1) Do nothing to achieve more
All of us have a
problem with busyness. But being busy and being successful are not one and the
same. But, doing less or nothing at all is easier said than done,
especially in a society that suffers from extreme busyness. Bill
Gates attributes much of Microsoft’s success to the big ideas and concepts he
stumbled upon while doing nothing.
On either Saturday
or Sunday, force yourself to step away from all forms of technology — a
practice known as a digital sabbath. Shut off your smartphone and hide it
in your closet. Power down the laptop and slide it under your bed. Give
your brain space to think by stepping away from the daily grind and doing
nothing. Your mind will have time to stumble upon new ideas and further process
old ones.
2) Can you do better by working 4 days-a-week?
A 4-day work-week is
being discussed by a lot of corporates and productivity experts. Here is one
company in Australia which has tried it.
A mid-week break
lets staff go to the gym, get on top of housework, look after young children,
schedule appointments, work on their start-up or just watch Netflix. Sometimes,
they’ll catch up on work. Sick days are down, staff satisfaction is up, says Blackham.
“You get that Monday feeling a couple of times a week.”
For employers,
shutting down mid-week gives “more bang for your buck”. he says. “The Wednesday
break means you return to Thursday fresh, and this is when people feel most
productive.”
Some start-ups
which have trialled the four day week in the US have had to return to five
day working after finding the day off made the company less competitive and
staff more stressed.
3) Is free good for you?
Technology companies
based in Seattle or Silicon Valley now account for five out of the five most
valuable companies in America.
Big Tech has, in
some sense, gotten “too big.” And in 2019, politicians are starting to listen.
The issue is
complicated by the fact that even though it’s convenient to shorthand
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook as “Big Tech,” these five
companies are actually structured in very different ways.
Contemporary
antitrust law mostly cares about high prices. The standard, in other words,
isn’t that one company dominating a market is bad. It’s that it’s bad if a
company’s market domination leads to bad outcomes for consumers.
However, most of the
big tech is cheaper or provide better service to the end customer making them
difficult to prosecute. Google provides nearly all of its services for free.
Amazon makes shopping cheaper. Anti-trust needs to find out a balance between
low prices and utility to the customers.
4) We are killing the planet and ourselves; we just
don't realize it yet
Humans are
transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one
million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire
threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their
survival
Humans are producing
more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural
productivity on 23 percent of the planet’s land area.
Over the past 50
years, global biodiversity loss has primarily been driven by activities like
the clearing of forests for farmland, the expansion of roads and cities,
logging, hunting, overfishing, water pollution and the transport of invasive
species around the globe.
5) The food we eat is killing us
Health officials
around the world are struggling with the explosive rise of deadly
drug-resistant strains of the fungus Candida
auris, which prey on people with weakened immune systems. Worryingly,
their emergence may be tied to indiscriminate use of fungicides in agriculture
and food production.
Antibiotics are
applied on a massive scale in food production, pushing the rise of bacterial
drug resistance. A British government study published in 2016
estimated that, within 30 years, drug-resistant infections will be a bigger
killer than cancer, with some 10 million people dying from infections every
year.
“Food is no longer
valued for its ability to sustain life,” Walker concludes, “but only for its
ability to generate profits.”
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