🧘‍♀️ Building Mindful Products—Anne Laure Le Cunff, Founder of Ness Labs

because we have next up a very, very exciting talk and Q&A from Anne-Laure Le Cunff of NEST Labs. And by her biography alone, you'd want to be inviting Anne-Laure to your dinner parties if you're going to make friends with her. So she's the founder of NEST Labs, which is a product and research studio with a focus on mindful productivity, which helps hundreds of thousands of makers achieve more without sacrificing their mental health. She's got an MSc of Applied Neuroscience. Uh, that's what she's studying at King's College London. She's an ex-Googler, an entrepreneur, self-taught coder. Um, there's nothing this woman can't do. Um, and she also runs Make a Mind, which is a weekly newsletter at the intersection of neuroscience and entrepreneurship, which has more than, uh, 7,000 subscribers. So yeah, it's an absolute pleasure, um, and honor to, um, welcome Anne-Laure Le Cunff to the stage. I'm just going to Anne-Laure Le Cunff and she should become visible. Hey Anne, how's it going?

Hi everyone, thanks for the great intro. It's very good to be here.

Great, and so you should be in a good position to screen share if you'd like to. And just one last thing is that I think we've got a Q&A after this, and so start posting your questions in the chat as the talk goes on, and we're all good.

Great. Can you all see my screen? Awesome. Thank you. It's great to be here with you all. Yeah, I'm Anne-Laure. Thanks, Ed, again for the great presentation. I don't think I need to say much more, but I studied neuroscience and I'm the founder of a company called NestLabs, and I'm really, really into mindful productivity. So, Today together, we're going to talk about how you can build more mindful products. So I do think working in tech that tech has been something positive for society in general. However, and especially in 2020, you can see that people are having an increasingly complex relationship with digital products. And you see people talking about doomscrolling and FOMO or being part of so many group chats that they experience communication overload. And obviously, I think we've all felt some form of phone addiction at a point or another in our lives. So all of this creates tech-driven anxiety and stress. But the good news is that as product creators, as makers, as designers, we all have a role in trying to change the status quo. And in trying to make all of this better. So this is why we're going to talk about how to build mindful products. And it doesn't have to be hard. Actually, it can be as easy as 1, 2, 3. So during this very quick presentation, I'm going to cover one overarching principle that is very helpful whenever your goal is to design mindful products. We're also going to talk about 2 facts coming from neuroscience, 2 scientific facts that really explain how we as human beings interact with digital products. And finally, we'll cover 3 product personas. And this is more about looking at the other side of the table and thinking about how products interact with us. And to make this as helpful to you as possible, I really encourage you Whenever we talk about one of these 3 product personas, to ask yourself, is that like, you know, does that correspond to my product? Does my product do some of these things? Because if so, I'm going to try and help you shift the way you approach, the way you build products so they're a bit more mindful. So the big overarching principle that is really important to keep in mind if you want to design mindful products is I will not exploit the human mind's vulnerabilities. And it's very important because human beings have so many cognitive biases, so many flawed mental models, and we are full of obsolete survival mechanisms that made sense thousands of years ago, but not so much in today's society. And lots of products actually use these cognitive biases, these mental models, and these survival mechanisms to create addictive and sometimes harmful experiences for users. So let's try and see how we can change this. But first, I promised you two principles from neuroscience. The very first one is that our brain was designed for distraction. Right now, you may be feeling like you're laser focused on this presentation, looking at your screen, your eyes fixed on the screen, but really that's not what's going on. Actually, your eyes are constantly scanning the environment around you. They're going back and forth, zooming in and out of attention up to 4 times per second. And you don't really feel it, you don't realize it, because your brain is constantly recreating this continuous picture. So it doesn't feel like you're looking everywhere, but you actually are constantly looking for movement, something going on around you. And that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because when we were still living in the desert or the forest or the jungle, even if we were in a relaxed state, we needed to be on the lookout for any potential danger, such as a hungry lion who wanted to turn you into their next snack. But in today's society, you know, luckily we don't have lions roaming around in our streets. But our brain hasn't changed that much and keeps on scanning the environment. Remember, up to 4 times per second, looking around, looking for movement. And it's not a lion anymore that's grabbing our attention. It's usually digital products in the form of notifications. And the additional problem here is that once those digital products, these applications, have grabbed our attention, by, you know, just like in the corner of our eye, then they do everything to keep that attention, to not let us go and do something else. So that was the first principle of neuroscience, which is that our brain is designed for distraction. The second one is that we are absolutely terrible at multitasking. And there's a very interesting study where they took two groups and they gave them some tasks to do. And in the first group, they asked them to do them in sequence, like just do this first and then the second and the third. And then the other one, they just let them do whatever they wanted and they told them it's completely fine to multitask. And so people there were multitasking and switching constantly between the tasks to get them done. And they measured the performance of the two groups. The group that was multitasking performed much more poorly than the one that was not multitasking. And the extra thing that I think is pretty funny is that they also asked them to fill a survey at the end and for them to measure their own performance. They asked them, how do you feel you did on these tasks? Like, did you, did you do a good job? And the people who were part of the multitasking group invariably were seeing their performance as much better than it actually was. So it's something that's interesting to keep in mind more on the personal level. But if you hear yourself or someone else saying, "I'm a great multitasker," it's probably not true. And you can refer them to this research. In fact, the word multitasking was initially— it's pretty recent, and it was initially created by IBM in 1965, and it was made to define a computer capability. And it's only way later that we started using it for humans. So multitasking is not for humans. It's for computers. So now that we have these principles in mind, how can we use them to build more mindful products? You're probably familiar with this meme. Everyone has seen it. For those who are not familiar, this is the Overly Attached Girlfriend. And if you can't read it on the screen, it says, "Are you okay? Are you mad at me? Is there someone else? You've taken longer than a minute to text me back." So you really don't want your product to be like the Overly Attached Girlfriend. This is what I call the nagging product. It's like, "Look at me," and it has these endless notifications very often without asking the user for permission. And to make these notifications even more effective, they use artificial scarcity like click now or it's going to be gone forever and urgency signaling. All of this to seek the attention of the user. And if that doesn't work, some of them go even beyond that. And if they can't reach you by a notification on your phone, they will send you lots of emails telling you, you haven't logged in in such a long time, come back, I miss you. Instead of building a nagging product, try and build a helpful product instead. So some principles here are to be silent by default. So instead of trying to be loud and grabbing the attention, just try and stay in the background. Another important thing is good timing. Just like try and think about when this is going to be helpful. Being silent by default is asking yourself, do we really need that notification? And good timing is like, okay, we need that notification. When is the best time to actually send that notification? And it can be some things that are as simple as taking into account the time zone of the user when you're sending a notification, or also adding some fine-tuning where when they're on full screen doing something else and you don't want to interrupt them, you just send a silent notification instead. And obviously, and I think if all of you are here at Jamf today, you're probably very passionate product creators and you know that already, but obviously give control to your users. Let them decide what notifications they receive and let them turn them off. This is an example from Google that I really like. I use a Google Pixel myself, and this is one of my favorite features. I can just flip my phone down and then I get zero notifications. It gets on do not disturb mode, which is great when I want to work. Another one that I really like is from YouTube. And this is an in-app notification that you get and that if you've been watching YouTube for too long, it's just very helpfully tell you, hey, do you want to take a break? It's been quite a long time you've been watching this. So I think we all have a friend like this where it's always so complicated to organize something to do with them and to hang out and to make plans. And this is the kind of friend who's always going to want you to come to their neighborhood, you to make the trip and come to their area. And then, they have a really hard time making decisions. Like they're very indecisive. It's hard to figure out what we're going to do. And this friend who's always asking you to come to theirs and who's very complicated is not the kind of persona that you want for your product. This is like the stressful friend, the stressful product. And it requires, in terms of for a product, constant context switching where you're always asking them, come to my app, come to my product instead of meeting them where they are. It gives endless options where you start having analysis paralysis. You don't know what to do. It has lots of different filters, which may seem like a good idea to give control to people, but that become very quickly overly complex. And there's lots of movement and complicated UI, et cetera. And that makes for a very stressful experience. Instead, you want to build a calm product where you use mindful context switching, where you ask yourself, isn't there a way to actually meet the person where they are? To her instead of asking them to come to me. You offer limited options so it's easier to choose, simple filters, you try to avoid having too much movement, and you try to keep your UI as straightforward as possible. So I think Slack bots are actually an amazing example of this. Instead of asking people to go to the app, in this case the Doodle app, the app comes to you in Slack where you're already spending a lot of your time. And there are very few options. It's very clean and it's really focused on removing any stress and making it as much of a calm experience as possible. And you see another example here from more of a meditation app, again, in Slack. There is a mobile app for Stop, Breathe Think, but they still come to you, so it's as calm as possible of an experience for the user. I don't know if you've heard that term, but I've seen it everywhere in the past few months, doomscrolling. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? We keep on scrolling and we're not stopping for hours, even though it's making us feel absolutely miserable because everything in our timeline is so bad and so negative. But somehow we just keep on scrolling and keep on scrolling. And some products, unfortunately, are designed to actually encourage that behavior. And one of the biggest features of these products is infinite scrolling, for example. It just never stops. You can keep on going and stay awake until 3 AM and there will always be more content to look at. And this is because these are optimized for screen time. This is the metric that they're using to measure success. Another way products do this is by creating FOMO, fear of missing out, where, you know, there's like disappearing content. And so if you're not constantly in the app to see it, you're going to miss something important. So as a result, you just use it all the time. Another thing that this does is information overload, where people can't really process information anymore because there's just too much of it and not enough time to process it. And these apps in general are pretty addictive. And I'm not going to, like, name names here, but I think you can all think of a few apps that are on your phone where you just keep on scrolling or keep on swiping and you just can't stop. So instead of having a time-sucking product, you want to design a value-focused product. And something that's really important that I think everyone deep down is aware of, but that we forget, is that time is the most precious currency that we have. It is literally the only thing we have where you spend it, it's gone. You will never get it back. So it's really as a product owner and creator and maker asking yourself, what does time well spent mean for my user? And how can I make sure that the time the user spends in the app is valuable? The second thing is what is the job to be done here? What is the user trying to achieve? And that's success. If you can help your user achieve what they want to do, that's success, not keeping them in your app for as long as possible. And something that is really great that I've seen, and I'm going to just show you Here is the "You're all caught up" prompt from Instagram, where if someone has seen all of the posts in their network for the past 48 hours, which means they've probably been scrolling and swiping for a very long time, they're going to get this screen. Instagram could have made the choice of just pulling more content from an extended network of friends, but instead they do this for the user. And this is pretty amazing, and this is value-focused. Another example of an app that I absolutely love is Noisli, that is also value-focused because it does one job. It does it very well. It's not trying to keep you in there for as long as possible. It's trying to just deliver value. In this case, relaxing background sounds that you can put behind you, next to you when you're working. So it feels like you're working in nature, which I think has been really helpful for me during lockdown this year. So as a conclusion, I just want to review everything that I just talked about. Building mindful products is about having this one mantra, which is, "I will not exploit the human mind's vulnerabilities." Do not exploit cognitive biases, the, you know, flawed mental models, and all of the evolutionary kind of like obsolete reflexes that we have as human beings that come from a time where we were still living in the jungle. Talking about living in the jungle, remember, we are designed for distraction. Our eyes are always scanning around us. And so as a mindful product, you don't want to take advantage of this. You want to really help people be focused on whatever they want to do. And if what they want to do is not using your product right now, this is fine. Don't be the nagging, overly attached girlfriend with your product. And then the second thing in neuroscience was that we are terrible at multitasking. So try to avoid context switching, try to avoid asking your users to do a thousand things at the same time. Try to not be stressful. And so that gives you the three pillars of building mindful products that I hope will be useful to you, which is Being helpful, really like trying to avoid creating stress, being like a calm experience. And focusing on the value, like stop optimizing for just like screen time and time spent in the app and scrolling. You want to just give value to people and help them get the job done. So thank you very much everyone for listening to this little presentation. And yeah, I think I'm going to switch to a Q&A session in another room, right?

No, your Q&A is actually going to be here. Oh great, easy, which is nice and convenient. So if you stop screen sharing, then we can read some of the questions from the audience which are coming in the chat channel. So well done everybody, and thank you very much, Anne-Laure. That's a very A very clear and inspiring talk and a very difficult topic, right? Because so much of success in product is actually capturing people's attention and in a sustained way. So yeah, we've got a few great questions on the thread. So thank you everybody for getting involved. There's also a kind of strange boyfriend meme going on on the thread. I don't understand this at all. But anyway, Holly, And Holly is from the Tesco team, and she says, how can we be more mindful when it comes to notifications, especially when it comes to a product like groceries that don't necessarily have an optimal helpful time for customers? And if they do, presumably it's when your groceries have arrived. So tell us about that.

Yeah, I mean, if the notification is about telling them when the groceries have arrived, I think this is part of the jobs to be done part that you have in an app. You're generally delivering the value that you said you were going to deliver, which is to help them get their groceries and to be able to go downstairs and take them when they have arrived instead of just like leaving them out of the fridge, right? So this is completely fine to have this kind of notification. But for a grocery shopping app, I would really avoid any of the kind of like bells and whistles that I see in some apps where it's a bit over the top. I don't need to have a notification for a new blog post about how to do your grocery shopping, how to pair this food with this food when you don't even know if I'm vegetarian or pescatarian, et cetera. And like lots of these that you get as a user, I'm feeling like, you know, this is not helpful to me. So really, I think it's completely okay to be a utility app and embrace it, be helpful, be the most helpful grocery shopping app. And that doesn't necessarily go through notifications. This is really what I would focus on.

Great, that's nice and clear. Thank you. And we've got another question which is, yeah, for Michal, who's Product at Yogendra International. And he's asking, you know, what are creative ways to create a calm product while also providing effective options for power users and active tinkerers? I love this idea of active tinkerers.

I have one of my favorite products at the moment, it's called Roam Research, and I really encourage everyone to go and have a look. What I really like about it is that when you log in the first time, it looks so minimalistic that you're like, "Where are the features? Where am I supposed to go?" And basically, it's a journey. You go from being a user who just wants like the simple note-taking, you're just like writing things down and that's it, and you don't need more. And the more you use it, the more you're like, "Actually, I want to start filtering my notes." and I want all of my notes that talk about this topic. Where's the filter? Oh, cool. I can actually do that too. And Roam Research actually has crazy, crazy features that allow you to do like, you know, you could write a whole mathematical paper in it. Like it supports LaTeX and like code. You can write like HTML and JavaScript inside of the note-taking app, right? That's for very advanced users. So I really think that What's important is to think about the journey. And the reality is that the vast majority of your users are going to be very happy with the basics. So keep that very calm, very minimalistic, but then it doesn't mean that you cannot have the extra features. And the tinkerers that you mentioned, they are going to find these features. It's okay if they're not as accessible as the rest, because by definition they're tinkerers and that's going to be part of the pleasure to go and find what else they can do with the app.

Right, fantastic. Funny enough, I've not used Roam Research, but I know that it's backed by Patrick Collison, the almost ridiculously intellectual CEO of Stripe, and that makes sense. He's always complaining about how desktop operating systems don't allow new modes of thought and stuff, so maybe Roam is the answer to that. Great, some other great questions. So from Mafalda Marquez, Something I read about is how sometimes prompts to take a break— this is almost the paradox of some of these prompts where they're kind of a bit paternalistic or something— but prompts to take a break can create guilt. You know, you've been 2 hours on Instagram and somehow they're communicating in a fashion that creates guilt. So like, you're still watching off of Netflix. Any thoughts how you can implement mindfulness without triggering guilt? And by the way, why does it trigger guilt if it does?

That's so interesting because when I was researching that Instagram prompt that says, "You're all caught up," actually, if you go on Twitter and you type, "You're all caught up," there are so many angry tweets from people who are like, "Who are you to tell me I'm all caught up? I want to keep on scrolling." So this is a great question. I think in the end, it really is about giving people control. So that's not something Instagram has. Maybe they should have, but the YouTube app actually you can go and set it up for yourself. This is not— I'm sorry, that actually wasn't clear in my presentation, but this is not a default feature. This is something you set up for yourself and you can also set up how long the time is going to be. And so I think if people are— you need to be able to help people when they are at this time in their journey where they want to become more mindful. And so I think giving them these tools is what you have to do to create these experiences without creating guilt, because this way you're not patronizing. You're just genuinely just giving tools for people to manage their own mental health. And the tools are here and make them accessible. Don't bury them in like random obscure place in your app where no one's going to find them. Let's just people know, hey, we have this feature. And if at some point you want to control a little bit the way you interact with this app or limit it a little bit, 'You can use this.' So I think YouTube is doing it in a much better way than Instagram is.

Funny enough, the cynic in me when looking at that Instagram post made me think that they designed that to virtue signal that they weren't trying to grab your attention in an abusive fashion, while actually designing it in such a fashion that your reaction is to—

Probably a bit of that, yes.

Okay, well, so Matt Walton, from whom we heard earlier, ex-chief product officer of FutureLearn, has come on. This is now the business end of the questions. What do you think some useful mindful metrics might be? It seems like lots of the metrics traditionally used for product fall foul of your excellent suggestions.

Yeah, I think first is one thing that I think is not used enough in terms of kind of evaluating how well your product is doing is just qualitative data, like talking to your users and actually asking them how they're feeling. And another metric that is completely neutral, that is not evil at all, and it's not good or bad, but that shows how well your product is doing is purely retention. If you're doing something good for users and you're helping them and they're sticking with you and you have a lower churn rate, it just means that your product is doing something good. So I would optimize more for retention and I would not use these metrics on their own without also conducting interviews and gathering qualitative data so you can understand, okay, cool, they're sticking with us, that's great, that's what we want. Why are they sticking with us? Are they sticking with us because they're completely addicted and we've created something like TikTok where they genuinely can't leave and it's 3 AM and they're still scrolling? Or are they sticking with us because we're delivering them value? And I think the only way really to know this is by actually asking.

Yes, because I want to push back against your suggesting retention metric there. Having studied, for instance, FarmVille, where every imaginable form of scarcity and like attention-grabbing notification, "Oh, your friends are waiting for you to pick their carrots," etc. And you know, FarmVille is one of the great products actually in terms of its retention. You know, I heard a PM at Zynga once tell me that if they got people to come back, so I think it was like every 4 hours in the 2 days following signing up, they had like an 80% certainty they'd come back every day for a year or something. And so this is retention with abuse. So it has to be qualified by something, right?

Absolutely. And by retention, I don't mean, and I mentioned how dangerous optimizing for screen time is. And so for me, this is absolutely not what should be optimized for. By retention is more like looking at your cohorts and looking month per month and being like, who's staying? Or week per week, which is already healthier than the day-to-day retention ones where it's like they have to keep on logging in every day and spend that many hours. So I totally agree with you. You need to have a healthy way to look at the metrics. That's why I said retention for me is a neutral one. It's not bad. Screen time for me is just bad, whereas retention, it really depends on how you define it, and you can define it in a mindful way. And again, I think numbers without actually talking to the users are usually useless.

Right. So just to summarize, retention balanced by appropriate time in app, and maybe an attention appropriate retention metric. There's a big difference between daily, weekly, and monthly, and also by qualitative research. That sounds convincing to me. So we've got a couple of other kind of questions coming in from the business perspective here. And I have a lot of empathy for these questions because you start a startup and all you wanna do is, you know, whatever, Memrise's case, help the world learn languages. And then you got your investors and you got all these pressures. And so here's a question from Ben, he's Senior Product Manager at Peak. Brain training app. How do you think about the balance between product mindfulness and business value? And, you know, and I want to ask this question in a tough way to say like there are going to be times where you have to sacrifice business value in the name of mindfulness. And how do you actually convince your senior stakeholders— that terrible phrase— but, you know, how do you convince the people whose jobs are on the line when the numbers don't move that this is a legitimate path?

I think this is the same for anything that's good for us or good for the planet, where it is a choice. It's not an easy one. And I think in the end, long term, you are going to generate more value by building mindful products. It's the same I mentioned for the planet, but companies that care about climate change, they're trying to not have such a negative impact. It may seem in the short term that you're losing business value,. But in the long term, when you look at the research, you usually get to hire people who have similar values. It becomes easier to hire. It becomes easier to attract people. There are more and more people who care about these things. Like this is really, this is zeitgeist at the moment when it comes to mindfulness, when it comes to just doing what's right. So I really don't think that this, would be like a dichotomy between business value and being mindful, whether of people's mental health, the planet, et cetera. I think really long-term, you're going to create more value if you do this.

This is actually a theme which has come up a couple of times today. Chatting with Alex Watson, he also sort of touched on this theme that the kind of the near-term metrics can sometimes confuse you as regards to the kind of long-term thing. And something else you say there, which, I think is worth kind of amplifying is just the sheer value in having a perspective. If you have a perspective, your perspective is distinct in relation to these feedback effects when it comes to hiring and coordinating the team and doing all these things. Great. So we've got a fun question here from Matilda, who is the insuperable organizer of CHAMM. And so thank you, by the way, Matilda. Such a fantastic product conference every year. I think everyone here really appreciates that. And she asks, when and why did you first become interested in mindful productivity? And cheekily then she said, then asked, was it during your time working at Google? We'd love to hear about your journey starting Nest Labs.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm actually very transparent about this, that I experienced burnout when I was at Google. When I started there, I generally couldn't believe that I was working there. I was like, everyone is so smart. Someone's going to discover that I should not be here. And as a result, I worked extra hard. I was saying yes to absolutely everything. I was the yes girl. You come to me and say, can you help me with this? Yes, of course. Yeah. And at one point I was on the work trip in San Francisco and my actual office was based in London. And I kept on working. Now that I think about it, I'm like, why did I do that to myself? But I kept on working my London hours on top of everything I had to do in San Francisco. So I was basically not sleeping. And at some point I was on the call with a coworker and I was showing him some research that I did. And he was like, oh, I don't know what he said, but like very valid feedback. Like just something like, oh, maybe this could be better. And I started crying and I just turned off the Google Hangout we were doing. And I pretended that I had a problem with the internet connection to just like finish the call. And I was like, whoa, what's going on? That has never happened to me. I've never felt this way. I love my job. And this is when I started looking into burnout, and there was so much information for people who hated their job. Like, people were like, I'm burning out, I really hate my job, my boss is horrible. There was nothing for just ambitious people who love their job, they love their team, and they're just probably pushing themselves a little bit too hard and not being mindful of their productivity. So this is when I started looking into it. And it stayed in the background for quite a long time until I started NessLabs, where I was like, okay, this is something I actually really care about. I've seen so many of my friends go through this, and I want to help people deal with this, not during when it happens, but before. There's so many ways, so many red flags that you can see if you know what to look for. And so that's how NessLabs started. I went back to school to study neuroscience 2 years ago, and I decided to take everything I was learning at university about neuroscience and translate it into applicable content for knowledge workers, creators, designers, people like me who would find it helpful.

Okay, magic. And just to kind of pick up a theme in what you just said, which triggered an amusing tweet I saw the other day from Nassim Taleb. Who's obviously not a very nice guy on Twitter, but he at least has a perspective. Anyway, he called out workaholism as basically a failure of character and taste. Just like he calls out people who eat alone, you know, whatever. Anyway, this goes right into me. And I guess, like anybody else in the startup scene, I can sometimes find myself in the workaholic kind of mentality. Because there's always so much to be done. How are you doing your kind of HR policy at Nest Labs? How are you working yourself? Have you done any innovations there?

So yes, first I wanted to talk about the workaholism. I think it's so interesting because I always tell people that work is going to be a very important part of your life, whether you want it or not, because some people use it to find meaning in their life and some people use it to like forget the fact that they don't know what the meaning of their life is. So it's just a way to not think about it. And either way, work is going to be very important. In terms of what I do at Nest Labs, I'm the only full-time employee and I work with freelancers and contractors and I have a few interns. The one thing that I do, which I think maybe work for some people with contractors, but I don't give them a hourly rate. I don't pay by the hour. I don't care. I'm just like, hey, can you work on this? And honestly, you know, I'm going to pay you based on the value of what you're delivering to me. If it takes you 1 hour or 10 hours or 20 hours, if you're super smart and fast and you can do it in 30 minutes, but the result is good to me, I don't care. I'm not going to ask you to log your hours. So I would say that that's something that I'm doing a little bit differently from some of my other friends who are entrepreneurs and who always are like, how many hours did you work on this? Which for me has no value. I don't care.

That's a very, very interesting, and I think quite scalable insight because the equivalence between time and money, I guess, is like, you know, I don't know all the historical details of it, but I do know that sort of the Industrial Revolution and having good clocks kind of coincided and, you know, I spent a lot of time observing, but not being able to deal with the fact that, you know, a meeting scheduled for 1 hour takes an hour and the rest of it. And I guess, you know, one person who's, I guess, for like 15 years has been pretty lucid and inspirational on this topic is Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, who in the context of his remote work culture says similar things. I don't care how long you're working. I don't care when you work. Everything's as asynchronous as possible, so allow people to live a rich life at the same time as pursuing their work.

Absolutely. It's called Parkinson's Law, I think. It's like your work is going to expand to fill the time that you allocated for it. So as you said, a 1-hour meeting, people are going to find stuff to talk about for the 1 hour, even if it could have been 5 minutes.

Yeah, there's actually a positive version of that by Nietzsche, which is like Something along the lines of, um, a day can contain an awful lot of stuff if you give it the pockets to put them in. Great. Okay, well, we're just coming to the end of this Q&A. I've just got one last question, which is, of all the— you've mentioned and referenced neuroscience experiments which sort of speak to the negative, the abusive side of things, and, you know, and your, your put-up principles kind of talk about like do not exploit the vulnerabilities of the human mind. But the vulnerabilities, another word for that is like propensities, and some of the propensities of the human mind are for joy and pleasure and for consciousness to be animated and the rest of it. And so it's a double question, which one of which is, can you cite a neuroscience experiment which speaks to that positive side? And also, do you have a heuristic for telling the difference?

Yeah, I don't like have right now on top of my head a neuroscience experiment that is exactly about this. But I think to be able to tell the difference just for yourself, you're going to see lots of different symptoms depending on if something is draining you or giving you more energy. And I have a friend, she uses this expression for people, not for products, but she says that some people are energy vampires and others are energy fairies. And I think that's the same for products. And for example, like, you know, if I'm playing in Figma or doing something like, I'm like, I'm feeling creative and this is fun and it's giving me energy. If I'm opening Headspace or Calm, a meditation app, and like, I'm like refueling my mental energy stores, I can feel it. And I don't think that this is something, and there's probably research on it, but even if there wasn't, I don't think this is something where you should use like a very strict measurement tape of saying like how good or bad this is. Something that people really struggle to do sometimes is just to listen to themselves and actually taking the time for 2 seconds and like stop, like just stop scrolling for a second and ask yourself, how is it making me feel? Am I feeling better or not? And if the answer is no, maybe being like, what else could I do that's also lazy? That's— I won't feel lazy, but is there something that will feel more nourishing to my mind than what I'm doing right now. So yeah, just ask yourself the question and try and be honest with yourself as to how the experience is making you feel.

Well, thank you very much, Anne-Laure. I think right there, everyone, we have a piece of life advice which life will offer multiple opportunities to deploy even in the next few days. In the course of a given activity, close your eyes, ask yourself whether this is vampirical or energy positive, and then perhaps choose to be doing something different. Well, Anne-Laure, thank you ever so much. This has been extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging. And everybody check out Anne-Laure's blog, which is just on the chat. The chat, it's over there for me, it's probably over there for you. Just on the chat, and I'm sure she'll be knocking around the coffee break spaces if you want to talk to her directly. And so that's what's up next. We have coffee And so 15-minute break, maybe do a stretch, maybe go to some of the areas and hang out and meet some of your fellow attendees. And you know, you can, by the way, chat directly to people by clicking on them and sending messages, so you can organize to meet up on like table 7 of the harbour, whatever you fancy doing. So thank you very much, Anne-Laure. I'm going to turn on the volume on the applause button so you can hear all the applause, and we will see you back here in about 15 minutes' time.