“I’m so bad at doing the dishes! You do it so much better.” Sound familiar? How about: “I don’t understand how to adjust the fonts in this doc—can you do it?” Whether you’re the culprit or the victim here, the truth is out: Weaponized incompetence isn’t just for terrible roommates and significant others. It’s also ripe for workplace drama.

You’re on your own when it comes to talking to your BFF Jill about who’s better at bringing in the trash cans, but for office interactions, here’s how to combat a coworker who’s using their alleged lack of skill to increase your own workload:

Fall back on task-based boundaries: Rumble strips are there for a reason, especially if you’re going 80 while blasting T Swift. Make sure your team has an equivalent for work tasks and ownership, even for things like party setup, that you can refer to.

• If your team doesn’t have one yet, get together to create a master list of duties for each role. Plus, it’ll be a helpful, non-targeted reminder to our ne’er-do-well coworker about who’s responsible for what.
  

Foster a growth mindset: Sometimes strategic incompetence is just straight-up incompetence, in which case we can teach someone how to print a PDF or download an image from Google Docs.

• Try the simple framework “I do, we do, you do” to tactically get the point across.
• Just make sure to factor in plenty of time if this is a project with a strict deadline.
  

Create user guides and share with the team: You’d be surprised how many people could benefit from a “how to make decent coffee” manual in the office kitchen. Spread the info and never have to brew another pot yourself again.

Push back: Your time and energy are valuable resources. To the extent you can, defend your boundaries.

• Sometimes a simple go-to phrase is all you need: “Sorry, I don’t have the bandwidth to take this on for you right now.”

And if nothing else works, forward them this email and let us connect the dots for them. Sometimes you’ve got to fight fire with fire…and weaponized incompetence with passive-aggressiveness.—CS

Earlier in May, former CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer sat down with our sibling newsletter Tech Brew to talk about all things, well, tech—including her regret at leading Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr over other contenders like Hulu and Netflix.

• But hindsight is 20/20, since Yahoo bought the blogging platform for $1.1b in 2013 and it was sold in 2019 for $3m. If you were scrolling Tumblr instead of paying attention in math class, that’s a 99.7% loss.

Regret is the most common negative emotion, but it has the potential to do more than keep us awake at 3am thinking about the time you said “I love you” to your soccer coach, and other peak middle school angst moments.

If we deal with our regrets properly, they can help us improve the decisions we make and boost performance.

How? When something happens that you regret, avoid wallowing or getting stuck blaming yourself. Easier said than done, but try to:

• Acknowledge what you regret about what happened
• Reflect on what you could have done differently
• Use those findings to make different decisions in the future

The reflection element is the key here. Write it down, talk it out with a friend, think really hard with a glass (or three) of wine. And go easy on yourself, because it could be years before you realize that people really want aspirational Insta instead of the emo version of Pinterest.

Dive deeper: Read Daniel Pink’s The Power of Regret to get all the deets on how to use that uncomfortable feeling as a growth tool.

Let’s face it, you have too many ratty T-shirts.

Sure, it’s about to be 100 degrees outside for the next three months, but do you really need to go out in public wearing a torn-up 2009 Fun Run tee? Your partner thinks it’s embarrassing.

Freshen up with Morning Brew’s Smiley Nike Dri-FIT Tee. The blue will bring out your eyes.

Bonus: It’s now 30% off, so retire that freshman orientation T-shirt today.

When your wish comes true and a meeting becomes an email instead—well, why not keep downsizing? That’s right, Gmail has shortcuts.

First, you have to turn on the shortcuts feature:

• Go to the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner and click Settings
• Scroll to the “Keyboard shortcuts” section and click “Keyboard shortcuts on”
• Scroll to the bottom to click “Save Changes”

And now for our top five time-savers:

To start a new email: Press C on your keyboard. Yep, that’s literally it.

To send an email: Command + Enter [use Control for PCs]

To forward an email: Press F while you’re in an email

To reply: Press R while you’re in the message (press A to reply all)

To mute a thread: Press M while you’re stuck in the convo

Dive deeper: Get the full Gmail scoop with even more shortcuts. And for all you Outlook folks, stay tuned. We’re getting to you next.

Work Hacks is where we ask industry experts about the best tools and frameworks for simplifying the inefficient or boring things we all end up doing at the office.

Komal Sheth lives in Indianapolis, where she’s the founder of Sheth Strategies and a member of the Alumni of Learning Brew Advisory Board. Here’s her No. 1 work hack right now:

“AI writing—BUT in ways you probably haven’t thought about. I know, I know, there’s all this talk about AI taking jobs. But instead, maybe we should be thinking about how to use AI to take our bosses’ jobs.

Sure, you can use it to quickly create content, but did you know it also can help you figure out where that CSS or HTML code went wrong?

As a designer (read: not a coder), when I’m working on a client’s website or even my own and I want to, say, have the color change in a drop-down accordion, I can just ask AI what the CSS code is—and 90% of the time I get what I’m looking for. No more scrounging around on Google.

• This also helps when I’m stuck and need to fix a code when there seems to be a syntax error.
• Just pop the code into tools like ChatGPT and ask it to figure out what’s wrong (and to fix it). Once you have the updated code, add it to your website and shazam, you’ve got a cool custom feature that took a fraction of the time and budget to create.

AI has been accused of a lot of things, but let’s not forget it can also be a great coach as you stretch into new areas!”