#productivity

#productivity

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Anthropic has launched Claude Cowor, a general-purpose AI agent that can manipulate, read, and analyze files on a user's computer, as well as create new files. The tool is currently available as a "research preview" only to Max subscribers on $100 or $200 per month plans. The tool, which the company describes as "Claude Code for the rest of your work," leverages the abilities of Anthropic's popular Claude Code software development assistant but is designed for non-technical users as opposed to programmers.

It utilizes the context of your conversations, files, channels, and more to answer questions about your workflow and even take action on your behalf, such as scheduling meetings, from just a single text prompt. The company emphasizes that the experience is meant to be intuitive, with no training required and just a simple conversation needed to get started, such as, "What did we decide about the Q4 budget?"

Japanese design philosophy has long celebrated the marriage of form and function, transforming everyday objects into tools that spark joy while serving practical purposes. This ethos shines brightest in stationery design, where minimalism meets innovation to create products that streamline workflows and declutter both physical and mental spaces. The items on this list represent a modern evolution of this tradition, offering solutions that fit seamlessly into contemporary life.

Many organisations are entering the year facing economic headwinds, while the early promises of AI have yet to be fully realised and hybrid working has still not fully settled. Leaders will be asking what it will take to unlock higher productivity in a period of uncertainty. At the same time, the labour market will feel unusually static. With a frozen jobs market for recent graduates, fewer people will want to take risks by moving roles.

But I realized that rather than avoiding YouTube altogether, I could reshape how I use it. So I did just that: I put certain rules around it, stopped clicking around, and, while still using the same videos, it quickly stopped feeling like a temptation. YouTube is now part of my workspace, and I don't have to juggle several productivity apps.

We have seen quite a number of laptops bearing mind-blowing flexible screens that fold or roll, and while they do help push the envelope of laptop design, they might be the future, but it is definitely not yet here. Foldables still scratch easily and are expensive, rollables are at a concept stage, and both rely on technology that is impressive in a demo booth but nerve-wracking when you actually need to get work done and cannot afford downtime or repair bills.

Barely 10 days into the new year, it already feels like you can't look away from the news. In the last week alone, the U.S. military captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and took over operations of the country; President Trump withdrew the U.S. from dozens of international organizations, including a major climate treaty; and an ICE agent fatally shot a Minneapolis resident, sparking outrage and widespread protests.

Turning a computer monitor from a landscape position to a portrait position may seem odd at first. After all, a horizontal display allows you to see more content on-screen, plus it is a more familiar experience. However, there are certain situations where flipping your screen vertically is genuinely useful. Programmers, for example, often prefer this orientation because it lets them see more lines of code without needing to scroll. Writers, like myself, appreciate this mode, as it makes reading and creating documents easier.

Microsoft is making it a lot faster and easier to add links to text inside Word documents. Instead of having to open a menu item to insert a link or use the CTRL + K keyboard shortcut, you can now simply paste a link on top of the text you want to hyperlink. This new feature reduces the amount of clicks you need to do an everyday task like linking URLs, and it works across Word for the web, Windows, and Mac.

I love a physical annual planner. I'm not one of those people who has a shared Google calendar with friends or my spouse, and I'm definitely not one of those people who can take each day on the fly and remember things I have to do or play it all by ear. I find that when I keep my to-dos digital rather than physical, I struggle to actually absorb and remember everything I'm supposed to do that day.

January often arrives with a whirlwind of activity, from putting away holiday decorations and returning to work, compounded by the pressure of New Year's resolutions. This first week can feel challenging. However, by taking a moment to gather the right resources, it transforms into an ideal time to strategically map out the months ahead. My past approach involved stressing over starting super strong, precisely on January 1st.

On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes. In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user's messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, reply to a request from their child's sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline.

We spend one-third of our lives asleep. This biological fact is something that, with time and technology, is less and less taken for granted. In many science fiction stories, the future of sleep is cozy and idyllic - an elevated state living within dream world. In others, sleep is more of an evolutionary shackle that gets in the way of productivity. The latter focuses on questions that haunt anyone who feels there are not enough hours in the day. What if we didn't have to sleep?

Sometimes you have to take a step back before you can take any steps forward - and this adage definitely applies to taking care of your home. Whether you want to start a brand-new hobby or habit, do one thing to make your home your happy place, or devote your energy to physically refreshing a room, you'll want to first approach it with our productivity trick to ensure that whatever you do has staying power. That trick? The "one word" method.

An early disruption to your routine or sudden mood swing could set a surprising tone for your morning. However, the playful Leo moon's bump with rebellious Uranus urges you to drop your expectations. This could be the opening you didn't know you needed. Power moves lead to tangible progress under today's triple alignment of the sun, Venus, and Mars in disciplined Capricorn.

Time is the only form of capital we can never earn back - once it's spent, it's gone Over the past few years, one sentence has come up again and again: "I don't have enough time." People say it about work. About family. About friendships they keep meaning to return to. About exercise, rest, reading and even sleep. Once it's said, the conversation tends to drift on, as if something has just been acknowledged and filed away.

That title's not a typo. The 5-to-9 is the time period before and after the 9-to-5 workday. Social media influencers have racked up millions of views showing off their outside-of-work schedules-#5to9routine has more than 35 million views on TikTok. During these videos, quick cuts of clips show off aspirational mornings and evenings packed with journaling, working out, meditating, cleaning, side hustling, and more. The trend's an offshoot of the " 5am club," which counts Mark Zuckerberg and Michelle Obama as early-rising members.

Programmers today find themselves with a whole new suite of AI tools, from Claude Code to Cursor to Codex. These editors enable engineers to generate entirely artificial lines of code or modify their handwritten code with the assistance of a large language model. There's a term for this type of AI-assisted programming: "vibe coding." Engineers from Meta to Google are embracing a vibe coding approach in their day-to-day work.

As an avid book lover, I'm a sucker for a great e-reader. Yet many of these devices are way too limited to really become a companion device. This is why I loved the TCL Nxtpaper tablet so much; however, the new DuRobo Krono is here to address that tablet's single downfall: it's a pocket e-reader and productivity device that is finally available for preorder.

Since the launch of Power Hours - which takes readers inside the daily routines of highly successful CEOs, founders, investors, and public figures - earlier this year, Business Insider has been asking high achievers a deceptively simple question: How do you actually spend your day? The answers we got were as fascinating as they were varied. To determine which habits were the most prevalent among these leaders, we fed months of Power Hours interviews into ChatGPT and asked it to find the common themes.

"You need a ratio of at least 70% signal, which are the three things, and the 30% can be noise - whatever is going to stop you from getting the three things done," he continued. "So I pick three things I want to get done that day, and I don't let anything get in the way until those three things are done."

The former lawyer turned time management coach Kelly Nolan suggests starting with a commute audit to assess its true impact. Begin by blocking it out on a calendar. Creating a visual representation of how much commuting takes out of your day gives an accurate picture. It's not just about how much free time you have left, it's about seeing how commuting affects other activities in your life.

Instead of displacing employees from their jobs, AI is helping humans perform better at work, leading to some career wins. The job growth rate of occupations with high AI exposure-including office clerks, HR assistants, and data scientists-increased from 1% in pre-COVID-19 years (2015 through 2019) to 1.7% in 2023 and beyond, according to Vanguard's research. Meanwhile, the growth rate of all other jobs declined from 1.1% to 0.8% over the same period.

Did your Christmas morning start off with a Mac under the tree? No matter if you unwrapped a new MacBook, iMac, or Mac mini, that hardware is just the beginning of a gift that will keep on giving. In 2025, there are more apps and games for Apple computers than ever. Here are six we recommend taking a look at.

"They will see me chirp in on some random thread in some random channel," Grimm said. "People will be like, 'How the hell did you see this?'"

Somewhere between endless meetings and half-finished projects, we all went looking for better ways to get things done this year. These are the 2025 titles that helped people stay organized, focused, and finally finish what they started.

For the better part of 2025, agentic AI has been the industry's buzzword. It's defined as "a situation where multiple AI agents work together to complete complex tasks, with minimal oversight or intervention from a human user," as Digiday explains it. The minimal oversight from a human user, however, seems to be the hangup keeping marketers from embracing agentic AI's full autonomy.