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The Untold Story Of Facebook Live

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The behind-the-scenes tale of how a seemingly obscure service turned into the future of Facebook.

On Monday night, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump went head-to-head to make their case for why they should be America's next leader. The stage also doubled as Facebook Live's coronation.

The social giant partnered with ABC to live stream the debates via Facebook Live, putting the much-hyped feature on the national stage. Early reports suggested the debate drew a Super Bowl-sized audience. And Politico reported early Tuesday that 55 million people watched debate-related videos on the platform, building on Facebook's success with the Democratic National Convention, when over 28 million people tuned into the live stream.

Outside of Snapchat, there is no more interesting corner of the social media universe than Facebook Live. Live has been touted as Mark Zuckerberg's pet project, one he's "obsessed" with. Some believe Live is the key to Facebook's future—a resource that will help it compete against broadcast television. Others doubt that Live will ever take off. But no one can deny the potential of live video on a platform that has over 1.71 billion users.

What makes that potential even more incredible is that Facebook Live was almost shut down before the public ever got to see it.

The Birth Of Facebook Live

Facebook's mythology is rooted in humble beginnings—a site started in the dorm room of a socially frustrated Harvard freshman. Similarly, Facebook Live began in relative obscurity.

After graduating from Columbia's journalism school, Vadim Lavrusik joined Facebook in April 2011 as the journalism program manager. He launched Facebook's partnership efforts with the journalism community and set to figure out how to make the platform more useful for reporters.

"I had been trying to convince people at Facebook to build live video four years ago when I was working with journalists," Lavrusik said. "But the technology wasn't quite there, and also I think people internally just didn't believe it was going to be a consumer use case."

But over the next few years, mobile technology accelerated. Data plans grew, and 4G LTE became widespread. In the fall of 2014, Lavrusik made his pitch again.

"We were able to convince our executives to give us one engineer," he recalled. "I remember the fall of 2014, when we had recruited one engineer to work on it [John Fremlin], and he had made some progress by December. We started to get more infrastructure engineers involved, and then Meerkat launched in March of 2015."

People inside Facebook were still skeptical of the live-streaming project. According to Lavrusik, the biggest concern was whether Facebook could build something that could compete with established platforms like Periscope and Meerkat.

"My argument was always, look, we have the scale," he said.

Lavrusik's argument resonated. Facebook transferred him from the media partnerships team and made him a product manager for Facebook Mentions, an app that helps verified celebrities engage with their fans. He pivoted his seven-person engineering team to work on Facebook Live, with plans for it to operate as part of the Mentions app.

"They were all working on different projects, and I was everyone's least favorite person because I was getting them to work on something they didn't want to work on," he said. "Once we started making more and more progress, actually everyone got really excited."

On August 5, 2015, Facebook launched Live on a limited basis to celebrities with a verified page. Even though the product "still wasn't in a great place," by Lavrusik's own admission, it got its big break. The day after the launch, comedian Ricky Gervais went live from his bathtub.

It was a bizarre yet charming video capturing Gervais's trademark awkward humor. Over 800,000 people watched it.

Right after the launch, Lavrusik showed the initial response to Facebook CCO Sheryl Sandberg and her direct reports. "Everyone had their 'aha' moment in the room," Lavrusik said. "They were like, 'Wow, we get it.'"

It didn't take long for celebrities like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Perez Hilton, and Carson Daly to broadcast using the app. Soon after, the team opened it up to all users, not just celebrities. And as they did, a treasure trove of data came back that would make Live even bigger.

"This Thing Is Going to Blow Up"

Internally, Facebook monitors a metric that focuses on how friends share. The goal is to figure out how to get more users to post original content that's native to Facebook, instead of just liking, commenting, or sharing a link from an external news outlet.

"Our U.S. release [of Facebook Live] basically moved that metric more than all of their other launches and efforts over the course of the previous year combined," Lavrusik said. "At first I was like, 'Oh, this can't be accurate,' and then we had another analyst look at [the data] and it was real. I was like, 'This thing is going to blow up.'"

Then Mark Zuckerberg saw the data.

Zuckerberg was already a fan of Live. But then he saw how much people were sharing live video compared to links and other video formats. He also noticed that, on average, people were watching live streams three times longer and commenting 10 times more than on regular video.

With Live, Facebook had an instantly valuable product. The videos were exclusive because users had to access the platform to create them. Since streams were live, the content was timely. And there was also an inherent interactivity to them, since people could comment as they watched.

"Mark was like, 'Wait… why wouldn't we make the video tab all about live video?'" Lavrusik recalled.

Live would give Facebook something it needed: a dedicated home for video. Zuckerberg planned to announce the new tab at Facebook's F8 Summit the following April. Facebook's product team liked the suggestion, telling Zuckerberg to expect a plan the following week.

Only days later, however, Zuckerberg emailed the team. He laid out product specs for the Facebook video tab and ordered the entire media engineering team to spend the next few months focusing on Live "in lockdown."

Lavrusik's team suddenly went from 12 people to more than 100. They worked through the end of March to make Facebook Live accessible to all users in time for the F8 Summit. Rumors spread that Zuckerberg was more "obsessed" with Facebook Live than he'd been with any Facebook feature.

Then, a couple of weeks before the announcement, Lavrusik left Facebook.

The Future

Since Zuckerberg announced Live with much fanfare in early April, telling users that it's "like having a TV camera in your pocket," the media has been considering one question: How big will Facebook Live really be?

Outside of all things Snapchat, Facebook Live has been the biggest social media story this year. After more than 800,000 people watched BuzzFeed explode a watermelon with rubber bands, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed's founder, boasted that they had cracked the code, producing something online capable of topping the reach of live TV.

At the Digital Content NewFronts conference in May, media companies eagerly assured advertisers that Facebook Live was a game-changing platform.

To capitalize on that momentum, Facebook also paid approximately 140 publishers and influencers a combined $50 million to start creating video for Live.

But the content that might have shown the greatest potential for Live didn't come from a media outlet or established publisher. Instead, it came from a 37-year-old mom from Texas named Candace Payne, or, as you probably know her, Chewbacca Mom.

On May 19, Payne live-streamed herself in her car, unboxing a Chewbacca mask she'd just bought from Kohl's. Her infectious laugh made it hard not to smile while watching, and Payne soon went viral as countless media outlets embedded the video on their sites. In total, it's been viewed over 161 million times.

This type of success story highlights the potential of Facebook Live as a large-scale platform for both media organizations and professional content creators, as well as a place where amateurs and influencers can build an audience and go viral.

"The vision is basically, 'How can we create the next generation of TV on mobile?'" Lavrusik said. "It's going to start with this video tab because that will be a discovery surface for you to actually consume and discover interesting creators or content."

Why, then, did Lavrusik leave Facebook while sitting atop the live-streaming world?

Facebook's Broadcast Problem

"Most people think I'm crazy because they're like, 'Why would you leave your baby when your rocket ship is taking off?' For me, I felt like that rocket ship was taking off, and I wanted to build another rocket ship."

As the Wall Street Journalreported last month, Lavrusik left Facebook to launch a "one-to-few" live-streaming app called Alively. The startup was born, in part, out of user behavior trends Lavrusik noticed at Facebook.

When Facebook Live rolled out in the U.S., Lavrusik was surprised to see that teens used it at a much higher rate than anticipated. "We asked people who would try it once and wouldn't use it again why they hadn't used it again, and the number one answer that we got was along the lines of, 'I want to be able share live, but I only want to share with a few people.'"

Facebook has known about this problem for a long time. The platform has become a place where you broadcast updates to everyone in your life, not share information only with close friends.

"I knew that we weren't going to solve this problem when we made this strategic decision to basically punt on it and focus on making Facebook really good for broadcasting to lots of people—growing your audience, almost using Facebook Live to become famous, things like the Chewbacca lady," Lavrusik said.

For now, Facebook has a legitimate challenge when it comes to the intimate sharing of live video with small groups of friends. That space seems destined to be dominated by Snapchat—which started dabbling with live streaming through its Live Stories feature this year—or by an upstart competitor like Alively.

The Measurement Problem

The biggest questions about Facebook Live come down to money.

Facebook clearly has a video measurement problem. Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journalrevealed that Facebook had inflated the average viewing time for its video ads for more than two years, infuriating advertisers and damaging trust. When calculating the average time users spent watching videos, Facebook excluded sessions of less than three seconds. Facebook told Publicis Media it likely overestimated viewing time by 60 to 80 percent.

Even if the data was accurate, it would still be difficult to assess the value of live video for advertisers. BuzzFeed and Peretti, for instance, argued that the 800,000 concurrent viewers on their watermelon clip represented a turning point for online video, which could now compete with prime-time TV. CNN, for instance, averages 723,000 prime-time viewers.

The problem, as Kevin Draper explained on Gawker, is that Nielsen calculates television viewership on a per-minute basis. In other words, it's an average of how many people are watching across each minute of the show. Draper writes:

Since it was broadcast live, the watermelon explosion has been watched by 10.7 million people, per Facebook's count. If those people were as engaged as online World Cup viewers—and I'd venture that, on average, they were less engaged than people watching the most popular sporting event on the planet—those 10.7 million digital views would translate into an average-minute TV audience of 28,563 persons. If Peretti brought that number to advertisers at the NewsFronts as evidence of wild success, they would've laughed in his face.
Nonetheless, Facebook is forging ahead with a pricing model resembling television advertising's. In August, Facebook rolled out the ability for publishers to insert 15-second mid-roll ads that would essentially act as commercial breaks for live streams. The feature is still in the testing phase, and Facebook doesn't know if it'll become permanent.

"That type of format doesn't work as well for something like Facebook Live as it does for TV, because TV is completely a broadcast model where the audience can't interact with the broadcaster," Lavrusik said. "They can't leave feedback."

Lavrusik suggested that advertisers and Facebook could find a different solution, such as allowing advertisers to insert polls and other interactive content into mid-roll ads. However, the mid-roll format may not work as well for influencers and amateur video content creators, since they may not have the structure in place to sell and program 15-second spots. Facebook seems more intent on convincing those folks to use Facebook Live over other platforms like YouTube or YouNow, rather than setting up advertising infrastructure.

To tackle this problem, Facebook might adopt a tip-jar format, which has worked thus far on YouNow. Another possible avenue, Lavrusik said, calls for users to pay to have their comments and other interactions featured more prominently in the feed. He also said that branded content was a logical solution.

"What works for people who have huge audiences is different for these kind of digital influencers who might have smaller audiences," Lavrusik said. "You need something that incentivizes up-and-comers to actually create content and grow their audience using this format. Then you also need something that works with existing models for big media companies and influencers with huge audiences."

To Virtual Reality and Beyond

As of today, Facebook's hyped video tab has still only been released to a small percentage of iOS and Android users. Since Facebook has not released usage data for Facebook Live, it's unclear how successful video has been on the platform. However, Lavrusik claims that before he left, Facebook had already eclipsed live-streaming competitors like Periscope, YouNow, and Twitch even before it rolled out Facebook Live.

Despite the reach of its platform, Facebook's biggest challenge for the future will be differentiating itself from those competitors, which is where virtual reality could come into play. (Facebook owns Oculus, which makes VR technology.)

"We started working pretty closely with our 360 team on Live 360, and I think that there's going to be a big investment there," Lavrusik said. "It's going to take time for that to come to fruition. But you think about Facebook's advantage, it's the ability to move faster than some of the traditional media companies. They could figure out and jump into the live VR space before a lot of these traditional folks figure it out."

Today, you might only opt to watch a presidential debate on Facebook Live out of necessity. But if Facebook Live were to become the dominant platform for live VR, that could be a game changer. With 1.71 billion active users and growing, the platform's potential is too big to bet against.

"Facebook will win the one-to-many fight because of that scale," Lavrusik said. "Because you have so many people on your platform, you can deliver them the best audience and the most relevant audience."


This post originally appeared on Contently's The Content Strategist. Joe Lazauskas is the editor-in-chief of Contently and a marketing and technology journalist. Follow him on Twitter for media analysis and bad puns.


Apple's New TV Ad Artfully Pushes New Messaging Features In iOS

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The star of the video is a red balloon that travels a long distance to reach a birthday party.

Apple's new TV ad hopes to turn people on to the fancy new messaging features in iOS 10, which the company calls "expressive messaging."

Messaging in iOS is far more dynamic than in earlier versions of the OS. You can now add colorful backgrounds (like rising balloons or confetti or disco laser lights), make text larger, smaller and animated, add video or music within the messages, or add in content from messaging app partners like Jib Jab. A new feature makes suggestions where you might want to replace words with emoji.

The video is quite beautiful (of course). It features a bright red balloon coming out of a farmhouse window and flying against gray skies and over the ocean until making it to a city setting, then flying through a window where a birthday party is taking place.

The ad seeks to convey the idea that messages can now contain a much wider array of emotional meanings.

The music in the video—by the artist Toulouse—is pretty cool, too.

iOS 10 officially launched with the new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus on September 7.

This Chef's Ambitious Menu Is A Model For Creative Reinvention

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"When people tell you you can't do something, that serves as excellent fuel to prove them wrong," says chef Niki Nakayama.

Even before she was one of the first chefs to be spotlighted in the Netflix series Chef's Table, before she put her name on n/naka, the award-winning culinary landmark restaurant in the Palms neighborhood of West Los Angeles, chef Niki Nakayama stood out.

After studying at the Southern California School of Culinary Arts, Nakayama worked in the kitchen at the sushi restaurant Takao in Brentwood where—as female sushi chefs are such a rarity—her presence drew attention. But it wasn't always positive.

In her Chef's Table episode, for example, her former employer Takao Izumida remembered her with an interesting descriptor: as the restaurant's "mascot." She also remembers frustrating experiences at her first restaurant, the sushi cafe Azami, which she opened in 2000 and ran for eight years before selling it. Sometimes, Japanese men would walk in, see her behind the counter, and immediately leave.

Chef Niki Nakayama

No wonder this was the headline for a 2013 Los Angeles Magazine piece about her: "I'm a female sushi chef. Get over it."

She's a lot more than that. Nakayama is known for being one of the only female chefs focused on bringing a modern touch to kaiseki cuisine. At n/naka that means 13 courses involving a progression of flavors, textures, and cooking methods.

Nakayama burned out at her first restaurant because of the somewhat stifling nature of preparing sushi. She wanted freedom to experiment without being constrained by the expectations people bring to sushi. Today, at her 26-seat restaurant—as serene as a spa with dark wood floors and white walls—she's as much a chef as an artist in pursuit of the sublime.

[Photo: courtesy of Netflix]

She prefers the focus to be on the food, which is why she cooks at n/naka behind a screen, away from view. And Nakayama makes sure customers who come back don't get served the same thing twice. Those hoping to get a taste have to make a reservation about three months in advance.

Here, she talks with Fast Company about what being one of LA's most celebrated chefs has taught her about creativity, and how she's dealt with the highs and lows of the profession.

Fast Company: How did you get started as a chef?

Niki Nakayama: Before I started at culinary school, I was in Japan for the summer and staying with my aunt and uncle, and they had this inn. I was sort of helping out. I was 19. I really, really enjoyed being in the kitchen, just doing the detailed work. I thought that was so fun. At that point in my life, I was kind of lost. I wasn't really sure what direction I wanted to take. And then all of a sudden, it's like when you happen to get this inspiration or epiphany—it was like, I should go to culinary school.

I came back to the States and decided to go to culinary school, but there were doubts along the way. I remember telling my mom, and her initial reaction was: 'You're too short! You're too small! It's a tough life! This is not the kind of life you want.' And I was like 'No, no, this is good for me. I think this is what I want.'

But I still remember the first day, they had us cutting carrots. And I still remember thinking, 'What am I even doing here?' There was a little moment of doubt. But as I went along and did more, I really enjoyed it. As I went through the year, everything just felt so right.

I was lucky enough to land a job at Takao restaurant in Brentwood. A sushi restaurant. [Takao Izumida] has always been very open. He's never felt like he shouldn't teach me things. He's always been very helpful. He gave me everything he could during the time I worked with him.

But you felt stifled and ultimately got burned out when you had your own first sushi restaurant?

The opportunity came where I could open my first restaurant with my cousin. We opened a sushi restaurant and had it for eight years, and it was a really wonderful experience. But the whole time, I was dreaming that one day, I would have this place where I would just serve the food I wanted that was very personal to me. And it wouldn't be just sushi, but a whole entire meal. Because I really enjoy all the aspects of cooking.

Sushi is wonderful for people who love the technique and every aspect. I love the variety of different things and so, after eight years, I was ready to call it quits. I was so tired. I was kind of feeling lost. I didn't feel excited by cooking anymore. So I was just going to take a little break. And then it just so happened this n/naka spot came about.

I'd always wanted a place like this. And I was like, 'Okay, I guess this is a good thing.' But it was going to take two to three years to complete the project because of permits and everything with L.A. So in between, I thought, I'm not going to do anything.

I remember driving listening to NPR about this restaurant Talula's Table (in the Pennsylvania town of Kennett Square) that was, like, one of the hardest restaurants to get into. They were talking about how the chef had come from the city and moved back to the countryside and done this tasting menu and I was like, 'That's exactly what I'll do! I'll do that in this new space, and try all these ideas I have.' [Azami] (her first restaurant) definitely prepared me for this, though. Had it not been for that, this place would have been a lot harder for me.

How do you carve out the space in your life to be creative when you also have to deal with the responsibilities of owning and running a restaurant?

Me and my partner Carole (the sous chef at n/naka), we both cook, conceptualize, clean the kitchen, everything! And sometimes we're like, 'Why are we doing so many things?' We spend so much time organizing when we could be thinking about creative things! It's kind of crazy, because right now we're doing this crazy project I had in mind called our California menu, which is a menu of only California ingredients. Which means even ingredients we'd been importing from Japan won't be available for us to use for this menu. And it's been really hard and challenging. It's actually been on my mind for the past year.

Last night, I was up at 4 a.m. and just couldn't stop thinking about the menu. And my brain just kept working and working, and it felt like my head was getting hotter and hotter. It's so not fair, because during the regular prep days when we're working on our menu, there's very little time to do creative things.

Sometimes when you're in the middle of cooking, an idea just comes! And you're like, 'Oh my God, I've got to try this.'

How do you nurture that inspiration?

For me, I have to be very disciplined and constantly researching and reading. Inspiration is a crazy thing. I don't feel like I can look for it. I feel like it just comes when it's ready. So it sort of looks for me. And when it comes, the idea's just so big and vague at the same time, but I have to take time to interpret it. There's a constant file cabinet of things you have to pull out and put together. That's how it works.

I think it always starts with an idea. Sometimes it's an idea. Sometimes it's an ingredient. Sometimes it's this whole concept menu we're doing. For example, with the California menu, I thought, maybe I'll pair corn with sea urchin. They're both sweet elements with soft textures. In my mind, that works. But when I actually tried it, it was a horrible combination. I can't believe how bad it was. And then I was so sad. But then I had this cucumber granita that was sitting around that I wanted to pair with some other seafood. And I was looking at both of them and was like, I'm going to try the two together. And I put it in my mouth and that's the weirdest combo, but it works! So that made its way onto the menu.

Is there a part of you that's always absorbing, collecting ideas when you're maybe at other restaurants or during unexpected moments?

It is a constant thing. I think when I eat at a very upscale restaurant, there's a tendency to go in with a mind of studying versus a mind of enjoying. Whereas if I go to a simple restaurant that's like family style or a casual place, it's easier just to enjoy.

When there isn't somebody standing above you with their own ideas, there's so much more freedom to just do whatever feels right. But for me, I feel like a lot of my ideas all came from very simple things. A menu where people would never eat the same thing twice, oh, I should just do that. It was just a simple feeling. That I should just do that, that it would be a challenge and constant learning experience for me. I saw it as if I did this, I could keep growing.

With the California menu, we have bits and pieces of it on our current menu. As a whole, it's so conceptual. So as I'm doing it, I'm like, 'What am I doing? Why am I messing with the perfect formula, just to prove a point of trying to challenge myself? I must be crazy! This could totally ruin my career!' There's all these thoughts going through my head as I'm doing things and prepping for this.

Do you feel like you still have something to prove? What does success mean to you?

I'm very happy. I think I'm too happy to not notice I'm happy. When you're very happy, sometimes you can take it for granted. I think it's why I want to put crazy challenges back into my life. To make it feel like I'm still struggling or still striving.

I think at this moment, if I can really take success into consideration, it feels like, really, success just means more elevated pressure. On another level. There's this image you have of success where you're just like, 'Oh, I'm going to lean back,' and you think, 'I can just relax from that point on.' But it's not that way. You have to keep making sure it's even more perfect. Even more detailed. There's a lot more concentrated effort to make sure things live up to expectations.

What I love about kaiseki, it's all about showcasing what's around you, in your environment, and highlighting the things that are in season. To take ingredients and present them in a way that's their best presentation. So we decide which cooking method is going to best showcase this ingredient throughout the meal.

What I love most about kaiseki is it comes from a place of gratitude. Being grateful to nature, to ingredients, to all the things that surround us. When we cook in this manner, we're more careful to make sure that the ingredients and everything's that's in the environment are speaking more loudly than our ideas.

What have you learned from pushing past the people who've told you you're not good enough over the course of your career or thought you wouldn't make it or certainly would never have a restaurant of your own?

There's this natural feeling I have for cooking. I like it, because it feels most honest to me. When I do it, I feel like I'm my most honest self. I wouldn't be happy not doing it. But also when people tell you you can't do something, that serves as excellent fuel to prove them wrong. To sort of push yourself even harder. When people say you can't, there's this natural tendency to say, 'Well, yes I can.'

If I could go back, maybe the best advice I could give myself would be to just be a little more patient, though, for things to happen. And even with things I'd dream of wanting to happen, remember that those all come with other responsibilities. That it's not always that beautiful romanticizing something. The reality takes so much more effort. And be okay with that.

This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.

Got 15 Spare Minutes? Here's How To Make It Count

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Having a head full of things we need to do is one of the biggest distractions. Here's a better way to parse tasks and get more done.

When we're faced with only 15 minutes in between meetings, or waiting in line to get coffee or lunch, our natural inclination is to either answer email, look at social media, or text someone. These are not always the most productive uses of small slivers of time, according to several experts.

They say there is plenty you can accomplish in 15 minutes, if you do three things:

  1. Separate your to-do list into tasks and projects, and focus on the tasks.
  2. Write your to-do list in a way that allows you take immediate action.
  3. Look at email and social media with a focus on moving forward.

Tasks Versus Projects

The definition of a task is something that takes five to 10 minutes, says Kathy Lee, productivity tech expert and owner of DoubleSpaces LLC, a company that helps individuals use technology to boost their productivity.

There are several timesaving actions you can take with your smartphone when you only have 15 minutes to spare, Lee says. They include:

  • Unsubscribe from junk snail mail using an app like PaperKarma. While not always 100% reliable, it does help you to stop most catalogs, Lee says.
  • Read all your email subscriptions in one daily email with Unroll.me.
  • Search for recipe ideas for tonight's dinner.
  • Call the doctor, dentist, salon, vet, etc. to make an appointment.
  • Read an article you saved from a website or social media in Pocket.

You can also use the time to write down any tasks that come to mind as incomplete, such as picking up pet food on the way home from work, says May Wang, productivity expert, coach, and consultant. Making a list of anything you are thinking about doing but haven't done yet allows you to free up your mind to consider other ideas and topics, she says. Keeping a running to-do list in your mind "is actually one of the biggest distractions," says Wang.

Similarly, Wang recommends using the time in between meetings, even if it's just 10 or 15 minutes, to capture action items and deadlines from your last meeting before the next meeting starts. Plus, she says, you're less likely to forget about a deadline if you record it immediately.

Active To-Do Lists

A vaguely written to-do list with words such as budget, birthday card, or check to school can slow you down, says Maura Thomas, productivity expert, author, and founder of Regain Your Time.

Instead, she says, write your list in a way that allows you to take immediate action, rather than having to think about what to do. For example, an active to-do list would look like this:

  • Enter totals into spreadsheet
  • Find Jane's address via Google or by emailing a friend so you can send a birthday card
  • Pay college tuition bill via online payment system

"Eliminate vague sounding words like plan, implement, and develop," says Thomas, "because if you only have a few minutes, seeing a word like develop on your list will act like a speed bump, and you'll probably skip over it."

Another way to make your to-do lists more helpful is to categorize them into four quadrants: work, family, home, me. By focusing on goals from one quadrant at a time, you can use your time more wisely, says Lisa Woodruff, productivity expert and owner of Organize 365.

Forward-Moving Social Media and Email

You can use small pockets of time to catch up on social media and scan emails, but your ultimate goal should be to help you, your client, or your team move forward. For instance, when scanning through email, focus on quickly replying to a client who is stuck or team member who needs more direction, Woodruff says. "The key is to scan your social media and email with the purpose of moving everyone forward," she says. "Cute quotes, lengthy emails to read, and long phone calls can wait."

Most of us could easily let our entire day get sucked up by answering email, says Lee, but that won't give us a sense of accomplishment. "I've never heard anyone say, 'I've read all my emails today,' as if it was an achievement," Lee says.

Necessary Wandering

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is let your mind wander and allow yourself to daydream. Several studies have shown that a wandering mind can be both a well of creativity and a place to parse complex problems. "Being productive is a function of being focused and working from the state of peace of mind," says Wang. "It is not about doing, doing, doing."

Next time you are waiting in line, instead of browsing social media, write down two aspects of your life that you are grateful for, suggests Marie Levey-Pabst, founder of Create Balance. "Taking time to remember what you are grateful for will boost your mood, outlook, and focus," she says.

Consider spending 10 or 15 minutes practicing mindfulness, doing a guided meditation, or even just closing your eyes, says Thomas. "The brain needs time to consolidate and generate insights," she says, "and these are not things that we can command our brains to do."

Productivity tips from the world's busiest people

Female Execs To Contrite VC: Thanks But The Damage (Continues To Be) Done

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A recent article went viral for telling women to use their initials online. Here's why successful female entrepreneurs think that's bunk.

"How does someone get that much space," Nicole Sanchez asks, to write about a subject when "they don't understand the world they're talking about?" Sanchez—who currently works at GitHub as its vice president of social impact, but has been a decades-long technology diversity activist— was referring to an op-ed written in the Wall Street Journal.

In the tech industry, where sage advice is hawked so often it might as well be considered a liquid asset, the headline for the post in question summed up its thesis: "Why Women in Tech Might Consider Just Using Their Initials Online." The piece was written by investor, entrepreneur, and frequent Wall Street Journal contributor John Greathouse. In it, he suggested that the way to provide an impartial good impression in a male-dominated industry would be to obscure identifying information that could cloud their perception—if you are not a man.

An online firestorm ensued. Former business journalist Shane Ferro took to Twitter to explain that while research found that people's names can instantly cloud others' judgements, Greathouse's prescriptions are not the correct course of action.

A day after the story went live, Greathouse apologized for the piece on Twitter. "I hurt women and I utterly failed to help, which I wholly regret and I apologize for having done," he wrote.

The Wrong Argument

Sanchez believes that Greathouse's argument uses a popular mental sleight of hand for cultural conflicts; "It was a classic example of putting the onus of inclusion on the people who are being excluded," she says. Indeed, the first sentence in the piece did just that: "Professional women, are you properly curating your online first impression?" Sanchez says, "It's a very well-worn, poorly developed argument for how we create more equitable experiences." If people are being pushed to the fringe because of others' actions, the oppressing group ought to be the ones to make things right.

What Greathouse proposes not only doesn't solve any problems, it reifies the assumption that technology is a male-dominated industry and always will be. For women to admit that and hide their own identities only makes the intrinsic misogyny more insidious.

"I've been in leadership roles all my life in industries dominated by men," writes Jennifer Keough, cofounder of JND Legal Administration and CEO of JND Class Action Administration. In an email to Fast Company, she says, "Sure, there've been times I've thought it would be easier to conform to the gender bias, but I've worked hard to defeat that voice—it isn't who I am, nor do I think it helps do the hard work we need to do to stand up and be counted."

Freada Kapor, technology investor and diversity advocate, echoes this sentiment. In a statement to Fast Company she maintains:

Shielding your gender online may be a reasonable adaptive strategy for individuals, if we accept the idea that tech can never change its culture, but that would be giving up, wouldn't it? Tech prides itself on being able to use innovation to solve complicated problems. Certainly we can figure out a way to challenge and fix the industry's biases.

Aside from avoiding the main problem, there are plenty of holes in this strategy. If most men are using their full names, and the majority of women are using their initials, it would be pretty clear who is who. And in this era of online profiles, a 30-second search is all it would take to reveal gender and other characteristics.

Importantly, this strategy won't help women whose last names indicate a likelihood of being African American or Latinx. Numerous examples of rigorous resume studies show how racial bias is far more pronounced than gender bias in the workplace.

Celebrating Individuality, As Long As It Looks Like Them

The technology industry is known for patting itself on the back for entrepreneurial individuality. The cult of the founder—someone who thinks outside the box and dares to be different—is said to ultimately lead to business success. But it's a certain type of different that investors have traditionally looked for; being white and male is almost always a prerequisite. Research confirms that less than 10% of venture-backed companies are led by women.

Ximena Hartsock, cofounder of the advocacy communication platform Phone2Action, sees her personal identity as something she brings to the table. She's a Chilean-born, female entrepreneur. Both these pieces define who she is as a businesswoman.

"You want to put everything out there to make it very clear that's who they're dealing with," Hartsock says. Meeting with potential investors is as much interviewing them as it is vice versa. And if someone doesn't like you because you're a woman, well you likely wouldn't have wanted to do business with them anyway. "You can weed out all the investors," she says, like Greathouse, "who clearly thinks he's giving good advice. But he's doing the opposite."

After The Apology

GitHub's Sanchez says she appreciated that Greathouse apologized. "I love seeing people grow on these specific topics," she says. All the same, Sanchez, who has spent decades working to educate the technology sector about the need for diversity, can't help but wonder how that article went from an idea to publication.

"There wasn't anyone on the process who put the brakes on," she says. "There wasn't someone fluent in this topic—maybe not even a woman in that process." Someone, she says, "who would've given it much more nuance."

While the apology is good and shows that people in the space are owning up to their own misgivings about the gnarly issue of diversity and unconscious bias, it's still worthwhile to think of the damage it may have caused.

"This is a really dangerous article," says Hartsock. "We have a lot of women out there—especially young women—who need to hear the opposite." Most of all, she says, "they need to hear [this] from women and also from men. Especially investors."

Five Ways To Revamp Your Pathetic Follow-Up Emails

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"Following up" often creates more work because it just grabs someone's attention without giving them new information.

Emails are usually about asking. Either someone is asking you for something—to do a task, consider an offer, or share a piece of information—or you are asking them.

No ask is complete until it has an answer, and yet many of us treat email as if it were a one-and-done proposition. You shoot off an email with your request, and now the ball is in their court. It's on them to notice your email, thoughtfully consider it, and respond in a timely fashion, right?

Wrong. Assuming that anyone has the wherewithal—or even the obligation—to respond to your email is a recipe for failure. We're all busy and distracted and overwhelmed, and that means things slip through the cracks. It's no one's fault, but it is a fact. That means you need to have a system for tracking pending items.

Many of the things you ask for in emails are linked to a task you need to get done: You need to book a venue for a party so you email the venue asking for a quote, you need to upgrade your version of WordPress so you email your web developer asking her to do it, and so forth. But merely sending the email does not mean these tasks are done—what they are is pending completion. This means you need to keep monitoring them to ensure they do get done.

This kind of conscientious follow-up is a skill that is overlooked and underrated by many. But it couldn't be more crucial to actually getting things done, both in the world of email and the great wide world beyond. Here are five pointers on following up effectively.

1. Don't Be Shy

Some people hesitate to follow up because they think it would be intrusive or off-putting. But typically the opposite is true: Rather than viewing such persistence as annoying, most professionals view follow-up as a sign of passion and initiative.

Speaking personally, I have hired people, responded to sales pitches, and taken time out to offer advice precisely because someone pursued me with an alacrity that caught my attention. Follow-up shows that you genuinely care. (That being said, too much follow-up won't endear you to anyone. One or two follow-up messages, appropriately spaced out, is typically a good threshold before you tip into the category of truly annoying.)

2. Consider Your Timing

As we are all well aware, there are certain times of the day and week when our influx of email is particularly intense, as well as times when people are less likely to be focused on work. Everyone has a lot of email on Monday mornings, for instance, and most everyone is a bit checked out on Friday afternoons and weekends.

If you're extremely keen to get a response, time your follow-up for a moment when the recipient is likely to be paying attention. In my experience, this means sending your email outside of normal work hours, either very early in the morning or later in the evening.

3. Offer A Concise Recap

Some people follow up by merely forwarding their original email and saying, "Hey, did you get a chance to look at this?" Now, if that person didn't respond to your email the first time, resending the same message is probably not going to get better results the second time.

Instead, forward your original email as a record, but write a new message on top that rephrases your ask in a more concise manner, ideally so that the recipient can skim the follow-up email and respond without reading down the thread.

4. Add A New Angle

Although you should never assume that your recipient actually read your first email, there's always a chance they did—and they didn't respond because it wasn't compelling. Without making your email too lengthy, consider adding a fresh angle on why the opportunity you're proposing is valuable when you follow up.

Maybe it's a new sentence or just a few well-crafted words that capture a benefit you didn't mention in your original pitch. Offering not just a reminder but new information reiterates that you're enthusiastic about working with this person and gives him or her a new reason to consider your proposal.

5. Be Polite, Not Pushy

We've been talking throughout this book about how you are not obligated to respond to anyone's email—unless it's your boss. But remember that it goes both ways: Neither are you entitled to a response from someone else who, like you, might be too busy with their own tasks to deal with yours.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't bother following up, but it does mean you should try to do it with grace and consideration. You might begin your message with, "I know you have a hectic schedule, but I'm wondering if you've had time to consider my request to . . . ?" or something similar. Acknowledging that you understand the receiver is juggling a lot of tasks, of which your request is just one small consideration, always helps.


This article is excerpted from Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done by Jocelyn K. Glei. Copyright © 2016. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. It is reprinted with permission.

Bonus: 2 Useless Phrases You Need To Eliminate From Your Emails

HBO's Westworld Creators Talk AI, Sentience, And Surveillance

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Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan explore dark sides of AI and humanity in series that reboots the 1973 film about a robotic theme park gone haywire.

As Game of Thrones marches into its final seasons, HBO is debuting this Sunday what it hopes—and is betting millions of dollars on—will be its new blockbuster series: Westworld, a thorough reimagining of Michael Crichton's 1973 cult classic film about a Western theme park populated by lifelike robot hosts. A philosophical prelude to Jurassic Park, Crichton's Westworld is a cautionary tale about technology gone very wrong: the classic tale of robots that rise up and kill the humans. HBO's new series, starring Evan Rachel Wood, Anthony Hopkins, and Ed Harris, is subtler and also darker: The humans are the scary ones.

"We subverted the entire premise of Westworld in that our sympathies are meant to be with the robots, the hosts," says series co-creator Lisa Joy. She's sitting on a couch in her Burbank office next to her partner in life and on the show—writer, director, producer, and husband Jonathan Nolan—who goes by Jonah. Both are in jeans and T-shirts—Hollywood's workaday flip side of red-carpet fashion. When I meet with them, it's not even three weeks to the show's premiere, with last-minute tweaks still being made, but they seem fresh-faced and excited.

Their Westworld, which runs in the revered Sunday-night 9 p.m. time slot, combines present-day production values and futuristic technological visions—thoroughly revamping Crichton's story with hybrid mechanical-biological robots fumbling along the blurry line between simulated and actual consciousness.

Robots becoming something like humans is a well-worn film theme—from 2015's Ex Machina back to 1927's Metropolis. Based on the four episodes I previewed (which get progressively more interesting), Westworld does a good job with the trope—which focused especially on the awakening of Dolores, an old soul of a robot played by Evan Rachel Wood. Dolores is also the catchall Spanish word for suffering, pain, grief, and other displeasures. "There are no coincidences in Westworld," says Joy, noting that the name is also a play on Dolly, the first cloned mammal.

The show operates on a deeper, though hard-to-define level, that runs beneath the shoot-em and screw-em frontier adventure and robotic enlightenment narratives. It's an allegory of how even today's artificial intelligence is already taking over, by cataloging and monetizing our lives and identities. "Google and Facebook, their business is reading your mind in order to advertise shit to you," says Jonah Nolan.

The setup comes in the first episode when petulant Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), who writes the salacious storylines for the park's synthetic characters, questions the cantankerous head of quality assurance Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) about the real aims of their parent company, Delos (also the name of the Greek island where the gods Apollo and Artemis were born). "This place is one thing to the guests. Another thing to the shareholders. And something completely different to management," she says, clutching one in the steady stream of cigarettes she burns through during the show.

"We based that statement loosely on Google, for whom, for its customer's, it's search," says Nolan. "For its shareholders, it's advertising. For the principals behind the company, I think they're interested in building God."

AI For The Customers

Google's customers get its services for free—in exchange for revealing the outlines of their lives. In Westworld, guests pay $40,000 a day, although they receive a lot more. "All our hosts are here for you, myself included" says the blonde welcoming robot, Angela, pressing herself against first-time guest William (Jimmi Simpson). At least this robot (played by author and on-again/off-again Elon Musk spouse Talulah Riley) knows what she is. The characters in the park think they're real—well, assuming they genuinely can think. They are like humans, but not humans, meaning that guests are free to befriend them, court them, rape them, or kill them—without guilt.

"Exist free of rules, laws or judgment. No impulse is taboo," reads a spoof home page for the resort that HBO launched a few weeks ago. That's lived to the fullest by the park's utterly sadistic loyal guest, played by Ed Harris and known only as the Man in Black.

Evan Rachel Wood

"In preparation for the project we went back and played Grand Theft Auto a little bit," says Nolan. Like Westworld, the vast, open world of the GTA game series doesn't have a set objective or moral code: All of that is up to the player. "We're sort of fascinated by, not just the state of the art in terms of the companies that are actively pursing machine intelligence, but [by] gaming," he says. "Gaming is another forefront to AI. It's now a massive industry."

Nolan and Joy envision Westworld as the apotheosis of gaming, in which the non-player characters, the AIs, are not only physical but are human-level smart and absolutely dedicated to the player having fun. Today, he says, open-world games outsource intelligence to other humans in multiplayer online titles—where some 14-year-old kid will always kick your ass. "The idea of a non-player character that is every bit as fascinating to interact with and potentially challenging, but whose whole purpose is to gratify your ego—that's the ultimate," says Nolan.

Thandie Newton, and Rodrigo Santoro

Real-world tech is already headed there. "In some sense, being human, but less than human, it's a good thing," says Jon Gratch, professor of computer science and psychology at the University of Southern California. Gratch directs research at the university's Institute for Creative Technologies on "virtual humans," AI-driven onscreen avatars used in military-funded training programs. One of the projects, SimSensei, features an avatar of a sympathetic female therapist, Ellie. It uses AI and sensors to interpret facial expressions, posture, tension in the voice, and word choices by users in order to direct a conversation with them.

"One of the things that we've found is that people don't feel like they're being judged by this character," says Gratch. In work with a National Guard unit, Ellie elicited more honest responses about their psychological stresses than a web form did, he says. Other data show that people are more honest when they know the avatar is controlled by an AI versus being told that it was controlled remotely by a human mental health clinician.

Virtual human therapist Ellie speaking with a client.

Technologically, a flesh-and-blood-and-silicon Dolores may still be far off. Ken Goldberg, an artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, calls the notion of cyborg robots in Westworld "a pretty common trope in science fiction." (Joy will take up the theme again, as the screenwriter for a new Battlestar Galactica movie.) Goldberg's lab is struggling just to build and program a robotic hand that can reliably pick things up. But a sympathetic, somewhat believable Dolores in a virtual setting is not so farfetched.

Ellie formulates pretty convincing dialogue by intelligently drawing on a vast store of prerecorded phrases. Westworld robots often use canned phrases; but they can also improvise. Today's AI is developing that ability as well, by gaining a level of emotional intelligence.

"If you build it like a human, and it can interact like a human. That solves a lot of the human-computer or human-robot interaction issues," says professor Paul Rosenbloom, also with USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. He works on artificial general intelligence, or AGI—the effort to create a human-like or human level of intellect.

Rosenbloom is building an AGI platform called Sigma that models human cognition, including emotions. These could make a more effective robotic tutor, for instance, "There are times you want the person to know you are unhappy with them, times you want them to know that you think they're doing great," he says, where "you" is the AI programmer. "And there's an emotional component as well as the content."

Achieving full AGI could take a long time, says Rosenbloom, perhaps a century. Bernie Meyerson, IBM's chief innovation officer, is also circumspect in predicting if or when Watson could evolve into something like HAL or Her. "Boy, we are so far from that reality, or even that possibility, that it becomes ludicrous trying to get hung up there, when we're trying to get something to reasonably deal with fact-based data," he says.

Anthony Hopkins and Jeffrey Wright

However, Westworld offers no hint of its time frame, except that the park has already been in operation for 30 years, created by visionary and now ever-more eccentric aging scientist Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins). Westworld is isolated from any reference to or communication with the outside world that could provide a context of time and place. "Wherever this space is, wherever this park exists, you're not bringing your phone into it," says Nolan. "You're going into it as naked as the day you were born." That's not only to protect the privacy of the guests, but the intellectual property of the park.

Even today, artificial intelligence is creeping ever closer toward believability. In a 2014 competition, a chatbot was declared to have passed the Turing test—able to fool people more than 30% of he time into thinking that they were communicating with another human. The results are controversial, but the controversy itself illustrates the slippery slope of verisimilitude.

"Can simulations, at some point, become the real thing?" asks Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. "If we perfectly simulate a rainstorm on a computer, it's still not a rainstorm. We won't get wet. But is the mind or consciousness different? The jury is still out."

Lisa Joy (who wrote for the shows Pushing Daisies and Burn Notice, and was a coproducer for the latter) jokes that it would have been easy to simulate her while they were developing the show. "You would just need something with brown hair, bipedal, that would sit at a desk and type for, I don't know, like 12 hours a day," she says, chuckling. Then it would, "go home, give a kid a bath, read it a story…and go to sleep." Those trips home were in the couple's robotic-driven Tesla, and the kid is their nearly 3-year old daughter. "When we were brewing this pilot, we were also cooking her up," says Joy. "It was like a meditation on sentience while one was forming."

Steadicam Operator Chris Haarhoff, Director of Photography Paul Cameron, Jonathan Nolan

AI For The Management

While artificial consciousness is still in the dreamy phase, today's level of AI is serious business. "What was sort of a highfalutin philosophical question a few years ago has become an urgent industrial need," says Jonah Nolan. It's not clear yet how the Delos management intends, beyond entrance fees, to monetize Westworld, although you get a hint when Ford tells Theresa Cullen "We know everything about our guests, don't we? As we know everything about our employees."

AI has a clear moneymaking model in this world, according to Nolan. "Facebook is monetizing your social graph, and Google is advertising to you." Both companies (and others) are investing in AI to better understand users and find ways to make money off this knowledge. "When was the last time you saw a banner ad that you actually clicked on? That's the Holy Grail, and they're getting better at it," says Nolan. This version of AI, the one controlled by humans, is the one that troubles him.

Nolan doesn't fear AI in the 2001-HAL 9000 sort of way. That's clear in his screenplay for the 2014 movie Interstellar, one of several collaborations—including Memento, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises—with his big brother, writer/director Christopher Nolan. "If you're waiting for the moment when the robot crew rises up and purges the human crew through the airlock, you're going to be disappointed," he says of bots in Interstellar. "They are the most loyal, the most selfless, brave, capable members of the crew. And that's never questioned."

Ingrid Bolsø Berdal

You get clues to Jonah Nolan's thinking about the dark side of AI in Westworld by looking to his first TV series, Person of Interest. It's based in the present world of NSA-style electronic surveillance, using machine-learning AI to predict criminal and terrorist activity. "Person of Interest…was ostensibly a CBS crime procedural, but actually for me an exploration of networked artificial super-intelligence, birthed in secret, that had gotten frustrated with its role as a sort of asset in counterterrorism," he says, "and it decided to start gently acting on some of the information that it had that didn't relate to its principle mission."

In the show, the AI goes rogue in a good way, passing information to help stop everyday crime through a backdoor installed by its creator Harold Finch (played by Michael Emerson). He's an eccentric, reclusive billionaire who uses high tech to fight crime—a bit like Bruce Wayne, except Finch outsources the groundwork to a crack team of operatives. (Like Nolan and Joy, Finch is a show runner.)

"Person of Interest dealt with the idea of a networked intelligence that was more along the lines of the intelligence that…I would imagine would emerge in the next 10 years," says Nolan, "…an industrial intelligence suited to a narrow set of qualities whether that's investment, well, you know what I'm talking about." The show is saturated with images of surveillance cameras and storylines using social media and smartphones as data-gathering devices.

With selfies (which Nolan loathes), social media posts, and free services like Gmail, humans are willingly disgorging data about themselves, no Orwellian government required, according to Nolan. "We went to the Apple Store, and we bought it," he says. "We created this surveillance state, and it's a fucking horror show."

Anyone who's seen online ads for something they just bought can attest to how poor technology is currently doing at targeting us as consumers. The same is true when we get ads for products vaguely related to a topic we may have searched on but have no interest in buying for ourselves. That's why advancing AI is so critical to the consumer economy, says Nolan. From what you say and do, Google, Facebook, retailers, and many others need AI that can ascertain what you genuinely desire.

"Can it read your mind?" asks Nolan. "The only way you can build a technology that can read your mind is if it possesses one itself."

Related Video: Watch HBO's Award-Hoarding History In 4 Minutes

Coursera Brings Everything You Need To Code Into Its Virtual Classrooms

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The online education firm wants to teach people to code with less hassle and more hands-on time.

Tucked inside one of Coursera's 1,500 online classes, there's a multiple choice quiz that's not like the others.

Instead of just asking questions and expecting answers, each challenge includes a text box with a "Run" button next to it. Here, you're expected to enter the appropriate code in the SQL programming language, so you can grab the database information you need to make the correct choice.

Essentially, Coursera has condensed an entire coding environment into a series of boxes on a web page. The hope is that computer science and data science classes will become much more interactive, with the ability to play with your own code in the middle of a reading assignment, video lecture, or quiz.

"We want to help learners learn by doing," says Tom Willerer, Coursera's chief product officer. "We want people to apply and practice what they're learning in the readings and the lectures, not just sit passively."

In-browser coding is not a novel concept, and Coursera is hardly the first educational resource to take advantage. Other services such as Code Academy, Treehouse, and Khan Academy also allow users to write and run their own code on a web page as part of their lessons.

Coursera says its offering is different because the lessons aren't created in-house. Instead, the company has built what it describes as a platform for its university instructors to build programming challenges on their own.

"We'll have a thousand flowers blooming out of this, and we can't really control it, so we need to be able to build a powerful engine to let all of our instructors plug into this in the different ways that they want to," Willerer says.

An interactive coding exercise on Coursera

In a demo, Coursera showed how an instructor might scatter interactive coding boxes throughout a single page of reading material. The company says teachers can also insert coding pop-ups into their video lectures. In the background, Coursera uses page prediction to start loading each coding environment before the user gets to it. That could help as Coursera adds slow-loading languages such as Apache Spark.

As for language support, Coursera is starting off with Python, SQL, and Scala, but the company says it can add a new programming language in as little as a day or two. That's because the interface for instructors and students is already set up. Coursera just has to add the necessary interpreters, compilers, and error handling for each language it wants to include, along with a way for teachers to select that language as they create their coding blocks.

"We want to enable teachers to be able to come in and plug into a sophisticated engine to teach whatever language at whatever complexity they want to teach," Willerer says.

Over time, Coursera imagines it'll be able to use the data that students are entering into those programming fields to personalize the learning process for students and give better feedback to instructors.

"If people are struggling with certain aspects, you can actually give them remedial content," says Christine Wong, Coursera's product manager. "That's one way, but also that data gets back to instructors so that they can . . . use that to inform updates or new content, etc."

Beyond Coding

Although computer science and data science are Coursera's "sweet spots" according to Willerer, the company believes its new platform might eventually have applications beyond programming.

One example: Coursera could add a grammar-parsing tool for human languages to help people master concepts like business English. "We've got a lot of language-learning courses on our platform, and you could imagine those becoming more interactive, just like the code is, when you have to write something," Willerer says.

The system may not even be limited to languages in the future. It could also be applied to fields like photography and user interface design, with algorithms that recognize proper placement of an image.

There's no timeframe for those developments, but Willerer says the company is holding a "make-a-thon" next week, where employees can work on passion projects. He's hoping some engineers will start to experiment with the platform and come up with some novel uses.

In the meantime, Coursera is offering a handful of courses with the new programming tools, and hopes to have several hundred available over the next year.


Is The iPhone 7 Plus Apple's First Step To Augmented Reality? Not Likely.

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The dual cameras were most likely meant only to create better photographs, not detect 3D content for AR apps.

It was a reasonable question to ask. Apple purchased a 3D imaging company called PrimeSense in 2013, and now has released a phone with two camera lenses and the ability to perceive depth of field, the base requirement for capturing 3D spaces and objects. Add that to the fact that Apple CEO Tim Cook has made several statements expressing his interest in augmented reality.

So it's natural to wonder if the iPhone 7 Plus represents Apple's first steps toward some augmented reality product that could place 3D objects over a real-world space. Microsoft's HoloLens headset already does just that, as does Lenovo's PHAB 2 Pro, the first product to embody Google's Project Tango AR technology.

The iPhone 7 Plus features a 28mm wide angle lens and an additional 56mm lens (which technically is not the telephoto lens that Apple's promo materials suggest, but rather something like a "portrait" lens).

The two cameras can work together to measure a limited amount of information about the depth of field of objects in the frame. But they are limited in their usefulness for capturing AR imagery for two main reasons—they can only get depth of field data on image elements they can each see, and they are placed too closely together on the back of the device to get much range.

The Limits of Dual-Lens

The camera modules used in the iPhone 7 Plus, sources tell me, are almost certainly developed by an Israeli mobile camera module company called LinX that Apple acquired in 2015. Before the acquisition, LinX claimed its smartphone camera modules could deliver DSLR-level photo quality while taking up so little space as to preserve the thin profile of the phone. These claims are very similar to the ones Apple makes about the iPhone 7 Plus's camera.

LinX also boasted about its dual-lens technology's ability to capture depth of field in images so that the background in an image could be affected independently of the foreground, or even replaced by another background. This, of course, describes the trick that Apple is most proud of in the iPhone 7 Plus camera, in which the foreground image (a person) is put sharply in focus while the background is blurred. Apple calls this "Portrait" mode.

To create this effect, the two cameras must work together to capture enough image data to form the reasonable assumption that the thing in the foreground is a person. They may be able to recognize things like the edges of the head. The camera might use an algorithm to recognize aspects of a human face. Once it's identified the object in the foreground as a person, it can bring that area of the image into sharp focus. It can also assume that everything else in the image is background, and can then blur the background.

But here's the rub. In order to establish depth of field for a given area of an image, both lenses must be able to independently and uniquely identify points in those areas. When the software can match those identified points, the camera can capture a 3D rendition of the things in the frame.

This, however, relies a lot on the variety of the objects and surfaces within the frame. If the camera is pointed at a flat white wall where there is little variety, for example, the camera software will have trouble finding matches between points captured by each lens. So not much depth information would be collected.

Capturing 3D images and mapping local environments for AR content requires hardware that can provide more refined and consistent depth of field data. The camera sensors should detect and assign horizontal coordinates (x and y) and a vertical value (z) to surfaces and objects in its field of view. The camera must be able to locate itself within a space, even as it moves around.

Camera placement

The placement of the two cameras on the iPhone 7 Plus also raises doubts about its usefulness for AR. The rule of thumb says the distance between two identical lenses, times 10, equals the distance from the camera within which it's possible to capture depth of field. So if the distance between the lenses is one inch, together they can define three-dimensional objects in a space of 10 inches or less in front of them.

The two lenses on the iPhone 7 Plus's camera appear to be roughly a centimeter apart. If the lenses were identical, that would mean the camera could detect depth of field within 10 centimeters.

But the iPhone 7 Plus's lenses are not identical—one is wide angle and the other "portrait"—so the "distance times 10" equation may not neatly apply. An AR developer told me that with some heavy software calibration, the iPhone 7 Plus camera may be capable of detecting depth up to 50 times the distance between the lenses. Even then, 50 centimeters in front of the camera isn't much range.

If the point of the two cameras was to capture imagery for AR apps, Apple would have put them farther apart in the design.

No PrimeSense Sensor

Devices equipped for AR normally use an active sensor to measure depth of field (like Microsoft's HoloLens, for example). These sensors send out a beam of light and measure the time it takes for the light to bounce off objects. That time interval determines the location of objects in the camera's field of view.

Active sensor technology is exactly what Apple bought in its PrimeSense acquisition ("structured light" sensors, to be exact). But that PrimeSense sensor was not used in the iPhone 7 Plus. The iPhone 7 Plus uses the same class of passive sensor used in most traditional cameras. Passive sensors, which work by pulling in light from the environment, capture less depth of field information, less reliably.

SciFutures CTO Scott Susskind believes the fact that Apple didn't use the PrimeSense technology in the iPhone 7 Plus indicates that Apple had no AR ambitions for the phone. "PrimeSense and their depth-sensing technology . . . is a far superior solution for AR tracking than the dual cams in the 7 Plus," Susskind said in an email to Fast Company.

Susskind said it's possible Apple applied PrimeSense's computer vision algorithms to the iPhone 7 camera, but added that simply using the PrimeSense hardware sensor instead would have produced far better 3D-tracking capabilities.

What Tim Said

And we're talking about the AR experience on a phone. Despite the success of Pokémon Go, I doubt that people in Jony Ive's Industrial Design Group are very excited about a phone-based augmented reality experience. It just doesn't doesn't line up with what we've seen of their sensibilities. It's a clunky experience in which the phone creates a barrier between the user and the world around, including other people.

If you listen closely, Tim Cook's comments about AR all but confirm this. Cook said this on Good Morning America: "[AR] gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present, talking to each other, but also have other things—visually—for both of us to see. Maybe it's something we're talking about, maybe it's someone else here who's not here present but who can be made to appear to be present."

Cook's comments seem to point toward a preference at Apple for pursuing augmented reality products, rather than an Oculus VR-like experience where the user loses visual contact with the real world entirely. But his comments also suggest that the type of AR Apple's interested in is not one where the user is focusing their attention on the screen of a smartphone or tablet. Vuforia (PTC) president and GM Jay Wright told me he thought Cook's comments suggest an experience you might get from some form of AR headset or glasses.

I don't doubt that Apple is very interested in some form of augmented reality, and I'm confident that there's a workbench in some undisclosed location (in some nondescript office park in the Valley) that's loaded with prototype AR devices. But I doubt those devices are tablets or phones.

Sheryl Sandberg On The Future Of Advertising: Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

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Facebook's COO offers insight on how the company is pushing clients to take advantage of the smartphone revolution.

Facebook's growing stature as an advertising juggernaut is increasingly overshadowing its identity as a mere "social network." This evolution was especially clear during New York's annual Advertising Week event, as chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and a team of Facebook of executives revealed some key client metrics and initiatives—among them, the fact that Facebook now has a whopping 4 million advertisers on its platform. Sandberg talked with Fast Company about the ways Facebook is helping advertisers take advantage of the global proliferation of mobile devices.

Consumers Have Moved To Mobile, But Businesses "Haven't Quite Gotten There"

"What's really going on, big picture, is that we're living through the fastest adoption of a communication technology that the world has ever seen," Sandberg says, noting that the average American checks his or her smartphone 150 times a day. Still, only 40% of Facebook advertisers are creating ads specifically for mobile. Sandberg wants that figure to be much higher, and says Facebook is working to make mobile ads more enticing for both businesses and consumers. "In a mobile world, even the smallest to the largest businesses really want to spend their money to reach people effectively," Sandberg says. "It's a win on both sides: If [businesses] have very effective ads, those ads give them a higher ROI. [But] consumers also like them better."

The Best Ads Are A "Combination Of Art And Science"

Sandberg says Facebook is working to make ads more engaging (translation: make them look less like ads) with tools such as Canvas, which lets businesses build immersive, full-screen experiences that include photos, clips, and slick editorial. This week the company even added 360-degree videos to Canvas, and the ability to link to other "canvases" for more in-depth storytelling. But pretty ads mean nothing without better targeting, which is why last week Facebook announced powerful data-measurement partnerships with the likes of Nielsen and Oracle. "It's the targeting and technology and the ability to show the right ads to the right person," says Sandberg, "But the creativity, the pitch, and the post, [are also] so important. It's creativity with technology." (Notably, Facebook's new measurement partnerships were revealed a day before the company went public about miscalculations in the way it promoted its video metrics.)

Mobile Offers The Bridge Between Physical And Digital

Last year, Facebook announced a "dynamic ads" product, which lets marketers better target people who frequently shop on their mobile devices. This week, the company went a step further and added the ability for businesses to display products based on their availability in nearby stores. "The most important thing is the role that we want to play in driving our partners' and advertisers' core business," says Sandberg. "We want to help them move products off shelves." Sandberg cites Bud Light's recent "My Team" campaign, which advertised beer cans branded with a specific NFL team based on Facebook users' location. She says that campaign resulted in a 8.3x return on ad sales. With Facebook's new in-store availability initiative, brick-and-mortar retailers can display products with the same level of specificity. "It's combining the best of both worlds into a new world," Sandberg says.

From Reading Habits To The Power Of To-Do Lists: September's Top Leadership Stories

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This month's top stories may get you to pick up a book, train for a marathon, and give yourself a break about those incomplete to-do lists.

This month, we learned how even unfinished to-do lists may still have productivity perks, why one exec turns to extreme sports to stay grounded in the office, and what it might take to revamp the presidential debate format.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership in September 2016:

1. How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain (Whether Or Not You Finish Them)

The very act of planning can be a productivity booster all by itself. Here's a crash course in the psychology that makes writing (if not actually completing) to-do lists so powerful.

2. 7 Surprising Facts About Creativity, According To Science

Hitting upon great ideas in the shower might not just be a cliché. In their book Wired to Create, authors Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire write that that's happened to a whopping 72% of us. This month we got a closer look at why, and examined several other quirks tied to the science of creativity.

3. This CEO's Secret To Work-Life Balance? Ultra-Marathons

"I'm a believer in work/leisure balance," Hotwire president Henrik Kjellberg told Fast Company. "I think life can contain both." That might sound like a bland remark if you don't know what Kjellberg means by it on a personal level. The exec frequently travels to remote locales and runs grueling ultra-marathons—an activity he says keeps him focused and grounded at work.

4. You Don't Need To Be In Tech To Find High-Paying Part-Time Jobs

Not all part-time work is created equal, according to new data from FlexJobs. Here's a look at the fields and roles that earn the highest part-time pay—plus a few other key trends in the freelance economy right now.

5. Want To Be More Productive And Creative? Collaborate Less

A former designer at IDEO, Lisa Baird claims that some of the fields best known for their creative teams harbor an inconvenient secret: They collaborate less than you'd think. Sometimes, Baird writes, just one person with a broad skill set is more creative and productive than a team of people with narrower ones. Here's her take on how we went overboard with collaboration.

6. How To Make Presidential Debates Better Without Breaking Them

The conversation over whether moderators should fact-check debates may miss bigger problems with the format, which many voters don't find useful. So Fast Company asked the experts what it might take to reinvent debating for the modern age.

7. How Two Companies Hooked Customers On Products They Rarely Use

According to one expert, brands can still create consumer habits around commercial behaviors that don't happen all that frequently, like buying a car or taking out a mortgage. This month we learned how Y Combinator and Hallmark keep their respective customers engaged, even during the periods when they aren't building startups or buying Christmas ornaments.

8. These Startup Founders Swear By The ROI Of Reading

Sure, your third-grade teacher told you to read more, but you haven't been an 8-year-old for quite some time, right? Well, it turns out that reading really is the lifelong success habit it was billed as being way back then—just take it from these entrepreneurs.

9. 6 Habits Of Trustworthy Leaders

According to recent research, people tend to trust their own colleagues more than their companies' execs, a gap that may contribute to employee turnover. This month we explored what leaders can do to narrow it.

10. How Silicon Valley's Talent Wars Are Killing Its Nonprofits

The astronomical costs of staffing and overhead in the Bay Area are putting pressure on organizations least equipped to survive it: nonprofits. Here's a look at how the thriving tech ecosystem is crowding out the mission-based one.

3 Hidden Reasons Why You're Unsatisfied At Work

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Sometimes the source of your workplace frustration really is the job. Other times, it's staring at you in the mirror.

Ever notice how nine out of 10 people run cold when the subject turns to how someone's job is going? People who hate what they do struggle to respond without anger and contempt. Reporting to a horrible boss or being forced to do boring and mundane work all day, every day, are among the chief complaints. These are valid issues, but there's also something to be said for causing your own dissatisfaction at work.

For years you've been taught that if a job makes you unhappy, you should quit, because it's obviously your boss's fault or your coworkers' or your mom's. But what if you actually have more control over your happiness at work than you think?

I'd be willing to bet that you know at least one person who is a serial job hopper. He gets a job, finds an issue with said job, and before his work email is completely set up, he's already logged onto LinkedIn trying to find a new gig.

Yes, there are many valid reasons for wanting to leave a company—no one should be forced to stick it out in a hostile work environment. But if your main reasons always seem to be centered on the fact that your coworkers just don't "get" you or that you're bored (again) and not sure how to stay motivated, it's time to take a long, hard look at the person in the mirror and be honest about the root cause of your unhappiness: you.

It's not an easy task to see beyond your dissatisfaction to the ways you're contributing to the madness, but it's undoubtedly helpful. Here are three ways you may be sabotaging your own happiness on the job—and, because I want you to be happy, solutions for how to nip these practices in the bud.

1. You're Not Setting The Right Goals

Goals are what motivate us in every area of our lives. Whether you want to lose weight, learn to cook, or get a promotion, the first step is to get really clear on what you want to accomplish and why. The key here, though, is that it's not enough to just set goals for the sake of doing so. In order to be successful, you have to make sure you're setting the right goals.

Just because your colleague wants to become the supervisor of the department or your best friend wants to take on a huge client at her company, it doesn't mean that these need to be your aspirations as well. If you're chasing something you don't genuinely want in the first place, or worse, if you have nothing to work toward at all, it's only a matter of time before you lose your motivation and it becomes an exercise in willpower and positive self-talk to make it into the office every day.

The first question to ask yourself is: Where do I want to be in the next one to five years, professionally? If this one doesn't get anything turning in your head, instead ask yourself what makes you feel fulfilled professionally. Once you have that list, you can start plotting out your path on how you'll get from where you are now to a job that hits as many bullets on that list as possible (aka, a five-year plan).

2. You're Not Building Your Following At Work

Growing your "followers" isn't something that should be relegated to social media. When I think back to the best work environments I've been in over the years, it's clear they were on teams where I felt supported—not only by my boss, but also by my colleagues. Having a group of people who encourage you to be your best, who care about your well-being, and who provide a good laugh every now and then goes a long way in making your job satisfying.

Many people complain about working in an unfriendly environment, but never stop to think about how they're contributing to this dynamic. In order to develop a community of allies at work, you need to be likable and a team player. You've got to show up as someone who is worthy of support and collaboration by also being supportive and collaborative with others.

It won't be something that comes without a little bit of work, but anyone can tell you that working around people you actually like (and who like you back) is one of the most crucial aspects of work happiness. Why not volunteer to help your colleague run point on the big project due next month when she asks for any takers? Or challenge yourself to go to lunch with a different coworker at least once a month to get to know something more than how he signs off on emails.

3. You're Not Being Your Authentic Self

Above all else, one of the major ways people sabotage their own happiness at work is by not keeping it real with themselves. Any time you're doing, saying, or acting in a way that isn't aligned with the real you, you'll naturally feel uncomfortable. The fix may seem easy—just be yourself—but in a lot of cases, it's not that simple to carry out.

Certain workplaces encourage you to communicate, act, and dress a certain way so that you fit in and avoid rocking the carefully crafted boat. It can be daunting to think about breaking away from the status quo. And yet, think about what you stand to lose if you don't. Most people who are unhappy at work immediately see their perspectives shift as soon as they start to bring their real selves to the office each day.

There's always a way to infuse who you really are into everything you do at work—whether it's by not being afraid to give your honest opinion, standing up for yourself when needed, or even just decorating your desk—without being unprofessional. Think about who you are outside the office and who you are when you're there. Of course you can't always use the same language or dress the same in both places, but who you are—at your core—shouldn't be that different.

Work is a fact of life for most people. This is why the goal should be to make it as enjoyable as possible. After all, we spend more time sitting at our desks than we do anywhere else, and it would be disappointing if you spent all that time unhappy. I know it's easier said than done (especially when you're buried under feelings of aggression and resentment), but if you can take a moment to stop complaining and instead consider that it may just be you—not your position—that needs to change, you could be well on your way to liking your job.


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

Four Hard-Won Lessons From My Early Years As An Entrepreneur

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Use this serial entrepreneur's four biggest mistakes to help you up the learning curve as a first-time startup founder.

When I started out as an entrepreneur, I made plenty of decisions without knowing what the outcome might be. I still do. But back then, I didn't have the same level of experience to guide me. Looking back, these were four of the toughest but most critical lessons I learned during those first few years when the learning curve was the steepest.

1. Winning A Large Sum Of Money Doesn't Guarantee Success

A huge chunk of change can actually put you right down at the bottom again if you don't manage it properly.

When I sold my first company, I made what I thought to be a small fortune. True success, it seemed, had finally arrived. Little did I know that this money would actually be the start of a string of problems that led me to end up with less cash than I'd had before I even started the business. Because I misunderstood what had led to those initial earnings, I wasn't able to manage them appropriately. That meant I didn't put them into a new business that I could actually go on to grow.

Looking back now, I should've worked with a mentor or money manager to determine how best to save and use that revenue as a springboard to make even more. Sometimes you've got to lose what you've got in order to know what it was really worth.

2. Never Fear Asking For Help

Being new to internet marketing, I was afraid to ask anyone for assistance because I saw it as a sign of weakness or worried it might compromise the personal brand I was trying to build.

This was a mistake. I realized only much later that it took me a lot longer to get up and running because I didn't go out and get the contacts that could help me make short work of some key steps. Instead, I chose to reinvent the wheel—and paid the price. It would've saved money and ramped up profitability more quickly had I just reached out for help.

Many entrepreneurs know they should find mentors or advisers that can guide them, but they're too slow to do it. There are lots of experienced people who can help walk you through the process of navigating a new industry and building a business from the ground up.

3. It Doesn't Have To Be Perfect Before You Release It

Like many startup founders, I've always been a perfectionist, so I spent way too much time on my first product than I needed to. Later on, I realized I'd wasted a lot of time and money again, plus lost the opportunity to start making money sooner. I had no idea that people don't mind if a product isn't perfect—or that getting their feedback is how you learn how to make it better.

In reality, you only need to have enough of the product available to help your customers with a problem or issue they're having. That's a lower bar to clear than many entrepreneurs set themselves for a product launch. Ideally, when you get the product or service out there, you can beat any possible competitors to market, and that's ultimately much more valuable than a "perfect" release.

With my subsequent startups, I've rolled out my product and then tweaked it later—after hooking customers with the initial product that gave them just enough to start seeing benefits. Later on, the other enhancements were just the cherry on top, but by that point we'd already figured out we could give our customers something they really wanted and turn our attention to doing it even better. Listening to their needs actually cemented those relationships and helped attract new users.

4. Don't Stay In A Business Niche Because It's What You Know

Early on, it felt easy to stay just in internet marketing because it's where I got my start and had become my comfort zone. The only problem was that it only would only take me so far as an entrepreneur.

When I realized that there was limited growth, it dawned on me that I could take what I knew from that field and apply it to any other industry that interested me. Once I did that, I really started making money—because I'd taken away the barriers I'd set up for myself by thinking I should just stick with what was familiar.

There's something to be said for domain expertise, but it can limit you, especially as startup founder. I didn't know much about online invoicing and business payments before I started exploring that space, but I studied the industry and looked for where I could make a difference. Then, I started using everything I knew about internet marketing to grow my business in that industry.

It doesn't require glossing over their differences to realize that in most industries, the same fundamental rules apply for growing and running a business. It hit me much later that I'd stayed too long in my comfort zone and could have launched into multiple industries sooner if I had just known that was possible. The truth is that you can probably bridge business niches even if you start out with a limited knowledge of those areas.

In hindsight, there were more than just these four things I could've done differently, but I learned the most from these experiences—enough to implement these lessons in all the ventures I've pursued since my first startup. And hopefully, they can help you save a ton of money up front and start succeeding much sooner than I did.

He's With Her: Why Prabal Gurung And The Fashion Industry Support Hillary Clinton

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We spoke with the Nepalese designer about creating a T-shirt for the Clinton campaign and why she's got his vote.

At the start of New York Fashion Week, the most talked-about event wasn't the unveiling of a new collection: It was a Hillary Clinton fundraiser.

Top American designers including Tory Burch, Diane von Furstenberg, and Joseph Altuzarra had come out to show their support for the presidential nominee. Many of them had already created T-shirts for Hillary Clinton's Made for History series that were for sale on her campaign website. But it was Prabal Gurung, a 37-year-old Nepalese designer, who had created the most popular design on the site. It had sold out within days.

Prabal Gurung

Gurung launched his brand in 2009. Since then, he's made a name for himself designing clothes favored by some of the world's most powerful women. Queen Rania of Jordan recently wore one of his suits to a United Nations Summit. He's dressed Oprah Winfrey for red carpet events, Michelle Obama for state dinners, and Amal Clooney for important court battles.

And as he explains in this exclusive Fast Company interview, Hillary Clinton embodies the kind of woman he is designing for. He's become a passionate and vocal advocate of hers in the fashion community. After many years in the U.S., Gurung recently became a U.S. citizen, and he explains that the 2016 election is the first time he will be able to vote for a president, so he is taking the responsibility seriously. Here, he explains why he's with her.

You describe yourself as a feminist. What do you mean by that?

I call myself a feminist simply because I believe that women are the biggest path to freedom for any kind of equality in the world. They represent the freedom to choose your destiny. There are many parts of the world where women don't have that right: Their lives are chosen for them. So it almost does not matter to me whether a woman is a CEO or a stay-at-home mom, as long as what they're doing is living out their principles. I come from a family where a single mother raised us, and she wanted to break her own glass ceilings. She always fought for equality. So I understand the struggle.

Tell us about how you first met Hillary Clinton.

I met her a while back at Diane von Furstenburg's book signing party [in 2014]. Hillary was there, walking around. I introduced myself and she said she knew me because her daughter wears my stuff. I was blown away. I took that moment to say to her, "We're waiting for you to run."

That whole experience made my day. When I left Nepal and came to New York knowing no one, I came to pursue my passion for design. I had all these big dreams, perhaps what people might even call impossible dreams. Politics is something I've always been interested in as well, but I never thought I would be part of the political process. It was an amazing moment for me. But dressing the First Lady or making T-shirts for Hillary Clinton: These are things you can't plan.

How did you decide to create a T-shirt for her campaign?

Cut to a few months later and she was running for president. I wanted to do something. I had been in touch with her team and they asked me to contribute to the Made for History T-shirt collection. It was an honor. What I realized was that as a fashion designer, I had an audience and followers, and I wanted to make sure that I was using this platform for something good that is bigger than me.

Prabal Gurung's Hillary Clinton Made for History series shirt

Why do you support her candidacy?

I came to the United States from Nepal as a student, then I got a work visa. Eventually I got my green card and a year and a half ago, I became a citizen. That was an emotional moment. It's hard to explain it to someone who has not been through it. It's a process that doesn't happen overnight; I had to commit to becoming a U.S. citizen.

This is the first time that I am able to vote. The fact is that Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person to run for the presidency—she's more qualified than our current president and previous presidents.

People always say, "I wish she would smile more," or "I wish she was charming." I don't wish any of that. I want my president to do her job well. I'm absolutely charmed by her achievements and qualifications; that's enough for me. The president has an enormous responsibility not just for America, but for the fate of the world. I don't need soundbites; I need an able leader.

The second thing is that the fact that she happens to be a woman, which is not the most important thing for me. Clinton becoming president—we [in the U.S.] take it for granted. Around the world, especially in places where women's rights are constantly compromised and challenged, it is such a big message. I've dealt with women in my own family who have said things like, "A country like America has never had a woman president. What kind of changes can we hope to achieve?"

I have a foundation in Nepal that educates underprivileged girls. I am able to go back to this foundation and tell these girls, "You too can become this. No longer is your identity based on who you marry."

Unfortunately, the situation is that her opponent happens to be someone who is against what my reality is. I am a minority. I am an immigrant. He is against everything that I stand for. He's against everything that I am. Electing him would send the message that we, as a society, are okay with the world shifting in that direction. I decided that if I want change, I need to be a change agent. I need to go and vote. I need to be able to talk about it.

Are you using your platform to encourage your audience to vote for her?

Here's the thing. I don't want to force anyone to change their beliefs. I have a wide range of clients, some who believe in her and some who don't. I want to engage in a healthy conversation and a dialogue. All I can say is here are the reasons—as a person, as a designer, as an immigrant, and as a new citizen—that I believe in her. And these are the reasons I don't believe in him. But it is totally up to you to make your own decision.

You have really compelling reasons to support Hillary Clinton. Why do you think your peers in the fashion industry have been equally vocal about supporting her as well?

It's simple. A lot of us believe she is the most qualified one in the race. But also her beliefs and her values resonate with us.

In the fashion community, we are filled with minorities, whether it's a matter of race, sexual orientation, or gender. We understand what it means when someone is threatening or questioning our existence. We are very aware of it.

Why Spotify Should Totally Buy SoundCloud

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Rumored talks between the two services could lead to a mega-music platform that solves problems for both companies. And maybe artists, too.

It's rare to go a week in 2016 without some new development or rumor coming out of the streaming music industry. But seldom are these tidbits as interesting—or potentially consequential—as the news this week that Spotify is in "advanced talks" to acquire SoundCloud, according to the Financial Times.

The deal is by no means set in stone—Recode reports that it's "more talk and less action" at this point—but it would certainly make a ton of sense. Not only would it shake up the constantly shifting streaming market by combining two major players, but a Spotify-SoundCloud merger would solve some very significant problems for both companies. It could even have trickle-down benefits for fans and—believe it or not—musicians.

[Photo: Flickr user Garry Knight]

Such a deal would marry Spotify's industry-leading music subscription service (which has over 100 million total listeners, 40 million paying) with SoundCloud's massive, more social and uniquely artist-friendly service (which has 175 million monthly listeners and over 125 million tracks). The result could be a sort of mega-platform for music and audio, one that offers an unparalleled (except perhaps by YouTube) source of free, ad-supported music fastened to the most robust music subscription service out there.

Not only would it make for a big competitive advantage, but the pairing just makes sense: The two services are already quite complementary in terms of content and would fit together nicely if they were more tightly integrated. The companies also share a similar cultural DNA: They're both European startups founded by Swedish entrepreneurs, each with a smart, laser-fine focus on the intersection of music and innovation. Both have long been heavily involved in events like Music Hack Day, for instance. Although Spotify has grown much bigger than SoundCloud since both companies were founded about a decade ago, their roots remain remarkably analogous.

What Spotify Would Gain: Big Numbers, For Starters

If the rumors of an impending deal pan out, the timing could hardly be more ideal for Spotify: Apple Music, which racked up 17 million subscribers in its first 14 months, is quickly gaining steam, just as Spotify reportedly inches toward an IPO. Oh, and Pandora and Amazon are both expected to jump into the on-demand music space soon. Spotify may be the dominant music streaming service, but the threats are growing and, increasingly, coming from bigger, more deep-pocketed tech companies that can afford to run music services at a loss as they reap profits elsewhere. If there were ever a sensible time for Spotify to make a bold, preemptive strike, it would be now.

Some of the immediate gains for Spotify in this scenario are pretty obvious: Buying SoundCloud eliminates a competitor (albeit a tiny one in terms of the subscription business, which SoundCloud just entered in March), while giving Spotify a ton of new content and millions of new listeners. But while bigger numbers look good on an IPO filing, these numbers come with a few caveats. For one thing, Spotify and SoundCloud measure their audiences differently. SoundCloud's 175 million monthly listeners is not a comparable metric to the registered users and paying subscribers that Spotify counts. That's because to use Spotify, you have to sign up. But anyone can listen to SoundCloud tracks, which are embedded all over music blogs and the web at large. Plus there's also already an unknown amount of crossover between SoundCloud and Spotify's listeners, so it's hard to gauge how much Spotify's audience would actually grow with a SoundCloud acquisition.

Either way, though, Spotify would be gaining many millions of new listeners. And while those are predominantly the sort of non-paying listeners that so deeply frustrate the music industry, nabbing them gives Spotify two opportunities: First, it could bolster its free, ad-supported service with millions of additional listeners (using its advertising salesforce and infrastructure—which are vastly more mature than SoundCloud's—to wring more revenue out of it). More important, Spotify would have a whole new army of listeners that it could try to lure to its premium subscription tier. Even a modest percentage of converts could give Spotify a sizable boost in paying subscribers at a time when it could really use it.

The Ultimate Music Streaming Mega-Platform

By buying SoundCloud, Spotify could create something that no rival could emulate: a monster catalog that covers an entire universe of music from undiscovered garage bands to the biggest stars in the world.

Right now, Spotify has roughly the same catalog that every other music subscription service offers (with a few famous exceptions like Prince and Neil Young, and putting aside the contentious issue of exclusive album debuts). Buying SoundCloud would mean buying something that nobody else has: SoundCloud's massive library of music and other audio content. It's a unique asset: SoundCloud's collection of music and audio is an entirely organic behemoth that was built by its community of users over the course of several years. Not even Apple, with its mountains of cash, could easily replicate it.

Of course, that trove of user-uploaded sound includes a significant amount of—let's be frank here—total garbage: bedroom demos, mediocre Justin Bieber covers, shoddy recordings of street musicians, you name it. There's also the hairy issue of piracy and takedown notices that comes with running a site that allows people to upload content. Spotify gets its music from record labels and third-party distributors, so this would be new territory for the company.

But make no mistake about it: SoundCloud features a ton of music that people want to hear, much of which they can't get anywhere else. This includes everything from up-and-coming indie dream pop bands and electronic musicians (for whom free, self-serve music distribution tools like SoundCloud and Bandcamp are priceless) to stars like Kanye West, Chance the Rapper, Skrillex, and many others who actually use the platform to upload new tracks—sometimes early or exclusively—and interact with fans in a way that other streaming services don't quite allow.

Indeed, so much of the value of SoundCloud has less to do with track numbers and listener metrics and more to do with something less measurable: street cred. For an online music service, SoundCloud enjoys a rare sort of affinity among artists who tend to see it more as a hands-on distribution and promotion tool rather than a totally new model with unclear motives and consequences. Spotify, on the other hand, has spent years at the center of a debate about the economics of streaming and royalty payouts and what the industry's shift toward streaming—now in full swing—means for music's creators themselves.

Spotify has slowly gotten better at selling its virtues to artists, even as the basic economics of streaming remain questionable for smaller and middle-class musicians. The company has started aggressively building out its artist relations efforts, most recently by hiring former Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter, in the hopes of winning over the hearts and minds of more artists as streaming explodes. They've also added new features for artists like concert listings and the ability to sell merchandise within Spotify (through a third party partner site). The popularity of Spotify's in-house playlists and Discover Weekly are starting to have a powerful trickle-down effect for some artists too. Still, the company has a lot of work to do in this department. Owning a musician-empowering platform like SoundCloud could make Spotify's pitch to the artist community a bit more compelling, especially if swiftly puts its resources to use turning SoundCloud into an even more artist-friendly platform.

SoundCloud is also a huge source of podcasts, which is something Spotify has been trying to get into more and more. SoundCloud has been at the podcast-hosting game longer, so it's a bit more established than Spotify's comparatively new offerings. Merging their content and resources on the podcasting front could make for a more compelling podcast discovery and listening experience as the podcasting industry continues to come of age.

[Photo: Flickr user frankieleon]

A Music Data Powerhouse To Rival Pandora—And Stun Apple

Whatever other effects the internet may have on music, one of the most important ones is the explosion of data. We now know more about listener behavior, how money flows, the complex connections among artists, genres, and individual songs, and so much more. It's a huge deal and it's going to be a major strategic asset as the music industry evolves. Between Spotify and SoundCloud, there's an absolute shitload of data.

Spotify already knows an incredible amount about how we listen to music and the complex inner-workings of its already vast universe of songs and artists. Its 2014 acquisition of the Echo Nest—easily one of the smartest deals made in streaming music in years—helped supercharge Spotify's data science capabilities exponentially. Recent data-powered curation features like Discover Weekly, Fresh Finds, Release Radar and Daily Mix merely scratch the surface of what Spotify's monstrous data machine is capable of.

SoundCloud doesn't have anything close to this data-crunching sophistication, but it does have something extremely valuable: billions of streams. In fact, some of Spotify's music-tracking and data-driven curation projects are limited by a blind spot when it comes to smaller, up-and-coming artists that simply haven't made their way to Spotify yet. Something like Fresh Finds, which uses some pretty sophisticated web-crawling and data sorcery to spot songs that are about to break—would be considerably more accurate and useful if Spotify could mine a source like SoundCloud, where so much of the brand new, about-to-blow-up stuff lands first.

And that's just the beginning of what's possible. Plugging SoundCloud's mountainous audio catalog and listening activity data into its virtual brain would give Spotify a much more comprehensive view of online listening activity in general, much more so than any other single streaming service. The quest for this sort of birds-eye-view of online listening is exactly why Pandora acquired Next Big Sound last year (notably, SoundCloud pulled its data from Next Big Sound shortly after the acquisition). Pandora's already massive trove of listening data—powered by 10 years of internet radio streaming from tens of millions of people—is poised to get even smarter if its upcoming on-demand Spotify competitor manages to take off and expose deeper insights into people's music preferences.

Such a scenario would leave Apple Music with a bit of catching up to do in the data department. Although Apple has years of user intelligence from operating iTunes, Apple Music itself is still young and learning about its small but growing audience. Once its data becomes more robust, it's anybody's guess how Apple would put it to use. The service is notoriously shy about sharing data with partners, labels, and artists. And on the consumer side, Apple Music is eschewing algorithm-fueled functionality in favor of human-curated playlists and terrestrial-style radio.

What SoundCloud Gets (A Lifeline, Mostly)

SoundCloud may be a popular destination for new music—and even one that many artists love—but that doesn't make it a business. For years, the company has struggled to come up with a viable business model. Prior attempts included the addition of advertising and paid "pro" accounts for creators, neither of which took off in any substantial way. Once SoundCloud settled on the idea of launching a paid, on-demand subscription service, the process was reportedly stalled by sluggish negotiations with the labels and some internal turmoil.

After finally buttoning up all the necessary licensing deals with labels and rights holders—including some unique arrangements that allowed SoundCloud to legitimize some of its "derivative" content like remixes, DJ sets, and cover songs—the company announced SoundCloud Go in March 2016. By then, the subscription market was well-dominated by a quickly growing Spotify, with players like Google, Apple, Deezer, and Tidal angling for subscribers as well. SoundCloud Go didn't offer much to paying subscribers that they couldn't get in more polished form elsewhere. Indeed, the service has seen a downward trend in new signups since April, according to data from marketing analytics firm Jumpshot. Earlier this month, SoundCloud announced a promotion offering three months of SoundCloud Go for 99 cents to try and jump start subscription growth.

An acquisition by Spotify would relieve this pressure to try and make yet another subscription service work and allow SoundCloud to focus its resources elsewhere, supercharged by the influx of additional resources that a parent company like Spotify could offer in just about every domain of the operation: design, product development, data science, artist relations and more.

Of course, a SoundCloud-Spotify hybrid wouldn't solve the broader economic questions around streaming. It's still a tricky business from which none of these companies are making a consistent profit, even as many artists keep crossing their fingers for a sustainable future. But eventually, the theory goes, the economic viability of streaming music will come as the model truly scales. We'll see about that. In the meantime, companies like Spotify will need to do everything they can to innovate, reel in subscribers, and keep the growing competition at bay. Snatching up SoundCloud wouldn't be a bad start.


How To Trick Your Brain To Slow Down Time

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You may not be able to warp space-time, but you can use these two psychological processes to slow your perception of time.

"Where did the time go?" is a question we often ask ourselves. The average life span in the U.S. is 79 years, but some people do a lot more living than others while they're above ground—not in physical terms, of course, but in their minds.

Famously, time flies when you're having fun. And it slows way down during moments of extreme experience. Movies love to capture the way everything goes into slow motion during a life-threatening event, but that isn't just a visual metaphor. Tennis great John McEnroe once described that phenomenon this way: "Things slow down, the ball seems a lot bigger, and you feel like you have more time."

If our experience of time passing were reliable, we wouldn't need to check our clocks and watches so often. Subjective time is anything but steady, which opens up an opportunity for us to manipulate it as we like—at least up to a point. Here's a look at how to adjust two of the key factors that researchers have found influence our experience of time: attention and emotional arousal.

Pay Closer Attention

Simply put, time slows down when you attend to more things. In one study, researchers found that when our attention shifts onto something novel, time appears to tick by more slowly. Think of the last time you walked somewhere you'd never been. Everything was new, and you probably spent a lot more time focusing on and thinking about all your new surroundings. Then on the way back, it seemed to go so much faster.

In that case, your attention shifting around was due to something novel you came across, driven by the situation. Obviously, there's no way to walk down that same street for the first time a second time. But there may be a different way of paying closer attention that you have some control over: We can notice more of what's happening at any moment by simply being more mindful. Mindfulness meditation, which is geared to helping people more fully attend to aspects of the present moment,has been shown to slow down perceived time.

On the flip side, if you're lost in just one task, time just whizzes by. Maybe it's the weekend and you're finally painting the baby's room or straightening up the house, and before you know it Sunday is over. When we focus on just one thing and are largely unaware of anything else, that speeds time up. Neuroscientists have even shown that the more engaged our attention is, the faster we perceive time moving.

So in order to slow down or speed up your sense of time passing, one of the most effective levers to pull (in either direction) is how much and what kind of attention to you pay to a given experience.

Get Amped Up

A second lever is what psychologists call "emotional arousal." When our emotions are highly engaged and the blood starts pumping, we may be able to experience more time.

For example, when researchers showed people angry or happy faces (both are emotionally arousing), people thought they saw the faces for longer than when they saw faces that didn't display emotion. Additionally, participants' brain scans showed a different pattern of activity in the parts of the brain thought to be involved in subjective time perception. This helps explain why athletes like McEnroe may feel time slow down during emotional, high-stakes competitions.

One study took this to a more extreme level and put participants into freefall, to scare the bejesus out of them. The goal was to see whether being terrified reliably slows down time. Sure enough, it did—by 36%, in fact. While participants were falling through the air, they were no better at actually seeing things in slow motion. But their recollection of the fall was that it took longer than it actually did. This isn't to say that if you want to experience time move slowly you need to go skydiving. But it does point to the emotional triggers that may lead to that impression.

So if you want to experience more time in the time you actually have, expose yourself to novel things and be more mindful of what's going on. If you can train your brain to become more conscious of what's around you, you'll likely get to have more life experiences overall. Or you could just get yourself amped up from time to time: Whether that's through positive (excitement) or negative (anger) emotions or something in between, adding more emotional arousal to your experiences may also help you feel like there was more time than there actually was.

As for the axiom that time flies when you're having fun, it turns out that link is even stronger than you may think. One study found that, all else being equal, we think we had more fun if we thought time flew by. So slow down time at your own risk. There are times when you may want to experience more of life or think more deeply about all the things you want to give your attention to. Other times, you just want to have fun.

3 Ways I Had To Adapt My Management Style For An Open Office

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Open offices don't compel workers to adjust their habits, they also pressure managers to change their tack.

Love them or hate them, open floorplans aren't going anywhere soon. And while the research is still coming in on whether office design directly impacts productivity, managers are still faced with redesigning their attitudes in order to keep their teams working effectively, not just their architecture.

I found this out firsthand when my agency moved from its traditional office layout in Philadelphia's famous Wanamaker Building to our current address a few blocks from City Hall, with high ceilings, great views, and zero private offices—not even for myself. Here's how I've learned to switch up my management style to accommodate our new digs.

1. Don't Be The Noise Police

It can be hard at first to think of noise as a design element, not a distraction. And it took me a while to pick up on this. Our office isn't constantly noisy, though. The conversation comes in waves. One minute everyone will have their heads down, fiercely plugging away on their projects, and the next there will be a lively debate about whether a hot dog should be considered a sandwich. It's just part of the creative process.

But even so, there's often a strong impulse to stand up and say, "Hey everyone, can you keep it down?" It's important to resist that impulse. That type of noise policing risks squandering the psychological safety that's been shown to build strong teams. Even if you say it once, it can create a chilling effect on the type of collaboration leaders should be encouraging.

I've also had to train myself to understand that not all casual conversation is necessarily unproductive. We've found that impromptu brainstorms and mini focus groups yield answers and solutions faster than pulling everyone away from their desks to hold a meeting for the same purpose. It can be incredibly efficient to stand up and say, "What does everyone think of this?"

Often, the spontaneity and informality that comes from working out in the open is a great way to show that everyone's ideas count.

2. Give Employees Space

According to some experts, some of the best ideas come from a combination of groupthink and solitary focus. It may seem obvious, but the challenge for leaders is to resist dictating the times and length of each type of thinking and to instead let people to collaborate on their own terms.

Sometimes, employees in an open office feel bound to their desks, in plain view of all their colleagues. Managers need to encourage people to make use of additional couches, lounge chairs, high-top tables, or whatever other spaces you've created around the office (and by the way, you need those) in order to head off any perceived cultural norm to the contrary. At first, we found that new employees saw that veteran employees weren't taking time to retreat into those more private areas, so they didn't want to look weird by doing the same.

It's important to let your team know that this isn't kindergarten—you won't get yelled at if you don't sit in your assigned seats. You can do that either explicitly or more indirectly, like organizing meetings in your office's less central spaces. Either way, make it clear that what's important is the quality of the work, not where it's done.

3. Make Time For Get-Togethers

In office-space physics, one inch equals a mile. Even the smallest distance—physical, political, or perceptual—can create "walls" in open spaces.

A year ago, we extended our office, essentially putting half our team on the east side of our building, and the other on the west side, with meeting spaces in the middle. Despite being only a short walk from each other, we found that people on either side would go days without seeing each other. All of a sudden, it was like everyone's institutional knowledge was halved because we weren't learning from each other's work anymore.

But I didn't realize this disconnect was forming until my team members alerted me. As CEO, I was aware of all our clients and the great work we were doing, but most employees didn't have that broad perspective on the enterprise—they were down in the trenches. I took it for granted that everyone was on the same page about our progress as an agency, but learned that even just subtle changes can completely change the flow of information.

Soon after I caught on, I began holding regular team get-togethers, even when that might've seemed pointless since we were all working in the same open space. We now have a weekly staff breakfast where we informally talk about everything we're working on, successes and challenges we've seen lately, and just the general direction of the firm. You'd be surprised how much great work you don't even know is happening all around you, even though it seems like you're hearing about it all the time.

Ultimately, I've learned, the key for leaders is to keep an open mind, not just an open office.


Hugh Braithwaite is the founder and president of Braithwaite Communications, an independent marketing and branding firm based in Philadelphia. An expert on crisis communications and corporate storytelling, he is also a guest lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

How To Maximize Your Bargaining Power As An Entry-Level Jobseeker

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You may have more bargaining power to negotiate an entry-level salary than you might think.

When you're fresh out of college or early in your career, negotiating your first salary can feel like you're trying to hit a moving target—blindfolded. First, you don't have any personal salary history to start from. Second, most companies don't publish their employees' salary information. And, third, odds are, none of your college courses covered what you can expect to earn at your first job.

Basically, you have none of the advantages of seasoned workers, but all of the insecurities of a new job seeker.

Don't sweat it. Use this step-by-step guide to determine how much you should get paid. Follow these moves and you may even squeeze out a slightly higher paycheck than what you expected.

Find Your Baseline

There's no magic formula that will give you the perfect number, but you can start with online resources. Make sure to look at least three websites, since research methods can vary, says Lewis Lin, author of Five Minutes to a Higher Salary: Over 60 Brilliant Salary Negotiation Scripts for Getting More. Try Payscale.com, Salary.com, and SalaryExpert.com—as well as Monster's salary calculator. Enter the job title or field and the level you'll be starting at, and you'll be given a rough idea.

Also check out the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Occupational Outlook Handbook, which includes median pay estimates for hundreds of jobs. You may need to adjust your salary expectations based on where you live. For example, BLS data shows that a registered nurse in New York earns on average salary of $78,950, compared to $56,980 in Mississippi, which has a lower cost-of-living index.

Talk To The Right People

Online research is a good first step, but the best way to get salary information about a particular company or industry is to go right to the source. That means setting up informational interviews with hiring managers and employees to get a better sense of what entry-level workers get paid.

You want to find out how much junior hires get paid and how hiring managers determine compensation. For example, ask, "Can you help me understand why that's the salary range?"

Granted, "Some people feel cagey sharing internal compensation information," says Lin. If that's the case, ask the employee to talk generally about what entry-level workers earn in the field.

Embed Yourself In The Industry

Continue your fact-finding mission by joining professional associations. "Oftentimes, industry groups have their own data that shows what workers in that profession make," says Phyllis Hartman, a national panelist for the Society for Human Resource Management. You'll also benefit by making valuable connections with people who can potentially help you get a job.

Ideally you'll find a local, low-cost association that's specific to your industry; general networking groups likely won't give you much insight into salary information for your field. Still on a college student's budget? Look for professional groups with no membership fees on MeetUp.com.

Leverage Your Research

You've done the legwork, but what good is having all this salary intel if you don't know how to use it?

Let's fast-forward to the point where you've aced the interview process and received a job offer. (Nice work!) Even if you've been offered a good salary, you should ask for more—your future earning potential depends on it. Sadly, only 38% of new college graduates surveyed by NerdWallet said they negotiated with their employers upon receiving a job offer.

Your salary research can be a great bargaining chip, says Robin Pinkley, co-author of Get Paid What You're Worth: The Expert Negotiators' Guide to Salary and Compensation. Pinkley recommends requesting a specific dollar amount rather than a range. Then, delicately present your research to the hiring manager. Lead with: "I really appreciate the offer. I know you probably already have this information, but I wanted to show you what I'm basing my number on."

"If you support your [salary] request with good evidence, bring a strong set of skills and the money is available, you'll get the higher salary," says Pinkley.

Don't Only Focus On Salary

If there's no room in the budget for the hiring manager to boost your salary, look for other ways to sweeten your compensation package. For example, 76% of employers offer sign-on bonus programs, according to a July WorldAtWork report. Although a sign-on bonus is a one-off pay boost, it can help you make up for taking a lower salary.

While you're negotiating, you could also ask for non-financial perks, says Lin, such as more vacation time or having the option to telecommute one day a week. Indeed, eight in 10 employers offer some form of flexible work, a recent Trends in Workplace Flexibility survey found.


This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.

Take These Three Steps At The First Sign That Layoffs Are Coming

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A layoff isn't necessarily a catastrophe, especially if you can snap into action at the first signs that your job may be in trouble.

When someone from HR tapped me on the shoulder and invited me to join her for a private conversation, I knew what was coming. By the time I had my, "We think you're great, but you need to exit the premises right now," conversation, several former colleagues had already had the talk. In fact, two rounds of layoffs had preceded mine within the past 18 months or so.

The first one didn't affect my team directly. That meant it was relatively easy to ignore it and still spend the majority of my allotted stress-about-my-career-time reading studies stating that sitting at a desk all day was shaving years off my life.

The second round hit closer to home. Suddenly my solid job didn't seem so solid. I responded by firing off a few applications for positions that looked okay, did a few interviews that went okay, and before long, settled back into the same old routine of doing my job.

This was a mistake. And I don't mean I should've launched a massive job search at this point, because I truly believe getting laid off led me to make career choices that I never would've made otherwise. (And I'm certainly not the only person who feels that way.) But I do know that taking a few steps during this in-between time would've made that first unemployed week far less frightening.

So if you're currently employed at an organization that feels a little shakier than you'd like it to feel (for the record, I like my companies to feel 0% shaky), I'd suggest taking these three simple steps.

1. Start Warming Up The Old Network

You know what's really un-fun after losing your job (besides having to think about what sad half-eaten stale snacks the person packing up your desk is finding in your drawer)? Sending awkward, "I just got laid off, know any openings?" emails to people you haven't spoken to in a while.

You know what's less awkward? Sending notes to those same people sans the scent of desperation.

For example, I wish I'd sent a message like this to a few old colleagues after the first round of layoffs at my company:

Hi,

How are you doing? That campaign you shared on LinkedIn last week looked really awesome. But you always were the graphics wizard at the office. I'm starting to think about making a job move and I'd love to grab a drink and talk about your experience working at Company X.

I'm free most nights after 7 p.m., let me know if any work for you in the next few weeks or two.

Looking forward to catching up,
Jenni

Meeting for coffees while you're still employed doesn't just make it less awkward to send out follow-up emails if you do actually lose your job. But it also means your conversation won't just be a pity party full of inspirational quotes that leave you both repeating tired mantras about silver linings and turning lemons into lemonade. Instead, you'll remind people why you're so awesome. That way, if the worst happens, they'll be far more eager to help you out in the way of leads and references.

2. Update Your Resume And LinkedIn Profile

Ugh, I know. You were totally hoping that I wouldn't say "resume." But trust me when I say that spending a leisurely Saturday afternoon bringing yours up to speed is far less stressful than doing it in a hurry after losing your job because your cousin just sent you an opening that's filling up so fast.

Plus, it's much easier to remember your impressive accomplishments and quantify your bullet points when you have access to your files and inbox. Because it's actually really hard to figure out exactly how many users you helped the website acquire when you can't see the internal company spreadsheet that lays out the month-to-month growth oh-so-nicely.

Not to mention, you'll be less likely to come up with bullet points like "Grew Facebook by 4 billion users, not that those selfish idiots appreciated it" if you're in a good place mentally.

3. Create A Budget

First, I recommended you update your resume, then I asked you to create a budget. I know—I'm the worst. But hear me out. When you go from making any amount of money to none overnight, it's really (really!) scary. And even if you have emergency savings for times just like this, it's still a little nerve-wracking to actually start transferring those funds out. (Trust me, the moment when you have to do this, you'll realize that you always assumed "emergency fund" was just a shorter way to say, "My life is together because I have an emergency fund, so I'll never have to touch this.")

Here's what I suggest: Figure out how you spend your money each month. That's it. Right now, you don't need to change a thing when it comes to your spending habits. And tell you what, you can figure this out in any which way you like. Personally, I love Mint, but there are lots of budgeting apps out there. And if you don't trust apps with your confidential information, people also swear by Excel.

Why do you need to do this? Because if you do find yourself unemployed, you're going to very quickly need to make changes to your lifestyle. And it'll be far easier (and therefore, way less anxiety-provoking) if you can determine right away what can be cut out. While the dinners and the drinks are obvious, it's often the small things that will surprise you when you see how you spend your budget.

I waited until the very end to tell you the best part of taking these three steps. And it's the fact that even if you never get laid off, they'll only benefit you. Unless, of course, you've met the one person in the world who trudges around town, ruing that Saturday she spent updating her resume.


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

How To Manage Your Anxiety During Tough Times At Work

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In some situations—a round of layoffs, a bad performance review—it's normal to worry, as long as you can still think strategically.

Of all the things that can make you worry at work, some of the worst are the problems you create. This is especially true when negative things happen and you find yourself waiting for them to happen again. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Say you've been in an organization that's been through a lot of change. Then one day, unexpectedly, you get laid off. You have no idea what you did to deserve it—you were sure you'd be in the group of people the company kept. You go into your next job, holding your breath, waiting for the axe to fall again.

Or perhaps you've had a difficult manager who never really supported or praised your hard work and efforts. Maybe she even called out your mistakes in front of other team members or taunted you in meetings when she was having a bad day. Now, you hear your manager and colleagues laughing in the next room, and you're convinced they're making fun of something you said.

Then there's the supervisor who looks annoyed every time you request time off or ask to leave early for a doctor's appointment. In your next job, you're literally afraid to use your vacation days for fear of your boss's uncharitable reaction.

This kind of thinking can be hard to escape. And it can be especially troublesome when you can't rid yourself of the memories from previous unpleasant work environments. Remembering a toxic office culture (or boss) may leave you feeling vulnerable even after you've moved on. You can't quite shake the idea that things are different, better now, and so you constantly question the motives of your colleagues.

If you're generally a worrier or anxious, your paranoia is likely to be even worse. Low self-esteem is another culprit, making it hard for you to accept the pleasant nature of your current workplace at face value.

When suspicion, fear, and persistent worst-case scenario thinking threaten to negatively impact the quality of your work life, your only response is to ditch the paranoia once and for all. These four tips will help.

1. Notice The Thoughts You're Having

The first step in changing any behavior is to realize that it's happening. For the next week or so, notice each time you harbor a paranoid thought. Keep a journal to note how often these thoughts are occurring, and try to get to the bottom of what they're really about.

Simply documenting your thoughts can be one way to release the hold they have over you. Once you have an idea of how much this anxious thinking has invaded your mind-set, you can start to do something about it.

2. Ask Yourself, "Is This A Fact?"

Say you're up for a promotion, and you're suspicious of a colleague in another department who's participating in the hiring decision. He doesn't respond to an email you sent him. Your first thought is, "Oh my gosh, I knew he was blocking me for the promotion I want. Now he's cutting off communication because he doesn't want to show his hand."

Instead of going down that path, stop and ask yourself, "Is that really true? Is that a fact, or is that a story I'm creating to explain a situation?" The reality is you don't know why your colleague didn't answer your email. You just know that he didn't. You have no other facts. And staying close to the facts will keep your stress at bay and help you from spinning a tall tale.

3. Ask Yourself, "What If The Opposite Were True?"

When paranoid thinking creeps into your work life, you tend to look for evidence to prove your thinking right. It's a cognitive function called "confirmation bias." When you have a belief, for example, that someone is trying to keep you from getting promoted, you look for evidence that confirms that belief. In this case, you believe your colleague is blocking your promotion. When he doesn't respond to your email, you see that as evidence of your belief.

Instead of jumping to this conclusion, ask yourself, "What if the opposite were true?" What if he wasn't blocking your promotion? What other reasons could there be for not responding to you?

Probably plenty. Perhaps he's out of the office. Or is working on a hot deadline. Or is overwhelmed with email on this particular day. Or maybe his kid is sick and he was up all night and is really low energy today and not responding as usual. There are myriad reasons why anyone does—or doesn't do—something.

If you think about what other stories could be at play, you'll deflect attention from your paranoid thoughts and anxiety, and instead get curious about what the other explanations might be. And if you really want to know, you can just ask your colleague what's holding up the email, and if there's anything he needs you to clarify in order to get a response.

4. Be Proactive

You're terrified to request time off in your new job due to the disapproval you felt from your last manager. You're tiptoeing around the subject for fear of being shot down or being perceived as lazy.

Instead of asking for days off and running for cover, be proactive and clear the air. Ask your manager for her preferences ahead of time. Find out if she has any hesitations about when people take vacation, how much lead time she wants, and how to handle those inconvenient daytime dental appointments. By going this respectful route and finding out ahead of time what works best for your manager, you establish good communication about PTO and time away from your desk.

It's natural that upsetting events like layoffs or difficult managers can make you wary as you move forward. But becoming suspicious of future colleagues and managers will keep you from fitting in with your new team, and building relationships essential to your success. By using these strategies to acknowledge and counteract paranoid thinking, you're taking big steps to greatly improve the quality of your worklife.


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

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