Those listening sessions are likely making me less productive. You’re having so much more fun that you feel more productive.

The Illusion of Productivity When Listening to Music

Listen to music for 10 to 15 minutes before you start working.<ul><li>Listening to tunes you enjoy can put you in a better mood and relax you. Your brain releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which gives you a “warm feeling of pleasure.” </li><li>You may also get a hit of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which elevates your mood and can make it easier to focus.</li></ul>

The Best Way to Listen to Music for Productivity

Unfortunately, listening to music also takes up some of your attentional capacity, meaning that if you listened to it while working, you’d have fewer resources left to direct toward the task at hand.The exception is when you’re performing tasks that are repetitive or monotonous, such as when you’re working on an assembly line or driving for long periods of time.

Music And Attentional Capacity

Stashed ideas

A Neuroscientist Explains Why You Should Stop Listening to Music While You Work

You have an idea for a new product, and now you want to bring it to market. You may not think it would be easy because of your limited budget and experience. The internet is an excellent tool for research, but there is also value in visiting brick and mortar retailers and befriending store managers. In addition, trade shows are great for doing market research and relationship building. Before you start spending your time and money trying to commercialize your idea, you need to ask yourself some pointed questions.

Bringing an idea to market

Market size: How large is the potential market for your new idea? Put otherwise, how many consumers may be interested?  Competition: How saturated is the market for similar products? Too much competition can make it extremely difficult to succeed. However, identifying products that have been selling for a while without innovation or improvement could be worthwhile. Value proposition: Does your new idea offer a benefit that consumers will want to pay for? Amazon reviews can help to identify the benefits that consumers are actively looking for.

Market size, Competition, and Value proposition

Manufacturing: Can your new idea be manufactured using existing machinery? YouTube can help in researching alternative manufacturing methods. Cost: Will the retail price of your new idea be low enough to stand up to the competition? Protection: How will you protect your ownership of your idea with intellectual property? Patenting can be very costly.

Manufacturing, Cost, and Protection

Education: Do people understand when you explain your concept to them? Educating the consumer can be expensive and time-consuming.Line extensions: One new idea doesn't make a business. Consider how you can expand your idea into a line of products.Profit margin: After all the expenses required to bring your product to market, can you live on the money left over? Experience: Do you have the necessary skills to launch a new idea, and can you build a team to help you?Money: Are you prepared financially?

Education, line extensions, profit margins

Crowdfunding to raise money.Test your idea while raising the funds you need to get started.Joining a startup. It can be enlightening to work with others who have skills that you don't.Focus on licensing your idea instead of venturing. Licensing is like renting. Instead of you doing all the work, your licensee takes on the responsibility of manufacturing, marketing, and fulfillment. The company should have great distribution.

Ways to mitigate risk

Ready to go all in on your new idea? Make sure you know the answers to these questions first. 

Can Your New Idea Compete? 11 Criteria to Help You Assess

A good quarterly plan can help your business move forward faster than you thought. But, creating a good quarterly plan is a skill. Most business owners may struggle to create a plan that is<ul><li>practical, and </li><li>considers their team's strengths and weaknesses.</li></ul>

Creating a quarterly plan is a skill

You may not have a realistic idea of how long certain tasks will take on your strategic plan. Consequently, you may either over commit or under commit. <ul><li>Understanding how long tasks take will help to create a more balanced plan.</li><li>Consider spacing out your deadlines, as putting all your action items at the beginning of a quarter may make it much harder to complete.</li></ul>

Don't have time blindness

Don't create your quarterly plan at the last minute. Instead, start working on your quarterly action plan in the middle of the previous quarterly. Once you've created a quarterly plan, remember to share it with your team and take action on the items at the start of the quarter.

Don't procrastinate

It's easy to have vague goals and then use them to excuse why you couldn't reach your goals. Instead, be clear on what you want to achieve. Ensure to quantify it. For example, instead of saying "I want to increase sales this quarter", say "I want to increase sales by 22%."

Don't be vague

Common pitfalls to avoid when planning your next quarter

How Not to Plan Out Your Next Quarter

Make sure you use every app on your home screen every day. For example:<ul><li>Phone, Messages — Self-explanatory&nbsp;</li><li>Clock — for alarms</li><li>Your to-do app&nbsp;</li><li>The messaging apps&nbsp;</li><li>Meditation app</li></ul>

Minimalist Phone: The Home Screen

When your phone does tap you on the shoulder, it isn’t because your phone has anything useful for you.&nbsp;On the contrary, it usually has something useful for someone else: notifications for coupons that help stores sell products, notifications about posts from acquaintances and ex-friends you don’t need to see, notifications from games that want you to waste your time, and notifications from apps to spend money on in-app purchases.

Use Your Phone When It's Good For You

Apps are engineered so that you spend as much time on them as possible.&nbsp;Social media is designed to have endless scrolling, buttons are placed right where it’s easiest to tap, and apps are full of bright and stimulating colors.

Don't Use Your Phone For Long Periods Of Time

This is not the first time I’ve written about digital minimalism. It feels like I can’t go a week without spotting someone’s phone out of the corner of my eye, overflowing with hundreds of unseen…

What My Minimalist Phone Looks Like

A fat person talking about fitness is like a nun giving sex advice.I do look like the kind of person who, as TV or movies might have it, does not exercise, has never been to a gym, and does not, as they say, “take care of themselves.” For a long time, I bought into that story, wholeheartedly, accepting what it said as the truth about me. Until I realized that fatness—that the way I felt about fatness—was something totally different.

Fat Shaming

I used to throw up after gym class. I once turned blue and had some sort of seizure. Not that any of the teachers cared, because obviously I was a fat kid and so the solution was more exercise.I have this slight suspicion that they looked at exercise in general and my migraines in particular as a form of appropriate punishment for the sin of being fat. The day they told us gym class was no longer compulsory was one of the top 10 happiest days of my life, a golden and glorious day of liquid sunshine and joy. I ended my time at school convinced that exercise was an elaborate form of torture.

Being Fat In The School

I really love my body. It's taken me ages, but I'm there now. I love it in the way you love an old friend, someone who's always there to support you, who tries their hardest to help you do all the things you want to do and asks so little in return . My body is like a waggy-tailed dog in its excitement to accompany me on adventures. It's so thrilled to go for a walk or work out at the gym or take a nice bath or have some good sex or dance to some music or lift some heavy things or curl up in bed at the end of a long day.

Love Your Body

I know some people do—we get emails every day from people who are losing weight with our app, and if that's a goal they have, I’m very happy we’re helping them to achieve it. It's just never happened to me. No, what happened was better: I started to enjoy being in my body. I felt better. I felt good. It is a very different feeling to be in a fat body that is moving a lot to one that hardly moves at all. It feels like love.

A Different Look At Exercise

There is a thing I feared when I started making a fitness app, and it was this: that someone would notice that I am fat. It's weird, really, because I mean: I am fat. It’s not something I can hide…

There’s No Morality in Exercise: I’m a Fat Person Who Made a Successful Fitness App

In my past life as a consultant at IBM, I led Ideation workshops with corporate leaders. I suggested to my group the classic Post-It Brainstorming strategy. We all scribble out as many ideas as we can — even ‘ stupid ones’. After generating a few dozen App ideas, we sorted them into categories to gain a better understanding of what themes we were collectively excited about.

Step 1: Ideate

Next, on a white board, we drew out the basic views we envisioned in our app. We incorporated our set of user stories to understand how these views would work in a skeletal app framework.

Step 2: Wireframe UX/UI

<ul><li>It could hold user image uploads in its cloud storage </li><li>It included WebSocket integration for real-time updating </li><li>It could handle our user authentication and offer easy OAuth integration </li></ul>

Step 3: Choose a data structure and type of database

We set up a Github repo, on which we prevented merging to master to force ourselves to review each other’s code. We also created an agile board on Waffle.Io, which is free and has easy integration with Github. We would each create git branches for the user story we were currently working on.

Step 4: Set up Github and an agile workflow

Because the JavaScript ecosystem is so complicated, we opted not to build our app from absolute ground zero. It felt unnecessary to spend valuable time wiring up our Webpack build scripts and loaders, and our symlink that pointed to our project directory. My team chose the <a href="https://github.com/FullstackAcademy/firebones">Firebones </a>skeleton because it fit our use case, but there are many open-source skeleton options available to choose from.

Step 5: Choose & download a boilerplate

If we weren’t using a Cloud-Based Database, this would have been the time to write our Back-End Express routes. But since we were using Firebase, which is already in the cloud, we just worked to set up our first successful Database listener.

Step 6: Write back-end API routes (or Firebase listeners)

Our next step was to create a “proof of concept” for our App. This meant finding a Front-End library to satisfactorily render Timelines. We connected it to Firebase successfully to display some seed data.

Step 7: Build a “Proof Of Concept”

<ul><li>ability to create new goals, milestones, and checkins </li><li>ability to delete goals, milestones, and checkins </li><li>ability to change a timeline’s name, color, and details </li><li>ability to zoom in on timelines </li><li>ability to add links to resources </li><li>ability to upload media </li><li>ability to bubble up resources and media from milestones and checkins to their associated goals </li><li>rich text editor integration </li><li>user signup / authentication / OAuth </li><li>popover to view timeline options </li><li>loading screens </li></ul>

Step 8: Code out the features

Once we had an MVP of the functionality we desired in our app, it was time to clean it up and make it pretty. My team used Material-UI for components like form fields, menus, and login tabs, which ensured everything looked sleek, polished, and coherent without much in-depth design knowledge.

Step 9: Choose and code the design scheme

We spent the final two days Simulating every user flow we could think of and hunting our App for bugs. This process was not the most systematic, but we found plenty of bugs to keep us busy.

Step 10: Find and squash bugs

We were using Firebase to store our data, so we deployed to Firebase hosting. We also bought a cheap domain name on namecheap.com to make our App more polished and easy to find. If we had a longer runway, step 12 would have been to run A/B testing on users, so we could better understand how actual users interact with our App and what they’d like to see in a V2.

Step 11: Deploy the live app

As most developers know, even when you “know how to code”, it can be really overwhelming to embark on the creation of your first full-stack app. The JavaScript ecosystem is incredibly vast: with package managers, modules, build tools, transpilers, databases, libraries, and decisions to be made about all of them, it’s no wonder that so many budding coders never build anything beyond Codecademy tutorials. That’s why I want to walk you through a step-by-step guide of the decisions and steps my team took to create our live app, Align.

The First Full Stack App

My three months of coding bootcamp at the Grace Hopper Program have come to a close, and the title of this article is actually not quite true — I’ve now built three full-stack apps: an e-commerce…

How we built our first full-stack JavaScript web app in three weeks

To determine the target value of the grant, there is a multiplier applied to the salary for every role/level in the company. Here are the multipliers Skillshare uses:<ul><li>Exec team/C-level: 2.45</li><li>VP: 1.86</li><li>Director: 0.54</li><li>Specialist/key contributor IC: 0.43</li><li>Sr. Engineer: 0.40</li><li>Engineer: 0.26</li><li>Individual contributor/most staff: 0.23</li></ul>When they get to the offer stage, they send candidates a slide deck walking them through the offer in plain language. In the deck, the option grant is broken out in detail — both how they got to the number and their estimated value of that grant.

Skillshare: Communicating option value to new hires

There are 3 ways to get additional stock options.<ul><li>Biannual refresh.&nbsp;</li><li>Merit grants (If you’re doing a great job)</li><li>Promotions.</li></ul>

How to handle refresh grants

Skillshare CEO Matt Cooper walks through how many options to grant employees, communicating the value of the grants, and how employees can assess option value.

A No B.S. Guide to Startup Stock Option Grants

In his 1997 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos issued a manifesto “It’s all about the long-term” where he laid out his approach to business and to running Amazon. He pledged that decisions would be made with a long-term lens and with a focus on market leadership. This manifesto has been included in every single shareholder letter for the last 20 years! After reading these letters, it is clear that the fundamentals of how Amazon does business remain the same. Talk about commitment and consistency.

It’s all about the long-term…

<ul><li>A focus on the long-term is important for several reasons. First, for a company that drives growth through innovation, a long-term approach allows for experimentation and an acceptance of short-term failures.</li><li>Second, having a long-term orientation reduces the impact of stock price fluctuations on decision-making.</li><li>Third, when you are long-term oriented it aligns customer and shareholder interests. In the short term, this is not always the case.</li></ul>

Why long-term matters

Bezos offers a set of guidelines for how to make decisions at high-velocity:<ul><li>Understand that decisions can be reversed: </li><li>Bias towards action: Most decisions should be made with close to 70% of the information needed. Waiting for 90%+ information will slow you down.</li><li>“Disagree and commit”: When consensus is not possible but you have conviction in a particular direction, “disagree and commit”. </li><li>Recognize when an agreement isn’t achievable: Sometimes different teams have different objectives and see the world differently. No discussion will change these views.</li></ul>

High-quality, high-velocity decision-making

From the outset, Amazon’s goal was to build the world’s most customer-centric company. Bezos would constantly remind employees to wake up every morning terrified… not of the competition, but of Amazon’s own customers. Customers are fickle; they are loyal to a company until a competitor offers a better service. Amazon designed its core value proposition around keeping customers happy by constantly offering more selection, better convenience, and lower prices.

Customer centricity as a north star

While Amazon takes financial outputs seriously, 100% of the company’s time is focused on inputs. This is because these inputs are controllable and are the most effective way to maximize financial outputs.

Put effort into inputs, not financial outputs


Many large companies fail to launch new businesses from scratch because of the patience and nurturing required. One of Amazon’s competitive advantages is its culture which is supportive of small businesses with large potential.While Amazon’s culture demands that these businesses be high potential and differentiated, it does not require them to be large the day they are born.

Build a disciplined, patient, and nurturing culture

Setting the bar high on hiring has been the single most important element of Amazon’s success. During the interview process, Amazon asks each interviewer to consider three questions before making a hiring decision:<ul><li>Will you admire this person?</li><li>Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?</li><li>Along what dimension will this person be a superstar?</li></ul>

Raise the bar on hiring… again and again

In every Amazon annual report, Jeff Bezos publishes a shareholder letter where he provides a broad overview of the company’s operations throughout the year. His letters are incredibly…

What I learned from Jeff Bezos after reading every Amazon shareholder letter

Wearing a smartwatch and recording all physical activities, along with the nutrition we take is highly convenient for the dieting apps which plan diets and exercise routines tailored for us.
All the online health data that is recorded and analysed, apart from the long online questionnaires asking users about their gender, weight, exercise habits, geolocation etc. are used by the dieting apps for pushing targeted ads and selling the information to interested third parties.

The Data We Give To Health Tracking Apps

The terabytes of user data recorded through tracking apps and smartwatches can end up with third parties, Facebook, Google Analytics, Yandex and data analysis firms who mine it for commercial purposes.User data is the currency of the decade and has made companies offer free products to consumers and yet enter the Fortune 500 club.Users need to demand more transparency into how their data is used and protected, to avoid being a product to these companies.

Data Is The New Goldmine

Nonprofit Privacy International’s new report shows how three dieting apps are collecting a lot of personal and medical data and may be sharing it with third parties. 


A Neuroscientist Explains Why You Should Stop Listening to Music While You Work

Can Your New Idea Compete? 11 Criteria to Help You Assess

How Not to Plan Out Your Next Quarter

What My Minimalist Phone Looks Like

There’s No Morality in Exercise: I’m a Fat Person Who Made a Successful Fitness App

Tammy King