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Do you ever have those weeks where you feel youve gotten nothing done? You’re staring at your screen, the same paragraph you’ve read three times still making no sense. Your mind drifts to that looming deadline, the difficult conversation with your manager, leaving before 3 to avoid a horrible commute, or the growing pile of unread emails. Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Almost half (43%) of Americans report feeling more anxious than they did the previous year, with workplace pressures playing a significant role in this epidemic of stress. The new brand of stress that 80% of workers report centers around productivity anxiety at work according to a recent study. The very stress that pushes us to work harder is now sabotaging our ability to perform well. Understanding this paradoxand more importantly, knowing how to break free from itcould be the key to reclaiming both your productivity and peace of mind. The Science of Stress: Your Brain Under Siege Not surprisingly, the biggest culprit of productivity anxiety is stress. When stress hits, your body doesn’t distinguish between a charging lion and a challenging quarterly review. The same ancient alarm system kicks in, flooding your system with cortisolthe primary stress hormone that can transform from helpful motivator to harmful hijacker. Cortisol levels peak in the early morning as part of the cortisol awakening response, then decrease throughout the day. But chronic workplace stress disrupts this natural rhythm, keeping cortisol elevated when it should be declining. The result? A brain struggling to perform its most essential workplace functions, including just seeing things properly. Research reveals the cognitive toll is severe. One study found that acute increases in corticosteroid levels are associated with cognitive decrements in both attention and memory. Three Ways Stress Sabotages Your Focus 1. The Working Memory Meltdown Your working memorythe mental workspace where you juggle information, solve problems, and make decisionsis particularly vulnerable to stress. Tasks that engage and rely on working memory seem to be particularly sensitive to pressure demands, possibly because working memory requires sustained focus and attention that acute pressure might disrupt. This explains why, under stress, you might forget what you just read or struggle to connect ideas that normally flow effortlessly. 2. The Attention Hijack All theories about choking under pressure involve the reallocation of attention away from the task at hand. Some researchers suggest stress pulls your attention toward the uncomfortable feelings it creates, while others argue it makes you hyperaware of your own performance, paradoxically impairing it. Either way, your focus fractures. 3. The Productivity Anxiety Spiral Since modern workplaces have birthed this new phenomenon of “productivity anxiety,” there has been a significant uptick in employees reporting a feeling that there is always more they should be doing, even if not humanly possible. This creates a vicious cycle where stress about productivity further impairs your ability to be productive, leading to more stress. Stress has a way of taking up your time by making you continuously worry about something that may or may not happen. Perhaps this scenario is best illustrated by my client Tim. Tim manages a large and critical function at an aerospace firm. With 16 direct reports, hundreds more in his organization, and a cadre of contractors, Tim is still the go-to for any technical questions or emergencies that arise. It wasnt until recently that I reminded Tim that a healthy number of direct reports for most leaders is no more than five, with far less technical work, and under far less work intensification that he perked up, realizing much of the problem he is managing is due to poor organizational design. 3 Evidence-Based Strategies to Reclaim Your Focus 1. Take a Walk Outside The research is compelling: stepping outside for a walk is one of the most accessible and effective tools for combating workplace stress and restoring focus. Studies show that spending at least 20 to 30 minutes immersed in a natural setting is associated with the biggest drop in cortisol levels. Even more impressive, compared to urban walks, nature walks resulted in decreased anxiety, rumination, and negative affect, as well as increased working memory performance. Walks either with or without music have mental health benefits. How to implement: Schedule a 20-minute walk outside during your workday, ideally in a green space. Can’t access nature? Even urban walks help. The beauty is you don’t need to power walkor even walk; both walking and sitting outdoors improve cognitive performance, with elevated levels of relaxation during the intervention being the best predictor of improved performance. 2. Practice Strategic Stress Recovery Individuals who have a higher frustration tolerance, the ability to moderate their responses to stress in the moment, have the capacity to think clearly and effectively work through problems longer and engage in productive decision making. Having an awareness of being triggered by observing physical shifts like heart rate changes, or a sudden burning chest sensation when stress hits, is critical data. Once aware, intentional choices can be made that mitigate reactionary stress behaviors: stepping away from a tough problem temporarily or engaging in deep breathing for a few minutes are both research backed ways of mitigating stress in the moment. Those able to do so expand their frusration tolerance, build the capacity to moderate other stress reactions with confidence, and experience less negative long-term effects from their stress. How to implement: Build recovery periods into your workday, which will start to create muscle memory. When a problem becomes particularly intense, take note to feel in your body where the pressure mounts. Common areas of feeling bodily stress are chest, temples on either side of your head, neck, or stomach. Being attuned to this is critical. Once youre aware of stress building in your body, step away from the problem at hand, and take a break such as a five-minute walk, practice deep breathing, or engage in light stretching. After any intensive work or problem-solving sessions, these micro-recoveries help reset your stress response system. 3. Restructure Your Work Environment for Focus People who are stressed have difficulty focusing and find themselves getting caught in modes of thinking that perpetuate stress, such as worry and rumination. Combat this by creating environmental cues that support focus. Also an organized workspace has positive effects on distractions and ability to focus. How to implement: Establish clear boundaries between high-focus work and administrative tasks. Use time-blocking to protect your most cognitively demanding work for times when your cortisol is naturally lower (typically midmorning after cortisol has subsided). Create a “focus ritual”a consistent set of actions that signal to your brain it’s time for deep work. Once or twice a week, block time on your calendar to clear your space of clutter, take out the trash, process any snail mail that comes in, and regularly delete files and screenshots no longer needed that sit on your screen. Such peripheral clutter cleaning makes clearer thinking possible, and it makes those things you need to find easier to find. Small steps with big impacts Job stress costs U.S. employers more than $300 billion annually due to absenteeism, turnover, decreased productivitybut the human cost is even greater. The good news? You don’t have to accept chronic stress as an inevitable part of modern work life. Start small. Choose one strategy and commit to it for two weeks. Notice not just how you feel, but how you thinkhow ideas flow, how problems untangle, how focus sharpens. Because when you master the art of managing stress, you don’t just survive the workday; you unlock your brain’s full potential to create, innovate, and excel. Your focused, calm, and productive self is waiting. It’s time to clear away the stress and let that person shine through.
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E-Commerce
Since no one ever does anything worthwhile on their own, who you know is important. But what you know — and what you do with what you know — is crucial. Learning, memory, and cognitive skills are a competitive advantage. Here are five neuroscience-based ways to learn more quickly, and even more importantly, better retain what you learn. Best of all, each takes a couple of minutes at most, and one requires no effort at all. Say it out loud. We took the grandkids to surf lessons. They wanted to go back for another session, the instructor was great, so I asked him his name. Problem is, I’m terrible at remembering names. So I said it aloud three or four times. Why? A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that saying words out loud (or even just mouthing the words) makes them more memorable. While the underlying mechanism is unclear, neuroscientists theorize saying something out loud separates and distinguishes it from “mere” thoughts. (You didnt just think it. You also heard it.) That makes the information, idea, or plan you want to remember even more memorable. When you need to remember something, say it aloud, or mouth it to yourself. Your cerebral cortex will help you retain it longer. Then… Do a 40-second replay. Remembering a name is fairly simple. Remembering something more complex requires memory consolidation, the process of transforming temporary memories into more stable, long-lasting memories. Even though memory consolidation can be sped up, storing a memory in a lasting way takes time. A good way to increase the odds is to mentally replay whatever you want to remember for 40 seconds. A 2015 study published in Journal of Neuroscience found that a brief period of rehearsal — replaying an event in your mind, going over what someone said in a meeting, mentally mapping out a series of steps, etc. — makes it significantly more likely you will remember what you replayed. As the researchers write: A brief period of rehearsal has a huge effect on our ability to remember complex, lifelike events over periods of one to two weeks. We have also linked this rehearsal effect to processing in a particular part of the brain, the posterior cingulate. A week or two? That should be long enough for you to actually do something with whatever you wanted to remember. Then… Make a prediction. While it sounds odd, a study published in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology shows the act of asking yourself whether you will remember something significantly improves the odds that you will remember, in some cases by as much as 50 percent. Thats especially true for prospective memories, or remembering to perform a planned action or intention at some point in the future. Following up with a customer. Checking on a vendor’s status. After you deal with a problem, determining the the root cause. Why playing the prediction game works is also somewhat unclear. Possibly the act of predicting is a little like testing yourself; as research shows, quizzing yourself is a highly effective way to speed up the learning process. What is clear is that the act of predicting helps your hippocampus better form and index those episodic memories for later access. Want to remember to do something in the future? Take a second and predict whether you will remember. That act alone makes it more likely you will. Then… Zone out for two minutes. According to a study published in Nature Reviews Psychology, “even a few minutes of rest with your eyes closed can improve memory, perhaps to the same degree as a full night of sleep.” Psychologists call it “offline waking rest.” In its purest form, offline waking rest can be closing your eyes and zoning out for a couple of minutes. But you can also daydream. Meditate. Clear your mind and think happy thoughts. While none of those sound productive — should you really be wasting time you could be learning? — intermittent lack of focus improves memory consolidation; in simple terms, constantly going from one thing to the next makes it hard for your brain to keep up. As the researchers write: Periods of reduced attention to the external world are a universal feature of human experience, which suggests that spending a portion of time disengaged from the sensory environment permit the reactivation of recently formed memory traces. This iterative reactivation of memory could strengthen and stabilize newly formed memories over time, contributing to early stages of memory consolidation during the first few minutes following encoding. The key is to be intentional about it. First, replay what you want to remember for 40 seconds or so. Then, predict whether you will remember it. Then, close your eyes, zone out, and engage in a minute or two of offline waking rest. As the researchers write, “Moments of unoccupied rest should be recognized as a critical contributor to human waking cognitive functions. And finally… Get a good night’s sleep. Here’s the effortless aspect of improving your memory. According to a study published in Psychological Science, peple who studied before bed, slept, and then did a quick review the next morning spent less time studying — and increased their long-term retention by 50 percent. The underlying mechanism is what psychologists call sleep-dependent memory consolidation: “Converging evidence, from the molecular to the phenomenological, leaves little doubt that offline memory reprocessing during sleep is an important component of how our memories are formed and ultimately shaped.” In simple terms, sleeping on it helps your brain file away what youve learned, and makes it easier to access when you need it. Thats also true where longer-term memory is concerned. Learning, then getting a good nights sleep, and then learning again is an extremely effective way to boost intelligence and skill. As the researchers write: We found that interleaving sleep between learning sessions not only reduced the amount of practice needed by half but also ensured much better long-term retention. Sleeping after learning is definitely a good strategy, but sleeping between two learning sessions is a better strategy. Say youre learning a new sales demo. After a practice session, say the main bullets of your presentation out loud. Then mentally replay key elements of your presentation. Then predict whether youll remember what youve learned. Then take a minute or two to zone out. Then get a good nights sleep, do a quick review the next day, and work on the next chunk of information. Rinse and repeat, and neuroscience says youll spend less time learning — and you’ll remember a lot more. Which means youll be able to do more. Because what you know is only as good as what you do with it. By Jeff Haden This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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E-Commerce
Weve spent decades building frameworks to help people lead teams: courses, certifications, coaching, culture decks. All aimed at shaping better managers of humans. But thats no longer enough. Because for many workers, their first report wont be a person. Itll be an agent. In June BNY Mellon onboarded 1,000 digital workers while JPMorgan Chase is building AI teams at scale. This isnt theoretical. The new direct reports are already clocked in and they dont need coffee, feedback, or PTO. The problem? Most organizations are still running on legacy management models built for human hierarchies and not set up to manage machines. Leading humans versus governing agents When you manage people, you guide behavior. You motivate, delegate, coach, and course correct. Its a loop built on trust and conversation. When you manage an AI, none of that applies. You dont coach a model. You govern it. You define inputs, monitor outputs, escalate issues, and answer for the consequences. And you do that in real time. In AI-led teams, leadership is less about motivation and more about judgment. The ability to assess, adjust, and act across decision chains is what separates performance from liability. Its knowing what good looks like. Its catching the drift, asking the right question before the system generates the wrong answer, and being accountable for outcomes, even when you didnt directly produce them. The HR model is out of sync HR isnt ready for this shift. Most performance frameworks still assume linear paths, human reports, and long-term role tenure. But digital agents break that logic. They dont climb ladders. They execute tasks. They can outperform junior staff one day and be outpaced by a new model the next. You dont manage their growth. You manage the conditions in which they operate. That shift puts pressure on organizational design itself. Hierarchies built for human oversight dont hold when decision loops involve systems acting faster than approvals can be processed. That means rethinking how we define productivity, collaboration, and leadership. It means building new metrics for how human employees interact with agents, not just what they produce on their own. Are they designing good prompts? Are they escalating ethical concerns? Are they reviewing outputs critically or rubber-stamping them? These are the new leadership signals. Most performance reviews arent built to detect them. Prompting is a leadership act Prompting isnt a technical skill; its a management one. The way you frame a prompt shapes what an agent does. Vague prompts lead to vague results. Biased prompts produce biased outcomes. And poor prompting isnt just inefficient. It can become a legal or reputational risk. Yet most companies treat prompting like its keyboard wizardry. Something for the engineers or the AI power users. Thats a mistake. Everyone managing agents, from interns to executives, needs to learn how to design clear, intentional instructions. Because prompts are decisions in disguise, shaped by where they sit in the organizational context and why theyre being made. The ethics chain is breaking In traditional teams, ethics and escalation follow a chain of command. Something goes wrong, someone flags it, and a manager gets involved. But with agents acting independently and often invisibly, the chain breaks. You cant escalate what you dont notice. And too often, companies havent defined what ethical escalation looks like when the actor is synthetic. Whos accountable when an AI produces a discriminatory recommendation? Or leaks sensitive information? Or makes a decision a human wouldnt? If your answer is the tech team, youre not ready. Governance cant sit in the back office. It needs to be built into team workflows. The best companies are training their people to pause, question and report, not just accept what the system spits out. Chain of thought and chain of reasoning arent just cognitive tricks. Theyre how human teams will spot drift, bias, and breakpoints in the AI value chain. And that skillset is only going to grow in importance. The bottom line AI wont replace all managers, but it will redefine what management means. Leading agents demands flexing a different muscle and most organizations havent trained for it. This isnt about replacing soft skills with hard skills, but rather its replacing passive management with active stewardship: less people-pleasing and more decision accountability, fewer status meetings and more escalation pathways. Managing machines still means leading people. But the people you lead need new tools, new rules, and a different playbook. The companies that get this right wont be the ones with the flashiest tech. Theyll be the ones that know how to change the game by managing what theyve built.
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E-Commerce
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