLab has also announced plans to work on Star Wars projects with the highly anticipated mixed-reality company Magic Leap, and has hinted at a larger Star Wars VR project that could be released in a few years.

For its part, the Star Wars project is a big step forward for The Void, as well as a major vote of confidence, which became part of Disney’s accelerator program this year.

Will it be a success? It’s hard to say, as it’s unknown what the new experience will cost, nor how it will be received by those who go through it. Location-based VR can be surprisingly persuasive in terms of inspiring people to suspend all their disbelief as they physically walk into unknown environments. The proof, of course, is in the pudding. But it’s hard to imagine people won’t be interested in becoming a participant in a high-quality, immersive Star Wars story.

“At ILMxLab, we want people to step inside the world of our stories,” lab head Vicki Dobbs Beck said in a release. “Through our collaboration with The Void, we can make this happen as guests become active participants in an unfolding Star Wars adventure….We hope to truly transport [visitors] to a galaxy far, far away.”

NASA may be best known for hits like landing humans on the moon and sending a probe to the sun, but it turns out the space agency has a side gig in party planning. In advance of the upcoming total solar eclipse (if you haven’t marked August 21 on your calendar yet, you shouldn’t be reading this), NASA has gone full Sandra Lee and laid out a 14-point plan for the best solar eclipse viewing party ever.

Strangely, the suggestions don’t include listening to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on repeat or setting up a “space buffet.” However, the agency has some good recommendations, including:

• Watch its NASA EDGE eclipse-tracking program on the UStream Main Program Feed.
• Check out the Eclipse Event Map, following the #Eclipse2017 hashtag on the social media outlet of your choice.
• Provide educational handouts to guests via their “Downloadables” page.
• Prepare to answer any of your guests’ questions by brushing up on Eclipse 101.

You can check out more of NASA’s party tips here.

“We aren’t where we’d like to be,” writes Facebook’s global director of diversity Maxine Williams, but the number of employees from underrepresented groups at the social network has increased.

In a blog post, Williams announced that:

• The number of female employees globally increased from 33% to 35% and the number of women in tech rose from 17% to 19%.
• Women now make up 27% of all new graduate hires in engineering and 21% of all new technical hires at Facebook.
• In the U.S., the number of Hispanic employees increased from 4% to 5%, and black employees rose from 2% to 3%.
• This year, 7% 0f Facebook’s staff self-identified as LGBTQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or asexual), based on a 67% response rate.

The full report on Facebook’s demographic data includes a caveat in small print pointing out that due to the way the government tracks EEO-1 data, the numbers reflected in its filing represent a point in time in July 2016, and not the current 2017 data, and that job groupings and categories do not align with the way Facebook groups employees internally. “We believe that the information presented in this post is a far more accurate reflection of the progress we’ve made and the work that remains to be done,” the report says.

It’s worth noting that Facebook shareholders recently rejected a proposal requiring the company to prepare a gender pay equity report for the second year in a row because they believe the company’s already achieved pay parity.

Read more on Why it’s important for tech companies to release diversity data regularly and on time.

So you finally hired your first assistant or direct report who can take a few things off your plate. Congrats! Now what?

If you aren’t careful, the task of managing your new hire can actually cancel out any time-saving gains they might be able to offer you. You’ve known for a while that you need to delegate, but it’s sometimes a struggle to know what to hand off–and how. You might even feel a little guilty asking someone to do certain tasks for you that you’ve always done yourself.

Here are a few tips to make sure you bring your new hire up to speed quickly and avoid micromanaging their work–this way you can both be as productive as you possibly can.

1. Reinforce The Right Habits

If you’ve been smart about it, you’ve hired a candidate whose skills and qualities will make them helpful to you. But in the first few weeks while they settle in, it’s worth calling out whenever they demonstrate the abilities you want to see more of. A little positive reinforcement can go a long way toward setting up time-management habits that benefit you both, yet it’s something that often doesn’t happen enough during the on-boarding process.

These are a few habits you should praise early on:

• Motivation to do things independently: It doesn’t matter whether you’ve hired an administrative assistant specifically or brought on a junior employee who reports to you while also working on your team. Either way, you shouldn’t feel like you have to push to get things done. Wherever they take the initiative, notice it and say thanks!
• Quick, clear, open communication: To make the best use of their time (and yours), your new staff member needs to communicate well with you, your colleagues, and your clients. Sometimes this requires being sensitive to the fact that you might not always be well organized, and having patience with your process–after all, that’s why you need their help.
• Getting the hang of systems and software: Technical chops matter, even if that just means managing an Outlook calendar. If your new hire doesn’t know how to use your main workflow tools already, give positive feedback for picking them up quickly.
• Keeping up with your pace: This one is tricky to nail right from the get-go, so express your appreciation if your assistant jumps in and picks up your work cadence right away. That’s especially important if you’ve hired an administrative assistant who works remotely for you part-time, since they likely have multiple clients as well as personal responsibilities of their own.

2. Systematize Your Procedures

People who have a gift for administrative work tend to thrive with very clear, step-by-step procedures. Ideally you’ll have those systems set up and totally documented before they begin. But if you don’t have a chance to do that, work it into the training process: Ask your assistant to write up your procedures while you show them what they are.

In my coaching business, I have written procedures for everything from how to put up a blog post to how to respond to new client inquiries. Every frequently repeated administrative task is documented and delegated. This doesn’t just make sure things stay consistent once you hand them off–it also saves you the time of verbally explaining everything, and your new hire the time of having to ask basic questions about how things work.

(Plus, if you later need to hire somebody new, you’ll automatically have the resources for your outgoing assistant to train your incoming one.)

3. Track All The Tasks You’ve Delegated

No, this isn’t a euphemism for “micromanage everything you’ve handed off.” It’s simply a matter of recording delegated tasks in a standard location where your assistant can mark off their progress on them. It doesn’t mean you’ll need or want to check in on that all the time, but this habit can add some clarity to tasks and processes that are now split between two people, rather than just handled by one. This saves time for you both.

Some of my coaching clients like to delegate tasks through Outlook tasks, others used shared lists on Wunderlist, and others like myself just rely on a few cloud-based shared documents. For my assistant and me, it works best to have a master shared Google doc where we record all of the current assignments we’re working on in parallel. Anytime I think of something for her, I type it into that document. My litmus test for effective delegation is not, “Could I do this?” but “Can she do this?” If the answer is yes, I add it to the doc, then hand it off.

We’ve also set up a shared spreadsheet for tracking particular types of work, like new client inquiries or book promotion tasks. Assistants and new junior employees can sometimes struggle with prioritization, especially when they’re settling in, so if you have particular deadlines for items, these simple task-tracking methods can keep them all in one spot and hard to miss.

4. Meet Regularly

Meetings are usually seen as time-wasters–and they certainly can be. But when you’re trying to save time by delegating, setting up recurring check-ins can prove critical to both parties. They don’t have to be long; even a regular 30-minute weekly meeting can help keep you on the same page and reset any priorities week by week. It’s a great opportunity to talk through delegated tasks, explain new projects, and generally make sure your assistant has the right information to move forward.

Most people who are hired to help support somebody else tend to waste the most time simply because they aren’t totally clear on what they’re supposed to do. Taking a few minutes to get some clarity on their top goals and priorities can save hours of time over the course of a workweek.

5. Set Reminders

In addition to the one-off tasks you delegate, you’ll likely have quite a few recurring tasks assigned to your assistant. Ask them to set recurring calendar reminders for those. You can also duplicate those same reminders in your own calendar so you can confirm that they’re done. This can be a good safeguard to make sure nothing falls off your radar (just be careful not to overdo it–your assistant needs to know you trust them to handle it).

Ultimately, the best time-management strategy for both of you is incredibly simple: Keep the lines of communication open. You may find there are small things you can ask your assistant to do that wind up saving you hours of time, or vice versa. But you’ll never know which ways to split things up the most productively if you can’t work as a team and value the roles you both play.

It’s a boss’s job to point out areas for improvement and to help you grow. And so, if you’re on the wrong track or falling short of expectations, you expect them to let you know.

But, of course, constructive criticism is only one kind of feedback.

Positive feedback matters too. It’s motivating to know that your efforts are seen and your work is valuable. Not just that, but it’s easier to believe in yourself if you feel that others believe in you, too.

But not everyone has a supervisor who makes it a point to give praise. And even if your manager has the best intentions, things get busy.

The great news is: Even if no one’s taking the time to say, “good job,” there are signs you can look for that tell you that yes, you are crushing it–and your boss knows it too!

Look for one (or more) of these three things:

1. You’re Given More Responsibility

A good manager isn’t going to pile more work onto someone they believe is struggling with their current workload. So, while it’d be awesome if new assignments came coupled with, “I picked this for you because you’re doing such a great job with everything else!” that’s often what it means.

Related: What To Do During An Employee’s First Week To Avoid Losing Them 

To be sure your new project is an endorsement of your skills (and not just an overworked boss shoving things off of their plate), ask yourself the following questions:

• Does this give me the opportunity to build skills or qualify me for other types of projects?
• Does this allow me to contribute to mission-critical work?
• Does this align with what I’ve expressed interest in pursuing?

If you can answer yes to at least one, it means your boss feels you have your current projects under control and wants to provide additional avenues for you to stay engaged and grow.

2. You’re Given More Autonomy

You know that a key reason why leaders micromanage is because they feel the employee isn’t meeting expectations. And if you follow that logic—that bosses hover over those whose abilities they question—you can see where the opposite would be true, too.

To put it plainly: If you’re right on target (or better yet, exceeding expectations) every time your manager checks in, then they won’t feel the need to do so as often.

So, if your supervisor tells you that you can run with whatever plan you think is best, or that you don’t need to touch base unless you have questions, that means they trust your judgement and skills. Empowering you to do more things with less supervision is the same as saying, “You’re doing a great job, and so I trust you can keep succeeding with a lot less input from me!”

3. You’re Given More Visibility

The best bosses find opportunities for their people to learn by doing. But they also know when they need their best foot (read: employee) forward. Who are they going to ask to run the account for a high-profile client or represent the company at a conference?

Related:Why Employees And Management Have Such Different Ideas About Company Culture

Someone who they have complete faith in, and who they think represents the company in the very best light. Without a doubt, when you’re asked to speak on behalf of your team, it’s because your boss thinks you’re doing a great job.

You may’ve noticed a common theme across these three items: They all boil down to trust. Before your boss asks you to take more on, self-direct your work, or represent the organization to someone important; they have to believe that you’re up to the task. And if that’s where you’re at, pat yourself on the back. You deserve it!

If you’ve read this far and you’re feeling a disconnect between your efforts and recognition, don’t despair! Instead read this article on how to get your hard work noticed, even if you’re really busy.

Because in the end, while it’d be nice if your manager said, “good job,” it’s even more important that they their actions show they know it.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission. 

More From The Muse:

• Don’t Always Be A “Good Employee”–From Someone Who Had A Breakdown Doing Just That 
• How To Do A Great Job Even When You Don’t Like Your Job 
• How Successful People Go From Good To Great In Anything They Do 

What: The first trailer for a forthcoming remake of Reagan-era vigilante flick, Death Wish.

Who: Filmmaker Eli Roth and star Bruce Willis.

Why we care: While watching this trailer, I experienced a moment like The Usual Suspects detective dropping his coffee mug as he realizes he just let Keyser Soze go. It was the moment I realized Eli Roth, whose work I’ve enjoyed, may secretly be a member of the alt right, whose work I have not.

First, there were the Hostel movies and Green Inferno. These can be nasty fun as a litmus test for one’s gore-withstanding threshold, but they also promote the idea of hostile foreigners hell-bent on torturing Americans. Combine that xenophobic concept with the fact that Roth intended Green Inferno partly as a rebuke to “social justice warriors,” and he might as well change the logo of his production company to Pepe the Frog. Some of this interpretation had crossed my mind before, but it never fully gelled until I saw the trailer for Death Wish moments ago.

As a piece of agitprop for Second Amendment avengers, the Death Wish trailer is about as inflammatory as that bonkers NRA ad from late June. For one thing, Eli Roth has moved the vigilante tale to Chicago–the original was set in New York–aligning with one of Donald Trump’s favorite talking points. Mainly, though, the trailer makes it look like the only way to reduce gun violence is not firmer regulation but arming every citizen and also teaching them how to orchestrate grand Guignol bloodbaths against criminal mechanics.

The gun violence in Chicago is real, and it’s a problem. Reducing it to something that can be solved with cartoonish Bruce Willis ass-kickery is a problem in its own right.

It’s been interesting to watch the reaction to Aziz Ansari’s recent GQ interview in which he explains how his head felt so much better after he deleted the internet from his phone. The quote has gone viral, as quotes do, and there’s been a lot of cheerleading over the last day or so.

hell yes Aziz Ansarihttps://t.co/L7lJELqnujpic.twitter.com/5g4Z7gcM9y

— Jon Ward (@jonward11) August 2, 2017

Part of the reason the quote has caught on is because the Master of None star so perfectly explains what we all already know—we’re addicted to our phones. “It’s just about seeing a new thing,” Ansari writes. “You get addicted to that feeling.”

If there are any medical professionals reading, I’d like to personally nominate “new thing syndrome” as a bona fide condition. At the same time, it’s hard not to notice that all the fanfare behind Ansari’s quotes is taking place on the internet via tweets, retweets, Facebook shares, and endless hot takes. We hear what he’s saying but do we listen? Maybe admitting there’s a problem is just the first step.

Check out the full interview here.

Fast Company‘s past is getting its ass kicked into shape.

Over the past year, the technology that powers Fast Company has been completely overhauled. Everything from the tech stack to the content management system, the video platform, and analytics package has changed.

To appreciate the magnitude of this upgrade, you’ll have to scroll back to February 2008. That’s when Fast Company announced its grand relaunch on the open source CMS platform Drupal, version 6. Believe it or not, Fast Company was still running on Drupal 6 nine years later. We had tried unsuccessfully to upgrade to Drupal 7, but our software was so tricked out with customizations that it had become a tangled mess of technologies. The technical debt had become so large that, for a couple years, we didn’t want to acknowledge it, and turned a blind eye to the opportunity cost of doing dev work in that environment.

Full recognition of the challenges came as we worked on what would be the February 2016 redesign. It was a challenge executing effectively and ultimately realizing our vision for the sites. The debt was much more than a technical challenge.

Fast-forward to 2017, and Fast Company is now in the final stages of a transition to a React.js progressive web app that is server rendered in node.js, and backed by the open source WordPress platform (REST API). This will unlock the next phase of our growth, making the site better for readers as well as for the writers and editors who work on the site every day.

Here are a few of the features we’ve implemented over the last six months.

1. Fast Company and Co.Design are now running on HTTPS. Among many other benefits (a modest SEO boost among them), this guarantees that any data being provided from Fast Company is genuine and has not been altered by a third party. It will allow us to create better, and trusted, user experiences across our sites.

2. For video, we migrated off an aging platform and onto the JW Player platform. This has allowed us to optimize our video workflow and to experiment with new integrations across our sites. As a result, our video views have more than doubled since the beginning of this year, and continue to grow.

3. Search got optimized. Without getting into all the gory details, the migration of 20+ years of content allowed us to address numerous internal issues exposed by our SEO audit. As a result, we are seeing record organic search traffic (sessions from search have more than doubled), and more important have established a consistent week-over-week growth trend.

4. The site was redesigned. We took the start-fresh opportunity to build a framework that is simpler to grok and enables both modularity and experimentation. Expect improved experience for our readers, our writers, and advertisers.

5. Our page load time is the best it has ever been. Google PageSpeed puts us at 80/100 on mobile and 90/100 on desktop.

6. Viewability is better. Advertising viewability is a constant challenge for publishers, and an area where we continue looking for optimizations without the need for third-party add-ons. We are currently seeing 64% viewability across all devices, and expect to get above 70% in the weeks ahead.

This is nothing short of a gargantuan undertaking, that includes training the entire editorial and marketing teams on how to use new content management tools, updating the way we use keyword tags, and changing our daily workflow. The engineering team has done an amazing amount of work getting this all done, with barely any service interruptions—save for the day we pushed our new CMS live, which in a twisted coincidence was also the day that Amazon AWS went out of service.

From Thursday to Sunday, the annual music festival Lollapalooza is taking over Chicago’s Grant Park—and Fast Company is bringing readers exclusive access. Over four days, we will be among festival-goers as they catch the likes of Chance the Rapper,Lorde, Arcade Fire, Muse, and the Killers onstage (not to mention other Fast Company favorites such as Run the Jewels and Tegan and Sara).

Follow along with Red Bull TV’s live broadcast of the festival below, and tune in to Fast Company‘s social channels for behind-the-scenes interviews and footage.

After Trump announced his intent to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, Conservation International–like other nonprofits–saw a surge in interest from people wanting to know how they could act while the government slowed or stopped progress. A revamped carbon calculator is designed to help: answer a few questions about your daily life, and it uses up-to-date data to tell you your carbon footprint, clearly see what you might be able to change, and offer you a verified way to offset your emissions.

“What we’ve really noticed lately is that climate change has really become a personal issue for people,” says Shyla Raghav, climate change lead at Conservation International. “It’s no longer someone else’s problem. There’s a recognition that we all have a role to play. By having access to this information, it empowers each of us to make decisions about our daily choices and our lifestyle that will have an impact on the planet.”

The calculator, which takes only two or three minutes to use, asks questions about the type and size of home you live in (tiny apartments have smaller footprints than larger houses, unsurprisingly), energy use, recycling, diet, daily transportation, and flights. As you answer, the calculator shows a running tally of your footprint. At the end, you have the option to offset that footprint through supporting programs that reduce rates of deforestation.

One set of offsets comes from the Chyulu Hills in Kenya, an area a little bigger than Rhode Island, where protecting the forest serves multiple benefits–beyond absorbing CO2, the forest supports Kenya’s largest population of elephants and populations of critically endangered black rhinos. The offsets are verified by a third party and then available as carbon credits.

A large part of that change, of course, needs to happen at national and international scale. But while someone can’t individually shift the entire power grid to renewables–beyond the role they can play as voters–the calculator recognizes that individual actions do have some impact. In some cases, individual actions could have an impact more quickly than larger-scale change: someone can decide to start taking public transit instead of driving today.

In stark contrast to last week, the U.S. Senate voted 88-1 today to actually approve a healthcare-related bill. The FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017 funds the Food and Drug Administration for the next five years and incorporates several smaller bills, including the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017. Already passed by the House of Representatives, the law will allow people with hearing difficulties to purchase a hearing aid almost as easily as they can buy any other set of wired or wireless headphones—without first visiting a doctor.

Currently, only companies certified as medical device makers are allowed to sell hearing aids, although consumer companies such as Bose, Doppler Labs, and Etymotic Research have been selling devices that incorporate hearing assistance into wireless headphones or earbuds. The legislation passed today (and virtually guaranteed to be signed by the president) will make it much easier for those companies to market their products as actual hearing aids, which consumers can buy without getting a medical exam or prescription.

That doesn’t mean any hearing aid maker can hang a shingle. The FDA will first set performance and safety guidelines. The process could take up to three years, but will probably go much faster, as it was already under way in anticipation of the legislation. One of the most important requirements will be providing apps or other simple tools that allow people, without the help of a doctor, to customize the devices to the specific amount of amplification, in the specific frequencies, that each ear requires.

Read our recent feature for the full story on the long struggle to make hearing aids cheaper and easier to get.

If you pressed me to name the most important year in the history of personal technology, I might come up with 1977. That’s the year that three groundbreakingly consumery personal computers were released. There was Apple’s Apple II and Commodore’s Pet 2001. And on August 3, 1977, RadioShack (née Radio Shack) unveiled its TRS-80 during a press conference at the Warwick Hotel in New York.

I cheerfully admit to having a bias in favor of the TRS-80, which I started using when my father brought one home in 1978. Even in its heyday, it had a reputation for being clunky snd unglamorous. But it outsold the sexier (and pricier) Apple II for years and was marketed in thousands of the Shack’s retail outlets at a time when Apple products were still available primarily in weird little mom-and-pop computer stores. To me, that makes it the most mainstream of the early PCs.

I had a lot more to say about the machine for a piece I wrote to mark its 35th anniversary in 2012. And here (via RadioShackCatalogs.com) is some imagery from the cover of the first TRS-80 catalog, back when anyone selling computers had to start by explaining what they could do.