This week on tips - Taking breaks between meetings, Graphs guide for storytelling with data & Easy to use friendly AI Chat (ChatGPT)
Hello dear reader,
As you may have noticed, I took a week off, and it was needed. Let’s welcome week VIII, and with that, some exciting things I have been able to stumble upon that I want to share with you.
This week I am trying a new format; let me know if you don’t like it by replying to this email. I will get your message - or answer the pool below.
More breaks = better performance
Some days you open your work calendar, which is already stressful before you even begin working because it is packed with back-to-back meetings. Regardless if a few of those emails could’ve been emails or a quick conversation through Slack, there are strategies that can help you manage them better, but most importantly, you need to take breaks in between each meeting.
But why? New research from the WorkLab initiative at Microsoft shows better performance if a person takes breaks between meetings.
I want to leave you with three options to explore this content:
A Twitter thread:
A summary that it was produced by an AI tool (that I will share in the academic special issue of this newsletter in January):
The key takeaways from this research paper are that taking breaks between conversations helps reduce stress and improves performance. Breaks, even short ones, are important to make the transitions between meetings feel less stressful and help our ability to do our best work. Brainwave patterns show that when the brain is experiencing stress, it is harder to stay focused and engaged. Taking breaks helps to prevent stress spikes and causes a dip in beta activity, which correlates with less stress. Additionally, when participants had meditation breaks, brainwave patterns showed positive levels of frontal alpha asymmetry, which is associated with higher engagement during the meeting. Without breaks, the levels were negative, suggesting the participants were withdrawn, or less engaged in the meeting.
The original source of this information: Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks
PD: Giving multiple options to explore the content is part of the new format.
The next tip continues with the old format.
A good graph could go a long way
Storytelling with data is a powerful way to communicate information and persuade your audience. Using data to illustrate your points, you can make your message more compelling and convincing. But the way you display this data is equally important as the quality of the data, so here’s a one-page guide I found that might help you:
Now that you experienced both formats, please me help responding the following pool:
A Game-Changing Tool for Better Communication and Efficiency (possibly even more)
I am talking about ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. A language model is an artificial intelligence model trained to process and generate natural language text.
It can do multiple things. One thing that I have been using it for it’s summarising text I find online to understand information quicker. For example, when you are applying for jobs, you can give the job description input and indicate the most essential things that cannot be missing in your CV to match this position - isn’t that awesome?
So I also asked ChatGPT what they can do, and here’s the answer:
As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am designed to assist with a wide range of language-related tasks. I can provide general knowledge on a wide range of topics, help with spelling and grammar, and assist with writing and proofreading. I am not able to browse the internet or provide specific information about products or services, as I do not have access to external sources of information. My knowledge is based on the text that I have been trained on, and I can only provide answers based on that information. If you have any other questions or need assistance with something, feel free to ask and I will do my best to help.
People have started playing it, and someone has already created direct access to ask questions to ChatGPT:
This is it for now. Please share it with your friends, coworkers, family, classmates - anyone that might find these weekly tips useful.
Have a good week,
Fernando