Over the past few months, work has been tedious and energy-sapping, everyone around me has been seemingly fighting against me, and I’ve become one of those people who, whenever asked the question, ‘How are you?’ always responds with some variation of ‘Busy.’ It’s not that my attitude towards what I do has suddenly changed, or I’ve just been […]
What would aliens think if they were to suddenly drop into the Earth’s atmosphere and peer out over our cities to try and discover what kind of creatures we are? First, they may assume we’re some weird faceless animals, as all they can see is the back of our skulls and bent necks. But on […]
Read More… from A Better Solution to Beating Smartphone Addiction
As entertaining as it is to read about and watch on the big screen, AI is too clever to come out guns blazing and try to take over the world by destroying its creators in some epic and confrontational apocalyptic showdown. As the superintelligent force that it is, AI’s attempt at world domination would be […]
Entry 1: 6.55am: Wake up, snooze alarm, drift back asleep while scrolling Twitter. Wake again, turn off alarm. Lie in bed staring at nothing. After a while, unlock phone, scroll left and right a few times, lock it again. Get up. Analysis: There’s a lot of worrying behaviour going on here, not least the staring, […]
It’s easy to forget that one of the main reasons tech giants collect masses of our data — other than to sell or abuse it — is to help craft and improve the products and services they offer us. If they didn’t, the world would be a much duller and much more frustrating place. There’d be […]
Ask someone what coworking is and they’ll no doubt shoot back something like “working from a shared office space with other remote workers/self-employed folk and, erm, a pool table, and starting and leaving whenever you like.” Sounds about right, doesn’t it? But this is not coworking. This is merely the description of what it’s like […]
Until I read David Graeber’s essay, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, I thought all my previous jobs qualified for the title. Now I see many of them were just ‘shit jobs’ and meaningless jobs. And that, despite thinking I’d moved up in the world, my current role is much closer to bullshit than any […]
Grab your laptop or device of choice and off you go: work from wherever you want, at whatever hours you please, using whatever methods and tools you like. It’s what makes remote working so popular — it’s not tied up in generalised work policies that regulate your hours, restrict your location, and dictate how you […]
Enough has been said about how great remote working is. We know it can broaden your talent pool, save you money, skyrocket productivity, and lead to a much happier and healthier life for both employees and businesses. But among all this hype and office-bashing, not much is being said about its downsides — and there are […]
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If you drop ship pyjamas via Amazon FBA, run a beauty haul Youtube channel, flip websites, develop mobile productivity apps, or sell generic infoproducts, then sorry, you’re not an entrepreneur. Correct me if I’m wrong, but last time I checked entrepreneurship wasn’t wholly about leaving the rat race and gaining individual financial freedom. It was about […]
In just a few decades, the image of a typical businessperson has gone from a suit looking out over their vast army of minions on the factory or office floor to a hoody-wearing, mobile-wielding 20-something with no overheads and a business in the clouds. It used to be that the best way to grow your […]
Read More… from Technology—Not Size—is The New Marketing Battleground
There’s a multi-limbed, polydextrous being in Buddhism known as Kannon that’s one of the most widely worshipped divinities in Asia and Japan. It appears in many forms, male and female, and is often depicted with various quantities of heads and arms. In one temple in Kyoto, Japan, there’s a particularly impressive figure of Kannon that features eleven heads […]
Read More… from Likes, Hearts, Claps: The Problem With Social Proof
Waking up at the crack of dawn to spend your day in a dull, grey office building. Putting in 50-hour weeks for a handful of days off a year. Spending the best part of your life stressed out and overworked, so you can pass your final decades, if you reach them, in peace. Welcome to […]
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As if just waking up from a hazy dream and shaking off the grogginess of FOMO, we’ve finally decided to join the slew of other businesses and individuals who’re getting shot of their pages and profiles and #deletefacebook. With fake news influencing presidential elections and catastrophic data breaches exposing the profiles of 50m people, anyone with […]
Nice view, but not a great place for working It’s 9am. I’m sitting outside a lakeside cafe in Mayan Village in Guatemala. The birds are singing, it’s the perfect temperature, and I’ve just been served a coffee by one of the friendly, traditionally-dressed staff. It’s the ideal place to start the working day, if that […]
Unlike the Pat Flynns’, Brian Clarks’, and Tim Ferriss’ of days gone by, very few people or brands will ever blog their way to the top again — at least in the traditional sense of the word. Gen Y and Gen Z no longer have the stomach for long-form opinion pieces and gritty social commentaries. Instead, […]
Just like the Slow Food Movement which emerged in response to the fast food industry and highly-processed convenience products, Slow Content Marketing is springing up in revolt against the industry of rapid-fire click-bait and subpar quality articles. This time, however, not to bring us locally-grown, homecooked meals in return, but original, fresh, home-baked content. We’ve […]
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LinkedIn is unique among big social networks as it is the only one to have single-handedly dominated its market. After acquiring services like news aggregator Pulse, presentation platform SlideShare, and online learning company Lynda, it has become the number one social media and content platform for business in the world. Although you wouldn’t have expected it […]
Publishing content on the web can often seem a futile game. You can spend hours crafting long-form, information-rich blog posts for them to pick up few readers and fewer conversions, and waste countless afternoons tweaking your product/service descriptions for them to make no impact whatsoever. But we often forget, publishing online follows different rules to […]
When I quit the 9-5, I also quit interviews, meetings, small talk, deadlines (for the most part), and above all, routine. For me, routine represented everything I wanted to get away from. It was the complete antithesis of what I wanted out of life: change, novelty, serendipity, freedom. I lived and worked well under this idea […]
Read More… from Why Freelance Creatives Need Routine More Than Anyone
