In short: no. I’ve been divorced, and broadly it mostly sucks and you lose different friend groups and all that. Eventually things pivot and adjust, and you find new friend groups, and while things are different, there’s a weird nostalgia to your late-30s if you’ve been divorced, and I think I’m generally good with words and still can never find the right ones to describe what it’s like to basically replace one group of people (and a person) with another group of people (and a person). It’s one of the weirdest things you will ever go through, honestly.

Now, when…

That is the potential finding of this study. Let me just pull-quote their abstract for you:

Studies examining the effect of social isolation on cognitive function typically involve older adults and/or specialist groups (e.g., expeditions). We considered the effects of COVID‐19‐induced social isolation on cognitive function within a representative sample of the general population. We additionally considered how participants ‘shielding’ due to underlying health complications, or living alone, performed. We predicted that performance would be poorest under strictest, most‐isolating conditions. At five timepoints over 13 weeks, participants (N = 342; aged 18–72 years) completed online tasks measuring attention, memory, decision‐making…

I was just reading this article about why childcare needs to be a business issue. It’s got all the common stats we’ve been seeing since COVID began to rage, including:

• 20% of working parents had to leave work or reduce their work hours solely due to a lack of childcare.
• Only 30% of all working parents had any form of back-up childcare, and there were significant disparities between low and high-income households.
• 26% of women who became unemployed during the pandemic said it was due to a lack of childcare.
• Data shows that the United States’ gross domestic product could…

You may have seen this Jason Fried (founder of Basecamp) thing going around; here’s the link. He’s already getting “cancelled” for it. But there’s an important distinction herein.

This attitude below (pull-quote) is actually progressive in a work sense:

6. No forgetting what we do here. We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it. We write business books, blog a ton, speak regularly, we open source software, we give back an inordinate amount to our industry given our size…

Here is a new study claiming that time management is deeply tied to happiness and personal well-being. To wit:

Despite narratives that suggest time management is primarily a work or career-based skill, the strongest link was between good time management and wellbeing: the effect of time management on life satisfaction was 72% stronger than on job satisfaction. Time management also reduced feelings of distress.

I actually wrote an article back on July 1, 2016 called “The Time Management Era Is Upon Us.” At that time, I had been predominantly freelance and work-from-home for about seven months, maybe eight. While I’ve…

I’m chasing my own fertility journey at present — you can generally tell what I’m chasing based on what I’m currently blogging about, and here’s something on fertility journeys, as well as something on jelly being placed on my scrotum — so when I see stuff about babies and growth rates and all that, my ears perk up a little. I always hate how these Census and population figure discussions default to “future workforce,” as if the only justification for having a child is that someday they can occupy a cubicle or office. In reality, we all know one of…

That picture above is from a New York Times “DealBook” report on working after COVID, which is probably the 97,121st thing published on that topic in the last seven days. As you can see from it, the highest # of days that employers want employees in the office seems to be 3 (29%), and the highest number of days that employees want to be remote seems to be 5 (also 29%).

There’s a potential reckoning there, for sure. I think in a lot of white-collar, supposed “knowledge” work, we already had this push-back for years. In 2008, I was at…