In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are t… - Cal Newport

When he ran a review of his team’s Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.

It’s not just that we’re less clear than we think, but we’re often completely misunderstood. You were sure that you were sending a nice note, while your receiver is equally sure you were delivering a pointed critique. When you build an entire workflow on exactly this type of ambiguous and misunderstood communication — a workflow that bypasses all the rich, non-linguistic social tools that researchers like Alex Pentland documented as being fundamental to successful human interaction — you shouldn’t be surprised that work messaging is making us miserable.

At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead.