✅ Today’s Checklist:
🗓️ THURS 9/24 @ 9AM PT: 42% of you told us your company handed you AI with zero instructions. 3 AI Plays is the training you should have gotten. Free, one hour. Save your seat.
🤔 Riddle me this: A rooster lays an egg on the exact peak of a barn roof. Which side does it roll down? (Find the answer on the bottom).
🍳 Dinner on the table in under 25 minutes, 50% off your first box and a free Staub bowl set with your third.
🎁 Seven corporate swag vendors worth using instead of another logo pen.
🧠 Glean’s AI search finds anything across your company’s tools in seconds.
⚡ Therapists share nine productivity tricks for when your to-do list wins.
Someone sent you a document last month that looked fine. Right length, clean structure, confident tone. Then you read it and realized you’d be rebuilding the whole thing yourself.
There’s a name for that now: workslop, AI-generated content that looks good and lacks substance. In their survey of 1,150 full-time desk workers, 40% had received some in the past month, and each instance took about two hours to sort out.
Everyone quotes the two hours lost, but the cost that lasts is reputational: about half of recipients rated the sender as less creative, less capable, and less reliable. Thin AI output changes what your colleagues think you’re capable of.
This is a training problem. Gallup found nearly half of employees who use AI have had no training at all, and 70% say their company has no clear rules for it. When we polled our readers, 42% said they were handed a tool with no instructions and nobody to go ask.
The output comes back thin because the tool doesn’t know who signs off, what your VP actually reads, or how it went the last time your team tried this.
Four things that help today:
Switch off the fast setting. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot all default to a quicker, cheaper mode and keep a slower reasoning mode one click away. Use it for anything that matters. Same subscription, better thinking.
Attach the source instead of describing it. Your summary is worse input than the document, and writing it takes longer. Keep it to what you’d be comfortable emailing a vendor.
Put your instruction after a long paste. Stanford researchers found accuracy is highest at the beginning and end of a long input and drops in the middle.
Name the risk you’re worried about. “I’m worried this reads like I’m blaming the other team.” It costs nothing and changes the draft.
Those four are a start. This Thursday, September 24 at 9AM PT/12PM ET, I’m walking through the rest of the AI moves I use every week, plus the one that stops you re-explaining your job in every single chat. Register free here.
Hope to see you there!
Joanna (TA Co-Founder)
P.S. I’ll be giving attendees a surprise gift, so register and show up live.
Generic harassment training clears the requirement and leaves the gray areas untouched.
Traliant’s Preventing Workplace Harassment training is attorney-authored and shot like a TV show, built on the ambiguous moments employees recognize from their own job.
Six industry editions, five country editions, and three lengths covering all 50 states.
Send it once: Smart assignment logic gives each employee the version matching their role and location.
Twenty Micro Reels, two to three minutes each with separate employee and manager tracks, keep it working all year.
“I struggle with eating at my office or not eating lunch at all. And not exercising as often.” — Karen C., SVP
Karen, nothing on your calendar is optional in the moment. Every meeting has a reason, every reason is good, and lunch is the only thing on there with nobody else attached to it. So it goes first, every week.
Here is how to give it someone to attach to.
Eat something, even if it’s sad desk food
Skipping entirely is the thing to stop. Hours without food tank your energy and your judgment by 2pm, whether or not you connect the two.
Keep a floor at your desk: a Built Bar (or Joanna’s fave: Rise bar), a protein smoothie with 20+ grams, a meat stick, almonds, edamame. The goal is never hitting 2pm on empty.
The break only counts if you picked it
A University of Toronto team tracked admin employees for ten days and found something counterintuitive. Socializing over lunch left people more fatigued by the end of the day. Lunch with colleagues is often still performing, especially when the conversation stays on work or a manager is at the table.
What predicted a restorative break was autonomy. People who chose their lunch, whatever they did with it, ended the day less drained. Even working through it cost less when it was genuinely their call.
So the lunch buddy works, but only if it’s someone you’d actually want to eat with. If a standing lunch turns into one more obligation, you have just moved the problem.
Give exercise an if-then, not a reminder
“Be better about the gym” is a wish. The research version is an implementation intention: if [specific cue], then I [specific action]. Across 94 studies, that format had a medium-to-large effect on whether people actually followed through.
Yours might be: If my 4pm gets cancelled, then I change and walk for twenty minutes. The cue has to be something an observer could confirm happened. That is what makes it fire before you can negotiate with yourself.
If you want the accountability version, start a Walk Wednesday. Twenty minutes, standing invitation, no agenda. Other people showing up becomes the cue.
Start with one
Pick the most doable thing this week. Text one person about lunch. Order the bars. Write one if-then and put it where you will see it.
One change that sticks beats four that last a week.
You know the smell wet beach towels leave behind, days later, somehow still there? I live near the water, so I know it a little too well. My guests, thankfully, do not.
Aura House diffusers fill my house with the layered, clean scent hotels always seem to nail. There’s no candle smoke, or burnt-off oil, and no water tank to refill. My go-to is Collins: lemongrass and orange up top, something warmer underneath. The oils are IFRA compliant and meet Clean at Sephora standards, which matters when the thing is running in a room all day.
My guests have started asking where the good smell is coming from. That is a much better question than the one they were previously too polite to ask.
👉 Use code ASSIST10 for 10% off your starter kit.
Fair warning: people may start asking if you’re free to host dinners.
Kristel (TA Marketing)
📰 TheFutureParty sends business, entertainment, and culture in one daily read, free to 250,000+ subscribers.
💵 Answer a few questions, then book a free video consult with an advisor matched to your life stage.
👉 That trip you book a dozen times a year? Let Navan Edge remember it and skip the rebooking scramble.
📚 That’s Not My Name by Megan Lally is the thriller you’ll finish in one sitting.
Upcoming Events
* Smart Girl Society is our private community for women who want deeper conversations, accountability, and tools that actually make life easier. Join the waitlist to get in the next round.
Work Wisdom of the Week:
“Observe, don’t absorb. Take the ‘sacred pause.’ Instead of reacting, take an intentional moment between a trigger and your response. It’s okay to take a beat to think, regulate and choose how to show up. In high stress moments, people can get emotional and reactive. As an empathetic person, learning how not to absorb other people’s emotions has been crucial for my mental health and my ability to show up with confidence, clarity in my communication, and helped me to stay aligned with my goals. I’m the youngest person on the leadership team and learning how to be steady has helped me build influence and gain trust.”
Sami P, Head of People & Chief of Staff
Have more feedback? 💌 Reply to this email and tell us.
✨ P.S. Want more inspiration and positivity to kick off your week? Sign up for our Motivational Monday texts (U.S. only).
👀 Want to see if your company is a good fit for our 250k+ ambitious readers? Join our Sponsor Waitlist here.
Join 301k+ smart women reading The Assist every Tuesday.
