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Youve tried it all before. Waking up at 5:30 a.m. Journaling first thing in the morning. The exercises youre supposed to do before work. But do your morning habits stick? Are you still practicing them? We all want to win the morning, to be productive and intentional. The trouble with morning routines is that they dont work as they should if you dont fix your evening habits. People are obsessed with morning routines. But they forget that winning in the morning starts the night before. Every single choice you make after dinner is either setting you up for a great morning or sabotaging tomorrow before it begins. That late-night binge doesnt just keep you up. Its changing your entire sleep-wake cycle. That work email you answered at 10 p.m. stays on your mind and makes you think about all the many responses youre expecting. Doing work or dealing with issues right before bed keeps your brain thinking, figuring out options. And the worst part is that you pick it all up again when you wake up. Youre not just losing sleep. Youre training your brain to wake up in stress mode. The quality of your evening routine determines the success of your morning habits. Every time you miss out on a better evening ritual, your morning routine will suffer. Your willpower will be lower. The decision fatigue trap most people overlook By the end of your day, youve already made thousands of decisions: what to wear, what to eat, which emails to answer, which tasks to tackle first. Each decision demands mental energy. The more decisions you make in the morning, the less energy you have left for your tasks. The bigger problem? If you wait until morning to decide what youre going to do first, youre not starting your day right. Make your morning decisions at night instead. In just 10 to 15 minutes the night before, eliminate the decisions that stop you from taking action on your ideal morning routine. Write down a list of things you want to get right in the morning. Youll sleep better and feel more prepared when you wake up. By creating a good plan the night before, you set yourself up to be productive. Ive been using this pre-decision method to make my writing habit stick for years. And its working for me. I decide what to write the night before. I even write down the introduction. And then I pick up where I left off. You could start by prioritizing three tasks for the morning. By reducing the number of decisions you have to make, you free up time to actually make your morning habit, whatever you intend it to be, stick. I think of an evening routine as a systema series of small dominoes you set up for the results you want. Start with your sleep. Everything flows from this. Your brain begins winding down for sleep a few hours before bedtime as part of your natural sleep-wake cycle. Work with this, not against it. That means two hours before bed, start dimming lights. Put away work. No more emails. Your body needs time to transition into a good morning. You could even take it further30 minutes before bed is your clarity window. Journal if you want. Read a good book. The goal is to empty your brain so youre not lying awake thinking about all the things you need to remember. Now try to go to bed at the same time each night. An inconsistent sleep routine prevents your body from releasing hormones at the right time, which can throw off your sleep cycle. Give your brain the right evening routine to shut down. When you prepare the night before, youre not relying on willpower in the morning. Youre just following the plan you already made. Self-control is highest in the morning and steadily deteriorates over the course of the day. Use your evening brain, which is tired but still functional, to set up your morning brain for success. Establishing a Routine Takes Time Youre not going to nail this immediately. Youre going to forget something in the evening. Youll most likely stay up late watching just one more episode. If you break the chain, dont stress yourself about it. The goal is to make your defaults a little bit betterto remove some of the friction between you and the person you want to be in the morning. Start small. Pick one thing youre going to decide the night before. Just one. Maybe its writing down three things you need to do in the morning. Do that for a week. Then add another thing. Aim to add one or two changes at a time, slowly building a routine. What you want is sustainable change. Morning people are not more disciplined than you. They just figured out that mornings are won the night before. Do the boring work the night before. And go to bed on time. Tonight, before you go to bed, do three things. Decide what time youre waking up tomorrow. Be specific. Write down what youre doing first when you wake up. Prep whatever you need to make that happen. Make it visible. Thats the system and the setup to give your morning a chance to be successful. Everything else can come later. Your morning routine is failing because youre trying to build a routine without systems, and making decisions when you should be doing things. Fix the night habits, and the mornings will be better.
Category:
E-Commerce
In 2015, in Gallups State of the American Manager report, then CEO and Chairman Jim Clifton made an assertion that startled many and quietly confirmed what others already suspected: Most CEOs I know honestly dont care about employees or take an interest in human resources. Sure, they know who their stars are and love thembut it ends there. Since CEOs dont care, they put little to no pressure on their HR departments to get their cultures right . . . Given the unique vantage point Clifton had into American business at the time, he offered a rather harsh and honest assessment. And, more than a decade later, the obvious question worth asking isnt whether Clifton was right then. Its whether top leaders are still operating as if he is right today. If you ask the average American worker whether they feel their employer genuinely cares about them and their well-being, the majority will say no. Recent research shows that fewer than one-in-four strongly agreea level roughly similar to pre-pandemic lowsand perceptions of care have steadily declined even as leaders insist they prioritize their employee experience. In my new book, The Power of Employee Well-Being, and in articles Ive recently written for Fast Company, Ive argued that companiesand their leadersmust make a transformational pivot by prioritizing employee well-being as a core driver of performance. Sadly, Ive received many messages from readers suggesting Im fighting a lost causethat despite mountains of evidence, the leaders they work have no inclination to change. More often than not, they treat employee well-being as a complete and utter distraction from the real work of hitting goals and meeting targets. Ive heard this lament so many times that I had to ask myself why my message hasnt gotten through. And my conclusion is that deep down, many leaders continue to fear that any support they give to their people will come at direct expense of productivity. Consciously or unconsciously, theyre convinced supporting well-being is a fools game. Rarely stated outright, this belief system influences leaders decisions every dayhow workloads are structured, how feedback is delivered, and how much time and energy are devoted to supporting employees in ways that make a difference. The problem is theres a mountain of evidence that refutes this very fear. We now have irrefutable proof that well-being is one of the primary conditions that makes achieving goals possible. Evidence Leaders Cant Ignore Well-Being Drives Key Performance Metrics:Drawing on 339 studies covering 1.8 million employees, a meta-analysis from the University of Oxfords Wellbeing Research Centre found a consistent and direct relationship between employee well-being and key business metricsones most leaders are directly on the line for: productivity, customer loyalty, employee retention, and profitability. Well-Being Predicts Performance: As separate reinforcement, a study in Population Health Management found that high employee well-being is a predictor of future productivity, lower absenteeism, reduced disability leave and lower turnovereven when controlling for other variables. Said another way, well-being doesnt merely coexist with strong performance, it precedes it. Investment Boosts Profitability: New research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) shows that organizations which meaningfully invest in employee well-being are four times more profitable than those that dontand are viewed far more positively by employees and job candidates. Well-Being Fuels Stock Growth Irrational Capital analyzed S&P 500 companies over 11 years and found firms in the top 20% for employee well-being outperformed the bottom 20% in stock performance by nearly six percentage points annually. Companies that intentionally offered competitively better pay and benefits alone outperformed by just two points. Why Resistant Leaders Are Wrong Leading a team of people, and being accountable for its results, can feel formidable at timesand its a common response for managers to believe that pushing harder and demanding longer hours is a justified action. But humans are not machines who can work endlessly without meaningful separation from work and adequate rest. When workdays feel endless, and people feel a lack of empathy and support, their capacity to focus, solve complex problems, and collaborate effectively nose-dives. Creativity stalls, mistakes increase, and high-level goals become harder to achieve. In short, neglecting well-being directly undermines the very outcomes leaders need to achieve. The High Cost of the Status Quo Despite many leaders vows to prioritize their employees well-being, the current reality in our workplaces is stark. Recent surveys show burnout has reached epidemic levels, nearly 60% of American workers report feeling stressed very oftenor always on the job. And burnout is the leading reason employees quit. Consequently, mental health struggles are widespread with one in five workers reporting symptoms of depression directly linked to their workplace conditions. And the stakes arent just emotionalignoring well-being hits the bottom line. Replacing a burned-out employee can cost 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary, while disengaged or over-stressed workers lower productivity, slow innovation, and increase errors. In short, neglecting employee well-being isnt just bad for peopleits bad for business. Leaders Wont Fix This Overnight, But Must Take The First Steps As the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, leaders must be realistic that they cannot solve all these conditions overnight. What they should do first is initiate support for their teams well-being by addressing the specific things people crave most: Emotional and Psychological Safety: Across multiple workforce studies, roughly 60% of employees say they want a culture where they can speak up without fear of negative consequences. Belonging: Around 55% report that feeling part of a cohesive, collaborative team that valuesthem personally is their top need. Meaningful Work: About 50% prioritize having work they know connects to a larger purpose or makes a tangible impact. Growth and autonomy: Neary half of employees48%seek support for skill development and more control over how they accomplish tasks. More than a decade later, Jim Cliftons jarring observation still resonates: many leaders have never cared because theyve never thought they had to. But, ignoring employee well-being today puts leaders in direct peril. Well-beingsomething 84% of all U.S. workers now say is their number-one priority in life isn’t a reward for hitting goals; it’s a condition for attaining them. Organizations (and leaders) that invest in it see higher performance, retention, innovation, profitability, and market value. Those that don’t will fall behind, no matter how competitive their pay or perks. The leaders who succeed in the next decade won’t choose between results and care. Theyll see this as a false dichotomy and embrace the new reality that thriving people sustainably produce uncommon results. If this resonates, share it with a leader who needs to hear it. Lead with care, and your organization will follow. Ignore it, and performance suffers. Its really an easy choice.
Category:
E-Commerce
The hottest AI tool on the market today isnt a powerful frontier model from the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic. Rather, its a kludgey, wildly complex, open-source platform thats already provoked a trademark dispute, multiple corporate bansand fawning praise from developers around the world. Its OpenClaw, and its specifically designed to build AI agents. I set it up, built an agent of my own, and promptly trained it to do my job for me. Heres what happened. Beware the Claw For more than a year now, Big AI companies have promised us an agentic AI future. AI wouldnt simply answer our queries or help us shop for a toaster, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic assured usit would actually do useful things. Turns out, the AI giants are generally too squeamish and cost-sensitive to actually release such a tool. Because AI agents can take actions on behalf of a user, they can easily cause harm or make mistakes at scale. As well see, theyre also blindingly expensive. Both those things scare Big AI firms with reputations and valuations to protect. Therefore, theyve largely given users neutered versions of agentic AI. Todays agents come with strict guardrails and perform very specific, bounded functions (like writing code or performing research). Theyre engineered to be unlikely to escape their cages or run up the compute bill. OpenClaw is different. The system is open source and model agnostic. That means it can leverage the best LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, or any other company. Developers install OpenClaw on their local server or computer, giving it broad permissions. This combination of unfettered access to hardware and tie-ins to the worlds most powerful LLMs is a potent one. It allows OpenClaw to do things that other agents cant, spending minutes or hours acting on its users behalf, crawling the web, signing into external platforms, and even controlling cameras and local hardware. The developers behind OpenClaw originally named it Clawdbot, a clear shot at Anthropics Claude system. Anthropic didnt take kindly to that provocation, and threatened a trademark lawsuit. OpenClaws creators briefly named their tool MoltBot, before pivoting to the current, lobster-themed moniker. And thats not the only trouble OpenClaw has gotten into during its brief tenure on the planet. Because the bot has such broad access to users hardware and data, multiple security experts have warned that its a potential data security disaster. Meta and multiple other Big Tech companies have already banned their own developers from using the bot, ostensibly on privacy and security grounds. Those bans just made me want to try OpenClaw even more. So I went to my hosting provider, found a reasonably safe way to install the bot, and set about training its agentic AI to make me obsolete. A Steep Curve To begin experimenting with OpenClaw, I used a Virtual Private Server from Hostinger to create a new OpenClaw instance. Basically, this keeps the bot contained within its own dedicated pretend computer, where it can do minimal damage. I immediately discovered that OpenClaws learning curve, especially for nonprogrammers, is extremely steep. I know my way around a Linux terminal, but it still took me several hoursand lots of back and forth with ChatGPT as my guideto get OpenClaw successfully set up and ready to use. Once it was active, I paired it with my OpenAI credentials, set it up to use OpenAIs flagship models, and set about building an agent. My goal was simple: I wanted an agent that I could unleash on the open internet, and that would do my job as a Fast Company contributing writer for me. Specifically, I wanted my agent to research everything happening in the world of AI, find a compelling news story, hunt down all the relevant details, write up a snappy and blindingly clever (but factual) piece in my writing style, add inline citations, craft a strong headline, and deliver the whole thing back to me. Unlike traditional chatbots, OpenClaw allows users to configure the system deeply. To build my agent, I gave OpenClaw specific instructions about my research process, as well as multiple samples of my prior Fast Company stories. That allowed the system to learn the nuances of my writing style and determine exactly what I wanted. After several hours of maddeningly complex configuration work, I had my OpenClaw doppelgänger ready to go. I named it AI News Desk. Then, I set it to work. Replace Me! Although configuring OpenClaw isto put it in technical termsa pain in the ass, using my AI News Desk agent is extremely easy. All I need to do is fire up a Linux terminal connected to my OpenClaw instance and tell my agent to work its magic. The first thing that struck me was how long OpenClaw spends doing its work. OpenAI users pay the company a flat monthly fee. That gives the company an incentive to do as little work as possible in responding to user queriesthe more work and thinking ChatGPT does on a given query, the more OpenAI has to spend on computing power, and the less profit it makes from the users fixed monthly fee. OpenClaw, in contrast, doesnt care about costs or profit. Its content to blithely burn through tokens to do the best possible job fielding your request. When I asked my agent to research and write an article for me, it often took as long as 20 minutes to produce a response, blowing though $2 to $3 worth of OpenAI API credits in the process. Thats not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but its way more than even a Blitz-scaling OpenAI or Anthropic would devote to a single query. With all that work and thinking, though, OpenClaws responses were quite good. In one test, the system successfully found a relevant piece of juicy AI news (Anthropics decision togive free users access to its powerful new Sonnet 4.6 model), researched more than 50 sources, chose a solid headline (Anthropic just moved its best everyday Claude into the cheap seats), and wrote a piece thats factually accurate and quite polished. Functionally, the Sonnet tier just cannibalized a lot of work that used to force teams onto Opus, OpenClaw opined in the article. I could see writing that. Human sacrifice metaphors in a business story? Thats my jam! OpenClaw writing an article OpenClaw even captured my propensity for including data and stats in my articles. Internal evals show developers prefer Sonnet 4.6 over 4.5 about 70% of the time and even choose it over last falls Opus 4.5 in nearly six out of ten trials, the bot wrote, citing a blog post from Anthropic. Overall, OpenClaw did a surprisingly good job following journalistic best practices. It has a strong sense of whats newsworthy, cites a mixture of sources (including company announcements and external analysis pieces), and keeps things compelling without embellishing facts or hallucinating. Sometimes it drones on about technical things. But then, so do I! In short, its a decent journalistif not, Id like to think, a real replacement for yours truly. Agents for the Win? To be clear, I would never use OpenClaw to actually write a Fast Company article for me. But based on my experiments, the system is a compelling and powerful tool. I spent most of my time on the basics. But with more time spent tweaking and improving its instructions and training data, I could likely improve its output even more. I could also give the bot more capabilities beyond just writing. Because OpenClaw allows deep integrations with other tools, I could train the bot to put its articles into a Google Doc, fact-check them, and even send them directly to my Fast Company editor. Other developers have trained the system to create videos for them, control their smart home devices, build entire iPhone apps, and clear their inboxes by responding to hundreds of emails on their behalf. Beyond the specifics of my experiment, using OpenClaw showed me the real potential of agentic AIas well as its drawbacks. OpenClaw bills itself as The AI that actually does things. Thats true, and refreshing. Its also expensive. In a day of using OpenClaw, I can easily spend $10 to $15. Companies like OpenAI are already burning through hundreds of billions just fielding basic ChatGPT queries. Theres no way theyd let everyday users access such a pricey technology. That means until frontier AI models get far cheaper, agentic AI will be the purview of big enterprises that can build their own bespoke agents, and the crazy few who are devoted (and deep-pocketed) enough to implement tools like OpenClaw for themselves. In short, based on price alone, you can ignore promises of powerful AI agents for the masses. Model prices will come down, though. And when they do, even consumer-friendly tools will be able to pull the same magic as OpenClaw. The agentic future will arrive. But not until its profitable.
Category:
E-Commerce
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