EDITION 753
18 FEBRUARY 2019

As another week slips by, here are 10 things which caught my attention and may have escaped yours. This newsletter is sent to 50,000+ subscribers each Monday. Please share on social media and forward to your colleagues and friends so they can subscribe, learn and engage. I'd be very grateful if you did.

1. How to ensure praise overshadows criticism. When you get feedback from your line manager or a colleague, it’s tempting to focus on the criticism. After all, that’s where you need to focus if you want to improve. But dwelling on the negative can be debilitating. You also need to make sure you hear the positive. [READ MORE]
    
2. May tells Tories 'history will judge' them on Brexit. The Prime Minister has told Conservative MPs to put aside “personal preferences” and support a Brexit deal in the Commons. Theresa May said “history will judge us all” over the handling of Brexit. However, leaked WhatsApp messages reveal that Steve Baker, of the European Research Group, has said Downing Street and Brussels were pretending to negotiate while “working together to run down the clock to force [May’s] deal through”. The Sunday Times
    
3. What’s money worth if you don’t have time to enjoy it? Most of us spend much of our time working, believing that it will make us money and that money will make us happy in the long run. But we’ve got it all wrong. Research consistently shows that the happiest people use their money to buy time. People who are willing to give up money to gain more free time - by, say, working fewer hours or paying to outsource disliked tasks - experience more fulfilling social relationships, more satisfying careers, and more joy, and overall, live happier lives. The Observer
    
4. A&E wait times worsened in January, despite the mild winter weather. Official figures show just 84.4% of patients were seen by A&E units within the four-hour target in January, versus 86.4% in December. Last month, a major survey revealed poor work-life balance is the number one reason doctors and nurses are leaving the NHS. The NHS needs to hire thousands of healthcare professionals to meet the goals of the government’s ambitious long-term plan. Daily Mail
    
5. We’re all biased, but there’s hope: Eradicating our biases is just about impossible. And that’s likely for the best. We use assumptions based on previous experience to get through our lives efficiently. But, if left unchecked, biases can go too far. While we can’t eliminate our biases, we can keep them under control. One way to start? Spend time with lots of different people and things. The more diverse our experiences, the greater range of assumptions we can make. Daily Express
    
6. Britain's richest man quits in tax avoidance plan. Britain’s richest man, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has been planning to avoid up to £4bn in tax after moving to Monaco. The outspoken Brexiteer, who built up the chemicals giant Ineos, has reportedly been working with the accountant PwC on the tax avoidance plan which would deprive the Treasury of up to £4bn. He was knighted less than a year ago for his services to business and investment. The Sunday Times
    
7. Traffic jams ‘cost drivers a week of their lives’. Motorists on the UK's most congested road speed an average of two and a half days a year sitting in traffic. Taxi drivers try to avoid the worst offender - London's A406 North Circular Road from Chiswick Roundabout to Hanger Lane - "at all costs", says one firm. Traffic data firm Inrix said drivers lost the equivalent of a week each to jams last year. Congestion is estimated to have cost the UK an estimated £8bn in 2018. BBC
    
8. New AI project ‘too dangerous to release’. A new piece of artificial intelligence (AI) software that can generate plausible-sounding text is too dangerous for public consumption, the Elon Musk-backed non-profit research firm OpenAI has ruled. GPT2 was trained using ten million sample articles and given a sentence or two as a starting point can continue the texts in the same styles. The Guardian
    
9. Desert Island Discs named as best show. A poll of radio industry experts carried out by Radio Times has proposed BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs as the greatest radio programme of all time. Currently presented by Lauren Laverne, the one-on-one chat show has been broadcasting since 1942. Long-running soap opera The Archers was voted the second-greatest show. The Independent
    
10. The bottom line. Britain imported 264,000 barrels of oil from the US every day last month, making America Britain’s biggest source of oil for the first time since the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Washington sent shipments to Britain to head off shortages. The Times