Yesterday, I was shocked to read the news about a leading TikTok influencer with 9m followers, a Netflix series to her name, and a $20m net worth. She is Alix Earle, and she caused a bit of an internet kerfuffle this week when she said that in her 25 years on the planet, she has never read a book. Not one. None. Zilch. Well, apart from the fact that she thinks she might have read something by Dr Seuss.

Unsurprisingly, she received something of a backlash. One commenter said, “Not having read a book since elementary school is not ditsy and cute, it’s embarrassing.“ Another commented, “That can’t be true. You went to college; you read books then surely.” The suggestion made by Alix Earle might or might not be true. The statement may have been designed purely to attract publicity. In which case it worked.

However, it has raised the fact that many commenters supported reading, although a few praised her for dispensing with books. Despite the growth of a variety of forms of entertainment, including a never-ending stream of TikTok videos, it appears that many people still love reading.

Indeed, according to the Publishers Association, we have recently had a record year for books. Sales are up and the book market continues to grow. Alix Earle might not be reading, but plenty of people do.

Even so, some issues are worrying. According to a YouGov poll last year, four out of every ten people hadn’t read a book in the previous 12 months. Similarly, data released by the National Literacy Trust show that in the past decade, reading among younger people has been dropping.

Reading is good for you. It doesn’t matter too much what you read. Reading itself seems useful. A review just published in the journal Psychological Medicine shows that reading brings health benefits. These include lower stress levels, a reduced risk of dementia, and slower cognitive decline. In addition, the authors showed that reading improves attention and memory, as well as “executive control”. That’s the way the brain organises everything it needs to do. Furthermore, neurological studies show that reading positively changes the structure of your brain. There is a significant link between reading and good mental health.

It has long been known that reading helps improve exam results. Research in Australia and the USA found that children who grow up with books around them at home do better across a range of skills. Other studies have shown that when children read for pleasure, their maths skills improve too.

Reading clearly has a range of benefits, from improving educational attainment to developing skills and supporting overall mental wellbeing. We all started to read when we were at school – unless you are a TikTok influencer, perhaps. Yet in adulthood, only around half of the population reads regularly. Despite a small recent uptick, the Reading Agency says reading has declined over the past decade.

It is possible we could see a further decline, as more and more people use artificial intelligence to summarise things for them. The very tool that provides such convenience could also be reducing our skills while harming our mental wellbeing.

A far better way of using AI is to ask it to recommend books for you to read. Tell it your preferences, give it examples of books you have loved, and it can tell you what else might interest you.

You could also use AI to help you schedule regular reading. One reason people tell me they don’t read as much as they used to is a lack of time. But there is no lack of time. We have the same number of hours in the day as we did as children, when we read books daily. What has changed are our habits. Instead of reading every day, we have replaced that habit with something else, like scrolling endlessly through TikTok. The habit you learned at junior school has not gone anywhere. It is simply waiting for you to pick it up again. AI can help you choose the book. The reading is up to you.

Just finding half an hour a week to read will help you think more clearly and cope with work pressure better. And it is linked to a healthier brain as you age. So here is a small challenge for this weekend. Tell an AI tool about two books you have loved and ask it to suggest three more. Then put 30 minutes in your diary on Monday to start the first one, and treat it like any other appointment you would not cancel.

If you want to pass the habit on, you could do no better than support the late, great Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. It sends a free book every month to children from birth until they start school. Its whole purpose is to make sure no child grows up with just one half-remembered Dr Seuss book to their name.

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At home, my office is near the kitchen, and the other day, I decided it was time for a sneaky snack. But as I took the few steps from my office towards the cake tin, I realised my knees were hurting. Normally, my knees don’t hurt, so I wondered what had gone wrong. My wife quickly diagnosed the issue. She said, “That’s the first time you have moved from your office all morning. No wonder your knees hurt.”

It is a reminder of that phrase, “use it or lose it”. A completely sedentary lifestyle is not good for our muscles or our heart. Sports scientists have pointed out that when people stop playing professional sport, several physical issues tend to crop up because of the lifestyle change. Staying physically active helps prevent illness in such individuals. 

The same appears to be true for our mind. Over a decade ago, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota found that we protect our brains from age-related decline if we keep using them. British researchers confirmed a few years ago that keeping our brains sharp reduces the likelihood of later-life memory loss or thinking decline. In other words, keep using your brain, and it protects you psychologically. The “use it or lose it” concept applies as much to mental well-being as it does to physical health.

Worryingly, the World Health Organization predicted that the increased sedentary lifestyle we are living is likely to lead to 500m cases of preventable disease by 2030. The WHO also says that increasing physical activity could avoid up to 5m deaths each year.

It is worth thinking about what would happen if we also stopped using our brains at the same rate we have been stopping physical activity. Our bodies are functioning less effectively because we lack movement. The chances are that we’ll also end up with psychological and neurological disorders if we stop being active with our minds.

And guess what? We are already losing our minds. Every day I witness people who have given up thinking. They are using artificial intelligence to do their thinking for them. They don’t question what AI has given them. They just use it because it is convenient and saves time. 

When I was at school, we had to remember things “by rote”, reciting things over and over again until they were embedded in our brains. But what is the point of a child trying to remember the names of the six wives of Henry VIII when a quick Google search will tell them? Come on, admit it. You have outsourced your memory to Google. You don’t even bother to remember things because you know Google is your extended memory. Indeed, a Columbia University psychologist found that Google has actually changed the way our memory works.

So what if we all start doing the same thing with artificial intelligence? What if we outsource our thinking to AI? Some people are already doing this. And even if you are not doing it yet, you will soon. After all, when Google came out, you still tried to remember things until you realised that Google could do it for you. We are likely to go the same way with AI. In fact, it looks like we have already started to transfer thinking to AI systems. Researchers at Microsoft found that when we trust artificial intelligence, we think less critically.

I was pondering this issue yesterday when this Guardian article landed on my desk. In it, an Edinburgh academic has raised the same problem. Professor Devi Sridhar wonders what will happen if we all give up thinking. 

Of course, this concern is nothing new. Plato has Socrates warning that writing would destroy people’s memories. When calculators arrived in classrooms, teachers thought children would never learn arithmetic. Each time, the doom-mongers were largely wrong, because handing off a routine task freed our brains for something more demanding. So why should AI be any different? Because this time, what we are handing over is not the storage of facts or the donkey work of sums. It is the judgement itself. Google gave you the names of Henry VIII’s wives, but it still left you to decide what that meant. AI will happily do the deciding too, if you let it. 

None of us can change what society at large will do about this. If we wait for something to happen, we may well have damaged our brains. So we have to look after ourselves now, because nobody else will.

That means we have to start arguing with artificial intelligence. When you get it to do something, cast a critical eye over it and don’t just accept what it says. This will not only help you maximise your returns from AI, but also keep your brain engaged. 

I work with a variety of AI tools every day. They might be getting fed up with me because I keep challenging them. I have a think about what they say, sometimes tell them they are wrong, or argue a point with them. I don’t usually treat what AI produces as the “complete answer” but as a starting point for a debate. It is what we do with human colleagues, so why would we not do it with AI? It certainly means I have to keep thinking.

So here is your challenge for this week. Next time AI hands you an answer, do three things before you use it. Ask yourself what it might have got wrong. Check one claim independently. And rewrite the key point it has made, in your own words. If you run a team, make these rules for them too. It takes a couple of minutes, about as long as my walk to the cake tin. And just as my knees told me that I hadn’t moved all morning, the first time you argue with AI, you might notice how long it’s been since your brain had a proper workout. Tell me in the comments how you get on. See how generous I am being with your brain by asking you to think for a moment?

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The other evening I went to a comedy club in Clapham, London, to watch the top TV comedian and winner of “Strictly Come Dancing”, Chris McCausland. He was performing alongside Rachel Parris, another skilled comedian trying out fresh material. At first, I couldn’t understand why the tickets were only £8 when, in London, you typically pay around £35 to see just one live comedian. 

At the start of the show, it became obvious. Chris told this small audience of just 40 people crammed into a tiny theatre above a pub that he was rehearsing for the recording of the Christmas special of a TV show the next day. During the run-through of his material, a couple of times Chris paused and said, “OK, I need to work on that a bit more”. He was clearly gauging the audience response and realising that his joke needed improving in some way. 

It’s not unusual for leading comedians to practise their new material before they go out on “the circuit” of theatres and comedy venues around the country. Indeed, The Comedy Store in London’s West End has a regular “Old Rope Night” where you can watch major stars practising new material for a ticket around a tenner. 

Before the Clapham comedy show, I had been talking about one of my previous jobs as a stage electrician in a regional theatre, The Yvonne Arnaud, in Guildford, Surrey. There I worked with the TV actor John Inman during the pre-West End run of the play “Charley’s Aunt”. After he had already been through weeks of rehearsal, I asked him why he was doing yet another one late on Sunday night, before the show opened the next day. He agreed that he had rehearsed the play many times over, and then added, “But I have never done it here”.  He went on to explain that he wanted to get used to the building’s acoustics, the size of the stage, the timing of the walk to the dressing room, and so on. 

After my theatre days, I worked in PR at Polydor Records and met some of the world’s leading pop and rock stars. You might imagine a world of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll”. But the real stars let outsiders think that. In truth, they spent hours practising. 

Now, I hope you can forgive me for reminiscing like this. But there is a point. In conversation with some students last week, they asked me how I managed to write several books. They wanted to know how I could just sit there and let words pour out onto the paper or screen. They asked because I was quizzing them on the process they used to write their assignments. 

They told me they often faced a blank screen and didn’t know what to write. They admitted they could do that for hours and then had to rush to finish their work close to the deadline. I suggested this was inefficient, as it inevitably would produce poorer results. I told them about one book I wrote in just one week. “All I had to do,” I said, “was write about 10,000 words a day”. That prompted their questioning about how I could do that.

My answer was simple: “Practice”. I can write quickly because I have written millions of words over the years, often to very tight deadlines. I practise it every single day. When all a student does is try to write a 2,000-word assignment, and that is the only writing they have done all term, is it any wonder they have trouble?

Whether you are a writer, a pop star, a theatre actor or a comedian, you cannot make progress without plenty of practice. Plus, as I have observed, the people at the top of their game are the ones who practise the most. 

Yet, as a Gallup study revealed a few years ago, business leaders tend not to practise essential skills. When it comes to feedback for junior colleagues, team leaders typically do so annually. How good are you at something when you only do it once a year? Be honest..! Yet, employees want feedback every week. Doing that weekly means business leaders get more practice and therefore improve their skills. It is not difficult, is it?

There are many things we are required to do in business that we do not practice enough. Data analysis might only happen once a quarter when you review recent results. Strategic planning seems to happen annually at best, and for some businesses, only once every five years. Time management pops up only once a year when people set their New Year’s resolution to manage their time better. I am sure you can think of other examples.

Now, you might be thinking you simply don’t have time to practise data analysis or strategic planning every day. But practice does not mean doing the whole thing each time. A comedian doesn’t rehearse an entire tour every night, and a pop star doesn’t record the full album at each session. They work on it one bit at a time. 

You could start right now by listing the skills your work depends on and how often you actually use them. Any you do only occasionally could improve if you make them part of a regular routine, ten minutes at a time. Practise these things a little each day, and you’ll soon get better at them, and so will your business.

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The other day, I received a lovely email from a colleague at work, telling me how much I had helped them. It was a touching note and stood out from the usual bunch of messages, such as those that ask when a report will be delivered or demanding a meeting. Indeed, the email was so unusual that I printed it out to keep. 

Having those words in print makes them seem more permanent. I can put the document in a folder and see it on my shelf. If I just left the email in the system, it would head into the frightful farrago that is Microsoft Outlook. I might never see it again…!

As I printed it out, I was reminded of a consultancy client from several years ago whose CEO printed every email that came his way. He would then handwrite his answers beneath the message and have his PA type them up as his reply. You might think this was rather quaint and old-fashioned. But it was a system that helped him lead a £250m business. 

I asked him why he used such an antiquated method of communication, and he said that emails were “not real” when they were on the screen. He suggested they were just temporary impressions flashing before his eyes. When they were printed out, they were “real”. 

Gen Z expresses a similar idea these days. Of all the generations, they print out more pictures than any other. A recent blog post on the Kodak Printer website said demand for printing photos taken with smartphones is so high that Fujifilm has to build a new factory. The market is predicted to grow to $6 billion in the next seven years. And you thought the days of printing out pictures were long gone.

Think again. It’s because the picture on your phone is transient. Besides the fact that it can be accidentally deleted and the memory lost forever, the temporary nature of the image on the screen has little meaning. It’s here now, and a second later it is gone as you swipe past. 

Talking to students recently, I was reminded of the need to create meaning through permanence. During my classes, I give them plenty of exercises and practical things to do. The last thing they want is to hear me droning on for two hours!  In recent weeks, I have been running workshops and giving students printed workbooks with “fill-in-the-gaps” sections. For decades in the training business, that’s just been “normal” for me. At the end of a lecture recently, one student asked if they could take away the worksheets they had completed. 

When I told them that was the whole point, they said it was really helpful, since they would have a written reminder of the workshop. They said it made the in-class exercises more memorable to them that way. 

New research from the University of Chicago has now confirmed the value of doing things that add meaning. They found that adding the option of permanence made anything more significant to the individual.  People who were asked to draw something were more motivated by the greater significance if they knew their artwork would be saved. If the art was going to be transient, it had no meaning, and the participants in the study lacked motivation to create it. 

That explains why a CEO wants to print emails and why Gen Z members need their photos printed. Without permanence, the items become less significant and lose their real meaning.

This should come as no surprise. Humans live in a physical world, and to help us navigate it, we have four million touch sensors in our bodies. We are primed for physicality. Yet we spend much of our working day in a virtual existence. A PDF is not really a document, is it? But when it is printed and bound, then it becomes real. Ever since we have had computers, total paper demand has increased. The forecast for paper used by computer users is that it will grow by a further 8.5% by 2030. This further indicates that even though we don’t need things printed because they are on our computers, we still print things out to help us derive meaning.

In the workplace, we can make small changes that help people attach significance and meaning to what they do, thereby increasing motivation. For example, “workbooks” or “activity sheets” for regular meetings could help. They can make discussions and associated notes feel real. Of course, printing can be wasteful, clutter an office, and reduce your company’s sustainability. If people worry about the sustainability of paper use, then the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) offers plenty of good advice.  

We can also make other small changes to help people create more meaning through a sense of permanence, with less paper. Badges and stickers to associate people and tasks may help. So could photos of events and meetings displayed on the office walls. Here is one thing to try this week: at your next team meeting, print a single page that captures what was decided and who owns each action, and pin it where everyone passes it. It costs one sheet of paper, yet it turns a meeting discussion that could have evaporated into something people can see, touch, and return to. That is the whole point. Permanence is not about printing more. It is about choosing the few things worth making real.

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Last week, I watched BBC Newsnight when Lord Toby Harris said we should all be stocking up on tinned food and bottled water. Lord Harris chairs the National Preparedness Commission, which advises the Government and the Civil Service on how the country should prepare for emergencies. On Newsnight, Lord Harris said most of us are unaware of the significant risk to daily life in the UK from Russian drones, for example. He said we were closer to a major war in Europe than at any other time in the past 60 years.

That all sounds rather scary, so most people do the proverbial “fingers in their ears” and sing “La, la, la” while hoping it all goes away or that somebody else will sort things out. Yet conflict isn’t the only problem. We’re facing major changes, with disasters like avalanches in Europe and floods in Nepal attributed to global warming. And that is before you even consider the growing number of attacks created by artificial intelligence, which are starting to appear uncontrolled. Some worry that AI is “going off the rails”, which could lead to chaos.

Then, yesterday, the UK Government announced that we should stock up on food because significant weather events are likely in the coming months that could prevent us from leaving our homes for several days. And the Dutch Central Bank has moved billions of Euros of Gold in preparation for an impending crisis. Perhaps it is time to invest in a new book, Disaster Prepping For Dummies.

Has the world gone bonkers, or should we be worried? Research from the University of Houston found that people likely to worry and be “preppers”, ready for a doomsday scenario, appear to have a specific personality type with low levels of “agreeableness”. This is one of the five personality components that tends to make people blunt and self-interested. They get triggered by anything that could threaten them as individuals. The rest of us, with higher levels of agreeableness, want to rub along well with others. As such, we are unlikely to want to “prep” because it would demonstrate self-interest over the common good.

In business, this means leaders are also unlikely to want their companies to prepare for impending doom because it would show they care more about themselves than their colleagues. At the same time, you’d probably aim to prevent panic among your staff.

However, you also wouldn’t want your business itself to be in a state of panic should these emergencies materialise. After all, a senior power engineer revealed yesterday that power cuts in the UK are only a matter of time. Is your business ready for several days without power?

Ultimately, it is all about language. “Preppers” are preparing for “disaster”. But a business leader who does the same thing would call it “being agile”. Similarly, a “prepper” is doing a one-off act of preparation for a specific emergency. However, a business could frame it as a routine item, as regular as a financial audit or a software update. 

Another way to deal with potential disaster in a business is to focus on the impacts, not the emergency itself. Data on “downtime” or “service levels” will help employees consider ways of ensuring these are not negatively affected. They are “prepping” without thinking of it that way.

You can also help staff be ready for problems by building different ways of doing things into a routine. For example, you can set aside half an hour each week to do a particular process on paper, rather than on a computer. This provides some relief from the tedium of being online all the time. It also builds resilience into the organisation. When the power goes out, people are ready and able to do things on paper. 

Preparing for disaster does not have to focus on a negative idea. Governments and local authorities worldwide say we will face real emergencies soon. But we need to be ready without panicking. We might need to stock up on food and water, but there’s much more we can do in business to prepare for problems. Think of it as building an agile company that is highly resilient. That’s much more positive than preparing for impending doom, even though it’s the same thing.

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This weekend I will avoid going into the centre of my local town, Reading. That’s because it is “Reading Festival” weekend, when over 100,000 visitors descend upon the place. At an average of £300 a ticket, they must really love being with one another in a muddy field. 

People who go to the festival want to experience live music with other loyal fans. They form a community of music lovers who will share festival experiences for years to come. Indeed, I still recall being with friends listening to Mungo Jerry play In the Summer Time, when they headlined the first-ever “Surrey Free Fest”. The reason for my recall of this occasion is revealed in new research from Australia. It has demonstrated that our memory of specific personal events, known as episodic memory, is better when we are in a social situation. 

No matter how many individuals spend their days with their heads bent over their phones in some isolated world, humans still crave being in groups together. That was highlighted this week in the latest episode of the BBC TV series Dragons’ Den. Towards the end of the programme, Louise Truman pitched her business, Plotpackers. It is a travel business that lets solo travellers join a group of like-minded people. 

The idea for a community of travellers was borne out of a need for safety for people travelling alone, following Louise’s experience of being assaulted while she was on holiday by herself. During the questioning by the “dragons”, Steven Bartlett said that he had been looking for something that could help create community during what he called “a loneliness epidemic”. Along with Deborah Meaden, they snapped up 10% of the travel firm for £120,000. Clearly, multimillionaire businesspeople see significant value in community.

I emphasised this in a session this week with students doing a work placement project.  I asked how their placements were going and what they had learned about doing business. One student was working with a local gym. She told me the business owners continually emphasised that their members were part of a community of people who preferred that gym to larger establishments where they felt isolated. Another student said the cake-making company they worked with depended almost entirely on a local community doing word-of-mouth marketing. A further student pointed out that the beauty firm she worked with focused on building a community of like-minded customers.

I asked the students what one thing they learned from their companies they could carry forward into their own business careers. Everyone in the class said the same thing – create and use a real-world community of customers. The students had realised that being with others, “IRL” (in real life) and sharing common experiences is a powerful force in helping businesses thrive.

Many business people I speak with, though, believe they can create their “community” using social media. But that’s not real. When we scroll through Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, we are spectators, not participants. We watch other people’s experiences from the outside instead of living one together. A shared experience creates a memory you both hold. A post you scroll past creates nothing you keep.

Indeed, this is reflected in the latest data on social media usage from Statista’s recent analysis. It shows that the main reason people use “social” media is pure entertainment. Social interaction and meeting people rank near the bottom of the list. 

So, rather than trying to improve your “number of likes”, your “impression number” or your “engagement score”, perhaps it is time to reconsider “IRL”. Indeed, a recent YouGov study has shown the significance of real-world advertising, such as posters on billboards. It found that real-world advertising experiences were a powerful trigger for talking about the company or product with family and friends. In other words, those real-world advertisements were a talking point within a physical community, not an online one.

We all need a community of friends for a laugh or support, and we can all recall past events we shared with a community of others. That’s why, as my students discovered this week, a real-world community of customers can be the foundation for a thriving business. So this week, do one thing to build yours. Host a customer evening, run a workshop, sponsor a local event, or simply get your best customers in the same room. Start with one gathering. Unless, of course, you are at the Reading Festival and are too busy sharing the musical experience.

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The world is drying up. Yesterday we learned that the mighty Danube is so low that there is not enough water to cool nuclear power plants along its course. The day before, we were told that the drought in Central America is taking greater hold, causing problems in the Panama Canal. Much of the UK has been officially in a drought for several weeks. However, I thought rescue was on the way when I heard a water company director being interviewed on the radio.

He proudly announced that work should start soon on building a new massive reservoir in Oxfordshire. Whoopee, I thought. But the answer to the interviewer’s next question stopped me in my tracks. “When will it be delivering water to the system?” he asked. The director’s answer was “In 2040”. I thought I had misheard, but the radio presenter confirmed my thinking by asking why it takes 14 years to get water from a reservoir. The water company boss appeared to avoid answering the question.

I know it is complicated, but a reservoir is not much more than a big hole in the ground. Why does it take 14 years? You could ask the same for HS2, the UK’s new “high speed” train line. It will save travellers between London and Birmingham less time than they might queue in the buffet car for a coffee. Yet it will not be open to passengers until 2039, some 27 years after it was given the go-ahead. Compare that with the world’s longest road tunnel in Norway, which was built 30 years ago in less than five years.

The problem here is not bureaucratic Britain. Nor is it the time taken for legal challenges, nor “health and safety gone mad”. But beneath all those explanations lies another problem: accountability. Nobody, other than a journalist on the radio, seems to question why a reservoir takes 14 years to deliver some water. As a result, not a soul appears to be held accountable. Delays in the construction of HS2 are bound up in decisions made by groups of people and an array of committees, meaning that nobody is really accountable.

True, bosses often say “the buck stops with me”. But they are not really accountable for the plethora of small delays that ultimately create bottlenecks and hold-ups. The people really responsible have a boss who takes on the accountability and passes that to another boss who then becomes accountable to a manager up the line and so on. The result is that the person who ought to be accountable for delays and problems has passed that accountability to someone else who can’t actually deal with the difficulties causing the lengthy delays. The project is swimming in treacle.

You’ve probably worked out by now that I get annoyed by delays and problems for which people seem to have no accountability. “Nothing to do with me,” is the mantra in many workplaces. However, my level of irritation seems to be shared by many.

According to a recent Ipsos study of “digital authenticity”, a lack of accountability is a significant problem. The study showed that “human accountability” was required by 95% of people. However, only 56% of respondents felt brands achieved accountability. This 39% gap between expectations and experience was the biggest issue for brands, according to the study conducted for the software company, Sitecore. The study also found accuracy and honesty to be significant customer concerns. They do not always perceive honesty, with a 23% gap between expectations and reality.

The research shows that our customers want us to be honest and accountable for what we do. That should come as no surprise. What is concerning is the level of the gap between what customers want and what they experience. Customers do not always perceive businesses as entirely honest, and the accountability gap is even more striking. As businesses hand more decisions and customer interactions to AI, knowing which human is ultimately accountable becomes more important, not less.

Earlier this year, the Center for Creative Leadership explained how to create a culture of accountability. Managers of large infrastructure projects, in particular, might enjoy reading it. One element of increasing accountability, the article says, is allowing staff to experiment and innovate. Who knows, by doing that, they may discover how to dig a hole in the ground quicker than 14 years.

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Somehow, I missed the eclipse the other evening. I was travelling and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time to catch a glimpse of the moon obscuring the sun. Indeed, I arrived at a motorway services at around the time the eclipse was due, to find hundreds of people standing by their cars all looking through special glasses, or holding up a cardboard box that served as a pinhole camera. But it turns out they were just seeing the last remnants of the eclipse and I was too late again…!  I had searched Google for the relevant times and places, but my journey just didn’t quite match.

The following morning when listening to the radio, I discovered that I had not been the only person searching on Google for information about the eclipse. Indeed, according to Google, there had been an 800% surge in searches for help in dealing with sore eyes during the previous few hours. My search for information about the eclipse, and the huge rise in people subsequently searching for information about painful eyes, shows just how reliant we have become on Google.

However, maybe it is time to reconsider our relationship with that behemoth of finding things out. Like me, you will have noticed that when you search for something on Google you mostly now get an “AI Overview” of information before you see any search results. Just a few months ago, the magazine Search Engine Land revealed that clicks on search listings have dropped by 42%.  That’s due to the fact that people are using the information in the AI Overview instead. This is bad for business. As the Guardian newspaper revealed a year ago, companies that are at the top of the search results lose up to 79% of their traffic when there is an AI Overview above them.

Further changes at Google are leading us away from traditional search results. Earlier this year they introduced the “Intelligent Search Box”. This now replaces the old box in the centre of the Google search page where you enter your request. The intelligence is deliberately designed to steer you towards AI-derived material. Indeed, you may have noticed that when you look at the Google search box, there is a drop-down list of items. These are all your previous interactions with Google’s AI search system. 

In the past, you could switch off this display of previous or trending items. Now, though, that ability has been removed. There is no way of preventing this list from appearing, unless you play about with ad-blockers. You might think that you could prevent this list from appearing by not engaging with the AI overview system. But as Google points out in its FAQs, the AI system is a “search feature” and “cannot be turned off”.

In addition, Google has recently confirmed that it is conducting an experiment where an AI-powered search page replaces the traditional search box. The “Android Headlines” news source says that Google’s changes that are focusing on AI demonstrate “the company’s aggressive push to pivot its core search experience”.

In other words, if you have got used to making your own decisions as to what to click on, and what to accept or reject from Google’s search engine results, you are going to have to get used to a new world. That world is where Google will be making many of those decisions for you. From everything I have read about this topic, it seems like a strategic move by Google to shift away from traditional search in a significant way.

Of course, Google has never promised to show you some objectively ‘best’ set of results. It ranks them according to its own systems, which businesses and search-engine optimisers have spent decades trying to influence. However, with traditional Google search, as users, we still did much of the final selection and synthesis. With an AI Overview, Google increasingly ranks, selects, and synthesises information before we encounter the underlying sources, even if we go that far.

Google’s AI system will now do much of the filtering we might otherwise do ourselves. Some might argue this will save us time and produce clearer, more reliable results. But it depends on how good the AI is. 

Is there anything you can do about it? Well, you could accept it and just go along with things, because there is no way you can take on the search giants and get them to change their ways. Or you could learn more about writing good search queries for the age of AI-enabled search. Alternatively, you could switch to a service like Brave, which offers strong privacy and operates as a traditional search engine without the AI interference of Google. 

What you probably can’t do is keep using Google in quite the same way you always have. Google is shifting from a service that points us to answers to one that increasingly provides the answer itself. That means we need to become more conscious of what has already been selected, filtered and interpreted for us. If you don’t adapt the way you search and the way your business expects to be found, that could increasingly become a problem.

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The other day I was talking to a colleague about a student who I described as “so laid back they are almost horizontal”. This young man has been achieving good grades, but is so chilled it makes it seem as though he does no work, yet manages to get everything done. It’s particularly annoying to the rest of us, apparently running ever faster on our own little hamster wheels to try and complete all of our work.

My student is in the minority. Most people I know are working hard but also saying they are finding it tough to get all their tasks completed. They feel as though they are on a never-ending journey. It is so commonplace, that the charity Mental Health UK, disclosed last year that 91% of people at work experience high pressure and stress. According to the charity’s study, more than four in ten workers said a high or increasing workload was contributing to their stress.  

So while thinking of stressful events, can you imagine then how it must have felt to people travelling back to London Heathrow Airport yesterday to discover it was closed to aircraft following a fire near a runway. Some flights were diverted to Manchester, only for the poor folk disembarking to discover there was travel chaos there due to a power cut on the rail network. Everyone’s stress levels would have been sky high, which is where the passengers would have rather been instead of amongst the ground level chaos.

Wherever you look, there are triggers for increased stress and anxiety. Last week Huff Post was one of many media outlets reporting a rise in “heat anxiety” following the unusually long period of warm weather. Plus, Ipsos reported last month that the nation is suffering from more “crime anxiety” than before. This is despite the fact that, according to official statistics, many forms of crime have actually been falling over the past decade. Whether it is the heat, crime or travel, we are increasingly getting stressed out.

Combine that with pressure at work and it is easy to see how so many people are ending up with burnout. Worse still, according to a British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) report in June, almost one in five UK adults say they are experiencing work-related burnout. Yet BACP therapists say burnout is often ‘the last thing people will admit to’. We seem to be anxious and stressed and try to battle on regardless. Stiff upper lip and all that. 

The world around us is increasingly stressful at the same time as work pressures are also mounting for many people. It feels like you are working harder than ever, but the job just doesn’t get done. Against this background, however, are two new pieces of research that could provide a way forward – unless you are like my chilled-out student and don’t need any help.

The first study from Athens, reported in Nature a couple of months ago, showed that our resilience depends upon five factors. These include whether we can imagine a worthwhile future, experience a sense of success and, importantly, have sufficient spacing between demands to allow recovery. It ties into the second piece of research published last week by Australian psychologists. 

This particular research found that workers who take several small breaks each day feel more energised and less stressed than people who keep on working. The study showed that repeatedly stopping work and doing something else allows time for something of a reset. This matches the Athens study, which also found that breaks provide respite.

Simple things like taking a walk around the building or chatting to colleagues about what you watched on TV last night are enough to provide the rest break needed for stress levels to fall. 

We live in a stressful world, with mounting work pressures. By keeping on working to “get the job done”, we are making things worse for ourselves and steering towards burnout. Instead, it appears that the best way to get the job done is to stop doing the job several times a day. So, if you want to get more done, perhaps the most productive thing you can put in your diary is an appointment to stop working.

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Today is “World Wide Web Day”, when we are encouraged to celebrate the creation of the WWW. Nobody quite knows why today was selected as a global day of celebration of the web. The date does not coincide with Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the web. That was submitted on 12 March 1989. Nor is it the date on which the phrase “World Wide Web” was suggested. That was 12 November 1990. And it is not the date on which the first website was publicly announced. That was 6 August 1991. So quite why today, 1 August, is “World Wide Web Day” is anyone’s guess. 

Even so, it gives us all a chance to reflect on what the web has achieved for us. It’s given us access to information like never before. It has given billions of people new opportunities to create, collaborate and publish their work. Plus, we’ve been able to communicate in real time anywhere in the world. In its 35 years of existence, the web has achieved an amazing amount for humans. 

Of course, it has not been all good. The web has helped create online trolls, for example, and it has spread violent pornography as well as enabling organised crime gangs to become more powerful. On top of this, it has allowed the production of some truly dreadful web pages that look horrendous and are impossible to navigate. Let’s hope that the Norwegian shopping site, Arngren, is not one of your favourites. 

However, it has also meant that many businesses now rely on the web for day-to-day communications and all their marketing. I know of one business, for example, that claims the “only” way to get customers is through sponsored links on search engines. They even point me to the “evidence” showing me all the business they got through these adverts. Of course, they don’t have any data on people who could buy their service through other means, as they rely solely on the web. 

That’s a shame, because they could probably increase their business if they looked outside the web. However, the problem extends beyond marketing. Whenever an organisation moves an activity online, it risks losing information that exists only in human relationships and physical settings.  Indeed, recent research from YouGov shows that most people discover new products through recommendations from family and friends. Good, old-fashioned word of mouth is still more important than anything the web provides, it seems. 

Similarly, when looking at what makes people buy from a company, a recent study suggests that the Top 10 factors do not appear to include anything specifically related to the company website.  

The convenience of the web and the ability to be creative and have great-looking websites is a bit of an illusion for businesses. They can produce something wonderful, track all the activity and then believe they have done all they need to do to attract customers. We can get vast amounts of data about our clients’ web activity, so it is easy to forget they live the bulk of their lives outside the web. Even the magazine Search Engine Land appears to be suggesting it may be time to do less online than we have in the past. 

This all coincides with the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, suggesting that businesses should focus more on real-world recruitment rather than virtual interviews. Before the Prime Minister made that announcement, I heard a recruitment expert on the radio talking about the same topic. He pointed out that recruiters get so much more information from being in the same room as a job applicant. His point was not that web technology has no place in recruitment, but that excessive reliance on it may prevent employers from seeing qualities that emerge more clearly through personal interaction. 

Back in the summer of 1991, when the web began, the Number One song was “(Everything I do), I do it for you” by Bryan Adams. It looks like we’ve taken that rather too seriously, expecting the web to do everything for us. Perhaps today of all days it is time to reflect on the real position of the web in our business. Maybe, just maybe, it can’t do everything.

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