First Thing Monday #53

This week we try a monk's productivity hack, engineer designer dreams, and embrace the eternal group project 🫨😴😅

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

👋🏻 Welcome back to First Thing Monday! 2025 is off to an interesting start, and I've got some thoughts to share. Let's dive in.

FTM is a newsletter that includes a recap of all the news you need to know to make better career decisions. Each issue also includes four tips for developing better relationships at work and a deep dive into a pressing topic. Issues come out on Monday mornings!

❓ Have a work question or topics you’d like us to discuss? Drop me a line 📱 simply reply to this email or leave a comment below!

I’m Jon Cochran, a workplace sociologist with over 15 years of experience leading sales, marketing, and product development teams and working with brands like J.Crew, Hilton, and Mattel. I want to provide resources to help you take control of your career and maximize your satisfaction in the workplace.

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⏰ What to read before your first meeting:

• How Leadership Styles Will Change in 2025 (Inc. Magazine): As 2025 unfolds, successful leaders are combining two essential approaches: "founder-mode leadership," which emphasizes bold vision and proactive planning (like setting ambitious quarterly goals and rapid prototyping), and "agile leadership," which prioritizes flexibility and quick adaptation. This transformation validates earlier instincts about needing more autonomy and purpose at work. As organizations embrace this dual approach, those moving into leadership roles should focus on building both strategic thinking and adaptable execution skills. This shift particularly advantages millennials, who can leverage their natural strengths: experience with rapid technological change, comfort with innovation, and appreciation for purpose-driven work. Success now depends more on building innovative, flexible cultures than maintaining rigid structures.

• How to Stop Dreading Stuff and Just Get it Done (Men’s Health): We all have those tasks that lurk in the corners of our minds - the overdue email responses, the doctor's appointments we keep postponing, the difficult conversations we're not quite ready to have. Traditional wisdom tells us to "face our fears" and tackle these challenges head-on, but Dutch Zen monk Paul Loomans offers a refreshingly different approach. Instead of treating our avoided tasks like enemies to be conquered (or what he calls "gnawing rats" to be eliminated), he suggests befriending them. This isn't about breaking big tasks into smaller ones - it's about fundamentally changing our relationship with the things we're avoiding. By asking ourselves what we're genuinely willing to do, even if it's just 15 minutes of work or visualizing taking action, we can transform these anxiety-inducing tasks from threatening "rats" into patient "white sheep" that can wait their turn. It's about acknowledging reality as it is and finding practical ways to work with it, rather than exhausting ourselves in an endless battle against our own anxieties.

• How do you work less when you love your job? (GQ): The familiar struggle of work-life balance takes an unexpected turn in this candid exploration of success gone awry. While our narrator successfully abandoned their 4 AM ice bath habit and scaled back their social commitments, their career exploded in 2024 with freelance opportunities, a podcast, and a book deal. But instead of celebrating, they descended into workaholic territory—typing through surgeries, infections, and family vacations like some kind of productivity bot. Even their therapist's reality check about using money to justify every project (hello, "this one assignment equals a year of Little League" math) couldn't break the spell. The kicker? They wrote this whole reflection during holiday family time, with an unfinished copy of "How to Do Nothing" collecting dust on their shelf. It's a masterclass in how success can actually make work-life balance worse, and why "just being your own boss" isn't the freedom fix we think it is.

• How One Company Used AI to Manage the Deluge of Documents (Harvard Business Review): A healthcare insurance company's use of AI to process documents reveals key insights about practical AI adoption in business. After struggling with backlogs and high error rates during the pandemic, the company partnered with Ricoh to transform its document processing system. Rather than fully automating the process, they developed a three-tiered approach: using cheap fuzzy logic tools for initial scanning, applying more expensive generative AI for complex cases, and maintaining human oversight for the most challenging documents. This hybrid approach tripled productivity, achieved a 15% cost reduction, and reached breakeven after 10 months, though it required significant upfront investment ($500,000 plus $200,000 monthly operating costs). The case study suggests that effective AI adoption should focus on improving outcomes cost-effectively rather than pursuing full automation or dramatic headcount reductions.

• Waterproof suit collection allows office workers to seamlessly move from desk to swimming pool (New York Post): David Lloyd Clubs has developed an innovative waterproof suit collection enabling professionals to transition directly between swimming and working without changing clothes. These specialized hydrophobic garments, taking over three weeks to create, address a growing workplace wellness challenge: research shows office workers spend over four hours weekly in meetings, with nearly half skipping fitness activities due to their schedule. The initiative responds to compelling data - only 18% exercise during lunch breaks, while 70% believe workplaces should encourage wellness breaks. The fitness club's solution aims to help members integrate "snackable" bursts of wellness activities into their workday, with running, swimming, and yoga emerging as the most popular forms of exercise. Based on member demand, these innovative suits may become available to the general public.

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🚰 The Water Cooler

• Do you know how much plastic goes into your vinyl collection? 50 million records were sold in 2024, and most were made of what Greenpeace calls “the most environmentally damaging plastic.” Don’t fret; there is hope! I loved this article about the ways artists like Bille Eilish and Coldplay are pushing record manufacturers to clean up their production processes and used recycled materials for their vinyl releases.

• Want to be dazzled this morning? You should take a look at Dolly Parton’s favorite pieces from her personal jewelry collection.

  

  Image courtesy of Vogue

• Ok, who out there got an infrared light mask this holiday? I’ve read up on them and they are not for me and my sensitive skin. Andrea Atkins sheds a light (pun intended) on the unclear science behind the viral-ad driven products.

• I’ll admit it—I tried to engineer my dreams last Tuesday night (mainly me saying, “You will dream about shoes and bags. You want to dream about shoes and bags” over and over.) Honestly, I couldn’t figure it out. Tell me if this works for you!

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📖 Reflections for this week:

This week, we reflect on space. Making it, holding it, and being comfortable with it.

Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash

For yourself: Notice how quickly your calendar fills up with back-to-back meetings. Creating intentional buffer time isn't just about avoiding burnout - it's about making room for deeper thinking. Those 15-minute gaps between meetings aren't wasted time; they're opportunities to process, reflect, and prepare. When we're constantly rushing from one thing to the next, we lose the mental space needed for creativity and problem-solving.

For your boss: Space in conversations is powerful. When discussing projects or challenges with your manager, practice getting comfortable with silence. Resist the urge to fill every pause with words. These moments of quiet often lead to deeper insights and more thoughtful responses. By creating space in discussions, you allow both parties to think more deeply and communicate more effectively.

For your direct report(s): Help your team create space for focus. Break the cycle of constant interruptions by establishing "quiet hours" or no-meeting blocks. Protect this time fiercely - it's not just about productivity, it's about respecting how deep work happens. When team members know they have dedicated time for concentrated work, they can tackle complex problems more effectively.

For your co-workers: Physical space affects how we work together. Whether it's choosing the right meeting room for collaborative sessions or finding quiet corners for focused work, be mindful of how different spaces serve different purposes. Create inviting areas for spontaneous discussions while respecting others' need for quiet focus time. Consider where you hold your meetings and the kind of work you expect to get done. The space could encourage or prevent certain kinds of collaboration. A well-designed workspace - whether physical or virtual - can transform how teams collaborate.

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⚡️ And one last thing…

As 2024 drew to a close, I reflected on my biggest professional lesson of the year: the true value of teamwork. I can pinpoint the moment this revelation hit me. During a recent work meeting, as my colleagues and I divided up quarterly planning tasks, I had a flashback to a disastrous college group project. Same dynamic, just with better coffee.

In college, our literature review group project had been a mess from the start. Half the team missed meetings, the PowerPoint was riddled with typos, and I emerged convinced that group projects were simply academic torture. Like many students, I approached these assignments focused solely on my grade rather than the collaborative process. My subsequent years in graduate school, with its emphasis on solitary research, only reinforced my preference for working alone.

SOLO WERKING

But here's what I didn't understand then: professional life is essentially one long group project. Today's workplace mirrors those college assignments more than I'd like to admit. We work in project-based teams, divide tasks based on expertise, and coordinate mostly online. The same characters appear: the scribe, the designer, the people person, the curmudgeon. Even the challenges remain - try coordinating a meeting across time zones instead of around midterm schedules.

The critical difference lies in shared accountability. In my early career, I strutted around with unearned confidence, whether I was misprinting conference nametags or pontificating about men's fashion trends (I was very early on the drop-crotch Rick Owens look, thank you very much). I thought I knew it all, but working with others quickly revealed how much I had to learn. Each piece of feedback exposed a blind spot; each collaboration demanded better communication. This wisdom had been embedded in those college assignments all along - I just wasn't ready to learn it.

The isolation of graduate school had left me clinging to the 'I'll just do it myself' mindset. Like many, I romanticized the idea of the solo genius, imagining myself as an artist crafting masterpieces in solitude. But this approach crumbled in the professional world, where true excellence emerges from the friction of different perspectives. Working alone, I wasn't just missing out on better outcomes - I was missing crucial lessons in self-awareness and reading the room.

Looking back at that college disaster, I now see that my stress wasn't about the PowerPoint or the missed meetings or even my misprinted nametags – it was about my resistance to true collaboration. While my younger self prayed to never face another group project, my professional self has learned to embrace the messy, challenging, and ultimately transformative process of creating together. Because our greatest achievements don't emerge from isolated brilliance – they come from learning to play as a team.

Here’s to a wonderful day!

Jon

Follow me on Instagram at @misterfantastik