Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

For a lot of people, work feels especially chaotic right now.. Projects start and don't finish. Layoffs happen, then reorgs, then new strategies, and through all of it, managers are expected to have the answers. Caroline Webb spent 25 years coaching leaders through exactly this kind of turbulence. She's a behavioral scientist, a former economist and the author of the new book Leadership Intelligence: Science-Backed Strategies for Mastering 21 Everyday Management Challenges. This week she joins Jessi to talk about what the science of the human brain tells us about leading through uncertainty.

In this episode, Jessi and Caroline discuss:

Why the current moment hits a stress trifecta — demanding, uncontrollable and unpleasant — and what that does to your team's brains

The "know-be-do" framework: how to lead people through uncertainty when facts are in short supply

Why naming how you feel is one of the most powerful things a leader can do and what affect labeling actually does in the brain

What "measured authenticity" means, and why "terrified" is not a word you want your manager to use

How to be honest with your team when you know more than you can say

Why letting projects die quietly is one of the most demoralizing things a manager can do, and what to do instead

What Astro (Google X's moonshot factory) does when it kills a project, and why it works

The "when-then" method for taking the sting out of worst-case scenarios before they happen

"Compassionate clarity": what it means in practice when layoff season arrives

Why walking people out of the building immediately is almost never necessary and what a seasoned CHRO said about it

Follow Caroline Webb and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn

Join us for Hello Monday Office Hours, Wednesday at 3pm EST

Listen to Caroline’s previous Hello Monday episode on how to have a good day at a bad job

We spend a lot of energy trying to optimize our time, but what happens when we're forced to surrender to it? Writer, meditation teacher and lifetime student of Buddhism Sebene Selassie has been living with cancer for more than twenty years. In that time, she's learned something most of us spend a lifetime avoiding: how little control we actually have, and how to find joy anyway. This is the third and final episode in our month-long series on time. We’ve discussed how we spend our minutes, our days, our months and our years. Today you’ll hear about how we make the most of all of it..

In this episode, Jessi and Sebene discuss:

Why a cancer diagnosis at 34 became the entry point to a deeper spiritual life, and eventually, to teaching

The tight relationship between fear and control, and how Sebene has spent twenty years slowly loosening her grip on both

What Sebene’s ticking clock has taught her about the present moment

The difference between joy and happiness, and why joy is available even in the hardest moments

Why meditation isn't about feeling better, and what the saccharine corporate version gets wrong

The paradox at the heart of Sebene’s book You Belong: A Call for Connection

How grasping for time is often just grasping for control, and what we miss when we do this

What it means to show up to life openhearted, fully as yourself

Follow Sebene Selassie and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

Join us this Wednesday at 3pm EST for the return of Office Hours!

Being busy and being productive are not the same thing. Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown and author of Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, has spent years making that case. This is the second of three episodes from the archive that we're revisiting this month on the subject of time. In it, Cal joins Jessi to zoom out and ask: what does it really mean to get meaningful work done over the course of our weeks, our months, and even our years?

In this episode, Jessi and Cal discuss:

Why "pseudo-productivity" — using visible activity as a proxy for real work — was always a bad idea, and why mobile computing made it unsustainable

How the pandemic pushed knowledge work past a breaking point

The administrative overhead trap: why agreeing to too many things at once is slowing you down

How to say no to new work without actually saying no, and why transparency is the key

Why boredom is essential

What your phone has to do with short-circuiting the most human productivity tool we have

Cal's rule for his kids on smartphones and social media, and the age he thinks unrestricted internet access becomes safe

Why doing fewer things at once will get you to the finish line faster

What AI tools like ChatGPT are actually good for, and what Cal is waiting for them to do instead

The difference between technology that helps you do things faster and technology that takes things off your plate entirely

Follow Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

Most of us are convinced we don't have enough time. Laura Vanderkam argues that we have enough time, we just aren’t using it with enough intention. This month, we're revisiting our series of episodes on time, and how we make the most of it. We’re starting here, with the bestselling author of numerous books on time management and the host of the daily four-minute podcast Before Breakfast.

In this episode, Jessi and Laura discuss:

Why 5 PM on Thursday is actually the exact midpoint of your week, and what that reveals about the time you're losing

How Laura has tracked every half hour of her life since April 2015, and what nine years of data taught her

The biggest time waster of all (it's not email or your phone)

Effortful fun versus effortless fun, and why doing a little of the first before the second changes everything

Why you should give yourself a bedtime, and how most adults are already getting more sleep than they think

The case for moving for 10 minutes by 3 PM every day

Why busy people need a hobby

The Friday punch list: how batching your small tasks protects your best hours for the work that actually matters

Follow Laura Vanderkam and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

Baratunde Thurston fired ChatGPT. And ChatGPT helped him do it. This week, the Emmy-nominated storyteller, writer and host of Life with Machines joins Jessi in the studio to talk about what it actually means to have agency in a moment when we’re still figuring out the rules and norms of AI.

In this episode, Jessi and Baratunde discuss:

Why Baratunde fired ChatGPT and what the chat bot taught him on his way out

What he means when he says we're not using a tool, we're entering a relationship

The "direction, not perfection" principle for navigating an imperfect landscape of AI companies and choices

Why switching platforms is itself a practice of agency, and proof that you can leave

What AI tools reveal about you that you didn't know you were sharing

The two people living inside every employee at an AI all-hands: the one on-program, and the one who's scared and skeptical

What the kids opting out of AI are trying to tell us

What the internet could look like if we treated it as a public utility instead of a commercial space

Why token-maxing is a "flagrant foul" in an era of climate change

What executives get wrong when rolling out AI, and the questions they should be asking their teams instead

Follow Baratunde Thurston and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.