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About 35% of current jobs in the UK are at high risk of computerisation over the following 20 years, according to a study by researchers at Oxford University and Deloitte. Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34066941 and type your job title into the search box below to find out the likelihood that it could be automated within the …

Continue reading “Will a robot take my job?”

When a former Nike employee joined the company a few years ago, she felt like she was in exactly the right place to work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. She believed in the sportswear giant’s DEI leadership and was moved by how John Donahoe, then…

Executive leaders today face mounting pressure to boost productivity and innovation with AI. Employees—on the other hand—report low trust in organizational change and limited information about how AI will impact their work (or whether it’s going to re…

We are living through the most rapid and sweeping digitalization in history. The average adult touches their phone hundreds if not thousands of times a day. And yet, at this moment of peak digital saturation, a countermovement is taking shape in schools, governments, and research institutions. More and more people have reached the conclusion that for human beings to think well, learn deeply, and stay mentally healthy, we may need significantly less technology.

Consider what’s happening in education. Australia passed legislation banning children under 16 from social media entirely. Sweden, having spent a decade rolling tablets into every classroom and replacing textbooks with screens, has now reversed course. Across the world, country after country is arriving at the same verdict: Digital tools, introduced with enormous enthusiasm and the best of intentions, turned out to be a corrosive threat to children’s cognitive development.

What happens to our cognitive and professional capabilities when we automate the most demanding tasks? Every convenience comes with an invisible tax levied on our skills. We have spent decades enthusiastically building workplaces that use our brains less and less. In schools, the reckoning has already begun. At work, we are still waiting.

The dominant professional narrative still pushes for more AI, more automation, more tools. Productivity discourse is almost entirely about addition—add this agent, this app, this workflow—with no attention paid to what is being subtracted in the process. 

Here are eight old habits that will give you and your organization an edge because everyone else has forgotten them.

1. Keep a work notebook and write in it by hand

The physical work notebook has become a rarity in the modern office. It shouldn’t be. When we write by hand during meetings or while thinking through a problem, we engage fine motor systems and higher cognition in a way no keyboard can replicate.

A landmark 2014 study shows “the pen is mightier than the keyboard”: Notetakers who write by hand show deeper conceptual understanding than those who type because the slowness of the hand forces genuine processing and synthesis rather than verbatim transcription. You have to decide, in real time, what actually matters. A 2023 Norwegian study used EEG imaging to confirm that in regions of the brain associated with memory encoding and creative thinking, handwriting produced greater neural connectivity than typing. 

2. Read long-form books, reports, and articles

Professionals who read substantive books, reports, and long-form articles gain a clear edge over those who rely on short digital content. Deep reading builds the capacity to follow sustained arguments, retain nuance, and engage critically with complex ideas. By contrast, screen-based reading tends to encourage skimming and shallower comprehension.

In a professional setting, this difference is significant. Being able to work through a 300-page book or a dense industry report (and apply its insights) is what distinguishes true expertise from surface-level familiarity. AI can summarize content, but it won’t replace your mental models formed through slow reading.

3. Run a real brainstorm with people, whiteboard, and no screens

The pandemic normalized video calls to the point where gathering colleagues in a room with a whiteboard now feels old-fashioned. It shouldn’t. Physical copresence generates qualitatively different creative outcomes from remote sessions. People read body language in real time, interrupt productively, and build on ideas before they have been fully articulated.

The best group outputs emerge from spontaneous, unplanned exchanges. A 2022 paper in Nature tracking 60,000 Microsoft employees detailed how remote work can measurably reduce the serendipitous connections that generate novel thinking. Also, remote workers’ professional networks become more siloed over time. “Weak tie” exposure is the single strongest predictor of creative output and career development! So book a room and ban screens for an hour. 

4. Walk, especially during the workday

The World Health Organization lists sedentary behavior among the four leading behavioral risk factors for global mortality, alongside smoking, excessive alcohol, and poor diet. Office work is sedentary by design. Most professionals know it and do little about it. The case for walking specifically is the most practical and evidence-backed intervention available to the worker.

A Stanford study found that walking boosts divergent creative thinking by an average of 81% compared to sitting, and the effect persisted after participants returned to their desks. Walking meetings, lunchtime loops around the block, taking the stairs—these activities cost little time and money. But uptake depends on managerial exemplarity: When leaders model these behaviors, they legitimize them and shift workplace norms. Sitting for nine hours a day, five days a week, over decades, by contrast, amounts to a slow, preventable decline.

5. Train and learn without AI . . . to use it better tomorrow

Here is the paradox at the heart of the current AI moment: The productivity gains from AI are substantially larger for senior, experienced workers than for juniors. A Harvard Business School study on AI-assisted consultants found that experts using AI outperformed all other groups, but that less-experienced users, when deployed on tasks beyond their current competence, produced worse outputs than those working unaided.

Let’s use the elevator as a simple metaphor. Pressing a button is effortless. Repeat that choice every day, and your legs and glutes atrophy. The colleague who takes the stairs is eccentric until the power goes out and they’re the only one left who can climb the stairs without strain.

If AI absorbs the entry-level and mid-level tasks through which junior staff traditionally developed into senior ones, organizations face a skills cliff. The solution may be deliberate, AI-free learning environments where people are forced to develop real competence and build the judgment that will make their use of AI useful. 

6. Have coffee with your colleagues and mean it

Small talk has a terrible reputation in productivity culture. It’s treated as wasted time. The research says otherwise. Casual exchanges improve mood, increase a sense of belonging, and make people feel more invested in the organizations they work for. They are the cement that holds professional communities together.

Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect, published more than a decade ago, is arguably even more relevant today. It shows that face-to-face social contact is one of the strongest predictors of longevity and sustained cognitive performance. The professional who cultivates a wide network of casual, warm workplace relationships invests in the social infrastructure that underpins collaboration and psychological safety.

Loneliness is also a performance risk. Among remote and hybrid knowledge workers, chronic loneliness is a pervasive occupational hazard.

7. Dress the part because enclothed cognition is real

“Enclothed cognition” refers to the measurable influence of clothing on the wearer’s psychological state and performance. Participants wearing a white coat described as a doctor’s coat made 50% fewer errors on attention tasks than those wearing the identical coat described as a painter’s smock. What we wear at work tells us who we are in that context and shapes how we perform accordingly.

The normalization of casualwear in professional environments, accelerated by hybrid work, has had a cost. Clothes also involve mutual respect. As the external signals of professionalism have eroded, many organizations report a corresponding drift in standards of communication, preparation, and commitment. It may not be necessary to go back to formal dress. But the small daily ritual of choosing to look like someone who takes their work seriously is worth a lot.

8. Speak without slides and learn to persuade your audience

The slide deck has become the default unit of professional thought. Every argument must be bulleted. Every meeting must have its deck that can be shared, forwarded, and consumed asynchronously. Thus we are good at making slides and less comfortable making an argument in real time through the force of clarity and conviction. In fact, now that more and more slides are generated by generative AIs, it will be more and more essential to regain the faculty to convince others without them.

Amazon famously banned PowerPoint in senior leadership meetings, replacing decks with written narratives that had to be read in silence before discussion: The underlying insight was that slides allow the presenter to hide behind formatting. Audiences who receive spoken explanation alone retain more than those who have explanation and on-screen text at the same time. Practice speaking without the deck.

An ad featuring Pamela Anderson offers an update to the brand’s body-positive ethos for the AI era.

I never thought I’d see discussions of looksmaxxing on LinkedIn of all places. But nowadays, I increasingly am.

For the uninitiated, “looksmaxxing” is an internet term that originated on incel message boards in the 2010s. It’s a practice that encap…

Ask most leaders to describe a high performer, and you’ll hear some version of the same profile: sharp, resilient, and relentless. Ask those same leaders what they mean by resilient, and the answer almost always collapses into two dimensions: mental toughness and physical stamina. We have built entire leadership development industries around cognitive acuity and physical wellness. What we have largely ignored is the third pillar: emotional recovery.

This is not a soft argument. It is a structural one. And the science, along with a growing body of evidence from the workplace, suggests that overlooking emotional recovery is not just a wellness gap; it is a strategic one.

We Use Emotions the Way We Use Energy

Melissa Painter, founder of Breakthru—a micro-break tool integrated into Microsoft Teams and Slack—put it plainly when I spoke with her recently: “We all use our emotions as a resource throughout the day.”

That framing rang true for me: not emotions as a byproduct of work, but as a resource consumed by work. Our emotional reservoir is a resource that needs replenishment.

Painter designed emotional recovery into Breakthru from inception, not as an afterthought. The product guides users toward one of four “mood states” (centered, energized, joyful, or confident) through body-based movement. The insight behind this is both ancient and neuroscientifically current: The body is one of the most effective tools we have for shifting emotional states.

As Painter noted, when a second grade teacher tells a child to “shake it off,” that instruction is both metaphorical and literal. Physical movement reorganizes the nervous system. It changes how we feel, not just how we move. It also changes how we think. As I like to say, when we move, our ideas move.

What Painter’s team did not anticipate was the range of emotional states users would report after just two minutes of movement. People came back with words like brave, fearless, and awake. These were not outcomes Breakthru promised. They were outcomes the body discovered on its own, when given the space.

The Data We’re Not Collecting

A telling signal from Breakthru’s usage data is the “surprise me” option, which asks the system to choose a mood state on the person’s behalf. Recently, it’s become the most selected choice. Painter’s read on this is that people today are experiencing such profound decision-making fatigue that many can’t summon the cognitive bandwidth to choose how they want to feel. They just know they need to feel different.

This is the hidden cost of a workplace culture that mistakes busyness for productivity. In my book Move. Think. Rest., I trace this confusion back to our designing today’s work around first Industrial Revolution norms—a model built around output, efficiency, and measuring only what was visible. We have inherited that model wholesale and applied it to knowledge work, where it fundamentally does not belong. The stretch and movement influencer, Alicia Archer, said it well: The challenge is not that we overperform, it is that we under-recover.

Painter told me that the physical consequences are well documented. Prolonged sedentary behavior increases early mortality risk by 35% in women and 18% to 19% in men. A mere two minutes of movement and breathing produces metabolic and cognitive benefits that last two hours.

But Painter points to a subtler form of self-harm that rarely makes it into the data: breath-holding. A significant number of people unconsciously hold their breath throughout the workday, for example, while reading email, before a difficult meeting, or in the middle of a deadline sprint. They are trying to access a state of hyperfocus, but what they are actually doing is slowly breaking their adrenal system.

Emerging Leaders Learn by Watching, Not Listening

Carson Van Gelder, head of growth at Breakthru, shared something in our conversation that I have not been able to stop thinking about: Teams are sometimes actively demonized for taking walking breaks during the workday. The implicit message is that pausing signals weakness and that weakness disqualifies you from leadership.

Painter named the mechanism precisely: People learn by watching, not by hearing. When a leader publicly endorses rest and then visibly skips it, the real message is transmitted, not the stated one. The subtext lands as: Breaks are for people who aren’t serious. If you want to lead someday, don’t be a weakling.

This is, of course, not the case. Leaders are paid to think strategically, hold the bird’s-eye view, and make high-quality decisions under pressure. None of those capacities is enhanced by continuous cognitive depletion. Most senior leaders will readily admit they have no real thinking time in their workday. We rarely treat that confession as the red flag it is.

What shifts a leader’s behavior, Painter has found, is not more data. It is one direct question: What is it in your own psyche that tells you two minutes is not available to you? And then: Just try a two-minute break once. Most leaders who do are genuinely surprised by how they feel. That surprise is itself diagnostic. It reveals how thoroughly we have trained ourselves to ignore the body’s signals in service of a productivity model that was never designed for human beings.

Redefining What Counts

In my framework of imagination age KPIs, I offer that organizations need a more expansive and honest definition of what constitutes high performance. Creativity, quality of thinking, emotional regulation, and meaning are not soft metrics. They are the actual inputs to the outcomes we claim to want. Painter makes the same argument from the product side: She hopes that when clients evaluate whether Breakthru is working, they do not stop at sentiment scores but also listen to individual voices. Is someone going home less depleted? Are they more even-keeled with their team? Has something shifted in how they show up?

That kind of qualitative measurement requires leaders to decide what they actually value and then build systems around it. Right now, most organizations are measuring what is easiest to count, not what matters most. The result is a workplace that produces decision fatigue, breath-holding, and a population of depleted leaders.

Emotional recovery is not a wellness initiative. It is infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, its value becomes undeniable only after we have watched its absence long enough.

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