The Best of the Best from Our March Newsletters

Can you believe we’re already done with a quarter of 2023? The days are flying by, and there’s so much to do and to learn. We’re truly grateful for the members of the Bureau and how much we work to help one another improve our professional and personal lives. Our Slack conversations are full of useful information and resources. I try to send out the best of these each week in our newsletter. You can get that right in your email by signing up here. But if you are carefully avoiding your inbox as much as possible, here are some of the best links from this month’s newsletters.

Business Operations

We can’t predict the future, but so much of our business success (and our ability to pay our people!) relies on effective forecasting. There are some good tools out there to help avoid the rollercoaster of too much work or not enough. The good folks of Parallax have put together a great list of ways you can keep your work level consistent. Check it out!

Additional business insights: 

• Resource Forecasting Tools for Digital Agencies

• Marketers adapt to serve niche communities as culture fragments, strays from universal water cooler moments

• Run a Reactive Agency? Every Employee Plays a Role in Forecasting

Thoughts on the Workweek

We’ve been talking a lot recently about how long the workweek should be, and it was even the topic of our most recent newsletter. A lot of research is suggesting a four-day week could help companies and employees if it’s done right, though there are still some questions to answer. If you decide to give it a shot, the Harvard Business Review has a handy guide for implementing it well. 

More about less:

• The five-day workweek is dead

• Doing More With Less: Kill Meetings, Consider The Four-Day Work Week

• With a 4-day workweek, you’d get 8,320 hours — that’s 346 days — back

AI

The hottest topic of the year just might be AI, and if you still haven’t tried some of the tools out there, you’re missing out. AI is not only the future, but for many of us, it’s already the present.

Continuing the AI conversation:

• Bringing Generative AI into Creative Cloud with Adobe Firefly

• Five Q & A’s on the potential, and challenges of generative AI and large language models like GPT and others.

Dollars and Sense

Money is always in style to talk about, and between inflation and bank troubles, there’s a lot to keep track of at the moment. NPR gives us a thorough primer on what went down with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and what it means for the finance industry as well as everyone in general. 

Mo’ money talk:

• From groceries to clothes, inflation-weary Americans flock to cheaper products online

• The Incredible Tantrum Venture Capitalists Threw Over Silicon Valley Bank

• Back-to-Back Bank Collapses Came After Deregulatory Push

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year has in store for us. You can keep up on the latest by signing up for the weekly newsletter. But if you prefer to wait, check back here next month to see what else we’ve been learning about!