There comes a point in life where we start to ask questions.

Perhaps our relationships aren’t going as well as we’d like them to. Perhaps we’d like to develop better habits and get lean. Or maybe we want to learn how to crush it at work.

And so, as people have done for thousands of years, we seek out teachers and often turn to the self-help section of our local bookstore.

There’s no doubting that many of these books are full of wisdom that can help us to stand on the shoulders of giants, and get closer to our goals…

The four-day workweek is making headlines again.

It first made the rounds back in 2008 when Utah state government employees began working ten-hour days from Monday to Thursday. A decade later, in the summer of 2019, Microsoft Japan trialed a four-day workweek, and it noted a 40 percent increase in sales per employee before curiously returning to the five-day workweek.

Now, Buffer, a tech company with 89 employees, is igniting the conversation again, particularly as the pandemic, remote work, and the blurring of lines between home and work has resulted in people working, on average, longer hours than ever before.

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Back in 2018, I wrote about my team’s six-hour workday experiment for Harvard Business Review.

We found that the shorter days acted as a forcing function, prompting us to waste less time sending cat gifs in Slack, effectively prioritizing our work, automating and outsourcing rudimentary tasks, and spending more time in deep concentration.

More recently, we decided to experiment with a four-day workweek, on the back of trending news that companies like Microsoft Japan, and Buffer had found the shorter week beneficial, from both a productivity and wellbeing perspective.

I specifically asked my team of 12 employees to take Fridays…

Dear Mr. Powick

I was delighted to read about Deloitte Australia’s elimination of both start and finish times, and its requirement for employees to be in the office for a set number of days per week.

As a former big four consultant, and currently, a published author and leadership coach on all things productivity, effectiveness, and emotional wellbeing at work, the decoupling of work and hours in the knowledge sector — something that is a throwback to the factory room floors of the industrial revolution, is long overdue.

This first step towards creating a truly flexible workplace that values outcomes…

Work anywhere.

That’s the message Deloitte is telling its Australian employees. It eliminated start and finish times, and removed the requirement to be in the office for a set number of days per week.

On the surface of it, this is an encouraging move and one that should be celebrated. However, telling people they are free to do things without addressing the underlying workplace systems and cultures that actively sabotage the spirit of this move, is like giving someone the keys to a Tesla, but not access to a charger.

As the bestselling author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, puts it, “You…

As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on the working world, the nature of how we do things continues to change.

With travel limited, and with a growing number of organizations embracing fully remote or hybrid setups, traditional face-to-face business and relationship development opportunities are dwindling.

But this can give sales professionals, who take the time to embrace online relationship development techniques, the upper hand.

Here are just eight ways you can develop relationships and keep them warm, online.

1. Automate Follow-ups

First and foremost, it is imperative that you either automate your follow-ups, or generate follow-up reminders.

Most people follow up on an…

“What nationality are you?”

Growing up in Melbourne’s ethnically diverse and working-class western suburbs in the early 90s, this question was a conversation starter.

It gave you an immediate sense of the other person’s tastes and culture, what you might have in common, and whether or not you should like them.

The western suburbs were a hotbed of nationalism, particularly the Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Croatian, and Macedonian variety. …

Gordon Gecko, the infamous trader played by Michael Douglas in 1987’s Wall Street, told us that greed is good. He was the embodiment of subservience to capitalism and the holy dollar.

In the 34 years since we’ve seen capitalism and materialism continue to flourish, but we also bore witness to a growing chorus of cries to the contrary, manifest in movements like Occupy Wall Street.

Ever since the industrial revolution transformed our world, arguments for and against the ruling economic system have been made.

Karl Marx, the German economist, was and remains the most celebrated critic of capitalism. He felt…