How to be a Great Gift Giver

December 7, 2025Leave a comment

It’s the holiday season once again!

While it is time to enjoy seasonal delicious food and the sparkling lights, there is one thing that many people dread: picking out the perfect gift. With a wide range of options, it is easy to get overwhelmed and default to boring gift cards. If you have experienced this problem, have you ever tried to figure out of there a way to become a great gift giver?

An article in Vox may resolve this yuletide tension. In a piece titled How to become a truly excellent gift giver, journalist Eliza Brooke shares insights from several gift giving experts. The first piece of advice is simple. Not every gift has to be life-changing, and a meaningful gift doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

“We often give ourselves this challenge of being like, ‘What is the gift that only I could give them? What is the gift that proves I know them so well?’ And that’s kind of impossible,” says Erica Cerulo, who runs the recommendation-filled A Thing or Two podcast and newsletter with her business partner, Claire Mazur. (Cerulo and Mazur previously co-founded the retail destination Of A Kind, which shut down in 2019.) A great gift doesn’t have to change someone’s life, Cerulo says: It can just be something that’s fun and nice and comforting.

The experts Brooke speaks with also provide a simple three-point strategy on gift selection that helps narrow down options quickly.

Because creativity thrives with constraints, Cerulo offered the following three-point framework for thinking about gift-giving: “Can I introduce someone to something they might not otherwise know about? Can I get them a nicer version of something than they would buy for themselves? Or can I make them feel seen?” If you can check one of those three boxes, you’ve probably got a good present on your hands.

Also, Brooke points out that gift giving doesn’t have to be an end of year cram. Identifying potential gifts across the entire year rather than just in December is a useful stress reliever.

Almost universally, great gift-givers are doing legwork throughout the year, not just in the weeks leading up to a birthday or major holiday. Many keep lists of potential gifts for their friends and loved ones, which they update every time someone mentions an item they’d love or when their internet travels turn up a particularly great present idea. You can do this in any way that suits you: Cerulo has a single note in her phone dedicated to gift ideas, Mazur keeps individual notes for individual people, and Rosner uses friends’ contacts as a place to log food preferences, birthdays, and present ideas.

Learn more useful tips on how to be a great gift giver by reading the rest of the article on the Vox website.

How People are Really Using ChatGPT

October 5, 2025Leave a comment

Are you concerned that AI is coming for your job?

Since it exploded onto the scene in 2022, ChatGPT and its AI cousins have created a sensation. Aspects of knowledge work that were always assumed to be the province of humans can now be done in mere moments with the proper prompt. This has led many prognosticators to assume that AI will take over all white-collar work. After three years of these AI tools, what is the actual truth?

A recent post from Daniel Pfeiffer on the website Choice360 sheds light on what people are actually doing with ChatGPT. In a review of a study of 1 million conversations, Pfeiffer discovered that the assumed absorption of knowledge work by AI tools is not what it seems. For starters, more people are using ChatGPT outside of work than at the office.

One of the key takeaways from this report is that, though work-related usages of ChatGPT continue to grow, they are wildly outpaced by nonwork-related usages, which have grown from 53 to 73 percent of all ChatGPT messages. This finding raises two important questions: Given its ostensible economic promises, why isn’t work-related usage growing faster, and why is nonwork usage growing so much?

Pfeiffer speculates that the clean AI interface has become preferable for regular searching than the messier Google page. The results are also easier for the average person to interpret, saving them time previously used to click through to other websites.

Another assumption is that most people are using ChatGPT to write the original copy of documents. However, actual use appears to be different.

Given the prized role of writing in educational environments, many academics might assume that when people use ChatGPT “for writing,” they’re using it specifically to generate new text from scratch—hence, the return of blue books. What this report finds, however, is that about two-thirds of all writing tasks have ChatGPT modify existing text, e.g., editing it for errors, adjusting the tone, or offering critiques, rather than generating new text.

On closer inspection, Pfeifer wonders if this finding holds for all types of users.

As we await more data, I think it behooves us to keep in mind that “writing” encompasses a range of activities. While we might imagine that students are asking ChatGPT to “write a seven-page essay on the Civil War,” for instance, they might well be using it to “make this email sound more professional.”

A third issue considered in the study is the economic impact of generative AI on workers. The media discussion often assumes that AI will take away jobs, especially lower-level knowledge work. Again, that may not be the case yet.

To get a more granular picture, researchers ran all the work-related messages through a different taxonomy based on common work activities, e.g., communicating with supervisors, scheduling events, and training others. They found that 57.9 percent of work-related messages fell into two broad categories “1) obtaining, documenting, and interpreting information; and 2) making decisions, giving advice, solving problems, and thinking creatively”. In other words, people are using ChatGPT less as a replacement worker and more as an advisor and research assistant.

Reflecting on this finding, Pfieffer comes to this conclusion.

“ChatGPT likely improves worker output by providing decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs where productivity is increasing in the quality of decision-making.”

Finally, Pfieffer speculates on the impact of hallucinations. As librarians have long complained, it is easy for people to believe what AI says rather than confirm that it is true. The study does not measure the effect of wrong information on people’s productivity and decisions.

The full blog post is worth a read. You can find it on the Choice360 website.

Ways to Overcome Summer Stagnation

July 27, 2025Leave a comment

Are you suffering from summer stagnation?

For many of us, summer is seen as a time for leisure. Our colleagues are off on family vacations or extended weekends hitting the beach, travelling to other countries, or finding a cottage in the woods. This can lead to a slowdown at work as key individuals are out of the office and offline. Projects pause and many of the usual meetings are cancelled.

Under these conditions, workers may feel less engaged and unmotivated as they wait for the office to return to normal. A recent article on Korn Ferry.com points out that 46% of office workers believe the quality of their work slumps in the summer. This can have many effects.

Indeed, being unmotivated during the summer can affect your ability to meet goals later in the year, says Mark Royal, a senior client partner for Korn Ferry Advisory. “It can negatively impact your image and personal brand within the organization,” he says.

Don’t let summer stagnation overcome you.
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

However, this time need not be wasted. Employees can take advantage of the summertime shift at work to explore news ways of doing and thinking. To counter stagnation, the article explores five ways to stay energized at work during the summer. One of the suggestions in the Korn Ferry article is to switch things up by busting out of the usual routine.

Simple changes—like working outdoors instead of indoors, or at a coffee shop instead of at home—support engagement and renew excitement, says Val Olson, a career and leadership coach at Korn Ferry Advance. “Slumps can happen due to a lack of variety. Variety is the spice of life,” she says.

If you can’t get out of the office, try rearranging the furniture or adding new decor to revive a tiresome space. Varying your surroundings can be energizing and aid focus.

Another way to take advantage of quieter summer workspaces is to reflect on what actually excites you about your work and career.

More people on vacation often means fewer meetings and emails. Experts say you can use this lull to reflect on, and pursue, the aspects of the job that most engage you. Being able to find meaning and value will help motivate you during any downtime, as well as when the workload heats back up.

Read the full article to learn three more ways to turn summer stagnation into engaging and worthwhile experiences.

Can ChatGPT Write a Speech Better Than a Toastmaster?

July 9, 2025Leave a comment

Just say you need to give an important speech, but only have a few minutes notice. Can an AI chat service bail you out?

For my upcoming Toastmasters meeting, I was challenged to write a speech titled, “AI – Friend, Foe, or Tool?” As a fun experiment, I decided to see what ChatGPT would do with this topic. Would it be honest about its limits, share it deep dark secrets, or in the end just give me an okay speech.

On the Efficient Librarian website, I wrote an article showing the prompts and output from this process. For reference I used a free ChatGPT account, which still provided enough access for delivery of a speech, but a few limitations on its output options. The whole process took less than five minutes from start to finish.

Overall, this quick dip into the AI waters showed that for all its versatility there are still some weaknesses. For example, I asked for a 5 to 7 minutes speech, but what was provided took only four minutes to speak. Also, it ran into some issues with suggestions that in the end I couldn’t do with the free service.

To see the entire process and read my other thoughts on this AI exercise, please read the article on the Efficient Librarian website.

The Secret to Success – Take Time Off

April 20, 2025Leave a comment

When was the last time you took a vacation from work? I mean a true vacation where you unplugged completely from the office, not even peeking at your email once.

There is a mindset that we need to keep working to succeed. Breaks and vacations are seen as distractions from accomplishing goals. However, is this true or simply a recipe for burnout?

In an article on his website, Darius Foroux suggests that taking time off is actually vital to completing your goals. In fact, time off not only is good for your physical and mental well-being, but it also a way to increase creativity and focus. To start, he chastises the idea that taking time off is for wimps.

People who never take time off to do nothing are short-term focused. “I want to reach my goals! NOW!”

But as always, short-term thinking harms your long-term development and growth. What happens when you power through work and burn yourself out? In most instances, your results suffer, and you become less productive.

In some cases, you even become depressed — which will set you back even longer.

His solution is to embrace time off from work. Whether it is deliberate breaks during the day or taking an unplugged vacation, time off has many benefits. One of the primary reasons breaks are important is that they give us time to think and process.

All ideas require processing. Are the ideas any good? Do I really want to do those things?

Again, that’s a thinking process. When you go from idea to execution, without processing, you often waste your time in hindsight.

Of course, you can never entirely prevent that. But by taking the time to process your ideas, you can prevent your future self a lot of pain, worry, and even money.

Read the full article on Foroux’s website to learn more benefits of taking time off.

Tips for Better Public Speaking from TED

April 6, 20251 Comment

Do you enjoy public speaking or does the thought of standing in front of an audience give you the chills?

Whenever you see a list of the top fears, public speaking is usually close to the top. There are many reasons for this trepidation, such as concerns about forgetting their speech or being seen as a fool. Yet the skill of public speaking is often required to succeed professionally at high levels. Therefore, how can someone overcome their fears and become a better speaker?

On their website, the Bright Network has an interview with Chris Anderson – Head of TED – the non-profit devoted to spreading ideas. From his experience watching and assisting people perfect their talks on the TED stage, he has compiled five important tips for effective public speaking. They can be applied by anyone from novice speakers to the most experienced orator. For Chris, the starting point is the idea.

The most successful presentations focus on one, coherent idea – something that will change the way your audience thinks, acts and approaches the world.

Your idea should take centre stage, not you. As a speaker, your job is to successfully share your knowledge with those listening. Think of it this way – you’re offering your audience the gift of an idea and your presentation is the wrapping paper.

To learn the other four tips, please read the short interview on the Bright Network.

Habits of Success – Are They Real?

February 16, 2025February 16, 2025Leave a comment

If you scroll long enough on any social media feed eventually a story will show up with a title like “The Top Ten Ways to be Successful” or “Emperor Caesar’s Habits for Success.” The gist of these articles is that copying the things successful people do will inevitably lead you to success too. But is that true?

According to Darious Foroux, copying the actions of seemingly successful people is no guarantee of success for yourself. In his article, Stop Imitating The Habits Of Successful People: It’s Killing You, he points out the main flaw with all these Internet advice pieces.

They always focus on the outcome. Not the process. Studying, learning, and stealing productive habits or tactics are all smart things to do. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I talk about people who only focus on the outcome. I.e. success.

Also, everyone pretends that the word success has nothing to do with money and status. But that’s simply not true. When we talk about success, we all talk about getting rich. Just be honest.

For Foroux, success is not simply a matter of counting your money to keep score. Success is much more varied than that. He adds:

But let’s keep it real and not pretend that “only you can determine the definition of success,” and then talk about the habits of millionaires.

Foroux then points out the flaw in the logic of copying the actions of notable people. It is simply that mindlessly following habits alone does very little to help us achieve our goals.

For instance, take waking up early. That’s always part of the lists of habits. But waking up is not a skill that does something. When you try to imitate a rich person who wakes up early, will you become rich by waking up early?

That’s why I find it odd that people try to imitate successful people. What’s the point? Even if you know the EXACT ingredients of success, it’s no good to you.

To hear what Foroux suggests instead, please visit his website to read the rest of his article.

To Solve a Problem, Take Something Away

November 3, 2024Leave a comment

There’s a funny thing about the human mind when it comes to problem solving. Usually, we look for solutions that add something to the equation, whether it be another resource, person, or strategy. Yet is it easier to solve problems by removing things?

In an article by Diana Kwon for Scientific America, she explores the reason that removing something is a often the more efficient problem-solving strategy. She uses the example of teaching a child to ride a bike.

For generations, the standard way to learn how to ride a bicycle was with training wheels or a tricycle. But in recent years, many parents have opted to train their kids with balance bikes, pedal-less two-wheelers that enable children to develop the coordination needed for bicycling—a skill that is not as easily acquired with an extra set of wheels.

Later in the article she explores research done at the University of Virginia. Observational studies of people solving problems highlighted some interesting patterns.

The researchers first carried out a set of observational studies, assessments without a control group, to see whether this bias existed at all. In one, they asked 91 participants to make a pattern symmetrical by either adding or removing colored boxes. Only 18 people (20 percent) used subtraction. In another, the team scanned through an archive of ideas for improvement submitted to an incoming university president and found that only 11 percent of 651 proposals involved eliminating an existing regulation, practice or program.

Is there a way to guide people to consider removing items rather than adding? Turns out a little nudge in the right direction can do the trick.

The researchers also observed that people were more likely to remove features when they were given more opportunities to consider alternative ways to address a problem: when participants were asked to create a symmetrical pattern by adding or eliminating colored blocks, they opted for removal more often if they were given practice trials than if they had just one chance to tackle the problem. On the other hand, having to simultaneously juggle another task—such as keeping track of numbers on a screen—made individuals less likely to subtract elements to solve the same problem, suggesting that it requires more effort to think up subtractive solutions than additive ones.

Read the full article to learn more about how to consider subtractive solutions.

Do Our Projects Define Us?

October 20, 2024Leave a comment

What projects do you prioritize with your free time?

Whether we spend the time on entertainment, home maintenance, or personal development, the choice of our personal projects impacts our lives. But do these projects end up shaping the nature of who we are?

Tiago Forte believes that our projects shape our identity. In a recent article on his website, Tiago looks at recent research into the topic, first by explaining exactly what a personal project is according to the researchers.

“Personal projects” by his definition include not just formal ones you might focus on at work, but informal ones as well. Toddlers are pursuing a project as they learn to walk. Lovers are pursuing a project as they fall in love. All the way to the highest reaches of human achievement, like landing on the moon.

The key factors in making them “personal” are that they are personally meaningful and that they are freely chosen, not imposed from the outside. Little’s research has shown that such “intrinsically regulated” projects tend to be more successful and lead to greater well-being than “externally regulated” projects.

In fact, Tiago believes that our choice of projects demonstrates who we are at our core.

This is a fundamentally different view of “personality”: We are not limited to a collection of traits fixed at birth, or shaped in childhood. We evolve over time through personally meaningful pursuits we decide to take on. This opens up the possibility that we can purposefully choose the ways we want to change, by choosing projects that give us new skills, perspectives, and ways of thinking.

In other words, by changing what you do, you can change who you are.

To learn more, please visit the Forte Labs website to read the rest of the article.

Efficient Librarian

Exploring the Intersection of Efficiency and Librarianship

Category: Creativity