FastCompany Magazine

We can all agree that the conference room is probably not where your best ideas are born. Which is why taking a run is far from a waste of time.

The Takeaway: Often, the most productive meetings take place outside the office.

How A Little Graciousness Can Do Wonders For Your Career

Tom Chiarella recently wrote an ode to graciousness for Esquire. Any aspiring lady or gentleman would do well to take it to heart:

Do not mistake mere manners for graciousness. Manners are rules. Helpful, yes. But graciousness reflects a state of being; it emanates from your inventory of self. Start with what you already possess. You, for instance, have a job. Live up to that.

Read more about what it means to be gracious here.

4 Reasons To Love Your Work—And The People You Work With

1.Your customers are people.

2. You work with—not for—your manager.

3. You actually like meetings.

4. You enjoy being at work.

Fast Company’s Drake Baer explains them here.

One-Minute Email Triage For Those Kinda Sorta Useful Messages

Unroll.me is a service that, in a sense, puts health monitors on your inbox, shows you how it’s running, and asks you which email sources you can live without, or with. 

Here are a few alternatives:

- Nutshell Mail

- Otherinbox

- Outlook.com

Read more about Unroll.me and email triage here.

[Image: Flickr user Calypsocom]

Passion Projects Done Right: Rainn Wilson Ponders The Runaway Success of SoulPancake

The Office’s Rainn Wilson wanted to create a personality-packed place to intelligently debate life’s big questions. SoulPancake-both a passion project and a brand with a higher purpose-does both.

Wilson, whom you probably know from his role as “crazy dork” Dwight Schrute on The Office, decided to make a place for people who want to debate (intelligently) about life’s Big Questions.

It’s also extremely popular, drawing more than a million views a month. There’s a best-selling book with glowing Amazon reviews. They’ve got SoulPancake meetups, a dedicated YouTube channel, and a deal with Oprah.

“You need to go a little deeper than “How can we make money” because there’s 68,000 people out there who are saying ‘how can we make money on the Internet,’” Wilson robot-voices.

“If you can follow your passion and fill a need then you will eventually make money and you’ll be successful, but more importantly, you’ll be fulfilled.”

The Takeaway: You’re weird. So are other people. Make something for them—and for you—and the money will follow.

You can read the full story here.

[Image: Flickr user John Lambert Pearson]

The 6 Best Alternative To Do Apps

Here are some upcoming apps to suit all personalities, from the type-A’s to the guilt free procrastinators.

Mobile to-do lists such as Clear, Evernote, and Google Keep get a lot of love online, but they’re not alone when it comes to high-quality apps to keep track of everything you need to do in a day.

In fact, a simple “to do list” app search on Google yields 1.9 billion results, a lofty number to sift through if you’re already drowning in tasks. Thankfully, there are a few gems rising to the top of the to-do list category, including these six:

For the guilt-free procrastinator
Do It (Tomorrow) HD (iOS/Android - FREE; iPad - $4.99)

For the team leader
AnyList (iOS - FREE)

For the goal-setter
Lift (iOS - FREE)

For the task-master
Doit.im (iOS/Android - FREE)

For the inbox ninja
Handle (iOS - FREE)

For the big planner
Trello (iOS/Android/Windows - FREE)

What’s your favorite to-do list app?

Here is a sneak peek of 8 Lessons For Innovation And Success From Chef Mario Batali

Famed restaurateur and chef Mario Batali took the stage with Fast Company Editorial Director Tyler Gray at our Innovation Uncensored event last week in New York.

Batali shares some of the business lessons he’s learned over the years, especially now as expands his restaurant Babbo in the east, his Mozza Restaurant Group in the west, and his Italian market Eataly in Chicago, London, and other cities.

Here are a few snippets from the conversation:

On Nurturing Talent: ”We don’t hire executive chefs ever. We hire line cooks and prep cooks and wine waiters and busboys and waiters—and they become chefs and sous chefs and sommeliers and general managers and service directors.”

On What His Approach To Italian Cooking & Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco Have In Common: ”Sometimes renovation is innovation.”

On Success: ”If I were going to whisper something into my younger self, I would just say, ‘Keep your head down, work hard, and listen to whosever is ahead of you because you’re going to learn something from them.’ And that’s kinda what I did.’”

You can find all 8 tips here or listen to the audio of the full interview here.

[Photos by Nicky Digital]

4 Ways To Prevent Burnout Before It’s Too Late

This is what happens when you log one too many Red Bull-fueled 80-hour work weeks:

I remember coming home and curling up into a ball. I was so emotionally and physically exhausted, I couldn’t even move. My productivity was cut to nothing. The next day at the office, I found myself just staring into my computer, for hours. No movement, just staring.

That’s Andrew Dumont, the creator of Strideapp.com, describing his first startup experience. Just pushing through wasn’t an option—dude was burnt out.

Understanding burnout

• Exhaustion: feeling over-extended by your work
• Depersonalization: feeling alienated from your work
• Personal accomplishment: feeling like you can never get enough done

Preventing burnout

John Coates’ book, The Hour Between Dog And Wolf, goes deep into the physiology of stress. In it he observes that exhaustion, fatigue, and anxiety are all “messages sent from our body telling us what actions we should take”—which means that we need to listen closely. To get an idea of how, read our excerpt.

As the Burnout Inventory suggests, burnout isn’t only physical, but also emotional.

An antidote, then, is to do work that’s meaningful.

Thing is, you won’t have time to ponder the meaning of your days if you’re filled up with meaningless tasks.

If we don’t carve out the time to reflect, we sure won’t.

And remember: busy is the new lazy.

Finally, you won’t be able to think unless you eat well.

According to Dumont, “eating the right food can help extend your runway.”

And eating with the right people can extend your network. 

Avoiding Burnout

[Image: Flickr user Jan]

Using Social Media To Make Offline Products More Meaningful

We may have pushed the digital image to its shareable limit, but there is still something nice about that framed desk photo (or album, or personalized tennis shoes).

With Google Street View, Yelp, Foursquare and a host of other location-aware technologies, we have successfully uploaded the world onto the Internet. It’s not enough, though, to have achieved augmented reality—the hyped tech trend that developers and entrepreneurs enthused over back in 2009. Now, as we stream the human experience 24-7, through our mobile devices and social services like Facebook and Instagram, the process is being, yet again, flipped on its head.

First, Some Cultural Context

Today’s human experience has been uploaded as a hazy, sutro-filtered snapshot, a carefully curated bite-sized moment to be easily digested and then swiped away by ever-hungry thumbs…While easily consumed, none of this is meaningful or exists in our very real world.

Bringing the Feed Offline

What today’s social retailers are getting right is that the most compelling content to consumers these days is the media created by the consumers themselves. Like a photo booth or Splash Mountain snapshot, the product is compelling because it captures a story and memory. 

Yes, people’s lives are now instantaneous and attractive—and as people can better document their real-world experiences, they’re finding new ways to bring their lives, now shared in Facebook and edited in Instagram, back off the news feed and into their surroundings. Services like Blurb turns your Facebook photos into photo books.

Two fundamental components that drive companies around this model:

- These online social interactions are inherent in modern relationships and people have, through technology, become much more creative.

- If companies allow their customers to feel empowered in both aspects, the product could be as compelling and as viral as the media that personalizes it.

Beyond the Wall

While our interactions have become increasingly casual, we’re no less sincere in our relationships and interactions.

But up until now, brands and companies have been aiming to bring in revenue by drumming up conversations and interactions around these events instead of developing products directly from these conversations.

The ultimate goal for these and future companies is to turn these social feeds into a product and revenue source. This is the most meaningful content on the web today, and the race is on.

—Kealan Lennon is the CEO of Cleverbug. Find him on Twitter at @kealanlennon.

[Image: Flickr user Kris Krug]