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Summertime is vacation season. The weather is wonderful, the warm days are conducive to taking a break and getting away for a week or two. Plus, it is often easier for families with children to get away when school is not in session. Vacations from work are not only fun, theyre also important. They are a chance to reconnect with family or friends. Theyre also a way to get a break and reset. Because vacations are important, it is useful to think about what youre trying to get out of them, so that you plan them appropriately. A vacation or a trip? I like to distinguish between two kinds of getaways: vacations and trips. A vacation is focused on relaxation. The most difficult choices on a vacation should be where to eat, and whether to read by the pool or the ocean. A trip is busy. Youre there to see new things, meet new people, and explore the world. Both vacations and trips can be rewarding. Vacations provide a true oasis from a packed daily life. The aim is to sleep late, relax, catch up on pleasure reading, and enjoy a slower pace. Vacations are most valuable when the fast pace of life has gotten to you. If youre living a life when every minute is scheduled, then a vacation can remind you that time spent without an agenda has its benefits. It is also useful when you feel like youre always living on the edge of exhaustion. Trips are opportunities to create memories of experiences. They require a lot of advance planning in order to decide exactly where to go and what to do. Just about every day of a trip involves an itinerary in order to maximize what you get out of the place youre visiting. Indeed, many trips are a little stressful while youre on them, but they reward you with memories that you can look back on for a lifetime. Another value of both vacations and trips is that they can slow time down. You have probably noticed that when youre engaged in your normal routine that the days and weeks fly by. That is because your brain is able to predict what is going to happen next, so it doesnt need to store a lot of new information. As a result, the moments go quickly as they are happening, and they dont leave a lot of information behind, so they dont seem that long even when you look back on them. When you break up your routine, the days feel like they slow down, because your brain doesnt know exactly what is going to happen next. Plus, if you are visiting a new place, you have lots of new memories to create, which makes the time feel long when you look back on it as well. Plan to connect Your relationships can suffer during the normal course of life. Running from one thing to the next means that you may not spend as much quality time with your partner as you should. You may miss out on time with children, parents, or friends. As you plan a vacation, think about people you need to connect with and how to use your break to renew these connections. If you have family or friends that live far away from you, consider spending some of your vacation with them. Those moments of reconnection help to refresh relationships that are hard to maintain just with email, calls, and social media. Those visits will also help to create continuity between your life now and your past, which gives you a greater sense of coherence to your life story. That can help you to feel more grounded. Plan to disconnect If youre going to take a vacation, you should also use that time to disconnect from work. One question you need to ask is how long you can go away before you will feel like you need to check in on work. For example, in my role, I find it easy to disconnect from work for a week, but if I were to go away for longer than that, I would feel like I need to check in on decisions that may require my attention. As a result, I tend to go away once toward the beginning of the summer and a second time toward the end rather than taking a single two-week vacation. It is important to really get away from your work. If you check your email every day while youre away, then part of you is being dragged into the context of work on a daily basis. You may not be physically present at work, but mentally you havent gotten the distance you need. By leaving work behind for the duration of your vacation, you create the conditions to feel refreshed and ready to return when the vacation is over. In order to make this work, you also need to ensure that tasks that normally require your input can either be held until your return or that someone else can step in to address your responsibilities in your absence. Make sure you train people to do your job, so that you can leave without having to worry that things will fall apart while youre away. That means you may need to start getting people at work ready now for your absenceeven if your trip is weeks away.
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E-Commerce
Often lost in the generally breathless coverage of generative AI, ChatGPT sports a few genuinely useful features that arent quite so obvious. These options dont get splashy demos or make the headlines, but instead quietly make your life as a gen-AI user a bit easier. Let’s take a quick look at some of ChatGPT’s unsung heroes. Edit Prompts We’ve all been there. You type out a prompt, hit enter, and immediately spot a typo that fundamentally changes the meaning. Or perhaps you realize you forgot a crucial piece of context. But lo and behold, hover over your prompt and youll find a simple “Edit” button, which allows you to refine your input in real time. Iterate on your questions, add details, and guide the AI more effectively without losing the thread of the conversation. Custom Instructions A must-tweak for anyone who uses ChatGPT regularly, tucked away in the settings (click your profile photo up in the right-hand corner) is the “Custom Instructions” feature, which lets you tell ChatGPT how you want it to behave. Want it to respond in a particular tone? Prefer bullet points over paragraphs? Want to avoid jargon? This is where you set the rules, ensuring consistency and making the whole experience feel a lot more personal. Regenerate Responses Whether ChatGPTs response is a total dud or simply good, but not perfect, the Try again feature is worth playing around with. Click the recycling arrows-looking icon that appears when hovering over the AIs response and choose Try again to regenerate its response. Each iteration should give you a slightly different angle, new phrasing, or an updated perspective. It’s a quick way to explore variations and ensure youre getting the best output for whatever task youre working on.
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E-Commerce
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Curious about my actual tech tool kit? I’m sharing the apps and tools that powered me through a recent morningfrom wake-up alarm to lunchtime break. This builds on my recent focusing and timeboxing posts. Id be delighted to hear about the tools youre relying on today in a comment below or an email reply. 7 a.m.: Get ready for the day I welcome the morning by getting my body and brain moving, picking a few words of gratitude, and gauging my wellness. When Im exhausted, running late, or otherwise off-center, this gets blurred. Oura Ring: I check my sleep quality and resilience score to calibrate my expectations for the day. Having an objective measure of how well Ive slept, my heart rate volatility, and other metrics helps me decide whether to push my exercise harder or give myself grace. It also helps motivate me on dreary days. Brain Games: Playing The New York Times Spelling Bee, Wordle, and Connections with my wife and daughters is a fun breakfast ritual, and less stressful than scanning headlines. I also like Pointed, Bloombergs new (first) game, and various other quick thinking games. TickTime Cube Timer: I flip this onto its 1-minute side to initiate a simple countdown. Having this nearby helps me stick to a new habit: a trio of one-minute core exercises. Doing these at the start of the day helps get my energy going. It also means a busy day later wont rupture my routine. 8 a.m.: Walk my daughter to school No tech. No tools. 8:30 a.m.: Plan the day While commuting to work, I listen to podcasts with Snipd. If my subway isnt too crowded for me to lift my arms to read, I use Readwise Reader to catch up on articles Ive saved for later. I also use Superhumans email app to check for work emergencies. When I get to work, I map out what’s ahead with a digital/analog mix. Google Calendar: I check GCal for meetings. I experiment with other calendarsincluding Vimcal, Akiflow, Fantastical, and Notion Calendarbut on this day, the simple and free GCal is sufficient. Apple Reminders: I keep at most three priority tasks at the top of my list. I only add to that top tier when Ive completed one. I adopted that tactic from Oliver Burkemans excellent Four Thousand Weeks. ReMarkable Paper Pro: I timebox my day hour by hour, based on priorities, energy level, and scheduled meetings. Having a detailed plan helps me avoid decision fatigue later. And when I lose focus, it pulls me back on track. Sometimes I use Sunsama, a digital planner. I like varying my routine, so I rotate between planning there or on my Remarkable tablet [heres why I use it], my office whiteboard, a Rocketbook erasable notebook, or paper. 9 a.m.: Writing I tackle creative work early when my focus is freshest. Tools help minimize distractions and friction so I can concentrate and think. Letterly: I dictate my thoughts into this app, which cleans up filler words and formats my dictation into an outline, summary, or series of questions to explore. It’s good for getting ideas flowing before more detailed thinking and editing. When I want an AI assistant to challenge my ideas, I use ChatGPTs Advanced Voice Mode, but Letterly is great for bionic dictation. Lex: This writing tool provides a simple interface plus an AI editor that lets me check grammar, spelling, syntax, repetition, and more. Google Docs/iA Writer: Reliable blank canvases with minimal friction. Raycast: Without switching apps, I can quickly add items to my Reminders or Calendar, maintaining my writing flow. Headspace: Focus music without lyrics helps with concentration and blocks out city noise around my Times Square office. 10 a.m.: Wrangle Email I set up periodic sprints to process email so it wont consume my day. Superhuman: I use keyboard shortcuts to move through routine emails quickly. Superhuman also has helpful tags and filters so I dont drown in messages. The automated reminders ensure I follow up on open threads. Boomerang is a great alternative for follow-ups if you use Outlook or Gmail. Shortwave: I like this AIpowered email app for easily finding, organizing, and summarizing messages. Lazy: I use a quick keyboard shortcut to clip and file important info from an email into Lazy, my notes app, with contextual info automatically included (sender, date, subject line) without having to switch out of my email app. Flow: Dictating messages saves my hands from typing fatigue. Its remarkably accurate compared with old-fashioned dictation software. Unlike Letterly, this plugs text directly into whatever app Im working with. 11 a.m.: Break Wakeout: This app features GIFs of ordinary people doing stretching and cardio. I can imitate their movements for a variety of one-minute exercises. The exercise is minimal, but at least my brain briefly pauses and my body moves. These breaks help clear my head three times a day. 11:05 a.m.: Craft a presentation When preparing workshops or classes, these tools help me craft engaging visual materials. I like app-smashingusing multiple apps together to benefit from their best features. ChatGPT-4o Image Generation and Ideogram: These help me generate custom images for slides when needed. Beautiful.ai: Slides automatically adjust as I add content, saving design time. Keynote: This reliable Mac presentation software works offline, supports in-person plus remote presentations, and offers slick moving slide backgrounds. iA Presenter: I use this to create a visual presentation out of an outline. When Im turning text materials into visuals, I import my words into this (non-AI) app, which displays markdown text as visuals alongside presenter notes. Claude Projects and NotebookLM: These AI tools help me find common themes, key ideas, and examples in prior materials Ive created, so I can build on my own past work. Perplexity: Provides thorough, citation-backed search results powered by AI models that understand my detailed queries. The helpful search summary ensures Im not left with hundreds of raw (Google) links to sort through. This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
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