Weekender #252

 💥 The Anthropic and Figma feud is messier than the headlines let on.

✈️ Don’t pack without these travel essentials for your next trip.

🤓 Finally, a work email you’ll look forward to. Career inspiration with a welcome dose of pop-culture
and hot takes to perk up your work week.

🎒 Back-to-school tips for working parents who are already running on empty.

I needed a desk that mounted to the wall and folded down. Amazon had them for $600 and up. A pre-built folding arm table seemed so expensive for something so easy.

So I did what I always do: I researched a better way.

I showed Claude my inspo photos, gave it my dimensions and told it what I was trying to accomplish. Between us we figured out I could order the hardware online and get a piece of wood pre-cut from Home Depot and delivered to my house. Bada-boom!

Then I got to the install

I used drywall screws from my sophisticated private collection of leftovers from whatever random project I’d done before. They turned out to be way too weak to hold a desk plus everything I needed to put on top of it, like a computer monitor.

Within one day of using my brand new desk, it was already falling out of the wall.

My Claude boyfriend told me I needed to go to Home Depot and pick up a stud finder, special screws, and drywall anchors.

Now listen, I love Home Depot

It’s one of my favorite stores. But every single one seems to have a different layout and I can never find anything. I also don’t want to ask for help finding stuff. I’m a big independent woman. I wanna walk in there like I own the place!

So there I was, asking Claude things like “What aisle would I find the drywall anchors in?” and “What size length do I need?” and “They don’t have X, can I get Y instead?”

Claude could answer almost all of it. What it couldn’t tell me was where the thing physically lives in my store.

The Home Depot app has a store mode

You click into it, type in the product name, and it tells you exactly what aisle it’s located in.

That’s the missing piece. Claude knows what you need and why. The app knows where it is. Put them together and you never have to flag down an employee again.

How to run it

Before you go: Give Claude your photos, your measurements, and what you’re building. Ask for a materials list with sizes, weight ratings, and quantities, and have it explain why each item is on there.

While you’re there: Open the Home Depot app, switch on store mode, and plug in each item one by one. It’ll route you aisle by aisle.

When something’s missing: Ask Claude if the alternative on the shelf will work for your specific load. This is the part that saved me. I would have grabbed the wrong anchors again.

My desk is now very much attached to the wall, and I did the whole thing without asking a single human being for help.

Happy DIYing!

Thania (TA Content Mgr)

Sunday night, something slipped: a deadline that moved, a handoff nobody confirmed. By Monday you’re doing archaeology on your own projects instead of leading the day.

monday.com puts every project on one board your whole team actually checks. The Executive Digest agent scans overnight and flags what’s behind before you’ve had coffee. monday sidekick answers “where do things stand?” in plain language, no digging required.

You start the week already caught up.

👉 Start free: no credit card required, unlimited time on the Free plan.

P.S. We also created a handy monday start-up guide to get you up and running in no time.

📚 Read: Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick

Phoebe Berman is a hopeless romantic about to turn 30 who’s determined to finally lose her virginity before the birthday hits. She makes a checklist, suddenly has three romantic prospects, and it’s just as chaotic and funny as that sounds.

📺 Watch: Cape Fear (Apple TV+)

A convicted murderer played by Javier Bardem walks free after 17 years and immediately starts working his way back into the lives of the married attorneys who put him there. Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson co-star in this Scorsese and Spielberg-produced thriller, and it is exactly as tense and stylish as that sounds.

🎧 Listen: Petal by Ariana Grande

Her eighth studio album with lead single “Hate That I Made You Love Me” going straight to No. 1 before the album was even out. And while she’s not showing off her multi-octave range, Ari’s more subdued sonic experimentation makes the album one of her most interesting.

The last weeks of summer always feel the same: fifty browser tabs open, a Notion page you haven’t touched since June, and a low-grade dread about everything you’re behind on before the next season of work even starts.

Eney, a new AI assistant from MacPaw, handles the scattered work so you don’t have to. Open your Mac and it hands you a morning briefing: your meetings, your tasks, what actually needs attention today. Ask for a news catch-up and skip the multi-tab scroll. Tell it to pull a file from Google Drive or update a doc in Notion, and it does (without switching screens).

Give it one instruction and it runs the multiple steps.

Eney comes from MacPaw, the team building Mac tools for nearly two decades. Try it free on Setapp ahead of its full public launch.

👉 Try Eney free on Setapp ahead of its full public launch.

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* 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.

💼 Browse our job board here.

Sawyer is 50 pounds of pure delusion and the best coworker we’ve ever heard of. He’s been on the job for three years, mostly as a lap dog, despite the fact that there is no lap big enough for him. He appears in meetings uninvited, takes over the office chair mid-call, and has truly never once read the room. After a long week, he rewards himself with a vanilla ice cream.

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