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Tag: productivity

  • The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson – Simon & Schuster

    In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming.

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  • Paper apps™ – Gladden Design

    Delightfully simple and simply delightful, Paper Apps™ are a fun, smart alternative to screen time. Check out our solo games like DUNGEON, GALAXY and GOLF, as well as gamified tools like TO•DO and NUTRI•TRACK. For the full experience, we recommend grabbing a couple of Pencil Dice as well!

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  • ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. DeepSeek: the battle to be my AI work assistant – WSJ

    As I embark on my AI book adventure, I’ve hired a human research assistant. But Claude has already handled about 85% of the grunt work using its Projects feature. I uploaded all my book-related documents (the pitch, outlines, scattered notes) into a project, basically a little data container. Now Claude can work with them whenever I need something. At one point, I needed a master spreadsheet of all the companies and people mentioned across my documents, with fields to track my progress. Claude pulled the names and compiled them into a nicely formatted sheet. Now, I open the project and ask Claude what I should be working on next.

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  • 93% of IT leaders see value in AI agents but struggle to deliver, Salesforce finds – VentureBeat

    “A digital labor workforce can act autonomously in a business to successfully carry out both simple and complex tasks, enabling increased productivity and efficiency,” said Comstock. He noted that enterprises will eventually move beyond simple AI agents to “super agents,” which don’t just respond to a single command, but pursue a goal and perform complex human tasks.

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  • Education Secretary gives Bett Show 2025 keynote address – GOV.UK

    Over two thirds of those using generative AI in education say it’s having a positive impact. And we’re going further. Last week I announced that £1 million of funding has been awarded to 16 developers to help teachers with marking and tailored feedback for students. And my department continues to support the Oak National Academy, whose AI lesson assistant is helping teachers to plan personalised high quality lessons in minutes. And for children, that means more attention, higher standards, better life chances. For teachers, less paperwork, lower stress, fewer drains on their valuable time.

    Using AI to reduce work or help unlock the recruitment and retention crisis that we face, so that once again teaching can be a profession that sparks joy, not burnout. Where teachers can focus on what really matters, teaching our children. But not just teachers. We need to support leaders and finance professionals in schools too. That’s what DfE connect is all about. A one stop shop for leaders and administrators. It’s already helping academies to manage their finances, and we’ve just released new features that will help them understand and access new funding.

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  • How to Work Better: Making a mural on Houston Street – Guggenheim

    As the critic John Kelsey notes in the Guggenheim retrospective’s catalogue, “Taken from a factory in Thailand and displayed in a supremely wealthy nation with one of the strictest immigration policies in Europe, the text becomes an ironic reflection on the way things go for commuter drones within a productively mobilized post-society, some of whom happen to be artists and curators: ‘SMILE.’” The mural’s audience in New York 25 years later is, if anything, even more subject to the piece’s ironies.

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  • ‘Dailyish’ – Oliver Burkeman

    If you’re prone to making yourself miserable by holding yourself to unmeetable standards, like me, “dailyish” probably sounds a bit self-indulgent. But it’s the opposite – because it involves surrendering the thrilling fantasy of yet-to-be-achieved perfection in favour of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete progress, here and now. Besides, it isn’t synonymous with “just do it as often as you can”; deep down, you know that if you never average more than a day or two per week on your novel/fitness plan/meditation practice/side business/whatever, then you won’t acquire the momentum to move forward. “Dailyish” involves applying more pressure to yourself than that. But (crucial distinction coming up!) it’s a matter of pressure rather than of forcing.

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  • OpenAI ChatGPT can now handle reminders and to-dos – The Verge

    While scheduling capabilities are a common feature in digital assistants, this marks a shift in ChatGPT’s functionality. Until now, the AI has operated solely in real time, responding to immediate requests rather than handling ongoing tasks or future planning. The addition of Tasks suggests OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s role beyond conversation into territory traditionally held by virtual assistants.

    OpenAI’s ambitions for Tasks appear to stretch beyond simple scheduling, too. Bloomberg reported that “Operator,” an autonomous AI agent capable of independently controlling computers, is slated for release this month. Meanwhile, reverse engineer Tibor Blaho found that OpenAI appears to be working on something codenamed “Caterpillar” that could integrate with Tasks and allow ChatGPT to search for specific information, analyze problems, summarize data, navigate websites, and access documents — with users receiving notifications upon task completion.

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  • Why Starmer and Reeves are pinning their hopes on AI to drive growth in UK – The Guardian

    Underneath all of this is the implication that efficiency – through AI automating certain tasks – means redundancies. The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has suggested that more than 40% of tasks performed by public sector workers could be automated partly by AI and the government could bank those efficiency gains by “reducing the size of the public-sector workforce accordingly”. TBI also estimates that AI could displace between 1m and 3m private-sector jobs in the UK, though it stresses the net rise in unemployment will be in the low hundreds of thousands because the technology will create new jobs, too. Worried lawyers, finance professionals, coders, graphic designers and copywriters – a handful of sectors that might be affected – will have to take that on faith. This is the flipside of improved productivity.

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  • ‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI – The Guardian

    Under the 50-point AI action plan, an area of Oxfordshire near the headquarters of the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham will be designated the first AI growth zone. It will have fast-tracked planning arrangements for data centres as the government seeks to reposition Britain as a place where AI innovators believe they can build trillion-pound companies. Further zones will be created in as-yet-unnamed “de-industrialised areas of the country with access to power”. Multibillion-pound contracts will be signed to build the new public “compute” capacity – the microchips, processing units, memory and cabling that physically enable AI. There will also be a new “supercomputer”, which the government boasts will have sufficient AI power to play itself at chess half a million times a second. Sounding a note of caution, the Ada Lovelace Institute called for “a roadmap for addressing broader AI harms”, and stressed that piloting AI in the public sector “will have real-world impacts on people”.

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