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Unlike in the U.S., Canadian politics is multiparty and often defined by issues without salience to its neighbors to the south. But after President Donald Trump took office for a second term earlier this year and threatened Canada’s sovereignty and economy, the top issue in Canadian politics became one intimately familiar to Americans: Trump. Trump was the central figure in Canada’s election Mondayand voters were impressed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s vision for standing up to him. In a campaign video released on Election Day, Carney laid out his closing message. “The crisis in the United States doesn’t stop at their borders,” he says. “But this is Canada and we decide what happens here. Let’s choose to be united and strong. Canada strong.” [Image: liberal.ca] “Canada Strong” is Carney’s campaign slogan, itself a crib on an American trend of cities messaging resilience following tragedies like shootings or natural disasters. But Carney’s message is pure Canadian and emphasizes national unity against Trump’s saber rattling and trade wars. It’s defiant and conveys Carney’s “elbows up” approach toward the U.S., and it also provides a handy counterpoint to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, whose campaign slogan “Canada First” echoes Trump’s own “America First” refrain. “You cant stand up to Trump when youre working from his playbook,” Carney says in his campaign announcement video. The video juxtaposed footage of Trump and Poilievre, including a clip of Poilievre chomping on an apple during a viral interview where he was asked about “taking a page out of the Donald Trump book.” The Liberal Party’s fundraising message on its homepage emphasizes its anti-Trump stance by being Canada nice: “Support #PositivePolitics,” the site says, with a call to action to support things like “diversity over division” and “evidence-based decision making.” And Carney’s campaign logo and visual identity is simple and patriotic, reflecting a public image of someone who’s handled crises before and is prepared to do so again. Carney, a former central banker for Canada and the U.K. during Brexit, never held elected office before being elected Liberal Party leader in March. He replaced former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and came to the campaign with a simple message and a present threat with Trump in office. Trump repeated his rhetoric against Canada Monday, calling the country a “beautiful . . . landmass” in a social media post and suggesting the U.S.-Canada border is an “artificially drawn line from many years ago.” Canadian consumers have already responded to Trump’s tariffs and threats by not vacationing in the U.S. or selling their U.S. homes. Canadian consumer brands have responded in the form of initiatives like “Made in Canada” advertising and in-store signage at grocery store chains. Politics followed suit. Carney’s campaign strategy and the brand built to communicate it is similar in ways to what U.S. voters sometimes see in down-ballot elections when the president is unpopular, as Trump is (his approval is at 39%, according to an ABC News-Washington Post-Ipsos poll, the lowest of any presidential approval at this point in their term in 80 years). With Trump, the trend of tying your opponent to an unpopular president has now gone international.
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While 40 hours has been the standard workweek for the last few generations, the promise has long been that technology will give us more free time. Yet many Americans still find work spilling over into nights and weekends.Whether you want to cut back your hours to make room for a side hustle, to spend more time with your family, or to pursue your own interests and hobbies, it is possible to complete your full-time job in 30 hours a week. As a time management coach for over 16 years, Ive worked with a lot of people in a lot of situations. What Ive seen is that almost everyone can reduce the amount of time theyre working. Getting down to 30 hours or less per week isnt possible in all circumstances, but it is possible in many. Here are the steps to make it happen. Set clear constraints If youre used to working more, youll need to put in place very intentional time constraints to learn to limit yourself to 30 hours a week or less. To make this as easy as possible, I recommend setting a new schedule and trying not to deviate outside of it. For example, this could look like working 8:30 a.m.2:30 p.m. so that you can pick up your kids from school and take them to their activities. Or it could look like a 10 a.m.4 p.m. schedule if youre training for a huge competition and want to get in both early morning and evening workouts. Without these limits, its too easy to fall back into more of a 95 and never really feel free to put extra time into your outside of work goals. Consolidate your work Most likely youve been keeping busy for 40 or more hours per week, but that doesnt mean that youve been effective. One of the fastest ways to reduce your hours is to consolidate your meetings. Take a good, hard look at any recurring meetings. Could they be reduced by shortening them, reducing the frequency, or even eliminating them? Could you cluster meetings on fewer days of the week so that you can open up longer stretches of focused work time on other days? Could you reduce spontaneous meetings by asking people to schedule in advance or send you an email with more details before agreeing to meet? All of these strategies can shave off hours from your schedule. Next, youll want to look at the content of how youre spending your work time. If youre like most professionals, youre likely overinvesting time in communication and under investing time in the highest impact activities. Theres room to consolidate here, too. Some work environments do require instant responsiveness, but in the majority of them, its not necessary. If permissible, turn off all notifications so that youre only engaging with your inboxes and IM tools when you decide its the priority. Then limit your checks to a few times a day. For example, you may set aside time to process through your inboxes at the start of the day, around lunch, and as youre wrapping up. For myself, I have a rule that I reply to business email messages by the next business day, and I reply to LinkedIn messages once a week. You need to figure out the cadence that works for you so that youre checking just enough, but not too much. With the time opened up from reducing meetings and communication time, you can then invest in consolidated focused time where you can complete tasks from start to finish without constant starts and stops. Delegate out as much as possible If you have the ability to delegate to others, youll want to fully leverage other peoples time to open up hours in your schedule. As you go through your day, make a list of what others could do to support you and then begin to hand those items off bit by bit. Here are a few ideas of areas that have been effective for my clients to delegate: Doing research Following up on outstanding items Completing expense reports Booking travel Calling clients for longer conversations Scheduling meetings Answering standard email Putting together presentations Booking meeting rooms Planning events Taking meeting minutes Posting on social media Theres a potential that almost everything outside of your core responsibilities could be done by someone else. Challenge yourself to let go of some task at least once a week so that you can eliminate excess work from your schedule. Automate where you can With rapid advances in technology, more and more parts of your life can be automated or at least augmented. So where its supportive, let tech do the work. For example, for many of my clients, getting some sort of email filtering in place can radically change their relationship with their inboxes. It could be as simple as setting up some of their own filters or using tools like SaneBox that utilize AI for email sorting. For clients who struggle with longer email replies, theyll dump their thoughts into a tool like ChatGPT and ask it to write an email for them. Or theyll write their own email and ask for AI to change the tone. If youre someone who schedules a lot of meetings with outside parties, online scheduling tools like Calendly can be a game changer. You eliminate all back and forth. And if you really struggle with weekly planning, you may want to check out tools like SkedPal, Focuster, or Motion that use AI to come up with a plan for you. If you notice anything else time-consuming and repetitive in your work that you cant give to someone else on your team, see if theres a tool that would gladly do it for you. The options are increasing daily. I cant guarantee that youll carve your schedule all the way down to 30 hours a week or less. That can depend on a number of different factors. But what I can say is that if you try out these strategies to consolidate, delegate, and automate that you can find yourself working significantly less and opening up significantly more time for life outside of work.
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E-Commerce
Ernest Hemingway had an influential theory about fiction that might explain a lot about a particular weakness of artificial intelligence, or AI. In Hemingway’s opinion, the best stories are like icebergswith what characters actually say and do located above the surface, but making up only a fraction of the unfolding action. The rest of the storythe characters motivations, feelings, and their understanding of the worldideally resides instead beneath the surface, like the bulk of an iceberg, serving as unarticulated subtext for all that transpires. Perhaps the reason Hemingways theory struck a chord is because human beings are like icebergs. Whatever people say or do at any given moment is undergirded by reams of nonverbal context that exists beyond the cold, hard facts of what may appear to be happening. What does it look like when theres tension between two people, or supreme comfort? What kind of face does someone make when theyre desperately trying to end a conversation? These are things humans come to understand intuitively. According to a new study from Johns Hopkins University, though, AI is hopelessly out of its depth at interpreting such things so far. “I don’t think humans even have a full understanding of how we pick up on nonverbal social cues in the moment, but the idea behind most modern AI systems is that they should just be able to pick up on it from all of the data they’re trained on,” says Leyla Isik, lead author of the study. Isik is a cognitive scientist whose work centers around human vision and social perceptions. She had read a lot of scientific work recently suggesting that current AI models are adept at discerning human behavior when they categorize objects in static images. Since plenty of AI in the near-future wont be parsing static images, though, but instead processing dynamic action in real time, Isik set out to determine whether AI could correctly identify what is happening in videos depicting people engaged in different social interactions with each other. Its the kind of thing a person would want their self-driving car to excel at before trusting it to correctly size up, say, whether two people are having a heated exchange on a nearby sidewalk, and if one of them seems to be perhaps one harsh word away from bolting into the crosswalk. Isiks team asked a group of people to watch three-second video clips of humans either engaging with each other or doing independent activities near each other, and interpret what the clips portrayed. Sourced from a computer vision data set, the clips included everyday actions ranging from driving to cooking to dancing. The researchers then fed the same short clips to 350 AI language, video and image models, and asked them to predict what humans would say and feel about them. All of the videos were soundless, so neither humans nor AI models could make use of vocal tone, pitch, or dialogue to contextualize what they were taking in. The results were conclusive; while human participants were overwhelmingly in agreement about what was happening in the videos, the AI models were not. To be clear, participating AI were able to determine some aspects of what transpired in the clips. The scientists asked questions about things like whether a video was taking place indoors or outdoors, and in a small enclosed space or a large open setting. The AI always matched humans on those kinds of questions. They were less successful, however, at peering beneath the surface details. Pretty much everything else, we found that most AI models struggled at some subset of it, Isik says. Including questions as simple as ‘Are these two people in the video facing each other or not? All the way up to higher level questions like, ‘Are these people communicating?’ and ‘Does this video seem like it’s depicting a positive or negative interaction?’ The researchers asked, in particular, about both the emotional valence of a scenewhether it appeared to be positive or negativeand the level of arousalhow intense or engaging the actions in the video seemed. While a lot of humans involved couldn’t always pick up on what was being communicated in a video, they were able to determine whether a scene seemed intensely positive or mildly negative. AI models could not read the subtext in nonverbal cues, though. This disparity is likely due, the study claims, to AI being largely built on neural networks inspired by infrastructure from the part of the brain that processes static images, rather than the parts that process social interactions. Most AI models are trained to see an image and recognize objects and faces, but not relationships, context, or social dynamics. They may be trained on data sets that encompass movies, YouTube clips, or Zoom calls, and they may have encountered labels that explain what smiles, crossed arms, or furrowed brows mean. But they do not have the accumulated experience from years and decades spent constantly encountering these data sets and cultivating an intuitive understanding of how to navigate them in real time. Since another line of research in Isiks lab at Johns Hopkins is developing models for building more human-centered priorities into modern AI systems, perhaps her research will help close some of these gaps eventually. If so, it wont be a second too soon, as the AI boom continues to expand out into therapy and AI companions, along with other areas that rely on nonverbal cues and everything else lurking beneath the surface. “Any time you want assistive AI or certainly assistive robots in the workplace or in the home, you’re gonna want it to be able to pick up on these subtle nonverbal cues, Isik says. More basically, though, you also just want it to know what people are doing with each other. And I think this study highlights that we’re still pretty far from that reality with a lot of these systems.”
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E-Commerce
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