the password every group chat needs – OG #316

🎁 Heads up: Boss’s Day is this Friday.
Our gift guide covers solo picks and team group gifts, plus what to skip.

🎁 Show your team some love with these employee gift cards.

🔐 Fake recruiters now text you a job and just ask you to reply “YES” (so don’t).

🤲 Could your team run a hard week without you? If the answer’s no, it’s time to delegate.

⏯ When Atlassian took AI away for a day, 82% of staff felt the urge to “just ask AI.”

You know the call. It comes at 9pm: “I think I clicked something.” Or it’s a screenshot with no context and the words “is this real??” Now you’re the IT department, walking someone through a password reset while your dinner gets cold. (And let’s be fair, sometimes you’re the one making that call to your kid.)

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so this is the moment to handle the stuff you’ve both been putting off.

First, the old tells are gone

Bad spelling used to be the giveaway. AI writes clean copy now, and AI-generated phishing emails get a 54% click rate compared to 12% for the human-written kind. What actually signals a scam in 2026:

• It knows too much. Your supplier’s name, your last invoice amount, yesterday’s meeting, all scraped from old breaches and public posts. That specificity is exactly what stops you from checking.
• It keeps changing channels. Email becomes text becomes a phone call, and each hop is designed to escape the scrutiny you gave the last one.
• The number you googled is theirs. Scammers game search results so fake support lines outrank real ones. Get numbers off the back of your card or inside the official app.

Set a family password this weekend

Cloning someone’s voice takes three seconds of audio and produces an 85% match, which is about one Instagram story’s worth. One in four people say they’ve encountered an AI voice scam or know someone who has, and 77% of those targeted lost money.

So pick a word that’s unguessable and not in anyone’s feed (no pets, no street names). Anyone who calls in a crisis asking for money gets asked for it. Real family knows it, and scammers hang up. Make it today’s group chat message. It takes two minutes and it’s the best thing on this list.

At work, it’s a liability

Clicking the wrong thing on your work laptop is embarrassing, and depending on what you touch and what’s in your employee agreement, the fallout can land on you (and on your team, if you manage people).

Watch for the gift card ask. A scammer impersonating your boss asking you to urgently grab gift cards is one of the most common workplace scams. It ramps up around the holidays because it blends in with real gifting, and gift cards are untraceable once redeemed, which is the whole point.

Three things to do today: turn on two-factor everywhere using an app instead of texts, stop reusing that one password with the exclamation point at the end, and report suspicious emails instead of just deleting them, since you’re probably not the only one who got it.

At home, it’s your whole digital life

Losing your Instagram is a special kind of hell, especially while someone’s DMing your sister asking for Venmo. Bookmark facebook.com/hacked and instagram.com/hacked now. They’re Meta’s official recovery pages, and they work best from a device you’ve logged in from before. When it happens to someone you know, send them these instead of letting them google it, because “account recovery service” results are their own scam category.

Through the holidays, skip the link in any delivery text and track in the retailer’s app instead. Pay with a credit card rather than debit or Venmo, since the fraud protection is better. And lock down your email first, because every other account resets through it.

And get a password manager already

One reused password turns one old breach into six broken accounts. A password manager makes a unique one for every site, so you only have to remember one. It also won’t autofill on a fake site, because it reads the actual URL and catches the lookalikes your tired eyes miss. LastPass is what our team uses.

Now forward this

Send it to your mom, your aunt, and the coworker with passwords on a sticky note. The people getting hit hardest learned to watch for typos and never got the memo that the typos went away.

Client names, salary numbers, a deal that isn’t public yet. A lot gets said in meetings, and most of us never ask where the AI notepad sends it.

It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so here are five questions worth asking, with Granola’s answers:

• Is the audio stored? No. Granola transcribes from your computer’s audio as the call happens and doesn’t keep the recording.
• Is my data encrypted? Yes, in storage and in transit.
• Can AI companies train on it? OpenAI and Anthropic never can, and you can turn off Granola’s own anonymized training in Settings.
• Is it independently audited? Yes. Granola is SOC 2 Type II certified*.
• What about health information? Eligible enterprises can enforce HIPAA compliance and sign a BAA**.

👉 Download Granola and try it in your next meeting. Free month with the code THEASSIST.

*SOC 2 Type II means an independent auditor watched their security practices for months and confirmed they held up. It’s the standard box that corporate IT and security teams want checked before they’ll approve a new tool.

*HIPAA is the federal law that protects health information. A BAA is the contract a healthcare team needs a vendor to sign before it can use that tool with patient data.

“My biggest one has been rebuilding and trusting my professional confidence. I’ve noticed that I sometimes second-guess myself about whether I’m contributing too much, asking too many questions, or taking up too much space, even when my intention is simply to understand, learn, and contribute in a meaningful way.” — Tesla

The instinct you’re describing, wanting to understand, learn, and contribute, is exactly what good managers hope for when they hire someone. Somewhere along the way you started reading your best qualities as liabilities, and that’s the part worth unpacking.

Figure out where the doubt started

Self-doubt at work rarely starts at work. Maybe a past manager made you feel like a burden for asking, or maybe the pattern goes back further than your career. A therapist can help you get to the root so you’re addressing the source instead of managing symptoms, and a career coach can help you get clear on how you want to show up. Both are investments in taking your growth seriously, and neither means something is wrong with you.

It also helps to name the bigger picture. Women are socialized to ask fewer questions and take up less space at work, so the inner critic telling you you’re too much was handed to you. Naming that won’t make the doubt disappear, but it does take the self-blame out of it.

Keep receipts

Start a brag book, a running doc of your wins, the thank-yous you get, the projects that landed, and the questions that opened up a conversation nobody else was having. (We call ours a credibility backpack.) Self-doubt has a short memory for the good stuff and a long memory for every cringe moment, so on the days the voice gets loud, you’ll have receipts that tell a different story.

Borrow someone else’s eyes

Find a mentor whose judgment you trust and who’ll be honest with you even when you don’t want to hear it. A good one points out your blind spots and reminds you of your strengths when you’ve lost sight of them, and that second part matters more than people think. A peer group helps too, whether that’s a professional community or one colleague who gets it. Knowing other women are working through the same thing makes it lighter to carry.

Practice taking the space

Confidence tends to follow action. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy’s talk on presence makes the case that showing up as if you belong can help you feel more confident over time, so ask the question, speak up early in the meeting, and keep doing it until it stops feeling like a performance.

Build evidence outside the office too. Run the race, take the class, lead the volunteer project. The woman who figured out something hard on Saturday is the same one walking into Monday’s meeting, so let her show up.

The questions you ask and the space you take up are how good work gets done. Keep asking.

Someone on your team is retiring, hitting ten years, or turning fifty. The people around them have stories and thank-yous worth saying out loud, and most of those never get written down.

Newlywords turns them into a collaborative memory book. One person starts the project and invites everyone else, and each person adds whatever suits them: a long story, a two-line message, a photo collage, a list, even a meme. A built-in questionnaire helps anyone who’s stuck on what to say, and Newlywords pulls it all together into a printed book. Unlike a photo book site, Newlywords makes it really easy to collect content from many different people and quickly get it into a physical book that is cherished forever.

A few honest paragraphs from someone who worked beside you for years can carry a person a long way, and a book keeps them on the coffee table long after a group e-card has been read once and closed.

Teams use it for retirements, work anniversaries, milestone birthdays, and employee recognition. Some companies even turn it into a cookbook of recipes from employees across offices.

👉 Start a collaborative memory book for your next team milestone.

📖 Adam Grant’s new book, Vibe, is out today and already on Kristel’s list.

🚗 Future you, scraping ice at 7am, will be glad SimpleTire shipped your winter tires free to a local installer.

🗞️ A clearer view of the world, delivered in five minutes flat.

🧠 DONUT Games sends free daily puzzles, trivia, and debates that put your brain (and your opinions) to the test.

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 Work Wisdom of the Week:

“You cannot cry and drink at the same time. If you are going into a situation where you feel your emotions may get the better of you, bring your water bottle with you. When you feel like you might start crying, start sipping instead.”

Tania Koles (US Public Sector Compliance & Legal Affairs Lead)

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