How do you define work? I was at the Washington Workplace Summit last week when the lunchtime keynote speaker, Jeff Utecht, ended with a line that really stuck with me and sent me down a mental rabbit hole. “Leadership is not choosing one generation’s definition of work over another. It is creating a definition of…
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Is your to-do list stressing you out? Maybe it’s not even a full list yet. Maybe it’s just the thought of making one, sitting down and actually accounting for every project, every task, everything you said you’d do. Just the idea of it is exhausting. The problem likely has nothing to do with the tool…
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Your workday needs a palate cleanser between tasks. I had finished responding to emails. Closed all my apps and browser windows. Opened a doc. Time to write. And then I just sat there. Slumped back in my chair. It wasn’t writer’s block. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I had my coffee. I…
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This is a story about Hanlon’s Razor at work, and why it might be the most useful mental model you’ve never heard of. I was facilitating a team-building session last week. It was getting late in the day. People were getting tired. I asked participants to partner up with someone they hadn’t worked with earlier…
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You probably know this freezer. It lives in someone’s garage – your parents’, your grandparents’, your in-laws’. The light burned out sometime during a previous administration. It hasn’t been defrosted since the invention of electricity. And it’s packed floor to ceiling with food wrapped in foil. Every Thanksgiving, the leftovers go in there with the…
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Work feels far more complicated than it used to be. Navigating the incorporation of AI. Multiple generations in the workplace. Divisive politics. Upskilling, downskilling, reskilling. Whenever something starts to feel overly complex I go back to Rule #1: When things seem overly complicated, they probably are so simplify. So let’s go back to basics. What…
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Welcome to BetterAtWork! The place where I explore anything and everything having to do with how work gets done. Hi, I’m Garth Reed. I founded ExperienceBetter LLC with one thought in mind: a job should make your life better, not worse. That’s what we’ll be exploring each week. Not what we do or why we…
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