From Redesigning The Workweek To Giving Up TV: This Week’s Top Leadership Stories

This week we learned how TV affects your brain, a one time-management pro’s approach to team efficiency, and the right way to recharge over the weekend.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of June 6:

1. How Giving Up TV For A Month Changed My Brain And My Life

Growing up, do you remember hearing how too much TV would rot your brain? Well it doesn’t exactly do that, but researchers have linked substantial TV viewing with a “thickening of the frontopolar cortex, which is related to verbal reasoning ability, and also correlated with a drop in IQ in proportion to the number of hours of television watching.” So writer Stephanie Vozza kicked the habit—and here’s what she found.

2. How This Googler Redesigned The Workweek

Jake Knapp was, by his own description, “obsessed” with optimizing his time before joining Google in 2007. But after perfecting his personal time use, Knapp has since moved on to tackle team efficiency, developing a method for intensive, week-long bursts of productivity that leave more calendar space for home and family the rest of the time.

3. How I Added $15,000 To My Income In One Year

Sometimes incremental changes will get you where you want to go, but other times they just don’t cut it. One writer recounts how taking a combination of two dramatic steps helped give her income—and career—the boost she was looking for.

4. How I’ve Learned To Lead As An Introverted CEO

Jeff Booth, CEO of BuildDirect, says he’s “generally slow to speak or act,” which some could see as a leadership liability. But over time, he says he’s managed to turn his natural introversion—a trait that a surprising number of high-profile CEOs share—to his advantage. This week he explains how.

5. Five Things To Do This Weekend To Make Monday The Most Productive Day Of The Week

It may be that both your rigorous to-do lists and your company’s official work-life initiatives fail to touch the one slice of your week where you’re most in control: the weekend. But instead of scrambling to get ahead of next week’s work, taking time to recharge may be the best thing you can do to start Monday off right.