executives overwhelmingly said the most urgent problem they face is igniting their managers to coach employees

n sum, here are the principles and practices you can revisit… Don’t ask “How can I help you?” Ask more meaningful specific questions.Don’t require participation. Figure out work preferences.Don’t say “ASAP.” Give choice.Don’t strengthen deadlines. Clarify expectations and progress.Don’t measure morale. Focus on building trust.Don’t put everything on yourself. Take care of yourself. I hope that rethinking of our usual impulses around team morale – and clarifying what morale is to begin with – can help us make progress, not to short-term blips of enthusiasm, but toward longer-lasting positive sentiment. As we all work remotely these days, many of us for the unforeseeable future, that longer view, not short term view, is one to aim for.

DO: Take care of yourself. This means you have to prioritize your own morale if you want your team’s morale to be strong. You can’t ignore that if you’re feeling dejected, it’s likely your team will feel dejected too. Here are some recommendations of things you can do to help bolster your own morale: Step away. It’s an obvious action, but one we forget benefits us. Distance gives us perspective. And if we carve out time to see things from a different view, our sentiment on them at times may change.Create a wedge. If you can’t step away for a week or two, do create what I call a “wedge” — it’s a small sliver of time and space for yourself only. Perhaps 10 minutes before you start your workday, to regroup, recharge, and recenter.Allow yourself to admit how hard it is. Sometimes, our admittance of reality keeps us from relieving any pressure. It’s okay to tell yourself, “This is harder than usual right now.” Sometimes that singular admittance is all you need to regain a bit of stronger morale.

DO NOT: Put everything on yourself. When you sense low morale in your team, it can be easy to pile that dissatisfaction on yourself. You think: This is on me, and I’ve got to fix it. What you might not be aware of is that pressure you put on yourself doesn’t protect your team – it deflects onto your team. The more drained you’re feeling, the more desparate you’re feeling, the more drained and desperate your team will feel too. We can’t hide our own attitude, energy, and morale, as a leader – it’s unknowingly transferred.

DO: Create an environment where team members feel comfortable telling you how they truly feel. You cannot improve morale unless your team is willing to tell you their true state of morale and what is affecting their morale. In order for them to be honest with you, they must be able to, in a word, trust you. They most believe not only that no ill repercussion will occur if the truth is spoken – but also some genuine listening and follow-through will be sought. In fact, when we surveyed managers and asked what were the most effective ways to build trust, the top three answers were: (1) Show vulnerability (2) Make intentions clear and (3) Follow through on commitments. In short, your team must feel you truly want to know what their morale is – in both your words, and your actions. They want to hear that you know the team’s morale could be higher and that you haven’t always done the best job of encouraging that, and they want to see you take small actions to have that be true. A trusting environment enables your team to tell you their true state of morale, which is what you’re seeking in the first place.

DO NOT: Try to “measure morale” all the time. Remember that morale is sentiment – and it can influence engagement, motivation and culture – but it is not a singular predictor of any one of those elements. Yet we don’t always remember this – and this is most clearly shown when we attempt to measure morale. When we try to measure morale, we often fall into the pitfall of overcomplicating it and overstating it’s influence on engagement, motivation, and culture. For example, some teams will be focused elements completely unrelated to a team’s true needs for positive morale. Or other times, a team will inflate their scores, giving the guise that morale is positive when in reality it’s not. We also overuse team pulse surveys, inundating and overwhelming our team with too many questions too frequently, and failing to take action on the results. Instead, we should pause and ask: What is this all for? The truth is that we do all this measurement because we’re attempting to understand how our team is feeling so we can do something about it. If we want to figure out how to build team morale remotely, rather than trying to simply measure it all the time, we should try to create an environment where team members feel comfortable telling us the truth of how they feel. More on this below.

DO: Clarify expectations and progress being made. If we want morale to be high and to speed up the progress being made, we must make clear what is expected from our team and what that progress is. What accelerates work and people feeling good about what they are doing is (1) knowing why they should be doing it and (2) seeing that progress. This is how to build team morale remotely. Consequently, instead of more deadlines and check-ins, you must define what success is, clarify the expectations to get there, and create a system where people can proactively share progress. To define success, you can ask questions like: How should we define success?How will we know when we have been successful?What’s the best way to define if something is “done” or “high quality”? To clarify expectations, you can ask questions like: What’s the best way to share progress about this project?When is it most helpful for you to loop me in?How much context upfront would you like before I hand off a project or a task? To create a system where your team can proactively share progress, you can use a tool – perhaps email, or Google Docs, or even software (like Know Your Team) that asks everyone to share each day, “What are you working on?” In Know Your Team, we have a tool called the Heartbeat that does this, and then shares the answers with everyone automatically. Be sure to give our Heartbeats in KYT a try if you’re looking to automate your status updates and improve morale.

DO NOT: Strengthen deadlines and the frequency of check-ins. It can be tempting to increase the frequency of your check-ins and tighten the deadlines you’ve set as a means for how to build team morale remotely. Especially in a remote environment where things feel more opaque to you, it can often seem like the only way forward. However, things don’t move faster because we’re touching them more. Rather, we cause interference and add baggage. The more pressure we put on a direct report in the form of check-ins and deadlines will continue to erode team morale. What should you do instead? Read on.

DO: Give choice. Of all the practices for how to build team morale remotely, the most powerful is this: Give choice. Choice, as found by Deci in his research, enables people to feel more agency and self-efficacy – and as a result, increases the likelihood of positive morale. We as leaders can give options and create alternative pathways for our team. And it does not need to be grand. Choice on even the smallest of levels can help improve team morale. For example, here are questions you can ask that give choice around small items… “What time of day would you prefer our 1:1 meetings?”“How often – if at all – would you prefer me to check in with you before a project is due?”“Do you prefer receiving feedback via writing (e.g., Basecamp, email, Slack) or via a video call (e.g., Zoom) or a phone call?” Certainly, there are times when we cannot offer choice. A situation is out of our hands, and we can’t influence the degree of optionality offered. Acknowledge this. Doing so will help your team feel as though you are in tune and not oblivious to the frustrating nature of the circumstance. You too feel it. For instance, you can simply say: “I know this sucks.”“I know I’m putting you in a tough spot.”“This is a terrible situation, and I’m sorry for it.” Admitting a deplorable situation doesn’t make you deplorable: It makes you well-adjusted to reality. And that is is in fact helpful for team morale.

DO NOT: Say “ASAP”, “Urgent”, and “Should”. When we’re trying to figure out how to build team morale remotely, we tend to use words that we think will accelerate progress. So we find ourselves saying things like, “ASAP,” “urgent” and “should” more frequently. However, these words only give us the illusion of control. In reality, they incite pressure – and pressure can have disastrous consequences on the outcome itself. Edward Deci, the seminal scholar on human motivation, found in his 20 years of research that exerting a feeling of pressure or control on others unknowingly chips away at people’s intrinsic motivation. His studies revealed how when pressure is applied, performance worsens, quality of outcomes worsen, the person learns less, and the person ends up not enjoying the task as much. Rather, there are alternative words we can use. Instead of saying, “ASAP”, try saying… “Is this deadline reasonable?”“What trade-off will we need to make so X is delivered by this time?”“What can I take off your place so we can accomplish this?” Instead of saying, “We should do Y…”, try saying… “What’s your opinion on how to move forward?”“What do you think is the best way to approach this?”“What advice would you give me if you were in my position?” Instead of saying, “These are your goals…”, try saying… “What goals would you get excited about achieving?”“What should the team accomplish that you’d be proud of?”“What kind of work would make you feel energized and “I’m glad I did that?”

DO: Figure out work preferences. To put the Silver Rule to work, you’ll want to figure out, well, what others truly like. I call these “work preferences” – the proclivities, leanings, and habits of how we all like to work. To encourage positive team morale, you’ll want to ask your team members what their work preferences are, particularly around social events, before you mandate that they all need to show up for the Friday online game activity. Start with these work preference questions: Where on the spectrum of an extrovert to introvert would you place yourself?How much social interaction do you typically enjoy at work?What’s your biggest work-related pet peeves?What does “work-life balance” mean to you? We automatically ask these Work Preference Questions and more in our Icebreakers feature in Know Your Team. Give is a shot and ask your own Work Preference Survey to your team today.

DO NOT: Require participation in team-building and social activities. When we feel team morale is low, we often seek out social engagements as a solution. But it’s hard to “rally the troops” so-to-speak when everyone is working remotely. Particularly if it’s required. Make anything required and it automatically becomes dreaded. This is a funny part of our human psychology that we resist the things that are imposed upon us. Additionally, when we default to stacking Zoom social events on the calendar as a way for how to build team morale remotely, we assume because it’s something we like that others will enjoy it. This is a grave mistake. Because while of course, you might enjoy it, the truth is this: Other people are not you 🙂 Think of it this way: Rather than employ the Golden Rule of “treat others the way you want to be treated,” try the Silver Rule: “Treat others the way they want to be treated.”

DO: Ask more meaningful, specific questions. Instead of reverting to “How can I help you?” during a one-on-one meeting, try different questions: Questions that put an employee at ease. Questions that enable them to speak from the heart, to level with you honestly, and share things perhaps that they might not normally share with you. Specifically, here are some of the best questions to ask if you want to improve team morale remotely: “How would you describe your energy level these days?” This is a fantastic alternative to asking “How are you doing?” and helps to reveal the morale of the person more accurately. Follow-up questions you can ask include: “Have you been able to take time for yourself, in any way? How can I support you in that?”“Are there any tasks or projects lately that feel more like a struggle than usual? How can I adjust things to help make that project more manageable right now?” “What fears or trepidation do you have around the team, and/or company, if any?” This question helps pinpoint what might be causing or triggering the low morale – and help you understand if there’s anything within your locus of control to fix it. Follow-up questions you can ask include: “What can we communicate more often and more transparently to help reduce anxiety around X?”“Is our plan for the next 90 days clear?” “How have you been feeling about your own performance lately?” When you ask this question, you’re trying to see if the level of morale a direct report is based on their own perceived performance level. Follow up by asking these questions, as well: “What are you most worried about getting ‘wrong’ with the project?”“In your view, did anything fall short of your own expectations?”“In your view, did anything fall short of the team’s expectations?” “What are your biggest time wasters?” If you’re trying to figure out how to build team morale remotely, this question can help identify blockers for your direct report – blockers that you can potentially eliminate to help improve morale. Follow-up by asking these questions as well: “How am I or others holding up progress for you?”“What have you seen in the team that could accelerate our progress?” If you find these questions helpful, be sure to check out our One-on-Ones Tool in Know Your Team. We give you hundreds of suggested questions like these, and agenda templates, to help you have effective one-on-one meetings that help improve morale.

DO NOT: Ask, “How can I help you?” Bear with me here. You’re likely thinking, “What do you mean I shouldn’t ask, ‘How can I help you?’ Isn’t that a fine, normal question to ask?” I hear you. Up until a few years ago, I personally found myself asking this question to team members. Asking “How can I help you?” doesn’t help the other person at all. It burdens them. You’re asking your direct report to come up with a thoughtful critique and feedback of you and your role on-the-spot. Instead of encouraging positive sentiment by asking that question, you’re whirring up more stress and more anxiety for your direct report. While your intention may be to help, the question hurts.

Or perhaps, a team has low morale –but they have high engagement out of fear of repercussions if they don’t.

Above all, we must not conflate morale with culture. As organizational scholar Edgar Schein delineated, culture is comprised of artifacts, beliefs and basic underlying assumptions. And while morale absolutely influences these elements and culture as a whole, team morale is a team’s sentiment – it is not culture, in itself.

Defining “team morale” Before talk best practices for how to build team morale remotely, let’s get clear on what we’re trying to improve, in the first place. You can’t improve what you haven’t properly identified. As a result, we have to properly define what team morale is, first. Morale is the outlook and sentiment of your team. It’s the way people feel about the team and the company. Morale is not is the engagement of your employees. Employee engagement is the level of involvement and enthusiasm of your team. Nor is morale equivalent to motivation. After all, motivation is our own drive and willingness we have in the workplace. It’s our inner impulse that encourages us to do – or not to do – something.

Some Diversity Resources We’re Digging IntoAs we begin to dig deeper into this important issue, we’ve been discovering a lot of great resources that I thought might be helpful to share here. Here are some of the articles, books and videos we’ve been watching, reading and studying lately: Implicit Association Tests on race and gender NPR podcast on the history of the gender gap in computer science/engineering

This felt like a way to A) acknowledge that our roles and passions are fluid in a self-managed team, and B) allow any potential candidate to have the opportunity to picture themselves in any position at Buffer.

It was eye-opening for us to realize the ways we had perhaps been implicitly biased without realizing it.

Although “clarity” is one of Buffer’s 10 values we strive to live every day, we definitely could have been doing a better job of paying attention to the connotation of every word in this case.

Even if titles don’t matter to us, they still matterIt’s interesting that while we were having this discussion about external job titles and descriptions, inside Buffer we were more or less doing away with job titles and descriptions as we became self-managed.

We wanted to be as inviting in our job listings as possible. This also seemed most in line with the way we hire, prioritizing culture fit over technical skill.

In researching this challenge, he met with Angie Chang, the Vice President of Hackbright Academy, an engineering fellowship for women, and discovered that the term “hacker” might be one reason why.Angie said the “hacker” title might not be as inclusive as other titles and could be tough for many to identify with. She mentioned that many organizations that work with Hackbright often revisit their job listings in order to paint a clearer picture of what it’s like working there.

Cognitive Architecture We have been talking about mental models as if they were real things, but what actually goes on in a learner’s brain when they’re learning? The short answer is that we don’t know; the longer answer is that we know a lot more than we used to. This chapter will dig a little deeper into what brains do while they’re learning and how we can leverage that to design and deliver lessons more effectively. What’s Going On In There? Cognitive architecture

How can we handle errors with asynchronous code?

How can we build tools with promises? Use this to build a line-counting program Use the promisified version of fs-extra Turns all of the callbacks into promises for us

There is one unfortunate trick: bind. When we create an object obj and call a method meth, JavaScript sets this inside meth If we use a method as a callback, this isn't set To convert the method to a plain old function with the right this, we have to use bind

Fill in the blank in the code below so that it runs correctly. Note: you can compare strings in JavaScript using <, >=, and other operators, so that (for example) person.personal > 'P' is true if someone's personal name starts with a letter that comes after 'P' in the alphabet.

This works… …but four levels of asynchronous callbacks is hard to understand We need a better mechanism

Remember, a function is just another kind of data

JavaScript's original solution to this problem was hard to understand in programs of even moderate size So a second layer was added, and then a third We need to understand all three layers in order to debug things when they go wrong This chapter introduces the first two layers Chapter 5 introduces the third

Questions remain, however, about the significance of the agreements. Even in Israel, where the accords have received widespread acclaim, there is concern they might result in U.S. sales of sophisticated weaponry to the UAE and Bahrain,

agreements do not address the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, who view the pacts as a stab in the back from their fellow Arabs and a betrayal of their cause for a Palestinian state.

The bilateral agreements formalize the normalization of Israel’s already thawing relations

The Development Team modifies the Sprint Backlog throughout the Sprint, and the Sprint Backlog emerges during the Sprint.

The Product Owner tracks this total work remaining at least every Sprint Review. The Product Owner compares this amount with work remaining at previous Sprint Reviews to assess progress toward completing projected work by the desired time for the goal.

a Product Backlog is a living artifact. Changes in business requirements, market conditions, or technology may cause changes in the Product Backlog.

The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to: Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools; Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and, Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work.

The Product Owner discusses the Product Backlog as it stands. He or she projects likely target and delivery dates based on progress to date (if needed);

What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal? What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal? Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

The input to this meeting is the Product Backlog, the latest product Increment, projected capacity of the Development Team during the Sprint, and past performance of the Development Team. The number of items selected from the Product Backlog for the Sprint is solely up to the Development Team. Only the Development Team can assess what it can accomplish over the upcoming Sprint.

Inspection Scrum users must frequently inspect Scrum artifacts and progress toward a Sprint Goal to detect undesirable variances.

Transparency Significant aspects of the process must be visible to those responsible for the outcome. Transparency requires those aspects be defined by a common standard so observers share a common understanding of what is being seen. For example: A common language referring to the process must be shared by all participants; and, Those performing the work and those inspecting the resulting increment must share a common definition of "Done".

Scrum is not a process, technique, or definitive method. Rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques.

Reflecting on these strange couple of weeks of coronavirus house arrest, I realized I have had more funny videos sent to me from neighbors in 10 days than in the past four years that I’ve lived in this neighborhood. Perhaps this is also why when we receive jokes from friends, we often immediately forward them to others.

Tim Minchin, the British Australian comedian, actor, and composer, agreed. “We don’t laugh at scary things because we don’t understand their seriousness,” he told me. “We laugh because they’re serious. Making jokes gives us a sense of power over the threat.”

“People want jokes,” Baddiel told me. “Partly because jokes are a relief, and they take the edge off danger; partly because they are a way of processing the experience; and yes, partly because … this is a massive shared experience.” People are looking for the release of comedy—and the knowledge that they are not alone.

“Most people think of laughter as a simple response to comedy, or a cathartic mood-lifter,” he wrote. “Instead … I concluded that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together.” We laugh with others to give us “the pleasure of acceptance,” Provine argued—to show that we are the same.

We might be scared, but we seem determined to carry on laughing.

and allow guardrails for self-organization

Good estimation requires a trust-based environment where information is given freely, and assumptions are discussed in the pursuit of learning and improvement.

Focus on the outcomes not the work During sprint planning it is easy to get ‘bogged down’ in the work focusing on which task should come first, who should do it, and how long will it take.

The product owner must be prepared, combining the lessons from the previous sprint review, stakeholder feedback, and their vision for the product, so they set the scene for the sprint.

Also, don’t take on a large amount of unknown or high-risk work. Break down stories that are large or have high uncertainty, and don't be afraid to leave some of that work for the next sprint.

Don’t pull in too many stories, overestimate velocity, or pull in tasks that can’t be completed in the sprint. You don’t want to set yourself or your team up for failure.

Focus the scrum master on the team's adoption and implementation of agile, and the development manager on hiring the right individuals, mentoring existing team members, and ensuring good development culture in every team. Both roles, working together, will foster high-functioning agile teams.

The scrum master and the development manager also protect teams from outside distractions like feature creep, waterfall anti-patterns, cross-functional thrash, and side projects that distract from the team's true goals.

Most waterfall teams are manager-centric. They look to managers to set priorities, track progress, and evaluate performance.

The scrum master also acts as an agile coach for the larger organization, helping the team adopt and own agile practices throughout the product life cycle

As a result, the scrum master coordinates most of the inputs and outputs required for an agile program. He or she drives the agile ceremonies of sprint kickoff, daily stand-ups, sprint review, sprint retrospective, and works with the team and development managers to estimate larger items like epics and individual user stories in the backlog.

Scrum masters are project leaders in an agile team who focus on optimizing performance, working between the product owner and the team to ensure consistent, successful sprints. Scrum masters also own cross-team coordination so that the core team can focus on product development.

and cross-train each other so no one person becomes a bottleneck in the delivery of work. Strong scrum teams are self-organising and approach their projects with a clear ‘we’ attitude. All members of the team help one another to ensure a successful sprint completion.

An effective scrum master deeply understands the work being done by the team and can help the team optimize their transparency and delivery flow.

Also, it's important that the product owner be an individual. No development team wants mixed guidance from multiple product owners.

However, we’ve seen the meeting quickly turn into people reading from their calendars from yesterday and for the next day. The theory behind the stand up is that it keep distracting chatter to a daily meeting, so the team can focus on the work for the rest of the day.  So if it turns into a daily calendar read-out, don’t be afraid to change it up and get creative

A sprint backlog may be flexible and can evolve during a sprint. However, the fundamental sprint goal – what the team wants to achieve from the current sprint – cannot be compromised.

While Scrum is structured, it is not entirely rigid.

It acknowledges that the team doesn’t know everything at the start of a project and will evolve through experience.

But you can use a framework like Scrum to help you start thinking that way and to practice building agile principles into your everyday communication and work.

Nguyen also recommends that, when working alone, you should keep a more structured daily schedule than usual. “Usually our time and the structure of our day are influenced by other people,” she says. “You’re going to experience your day as lacking the normal structures that you usually have. People might have a hard time dealing with it. So one of the things that we found in our trying to understand solitude, is that time spent alone is better if it’s structured.”

Find a Buddy You might find it easier to be productive without your most chatty coworkers constantly buzzing in your ear. But social interactions — even with coworkers — can alleviate feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Location, Location, Location Try to find yourself a dedicated and comfortable spot to work that you can associate with your job and leave when you’re off the clock — that means get off the couch, and definitely out of bed.

Social narrative is a learning tool designed for a person with disability (e.g. Autism and Asperger syndrome) that teaches them how to do something new. It is referred to as a story or a written explanation that tells the learner not only what to do but also what the situation is, with the goal of addressing the challenge of learners finding social situations confusing.[2]

Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, suggested that solitude can heal us from an overstimulating culture (“Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you dazed by the noise of men”) and reconnect us to ourselves (“go into isolation ... seek the way to yourself”).

Billy Barr, who’s been living alone in an abandoned mining shack high up in the Rocky Mountains for almost 50 years, has very similar advice. He says we should all keep track of something. In his case, it’s the environment. How high is the snow today? What animals appeared this month? For decades, he’s been keeping track of the answers to these questions, and his records have actually had a serious influence on climate change science.

Many factors have conspired to make us bad at solitude. They’re mostly not our fault. As Jenny Odell lays out in her book How to Do Nothing, we live in a culture where sociability and constant connectivity are rewarded, and where choosing to be by yourself marks you out as a loser, crazy, possibly immoral.

If ADHD is not a disorder, but a mismatch with a human environment, then suddenly it’s not a medical issue. It’s an issue for educational reform.

You can also find a therapist through “fast therapy” apps like TalkSpace, which connects you to a licensed therapist through not just video chat, but texting, too. Out-of-pocket TalkSpace subscriptions start at $260 per month — which sounds like a lot up front, but it gets you unlimited text, video, and audio access to a therapist five days a week. For comparison, IRL therapy might cost $200 per month in insurance copays for one 45-minute session once a week.

First, let’s figure out how you’re going to pay for it. If you don’t have insurance (or even if you do), there are resources available to you at no cost. Consider looking into Federally Qualified Health Centers, community-based centers that offer care including mental health and substance use services

To those who are very understandably feeling an increased mental or emotional strain brought on by the changes and the uncertainty of this pandemic, it’s valid to want to talk to someone about it. Very few of us want to process this alone. And whether you’re looking to move your therapy sessions online or just trying to figure out how to start therapy at all, you may find a lower barrier to entry than you’d likely face in non-pandemic times.

And crucially, you can now meet with providers like this regardless of the distance between your physical locations, which used to just be an option for patients in rural areas that were basically therapy deserts.

The coronavirus pandemic has created a paradox in mental health care: Widespread social distancing means that more people are in need of support for anxiety and depression, and that more of those resources are harder to access in person. The past several weeks, though, have wrought a change in the national mental health care landscape — a big shift of services and social safety nets from face-to-face meetings to virtual ones.

How to find a therapist during the Covid-19 pandemic

What’s something you’re looking forward to, either at work or outside it?

There are four rules to Analytical Reading Classify the book according to kind and subject matter. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve.

At this point, you start to engage your mind and dig into the work required to understand what’s being said. I highly recommend you use marginalia to converse with the author.

Analytical reading is a thorough reading. If inspectional reading is the best you can do quickly, this is the best reading you can do given time.

Superficial reading

Systematic skimming

Inspectional Reading We’ve been taught that skimming and superficial reading are bad for understanding. That is not necessarily the case. Using these tools effectively can increase understanding. Inspectional reading allows us to look at the author’s blueprint and evaluate the merits of a deeper reading experience.

Reading is all about asking the right questions in the right order and seeking answers. There are four main questions you need to ask of every book: What is this book about? What is being said in detail, and how? Is this book true in whole or in part? What of it?

Defining the Issues — If you’ve asked a clear question to which there are multiple answers then an issue has been defined. Opposing answers, now translated into your terms, must be ordered in relation to one another. Understanding multiple perspectives within an issue helps you form an intelligent opinion.

Getting the Questions Clear — Rather than focus on the problems the author is trying to solve, you need to focus on the questions that you want answered.

Bringing the Author to Terms — In analytical reading, you must identify the keywords and how they are used by the author. This is fairly straightforward. The process becomes more complicated now as each author has probably used different terms and concepts to frame their argument. Now the onus is on you to establish the terms. Rather than using the author’s language, you must use your own. In short, this is an exercise in translation and synthesis

This task is undertaken by identifying relevant passages, translating the terminology, framing and ordering the questions that need answering, defining the issues, and having a conversation with the responses. The goal is not to achieve an overall understanding of any particular book, but rather to understand the subject and develop a deep fluency.

This is also known as comparative reading, and it represents the most demanding and difficult reading of all. Syntopical Reading involves reading many books on the same subject and comparing and contrasting ideas, vocabulary, and arguments.

The evaluation should help distinguish typical disfluencies from stuttering and determine whether difficulties lie in speech production or other areas, such as organization of language. It is important to determine if the problem is motor and/or language-based

Because children with ASDs have many ongoing issues with social interaction and communication, stuttering is not always noticed and diagnosed until a child reaches school age. Interactions between ASDs and stuttering present a complex combination of disorders for which research is ongoing

But I’ve been learning from many of our underrepresented employees that starting over in a new community can feel jarring, isolating, and even unsafe.

To require people to choose between being part of the tech economy — which is arguably the future of American wealth and opportunity — and the stability of homeownership is unfair and separates us into Two Americas.

Remote work distributes wealth into the whole system

Our company is remote-first and will always be open to employees to work anywhere in the U.S. (or the occasional trip abroad). We made this decision with a great deal of intention because we believe creating and nurturing a remote culture is a key to inclusion.

The CHT, by contrast, spends its defining effort on a much smaller goal: it seeks to define a temporary and nearby nextstep. It doesn't deny the existence of distant targets, but "orients" towards them as it defines the nextstep.

The RAT seeks to get to the final state because it receives no value until it gets there. The CHT seeks to gain partial value almost immediately, and to continue harvesting that value throughout the lifecycle of the program.

The CHT uses a short initial period to get a crude, even paltry, version of the program shipped. From that point on, the working process is much more "on-line". It is in the field, people are using it, and the focus is on morphing the shipping version to its next iteration.

"Off-line" vs "On-line". The RAT's focus is to get to a final state, and then ship it, all at once. During the working process, the thing we're working on is "off-line". It's not in the field and no one is using it

The RAT model sees software development as an off-line program-construction activity composed of these parts: defining, decomposing, estimating, implementing, assembling, and finishing

alternative processes to positive thinking called Mental Contrasting

Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen (2014) said that positive thinking is deceiving, and it may tune our minds to overlook problems that are solvable in reality

3) Tell your students to study different subjects in different rooms in their house and use the cues in their surroundings (furniture, windows, colors, shapes, etc) to help them access that memory later. They could use the same rooms they imagined in their memory palace: study the modals in the living room and vocabulary in the kitchen;

In mid-2019, researchers at Facebook began studying a new set of rules proposed for the automated system that Instagram uses to remove accounts for bullying and other infractions.

“They need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on Fox Business Thursday morning of the states that are implementing universal mail-in voting ahead of the November election. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”

Simply chunking your text isn’t enough — you also need to support scanning by making it easy to quickly identify the main points of the chunks. You can do this by including: Headings and subheadings that clearly contrast with the rest of the text (bolder, larger, etc.) Highlighted keywords (bold, italic, etc.) Bulleted or numbered lists A short summary paragraph for longer sections of text, such as articles

Yoi focuses particularly on the six-month journey of the onboarding process, offering managers a chance to identify challenging areas for their hires and then intervene before little problems become big ones.

Components of the lessons can be exported for re-use and alternative uses

The desire for uniformity across institutions was the primary motivator for the spread of these systems

We’re publicly reaching out on social media to recommend books, movies, podcasts, soothing playlists, and museums we can visit virtually while we’re separate but oh-so-together in our fear. In this world that has had trouble practicing civility lately, we are experiencing a much-needed resurgence of kindness.

She could think about her cancer all day, about the uncertainty of what might happen, or she could feel her fear at times but also be present in her life right now

This kind of anxiety causes us to futurize and catastrophize, both of which take up a lot of emotional real estate. It’s a vicious cycle: The more we worry, the more we try to control our worry with something tangible, such as information. But clinging to our screens for the latest update has the opposite effect because it serves as fodder for more futurizing and catastrophizing. A daily update makes sense. But bingeing on up-to-the-minute news is like stress eating—it’s bloating our minds with unhealthy food that will make us feel sick.

and underneath the quip was the hope that others might feel less alone in this very strange and anxiety-provoking time

when you want to emphasize something, you need to slow the reader’s pace with shorter sentences and bolder punctuation.

couples concepts with concrete examples

but it really pushes the boundaries of your technology stack, surfacing issues that you might not have noticed until you reach a certain scale

having a completely distributed team can make it very difficult for team members to get to know each other on a personal level

On Quora, in fact, the question can (and often is) edited by the community for clarity, and on Stack Exchange posters who pose badly formulated questions are pushed by moderators to reformulate their question in ways more beneficial to the site.

Course as community of practice

Course as community onboarding

Course as generative learning event

Course as introduction or teaser

Facilitators don't have to be experts in the topic — they can be learners too!

and because we largely lack the infrastructure to support their creation and maintenance

Building course structures is a creative venture. Courses should be experimental, iterative, and forever changing to better serve learning.

Online courses tend to be based around linear playlists of videos, along with associated readings and other activities. These often look like university courses filmed and translated more or less directly to online form. More internet native courses tend to be shorter and more focused, but still just as linear and video-centric.

What is a "course"? And more importantly: what more can a course be?

reate a note by selecting