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Technology can seem pretty mysterious at times, so its all too easy for misconceptions to spread. That helps explain why I keep seeing technological myths propagate. Should you bury a wet phone in rice? Do you need a VPN to use public Wi-Fi networks? Is your phone secretly recording your conversations? The answer to these questions and more is no, but believing otherwise can be detrimental. Heres my attempt to dispel a half dozen popular tech myths, and what you should do instead of believing them. This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jareds weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up for free to get more tips every Tuesday. Myth 1: Dry rice can save a wet phone The idea that uncooked rice will draw the moisture from a waterlogged phone is so pervasive that even Apple has tried to dispel it. Dont put your iPhone in a bag of rice, the companys support documentation says. Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone. What to do instead: Your phone may already be water resistant, rendering the rice trick obsolete. But if not, iFixit recommends shaking loose any excess water, turning the phone off, and leaving it out to dry for as long as possible. (Putting your phone in rice forces you to leave it alone, which may explain why the myth persists.) Myth 2: You should regularly force-close all your phone apps Since the advent of recent app menus in iOS and Android, Ive seen too many people compulsively swiping up to force-close all their apps, mistakenly believing this will conserve battery life or help the phone run faster. In fact, force-quitting everything can make performance and battery life worse, because your apps will use more power each time they fully reload. Even Apple says to force-close an app only if its not responding, and the same logic applies to Android phones as well. What to do instead: Use the Battery menu in your phones settings to identify apps that are draining your battery. You may need to adjust the background settings for that app or find an alternative. Myth 3: Incognito mode prevents websites from tracking you Misconceptions about Incognito mode are so widespread that Google had to settle a class-action lawsuit last year after Chrome users claimed that it provided a false sense of privacy. So heres what your browsers Incognito or Private Browsing mode actually does: Prevents sites from showing up in your browsing history so that others with access to your computer cant see them. Lets you browse sites in a logged-out state, with none of your interactions carried over from previous visits. These modes do not render you invisible online, as websites can still collect data and use identifiers such as your IP address to track you. And if you sign into a website while using Incognito mode, that activity will be associated with your account. What to do instead: Use a web browser with strong built-in tracking protections, and possibly a VPN if youre extremely concerned about privacy (though VPNs arent panaceas either). An ad-blocking extension can help, but only if youve set it to run in Incognito mode. Myth 5: Public USB charging ports spread viruses Thanks to repeated FBI warnings over the years, the idea that public USB charging ports can infect your devices with malware has become pervasive, yet the actual threat of juice jacking remains theoretical. To date, no ones provided a single real-world example of charging ports spreading viruses. Besides, both Android and iOS require permission to transfer data when connecting your phone to another devicesomething youd hopefully reject when plugging into a nefarious port. What to do about it: Your own adapters and cables may be faster anywayespecially if youve followed my buying guidebut I wouldnt fret about using hotel or coffee shop charging ports in a pinch. Myth 5: You need a VPN for public Wi-Fi This ones just as pervasive as the juice-jacking myth, but at least it used to be true. These days, youll notice that pretty much every website has an https in its address, indicating that your traffic is encrypted. That makes the encryption from a VPN redundant. In the extremely rare case where a website transmits unencrypted data over Wi-Fi, your browser will use stern warnings to try to stop you from visiting it. What to do instead: According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the best thing to do is make sure your devices software and operating system are up-to-date, so youre not at risk of security vulnerabilities that might transmit unencrypted traffic. Myth 6: Your phone is listening to you Youve probably heard an anecdote like this: I recently met up with a friend, and they told me about something they bought that Id never heard of before. Then a couple of days later, I started seeing Instagram ads for that exact product! My phone has to be recording me. Its not, but the reality is no less concerning: If an app on your phone has access to your location, and that data gets shared with a company like Facebook or Google, its fairly trivial for those companies to understand which devices are nearby and to target ads based on what those devices have been doing. Thats a lot easier than secretly recording audio, especially because your phone indicates when thats happening. What to do about it: If you find this behavior unsettling, take a few minutes to do the following: Disable your ad ID in iOS or Android. Manage which apps can access your location on iOS or Android. Disable off-Facebook activity on this page under Manage future activity. Turn off targeted ads from Google on this page. Consider using a web browser with tracking protection or an ad blocker such as uBlock Origin. These steps wont solve every potential privacy issue, but theyll alleviate the feeling that your phone is always listening. This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jareds weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up for free to get more tips every Tuesday.
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E-Commerce
Its annoying to feel like your boss is bad at their job. But it doesnt mean you have to quit.
Category:
E-Commerce
Juliet Schor is an economist and sociologist who specializes in the study of work. She is a professor of sociology at Boston College, having previously taught at Harvard for 17 years. Her previous books include the national bestseller The Overworked American. Juliet has received numerous awards for her research and writing and has had her work published in scores of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and People magazine. She has also made several appearances on popular newscasts. Whats the big idea? For a while, the concept of a four-day workweek seemed aspirationalutopian, even. However, it is now more realistic than ever. Research increasingly shows that switching from five to four days is a win for employees and their entire company. Well-being increases (and stays that way), retention issues are solved, and heightened productivity replaces fatigue and stress. The benefits are so impressive that governments are getting involved in legislating fewer working hours. Times are changing, and modern life and modern business are better off on a four-day work schedule. Below, Juliet shares five key insights from her new book, Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter. Listen to the audio versionread by Juliet herselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. The four-day week is life-changing for employees Between dual-earner households, the faster pace and complexity of modern life, and intensifying job demands, weve heard over and over that two days is not enough to manage life admin, see family and friends, and recover from the workweek. Around the world, levels of stress, burnout, and disengagement remain historically high. Thats a big part of why we find that a third day off is transformational. Physical and mental health, sleep, fatigue, and anxiety all improve, according to survey and biometric data. Stress and burnout are reduced. People are happier and more engaged in their work. The obvious reason a four-day week is transformational is the ability to work less. In our statistical modeling, we found that the larger the working time reduction, the bigger the well-being impacts. People who manage to reduce their time by a full eight hours per week experience about twice the improvement in well-being. When we drill down to see what it is about working less that makes people so much better off, two factors emerge. About half the increase in well-being is due to behavioral changes outside of work, such as better sleep, more exercise, and less fatigue. The other half is that people register much higher levels of effectiveness and performance at work. 2. Working less boosts productivity We discovered that people are much more productive on a four-day week. They report being able to find more efficient ways to do things. People report that theyre no longer experiencing the Sunday Scaries, and they show up on Monday mornings feeling refreshed, rather than anxious. They feel more on top of their workloads and score higher on a work smart scale. They do a better job prioritizing whats important, spend less time spinning their wheels, and are more motivated to get through their to-do lists. These individual impacts collectively contribute to the organizations overall success. Companies tell us they are maintaining or increasing overall productivity when they switch to a four-day workweek. Thats counterintuitive if we assume that productivity mainly depends on how long we work. But there are several reasons for better performance. Staff are healthier, more energetic, and more loyal. Organizations become more intentional and invest in the upfront work that saves time in the long run. Customer-service-facing organizations in the tech world tell us they have finally gotten serious about documentation. Other companies report eliminating unnecessary forms or bottlenecks in approval processes. These are all examples of the forcing function of the four day week (4DW). It makes organizations do things they know will save time but have been too busy to accomplish. Organizations become more intentional and invest in the upfront work that saves time in the long run. The other major effect is that the four-day week stops resignations dead in their tracks. In one of our most successful cases, the manager explained that, on her team, turnover went from 30% a year to zero. That 30% turnover figure is common in her industry, and solving it avoided the wasted time of onboarding and training new people, which yielded a better product and higher sales. At a hospital we studied, the opportunity for overworked nurse managers to get a third day off led to many rescinded resignation letters. At a restaurant (another high-turnover industry) people also stopped quitting. A four-day-a-week job is much more valuable to people. About 15% of our sample says that no amount of money could induce them to return to a five-day schedule. Many more would require a significant pay increase to return. Thats why when people get a four-day week, they dont leave. 3. A whole organization transformation For years, companies have tried to address employee stress and burnout with individual solutions. Theyve tried flex time, scheduling accommodations, wellness classes, yoga, and mindfulness. The academic research shows that none of these works. Stress and disengagement have only gone up. Those on shorter schedules often suffer stigma or get paid less, but end up doing as much work as before. In contrast, reducing hours across the entire organization is a real solution. In the trials we studied, companies received two months of training on how to implement the 4DW before they began. How is making it work defined? Well, there is some variation across companies, but generally, its defined as doing five days work in four. Companies were coached on ways to get inefficient meeting cultures under control and to create focus time. They learned about new time-saving software or how to analyze their processes to eliminate wasted steps. They achieved success because it wasnt just on individuals, but everyone was pulling together to change the culture. That results in a true shift in work norms, shifting from the facetime/productivity theater model to one thats focused on results. 4. Almost all the companies who try it stick with it Our team wanted to know if the great results we saw would persist. So, we went back to the companies at one and two years in. We found that improvements in employee well-being were remarkably stable. Almost all the companies stayed on the four-day schedule. Perhaps more surprisingly, almost all the companies stayed on the four-day schedule. Some instituted a few tweaks to their programs, but only about 10% reverted to five days after a year. If we exclude those who never really gave it a try, its closer to 5%. Maintaining or raising productivity, improving product quality, reducing turnvers, and getting happier, more satisfied employees is a recipe for success. 5. The four-day week is coming It has been 85 years since the workweek was last reduced. Since the pandemic, pressure has been building, especially in the U.S., where working hours have been increasing. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Fridays are evolving away from a standard workday. Working from home is accelerating this process. But its not just an organic evolution to the four-day week that were seeing. Governments are beginning to encourage or even legislate worktime reduction. The Polish government has just announced a pilot program similar to the ones weve been studying. This follows similar pilots by the governments of Spain, Scotland, Belgium, Portugal, and the Dominican Republic. The government of Tokyo has recently implemented a four-day workweek for all its employees. Spain has just legislated a reduction in the workweek for the entire country to 37.5 hours per week. Recently, two bills to run pilots were filed in New York state, making it the 11th state considering legislation. And a growing number of local governments are shifting to a four-day week for their employees, with some saving money in the process. AI will accelerate the shift to four days. As companies incorporate AI at a rapid clip, society is faced with a stark choice: Are we going to lay off millions of people? Thats a possible outcome with a technology that can replace so much human labor. But its not our only option. We could follow the path we took with the first industrial revolution. We can use that labor-saving technology to reduce working hours and keep employment high. Thats the path we shouldand I think willtake. I started researching worktime reduction many years ago. At the time, it was seen as aspirational, even utopian. But that has flipped, and now the four-day week has become common sense. It is also the smart option if we want to protect our economy, democracy, and society. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
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