When COVID happened, webinars were suddenly everywhere—an unavoidable part of our changed work landscape. Almost three years later, with in-person meetings possible and a diminished hunger for any kind of human interaction, the deluge of webinars in my life has slowed to a trickle. So what surprised me the other day, when I hopped into … Continue reading On the foolish hope that remote work alone would improve webinars
Category: Working Life
On making good use of your name
When I was growing up, my mom taught me how to answer the phone: Hello. This is the Coe household. Who am I speaking to? (If you were good at this, you could say the above as if a single word—HellothisistheCoehouseholdwhoamIspeakingto?—prompting callers to either say "Excuse me?" or ignore you altogether—"Is your mother there?") There … Continue reading On making good use of your name
On considering the color blindness of potential clients
As someone who designs layouts, I don't think nearly often enough about color blindness. What's worse is that I have a color blind colleague who regularly reviews my work! But I should worry about more than colleague: I should worry about potential clients. According to the National Eye Institute, one in 12 men has some … Continue reading On considering the color blindness of potential clients
On ChatGPT as part of our future workplace
Over the past months, it's hard to think about the future of education and not consider how AI fits into it. K-12 teachers have fretted over whether homework is dead. College professors are worried the essay as assignment is a turn-of-the-century relic. ChatGPT (and its improved future versions and competitors) will generate essays, answers to … Continue reading On ChatGPT as part of our future workplace
On the danger of asking your interview panel to take out their phones
There's a clip somewhere online of Simon Sinek bemoaning a new reality that many of us have come to groan about in this post-COVID era: QR codes for menus in restaurants. But Sinek doesn't wax nostalgic about paper menus or the poor structure of the new digital ones—he's concerned about how QR code menus are … Continue reading On the danger of asking your interview panel to take out their phones
On loving “event time” but living on “clock time”
An NPR segment the other day made a distinction I'd never heard of before: there are two types of people—those who live on "clock time" and those who live on "event time." (I don't love "two types of people" claims, but the segment did clarify that we all have a little bit of both types … Continue reading On loving “event time” but living on “clock time”
On designing a careers page on your company website
I spent a big chunk of my morning trying to figure out what a good Careers page was, and only managed to dishearten myself about the state of my career. This exercise saw me come out the other end with the required document but also a creeping existential fear about the point of my career, … Continue reading On designing a careers page on your company website
On the possibility of explaining your job away
Because we're expecting another baby in a few weeks, my wife and I have been preparing for a boring but important inevitability: Someone else will have to do our jobs for a little while. One way we've preparing, aside from directly on-boarding colleagues in meetings, is by writing stuff down. In doing this, we wondered: … Continue reading On the possibility of explaining your job away
On teaching more like Socrates
A few months ago, I enjoyed a lovely child-less vacation with my wife. Besides sleeping in and eating long leisurely meals out at nice restaurants, one of the joys of those days was getting to read. Given hours to while away beside a pool, I brought along a book of Plato dialogues to see what … Continue reading On teaching more like Socrates
On considering the stakes
I wrote a post the other week reflecting on how there are different types of mistakes. Originally, this post was just an addendum to that one, until I realized I had a lot more to say about “stakes” than I thought. I completed that original post with a discussion of “high-stakes mistakes”—the mistakes you can’t … Continue reading On considering the stakes
Taylor Coe 