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Effective planning before you go on vacation can make your time off more relaxing and enjoyable. Unsurprisingly, research reveals that vacations are beneficial for your mental and physical well-being and most employees return more creative and productive. However, to maximize your chances of having a restful vacation, its helpful to have a game plan in place to make sure your responsibilities are covered when youre gone and youre setting yourself up for an easy return. To truly relax, professionals need thoughtful preparation, which helps them offload details from working memory and relax, says Anita Williams Woolley, professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh. Here’s what experts suggest. Determine your goals Take the time to delve into both short-term goals and long-term objectives youre responsible for managing. Woolley suggests these action points regarding work goals to address before signing off for your PTO. Clarify and prioritize immediate tasks to complete before you leavebe realistic about what you can get done. Confirm what your team should handle (or ignore) during your absence. Outline your return plan, including contingencies in case of delays. Create an alignment plan Before your absence, create a plan to help your team handle your responsibilities while youre gone. Woolley advises including strategies for obstacles or issues that may arise while youre away. Heres what she recommends: Clearly assign responsibilities. One suggestion is a vacation task list, where your specific duties are divided up among other team members. Make sure everyone understands what they are responsible for. Agree on which issues are urgent and warrant contacting you, empowering your team to handle everything else. Identify critical risks and provide explicit guidance on how to handle emergencies without you. Notify your team Be sure to let your colleagues and clients know when you will be out of your office. Woolley says: Be proactive. Alert your team youre going to be on vacation instead of a colleague or client receiving a bounce-back email announcing youre out of the office. Inform everyone who needs to know about your absence. Select a trusted “gatekeeper whos someone who decides when to contact you and serves as a central reference for others. The day before your vacation Although youre excited for your break, be sure to wrap up any loose ends. Annie Rosencrans, people and culture director at HiBob in New York, provides these tips: Send final follow-up emails, close out minor tasks, and tie up easy wins. Avoid pushing nonurgent new work to others right before you leave, and instead table them for when you get back. Cancel, decline, or reschedule meetings on the calendar for your time away. Set up your out of office (OOO) messages on email, Slack, and other communication platforms. Set yourself up for an easy return Establishing a plan before you leave for vacation can reduce pre-trip anxiety and ensure that you and your team are set up for success during your time away, says Rosencrans. A structured plan gives employees time to transition both practically and emotionally out of work mode, she continues. When executed well, this approach creates clarity, accountability, and space to truly disconnect. It also offers teammates confidence that nothing will fall through the cracks in your absence. Woolley at Carnegie Mellon advises organizing your workspace and priorities ahead of time, ensuring your goals guide your first days back, rather than an overflowing inbox. She recommends setting yourself up for an easier return: “Park on a downhill slope. Be assured, with some mindful planning, you can enjoy your vacation with less anxiety. Rosencrans asserts how time off isnt just a perk, it’s a performance strategy. The more intentionally we approach it, the better we protect well-being and long-term productivity, she explains. And no one should feel guilty for unplugging. If we normalize structured, respectful pre-vacation planning, we make space for real rest and thats something every employee deserves.
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E-Commerce
There are many regional terms for a submarine-shaped sandwich. One of them is hero. On Monday, as President Trump ordered 800 National Guard troops to descend upon the streets of Washington, D.C., plenty of social media users were using that termnot to describe such a sandwich, but the man who wielded it. A viral video taken in D.C. over the weekend shows a man in a jaunty pink button-up and north-of-the-knee white shorts confronting heavily armed federal officers. He appears at first bouncing in and out of a slight crouch, his head swaying from side to side, looking spectacularly undaunted by the agents all around him. Its unclear what he is saying, though a longer video shows the man ranting about fascism moments before the confrontation, so its easy to imagine what he may have been saying. Soon enough, the man pulls back his arm to reveal, incredibly, an as-yet unglimpsed footlong Subway sub. He hurls the enormous sandwich at one of the officers, right in the chest, before breaking into a flat run. The video ends with the extremely confident, questionably athletic man seeming to evade capture, though subsequent photos suggest he was later apprehended. The federal takeover of D.C. is something Trump had been threatening since at least August 5, after a former member of DOGEEd Big Balls Coristinewas beaten up by two 15-year olds in an attempted carjacking. If D.C. doesnt get its act together, and quickly, the president wrote on Truth Social following the attack, We will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that theyre not going to get away with it anymore. Considering hed previously dispatched National Guard troops to Los Angeles just two months ago, it was clear this was no idle threat. Sure enough, Trump eventually sent agents from the DEA, FBI, and ATF into the city late last week, ahead of Mondays press conference announcing a deployment of the National Guard and his taking control of the Metropolitan police department, putting its 3,100 officers under his direct command for at least 30 days. For much of Monday, social media users shared surreal footage of DEA officers in tactical gear patrolling the leafy walkway of the National Mall as joggers jogged by. It served as a counterpoint to the doomsday dirge on conservative media, with one GOP senator after another talking about how unsafe and scary they find Washington, D.C. The emerging footage seemed to instead reflect data collected by the Metropolitan police department showing that violent crime in the city last year was down 35% from 2023, and at its lowest level in over 30 years. And that was before Bluesky and Reddit got a better look at some of that violent criminal elementin the form of assault with a hoagie. Thats when the jokes and memes began. guys its really not funny that the fbi agent took a footlong to the chest. stop laughing. its NOT FUNNY that an fbi agent in head to toe tactical gear tried to chase the guy who hucked a sandwich straight at his bulletproof vest but couldnt outrun him— rax levon honkers king (@raxkingisdead.bsky.social) 2025-08-11T23:20:39.021Z Oh no! Is the sub all right?— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2025-08-12T00:21:47.876Z Most social media users werent necessarily cheering for the battery of police officers, but rather admiring the assailants fearlessness and laughing at his choice of projectile. Beaning an authority figure with a footlong sub, after all, seems more like a means of conveying disrespect and creating a spectacle than inflicting injury. In any case, whether because the man gave voice to their own lack of respect toward the deployed feds, or just because it gave them a much-needed laugh, users on Bluesky and Reddit quickly elevated Footlong Guy to folk hero statusa sort of non-homocidal Luigi Mangione, or way-less violent Waymo-destoyer. to every generation is born a folk hero who will perfectly channel the will of the people. his weapon will be harmless, even laughable, like say for example a shoe, or a footlong sub,— alix e. harrow (@alixeharrow.bsky.social) 2025-08-12T00:35:35.213Z
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E-Commerce
The AI search startup Perplexity has tendered an unsolicited offer to buy Googles Chrome browser for $34.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. The bid comes as the Justice Department has asked a federal judge to require Google to sell off Chrome to end an ongoing antitrust case. But its questionable that a startup valued at half that amount on paper ($18 billion) can afford to buy Chrome; and Google, of course, almost certainly has no intention of selling itat least not yet. (Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.) A federal court in Washington, D.C., decided last year that Google holds a monopoly in the internet search and advertising markets and is now considering a Department of Justice demand that the search giant sell off its Chrome browser. Google called the DOJ proposal wildly overbroad and part of a radical interventionist agenda (language that could draw some negative attention from the Trump administration). Perplexity testified in that same case last spring, at which time it expressed a desire to buy Chrome. OpenAI also testified, and its ChatGPT product lead, Nick Turley, testified that his company would be interested in buying Chrome if the court required Google to sell. Indeed, owning the Chrome browser would immediately catapult Perplexity from being a long shot for winning, placing, or showing in the internet search wars, to being a real contender. In theory, Perplexity could use the Chrome browser in the same way Google doesas a widely popular front door to its AI-powered search engine. “A clever publicity play” With Chrome, Google fused the ideas of web browsing and web search into one thing that could be done in one place. Chrome changed the browsers URL to act as a search bar, too (the omnibox, as it’s called). A huge portion of Google searches come from Chrome, and Google makes the lions share of its revenues from showing ads around search results. Google can place ads more effectively because of its access to all kinds of user browsing behavior in Chrome. Perplexitys bid is very likely something less than a serious strategic gambit. “This is a clever publicity play by the startup, but no one should take this stunt seriously,” says Neil Chilson, former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission and current head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute. Chilson adds that the bid will have no bearing on the remedies that Judge Amit Mehta is currently considering in the antitrust case. Perplexity is talking like it has every intention of buying Chrome. “Multiple large investment funds have agreed to finance the transaction in full, so we have a wide range of options,” the company said in a statement to Fast Company on Tuesday. “We are confident in our ability to close quickly.” Interestingly, Perplexity says it commits “never to stealthily replace the default search engine of Chrome (Google).” Perplexity is good at what it does, but still small Perplexity employs some very talented AI engineers, its answer engine product works surprisingly well by most accounts (including mine), and the company has been agile about releasing new products that augment its core service. (It recently released its own browser called Comet.) But in the face of Google Search, Perplexity is still small-fry. It serves only a fraction of internet searches and sends only a fraction of the product search referrals that go to brand websites. Perplexity looks more like a company to be acquired, not like an acquirer. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reportedly held talks to acquire Perplexity earlier this year, but an agreement couldnt be reached. It’s likely that other suitors have approached the startup. And yet the existing rules of market dominance in tech could be shifting under everyones feetbecause of generative AI. During this seminal period in the potentially transformative technology (when the next Googles and Apples may be being decided), optics matter. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas seems to have a keen sense of this. He knows he needs to keep his companys name in the conversation with other up-and-comers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as the so-called AI revolution unfolds. Hes done an admirable job of itas evidenced by his many podcasts, public appearances, and viral tweets. So Perplexitys Chrome bid may come out of the same playbook. Its about posturing. For a company of Perplexitys stature to convince consumers that it could really be the heir to Googles search throne, it may want to puff itself up to appear to belong in (roughly) the same weight class as the incumbent. Putting in an offer to buy a key piece of Googles business may serve that end.
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E-Commerce
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