🤝 Let’s be boring together

Plus: Harry's big run, every US river, and more.  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

You're just 3 referrals away from earning a Hustle Essentials kit. Check out all of our prizes here. Share your link: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Share The Hustle: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Check your referral progress & prizes here 👋  Good morning. If you're feeling stretched thin by all the roles you're juggling, perhaps turn to Philip Noel-Baker for some perspective. After competing in the 1920 Olympics as a middle-distance runner and working on international disarmament for decades, he became the only person to win both an Olympic medal and a Nobel Peace Prize in 1959. That makes your calendar seem slightly less impressive, honestly.  STARTING UP This startup is saying RIP to the PDF  ❌  The problem: PDFs were invented in 1993 and, while they have evolved, they're static, hard to govern, and rely on external systems to track updates (looking at you, _final_final1_final2.PDF extension).  💡  The pitch: Tel Aviv-based Factify is building what it calls "document-as-infrastructure," a cool tech way to say it embeds all the good stuff — identity, access control, version history, audit trails — directly into a document itself. The startup's "Factified documents" record every event in a permanent audit log, and are machine-readable to serve as a single source of truth as AI increasingly reads documents autonomously.  🚀  The outlook: While AI is changing a lot of things, we'll still need documents, especially in heavily regulated industries like banking, law, insurance, and HR — Factify's target customers. Great for accountability. Less great for whoever introduced that typo. NEWS FLASH   Feeling sleepy? Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick and Oliver Ripley, founder of hospitality group Habitas, have partnered on Sekra, an upscale apartment company that prioritizes socialization and sleep (noise insulation, blackout curtains, circadian rhythm lighting). Sit, stay, subscribe: Snout, a pet wellness startup, helps members pay vet costs upfront by essentially turning bills into memberships, per Fortune. The average customer pays $65/month to cover exams, vaccines, and other preventative care.  Certified vibes only: LinkedIn will now let you add a certificate for vibe coding. AI platforms including Descript, Lovable, and Replit will gauge your skills as you use them, then generate a certificate.  Seeing things differently: Snap is spinning its AR glasses department into a wholly owned subsidiary called Specs Inc. as it looks for investors and partners. Snap — sorry, Specs Inc. — is one of several companies looking to enter the smart wearables market, alongside both Big Tech like Meta and numerous startups. MAXIMUM PRODUCTIVITY How to be more productive There are times for dillying and dallying, and other times for coming up clutch. When you need yet another game winner, lock-in on work with this free productivity kit by ClickUp and HubSpot. It's filled with frameworks, templates, and tips to make you way more efficient.  Amplify your output:  Respectably work from home Maintain flow-state efficiency Visualize goals and progress (two templates) Calculate labor hours for long projects Prioritize with a PIE scoring chart Stop slackin'. Get crackin'. Get stuff done   THE BIG IDEA Feeling unproductive? Host an admin night  It's January, which means you're probably gathering all your W-2s and 1099s. How excruciating! But a new trend is bringing people together to complete their most boring, tedious tasks over food, friendship, and maybe a glass of wine: Admin Night.  Author Chris Colin coined the term in The Wall Street Journal, noting that in today's modern world, "We're sinking into a quicksand of tiny, dumb administrative tasks." So, he started inviting friends for weekly beers and to-dos. They'd book appointments, pay bills, clear emails, manage subscriptions. Basically, the stuff you put off because you're tired of logging into clunky apps when you could be playing video games or petting your dog or literally anything else.  That's a great idea…   … which is probably why it's taken off, with numerous posts across social media where users praise the idea, share clips from their own gatherings, or offer tips.   TikToker Benjamin Chipman posted about how six months of a weekly admin night was life-changing. In his most recent sesh, he wrote several birthday cards, booked a flight, and returned texts.  Even venues are getting in on the idea: The Omni Boston Hotel hosts an admin night in its lobby bar with themed cocktails — the Inbox Zero Martini and the Done & Dusted Old Fashioned. The Roguelike Tavern in Burbank, California, recently hosted a "Do-a-Thing Day" for community and political activism and will likely host more. Owner John McCormick told The Hustle their hope was that people would "prioritize their own to-do lists while also getting ideas for how they can help the causes they care about. We're also hoping to inspire folks to support causes they may not be familiar with and share resources and knowledge." This all sounds a lot like… … body doubling, or parallel work, in which people work independently, but alongside others for greater focus and accountability.  So, you mean, like... an office? Sure. But in an increasingly remote world, body doubling has begun happening online, too.  And all of this may remind you of other groups where people do separate tasks together, like silent writer's groups or book clubs, or even knitting circles.  Admin nights may just be the mundane cousin of our communal instinct to do stuff — any stuff — together.   🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   Gen Z wants to speak with your manager. Or better yet, your CEO. Here's how to reach the generation that's turning the marketing model on its head. NEWSWORTHY NUMBER People who signed up for Harry Styles' Madison Square Garden residency, "the highest volume ever recorded for an artist presale" in New York or in a single market,  per Ticketmaster.  The Hollywood Reporter provided some perspective into how many people are gonna be disappointed:  Styles is playing 30 shows.  Madison Square Garden can accommodate 19.5k people per night.  That's ~585k tickets available for Styles' entire run, or just 5% of people who signed up for the presale.  Of course, some of those people may actually be bots or people who signed up without actually intending to fork over the dough. Some tickets are going for $1k+, reflecting a trend in ticket pricing among top performers that you might say is an unfortunate… sign of the times. AROUND THE WEB 📆  On this day: In 1920, Jujiro Matsudo founded Toyo Cork Kogyo in Hiroshima, Japan. While the business initially produced cork, it pivoted to vehicles in 1931 and changed its name to Mazda. 🖼️  Art: The Particle Art Museum. 🚣  That's cool: A map of every river in the US. 🔒  Game: Crack the safe. 🐾  Aww: What it's like to have a best friend. SHOWER THOUGHT It only takes one person with a vendetta to ruin a fast food restaurant's survey percentage for the whole year. SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo. Editing by: Sara "Hosting a whine night" Friedman.   Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. Working on something big? We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you. Subscribe to our other newsletters Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream  |  Expert insights: Marketing Against the Grain |  Sell better: The Science of Scaling Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. HubSpot Media, 2 Canal Park, Cambridge, MA, 02141, USA, +1 888.482.7768 Never want to hear from us again? 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