Do you answer your e-mails on a Sunday night? Do you search for ways to hack your brain to be more efficient? Do you only read the first paragraph of news articles you’re interested in because you don’t have time to read the rest? Are you piling more and more onto your plate at an increasing rate yet deriving less and less satisfaction? Welcome to the “always more” era, devoted to the cult of constant activity and perpetual improvement – which are false gods. Because people are not machines: we need breaks. By seeking to constantly optimize our use of time, we end up wasting it. And what we do loses meaning. It’s time to stop rushing around and instead invent a world more suited to human beings. We can start by questioning some preconceptions about time management, performance, and productivity.
Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving
by Celeste Headlee (Harmony Book, 2020).
Every era produces heroes who embody its dominant values. Bill Gates would get up at 4 a.m. every morning and work 16 hours a day when Microsoft was just starting. Jeff Bezos and his inner circle claim they were connected 24/7 in the mid-90s. Marissa Mayer was said to work 130 hours per week at Google.
This contemporary model of the workaholic boss is not benign. It contributes to the cult of longer working hours, which spreads to all levels of a company. The number of hours worked is seen as the simplest – if not the fairest – way of measuring a colleague’s performance. This purely quantitative logic is a legacy of Max Weber, put forward in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. Time is money: not making the most of it is a cardinal sin. The incitement to always do more – and to make those opposed to the idea feel guilty – has become common. Laziness has never gotten such bad press. Using every available minute is a cardinal virtue.
This imperative has spread widely, even when it comes to leisure time. The number of nine-hole golf courses increased because players found that the classic, 18-hole course took too long, according to a 2015 poll.1Similar impatience is driving a growing number of podcast and audio book listeners to double, or even triple, listening speed.
Forget 10,000 steps and heroic workouts: better health may begin with simply walking better. Speed, cadence, balance, feet, and footwear become critical indicators of mobility, independence, and longevity. How the most ordinary movement in our daily lives became a sixth vital sign.
Forget Silicon Valley’s “fail fast, fail often.” Edmondson paints a more nuanced picture of failure, and encourages “intelligent failures” that lead to discoveries and innovation while reducing the risk of avoidable destructive mistakes. A guide to becoming more resilient and inventive in a world that refuses to sit still.
What if uncertainty were not the problem, but our reflex response to it? Blending neuroscience, extraordinary stories, and practical exercises, this book turns fear into action, mental fog into agility, and paralysis into connection. A survival kit for spending less energy predicting the future and more learning how to move through it.
The myth of the visionary leader with a compliant crowd marching behind has aged badly. Innovation at scale depends on leaders who act as architects, bridge-builders, and catalysts: shaping cultures, connecting partners, and starting movements. How sharing the wheel can take you much farther.
Values plastered on a lobby wall are useless if they never help settle hard decisions. Ingram proposes identifying what matters most, then turning it into a practical tool for choosing, motivating, resolving conflict, and building more coherent teams. A personal and collective compass—provided you accept that it may point somewhere uncomfortable.
Startups do not die only from a bad idea or bad luck. Broken technology, misunderstood markets, thin engineering, weak leadership, passive boards, insufficient cash: Bulkin dissects six largely avoidable pitfalls. A useful antidote to startup mythology—and to the intellectually lazy advice to “fail fast.”
Your attention is not merely distracted. It is captured, fragmented, and sold by an industry that turns every glance into revenue. Against this “human fracking,” the answer is not another productivity hack but a collective movement built on study, coalitions, and sanctuaries for attention. How to stop optimizing attention and start liberating it.
Good companies do not always betray their missions because their leaders turn bad; governance often drives them to do so. Ownership, incentives, and decision rules create a kind of “financial gravity” that gradually turns success into extraction. How to build a company that can scale without selling its soul along the way.
Punitive self-denial is terrible fuel for lasting behavioral change. It’s much better to focus on high-impact climate choices that also improve our lives than to feel guilty about every light left on. How joy—not permanent sacrifice—can become a transition strategy.
When you’re beginning to feel exhausted, forget passive rest which isn’t very effective. You are better off setting personal goals for your weekends and days off: go and see friends, organize your closet, or plan to see an exhibition. What benefits can you hope to reap?
Take care to stay flexible though, and not pile on additional obligations! Keep some space for spontaneous activities, and give yourself permission not to achieve all your goals!
The pandemic has significantly impacted all our leisure and holiday time, so let’s take back as much control as we can. Prioritize the goals that bring you into contact with others; they will boost your feelings of happiness!
Laura M. Giurge and Vanessa Bohns (Harvard Business Review, 1 December 2021).
To see whether you are grounded here and now:
The real AI risk is not that people will stop working. It is that they will produce more “work-shaped” material that shifts the burden to others. BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab call this “workslop”: AI-generated content that looks finished, but lacks substance.
It may be a neat summary, a long deck, a clean email, or a tidy analysis. But if colleagues must decode, verify, correct, reframe or redo it, the productivity gain is fake. Worse: the person using AI saves time by spending someone else’s. That is not efficiency. It is cognitive dumping. In the AI age, the critical soft skill is not just prompting. It is knowing when your output is actually useful to the team.
1. Ban “polished but empty” work. Do not reward volume, speed or formatting. Reward clarity, usefulness and decision-ready thinking.
2. Ask one brutal question before sharing AI-assisted work. “Will this save my team time — or quietly create work for them?”
3. Make AI use a team norm, not a personal shortcut. Define what “good enough to send” means: checked facts, clear context, explicit assumptions, and a real recommendation.
A concise synthesis of BetterUp Labs / Stanford Social Media Lab study, 2026.
A and B sound like good leadership. That is exactly why they are traps. A brain under pressure does not necessarily lack meaning. It lacks space. When uncertainty, fatigue or social threat rise, the brain shifts toward automatic patterns. It protects what it already knows. It repeats. It narrows.
So the leader’s job is not only to inspire or persuade. It is to create the biological conditions for change: less noise, less threat, more concrete testing. Before asking people to be bold, leaders must make boldness practicable.
1. Remove one unnecessary pressure before adding one new ambition.
2. Replace “let’s change the culture” with one visible behavior to test this week.
3. Treat resistance as data, not as a defect.
A concise neuroscience research roundup (Business Digest, 2025)
The worst leadership mistake would be to double down on resilience, grit your teeth, hold the line, lead by example. Resilience turns toxic when it becomes a way to disguise exhaustion as virtue. The real issue is not how to “hold on longer,” but how to understand what is breaking — in the body, in choices, in relationships, in the system.
Based on the book Shatterproof, by Tasha Eurich, MacMillan 2025.
1. Stop confusing strength with silence. An employee who “keeps going” is not necessarily doing well. Apparent calm may hide an internal system running dangerously hot.
2. Treat weak signals as strategic data. Irritability, fatigue, withdrawal, loss of meaning: these are not emotional whims. They are overload indicators.
3. Replace “be resilient” with “what needs to change?”. The right question is not: “How can we endure this?” It is: “What choice, structure, relationship, or priority do we need to rebuild?”
1. Take resilience out of hero mode. Stop training managers to become human shock absorbers. Train them to read overload signals, avoidance mechanisms, and unspoken needs.
2. Build around the three foundations: trust, choice, connection. A strong leadership program should not just talk about mindset. It should help leaders rebuild inner safety, agency, and real human connection.
3. Work on the brain’s “glitches” in real situations. Negativity bias, hypervigilance, intolerance of uncertainty: these are biological reflexes, not personal flaws. Leaders need to learn how to spot them before making decisions under stress.
The real risk of AI is not that leaders will disappear. It is that they will become more efficient at avoiding the work only they can do.
AI can summarize, automate, compare, predict and accelerate. But it cannot replace judgment, courage, responsibility or the ability to create meaning with others. A leader who uses AI only to move faster may simply scale confusion, bias and superficial thinking.
The article below reminds us that leadership in the AI age is not about becoming a machine-enhanced superhero.
It is about helping people think better together when technology changes the ground beneath them.
The best leaders will not be those who master every tool. They will be those who know when to slow down, ask better questions and protect the quality of human judgment.
AI can buy time; wisdom decides what to do with it.
1. Do not confuse acceleration with progress. Before using AI to speed up a process, ask whether the process deserves to exist at all.
2. Keep the hard parts human. Use AI for preparation, synthesis and options — not for courage, accountability or difficult conversations.
3. Make judgment visible. When AI supports a decision, ask teams to explain the reasoning, the assumptions and what the machine may have missed.
1. Train leaders to slow down intelligently. In the AI age, reflection is not a luxury. It is a strategic skill.
2. Move beyond “AI literacy.” Leaders do not only need to understand tools. They need to understand how tools reshape power, attention, trust and decision-making.
3. Build collective judgment muscles. Design exercises where leaders must challenge AI outputs, surface blind spots, debate trade-offs and decide under uncertainty.
Transparency is a managerial duty; sharing anxiety is not. State what you know, what you don’t yet know, and when you’ll be back with answers. Use calibrated wording: what is confirmed, what is plausible, what is under review.
Ban doom-laden projections or raw, emotional asides in front of the team. If you are highly worried, debrief first with a peer or your manager, then go back to the team with a clarified message. Repeat a simple rule: truth, restraint, regularity. Perceived consistency beats instant exhaustiveness. And when you don’t have the answer, say so, then lay out the path to obtain it. Candor about the process reassures more than fragile certainties.
