Angela Gorrell addresses decision fatigue on the pod this week. Listen to this episode to find your way back to gumption.

You don’t have time for this podcast. You have 105 other emails just this morning, and you have 44 minutes till your next thing. (Make that 43 minutes.) But maybe you should skim it? Or maybe you should finalize this afternoon’s agenda? (Why did you schedule that meeting for 3:30?) Or maybe you should just delete a bunch of emails?

If you have too many tasks to do before mid-afternoon, you’re eventually going to suffer decision fatigue—aka, ego depletion, brain degradation, cognitive overload.

Sometimes the choices are big.

I wake up every morning with a weight in my chest—so, yeah, I kind of hate this job. But that other position I’ve been looking at has sucky health insurance. Maybe we could go on my partner’s plan, tho’. But I care about the mission here. Also, my hair’s falling out in the shower.

Other times, the choices are micro.

Should I hit the bathroom now? If I take my laptop with me, is that gross? Should I update my operating system like tech support’s been telling me to? Should I make a third cup of coffee?

But the scale of the choices matters less than the sheer fact of how many you have to make. And the longer the day, the less you can decide.

This week, the Mode/Switch’s intergenerational team—Emily, David, LaShone, Madeline, and I—talk with Dr. Angela Gorrell about her latest book, Braving Difficult Decisions: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do. We’re stans for the book, mostly because Angela redirects attention to what lies beneath decision fatigue.

What’s the deep difficulty in your life that’s making these decisions difficult?

Angela says that that when you look beneath the surface, you find cor, which is Latin for heart and, if you follow the etymology long enough, you get to courage.

If it feels like you don’t have time for this Mode/Switch, let our team make just one decision for you today: put in your AirPods and let the Mode/Switch Pod take you towards courage, even in the teeth of too many choices.

Connect and consult with Dr. Angela Gorrell. She’s responsive to DMs on Instagram. She welcomes you to her website. And, yeah, you should buy her books.

Hey there, and welcome to the Mode/Switch! This week, we make sense of Gallup’s ⁠shockingly low job disengagement numbers⁠. It's tempting to ask, "Are people just lazy?" or "Are jobs just pointless?"

But to improve worker engagement, we need better questions.

Lee C. Camp of the celebrated ⁠No Small Endeavor⁠ podcast joins our roundtable this week to transform how we investigate pointlessness and purpose on the job.

I learned a lot from Lee’s questions about virtue in the workplace. But I also came away convinced that you can’t understand worker disengagement today without intergenerational exchange. Senior leaders, listen up! You need…

• Gen Xer David Wilstermann’s skepticism about corporate “purpose,” and…

• Xennial Emily Bosscher’s quest for meaning through brain fog, and…

• Millennial LaShone Manuel’s critique of exploding task lists, and…

• Gen Z Sheila Aupperlee’s stories about going to grad school while working three jobs—and still looking for some meaning in work.

My cohosts raise the question: Is it possible, in today’s economy, for a job to be anything more than just a job? A lot of people are asking the same thing:

Brene Brown’s turning from the self-help space to⁠ focus on the workplace⁠. Karen Sergeant’s asking about how AI enables us to ⁠rethink the workplace⁠. Meryl Herr’s asking about what to do ⁠When Work Hurts⁠. Anne Helen Peterson’s ⁠recent Substack⁠ engages “The Futile Search for the Bullsh*t-Less Job.”

Look, if you're asking if you should quit your pointless job--or stick it out for the sake of your amazing coworkers, you’re not alone. But I don’t think you can answer those questions till you’ve addressed the one Lee C. Camp raises in this week’s Mode/Switch.

Here’s my professional recommendation. Find a part of your job today that requires only 7% of your brain power, and then do that while hitting up this podcast.

In the surging currents of generative AI, our work-culture team talks with Olajumoke Fatoki. She says the future of work is human. We have much questions.

The world’s most powerful companies are pouring oceans of dollars into large language models and their data centers—and the rest of us tread water and hope for toeholds.

I feel giddy, and I’m not alone. A recent BCG report notes that worker’s moods about AI swing wildly: “The share of employees who feel positive about GenAI rises from 15% to 55% with strong leadership support.” Whoa. If the boss feels hopeful about AI, workers are more likely “to use it regularly, enjoy their jobs, and feel good about their careers.” (But 75% of workers aren’t getting this sort of senior leadership.)

I feel dread and anger and a lot of other unmanageable feelings, and I’m not alone in any of that either. When ChatGPT-5 dropped last week, users had a friggin’ melt down. Open AI had dialed back the model’s sycophancy—its tendency to suck up to users—with the result that some people missed GPT-4, yearning for its sweet-talking ways, like a football player missing a cheerleader girlfriend.

Sure, some soberminded users disliked GPT-5 for legitimate reasons: they had to revise their office workflows—again. That’s obnoxious.

But others seem to be asking, Why the heck isn’t ChatGPT5 calling me Man of the Year any more? (Read more here, especially about Kevin Roose’s idea for a Black Mirror episode about super intelligent suck-ups.)

I’m not sure if AI is a manageably rising tide or a friggin’ tsunami. And I’m wondering, what do managers and their teams need in this AI moment?

Here’s a start. We need courage. We need discernment. We need some humor. And we need a lot of stories about staying human when the current is strong and your toes just barely touch the sand.

We need an intergenerational Mode/Switch conversation.