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Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive. 

13 ways of looking at a Post-it note

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Anne says: The opening line of this article immediately resonated:

What’s the best “tool for thought”?

[Quoting] Howard Rheingold’s  “tools for thought” — pieces of tech that help us organize our mental work, find and sort information, and make sense of the world.

Now – think about it… what’s your response? I almost selected my smartphone, but although I use it for many functions of working and writing, it’s not something I use regularly for thinking. I tend to handwrite, doodle, sketch… and yes, I use Post-it Notes! And as I read through this article, I also realised how during COVID, confinement, lockdowns, restrictions on travel, no face-to-face workshops, online video meetings and endless webinars, just how little I’d been using Post-it Notes… and what a negative thing that was!

The author, Clive Thompson (worth following on Medium), outlines his 13 ways of looking at Post-it Notes – and you must read and consider them. I’m not going to outline them all here, however, here’s my fave five:

2) They can hold info for 30 seconds

3) They can hold info for 30 years

5) Post-It notes let you create physical, visual databases for ideas

7) Post-It notes have amazing gestural UI

11) They’re glanceable, and thus calming

13) … but they’re also social

Ooops – that’s 6, but who’s counting?

Now, I find myself longing for our Post-it Note walls in the office, our workshop spaces covered in colours, words, sketches on Post-its. In fact, note-to-self, dust off the Post-its and start covering my working spaces with thoughts, moments of clarity, questions for pondering, ideas that need development. It’s time to re-connect with thinking tools!

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PS. There is a rather lovely official Post-it app that allows you to photograph your wall of notes and then reorganise them on your phone. So you’ll never lose that wall, it’s really about storage in digital format. But nothing beats the action of creating a Post-it wall!! Try it this weekend – and send in your photos, we’d love to see them!

Read: https://forge.medium.com/13-ways-of-looking-at-a-post-it-note-6d72cd035c7d

How to stop languishing and start finding flow

Jakkii says: Another video from me this week, this time at TED Talk from organisational psychologist and author, Adam Grant, on languishing.

Languishing as a sense of emptiness, stagnation and ennui. It was coined by a sociologist Corey Keyes and immortalized by a philosopher, Mariah Carey.

I shared Grant’s NY Times article on languishing in our Friday Faves back in April, yet I think, particularly as we limp towards the finish line for 2021, it’s well worth revisiting the ideas – not just to acknowledge what languishing is, to give a name to how we’re feeling (if we’re experiencing languishing), but also to think about how to overcome it.

Whether or not it’s the case that more people find themselves languishing during the pandemic, or if it just seems like it’s probably true, as Grant points out during this talk, languishing is not pandemic-specific. It is, he says, a part of the human condition. Still, it is something I have struggled with through the pandemic, and whether that’s more coincidental than correlated, I certainly don’t think it helps for the world to have looked and felt like it has for the past almost two years.

Wallowing in it, though, isn’t really a useful strategy. So what is? The answer, according to Grant, is flow.

Flow is that feeling of being in the zone, coined by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

The best part is that, while languishing can pervade every aspect of your life it doesn’t have to be flow at work to help – though it can be. The important part is finding some activity you can totally absorb yourself in, to find mastery, mindfulness and mattering. In Grant’s case, it was MarioKart. For me, studying towards becoming a Cicerone (a beer sommelier). For you, it’ll be something else (and I’d love to hear what that something is!), whether a specific project at work, a hobby, studying, etc.

With the holidays rapidly approaching, we’ll soon have a chance to put work down and take a break. If we also work on finding that flow as we head towards the break, we’ll find an answer to the blah of languishing and, hopefully, find ourselves in January feeling rested, re-energised and re-engaged, ready to kick off 2022 with a fresh outlook for a fresh start.

Watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_how_to_stop_languishing_and_start_finding_flow/

At home

Richard Gere & John Travolta http://pic.twitter.com/IDONfT667V

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

Jakkii says: the countdown to the end of the year continues! Only four more Fridays to go before Christmas (three before Christmas Eve), oh my! Have you started your holiday shopping, online or otherwise, yet? I haven’t, but I better get a wriggle on! In the meantime, here’s 5 things you can read, watch, listen or do from home this week.

• Support a streamer who’s live with no views

• Explore the history of the American water park

• Check out any genre of music with ‘Every Noise at Once’

• Take a 4K tour through the International Space Station

• Play a round of trivia online with Isolation Trivia, Friday 6.30pm QLD time

Friday Fives

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Hybrid workplace and the future of work

• Working mums fear loss of flexibility in big return to the office

• A 5-point back-to-basics guide to networking in a hybrid world

• From ‘paw-ternity’ leave to business class fares: The Aussie businesses offering more than hybrid work

• No one-size-fits-all model for hybrid work in APAC, study finds

• Ensuring hybrid work works in the new normal

Remote work and the digital workplace

• What space missions can teach us about remote work

• Work from home works until you need time off

• Microsoft research reveals the biggest downside to remote work (and here’s how to address it)

• 8 strategies for effective knowledge management in the digital workplace

• Remote work and the collapse of the social network (no, not that one)

Communication, collaboration, engagement, and culture

• Chance encounters in the workplace help build trust – so how do you replicate that online?

• ‘Exhausted’ Aussie workers prioritise flexibility above pay

• The direct link between company culture and customer loyalty

• The toll of being left behind at work

• 4 steps to stronger teamwork

Community management, moderation and misinformation

• How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

• What misinformation actually looks like

• Twitter introduces aliases for contributors to its Birdwatch moderation program

• Facebook community group ‘seeing laugh reacts on death’ as COVID misinformation spreads

• 3 common challenges community builders face and how to overcome them

Privacy, data, security and safety

• Take control of your privacy online with the Off-Facebook Activity tool

• Metadata from encrypted messages can keep people safe

• The next big challenge for data is organisational

• Does data make us cowards?

• [Chart] Data privacy: giving power to the people

Big Tech, tech and regulation

• We know better than to allow Facebook to control the metaverse

• After Facebook leaks, here is what should come next

• These smart glasses offer a glimpse at the future Apple and Facebook are planning

• The Department of Defense is issuing AI ethics guidelines for tech contractors

• Meta isn’t the only company building the metaverse

Social media

• Ending online anonymity won’t make social media less toxic

• How Facebook could break free from the engagement trap

• Lush quits Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat over safety concerns

• TikTok taps BuzzFeed to produce the first sponsored weekly live shows on the platform

• Facebook tests giving more control of News Feed content to users again

Extras

if your roommates are always saying “we have a mouse problem” instead of “we have a mouse opportunity,” you need to upgrade your circle ☝️☝️🔑

— girl from ur high school, confused by ur post (@racecard_driver) November 15, 2021

This is interesting: Music and the metaverse: the vast sums behind Roblox’s virtual festivals

Things that make you go hmmm: Why suits against Netflix could shake streaming

Space: A billionaire space tourist by any other name

Podcast: Rethinking your workplace strategy for the hybrid era

Friday playlist: POV: You’re an Alien Pretending to be a Human (Poorly)

Sydney Business Insights – The Future, This Week podcast

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This week: all about cobalt, a behind the scenes look at the challenges of transitioning to renewable energy technologies.

Sandra Peter (Sydney Business Insights) and Kai Riemer (Digital Disruption Research Group) meet once a week to put their own spin on news that is impacting the future of business in The Future, This Week.

The stories this week

11:30 – what you need to know about cobalt

Listen: https://sbi.sydney.edu.au/on-the-future-this-week/