#ThirstyThursday Issue #256

📈 This AI notepad for people with back-to-back meetings now supports 32 languages.

🌤 37% of workers now say their work environment is hurting their mental health (up from 32% a year ago).

⏳ One founder calls it the Automation Tax, where the time AI save you gets filled with more work.

🙌 A record 43.4% of people with disabilities are now in the labor force.

Takeaways:

• If you can’t switch off, pay attention. Thinking about tomorrow’s meeting on vacation, bringing work home most nights, or bragging about running on four hours of sleep are signs you’ve normalized something that’s wearing you down.
• Your body usually flags burnout before your calendar does. Poor sleep, headaches, digestive issues, and rising blood pressure deserve attention now, because “after the next project” never comes when there’s always another project.
• Give yourself an identity outside your job title. If you answer “who are you?” with your role, or you struggle to name what you enjoy outside of work, work has taken up more room than you realize.

See all 5 signs on LinkedIn.

Every year, your team clicks through harassment training on mute, passes the quiz, and forgets it by Friday. Then something actually happens, and nobody’s sure what crosses the line or who to tell.

Traliant’s harassment training is built to be remembered. Employees and managers work through realistic, TV-style scenarios with interactive exercises, in courses written by attorneys and updated as laws change.

• Your logo, policies, and workplace images built in, so it feels like your company
• Industry and country editions, from a 15-minute course to a 2-hour deep dive
• One assignment that covers training requirements in CA, NY, IL, and the other states that mandate it
• 20 short refresher reels, with separate tracks for employees and managers, to keep it fresh all year

More than 14,000 organizations already use it.

👉 See the training employees actually remember.

P.S. Not the one who picks your company’s training? Forward this to the person who does.

Takeaways:

• Claude Cowork works across whole folders. Give it access to a folder of PDFs, spreadsheets, and docs, then ask it to combine and analyze everything or build something new, like an interactive dashboard.
• Connect it to Google Drive so it can pull from your cloud files too. In the demo, Claude found extra sales data in Drive, added it to an existing dashboard, refreshed the KPIs and insights, and restyled the whole thing in the company’s brand colors.
• Turn any task you repeat into a reusable skill, then schedule it. A “weekly sales review” skill can find new data, compare it with last week, flag what changed, and update your dashboard every Monday without you rebuilding the workflow.

Watch the full walkthrough on YouTube.

Takeaways:

• Keep 1:1s on the calendar even when things are going well, and read status updates before the meeting so nobody spends it reading them aloud. Use the time to clear obstacles, coach, and dig into what the person needs.
• Come in with a few questions written down. When someone says there’s “nothing to talk about,” go bigger: “What would it take to 2x your team’s output?” (On the other side of the table? Bring your own agenda and one clear ask to every 1:1 with your manager.)
• Open with one specific win and why it mattered, then stretch the thinking with “What would you do if you weren’t afraid to fail?” and help turn the answer into a next step.

Read the full LinkedIn post.

You know the smell wet beach towels leave behind, days later, somehow still there? I live near the water, so I know it intimately. My guests, thankfully, do not.

Aura House‘s cold-air diffusers fill my house with the kind of clean, layered scent hotels always seem to nail, no candle smoke, no chemical blast, just genuinely good. My go-to is Collins: lemongrass and orange up top, something warmer underneath. No heat, no flame, no water involved, and it’s Sephora Clean certified.

My guests have started asking where the good smell is coming from instead of just putting up with the wet-towel one next to me, and that’s enough of a win for now.

👉 Use code ASSIST10 for 10% off. Fair warning: people may start asking if you’re free to host dinners.

Kristel (TA Marketing)

Takeaways:

• Stretching alone won’t solve it. Your upper traps share shoulder-blade duty with your lower traps and serratus anterior, so strengthening those supporting muscles keeps your upper traps from taking over every movement.
• Build in serratus and lower-trap work. Wall punches, wall planks with shoulder-blade movement, band work, serratus punches, bear holds, and T, Y, and W raises all count. Do the office-friendly ones daily and add the rest before upper-body workouts once or twice a week.
• Watch your form on upper-body lifts. If you shrug during lateral raises, lean forward slightly and think about pushing the dumbbells out. On rear delt flies, bring your arms slightly behind your shoulder line to keep your upper traps out of it.

See all of the exercises on IG.

💭 For Emotional Wellness Month, How We Feel is a free app that helps you name what you’re feeling.

📓 Joanna swears by this gratitude journal (and used it to get through a particularly tough year).

😴 Blackout plus gentle vibration: Therabody’s SleepMask helps you actually switch off at night.

🖊️ Typos, meet the gel pen that erases.

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• Fri 10/16 @ 8AM PT: Play-by-Play Series: Session 3 – The Full LinkedIn Makeover (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Fri 10/16-Sun 10/18: Top Shelf Fall Retreat (Texas Hill Country)

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