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Revolutionary France may seem like a strange place to find a life hack, but in the 1790s, the French satirist Nicolas Chamfort offered some stark advice to cope with our daily travails. One should swallow a toad every morning, so as not to find anything disgusting for the rest of the day, he wrote. In other words, start with the thing you dread most, and the following obligations will feel far more pleasant. Chamforts name has largely been forgotten by the English-speaking world, but his unsettling phrase has endured as a popular productivity mantra: Eat the frog. The idea has even inspired a best-selling self-help book from the 2000s. But does it actually work? It is only within the past few years that scientists have investigated the strategy, and they have found that “eating the frog” can be surprisingly powerful, boosting our satisfaction, motivation, and performance in the workplace, while helping us to begin our evenings feeling more refreshed. We just need to gird our stomachs and get on with it. Biased expectations You may be skeptical. The very idea of eating the frog runs against the widespread intuition that we should ease ourselves into a job with the simplest possible task. Most of us think that we can build up confidence as we progress, but it turns out to be completely wrong. Rachel Habbert and Juliana Schroeder at the University of California, Berkeley, first exposed this bias in 2020. In a series of experiments, the researchers first asked participants to consider different word games, and to say which order they would like to tackle themwith the vast majority of people opting to work their way up to the hardest challenges. They seemed to believe that this would allow their confidence to grow. To test whether those preferences were justified, Schroeder and Habbert then asked the participants to perform the tasks in order of either ascending or descending difficulty. Contrary to their predictions, the participants who started with the most demanding task ended up feeling considerably more confident than those who worked the other way. Eating the frog at the beginning of the task, it seemed, had allowed them to finish on a high. The “easy addendum effect” The results chime with a later finding by Edward Lai, an assistant professor of marketing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was inspired, in part, by the peak-end rule. Put simply, this is the principle that our memories of an experience are biased by its most intense moments, and by the way it endswhile neglecting its overall duration. In the original experiments describing this phenomenon, the late Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist at Princeton University, asked participants to plunge one of their hands into unpleasantly cold14°C (57°F)water for 60 seconds. After they had dried off, they then plunged the other hand into water of the same temperature for the same length of time, followed by a further 30 seconds at 15°C (59°F)before being asked which trial they would like to repeat. The logical answer would seem to be the first, but most went for the second, since it ended on a more pleasant note. Lai and his colleagues wanted to test how this might apply to our work. They tasked some participants with common administrative jobs, such as filing books alphabetically or answering customer inquiries. Some of the participants were given a single block of tasks, while others were asked to complete the same number of jobs while also taking on a second block of easier tasks. (The people answering customer queries were given a few extra emails asking for straightforward clarifications, for example.) Despite doing more work overall, the people who had been given the additional problems felt that they had made less overall effort than those who had simply tackled the core task, and they were more satisfied as a result. They also showed greater persistence. They were less likely to want to take a break, and more likely to opt in to additional tasks, and actually complete them, Lai says. To double-check that the sequence mattered, they also tried placing the simpler tasks at the beginning, or at the middle of the sequence. But the only way that people felt happier and more satisfied was when we put the easy ones at the end, he saysleading the researchers to call it the “easy addendum effect.” We can only conclude so much from laboratory experiments, but the finding has since been replicated in real-life companies. In one weeklong study, Chen Zhang, an associate professor in leadership and management organization at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and his colleagues encouraged 83 knowledge workers at an IT company to change their schedules so that they focused on the days biggest challenges during the morning. As Schroeders and Lais findings would have predicted, they ended the day more positively, with less fatigue as they left work. A second survey at an e-commerce company found that this approach could also increase productivity. The participants supervisors reported that they were more likely to go above and beyond their everyday responsibilities after completing their most daunting tasks first, for example. Reflection and planning Putting all this into practice will take a little forethought. In Zhangs study, the participants spent the first moments of each morning rating the difficulty of each task before deciding on their schedule. In some cases, there will only be one logical order to do things. Whenever we have a bit of flexibility, however, we can choose to tackle the biggest challenges as early as possible. I frequently apply this strategy myself. Ive just started writing a new book, for instance, and some of the more technical sections will require particularly heavy lifting. Knowing about the easy addendum effect, I focus on these more demanding tasks before lunch and spend the afternoon working on the connective tissue and the personal anecdotes, which are often far more pleasurable to write, before spending the final hour revising what I have written. I arrange work calls and meetings in a similar manner, placing those with the potential for conflict in the first half of the day, and friendly catch-ups toward the evening. Simply categorizing your emails can make a real difference, Lai says. Clearly, some will need to be answered urgently, but once you have prioritized those that need immediate attention, you can eat the frogs first and leave the quickest responses until last. Lai is sure this simple habit has enhanced his own happiness. If I do that, I feel like it hasnt been such a bad day when I walk out of the office, he says. Nicolas Chamfort, we can guess, would heartily approve.
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Most people care about fairness at work and want to support colleagues who face marginalizationfor example, people of color, women, and people with disabilities. Our research has found that 76% of employees want to be allies to co-workers who face additional challenges, and 84% value equity. Thats in line with a 2025 national survey that found 88% of employees supported employers offering training on how to be more inclusive. So why doesnt that support always turn into action? Our new study in the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health points to one reason: Some people may freeze with worry because they feel like a fake. Specifically, they feel like they dont have the skills to effectively support their marginalized co-workers, even though they want to. Those feelings may block action, which makes people feel even more fraudulentcreating a loop thats hard to break. Together, weMeg Warren, Michael T. Warren, and John LaVellefound that 1 in 5 people who want to support marginalized groups experience the impostor phenomenon even when they have the skills to be effective allies. The impostor phenomenon, formerly called the impostor syndrome, is the feeling that youre not good enougheven when theres objective evidence that you are. Researchers have documented it across many workplace and professional settings, including in health care, technology, entrepreneurship, the C-suite, and academia. Importantly, these feelings are linked to significantly higher anxiety and feelings of depression among people who want to be allies. We found that men, leaders, younger employees, and people of color were more likely to experience the impostor phenomenon in the context of allyship. What the impostor phenomenon looks like for allies Consider James, a senior project manager. For the past few years, his company has expected all managers to undergo diversity, equity and inclusion training and to support the companys Black Employee Network. Earlier this year, however, the company publicly withdrew its commitment to DEI and removed all mentions of it from its website. When his team asked for his thoughts, James felt lost. The facts he learned during the Black Employee Network meetings were unsettling and undeniable. Before, he regularly cited these during various meetings with his colleagues and senior leaders. Now, he felt pressured to act as if none of this mattered. He felt frustrated, at a loss for words, and a complete fakelike he didnt know how to support his colleagues anymore. While James is a composite character drawn from many stories weve heard over the course of our research, his experience captures the bind that many would-be allies face. When allies feel this way, they often compare themselves to an imagined perfect ally, thinking that if they cant be outrageously heroic, they must be failures. They then deal with feelings of inadequacy by procrastinating or overpreparing before stepping up for othersto the point where they miss crucial opportunities where they could have made a difference. People tend to feel like an impostor when they encounter a challenge that seems bigger than their ability to cope with it. So its not surprising that a lot of people feel this way about workplace equity. Inequity and bias play out in complex ways in organizations: The rules change rapidly, and people can receive mixed messages about what behaviors are appropriate, valued and rewarded. This can make allyship feel overwhelmingly challenging, even for those who are otherwise skilled. Work culture also matters. In toxic organizational cultures or hypercompetitive environments, people feel pressure to hide their mistakes, they worry about colleagues sabotaging their efforts, and they see humility as a weakness. In such placesand especially when the would-be allys role is highly visible and entails heavy responsibilitypeople are vulnerable to impostor feelings. Past criticism can add fuel, too. If youve been admonished for standing up for a colleague or have seen others be attackedincluding by those who wish to maintain an unjust status quoyou might further feel pressure to only act in ways that are immune to criticism. Thats an impossible standard. Consequences of feeling like an impostor: Feeling worse, doing worse Leaders in particular are vulnerable to feeling like impostors on allyship. Many havent been properly trained on how to listen to and support co-workers who might be facing discrimination and are quietly suffering, yet are held responsible for solving complex issues around fairness that long predated them. And when stuck in this uncomfortable space, people who feel like impostors are likely to become defensive and feel pressured to be a hero. To prove themselves, they may overcompensate in ways that backfirefor example, by loudly claiming support for disadvantaged workers without following up with useful action, or by swooping in to fix issues without respecting the preferences of the people involved. Unfortunately, this not only affects their ability to be a supportive colleague, but it also likely harms their mental health. Indeed, the impostor phenomenon has been found to be linked to heightened anxiety and feelings of depression, both in our study and beyond. So you might wonder: What if I opt out of all of this by not thinking about inequity at all? Our research suggests that this is a bad idea. People who are disengaged from issues of inequity, and who dont invest in learning and growing as allies, experience lower self-confidence at work and have lower job satisfaction. Checking out of allyship could be bad for your professional well-being. The good news is you dont have to be stuck feeling this way. You can take low-risk, bite-sized actions that can pull you out of feeling fake and boost your confidence, all while improving your own professional success and mental health. Research points to three simple ways forward. First, recognize and loudly celebrate the strengths of marginalized colleages, which creates an uplifting work culture. Second, take concrete steps to build trustfor example, by giving proper credit to a disadvantaged colleague if their merit is wrongfully questioned. And finally, overcome your cynicismwhich research shows invariably suppresses constructive actionand instead adamantly choose hope, even when its hard. Meg Warren is an associate professor of management at Western Washington University. John M. LaVelle is an adjunct professor of public policy at the University of Minnesota. Michael T. Warren is an assistant professor of psychology at Western Washington University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Instacart just became the first company to offer an end-to-end integrated shopping experience with OpenAIs ChatGPT. Its yet another signal that AI is about to upend the way we shopand, maybe, the way we cook. The new partnership was announced by Instacart and OpenAI on December 8. To use the interface, ChatGPT users need to make an Instacart account and then surface Instacart within their chat thread using a prompt like, Instacart, help me shop for apple pie ingredients. From there, they can discuss recipes, ingredient swaps, and their preferred store with ChatGPT, which will help them order all of the items they need from Instacart without ever changing tabs or leaving the chat. [Image: Instacart] This partnership is a significant milestone in the race among tech companies to make AI an integral part of the shopping experience. Amazon, for example, now offers a suite of AI tools to help shoppers make decisions and point them toward future purchases. According to Adobe Digital Insights 2025 report on holiday season shopping, the company saw the first material surge in AI-directed traffic (users following links recommended by chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini) to U.S. retail sites in 2024. This year, it expects AI traffic to rise by 520%. In all, Adobe found that over a third of shoppers in the U.S. have used AI to help with online shoppingand that number is bound to keep growing. Clearly, many shoppers are already turning to ChatGPT for advice on the best products to buy and where to get them. For OpenAI, then, it makes sense to bring the shopping itself directly onto its own platform. In all likelihood, this partnership with Instacart is only a trial run ahead of plenty more integrations to come. In a press release, Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, said that the new collaboration will allow users to go from meal planning to checkout in a single, seamless conversation. I decided to put Turley’s promise to the test by using the new interface the way I predict that its target audience might: recreating a TikTok-viral recipe (Ina Gartens brownie pudding) from start to finish. Testing out ChatGPT’s recipe-generating chops Making a trendy recipe with the new Instacart integration starts with actually getting ChatGPT to accurately reproduce its ingredients and instructionswhich, as it turns out, can be a challenge. Based on my testing, ChatGPT is pretty good at regurgitating more general, nonspecific recipes from the open web. For example, a search for a popular, gooey chocolate chip cookie yields a standard recipe that ChatGPT describes as similar to The New York Times or Nestlé Toll House; while a search for green goddess salad yields a recipe that went viral in 2022 and has since resulted in dozens of publicly available articles, which ChatGPT is then able to pull from for its own summary. Things get a bit trickier when youre looking for one specific recipe, thoughespecially if it’s protected by a paywall or other blocker. When I asked ChatGPT to find the recipe and instructions for The New York Times Lemon-Tumeric Crinkle Cookies, it confidently provided a slightly inaccurate ingredient list and instructions, and attributed the recipe to the wrong author. I asked the question again, this time including the real author in the prompt, only to be met with the same response with the disclaimer, I cant reproduce the copyrighted article verbatim, but these ingredients + steps accurately reflect the recipe (they didnt). I moved on to attempting to recreate Ina Gartens brownie pudding, starting by asking ChatGPT to use popular TikTok videos to find the recipe. The resulting recipe was almost correct, but not quiteit substituted Gartens recommended framboise liquor for coffee. Next, I specifically requested that ChatGPT use the most-viewed TikTok video about the recipe in order to recreate it. The chatbot told me that it doesnt have access to TikToks live trending videos, so it couldnt pull exact instructions from the most-viewed clip, instead offering a TikTok-style version based on what it called popular adaptations. This version strayed even further from the original. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] As a last-ditch effort, I asked ChatGPT to pull the brownie pudding recipe directly from Ina Gartens official website. ChatGPT then assured me that it was providing the exact recipe from her site (not an adaptation, not a TikTok version, but her real published recipe). This was, once again, not the real recipe. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] For OpenAIs model, it seems, finding general recipes on the open web is simple, but accurately retrieving information from external apps, like TikTok, or paywalled websites, like The New York Times, is unpredictable at best. Following this slightly maddening exchange, I decided to bake both Gartens official recipe and ChatGPTs bootleg TikTok-style version in order to decide which reigns supreme. The battle of the brownie puddings After my frustrating back-and-forth with ChatGPT, I was ready to throw in the towel and place my Instacart order as quickly as possible. But the process of actually using the integration proved to be a bit of a rollercoaster. At first, everything was proceeding smoothly. I conducted several test runs using the activation word Instacart, and ChatGPT successfully added my requested ingredients to my cart directly through our chat. Mid-way through this experimentation, though, ChatGPT appeared to lose the plot, informing me, I dont have the ability to directly add items to Instacart or access your account. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] After several troubleshooting questions, during which ChatGPT informed me that the Instacart connector wasnt active, I asked how to reactivate it. ChatGPT then said that I needed to be in a ChatGPT Plus or Pro plan session with Plugins enabled. In an email to Fast Company, though, an Instacart spokesperson clarified that the integration is available to all accounts, including free ones. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] Its unclear to me exactly what went wrong, but when I tried again several hours later in a new chat, the connection was up and working again. Ordering the ingredients for the Tik-Tok style recipe was quick and straightforward, and everything arrived from my local Target within two hours (except the unsalted butter, which was substituted for salted due to a store shortage). The recipes themselves were a similar concept with notably different executions. The TikTok style version, for example, called for vanilla extract instead of Gartens seeds from one vanilla bean; likely a result of multiple TikTokers making the swap themselves at home and suggesting it to viewers (vanilla beans in this economy?). Gartens original version also required cocoa powder alone for the chocolate component, whereas ChatGPTs interpretation called for solid chocolate. And, in terms of the baking process, Gartens pudding needed to be suspended in a water bath and baked for an hour, while ChatGPT omitted the water step entirely and suggested just 30 minutes in the oven. Given its presumably crowd-sourced origins, the TikTok-style recipe was unsurprisingly cheaper, easier to make, and quicker. It had an extremely dark, almost bitter chocolate taste compared to the original recipe, which was mellower and sweeter. Both have their place, in my opinionthough Gartens was ever so slightly tastier. Right now, the Instacart integration feels built for people who are already regular users of both ChatGPT and Instcart. For that niche, it might save time when brainstorming for meal prep and troubleshooting general recipes. But for everyone else, Im not sold on the utility of this tool. If you have a specific recipe in mind, its probably easier (and less headache-inducing) to just make it the old-fashioned way. [Photo: courtesy of the author]
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From the latest skyscraper in a Chinese megalopolis to a sixfoottall yurt in Inner Mongolia, researchers at the Technical University of Munich claim they have created a map of all buildings worldwide: 2.75 billion building models set in highresolution 3D with a level of precision never before recorded. Made from years of satellite data analysis by machinelearning algorithms, the model reflects a sustained effort to capture the built world in three dimensions. The result now provides a crucial basis for climate research and for tracking progress toward global sustainable development goals, according to the scientists behind it. Professor Xiaoxiang Zhu, who leads the project and is the chair of data science in Earth observation at TUM, says the real achievement is that the new map is a threedimensional picture of how much space people actually inhabit. 3D building information provides a much more accurate picture of urbanization and poverty than traditional 2D maps, she explains. With 3D models we see not only the footprint but also the volume of each building. [Screenshot: FC] At the heart of this work is the GlobalBuildingAtlas, an open dataset that describes individual buildings across the planet both as 2D outlines and as simple 3D objects. In total, it contains 2.75 billion building footprintspolygons tracing the edges of each structurecovering every building the satellites could detect in satellite imagery from 2019. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] At first glance, there are some interesting takeaways from the map, like the distribution of building volume clusters around major metropolitan regionswith particularly dense concentrations in East Asia, Europe, and North America. Meanwhile, many parts of the Global South show vast numbers of buildings that are small and lowrise, especially in Africa, which has more buildings than Europe and North America, but far less total built area and volume. [Screenshot: FC] The ability to map building height and volume reveals disparities that conventional 2D maps tend to hide: A dense informal settlement and a carefully planned neighborhood of multistory buildings can look similar in a flat, areabased statistic. But if you have accurate 3D buildings, experts can understand that they offer radically different housing conditions and require different infrastructure. Their proposed metric of building volume per capita turns the GlobalBuildingAtlas into a lens for spotting where housing and infrastructure lag behind population and, therefore, where urban policy and investment should concentrate. [Screenshot: FC] How they made it The scientists used machine learning algorithms to identify one billion more buildings than any previous global database, creating simplified 3D “shoebox” models for 97% of them. That’s 2.68 billion 3D buildings, compared to Google Open Buildings, which has 1.8 billion building outlines. The team started with daily satellite images from the PlanetScope constellation, which photographs the Earth at roughly 9.8 feet per pixel. Then they stitched together about 800,000 cloud-free scenes from 2019 into a seamless global mosaic, and taught a neural network to recognize buildings by training it on known building outlines from OpenStreetMap and other sources. To add height to these flat building outlines, the team used laser measurements (LiDAR) from airborne surveys in developed countries to train an AI that can estimate how tall a building is just by looking at a single satellite photosimilar to how a person can judge a skyscraper’s height from its appearance and shadow. This height-prediction model scans the entire global image and assigns a height value to every pixel, even calculating its own margin of error.
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If youre order number 67 at In-N-Out, dont expect to hear your number called. The fast food chain has reportedly removed the number from its system, after viral videos show teens responding with wild celebrations after waiting around just to hear the number called. Imagine explaining this to someone in the future, one commenter wrote. Employees confirmed the number hasn’t been used for orders for about a month, according to a report from People magazine. After order number 66, the next order jumps straight to number 68. The chain has also removed the number 69, for good measure. The two digits, pronounced six, seven, not sixty-seven, have also been wreaking havoc in classrooms over the past couple months. Vice President JD Vance even took to social media and called for the numbers to be banned. He wrote on X, Yesterday at church the Bible readings started on page 66-67 of the missal, and my 5-year-old went absolutely nuts repeating six seven like 10 times. He continued, I think we need to make this narrow exception to the First Amendment and ban these numbers forever. Others have adopted an “if you cant beat em, join em” approach. In November, both Wendys and Pizza Hut added a 67-cent Frosty deal and 67-cent wings” to their respective menus, paying homage to the meme in the hope of enticing teens. Domino’s also launched its own promo deal, offering customers one large pizza with one topping for $6.70. The trend has, somewhat unbelievably, reached the house floor. Utah Republican U.S. Rep. Blake Moore, while reporting the ayes and nos for a vote on a joint resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives last month, joked the results were about 6-7 while doing the juggling hand gesture. “6-7” officially cemented its status as the choice for Dictionary.com‘s word of the year. “Perhaps the most defining feature of 67 is that its impossible to define, wrote Dictionary.com. Its meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical.” For those still lost, the numbers can be traced back to a song called Doot Doot, released by hip-hop artist Skrilla in late 2024, in which he raps, 6-7, I just bipped right on the highway (bip, bip). From there, a video of a boy yelling 6-7 into the camera at a basketball game went viral. Since then, its taken on a life of its own.
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E-Commerce
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