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There’s No Excuse For Equifax’s Catastrophic Breach, Say Experts

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Equifax just suffered what may be one of the biggest and most potentially damaging data breaches in history, and security experts are saying that the breach was probably preventable.

The credit bureau said Thursday that it learned July 29th that hackers had compromised the personal data–including credit card numbers, social security numbers, and birthdates–of 143 million US consumers and an unspecified number of UK and Canadian customers, in a breach that occurred sometime between mid-May and July. The credit cards of 209,000 U.S. customers were compromised, as well as personally identifiable information on 182,000 people involved in credit disputes.

Equifax chairman and CEO Richard F. Smith called the breach “disappointing.”

“This is a terrible story,” said Cooper Levenson attorney and security expert Peter Fu. “No one entity should ever have all of our personal data in a single breakable point of entry.” The sheer volume of the loss suggests hackers were able to quickly grab huge chunks of data in a “catastrophic” breach, Fu says.


Related: Equifax execs dumped company stock before disclosing data breach


While law enforcement is keeping the technical details of the breach quiet for the moment, the available facts strongly suggest Equifax may not have been following accepted security guidelines.

Fu points out that the Payment Card Industry security guidelines used by banks and credit card companies require that companies keep billing information (names, addresses, social security numbers, etc.), financial information (credit card numbers), and miscellaneous supporting documents in separate secure places.

“You’d expect the company to be at the extreme end of the security spectrum given it is their business to aggregate highly sensitive data and keep it secure,” says Randy Battat, cyber security expert and founder/CEO of PreVeil.

“This case highlights more than ever the need for a system that eliminates central points of attack and protects business data even when the servers are compromised,” Battat said.

Fu says it could be meaningful that Equifax broke out the exposed data into three different types–the personally identifiable data, the personal financial data, and the email and other correspondence about credit disputes. It suggests Equifax may at least have segregated the data by type.

“Either Equifax put everything in one big bucket or they suffered such a catastrophic attack that multiple buckets were compromised simultaneously,” Fu said. Normally, if a hacker breaches one server, the other servers automatically shut down, Fu says.

Still, because Equifax collects so much data, each of those buckets was very big, and a very big target. Large organizations often choose to keep massive piles of data in one spot so that it can be searched and accessed easier.

Equifax should have seen this coming from miles away, analysts and security researchers say.

Partly that’s because the credit bureau was the target of another serious data breach back in 2013. Equifax learned of the breach after hackers posted online social security numbers, credit reports, and other information about celebrities and government officials including Michelle Obama.

“After the breach debacle that Equifax went through in 2013, just four years ago, there is no conceivable excuse in the world for this kind of failure to happen again,” says Dr. Barbara Rembiesa, president and CEO of the International Association of IT Asset Managers (IAITAM). She said that “Equifax handles some of the most sensitive consumer information in the United States” and had “permitted what is perhaps the worst breach of consumer information in our nation’s history.”

The Equifax breach is still not the largest: In the past year, Yahoo has disclosed that over 1.5 billion user accounts had been hacked in attacks in 2013 and 2014.

Fu points out that the Equifax is different from other landmark breaches because much of the data on Equifax’s servers doesn’t come from consumers themselves. It comes from credit card companies, banks, and retailers.

That means that many of the victims of the massive breach probably don’t realize they are victims. And to find out if they are impacted using a new Equifax website, victims were asked to turn over part of their social security number. And to receive help from the company—a year of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection—customers were asked to sign an arbitration clause that appeared to prevent them from suing the company. Equifax clarified today that it will not require impacted consumers to forfeit their right to join a class action lawsuit against the company.

Now, one of the many questions for everyone involved in one of the biggest data breaches in history is just how big that lawsuit will be.


RelatedAfter The Equifax Hack, What Can You Do To Protect Yourself? Not Much 


The Surprising Upsides To Getting Angry At Work

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Being angry isn’t a pleasant feeling, and expressing how mad you are in the office is usually a bad idea. Not only does it lead to emotional decision-making and other risky behaviors, it harms your ability to get along with people. But the fact remains that anger is a universal human emotion, meaning it’s served an adaptive purpose for human beings over the course of our evolution–or why else would that emotion have stuck with us for so long?

While some have argued that humans as a species have steadily become less violent overall in modern times, there’s little reason to believe there will ever come a point when we’ll ever cease feeling angry now and then. So the question is how best to channel that emotion in ways that actually help us–especially at work.

It Fuels Nonverbal Cues That Can Preempt Confrontation

As Charles Darwin famously noted in a seminal essay, the essence of emotions is interpersonal–they’re meant to help us communicate our intentions to others. In fact, you can think of emotions as a predecessor of language; even today; much of what we communicate comes through nonverbal channels like facial expressions, body posture, personal space, and so on. While this may sound obvious, it suggests something that’s actually pretty counterintuitive: emotions are much more other-oriented than self-centered or introspective–even though you’re the one experiencing a certain emotion at a certain time. In other words, you feel something in order to guide your relationships with others.

In the case of anger, the point is to signal combative or retaliatory intentions to others, mostly to prevent them from annoying you in the future. This doesn’t mean you should lash out at your coworkers and intimidate them into behaving the way you want them to–far from it. Indeed, since anger is most powerful when it’s not manifested, the better course of action is to channel your frustration into subtler, nonverbal queues. You don’t have to sulk and cross your arms passive aggressively for others to get the sense that maybe now isn’t the best time to swing by your desk and tell that joke. Something as simple as putting on your headphones and maybe wrinkling your brow can do the trick.

At any rate, when others are able to predict what you might feel if they do something, they’ll likely hold off doing it in the first place. Ironically, then, anger–properly channeled into nonverbal signals–can play a critical role in keeping relationships peaceful.

It Can Help You Rally Your Team

Like it or not, we all use anger to intimidate–that’s one of its key functions–but this works better for some people than others. More powerful people are typically given greater license to express anger than are less powerful ones. So if you’ve acquired a degree of status over others, you can channel your anger into the way you deliver their marching orders. Whereas if you’re angry toward someone more senior to you, you’ll probably just feel frustrated and may even try to unload those feelings onto someone less powerful than you who doesn’t deserve it.

This difference is key. It means you shouldn’t come down on your team members with fire and fury when it’s your own supervisor you’re really mad at. But it does mean that expressing anger at a situation–“I’m so frustrated our client pitch fell flat, aren’t you?!”–can be an effective rallying mechanism when you’re the one in charge. And since anger allows you to showcase your status, it can give some added authority to the idea you’re expressing.

Psychologists also know that in high-status individuals, anger offers an important moral justification for behaving in non-altruistic ways–in other words, it lets the powerful feel entitled rather than guilty for their bad behavior (even selfish people prefer to have a clear conscience). So while this doesn’t license unethical business practices, it can add fuel to your team’s fire for going after the competition. After all, your company needs to act in its own self-interest in order to get an edge in the market over your competitors, who are all surely doing the same. Feeling a little angry and entitled can take you a long way in that race.

It Can Boost Your Performance

So it’s no surprise that in measured doses, anger can prove a useful performance catalyst. Of course, this requires self-control and emotional intelligence. If you can tap into the driving and energizing force that anger provides, you may be able to produce better outcomes than you would trying to suppress those feelings. But the key is to feel a moderate amount of anger (or what psychologists call “arousal”–the mental stress or pressure that motivates people to act) that leads to higher performance than just being pumped with adrenaline on the one hand or being too bored, calm, and cool-headed on the other.

Likewise, anger can help you become more aware of your values and motives, highlighting your inner compass and system of beliefs so you can realize how much you actually want something–and why. Conversely, the Zen-like ability to eliminate both anger and its sources will also extinguish any passion or desire to achieve. No wonder, then, that exceptional achievers–entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and even scientists–are often motivated by an intense sense of dissatisfaction, frustration at their past performance, and even anger. They’re rebels with a cause, always work hard to create change.

With this in mind, maybe we should learn to tolerate anger more in others. Especially around the office, we generally prefer people who are calm, agreeable, and nonreactive–they’re more rewarding to deal with and non-confrontational. But since there may be a price we pay for some of those “prosocial” qualities, we might want to broaden the definition of “anger management” to include not just tamping it down but channeling it more productively.

For Apple TV, The Price Is The Problem

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To understand Apple TV’s struggles, it’s instructive to look at the Roku Express.

Roku’s humble $30 streaming TV device is mediocre at best. It stutters and lags while moving through menus and apps, its single-band wireless connection is a generation old, and its remote control uses clunky infrared technology that requires a clear line of sight to the box. Given that Roku’s Streaming Stick eliminates all those problems for just $20 more, it’s hard to imagine many people buying the Express instead.

Yet Roku is having no trouble selling its cheapest streaming device. In its recent IPO filing, Roku said the Express drove a 37% year-over-year increase in device sales during the first half of this year. Devices under $50 now make up more than two-thirds of Roku’s U.S. sales, and the company’s average selling price is down to $47 in the United States, according to the NPD Group.

At $150, the current Apple TV costs more than three times what people pay for a Roku player on average. But while Apple’s streaming box is miles ahead of the Roku Express in performance and polish, the experience isn’t much different once video starts rolling in an app like Netflix. That may explain why Apple TV is bleeding market share to Amazon and Roku. People just don’t have much incentive to pay a premium for a streaming box.

Next week, Apple is rumored to announce a 4K HDR Apple TV, which should at least help the company reach feature parity with its competitors’ streaming boxes. But don’t expect the new format alone to drive a turnaround in market share. For Roku, the $75-and-up price categories that includes its Premiere+ and Ultra 4K HDR players only makes up 22% of sales, according to NPD. And while Amazon has offered a 4K Fire TV box since 2015, the cheaper stick has only gained share since then.

The notion that Apple must respond to low-cost competitors with its own cheap products is one of the most banal arguments in tech punditry, and Apple is usually wise to ignore it. But the business model that has worked so well for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac–differentiated software enabled by premium hardware–doesn’t translate to the streaming TV business, where content is king. Without either drastically lower prices or a breakthrough advantage in content, the Apple TV will continue to struggle.

A Stingy Set-Top Market

Roku isn’t the only one whose sales are dominated by cheap hardware.

In late 2014, Amazon launched the Fire TV Stick for $40. Compared to the $100 Fire TV box that launched earlier that year, the Stick had significant performance hiccups, and the first version of its remote control didn’t support voice commands.

But again, consumers didn’t mind. Within a year, Amazon’s stick was outselling its box 3 to 1, according to Parks Associates. A spokeswoman for Parks says the Fire TV Stick now makes up 81% of all Amazon Fire TV devices owned in U.S. broadband homes.

The success of cheap streaming TV devices is now having a profound impact on the Apple TV business. Both Parks Associates and ComScore show Apple TV in fourth place among U.S. broadband customers, behind Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Google’s Chromecast.

Apple isn’t just a victim of low-cost competitors, though. According to The NPD Group, the company’s tailspin began in fourth quarter 2015 with the launch of its fourth-generation Apple TV, which at $150 is pricier than its predecessor, as well as anything offered by Amazon, Roku, or Google. At the time, Apple made up 32.3% of U.S. streaming device sales, excluding Amazon’s Fire TV devices (which NPD doesn’t track). Since then, Apple’s share has consistently slipped, and now sits at 13.5%. And the biggest quarter-to-quarter decline came in fourth quarter 2016, when Apple discontinued the older Apple TV that it had been selling for $69. For Apple, the damage was at least partially self-inflicted.

Content Conquests

The natural rebuttal to these figures is that Apple isn’t overly concerned with market share, so long as it can hold the premium end of the market and maintain a vibrant ecosystem for apps and services.

On the ecosystem side, Apple TV is doing fine. It’s not starving for any major streaming services (except for Amazon Prime Video, which is coming), and it’s been among the initial launch platforms for several new streaming video apps, including Hulu, with Live TV, DirecTV Now, Twitter, and Facebook. Because Apple’s developer tools are powerful, and its customers have a reputation for spending more money, streaming providers may be willing to support the platform even as its market share sinks.

Still, it’s unclear if the premium end of the market is holding up. In January, Apple CFO Luca Maestri told the Financial Times that Apple TV’s 2016 holiday sales declined year-over-year. That was one of the reasons why revenue in Apple’s “other” product category–which also includes iPods and standalone Mac displays–fell by 8% in an otherwise record quarter.

Either way, weak market share gives Apple less leverage to accomplish what it really wants, which is to reinvent TV. The company reportedly walked away from trying to build a streaming TV bundle in 2015, and more recently has butted heads with studios over the price of 4K HDR movie purchases. As Recode’s Peter Kafka has pointed out, Apple used to win these kinds of content battles, but Hollywood studios have little incentive to budge when most streaming TV watchers are using Rokus, Fire TVs, and Chromecasts. Launching a live TV bundle still seems like Apple’s best shot at widespread success, but getting the channels and prices it wants might be easier with more market share.

All of this means that Apple has a tough decision ahead: The company could join Roku, Google, and Amazon in offering the cheaper hardware that consumers overwhelmingly prefer, or it can accept a life of low market share and the reduced bargaining power that goes with it. All available data shows a slim chance of Apple having it both ways.

RIP, Jerry Pournelle, a pioneer of tech journalism for the non-geeky

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[Photo: Flickr user Null0]
In 1980, anyone who used a PC was, by definition, something of a nerd. But Byte, the leading computer magazine of the time, saw a need for a column that emphasized the benefits of the machines rather than their innards. It found its author in celebrated science-fiction author Jerry Pournelle, whose Byte writings—best known by the name “Chaos Manor”—were not very technical; profoundly first person-y and opinionated; focused what you could do with a PC; and prone to going off on extended tangents which were as defining an aspect of the columns as the parts that more obviously belonged in a publication called Byte.

Pournelle continued the column until Byte’s dead-tree demise in 1998 and later on the Byte.com website and elsewhere; blog-like from the start—long before blogs existed—it eventually became a blog. He posted on Thursday, noting that he didn’t feel well. And yesterday he died, at the age of 84. His early 1980s columns were some of the most addictive reading about personal technology ever, and I hope I’m not the only one who will mark his passing by revisiting some of his work in the Byte issues at the Internet Archive.

This Dreamer’s Arrest Was Just The Beginning Of What’s Likely To Come

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Late this week, in the face of widespread condemnation of the Trump administration’s revocation of the DACA program, the president sought to reassure the more than 800,000 Dreamers in the country, telling them not to worry about their status during the six months that he has given Congress to come up with legislation to resolve their situation.

In a tweet—and one urged by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—Trump asserted, “For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about—No action!”

But judging by his administration’s actions over the last eight months, they may have reason to worry.

On February 5, just a little over two weeks after Trump’s swearing-in as president, Daniel Ramirez Medina was arrested at his family home in suburban Seattle by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. During a morning raid at his home that targeted his father, the 23-year-old explained that he was in the U.S., where he first came at the age of 7, under the protection of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but he was still taken to a processing center. When he said that he had a work permit, one ICE agent responded, “It doesn’t matter because you weren’t born in this country.”

Ramirez doesn’t have a criminal record, but ICE agents suspected that he was a street gang member, noting a tattoo on his arm, which Ramirez says is just the name of his hometown in Mexico. Even so, he alleged, immigration agents forged a confession to justify their gang suspicions.

The arrest shocked immigration advocates because it represented a sharp reversal of Obama administration policy, under which the Department of Homeland Security assured DACA applicants that they would not face removal proceedings unless they had committed a crime or represented a national security threat. According to a lawsuit later filed by Ramirez against DHS, the federal government had been living up to that promise and Ramirez’s lawyers stated that they were “not aware of any DACA beneficiary being subject to removal proceedings unless they had violated the criteria for receiving DACA by committing a crime.”

Ramirez was released on bail after spending six weeks in federal detention, but his status remains unclear. In a recent hearing, the government “conceded that he was not a threat to public safety,” his lawyer Mark Rosenbaum tells Fast Company.

The case they brought against DHS raises the issue at the heart of most Dreamers’ fears: They relied on the word of the government that that their status “would not be utilized in any law enforcement case.” Anecdotally, Rosenbaum has heard of similar cases in which Dreamers were arrested despite their law-abiding status.

Indeed, since Ramirez’s arrest, other Dreamers have been targeted, including Daniela Vargas of Mississippi, who says she was arrested after speaking at a news conference about immigration reform. After two weeks in detention, she was released. “Daniela’s case is representative of the mean-spirited and misguided immigration policy of this administration,” her attorney, Michelle Lapointe, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Los Angeles Times.

DACA revocations grew by 25% in the first three months of Trump’s presidency compared with the same period last year, and at least 43 people who once had DACA status have been deported on his watch, according to data provided by ICE to Vice News in May.

Meanwhile, immigration arrests in total surged nearly 40% from 2016 in the first six months of this year, and arrests of noncriminal immigrants more than doubled, according to ICE statistics. But the same period also marked a decline in the number of immigrants actually deported: From January to June, ICE removed 105,178 undocumented immigrants from the country, of which 42%, or 43,808, were noncriminal. In 2016 during the same time period, 121,170 undocumented immigrants were deported, 42% of whom were noncriminal.

In a statement Thursday to Vice, an ICE spokesperson said that “absent any law enforcement interests, the department will generally not take actions to remove active DACA beneficiaries.” The agency’s priority targets, ICE said, are “criminal aliens, illegal reentrants (in other words, persons who have been previously removed and illegally reentered the country), and those persons with outstanding orders of removal.”

What Happens With The Data?

This week, immigration advocates have also raised concerns that ICE could access all of the personal data submitted by Dreamers as part of the DACA process, despite vows that such information would not be shared except in cases of national security and public safety. In Ramirez’s lawsuit, he argued that the government’s assurance that their information would not be used for enforcement purposes encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to apply for DACA.

And over 15 state attorneys general share that concern. On Wednesday they filed their own lawsuit, arguing that the revocation of DACA violates the Fifth Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, which “prohibits federal agency action that is arbitrary, unconstitutional, and contrary to statute.” They also asked a judge to “bar the government from using DACA recipients’ information, which they submitted to the government voluntarily, to deport them if the program is revoked,” reports the Washington Post.

Several former employees at U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS)—the agency that keeps the personal details of both DACA recipients and applicants—also expressed their concerns about the sharing of data, noting that the Trump administration had loosened restrictions on immigration enforcement.

Soon after the DACA program was cancelled, Jeh Johnson, a former secretary of DHS under Obama, asserted in a public letter that there was a wall blocking off the personal data of personal Dreamers from ICE. And any data requests from ICE had to involve a legitimate immigration enforcement action—crime, immigration fraud, national security threat—and could not simply be blanket requests for, say, the personal information of all the DACA recipients in Arizona.

It’s unclear if ICE is making more requests and getting more data from USCIS. But the privacy policy is not legally binding. Per USCIS’s FAQ page, the policy “may be modified, superseded, or rescinded at any time without notice, is not intended to, does not, and may not be relied upon to create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable by law by any party in any administrative, civil, or criminal matter.”

A spokesperson for DHS did not return a request for comment.

Leak: New Apple Phones Will Be Called iPhone X, iPhone 8, And iPhone 8 Plus

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A major leak Friday night says the new phones Apple is expected to announce at its fall event on Tuesday will be called the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus. The iPhone X is Apple’s high-end, tenth anniversary phone, while the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are the successors to last year’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

The leak comes from developer Steve Troughton-Smith and the folks at 9to5 Mac, who found the nomenclature mentioned in the master code of the new iOS 11 operating system, just released by Apple. (Troughton-Smith in July combed through the HomePod firmware code and found illustrations of the new iPhone X and evidence of a facial recognition feature.)

They found a lot more than that, including solid evidence of some important features in the new phones, and images of other forthcoming products. The leak may steal some of Apple’s thunder when it announces its new products on Tuesday at its press event in Cupertino.

3D Animoji

The top of the line iPhone X will have new 3D “Animoji” for Messages that move with the movements of your head, mimic your facial expressions and can even say your words. The head and face movements are tracked by the new 3D laser/sensor on the front of the phone.

Another code spelunker, Guilherme Rambo, tweeted a screen showing the set-up process iPhone X users will follow to set up the 3D tracking. It’s thought that the 3D facial recognition technology will also handle the authentication for unlocking the phone and doing Apple Pay transactions, replacing TouchID. The new facial recognition technology appears to be called “Face ID.”

LTE Apple Watch, New AirPods

The firmware also contains some images that appear to confirm a couple of other products to be announced on Tuesday–the new LTE Apple Watch and the second version of Apple’s popular AirPod wireless earphones.

A leaked image of Apple’s new LTE Watch.

The images shows a phone call button on the watch face. Another image shows the Watch’s doc containing a button to turn on and off LTE service. The new AirPods look largely the same as the first version, but will probably pack some performance upgrades.

New Camera Effects

9to5 Mac also found mention of some new camera effects that build on the Portrait Mode introduced with the iPhone 7 Plus. Where Portrait Mode distinguished depth of field to set off the subject in the foreground with a blurred out background, the new effects are thought to use the flash to new depth effects in photos. The ones listed in the code are Contour Light, Natural Light, Stage Light, Stage Light Mono, and Studio Light.

Side Button Duties

The iPhone X will almost certainly have no physical home button. The functionality of the home button is being distributed to other parts of the hardware and software of the phone, the firmware code suggests.

A thin horizontal bar at the bottom of apps will serve as a place to swipe up to move between apps. The iPhone’s side button will also get some new duties. The firmware code suggests that double clicking the button will bring up Apple Pay, while pressing and holding the button will activate Siri.

If this leak is true, and Apple isn’t playing a massive trick on Apple geeks by putting fake names and photos in the firmware code, it will fill in many of the remaining question marks about the new phones. Let’s hope there will be some new features left to talk about when Apple trots out its new products in Cupertino on Tuesday. We’ll be there. Please tune into our live blog of the event for the play-by-play and commentary.

Here’s What Happened To My To-Do List When I Embraced Procrastination

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Forget everything you’ve heard: Not only is procrastination totally normal, knowing how and when to procrastinate can actually make you more productive than trying to fight it. Here’s what I’ve learned by embracing procrastination.

You’re Always Procrastinating On Something

There are only 24 hours in a day, which is rarely enough time to tackle your to-do list. This perceived time crunch makes you hyper-aware that the opportunity cost of completing one project is not completing another. Procrastination is all about managing these tradeoffs.


Related: Which Of These Five Types Of Procrastinator Are You? 


Let’s say you’re working on a major project at work. You’re trying to get promoted, so it’s important that you do this project well. You also have a new book you want to read. For the past week, you’ve stayed late to work on the project and have not read a single page of the book. So you technically have been procrastinating–on reading the book–because you made the choice that working on the project was more important.

But after facing situations like this continuously, I finally realized two things:

  1.  I’ll always be procrastinating on something; but,
  2. It isn’t really that bad if I don’t do everything right away.

This simple realization was actually pretty liberating. It helped me reframe procrastination as a tool for longer-term time-management, rather than a mark of failure. So now, for example, any time an idea for a blog post comes to me, I simply write it down, rather than assign myself the task of actually writing the whole post that day or even that week. Yes, this means my to-do list keeps growing each day; there’s no way I can write all those posts at one time, so I’m forced to put them off.

But that’s a good thing: rather than just procrastinating on those important tasks indefinitely, I’ve learned to give them a place lower down on my to-do list, where they’re actually more likely to get done.


Related: It’s Come To This: Procrastination Nannies Are Now A Thing 


How “Structured Procrastination” Works

Don’t believe me? Take it from John Perry, professor of philosophy at Stanford University, who wrote about the idea of “structured procrastination” more than 20 years ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education. When you procrastinate, he observed, you’re typically still doing something (rather than just being lazy)–it’s just that you’re avoiding doing something else that you perceive to be more important: How many times have I had a blog to write, for instance, only to spend hours on Facebook? Or how about all the times I avoiding running errands to binge watch House of Cards?

Perry goes on to argue that the typical approach to stopping procrastination like this is wrong. Most people think if they can eliminate their near-term commitments or distractions, they will quit procrastinating and get the important items done. However, since you are always procrastinating to some extent–including on clearly important tasks–then just having a smaller to-do list won’t help. Restructuring your to-do list, however, might.


Related: I Procrastinated For A Week And Accomplished An Astonishing Amount Of Work


Like most people, I tend to avoid the important items at the top of my list, but inspired by Perry, I realized that I could simply push them down the list. This forced me to find more “important” tasks to put above them. According to Perry, the tasks that are good candidates for this inflated “importance” usually have two characteristics: They appear to have “clear deadlines (but really don’t), and they seem awfully important (but they really aren’t).” Since you’ll likely procrastinate on those anyway, pushing them to the top of your to-do list lets you use your naturally tendency to procrastinate to the lower items, so you can accomplish the truly important items on your list.

Think about all the tasks you create self-imposed deadlines for, like cleaning out old clothes from your closet. You tell yourself it needs to be done by the end of the month and that it’s important because you need more closet space. If you’re like me, you’ve probably been telling yourself something like this for a few months.

But whether you clean out your closet now or a year from now really doesn’t matter; you’ve given it an inflated sense of importance and an undue sense of urgency. So if you intentionally put off cleaning and organizing for other tasks, you’ll be able to coach yourself into seeing your smaller to-dos as worthy, daily undertakings and your bigger ones as the less-urgent, longer-term projects they are.

Yes, flipping your to-do list around is a pretty simple mind game, but it’s worked great for me. By embracing my natural tendency to procrastinate, I’ve actually gotten better at executing near-term tasks whose true importance I didn’t realize I was downplaying. I now know that procrastination can be a productivity tool over the long haul–I just need to work harder at it.


Joe Sterf is a CPA, who is passionate about helping others learn about personal finance. He is the Founder of Average Joe Finance, where he demystifies complex financial topics.

A T-Shirt Company Tries On A Radical Idea: Tees That Fit Actual Women

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If you’ve ever purchased a T-shirt associated with a podcast, an independent editorial website, or a conference focused on making things, you likely own one made by Cotton Bureau. Just four designs from the Crooked Media podcast network add up to nearly 38,000 of the 300,000 shirts the company has sold to date. In checking my drawers, I have at least 20 different designs, about half associated with podcasts and publications I’m connected with. A men’s large generally fits my torso fine, though not perfectly.

I’m in the sweet spot, and I know it. T-shirts generally fit a narrow range of body types that is far shallower than the diversity of volumetric space that something like half of, if not more, people occupy. The sizing and fits are tilted toward men and a very specific small female frame. Most premium T-shirt companies ignore sizes beyond 2X, especially for women. Cotton Bureau fields a lot of complaints about this.

“People use the phrase: ‘I need you to make a shirt that fits us real women,'” says Michelle Sharp, who handles marketing and operations at Cotton Bureau. Tees might be too boxy in shape, customers say, or too tight around armpit and shoulder. For her, it’s personal. “Our largest women’s shirt is nowhere near fitting me.”

Nathan Peretic, the co-owner of the Pittsburgh-based company, says that half of their female-identified customers order men’s shirts. Jay Fanelli, the other co-owner, pins this squarely on American Apparel, the now online-only retailer, which, during its retail heyday in the 2000s, “decided that junior sizing was where it was at with women’s T’s.”

He says that American Apparel’s sizing practice spread, and wholesalers like Next Level Apparel—Cotton Bureau’s primary source—and Alternative Apparel adopted the same scale. “All their women’s shirts pretty much fit the same, and they’re all too small,” he says.

This isn’t a secret, especially to the large percentage of women and many men who find themselves at odds with both the size and fit of T-shirts. It’s not hard to find the sentiment among one’s friends and colleagues, or on the forums of podcasts and other projects that sell shirts to their fans. Cotton Bureau says it’s served 150,000 customers since its inception, and it knows how many of them returned shirts, and suspects many more got away because they didn’t order in the first place.

Michelle Sharp

The company has set out to change this in a small way, starting with new designs that will ultimately replace about 75% of the T-shirts it sources today. And it hopes to have an even bigger impact in changing expectations, even as the bespoke, made-in-the-US shirts will cost it roughly 50% more to make than the shirts it now purchases.

The quest began last year, after Peretic and Fanelli accepted their first investment, of $500,000, and used an undisclosed portion of this to begin development. The mission: create new fits in an unusually wide range of sizes, eight each for women and men’s styles: XS (extra small) all the way up to XXXXXL (5X).

Sharp, in charge of the team pursuing a new design, surveyed shirts available in the quantities and qualities the company needed—keeping in mind its guidelines for labor conditions and wages—but kept coming up empty-handed. “Why doesn’t this already exist?” Peretic recalls thinking. “I guess we have to do it ourselves.”

For its initial Blank designs, the company polled its customers first. “We created about 350 or 400 samples of our latest prototype, and we sent those out to customers all over the country,” says Sharp. The company asked, “What do we need to fix? What do we need to home in on and tweak?”

It launched a Kickstarter campaign last month to cover the raw costs of making an initial batch of “size-inclusive” shirts (but not the R&D it’s already invested)—$48,000. Funders who give $25 get one T-shirt; three tees come with a $75 pledge. The campaign reached its goal within about a day, and as of this writing, is 50% over its goal, at over $77,000. Cotton Bureau has set new funding goals that “unlock” new colors and styles: black and white cotton and black and grey triblend, but also navy, blue, and red triblend too.

Kickstarter trends suggest Cotton Bureau is likely to finish at two times its goal. Sharp isn’t completely surprised. “Nobody has made this fit that works for women in this size range, in this quality of fabric, in the colors we’re trying to do.”

The fit problem isn’t just about plus sizes. A quick scan of a cross-section of humanity, even those who don’t identify as women, reveals that most torsos and T-shirts don’t get along as well as they could. Given the small sizing of T-shirts to begin with, a large percentage of women wind up excluded from a fit: those who are taller than average, with large biceps, or have shorter or longer torsos than the narrow range T-shirt makers cater to.

Men have fit issues too, Sharp says, though not as many: “The way men’s shirts are made is a little more flexible, but also the way that they’re graded between sizes.”

Like Cigarettes In Prison, T-Shirts For Web Creations

T-shirts are one of the basic commodities of independent creators—the prison cigarettes of the startup economy. For a unique shirt, sometimes in a limited onetime edition, supporters of an artist or other maker are often willing to pay a premium price, around $25 to $30, sometimes higher. The raw shirts cost roughly $3 to $7, varying by supplying, color, fabric, and size. Add in silk screening, shipping, and overhead, and there’s still substantive cash for the creator’s take from the sales. These shirts often also serve as cultural markers for identifying like-minded people, to say nothing of free marketing.

Cotton Bureau isn’t by any measure among the biggest independent T-shirt makers, but it has carved out a seemingly ample niche by focusing on strong designs and high-quality shirts and printing. A previous overlapping company that Peretic and Fanelli ran, United Pixelworkers, worked directly with designers to develop shirts, helping to forge bonds with web and print design and illustration communities. (The two shuttered United Pixelworkers to focus on Cotton Bureau, which had far greater growth.)

While the privately held company doesn’t disclose revenue, Peretic says its 2017 sales are on pace to double those in 2016, and it’s grown from six full-time employees a year ago to 14 full-time and three part-time today.

Nathan Peretic

For each shirt it offers, Cotton Bureau runs a tiny crowdfunding campaign, and it has about 120 campaigns live at any given time, Peretic says. The company accepts unsolicited design submissions, and doesn’t take any rights in the submissions. It also works directly with creators with a track record, which includes The Incomparable, an avocational podcast network in which I participate. (We’ve sold hundreds of shirts via Cotton Bureau featuring zeppelins, robots, and dragons.) The company then posts designs that meet its quality and content standards and that it thinks can sell enough shirts to cross a threshold to be printed.

While some shirts sell in the thousands, the median is roughly two dozen. This long tail means the designs are intensely personal to the creators and those buying them.

Jay Fanelli

It’s this high-margin, high-touch niche focus that makes it rankle for the company all the more that they’re not suiting many of their customers adequately, says Peretic.

The upgrade has also been a lesson in cutting-edge clothing manufacture, which, Cotton Bureau says, remains a very manually intensive industry. It found a supplier in Los Angeles that could meet its design, ethical, and production needs.

Because designs are managed in digital form, Sharp says they could make rapid changes to patterns based on last-minute feedback from beta testers. The company hired a veteran patternmaker, Melanie Yi, to ease that part of its journey.

A Resizing Of The Business Too

Beyond the shirts Kickstarter backers will get, the campaign will fund the first couple of runs so Cotton Bureau can build up a back stock of what it needs, and ramp up into rolling production, Peretic says. This marks a shift in capital needs, as the company previously relied on just-in-time ordering from distributors. Now, the company will have to work backwards in predicting demand, pay upfront for manufacture, and have raw shirts sitting unsold in warehouses.


RelatedThis T-Shirt Sewing Robot Could Radically Shift The Apparel Industry


Eventually, Cotton Bureau says it expects to become a distributor to other T-shirt makers, but the current plans don’t focus on this until many months into the future, after the company has sorted out its own needs and made sure it can deal with the ebb and flow of working directly with a clothing maker. Fanelli says what it will need to charge at wholesale for its shirts will keep volume low relative to the size of the industry. “The truth is, going through us for these shirts is not going to be cheap,” says Fanelli.

Blank plays into a new iteration of the long tail that has a deeper tradition in American retail than in e-commerce. Nordstrom was founded as a shoe store in 1901 during the Klondike Gold Rush, and sold only shoes until 1963, when it began to expand into clothing. The retailer was and remains known for carrying the full extreme of shoe sizes, even though it can’t possibly sell many at the end of the long tail—how many 18EEEE shoe wearers are there?

But people shopped at Nordstrom, because they knew they could leave with a shoe that fit—including the rare policy of selling two separately sized shoes for the same price as one pair for people with uneven feet. There’s a potential for Blank to achieve the same sort of coup with its new offerings: 16 shirt sizes across several color/fabric mixes is a lot to encompass, as some of the sizes will sell very few.

If all goes well, the company will gradually roll out beyond the over three-quarters of unit sales this first set represents into other colors, fabrics, and cuts. However, these new shirts could grow as a percentage of sales if they hit the new fit correctly: More people will buy shirts in those sizes and styles as word spreads.

One concern: The first batch is all crew necks. Why no V-necks? The Cotton Bureau staff laughed long and hard about this. “That’s our biggest question,” Sharp says, as many women prefer a V-neck style. It’s on the list.

If Cotton Bureau nails the fit for most people, it creates wins on several fronts: It sells more shirts; it becomes more attractive to designers and projects that want to encompass fits for all genders; and each new customer it acquires happy with the comfort of a shirt they buy has the potential to become a repeat customer.

It’s a big order to fill, but the company has cut the task to the right size to avoid pinning their entire future on it. And even if Blank remains a modest project that mostly helps Cotton Bureau cater better to its customers, it’s brought attention to a widespread problem. Maybe it’s time for the garment industry to make a solution that fits.


6 Ex-Googlers Share How They Landed The Job

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Look at virtually any “best places to work” list, and you’ll likely find Google at or near the top. A 2016 report based on LinkedIn data found Google was the best at attracting and retaining its 60,000 employees, with benefits like free food, massages, and after-death benefits.

Look on its website and you’ll find the company’s perspective on how to apply for a job at Google and stand out. But people who’ve been through the process can add additional insight. Here, six ex-Googlers weigh in with their perspectives on the Google hiring process.


Related: Why Employees At Apple And Google Are More Productive


Highlight The Right Things On Your Resume

Of course, the first step in getting through Google’s doors is to make your resume stand out. That starts with showcasing your accomplishments, says Kevin Miller, director of growth at OpenListings.com, who worked in Google AdWords sales for two years. “Once you get to that table with Google, it’s likely because you’ve had a 3.9 or 4.0 GPA in college and you had done well in previous roles. Everyone else is on that same playing field,” he says.

University of California, Berkeley junior Neel Somani recently finished his software engineering internship with Google. He was thoughtful about constructing his resume to highlight the education and experience he thought Google would be seeking. “I think being very clear and detailed about my previous experience was very helpful. I had a lot of experience freelancing, and I’m currently a student at UC, Berkeley, so I think that the school probably helped as well,” he says.

Look For A Connection

Of course, working your proverbial “six degrees of separation” can be a smart strategy. Nate Smith is CTO and cofounder of recruiting software company Lever and a former Google associate product manager (APM). He worked on AdWords reporting for Google Analytics, image search, and web search, among other things. He also worked on facilitate [user interface] review and learned from Marissa Mayer and Google’s senior design team for two of his four years there. “I owe my initial opportunity to interview for Google to a close friend of mine who referred me. She had joined Google as an APM the prior year,” he says.

Show Your “Googleyness”

Beyond skill and experience, Google looks for a certain combination of qualities called “Googleyness.” In his book, Work Rules, former Google senior vice president of people operations Lazlo Bock defines it as a combination of fun, intellectual humility, conscientiousness, and a track record of having done interesting things, among other attributes.

Googleyness is a reflection of your personality and has a number of elements, Miller says. “How easy are you to get along with? With the Google recruiting process, one question that you have to pass is every person who interviews you is asked, Would you want to work with this person every single day? Would you be happy if you sat next to this person every single day? Would you be able to do good work, and would you enjoy their company?” he says.

Michael Brandt, cofounder and chief operating officer of HVMN, which manufactures nutritional supplements, held various roles at Google during his two-year tenure, including APM working enterprise privacy and YouTube, as well as a design consultant and instructor. He says the personality and interpersonal skills strengths that are part of Googleyness are essential for being successful in roles there. “You end up just being dropped into things, because there’s so much cross-product, cross-focus area, cross-specialist, specialty meetings,” he says. You need to be able to interact well with different people in different roles, he says.

Anticipate Questions And Prepare Your Own

Preparation is important, and thinking about the questions that interviewers might ask is a good idea, Smith says. In his role, he interviewed other candidates for APM and product manager roles. He learned how to interview by shadowing his peers, then using other interviewers’ questions to come up with his own questions that he could use for multiple candidates, he says. “Google’s APM questions evaluated a number of skill areas, including product judgment, analytical reasoning, a design exercise, and software engineering,” he says. He says Google assigned specific interview types to specific people on the interview panel. Interviewers also typically like when candidates have good questions for them, he says.

“Tell me a time when” is a phrase often used to ascertain your Googleyness in interviews, Miller says. “‘Tell me a time when you overcame adversity.’ ‘Tell me a time when . . . ‘ A lot of times it will be subject-matter based, so if you were in a marketing role previously and you had talked about how you couldn’t get organic traffic to the website, they would talk about what you did when your boss came down on you. How did you react? How were you able to get around that?” he recalls.

But other times, those questions might be life-related, Miller says. “People go through so many physical things in life, overcoming like an illness or something like that. They’ll ask, ‘Give me a story. How did you handle that when things weren’t looking so positive? What did you do to be able to overcome that?'” Here, the team is looking for personality and “who they are on the inside,” Miller says.

Show Your Passion

Interviewing with Google is a big opportunity, and some might want to play it safe when answering questions. But startup adviser Falon Fatemi, who began working for Google when she was 19 in 2005 and left as a member of the YouTube team at age 26, says playing it safe could backfire. The interviewing team is looking for creativity and insight into what motivates you. Giving them pat answers isn’t going to work in your favor, she says. When she interviewed, she was asked, If she could choose another period of time to live, past or future, what would it be?

“What they were really looking for was people that would give really big answers and have a sort of unique response. I think my response was that I would love to live in the ’60s in San Francisco and experience the Haight-Ashbury days,” she says.

Have Opinions About Google Products

Before your interview, familiarize yourself with the products you would be handling in the role, especially if they’re consumer products, says Azhar Hashem, former head of marketing for Google Fiber and owner of Tawla SF, a Mediterranean-style restaurant in San Francisco.

“Where is that product in terms of its maturity? Know how to critique it. What do you like about it? What can be done better? They want to see that you’ve critically thought about it and have more than a cursory understanding of the product,” she says. And don’t be afraid to have strong opinions about the products or your industry. They may ask you about an event–a marketing campaign or a product launch–that went well or didn’t go well. Go beyond the obvious responses (e.g., Apple). Choose a thoughtful example that fewer people will think of to help you stand out.

Bring Your Problem-Solving Skills

Problem solving is an important skill for Google employees. Brandt recalls being surprised when, after a series of technical questions, his interviewer asked him, “How many uses are there for a traffic cone?” After he started brainstorming uses, he realized that there were actually many, ranging from directing traffic and organizing soccer games to filling it with frosting and decorating a giant birthday cake.

“The point of the question there I think was just to get you to be good at risking, be good at speaking when you don’t have the exact right answer; it’s not even clear that there is a right answer. A lot of times the best ideas come when a group is working together and people are communicating openly and freely. And so that’s what that question was getting at,” he says.

Think About What Will Carry Through

The people with whom you interview are likely not the hiring managers who will make the ultimate decision on your future with Google, Brandt says. The interviewers pass along their feedback to a hiring committee that decides whether to hire the candidate, he says.

“The hiring committee is super experienced, not just anyone can be on the hiring committee. So look at an interviewer, and if the interviewer is relatively new at interviewing people, they’ll take that into account when they’re [considering] that person’s feedback,” he says. Brandt says that the system controls for certain biases and helps the organization find people who meet both the skill level needs and the cultural fit. So it’s important to use the interview to showcase what makes you different; what makes you stand out, he says.

“I’m not the most absolute technical person. I get it, and I’m a computer science major and all that, and I’m reasonably technical, but that’s not where my gift lies. And I know where my gift lies. I’m extremely creative and communicative. So I tried to use the interviews to showcase that, even if the interview wasn’t necessarily about that,” he says.

Impressing the interviewers enough for that to show through to the hiring committee is essential, Miller says. “I was usually the fifth or sixth person to go in there and just give another opinion of my two cents on how I felt that person would fit into our team. Would they be able to contribute at a high level and were we overly excited to have them? If the answer was a resounding yes, then that really would bode well,” he says.

Squarespace’s Super Bowl Ad Starring John Malkovich Wins Best Ad Emmy

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Back in March, Squarespace chief creative officer David Lee told me that diverting from its original strategy plan, at least in industry hardware, was a “calculated risk.” But now, that risk has paid off, and the brand’s reward is the 2017 Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Commercial.

Created by agency JohnXHannes, “Calling JohnMalkovich.com,” which finds the esteemed actor vying for his own name’s domain, is goofy, fun, but manages to still be all about the product.

The spot was up against four other contenders, including The Ad Council’s “Fans of Love” and “We Are America” from its Love Has No Labels campaign, agency Mcgarrybowen’s “Why I March,” and Google’s “Year in Search 2016.”

The Emmy-winning Squarespace spot wasn’t Malkovich’s first for the brand, but it was decidedly different in tone from the earlier, more serious spot. Lee told me they just loved the script enough to divert form the original plan.


Related: Why Squarespace Is Taking Calculated Risk And John Malkovich To The Super Bowl


“There was one script on the table that everyone really liked, but it didn’t quite fit with the overarching narrative we were going for with (the first ad). But it was so simple and witty, we decided to shoot it anyway,” says Lee. “John took the blueprint of that script and made it his own. On the first take, it was just genius, so we knew we had something fantastic and that’s what became the new spots.”

GM boasts “the world’s first mass-producible driverless car”

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General Motors has unveiled the third version of its self-driving car–the first such car “that meets the redundancy and safety requirements we believe are necessary to operate without a driver,” Kyle Vogt, CEO of the General Motors-owned self-driving car startup Cruise, wrote in a blog post. “There’s no other car like this in existence.” And, he says, it’s the first car that’s ready to be produced at scale once the software and regulations are in place.

  • Vogt says the company plans to add these vehicles (with humans at the wheel) to the on-demand fleet that caters to Cruise employees in San Francisco “in a few weeks”–though there’s no timeline for mass production at GM’s Lake Orion, MI plant.
  •  The car “has airbags, crumple zones, and comfortable seats. It’s assembled in a high-volume assembly plant capable of producing 100,000’s of vehicles per year, and we’d like to keep that plant busy.”
  • “Unlike the previous generations, which were similar to Chevrolet Bolt EV design, the vehicles we’re unveiling today have almost completely new and fault-tolerant electrical, communication, and actuation systems that are unique to a driverless vehicle.”

[Image: Cruise]
Others in the self-driving space might take issue with Vogt’s claim that this is the “first real self-driving car.” Tesla has long been working on an autonomous vehicle and was the first to roll out advanced cruise control to its customers.

The company has so aggressively positioned itself as a purveyor of self-driving technology that confused customers have given over too much control to their vehicles. In 2016, a Tesla Model S drove into the side of a tractor trailer as it was making a left turn. The driver had autopilot engaged and did not have his hands on the wheel. The National Transportation Safety Board is suggesting that the autopilot feature contributed to the crash, according to Bloomberg News.

Such a finding will be another blow to the safety reputation of self-driving technologies, and possibly impact the legislation Congress will use to spur autonomous vehicle systems, but it also creates an opening for other companies to assert their dominance in the race toward safe self-driving cars. GM’s advantage has always been its infrastructure for designing and building cars. That holds true, regardless of whether its new generation of autonomous vehicles are at or above the level of its competitors.


Related: GM’s Millennial Ride-Sharing Platform Expands In New York 

Forgot your Equifax password? You’ll need to reveal your whole social security number

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We live in the 21st century, a magical age where computers are teeny tiny and cars can fly and and any information can be stored remotely in a beautiful place called “the cloud”–or in our DNA. You would think that good operational security practices would go hand in hand with this new digital era, but alas, no, that is not the case.

Look no further than Equifax, which was the victim of a huge security breach that may have impacted the personal data of hundreds of millions of Americans. Not only is this hack proof that the company’s security protocol is not up to snuff, but it’s everyday login practices highlight just how out of touch the company is.

If a customer forgets their password, the only way to reset it is to enter their full social security number and birthday. That is, the company that owned up to a massive breach–which may have given hackers access to almost half of the U.S.’s social security numbers–asks users to fill in private and unchangeable information as its first line of defense.

Equifax asks for both SSN and birthdate to reset a forgotten password.

Equifax isn’t the only company doing this. TransUnion, for instance, also asks users to enter their social security number–not once but twice–if they forget their screen name. 

TransUnion asks users for SSN if they forget their username.

While companies like Equifax and TransUnion likely already have your social security number, having to type out your whole number, especially when you’re still reeling from news that your personal data has been breached, can be hard to stomach. It’s also bad security hygiene to ask users to enter information that cannot be changed as a way of verification. Safer than a social security number would be more personal security questions, and ones that can be changed periodically and that don’t have an objectively “right” answer that someone else might already have–thanks to a breach just like this one.

Meanwhile, those seeking to find out if they were impacted by the hack at the post-breach website Equifax set up were also asked to submit part of their social security number and last name. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Perhaps this saga could also begin a wake-up call not just for Equifax but for all the companies that have reams of people’s personal data. It’s time to rethink best practices for protecting people’s identities. And, at the very least, don’t ask us to risk more of our privacy in exchange for your help.

You don’t need a lawyer to sue Equifax–use this chatbot instead

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The DoNotPay chatbot has been helping people settle their parking tickets for a while now, but now it’s moved on to bigger things: helping people sue Equifax for its epic security breach, reports the Verge. The bot will take you through a series of questions you’ll need to answer and then help you fill in a small claims court application to sue Equifax for negligence. Maximum damages depend on the state you live in, but they can be for up to $25,000. Keep in mind, however, the bot can’t show up to court for you, so there are still things you’ll need to do on your own if you actually want to win in small claims court.

The Evil Genius Ways The Wealthy, Cities, And Businesses Try To Control Urban Spaces

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When David Geffen built an oceanfront compound on Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway–a property that sold this year for $85 million–he added fake garage doors to one wall to keep beachgoers from parking in front. Like other fake “no parking” and “private property” signs installed by nearby millionaires and billionaires, it was a move to keep visitors away from the public beach behind his house.

The “garage” is one entry in a new book called The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion, which details more than 100 ways that cities and individuals make decisions that shape who gets to be where–from zoning in Baltimore that restricted neighborhoods by race to “poor doors” in apartment buildings that force residents of affordable units to enter from the back.

The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion is available now. [Image: Tim Davis]
While the book makes good reading for anyone, it’s also meant to be a practical tool. “By assembling best (and worst) accessibility practices, we hope that this book can be used as a sort of tool kit for building more accessible cities and suburbs,” says Daniel D’Oca, a principal and cofounder at Interboro, a New York City-based design and planning office. D’Oca, along with the firm’s other cofounders, Tobias Armborst and Georgeen Theodore, and more than 50 other contributors, compiled the book based on eight years of research.

The encyclopedia-like entries can be browsed randomly, but the book also suggests a few “tours.” If you’re interested in understanding why cities are still segregated 50 years after the Fair Housing Act passed, for example, you can read about older practices like racial zoning and freeways that cut off black neighborhoods, along with a list of newer practices, such as a law passed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that restricted rentals in a predominately white neighborhood to blood relatives.

“These things are hiding in plain sight, and are all the more sinister for their banality.” [Photo: Tim Davis]
Other “weapons” listed in the book are more subtle. Armrests on park benches are often in place not for comfort, but to ensure that homeless people can’t lie down. Fake parks have been used to keep sex offenders away. (In California, where state law prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of parks or schools, L.A. has built tiny parks specifically to force offenders out of some neighborhoods.) Some businesses use speakers blasting classical music to deter skateboarders. In the mostly white community of Springfield, New Jersey, a basketball court was dismantled and replaced by a street hockey rink to make the park less attractive to black visitors.

“This kind of tactical reactionism is interesting to us,” says D’Oca. “These things are hiding in plain sight, and are all the more sinister for their banality.”

Many older physical barriers are still in place today, like Detroit’s “Birwood Wall,” built in the 1940s when a developer erected a white subdivision next to a black neighborhood; the Federal Housing Authority refused to insure mortgages in the new subdivision without a wall. Now, though neighborhoods on both sides of the wall are black, it still stands. “We’re very interested in these artifacts of exclusion: these things that are out there in the built environment that you can read as a sort of Rosetta stone,” says Armborst.

“By assembling best (and worst) accessibility practices, we hope that this book can be used as a sort of tool kit for building more accessible cities and suburbs.” [Photo: Tim Davis]
The book is also filled with examples of inclusive design. Accessory dwelling units (cottages in backyards), for example, can make neighborhoods more economically diverse. Lactation rooms make offices welcoming to new mothers. Bike lanes, obviously, make streets more accessible for people on bikes. Some cities–such as Schenectady, New York–have actively recruited immigrants to help boost declining populations.

The designers at Interboro, who all teach design students, say that they see the field changing to prioritize inclusion. “[Students] increasingly want to engage, and see how design can help,” says D’Oca, who teaches at Harvard Graduate School of Design. “Our students are self-selecting, of course, but we would like to think that the best and brightest are increasingly interested in public service, and want to use their talent to help plan and build more equitable, more sustainable cities. Where I teach, students organized a conference called Black in Design, which looks at how design can help dismantle institutional barriers to opportunity. This is hugely inspiring. We’re not sure this would have been organized 10 years ago.”

Judge rules monkeys don’t own the copyright for the selfies they take

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The news is sure to devastate selfie-taking monkeys all over the world. A judge has dismissed the case PETA brought against photographer David Slater claiming a macaque named Naruto was the copyright owner of the photograph when she picked up Slater’s camera in 2011 and took a selfie, reports the BBC. This case was an appeal to a previous case that ruled copyright protection could not be applied to monkeys, which caused PETA to appeal on the “monkey’s behalf.” After the ruling, PETA and Slater issued a joint statement saying the case “raises important, cutting-edge issues about expanding legal rights fornonhuman animals.” Slater also announced that 25% of future revenue from the photo will go to charities “dedicated to protecting the welfare or habitat of Naruto.”


Russia may have used Facebook Events to organize anti-immigrant rallies in the U.S.

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There’s long been a growing body of evidence to support the claim that Russia used social media to spread fake news in hopes of influencing the 2016 presidential campaign, but now the Daily Beast reports that Russia’s activities went further than that by organizing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim protests on American soil. The Daily Beast says Russian operatives used Facebook’s Events feature to organize and promote the real-world events.

According to some of the events’ pages, Facebook users did actually show up to a rally against Muslim refugees in Twin Falls, Idaho. If so, this would be the first known example of Russian operatives duping unwitting Americans into specific real-life actions during the 2016 presidential campaign. As Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and expert on Russia’s tactics, told the Daily Beast:

“This is the next step. The objective of influence is to create behavior change. The simplest behavior is to have someone disseminate propaganda that Russia created and seeded. The second part of behavior influence is when you can get people to physically do something.”

What Are Solar Storms Doing To The “GPS” Of Whales?

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A series of sperm whale strandings saw 29 of the animals beached across the North Sea in early 2016. As these whales are not normally found in the North Sea, the strandings were a bit of a mystery. But a study is now proposing that the solar storms that cause the northern and southern lights (aurora) could be to blame for the ill-fated whales ending up on the beaches.

In their seasonal migrations between warmer equatorial waters and the squid-rich Norwegian Sea, sperm whales generally don’t travel through the North Sea. Instead, they migrate along the western coast of the British Isles. The North Sea is far too shallow for the whales, and their favorite squid prey (Gonatus fabricii) generally isn’t found there either.

So once the whales entered the North Sea, it’s likely that they became disorientated, trapped in the shallow waters, and ultimately beached. Necropsies performed on the whales suggested that they were healthy and well nourished, and so why they had entered the North Sea at all was a mystery.

It is thought that some animals can get a sense of direction from the Earth’s magnetic field. Indeed, cetaceans, which includes whales and dolphins, are thought to be able to navigate using “magnetoreception” just like migrating birds and bats. The recent study suggests that the whales’ detour into the North Sea was the result of a geomagnetic storm interfering with the whales’ magnetic navigation system.

The authors propose that these storms, which are the result of explosions of particles from the sun, created disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field. They specifically identify two geomagnetic storms–occurring on December 20-21, 2015, and December 31, 2015 and January 1, 2016–which they argue could have caused disturbances strong enough to confuse the whales into traveling down the east coast of Shetland, rather than the west.

They suggest that a series of magnetic mountains, which have a magnetic field that is stronger than the surrounding area, would normally act as a barrier to the whales–preventing them from straying into the North Sea. During the storms, however, the local magnetic field was altered so much that these magnetic mountains appeared invisible to the whales–allowing them to pass into the North Sea.

The magnetic map of where the Norwegian and North Seas join. The whales should have traveled along the white arrow, but instead traveled along the red arrow. [Graphic: Vanselow et al]

Powerful Impact

The idea that geomagnetic storms cause navigational issues for animals is somewhat new, but previous studies have shown that homing pigeons and migrating birds, for example, have trouble navigating through regions of magnetic anomalies. One study has found that the number of honeybees returning to their hive seems to drop significantly during geomagnetic storms, though the exact link remains unknown.

We have known for a long time that the sun’s activity, and the space weather it produces, can have a significant impact on us here on Earth. Not only does space weather produce the beautiful aurora that lights up the night sky, it can also cause serious damage to our technical systems.

In fact, space weather has already resulted in damage to satellites, interference with the Global Positioning System (GPS), and power grid failure. And it is estimated that a serious space weather event could cost the global economy US$40 billion per day.

[Photo: Flickr user Biodiversity Heritage]

Finding Proof

While there’s increasing evidence that space weather can also affect biological organisms, it’s important to remember that a correlation is not the same as proof.

Further scientific analyses, such as actually monitoring a large number of whales to see if, and how, their travel paths change during geomagnetic storms, will be needed to prove this link for sure. After all, geomagnetic storms happen fairly often, so it could simply be a coincidence that these two events happened around the same time.

While space weather scientists are working hard to prepare our technological systems for future space weather events, it seems as though we may have to let nature take its course for the whales–at least for now.


 is senior research associate in space and planetary physics at Lancaster University, where he is a member of the AuroraWatch U.K. team, which issues alerts of potential aurora visibility from the U.K. Follow him on Twitter at @na_case

Female Nonprofit CEOs Still Get Paid Way Less Than Male CEOs

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You might think that the nonprofit sector, with its general focus on progressive policy, might avoid at least some of the ill treatment of women in its workforce. But new data shows that, just like in the private sector, female CEOs at nonprofits are still being paid far less than men in the same roles. And despite the attention that the problem of the wage gap has received, the disparity is barely improving: It’s just slightly less than it was last year.

The gender-based wage gap dropped from 8% to 7% at organizations with budgets of $250,000 or less. [Image: blackdovfx/iStock]
These numbers come from the GuideStar’s 2017 Nonprofit Compensation Report, which culled data from the publicly submitted 990 tax forms of roughly 96,7000 separate groups. Compared to survey results published last year, the gender-based wage gap dropped from 8% to 7% at organizations with budgets of $250,000 or less. But for those organizations with far larger budgets, at the $50 million or greater level, the problem is much greater: Male CEOs still make 21% more, though that’s down from 23%. And groups with budgets between $10 and $25 million saw the compensation gap actually inch upward from 20% to 21%. (The report highlights shifts from 2014 to 2015, as that’s the most current analysis available.)

The average wage gap in the $25 to $50 million range has stayed steady at 17% over time.

Part of the issue may be who is controlling the purse strings. As Fast Company has reported, 75% of the nonprofit field may be female, but only 45% of women move up to become CEOs. Within the top-funded charitable groups–about 15% of the industry operates on $10 million or more–that leadership ratio has dropped to less than 33%

The good news is that more women appear to be taking control of those groups’ futures. Over a decade, the number of groups employing female leaders has risen throughout the sector, regardless of budget size. It’s 22% among those with budgets at $50 million or above, yet 57% among those in the $500,000 or less zone. That’s up from 14% and around 53% or 54% (the survey breaks groups below $500,000 into two categories, either above or below $250,000), respectively.

Over a decade, the number of groups employing female leaders has risen throughout the sector, regardless of budget size. [Image: blackdovfx/iStock]
One classic explanation of the unequal wage problem is that once it starts, it snowballs. A woman who is paid less at the start of her career may share her salary with future employers, only to command less as she advances, perpetuating the cycle.

One way to fix that is to pay everyone the same based on a job’s description, not pro-rate salary based on previous pay levels. Another is spelled out pretty clearly in this data: the places where more women are in charge have seen the most equalization over time. The opposite is true in male-dominated categories.

“Women still represent the majority of CEOs at smaller organizations,” notes the report. And yet: “The gap is smaller at organizations with budgets of less than $500,000, but shows no clear trend of abating at larger organizations.”

This 10-Year-Old’s $2 Million Amazon Business Is Leaving Competitors In The Dust

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In a retail storefront about 45 minutes east of Seattle, in the small town of Carnation, Washington, you can walk in to Buttonsmith and find a wide selection of refrigerator magnets, brightly printed lanyards, and those retractable reels commonly used to attach employee badges. But that’s mostly just for the locals and tourists, who drop by on their way to a nearby farm to pick pumpkins or strawberries.

That tiny retail façade sits at the front of a 3,000-square-foot workroom filled with a mix of oldfangled and newfangled machinery: a ribbon-cutting device, a super fancy sewing machine, a PC-controlled “slicer, creaser, cutter” (which, when you glance through a glass-covered top, looks like Edward Scissorhands stuffed into a photocopier), a large motor-driven letterpress, a high-volume heat sealer, and so on.

And then there’s the factory you can’t see. For all the buttons and lanyards it produces—to an estimated 150,000 customers this year—Buttonsmith is also a software company, linking Amazon third-party seller APIs for custom- and mass-produced products, Adobe Creative Suite, and the inputs to the various machines they own, to create a unified workflow. Walmart’s APIs will soon be added to that mix, as Buttonsmith becomes one of the first companies to offer customized goods to the Arkansas-headquartered behemoth’s customers.

While Buttonsmith does sell some items manufactured identically in large quantities—like their best-selling Van Gogh “Starry Night” lanyard—it’s the orders that they make one at a time that have accelerated the company’s growth. “Custom name tags in a variety of styles, pictures of people’s pets, country flags, symbols like peace signs and environmental symbols, doodles of cats, school mascots for local schools, adjectives people could use to describe themselves,” says CEO Darcy Burner.

In fact, Buttonsmith is something of a customization powerhouse, one that’s used the leverage of geography and software efficiency to mount a defense against wholesale Chinese knockoffs. The company can turn around an order from Amazon’s customization ordering system in only eight minutes. As a result, Buttonsmith expects to earn $2 million in revenue by the end of this year, up from $250,000 in 2014.

And the whole operation was founded in 2013 by Henry Burner, when he was 10 years old.

Pushing Buttons

In fourth grade, Henry Burner came up with a terrific idea. His class had a trading-post unit–focusing on “whatever the frontier happened to be at the time we had a frontier,” he says–in which students would use beads to buy goods made by their classmates. Henry’s mother, Darcy, had some hand-operated button-making equipment, the result of three failed runs for a House seat. Henry says, “I proposed, ‘Let’s make some buttons,’ because I had fond memories of when I was really good at making buttons for my mom’s campaign.”

Most kids brought in baked goods and almost no one made durable items. Henry’s buttons–with messages like “I ❤ Minecraft” and “Fall City Elementary”–were a smash. “Almost every kid bought one, meaning I ended up with like half of all the beads in the entire school,” he says. He asked his mother if this might be a real way to make money, and with her support, he started to sell buttons at farmer’s markets.

Even then, he had a unique spin: He brought a battery-powered ink-jet printer along, and would produce custom buttons on the spot. He grossed about $1,000 that first summer. That led him to wonder how well he’d do outside the farmer’s market season, and he started to distribute to local businesses and online via Amazon.

“We looked up one day and we had sold a quarter million dollars’ worth of stuff on Amazon, and we were like, uh, it’s a little bigger than we thought it was,” Darcy Burner says.

Henry, a shy 14-year-old with a quick and sharp intelligence, just received his first patent for the Tinker Reel customized attachment system that’s a cornerstone of the company’s business. Most of these retractable style badge holders have one label on the front, and that’s it. Henry worked with a manufacturing partner, Key-Bak, to make the front magnetic and interchangeable, and thus infinitely customizable.

“We have a lot of nurses who wear scrubs all day that buy our badge reels,” says Sarah DeNike, the head of marketing and business development. “They love them because they’re more interesting than just the black or the pink colored ones.”

The buttons also double as refrigerator magnets, allowing multiple markets for the same product. When I visited, Henry was working through the tedious task of attaching preprinted patent labels to thousands of his Tinker Reels. Henry spends a lot of time at Buttonsmith doing a combination of scut work–“It needs to be done, but it’s not very hard and it takes time and we don’t want to actually pay people to do it”–and deep business strategizing. But he also attends school during the year, and his mom only pulls him out for important trips–to meet with Walmart in Bentonville, for instance.

The buttonmaking machines that started it all. [Photo: courtesy of Buttonsmith]

The Amazon Way

Buttonsmith first ran out of the family house, and as the business began to scale, Henry’s dad, Mike Burner, became the lead software developer. Mike developed the Wayback Machine for the Internet Archive in the mid-’90s, spent a decade at Microsoft, and then another decade building software for political campaigns. He wrote the Buttonsmith code that pulls information from the Amazon Custom API, passes templates through intermediate software, and then sends the results to a human being to inspect before passing on to a high-end printer.

For instance, one of his early tasks was solving how to create a simple ID card and have it come out of one of the firm’s printers. “It was a really tricky multi-step process to do by hand,” Mike Burner says. He connected Amazon’s data with Photoshop, which he instructed to create and lay out the card, but Photoshop lacked the required output options. His code passes the card to Acrobat, where it’s composited into a single PDF, which is then passed to the printer as a job.

This sort of workflow sounds familiar to anyone who has worked in a print shop or other production environment, only with people handling and handing off those tasks, introducing time and error, while also constricting the ability to scale to higher volume. Mike’s software has allowed Buttonsmith to keep a small staff while remaining efficient. As new print-shop hardware arrives, he extends his software to talk to it, too, or at least remove labor from one task to another.

Having created that first workflow, Mike can now slot different inputs and templates to create an ever-widening variety of printed goods. “Over time I developed the ability to simply bring up a new product just by adding something to a configuration file.” That ability to expand in breadth while retaining efficiency is part of how Buttonsmith grew eightfold in four years.

Time is of the essence, of course: Buttonsmith is part of the third-party Amazon Prime option, in which sellers have to meet Amazon’s brand promise for two-day shipping, which includes shipping orders the same day that are received up until 2 p.m. Pacific. Some days, dozens of orders pour in right at the cutoff.

“We may have 40 orders between 2 and 4 o’clock,” says Jonathan Shapiro, the company’s COO. UPS pickup is at 4:15 p.m. The company relies almost entirely on UPS rather than the U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail, because “the biggest problem with the postal service is that it’s not guaranteed, and Amazon actually has some fairly strict metrics around getting it into people’s hands in that two-day time period,” Darcy Burner says. “Any missed shipment counts against us.”

Carnation, where Buttonsmith is based, falls just barely within UPS’s primary urban delivery zone. Shapiro notes that when they were setting up their move from a home-based business to their current space, “They were all set to apply an out-of-urban-area surcharge. Until we pointed out that it’s the same driver on the same route that goes to our house where they don’t charge that.” Shapiro was able to negotiate a two-day rate given the company’s volume of orders.

Burner would like Amazon to offer a greater set of customization options for existing products and more flexibility for customers to submit a wider variety of data and imagery, all of which would let it offer more products and almost certainly increase the order volume.

Now he’s adapting the workflow to communicate Walmart’s upcoming custom-order system as well. Buttonsmith will be one of the few companies at launch offering customizable products (the official date has not yet been announced). Darcy Burner, and Henry, got in early on the new program by attending a Walmart vendor event last year. “We found the right people, and we were like, we really want to do this with you guys,” she says. “Here are the people that we have to build the backend. We can do this.”

Buttonsmith less one staffer at lunch. [Photo: courtesy of Buttonsmith]

Modern Family Business

One thing you won’t learn from Buttonsmith’s org chart is that software lead Mike Burner—Henry’s dad—is also Darcy’s ex-husband. She is now married to Shapiro, the COO. “Young Michael, who does a lot of our customer service, is Henry’s cousin,” says Darcy Burner. “Francis,” she points to an older fellow rapidly making buttons, “is Henry’s uncle.” Henry then points to an employee working on the sorting line and deadpans: “Carleen is totally unrelated to us.”

But most of the employees really are treated like family in this union shop. Buttonsmith joined the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, part of the AFL-CIO, in part because it allows both management and workers to be union members. “We’re small enough that if we have a busy day where we have 30 or 40 or 50 orders that need to go out in a relatively short period of time, it’s all hands on deck, which we wouldn’t be allowed to do if we weren’t all unionized employees,” Darcy explains.

The union membership stems from her progressive politics, but it’s also a strategic move, letting them put a union label for those who may like left-of-center labor policies alongside a “made in America” tag for those often further to the right who prefer domestically produced goods. The company also emphasizes that it creates local jobs and works with domestic manufacturers.

“The goal here is to build a business that is sustainable and adds value for our customers, but also to protect ourselves from competition from overseas,” she says. Fast turnaround for all orders, custom and otherwise, is a big part of that, but the marketing message also helps.

Their next order of business may be moving out of the storefront workshop in Carnation’s business district, which seemed far too large to them just a few years ago, and find more square footage outside of town. They’ll probably end up nearer to one of the surrounding strawberry or Christmas tree farms–as long as it remains with UPS’s primary delivery zone.

Five Work Habits To Kick Before The End Of The Year

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Kids are back in school. Pumpkin spice lattes are back in Starbucks. It’s official: Summer is over and the year is winding down.

But before it does, there might be a goal or two you committed to back in January that you’d still really love to make good on. Don’t worry–falling short on your New Year’s resolutions is totally normal. And even if you missed your chance to get back in the saddle at the six-month mark, there might still be some things you can do to make headway between now and the holidays. One tactic that might help? Cutting back.

Sometimes all you need to jump-start your progress is to ditch some of your routines, bad habits, and maybe even some of your other goals so you can redirect your energy where it counts. For inspiration, here’s what five Fast Company contributors–in their own ways, all experts on productivity and self-management–are kicking to the curb in order to end the year on a high note.

Habit To Break: Being Too Hands On With Work

“I’m a doer,” says Michael Litt. “I like to have my hands on the work I produce.” The CEO of video platform Vidyard, Litt has spent the past year adjusting to the company’s growth out of its startup phrase. Back then, he recalls, “I was able to improvise and troubleshoot–whether that [was] supporting engineering, sales, or customer service–and that made me a really strong team member. But as time went by, and we were able to hire more brilliant, qualified people, this actually became a bad habit.”

What You’ll Gain: Becoming A Big-Picture Leader

So between now and the end of the year, Litt is focusing on getting out of the trenches and becoming less of a doer and more of a CEO– “someone who could help plan and execute a long-range strategy, who could look at a thousand moving parts and zoom out to see the bigger picture. This was never my forte, and it hasn’t come naturally,” Litt admits. “But I’ve started to learn in the last few months that being bad at something means I’m figuring out how to be good at it. At times, this feels terrible, but it’s necessary.”

“To this end, I’ve started cold calling professionals who are a few steps further along in my career track. Some snub my advances,” he says, but he’s already gathered some great advice. “I’ve realized the importance of investing in continuous learning. Talking with colleagues who have walked in my shoes has given me a much clearer idea of the path forward.”


Read more by Michael Litt:This CEO’s One-Page List For Keeping All His Priorities Straight


Habit To Break: Procrastinating On Boring Stuff

After multiple mid-20s career changes, followed by a year as a digital nomad setting up a marketing business, Arianna O’Dell has settled (for now) in Seoul. In recent months, she’s focused her energies on getting a product line off the ground. “I’ve had a lot of fun creating items for my online store, but now it’s time to buckle down and do the hard part of finding distributors, licensing deals, and partners,” she says in an email.

What You’ll Gain: Finally Getting Down To The Important Stuff

To do that, O’Dell admits she’ll need to stop procrastinating on parts of the business she doesn’t enjoy as much. “I think my bad habit is putting the less-fun things off when I know I should be focusing on them. (Don’t even remind me about the pile of taxes receipts I have to sort through this month!) I’m putting off a lot of new creation (even though I love it) until I can get my revenue to where I want it to be. Between now and 2018 I hope to have new revenue channels and improved sales skills.”


Read more by Arianna O’Dell:How (And Why) To Launch Your Own Product Line, No Startup Required


Habit To Break: Micromanaging

Allen Gannett, CEO of marketing platform TrackMaven, is trying to kick a similar habit as Litt, but he’s taking a different approach. “I’ve spent this year working to end my micromanaging habit,” he says. “As our company scales, my detail oriented, type-A personality has become more in conflict with what the organization needs. Worse, I’ve hired experienced managers who not only needed space but thrive off autonomy.”

What You’ll Gain: Time For Building New Skills

But rather than practice big-picture thinking, Gannett is trying to force himself away from business issues. “I’ve been channeling my anal-retentive qualities into hobbies. For example, I’ve been doing more writing both for fun and for work. With writing, there are very few stakeholders, and I can strongly assert control,” Gannett points out.

“This seems to be working, as I feel less of a need to be ‘that guy’ at work. My team is happier and my internal leaders are enjoying being managed by me. Just don’t ask my editors if they like working with me.” (Editor’s note: This one does!)


Read more by Allen Gannett:What Happened When I Replied “Call Me” To Every Email I Got For A Week


Habit To Break: Too Much Screen Time

After recently learning about research suggesting that using tech devices before bedtime can worsen sleep quality, author Neil Pasricha is kicking his evening phone habit. “I will not check my phone or look at any screens after dinner,” he says. To help him stick with this habit change, Pasricha explains, “I have put my cell phone charger in the basement to help automate this since I plug my cell phone in when I get home.”


Read more by Neil Pasricha:How I Knew When Saying “Yes” Was Hurting My Productivity (And Worse)


For coach, consultant, and writer Suzan Bond, it isn’t her smartphone that’s been diverting her focus, it’s her TV. Looking back, she realizes she’s been spending “too much time in the past year immersed in all the binge-worthy television that’s out these days. I don’t have cable yet have just about anything I want at my fingertips through copious online streaming–Amazon, Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu.” Lately, she says, “I’ve found it too easy to immerse myself deep in series, watching episode after episode Ozark, The Handmaid’s Tale, and even old seasons of Fixer Upper.”

What You’ll Gain: More Time For Hobbies And Side-Projects

Bond has been working to kick that habit during the summer wind-down, and it’s already paying off. “While I’ve been known to read more than 65 books in a year, my reading had slowed to a trickle,” she explains. But already, “without TV shows or movies to distract me, I’ve returned to my reading habit. I read four books in a month. I’ve also recorded 10 episodes of my new podcast, Indiedotes. I look forward to using the time I gain away from staring at the screen for more creative projects in 2018.”


Read more by Suzan Bond:Setting Goals Might Be Preventing You From Actually Changing Anything


There’s still time yet–so don’t give up on whatever big goal you might’ve set for yourself. Hearing the clock ticking down might even give you the extra motivation you’ve been missing, just as long as you clear away whatever’s been distracting you in the meantime.

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