Working from home might be frowned upon at some companies these days, but the rising number of layoffs last year and the growing collection of workers who are launching their own businesses means the number of people working out of a home office is on the rise.
If youre among them, youve no doubt learned that to make it a comfortable experience, you need a lot more than a laptop and a convenient table.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year, plenty of items on display seemed well-suited to make work life easier for home-based employees. Heres a look at the most notable tools.
Xebec Tri Screen 3
If you’re used to a multi-monitor setup, you know the pain of having to adjust to a single monitor when you’re on the road or find yourself confined to a smaller workspace. Xebec has been providing solutions for that for a while, but the Tri Screen 3 is the easiest fix yet. Simply clamp the base onto the back of your laptop’s screen, plug it in, and in seconds you’ll have three independent screens with which to spread out your browser windows, spreadsheets, and documents. The Tri Screen 3 works with both PCs and Macs (adapter needed) and runs $699.
Libernovo Omni
A good office chair is critical for home workers. Plopping yourself down in a chair stolen from the dining room for long periods will result in back pain and decreased productivity. Libernovo’s Omni ergonomic chair has been on the market for a bit, but at CES, the company showed off upgrades that make it even more appealing. Rather than adjusting the chair itself, the Omni, which starts at $803, uses what it calls a bionic backrest, featuring 16 joints and eight panels, mimicking the human spine and following the users movement in real time. It also will offer a temperature-adaptive cooling cushion that adjusts to your body heat.
Jackery Explorer 1500 Ultra
Over the past few years, more and more areas of the country have experienced climate-related power outages, whether due to extreme heat, tropical activity, or some other meteorological quirk. But for the home-based worker, reliable power is essential. Jackery’s Explorer 1500 Ultra is a portable power solution that will keep the power running. Prefer to work outside on nice days? Jackery has also introduced a solar-powered gazebo, which can generate up to 10 kilowatt-hours per day. The company did not announce pricing for either product.
Ugreen NAS storage
Cloud storage has the advantage of accessibility, but security is sometimes a concern (and some cloud operators can shut down with little or no warning). Ugreen’s network-attached storage devices let you keep your data backed up and secure. The NASync iDX Series offers increased speed and fully local AI to help you parse the information you have collected. Prices start at $999 and increase as you add more memory.
Motorola Mesh Wi-Fi
There are plenty of mesh Wi-Fi receivers on the market, but you’d be hard-pressed to find one cheaper than Motorola’s current offering. At $129, it’s an affordable way to bring Wi-Fi 7 into your home office, with a range of roughly 2,000 square feet. Technically called the MNQ1525, it can support up to 120 devices, letting home-based workers unshackle themselves from their desks.
You hear the blurps and bloops after you pass the food court in the Mall of Georgia on a fall Sunday afternoon, the unmistakable sound of points being scored and players eliminated.
Then you see him: Standing in an oversize vitrine is a 6-foot-tall animatronic rodent. Hes grinning and waving, but frozen in place, preserved like a museum piece.
This isnt an outpost of Chuck E. Cheese, the 48-year-old family pizza chain with more than 460 restaurants in 45 states and another 88 abroad. Its Chucks Arcade, a fledgling new enterprise launched this past summer by parent company CEC Entertainment in an effort to expand the brands reach to Gen Xers, nostalgic millennials, and teens who have outgrown the flagship.
These 13-and-counting old-school arcades are crammed with a dizzying mix of optionselaborate games like Drakons Realm Keepers (flying dragon battles); games tied to Marvel and Jurassic Park and the NBA; arcade classics like Tempest; and analog options like Skee-Ball and air hockey. This one, in Buford, Georgia, draws a steady afternoon crowd of couples, families, and packs of teenagers. A pair of giggly tweens take a furtive selfie with the animatronic Chuck near the door.
Five years after the pandemic plunged Chuck E. Cheese into its second bankruptcy, the brand is showing surprising energy. In addition to launching the new arcades in exurbs and mid-tier cities around the country, it has redesigned most of its restaurants in the U.S. and expanded its menu; most recently, it announced another spin-off focused on physical active play.
And its financial picture appears to be stabilizing. While the company reportedly struggled earlier this year to raise funds to meet debt payments, in September it closed a $625 million private credit term loan, and ratings agency S&P Global forecast that the companys 2025 same-store restaurant sales will grow between 2% and 2.5%.
CEO David McKillips is not shy about his view of the brands potential. Since he took the helm, in 2020, the company has begun to leverage the intellectual property around Chuck E. Cheese, the character, inking several dozen licensing deals that have put the friendly rodents likeness on apparel, toys, frozen pizza, and more. A Chuck E. Cheese Christmasan animated holiday special featuring not just Chuck but also his sidekick charactersdebuted on Amazon Prime on Thanksgiving Day.
All of this may seem like a long-shot vision for a brand thats been more associated recently with cheap punch lines (California governor Gavin Newsom told Vice President JD Vance on social media that ONLY SOMEONE WITH A LAW DEGREE FROM CHUCK E. CHEESE COULD BE AS DUMB AS YOU!!!) and squalid Florida Man cringe (last July, a video of an employee being arrested on fraud charges while wearing his Chuck E. costume went viral).
But the CEC executives spin it differently. Its impactful when Chuck E. Cheese is in the news, good or bad, says Mark Kupferman, the companys chief insights and marketing officer. Chuck E. Cheeses Q scores are amazing.
Shawn and Shelbie Moseley, a couple in their thirties who are making their second visit to Chucks Arcade today, share a fondness for Chuckand the animatronics that used to be the chains signature. Shawn has enjoyed several YouTube documentaries about them. Nostalgia, he says with a knowing grin.
Its a sentiment that CEC is banking on. The company estimates that around 24 million kids, across four generations, have celebrated a birthday at Chuck E. Cheese.
My IP dream is a global movie release, McKillips says, citing Shrek, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the cross-generational appeal of a Pixar property as reference points. I wont stop until we have a movie. There are theme park opportunities, gaming opportunities. . . . Im not done until every 5-year-old is going to sleep in their Chuck E. Cheese pajamas and waking up and having Chuck E. Cheese cereal.
Nostalgia is an exercise in selective memory. And people remember things differently: One fans classic is another fans kitsch. Few brand mascots embody this tension better than Charles Entertainment Cheese.
Born as a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent, as Benj Edwards reported in Fast Company in 2017, Chuck first appeared alongside his animatronic bandmates co-vocalist Helen Henny, guitarist Jasper T. Jowls, keyboard player Mr. Munch, and Pasqually on drumsat a pizza-and-entertainment restaurant that opened in San Jose in 1977.
In those days, arcades seemed vaguely shadyhangouts for directionless teenagers. Chuck E. Cheese, as the chain came to be called, offered a family-friendly alternative with games, pizza, and music, geared to delight 2-to-12-year-olds.
Yet the concept always had deeper undercurrents. It was developed and tirelessly championed by founder Nolan Bushnell, the eccentric, visionary tech entrepreneur who also cofounded Atari (and was Steve Jobs’s first boss). He had sought to evoke the mix of technology and carnivalesque ritual that he saw at the heart of collective human culture.
And Chuck was a rat only by accident. Turns out Bushnell had always wanted to start a pizza parlor and had the name Coyote Pizza in mind. In the mid-1970s, not long after cofounding Atari, Bushnell ordered what he thought was a coyote costumebut it turned out to be a rat costume. Trotted out as a regular gag at Atari company events, the character became known alternately as Rick Rat and Big Cheese. Bushnell floated the idea of calling his restaurant Rick Rats Pizza, but his marketing folks intervened, coming up with an alternative: Chuck E. Cheese. The first restaurant had a sign out front reading “Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre,” and by the mid-1980s, it had become a chain, with more than 240 locations. Hampered by overexpansion and a slew of copycats, the company went into its first bankruptcy in 1984.
Bushnell resigned, and ShowBiz Pizza, a rival, bought the company in 1985, returning it to a suburban fixture again throughout the 1990s and 2000s. By the time Apollo Global Management bought the 577-location chain for $1.3 billion in 2014, Chuck had morphed into a cheerful adolescent, and, in the iPhone age, the animatronics were feeling antiquated.
McKillips, formerly a Six Flags executive, paid his first visit to a Chuck E. Cheese on a Saturday in Grapevine, Texas, in 2019, and says he found the brand environment tired and dated. But just as he was about to leave, there was a verbal countdown to the arrival of Chuck himself. It was like a Taylor Swift concert, he recalls. Kids were going bananas. And I was like, This is fricking awesome. He left a 13-plus-year career at Six Flags to become CE in January 2020just as COVID-19 hit.
Unexpectedly presiding over the chains second bankruptcy (filed in the summer of 2020 as diners stayed home), McKillips and his board raised $650 million in bonds, and ultimately spent $350 million to revamp its locations. COVID was a little bit of a blessing in disguise, he says. The brand was crushed for a time, and obviously the human toll on laid-off workers was severe. But it allowed us to pause and really look at the business.
Theres a choice that youth-focused brands grapple with: Do we grow up with our audienceor stay forever young? Chuck E. Cheese had always been in the forever-young business, but had, McKillips felt, lost touch with todays kids. Winking satires in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia (the Risk E. Rats Pizza and Amusement Center) and the horror movie Five Nights at Freddys didnt help.
Out went Munchs Make Believe Band, as Chuck E.s animatronic musical group was called. In came an interactive dance floor, with a jumbotron and Kidz Bop as an official music partner. Arcade games stayed, but the interiors got brighter and featured adventure zone areas with trampolines and superhero playgrounds. And the pizza got better. During COVID-19, the company converted its kitchens into ghost kitchens for its new delivery and takeout brand, Pasquallys Pizza & Wings. In the process, the company reformulated its pizza recipe and expanded its menu with more toppings and options than it had ever bothered with before, an experiment that resulted in a new adult menu when its dining rooms reopened and the ghost kitchen brand was retired in the spring of 2025.
The business model changed too. Borrowing a tactic from the amusement park industry, the chain started to offer a variety of seasonal and annual passessuch as a $49 Summer Fun pass for unlimited visits for eight weeksproviding discounts in a belt-tightening era, guaranteeing steadier revenue, and cementing loyalty. Chuck E. Cheese sold 79,000 passes in 2023. The next year, it sold nearly 400,000.
Since the beginning, Chuck E. Cheese has been, on some level, a tech company. Today, its main restaurant chain is the largest arcade in the world and the biggest buyer of games, McKillips says. We have 2 billion gameplays every single year.
The company opened a handful of arcades in malls in 2024, called the Fun Spot Arcade, which flopped. But Kupferman, the companys chief insights and marketing officer (and another Six Flags veteran), began envisioning a new stand-alone arcade business that could carry Chuck E. Cheese branding. McKillips was resistant. Doesnt fit, he recalls thinking. We are about age 2 to 12, wholesome, safe family entertainment. They ended up leaving the modern version of the mouse with the childrens pizza chain but using traditional Chuck E., the retro version associated with the 1980s and 1990s, for the arcade.
When the first Chucks Arcade launched in 2025, its logo featured the nostalgic version of Chuck, with the bowler hat and bow tie, and a salvaged animatronic rodent greeted people at the door. While the company wont share specific data, a spokesperson says the switch to Chucks Arcade from Fun Spot has had a very positive effect on the performance of each location. A typical visitor, whether a teen or a 50-year-old, buys a $50 game card and exhausts it over an hour or so.
Now the company is making another play for its millennial and Gen Z fans, this time alongside their Gen Alpha kids, with Chuck E. Cheese Adventure World. The first location11,300 square feet, or 10 times the typical size of an active play zone in one of its restaurantsjust opened in Arlington, Texas, in November. Features include slides and tunnels, climbing zones, a dance floor, and exclusive character appearances (as well as snacks, but curiously, no pizza). The company says it will test a handful of locations before setting any full rollout goals.
As for the flagship chain, the company is currently leveraging all those new screens for its CEC Media Network, announced in Maya de facto television network utilizing almost 4,000 screens across hundreds of Chuck E. Cheese locations. Appealing to todays screen-focused kids, this in-restaurant network plays selections from a library of original entertainment content, with more than 300 digital shorts featuring Chuck E. and the band, as well as partner content from Kidz Bop and others. We are using that as a promotional platform, selling advertising, creating a new revenue model, McKillips says. Its seen by 40 million visitors a year.
The company is also working with streaming technology provider Future Today to expand the CEC Media Network beyond the restaurants. CEC-branded channels now exist on other platforms, such as Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, and Future Todays own family-friendly platform, HappyKids.
But for some, watching a screen isnt as entertaining as interacting with it, and thats what Chucks Arcade is for. Back at the Mall of Georgia, a young boy and his mom play a seated, two-player virtual reality game that involves fighting a frantic array of monsters, including Godzilla, from an armed helicopter. The kid is ecstatic, blasting away at monsters and feeling the effects supplied by the VR headset. Mommy, were flying so high! he squawks, but Mom doesnt answer. Shes blasting away, too, lost in the game.
A small Finnish startup says it has done what the world’s biggest automakers are still struggling to do: put a solid-state battery into a production vehicle, starting with a motorcycle that can charge to more than 100 miles of range in as little as five minutes.
For the last 15 years, the entire battery industry in automotive has been talking about solid-state batteriesthat theyre the future, says Marko Lehtimäki, CEO of Donut Lab, the startup that makes the new battery. But up until today, despite all the talk, theres never been a single production vehicle that uses solid-state batteries. Theyve only been used at lab level.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
Verge Motorcycles, an electric motorcycle startup, is using the new battery in a bike thats shipping to customers this quarter. Donut Lab, which originally launched as a spin-off of Verge, is also in talks with about 100 electric vehicle companies that want to shift to solid-state batteries.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
Solid-state batteries have big advantages over the typical lithium-ion batteries that are in use now. The batteries, which use a solid electrolyte instead of liquid or gel, are safer, without the risk of catching fire.
Theyre also more efficient and can charge much faster, making charging an EV more like filling up with gas. (Verge advertises that its motorcycle’s new battery can add 186 miles of range in 10 minutes, though it can technically charge in as little as 5 minutes with a high-power charger; the vehicle offers up to 370 total miles of range.) Solid-state batteries also don’t degrade as quickly. And in Donut Lab’s case, the battery is made from low-cost materials that are abundantly available around the world.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
The new battery could help avoid the problem of EVs quickly losing resale value. “This battery lasts multiple lifetimes of a car or motorcycle,” Lehtimäki says. “So that’s another very important thing. You can rest assured that there’s zero degradation over time in the lifetime of a motorcycle. If there’s a new model and you want to sell the previous version, you know it’s as good as new from the battery perspective.”
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
The startup is still in the process of patenting the technology, and declined to share its specific chemistry or production methodology. (Automakers interested in using the batteries have seen more details under a nondisclosure agreement, Lehtimäki says.) But it argues that it was able to outpace other companies working on solid-state batteries because it’s more nimble.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
“When you have smaller groups of very talented engineers working on a single vision, where it’s okay to take risks and think outside the box and try out new thingswhich is quite hard in corporate environmentsit’s typically the young companies that actually bring new technologies and innovations to the market,” Lehtimäki says. Donut Lab previously designed a high-performance motor for EVs that fits inside wheels.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
The batteries each have cells roughly the size of mobile phones, arranged in larger modules. In the motorcycle, the full battery pack is around the size of a suitcase; for energy storage at a power plant, the system can scale up to fill a shipping container with battery cells.
[Image: Donut Lab]
The batteries, which Donut Lab produces at its own factory in Finland, can also be made in custom shapes, meaning they can easily be swapped into the design of current electric cars or other vehicles. In one demonstration, the team took a swappable battery pack out of a scooter popular in Southeast Asia and re-created it.
[Image: Donut Lab]
“We just took the dimensions and we created a battery in that exact shape and form,” Lehtimäki says. “That means that it can fit in the 100 million scooters in Asia as a drop-in replacement. And we can literally make these in any size so that the OEM [original equipment manufacturer] building cars doesn’t need to make any changes.”
Of course, some automakers have already invested heavily in making their own conventional lithium-ion batteries, and couldn’t immediately make the switch. But Lehtimäki says others are considering quickly adopting the new batteries.
Cova Power, a company that electrifies trailers for semitrucks, plans to use the new batteries. Several automakers are also in the process of putting them in cars, Lehtimäki says, though his company can’t yet name the manufacturers.
In the past, one of the major challenges for solid-state batteries has been cost. But Donut Lab says its costs are competitive because it uses readily available materials.
“The materials are the biggest driver for cost in batteries,” Lehtimäki says. “That’s why we are able to produce them already today at prices that are cheaper than lithium-ion for the end customer, which is the OEM. So that means that if you have a well-established company that produces, say, 100,000 SUVs a year, and they have negotiated the cost of their batteries for a decade, we can go to them and we can immediately offer them these better batteries at the same price than what they pay today.”
Companies that need energy storagelike data centers, EV charging stations, or solar farms, for examplecould also quickly adopt the new batteries. “They can have three or four times faster charging than what they have today, Lehtimäki says, with lower costs.
If youre like most Americans, youve already set all manner of goals and resolutions for the New Year. And likewise, if youre like most Americans, youll have entirely abandoned them by February 1.
Studies have found that 23% of people quit their New Years resolutions within a week, and almost half drop them by the end of January. Only 9% of Americans actually complete anything from their list in a given year.
The biggest issue, apparently, is that were all very bad at setting resolutions. The things we choose are too vague, too hard, or too external.
That got me wondering: Could AI do any better?
Specifically: Can I mine the vast treasure trove of personal information ChatGPT has gleaned from our conversations and use that to set better resolutions for the year ahead?
Turns out, the answer is yes. Heres how I funneled ChatGPTs casual disregard for privacy into a list of specific, actionable resolutions for 2026and how you can do it too.
Remember Me
Many users dont realize that ChatGPT pays careful attention to every conversation you have with it. Its constantly eyeing your language choices, facts you share about yourself, and data you upload in order to better understand what makes you tick.
And it retains everything.
This privacy-obliterating feature is called Memory. OpenAI rolled it out in 2024. And its been expanded and improved constantly ever since.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Memory one of the most important breakthrough areas for AI, and the company is leaning heavily into improving the feature in 2026.
Memory is helpful because it allows ChatGPT to respond to your queries in a more personalized way. If the bot knows youre a vegetarian, for example, it wont recommend a meatball sandwich when you ask it for lunch ideas.
But ChatGPTs Memory can also get extremely granularand strange.
You can see what the bot knows about you by clicking your profile icon in the ChatGPT interface, choosing Personalization, finding the Memory section, and pressing Manage.
Doing this for myself, I learned, for example, that ChatGPT knows my birthday, my marital status, where I live, and the names of my children.
But bizarrely, it also believes that Im writing articles about asphalt and has stored the fact that I like straight ASCII quotes in its vast Memory banks.
While OpenAI talks about Memory as a personalization function to help ChatGPT provide more helpful responses, its also likely a way to lock you into OpenAIs system.
If ChatGPT knows more about you than Gemini, youre more likely to keep using it. You wont just flit over to a different chatbot provider every time they roll out a new model, as many users do today.
All that stored info, then, is really there for OpenAI, not for you. But with the right prompting, you can readily access and mine it. Specifically, you can use it to make a killer list of resolutions.
Resolving Wisely
To do so, I fired up the ChatGPT interface and selected the GPT-5.2 model. I then set the bot to the Extended Thinking mode. That configuration ensures that ChatGPT uses its most powerful LLM, and spends as much time as possible processing a given query.
I then gave the bot this prompt (feel free to steal it for your own resolution setting):
Look back at your memory of the conversations we’ve had over the last year. Based on what you find, make a list of 10 highly specific, actionable New Years Resolutions for me for 2026. Cover all aspects of life, including work, health, family, and more. Follow expert guidance and best practices for setting realistic, actionable and truly achievable New Year’s resolutions. Specifically, use your knowledge of me to tailor the resolutions to the things I value and care about, and phrase/structure them in a way that you know will resonate with me personally.
After thinking for several minutes, ChatGPT responded with a customized list. As requested, the resolutions are very specific. And the bot clearly knows lots about me.
Its first recommendation is to Run a 45-minute 925 Newsroom Sprint 4 days/week with the goal of publishing 3 locally sourced Bay Area Telegraph stories/week (permits, public safety, openings, schools, city hall) and miss no more than 6 weeks total.
Based on that, ChatGPT clearly knows that I run a local news publication and publish a newsletter about the Bay Areas 925 region.
But it also seems to know about how much time I take off every year (six weeks), and correctly inferred the kinds of stories I cover for my publication.
For another resolution, ChatGPT advises me to Hit 30 minutes of licensing progress 5 days/week and gives specific ways I could do thata reference to my day job as a news photographer with licensable photos.
I mostly talk with ChatGPT about work, so many of its resolutions focus on my professional life. But it also recommended several health-related resolutions, like Make LDL-friendly eating automatic with 3 defaults including one soluble-fiber item daily (beans, oats, chia, etc.)
Sometime in 2025 I must have uploaded blood test results and asked the bot to explain them to me. Since then, ChatGPT has apparently been worrying about my LDL cholesterol and would like me to tweak it (thankfully, my actual doctor is not worried).
Other suggested resolutions focus on building a workout routine (including a less-strenuous dad-of-3 version for busy weeks), improving my Python coding, and traveling more to photograph hotels for work.
Forget It
Overall, Im impressed by ChatGPTs specificity and level of detail. My own real-life list of resolutions is laudable but vague, with items like be more present in daily life.
ChatGPTs, in contrast, are all about mtrics, action items, and accountability. Based on expert advice, thats probably a wise approach.
Still, it creeps me out a bit to see how much ChatGPT knows about me. And it feels stranger because I never specifically asked the bot to remember any of those thingsit just decided to retain all the minutiae I dumped into its interface.
Thats fine when ChatGPT remembers things like my preferred format for em dashes, and the fact that I enjoy Jared Baumans writing (hes a friend).
But when the bot starts retaining highly specific medical information based on a conversation I forgot I even had, the whole thing starts to feel invasive.
Thankfully, OpenAI makes it fairly easy to remove specific items from ChatGPTs memory. You can do so on the same Manage page I referenced earlier. After seeing what the bot knows about me, I deleted several items that were too overtly medical or were simply wrong.
You can also opt to switch off the function entirely, or to use a Temporary Chat for a specific, sensitive query.
Those are short-term fixes, though. As Altmans breakthrough comment suggests, Memory is becoming an increasingly important function of modern AI chatbots.
That means LLMs will almost certainly retain ever more knowledge about usespecially as companies exhaust the performance gains of building ever-bigger models and data centers. And they may not always explicitly share what they know.
For now, you can leverage that knowledge for good and set some resolutions for the year ahead.
But as you do so, might I suggest adding another resolution to your list: Share less with LLMs. And remember that what you do share they may never truly forget.
We all think that we have great ideas. And we all tend to fall in love with our own ideas because, well, theyre ours. But most of my ideasand yoursare probably mediocre. And no, thats not an insult; its just a fact about the way most ideas are generated. I mean, if we were all genuinely spewing game-changers the world would be in a much different place than it is today.
Most ideas are created without much thought or insight or pushbackand could probably benefit from people challenging them a lot more. Way too many ideas get approved that shouldnt have made it out of the conference room, but with lack of time, energy, and questioning, they move forward at an alarming rate.
It doesnt have to be this way. Imagine if you had someone whose job it was to voice concerns about those ideas; someone whose sole purpose was to poke holes, identify flaws, and challenge assumptions. A Devils Advocate isnt there to be negative just for the sake of it. The role exists to make your ideas sharper and more bulletproof before they ever get the green light. The purpose isnt to tear down or be difficult; its to help you move forward more confidently with the best version of your idea, an idea that has been stress-tested and refined to withstand real-world challenges.
A stress test
The reason you need a Devils Advocate is simple: its the only way to make sure your ideas are ready for the real world. It should be common practice to stress-test your assumptions, invite dissent, and build real critical thinking into your process. Constructive debate is a cornerstone of the innovation process and should be embraced. Personally, I love it.
Heres why: it makes me, and my ideas, better. The Devils Advocate role creates honest discussion, and pushes people to elevate their work by considering: Is this really the best we can do? They encourage people to say the hard thing: what others may be too afraid to express. Id much rather have someone help me think through all the potential angles early so I can win versus being blindsided later.
I tell my team when Im introducing an idea: Please argue with meI need your brain on this! I dont have all the knowledge or ideas, so I dont make a decision until weve done that, says Tracie Ybarra, VP of talent at Avantor.
Without someone willing to push back, your ideas may never reach their full potential. Instead, theyll simply be okay ideas, good enough to get by, but not strong enough to disrupt, innovate, or leave a lasting impact. And thats a shame. Because were all here to live a life of meaning, not mediocrity.
Make Your Ideas Stronger
How does being a Devils Advocate actually work? The goal isnt to be contrarian or difficult just for the fun of it. Its about creating a process that welcomes balanceseeing the potential and the problems in an idea, and generating solutions to overcome issues that arise. When you know that someone will challenge your ideas, you work harder to defend them, to improve them, to find the flaws before anyone else does.
A good Devils Advocate is a professional skeptic: They don’t just point out what’s wrong; they ask why its wrong, and they offer alternative solutions. Engaging with you like this forces you to reflect, to rethink, and revise with the goal of improvement, not failure.
Jarret Kleppél, VP, talent and organizational development at NBCUniversal, agrees: Inviting critique and cynicism throughout our process keeps our team less emotionally attached to the proposal and more focused on the outcome.
This process also builds an important skill: resilience. You cant prepare for every problem in advance, but you can certainly stress-test better things before you go live.
The Power of Constructive Conflict
Constructive conflict is what makes a successful team. But we often take conflict as a negative thing. I like to think of constructive conflict to be more like a contrastit creates productive friction by giving a different perspective, not a divisive one. Without that, we settle into mediocrity, where comfort ensures everyones happy, but nobody really grows. Real innovation happens when different perspectives collide, when people arent afraid to challenge each others ideas in a productive way.
A MIT Sloan-affiliated piece emphasizes that having a critical reviewer in meetings improves outcomes. One company that they studied experienced a 25% improvement in their project success rates when this role was active. What does that mean? It means that the Devils Advocate creates a stronger foundation for your ideas by challenging them before they face the real world.
Devils Advocates also eliminate some of the fatal flaws of some collaboration: groupthink and the tendency to favor consensus over critical thought. People are scared of scrutiny so we avoid it, and thats how “good enough” takes hold.
A Devils Advocate Doesnt Kill Ideas. It Protects Them
A good idea that hasnt been tested isnt goodits vulnerable. Its like sending a fighter into the ring without any practice or training, expecting them to win. Doing that is naive, and somebody just might get hurt. The Devils Advocate is the trainer that makes your idea go a few rounds in the gym before its ready to compete.
At X, Googles innovation lab, teams designate employees to act as devils advocates, identifying flaws in ideas to make them better before launch. IBM thoroughly tests ideas for weaknesses during high-stakes project planning to dramatically increase its chances of success.
Christine Tricoli, group executive vice president and chief human resources officer at H.W. Kaufman Group advocates for this approach: One of the benefits of having someone ‘call you out’ or share the ‘unspoken concerns’ of the group is that it spares the team the embarrassment of having someone external discovering the issue for you. It saves time and money and helps you be more productive sooner rather than later. Leaders need to cultivate an environment that encourages this type of disruption or challenge within the team.
How Do You Implement the Devils Advocate?
Its easier than it sounds. Start by assigning someone the role of asking (or rotating the role among the team) tough questions during brainstorms or project planning. This person should have the power to challenge assumptions, ask what could go wrong, and offer alternative solutions without repercussions. Their job isnt to just criticize; its to actively work with the team to solve problems and refine ideas so theyre more likely to succeed.
Ask yourself: when was the last time you let someone challenge your ideas in a constructive way? And if you dont have a Devils Advocate on your team, how could you benefit from having one?
Let Dissent Be Your Friend
My closest friends are the ones that can be most honest with me. I need them because they make me a better person, and their intent is to help, not to harm. Its the same here with ideas. By challenging your ideas early and often,you help move them forward and give them the best shot at success.
Stop avoiding the hard questions, and stop letting groupthink win. Instead, build the Devils Advocate into your process and let it turn your good ideas into great ones. Because in the end, the only thing worse than a bad idea is an unexamined one.
Hi there! My name is Marcus Collins, DBA, and I study culture and its influence and impact on human behavior at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Each week, this column will explore the inner workings of organizational culture and the mechanisms that make it tick. Every entry will be accompanied by an episode from my podcast, From the Culture, that digs deeper into the culture of work from my conversations with the organizational leaders that make it all happen. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you are not having. Sign up for the newsletter to make sure you dont miss a beat.
___________________________________
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Weve all heard this misattributed Peter Drucker quote and instinctively understand the disproportionate influence culture can have on an organizations business. However, if you asked five people to define organizational culture, youd likely get 55 different answers.
Chief among them would be something along the lines of organizational culture is how we do things around here, the behaviors and norms that make up how a company engages in the collective production of work. Sounds about right, right? Sure. However, a centurys worth of literature on the matter would say otherwise.
A social operating system
According to Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, culture is a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. Its a social operating system by which we collectively see the world and, subsequently, behave in it . . . together. What we wear, how we talk, what we dotheyre all byproducts of our cultural subscription.
The same goes for organizational culture, the shared operating system for an organization that helps employees collectively see, so that they might collectively do. Therefore, reducing our concept of organizational culture to merely what we do around here ignores half of what makes culture . . . well . . . culture. Its this half, the way the organization sees the world and makes meaning of it, that dictates what we do.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"","subhed":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Take Airbnb, for example. The company sees the world as a place where everyone belongs, so its behaviors are demonstrative of this perspective. Thats why Airbnb adheres to a No Meetings Wednesday tradition to accommodate team members who tend to be more introverted, so everyone belongs. They practice radical acts of transparency so that information is available to everyone, not just those in the know. They also provide employees with an annual $2K travel credit to encourage people to go out and experience the world the way other people do.
For everyone at Airbnb to feel like they belong, its important that employees see themselves as a part of a global community, not just as coworkers. World travel helps this endeavor by fostering the kind of empathy that drives connection. These ways of doing things around here at Airbnb are byproducts of how the organization sees around here. Together, the seeing and the doing constitute the organizations culture.
Culture isnt just values
Of course, there are those of us who understand this distinction. However, far too often we mistake the organizations perspective for its values; but the two are not analogues. Values are what an organization deems to be important. The way the organization sees the world, on the other hand, defines the truths that the organization holds about the world and why certain things have any importance in the first place.
For instance, Patagonia believes in “climbing clean.” The company envisions a world with minimal human invasiveness on the planet and, therefore, it values environmentalism and integrity, which, ultimately, inform its ways of working. Its valueswhich the organization deems importantare informed by its perspective.
Values alone are hollow without the deeply held truths of the organizations perspective that undergirds them. Its no wonder that research from the MIT Sloan Management Reviews 2020 Glassdoor Culture 500 study found no correlation between a companys stated values and the lived experiences of its employees. Culture is not a companys values; its the system upon which these values are constructed. So, without a clear perspective of the world, an organizations values are typically meaningless and have no impact on its behaviors. Theyre merely pretty words beautifully stated but rarely integrated.
This is a significant challenge for business leaders who have reduced organizational culture to a set of rituals, rules, and words. Culture is so much more than these components, but since so many of us have defined culture so narrowly, we have not yet fully realized its impact. Culture, as Durkheim asserts, is an operating system, and this system is the most influential external force on human behavior that we arent fully leveraging. Not because of a lack of skill, intelligence, or technology, but because of a lack of understanding.
Thats why this column existsto examine the whys and hows of organizational culture so that we might get better at it. Its also why I created a podcastin a world where there are probably too many podcasts, quite frankly.
Culture is an organizations biggest cheat code, but the only way to use it properly is to understand it deeply. So thats what were here to do . . . together. And this is our first unlock, with many more to follow. If we want to get better at the way we do organizational culture, it starts with getting better at the way we see it.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"","subhed":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores th inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Oscar Wilde famously noted, Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. It is arguably one of the best brief illustrations of emotional intelligence (EQ), a trait that became popular thanks to a nonacademic best-selling book by journalist Daniel Goleman, in which he insinuated that EQ is a more important driver of success than IQ (a claim that has been discredited).
And yet, theres no shortage of evidence for the importance of EQ when it comes to predicting interpersonal effectiveness, defined as the ability to manage yourself and others in everyday life. In fact, long before EQ was coined in academic research (before Goleman popularized the term), decades of personality research had already highlighted reliable individual differences in the propensity to engage in more or less effective intrapersonal and interpersonal behaviors. In fact, way before HR managers celebrated EQ, your grandma called it good manners.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Problematic personalities
Now onto the actual research: Here are five science-based generalizations about people with challenging personalities; that is, people who are significantly more taxing, unrewarding to deal with, and demanding on others than the average person is.
(1) Empathy deficits (and why empathy alone is not enough): Difficult individuals often struggle to accurately recognize or care about others feelings, perspectives, and needs. Yet, as Paul Bloom has argued, even empathy itself is an unreliable foundation for moral or cooperative behavior, because it is selective, biased, and easily withdrawn from those we dislike or see as different.
(2) High neuroticism and fragile core self-evaluations: Elevated emotional reactivity, anxiety, and sensitivity to threat make everyday interactions feel volatile. When people possess low core self-esteem or unstable self-confidence, they are more likely to overreact, personalize neutral events, and drain others emotional energy.
(3) Low agreeableness masked as EQ or blunt honesty: Some difficult personalities score low on agreeableness, meaning they are less inclined toward cooperation, trust, and concern for others. In workplace settings, this is often misinterpreted as emotional intelligence, confidence, or refreshing candor, when it is in fact poor impression management disguised as authenticity.
(4) Lack of self-awareness, especially among self-centered narcissists: Many difficult people are strikingly unaware of how they come across. Narcissistic individuals, in particular, tend to overestimate their competence, underestimate their impact on others, and interpret feedback as hostility rather than information.
In a way, this is what makes challenging personalities so difficult to deal with: They are either unaware of how unrewarding to deal with they are, or simply dont give a damn! Neither are particularly useful. When others are of the opinion that you suck, and that you are unaware of the fact that you suck, they will think quite poorly of you (unless you are a fictional character like David Brent or Michael Scott, in which case they will laugh . . . cathartically).
(5) Low external pressure or weak incentives to be rewarding to others: Finally, difficult behavior persists when it is tolerated, rewarded, or unpunished. Power, status, or perceived indispensability often insulate individuals from social consequences, reducing their motivation to regulate their behavior or invest in being pleasant to work with.
As I illustrate in my latest book, this explains the unfortunate fact that when people rise to the top of organizational hierarchies they stop feeling pressure to adjust their behavior to meet others needs. This kind of raw authenticity is a privilege for the elite, the status quo, or those who can afford to neglect situational demands to adjust their behavior in order to act pro-socially. But the less people care about their reputation, the more other people will careand not for the right reasons!
What to do
So, how best to work with these individuals, which will inevitably be required if you have a job that has you interacting with colleagues, clients, or coworkers (which basically applies to all jobs)?
Here are some basic recommendations:
(1) Learn their typical patterns: The Norwegians have a saying, namely that theres no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong choice of clothing. In a way people are just like the weather or climate: If you forget to check the forecast or are unaware of the climate, you only have yourself to blame for not being adequately equipped. So, if you have a moody colleague, irritable boss, or self-centered client, the mistake is not expecting rain, its turning up in sandals and acting surprised when you get soaked.
Once you recognize someones stable patterns, you can start to personalize your behavior, adjust your expectations, and optimize your responses accordingly. In essence, theres always a strategy for improving how you deal or interact with someone, regardless of how difficult they are.
(2) Avoid trying to change them: One big issue with difficult people is that we are often tempted to try to change them, assuming that insight, feedback, or goodwill will eventually override deeply ingrained tendencies. In reality, most personality traits are relatively stable over time, especially in adulthood, and attempts to fix others usually create frustration rather than improvement. To be sure, this does not excuse their bad conduct, but it does prevent you from wasting emotional energy on futile hopes that they will suddenly become someone else.
An old fable tells of a scorpion that asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog hesitates, fearing it will be stung. The scorpion reassures him that doing so would doom them both. Yet halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog anway. As they begin to sink, the frog asks why. I couldnt help it, the scorpion replies. Its my nature. The lesson is not about forgiveness or cynicism, but realism: Some interpersonal patterns are remarkably stable, even when they are self-defeating. Ignoring this does not make you kind, only unprepared.
(3) Be better than others: While difficult personalities can pose a challenge to most, your goal is not to find the perfect formula for dealing with them. Rather, think about being better in your interactions with them than most people are. In other words, its not how well you can handle them compared to how you handle other people, but compared to how well other people handle them.
This relative advantage compounds: Difficult individuals quickly learn who escalates them, who indulges them, and who remains calm, clear, and consistent. Over time, they tend to reserve their worst behavior for those who reward it, and their best for those who do not.
Research on social learning and reinforcement shows that behavior is shaped not only by personality, but by the reactions it reliably elicits from others. When you respond with predictable boundaries, emotional restraint, and clarity, you reduce the payoff of difficult behavior. You may not change who they are, but you can often change how they behave around you, and they may even appreciate you for being more open to them than others are.
(4) Practice rational compassion: One of the critical challenges with difficult personalities is that its often quite hard to empathize with them. Examples include chronically anxious colleagues who catastrophize minor issues, abrasive high performers who mistake bluntness for honesty, or self-centered leaders who dominate conversations while remaining oblivious to their impact on others.
But as Paul Bloom notes, empathy is by definition insufficient to create civil and prosocial work environments and cultures. Why? Because we are prewired to empathize most readily with people who feel familiar, similar, and psychologically close to us. In contrast, when we perceive others as different or as belonging to a separate group or tribe, empathy quickly breaks down, which is precisely why inclusion is so difficult to sustain in diverse workplaces.
Blooms alternative is not coldness, but rational compassion: a deliberate commitment to fairness, tolerance, and restraint that does not depend on liking, identification, or emotional resonance. Practicing rational compassion means treating people decently even when they irritate us, setting boundaries without hostility, and choosing principled behavior over emotional reactions. This approach is especially useful with difficult personalities because it allows us to remain civil and effective without having to feel empathy we may not genuinely experience.
(5) Master strategic authenticity: One common feature of difficult personalities is that they make little effort to adjust their behavior to others. Instead, they default to a This is just who I am approach to interpersonal dynamics, implicitly placing the burden of adaptation on everyone else. This unfiltered version of authenticity is often celebrated through popular mantras such as Dont worry about what others think or Just be yourself and others will adjust.
The problem is that this logic does not scale. If everyone follows it, the collective outcome is not freedom but a culture of entitled rigidity, where each person feels justified in prioritizing self-expression over social responsibility. A useful analogy is driving: Insisting on going at your preferred speed, regardless of traffic rules or road conditions, may feel good and taste like freedom, but it creates accidents, not progress.
Strategic authenticity is choosing when and how to express yourself so that movement remains possible for everyone. It means finding a workable balance between saying what you think and feel, recognizing that your right to self-expression does not override your obligation to others.
The inverse solution
Ultimately, working with difficult personalities is less about fixing others than about managing yourself with intelligence, discipline, and perspective. The best strategy is often to become the inverse of the problem (or, well, them): to show empathy where they show indifference, self-awareness where they show blind spots, and restraint where they seek release. Difficult people rarely improve because they are corrected, but because the environment around them quietly refuses to mirror their worst instincts.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
A work jerk isnt just someone who expects perfection. Its the high achiever whose nervous system runs at lava-like temperatures, whos chronically stressed, and demonstrates urgency as a personality trait. It looks like hair-trigger impatience, micromanaging, sharp feedback, and an automatic reflex to see others as obstacles rather than partners. Work jerk behaviors teach people at work to focus their energy on managing you and your reactions instead of doing good work.
People act out for countless reasons: a toxic work culture, impossible standards, or private stress that bleeds into work (an article for another day). None of those reasons makes treating others poorly acceptable.
If youre a work jerk who is also a leader, the impact can be huge. Your tone and word choice signal risk levels to your team because you control performance evaluations, if they get promoted, project access, and sometimes even professional standing. Being the leader work jerk harms two things at once:
Your mental health as a leader: because youre stuck in chronic activation mode
Your teams psychological safety: because they self-protect for survival around you
The crush it approach may produce short-term results, but it often drives burnout, turnover, and severe erosion of trust.
Emotional Self-Management Decreases Work Jerk Behaviors
If you are a work jerk these daily shifts can help protect your mental health as a leader and how your team experiences you, too, without lowering management standards.
1. Be precise, not urgent: When youre overwhelmed, everything feels equally important. How you address that ends up being your brain trying to reduce uncertainty, not effective delegation. The mood then becomes urgency, and everything is a five-alarm fire. Try this 60-second reset before an important interaction (i.e., 1:1, standup, client call):
Do two rounds of deep belly breathing (i.e., in through the nose for four seconds while inflating the belly, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds through the mouth). Then ask yourself:
What specific outcome do I need or want from this conversation?
What can I say to increase clarity and understanding, not pressure?
This will help mitigate worry, prevent misalignment, and signal to others that calculated execution is valued more than frantic reactivity disguised as responsiveness.
2. Treat emotions as information, not an action plan: just because we have a feeling doesnt mean we need to immediately act on it, even if it makes us feel better. Being immediately honest about how you feel isnt just being direct, its destroying psychological safety for others without context or a next-steps game plan. Before sending a response to an email that may want you to flip a table, name the emotion youre feeling and use an I statement with it (i.e., I am annoyed.). This creates space between stimulus and response. Try this feedback process:
Draft, but dont send: Write what you want to say, then wait five minutes (distract yourself with another task if you need to).
Rewrite and give feedback in this format:
Share your observation: It seems like . . .
Explain the impact: Im concerned about . . .
Make a request: Next time, what would be helpful is . . .
State your intention: Im saying this because . . .
This approach is a great example of pairing accountability with care. It helps you understand what you need to feel and figure out what youre really trying to say in a way thats useful to others. Providing effective feedback that leads to results, preserves your sanity, and helps teams realize they can and should approach you earlier instead of hiding issues until they turn into crises.
3. Make emotional self-care part of leadership, not a secret hobby: Many work jerk behaviors are symptoms of depletion. Sustainable leadership requires actual maintenance and recoveryyou cant mindset your way out of chronic unmanaged stress. Identify and practice one to two Mental Well-being Non-negotiables:
Show that your mental health matters: you cant lead if you dont care for yourself.
Do what you enjoy: do what you actually likenot what the wellness industry prescribes.
Be realistic: do what works for your scheduleget it on the calendar.
Be consistent: the goal is a cumulative effect over timeand adapt as needed.
Normalize it with others: it may inspire them to build recovery into their workday too.
What Leaders Should Ask Themselves in 2026
People can become work jerks when their mental health carries more strain than their everyday coping habits can absorb. If you want to determine if your professional drive as a leader is harming your mental health and relationships at work, ask yourself these questions weeklyand answer them honestly every time:
When Im stressed, do I become clearer or just forceful?
Do my team members bring problems to me early onor when theyre unavoidable emergencies?
This week, did my team seem like they were learning or self-protecting from me?
The answers to these questions will tell you if youre showing work jerk behaviors, who its impacting, and why that needs to change. The answers will tell you whether and how you need to shift how you regulate work pressure, communicate under stress, and emotionally recover as a leader.
In 2026, high performance shouldnt come at the expense of your teams or colleagues sanityor your own. The good leaders who excel wont be the most intense, results-driven machines. Theyll be the ones who focus on steady mental health self-care maintenance as a form of effective, sustainable leadership.
If you’re constantly hounding your teen to get out of bed before noon on the weekend, you may want to save your energy for a different battle. According to new research published in The Journal of Affective Disorders, sleeping in on the weekend could offer some significant protection against depression.
For the study, researchers at the University of Oregon and the State University of New York Upstate Medical University analyzed data from more than a thousand 16 to 24-year-olds in which participants reported their sleep/waking hours, including weekend catch-up sleep.
While one might imagine that teens who spring out of bed early each morning regardless of the day of the week are more mentally sound, the opposite may be true. Interestingly, the study found that teens who slept in on weekends were significantly less likely to report symptoms of depression. The group had a 41% lower risk of depression when compared with the group who kept a more regimented sleep schedule on weekends.
Researchers say that one of the major reasons why sleeping in may be so helpful for teens is because teens stay up later due to changes that occur in adolescence. “Instead of being a morning lark you’re going to become more of a night owl,” Melynda Casement, an associate professor at University of Oregon and co-author of the study, told ScienceDaily. Casement adds that later bedtimes usually last until around the age of 18 or 20 before leveling out.
Later bedtimes, coupled with early school start times, extra-curriculars, part-time jobs, and more, mean teens often accumulate “sleep debt” which puts them at a heightened risk for depression. Casement says that while teens need eight to 10 hours of sleep, most aren’t getting it during the week, therefore extra weekend sleep matters. “It’s normal for teens to be night owls, so let them catch up on sleep on weekends if they can’t get enough sleep during the week because that’s likely to be somewhat protective,” the researcher explains.
The latest study builds on previous research on the topic, including a 2025 meta-analysis of 10 studies which showed sleeping in on the weekend was associated with a 20% lower risk of depression. The growing body of research seems to show that sleeping in is not an act of laziness or teenage rebellion, but it can be a healthy and important sleep habit for teens in order to stave off depression. And, as teen mental health has worsened in recent years, those extra weekend hours could be more crucial than ever.
Batteries are powering a significant shift in how we go about our daily lives, ranging from the devices we carry to electric vehicles and energy storage systems. Batteries play a critical role across key sectors from data center infrastructure, military, and microgrid applications to consumer electronics and more. But as demand surges, so does end-of-life material that needs to be managed.
Beyond serving as compact energy sources, batteries also represent a domestic source of essential critical minerals. To fully realize their value, it is crucial to close the loop at end-of-life by recovering these minerals and strengthening the supply needed to support a rapidly expanding battery market. To responsibly manage battery materials at end-of-life, extended producer responsibility (EPR) for batteries becomes essential.
BATTERY RECYCLING INDUSTRY: GROWTH TRAJECTORY
In the U.S., battery EPR laws are being enacted at the state level, leaving battery producers, automotive original equipment manufacturers, and energy storage operators to navigate complex regulations, which vary by state. In states that have passed laws and those with active legislation, jobs will be created to manage these requirements, and we will see an increase in economic activity through the creation of closed-loop supply chains.The battery recycling industry will continue to grow, and battery EPR regulation will only fuel that growth through the creation of a more responsible system to ensure batteries are recycled.When systems are in place that require companies to recover batteries at end-of-life, we will significantly improve our ability to reclaim valuable materials. This applies to all battery chemistries, whether lithium-based or alkaline batteries containing zinc and manganeseyes, alkaline batteries can be recycled, and the recovered minerals from those alkaline batteries can be reused as micronutrients in fertilizers.
The groundwork has already been laid, and when you look at battery recycling as a whole, the value of recovering these materials is substantial. That value extends beyond financial benefits to include reduced geopolitical risk, improved logistics and supply chain resilience.
THE NATIONAL CHALLENGE
The country must address what happens to a battery when its no longer usable. Ultimately, through EPR legislation, we can make it a priority to recover critical minerals and increase the nations ability to produce battery-grade materials. In 2024 alone, the U.S. imported more than one billion batteries. These batteries are made of valuable materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. EPR laws are designed to track a batterys life cycle and, if done right, can help us take advantage of these materials once they are in the U.S. by recycling and reusing the minerals domestically to produce new batteries.
STATE LEADERSHIP
Battery recycling benefits everyone. Recyclers, producers, legislators, consumers, and the nation must work together to strengthen domestic supply chains, enhance national security, and keep batteries and the critical minerals they contain within U.S. borders.
When states introduce EPR bills, they will vary based on battery format or size, but several core principles should remain consistent:
Collection: In addition to standard collection sites, expanding to independent collection points increases accessibility. Recycling opportunities must be available to everyone, not limited to a specific group or location.
Avoid forfeiture requirements: The battery industry functions as a unified ecosystem, and the goal is to build a closed-loop supply chain. Restricting who can recycle and process the batteries after they are collected jeopardizes existing business models and risks harming the broader industry.
Transparency: Full visibility across the entire process from initial recycling through to metal recoveryis essential. Without transparency, innovation within the industry will stagnate.
EDUCATION & ACCESS
To better implement battery EPR laws, we must enhance consumer education on battery recycling. Many people do not understand how to handle and dispose of used batteries properly. For example, a recent study focused on lithium batteries found that nearly 40% of people do not know they can be recycled, and more than 60% do not know where or how to recycle them.
Lithium batteries are far too prevalent in our daily lives for consumers not to have resources and access to responsible recycling.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I am hopeful that as battery recycling becomes more mainstream and visible to consumers, a larger collection network with increased access will be available, and end-of-life batteries can be properly recycled and processed to recover the critical minerals effectively.
And not only is battery EPR a foundation for this and a stronger, more sustainable supply chain, it supports national security and ensures that we in the U.S. increase our global competitiveness through innovation and the domestic sourcing of critical minerals.
David Klanecky is the CEO and President of Cirba Solutions.
