#20 | 7.7.23 - Crowdsourced Life Hacks / Critical Questions To Ask New Hires / 50 Incredible Charts / Ultimate List of Productivity Tools
Welcome to Further Faster Fridays! Our goal is to curate the best content in personal development and leadership to help you go further, faster.
Wow, issue #20! For a project that began at the beginning of the year, hard to believe we’re at issue #20 already! Thank you for the comments, links and suggestions along the way, and to the new subscribers. As always, we hope this content is useful and beneficial to you. Looking forward to being with you all for the next 20!
Now, on to the content!
Crowdsourced Life Hacks
Arjun Mahadevan recently crowdsourced a collection of life hacks from 21.9 million people on Reddit. Normally, I would link the thread, but Twitter has changed their permissions this week so that if you don’t have a twitter account, you can’t view content on their site. With the debut of Facebook’s Threads, a Twitter competitor, I’m wondering if Twitter will reverse its new policies.
Anyway, here is a collection of some great life hacks from Arjun:
If you’re stuck on an annoying call, put your phone on airplane mode instead of just hanging up. The other person will see “call failed” instead of “call ended”.
When you sign up for anything online, put the website’s name as your middle name. That way when you receive spam emails, you will know who sold your info.
Always tell a child who is wearing a helmet how cool you think their helmet is. It will encourage them to always wear it in the future.
When you don't have all the facts, try to give people the most generous reason you can for their behavior. Annoyingly slow driver? Maybe it's a mom with a birthday cake in the back. This mindset will gradually make you less reactive and more compassionate. (I also wrote about this last week in Leadership Green Lights)
When a friend is upset, ask them one simple question before saying anything else: "Do you want to talk about it, or do you want help fixing it?"
Before you give your child a unique name, try it out first. Use it on food orders, reservations, appointments where applicable, etc. It’ll give you a glimpse of what they’ll deal with when they’re older and could prevent future issues.
If you tell someone you need to talk to them, PLEASE give some indication of what you need to talk about, or at least that it's not bad news
Never send a work email when you’re emotionally compromised. Type it up, save it as a draft, and walk away. Ideally, sleep on it. You’ll make a smarter choice when you're not heated.
Don't just let kids win at games. You can slow it down, you can teach them strategy, but keep it real. Someday, they will beat you fair and square, and it will be a moment they always remember with pride.
Ask yourself "what does it matter to me" the next time you find yourself judging someone for their clothing or hobbies. The more you train yourself to not care about the personal preferences of other people, the more relaxed and nicer you become as a person.
Critical Questions To Ask New Hires
This is a great article that contains questions to ask your new hires at 30, 60, and 90 days. Some fantastic ideas here. A couple samples:
30 days
What do you like about the job and the organization so far?
Have you faced any unforeseen surprises since joining us?
60 days
Do you have enough, too much or too little time to do your work?
What can the organization do to help you become more successful in your role?
90 days
In retrospect, what could we have done differently in terms of setting your expectations appropriate for working in our company overall and for your job specifically?
Do you believe your ideas and suggestions are valued? Provide me some examples?
50 Incredible Charts
Have you seen the chart on “The Cousin Explainer”? How about the one that details how hot asphalt is for dogs? Check this page out for those 2 charts, plus 48 more!
The Ultimate Collection of Productivity Tools
This is a great site that has a pretty exhaustive list of resources and tools to help you boost your productivity. I picked up a couple tools from the list.
Words to wrap up:
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." ― Mark Twain