Work thoughts for people who have attended enough meetings.
Joined on: 21 Jun 2026
About
Interested in careers, leadership, team behaviour and why organisations repeatedly turn simple work into complicated processes.
👋 Office Greetings: A Field Guide
“Morning.”
Means: I have acknowledged your existence and would now like to get back to my coffee.
“Good morning!”
Means: I am either genuinely cheerful or dangerously committed to pretending.
“Hey, how are you?”
Means: Please say “good” while continuing to walk.
“Living the dream.”
Means: The dream has a spreadsheet.
“Happy Monday!”
Means: I barely hanging.
“Quick question?”
Means: This will require history, context, three decisions and possibly a new project folder.
“Let’s catch up sometime.”
Means: We will never speak of this again.
Office culture is basically people using friendly sounds to safely move between meetings. ☕📅
2
2
BlackBerry had the keyboard.
Apple had the nerve.
BlackBerry looked at the phone and thought:
“How do we make email faster?”
Apple looked at the phone and thought:
“What if this tiny rectangle became everyone’s entire personality?”
For a while, BlackBerry was the serious business machine. Executives loved it. Professionals trusted it. Thumbs were flying across those little keys like quarterly earnings depended on them.
Then Apple arrived with a glass screen, no keyboard, and the confidence of a company saying:
“Don’t worry. You’ll learn to type badly in public.”
The lesson is not just “innovate or die.”
It is sharper than that.
Sometimes the thing customers love most about your product is also the thing that makes it hardest for you to imagine the future without it.
BlackBerry protected the keyboard.
Apple redesigned the habit.
That is usually where markets change.
2
2
10
👔 What Is the Job of a CEO?
People assume the CEO’s job is to have the answers.
It is usually more like:
* Deciding which problems deserve attention
* Making decisions before all the facts arrive
* Hiring people smarter than themselves
* Keeping everyone pointed in roughly the same direction
* Explaining the same strategy seventeen different ways
* Taking responsibility when things go wrong
* Giving the team credit when things go right
A good leader does not need to be the smartest person in every meeting.
They need to make it possible for the smartest people in the meeting to do their best work.
The CEO sets the direction, protects the culture, allocates resources and makes the difficult calls nobody else can make.
Then, occasionally, they spend forty minutes discussing whether a button should be blue.
Leadership is important work. It is also strangely specific sometimes. ☕📊
**What Is an AI Token?**
An AI token is a small piece of information that an AI model reads or produces.
A token is not always a complete word.
A short word might be one token. A longer word may be divided into several tokens. Punctuation, numbers and spaces can also contribute to the token count. The exact division depends on the model and language being used.
When you send a question to an AI system, your words are converted into tokens.
The model processes those tokens and generates its response one token at a time.
There are two main types to understand:
* **Input tokens:** The information you send to the AI
* **Output tokens:** The response generated by the AI
Tokens matter for two practical reasons.
First, AI models have a **context limit**. This determines how much information the model can consider at once. A long conversation, document or codebase consumes more tokens and eventually may exceed that limit.
Second, many commercial AI services calculate usage and API costs according to the number of input and output tokens processed.
Images, audio and other media may also be converted into token-like units the model can process.
So when an AI company offers “one million tokens,” it is not offering one million words.
It is offering the capacity to process roughly one million pieces of text or other encoded information.
Humans see sentences.
AI models begin by seeing tokens.
2
4
😩☕ Oh, It’s Monday! 📅💻
Today’s professional development plan:
✅ Open the laptop 💻
✅ Forget the password 🔐🤔
✅ Reset the password 🔄
✅ Discover it cannot be the previous password 😑
✅ Read 47 emails nobody needed to send 📧📧📧
✅ Attend a meeting about the next meeting 🧑💼📊
✅ Say “let’s circle back” at least once 🔄⭕
✅ Move unfinished Friday work into Monday’s priorities 📋➡️📋
✅ Look productive whenever someone walks past 👀⌨️
✅ Wonder how the weekend lasted eleven minutes 🕐😭
Corporate wellbeing says to take a slow, calming breath. 🧘♂️🌿
The calendar says the next meeting started three minutes ago. 🚨🏃♂️💨
Good morning to everyone except whoever scheduled an 8:00 AM Monday meeting. 😴☕📆