One of my favorite creative tools is a kitchen timer. I set the timer for a few minutes — for a sprint through really boring paperwork or to get started on a big creative project — and then I press start. I give myself a window to work through. After that, I can choose to stop, and sometimes I do. But many other times, I keep going.

My creativity comes from chaotic energy. But left unchecked, the chaotic energy is a breeding ground for obsession, fixation, and compulsiveness. So I do what project managers do: I employ “timeboxing.” …

In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman recalls an art class when he was told, repeatedly to “loosen up.” He writes, “I figured that made no more sense than telling someone who’s just learning to drive to ‘loosen up’ at the wheel. It isn’t going to work… I resisted this perennial loosen-up stuff.”

Feynman was then instructed to draw without looking at the paper. He kept his eyes on the model, not looking at what he was doing with the pencil. The first time he did it, his pencil broke at the very beginning and he had nothing but impressions in his paper. …

Last year, I spent a lot of time feeling distracted. I never seemed to have enough time to do everything I needed to do, and I didn’t have a strong grasp on the big picture of my life.

As I wondered how I could feel a greater sense of control over my days, I remembered a practice I’d heard about years back: The Weekly Review, popularized by David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity method. Basically, it’s the ritual of checking in with yourself every week and figuring out how to be more deliberate with your time.

Many ultra-productive people have written about their own versions of the weekly review: Michael Karnjanaprakorn, the founder of Skillshare, does one that ties into his New Year’s resolutions. Cal Newport’s weekly review is super flexible and matches the challenges of the specific week ahead (he writes that “the return on investment is phenomenal”). Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani’s review includes lots of concrete steps, and the productivity expert Tiago Forte keeps a weekly review checklist on a sticky note on his computer’s desktop. …

There are around 2 million apps on the iOS App Store, according to Lifewire. The market intelligence firm IDC bets this is just the beginning, estimating that by 2023, across all operating systems, “over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using cloud-native approaches.” Citing this statistic in a September 14 blog post, CEO Howie Liu promoted his company Airtable — the workplace collaboration and productivity platform — as a tool that will help create many of these new apps. That same day, Airtable announced it had raised a $185 million Series D round at a $2.6 billion valuation, more than doubling its $1.1 …

When we were children, none of us needed to be told to draw. It was practically primal. We would naturally doodle. Yet at some point, most of us stop drawing. The same applies to writing — as architect and art historian Manlio Brusatin has said, “Writing is nothing but drawing.”

Our natural-born instinct to write is stifled and tamped down so we can deal with the unpleasant business of producing results. We live in a world of hamburger essays, content creation, and feedback — no wonder why we stop writing.

And yet, we can still feel our instinct to write. Perhaps it comes out when we read Julie Zhuo’s, Mauricio Estrella’s, or Michael Bierut’s words. Maybe it gives us ideas to become better at what we do. Thus, the key to writing more starts with rediscovering our instinctive joy at putting words together on a piece of paper. Here are some keys I’ve learned through years of writing professionally, as well as coaching teams at Shopify, Flipp, and Skillshare on how to…

Headspace and Calm share the same friendly mission: Headspace wants “to improve the health and happiness of the world” while Calm wants to “make the world healthier and happier.” But the two companies, which both make apps that guide people through meditation exercises, are engaged in a cutthroat competition, one that has only intensified as the nation faces a growing mental health crisis exacerbated by the pandemic.

Before Covid hit, both companies had raised a lot of funding. Calm raised a $115 million Series B round in 2019. In February 2020, Headspace raised its Series C round, $93 million in equity and debt. Just a few months later, it extended the round and added another $47.7 million in equity. Since March, the companies have both spent millions on television commercials: Calm spent some $15.6 million on TV ads between March and August (up from $3 million the year before) and Headspace spent $27.3 …

While we don’t have to help our colleagues tie shoes or remind them to FaceTime Grandma (that’d be weird), parenting skills can translate surprisingly well in the workplace.

I don’t have kids myself, but I was curious when Julie Zhuo, a former vice president of design at Facebook and a mom of three, tweeted that she learns as much or more about improving teamwork from parenting books as she does from books about management. “I find kids present a more extreme version of the same kinds of interpersonal challenges that a colleague/friend/report would,” she writes.

On a recommendation from a parent, I picked up a copy of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, a classic manual of communication strategies — and found plenty of strategies I could use in my role as an entrepreneur. It turns out that whether we’re speaking to a team member or a child, the goal is often the same: We want to bring out the best in the other person. …

As of December, WeWork was weeks away from running out of cash, according to Marcelo Claure, the company’s executive chairman. This was less than a year after WeWork’s valuation rose to a high of $47 billion in January 2019, before plummeting to $8 billion in October after a disastrous attempt at an IPO. After the pandemic hit, the valuation dropped again to $2.9 billion in March 2020, as WeWork warned that the pandemic would likely get in the way of the company reaching its 2020 targets.

The whole industry has suffered because of the pandemic. A May 2020 report from Research and Markets projects the global co-working spaces market will “decline from $9.27 billion in 2019 and to $8.24 billion in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of –12.9%.” Because of this, analysts at DBRS Morningstar were pessimistic about WeWork’s survival. …