The only thing more frustrating than getting stuck behind a slow walker in the airport is feeling stuck in your job and not knowing what to do about it. We all have times when we don’t feel challenged or recognized career-wise, and that can lead to a lot of pent-up frustration and a roommate who’s heard it all.

• True, stability in your career is usually good—if you’ve stayed at a job longer than you thought you would but you’re still learning, there’s nothing wrong with sticking with that.
• But when you don’t see any growth opportunities (or promos) in sight or you’re bored and unfulfilled in your current role, then it’s time to get unstuck.

Here are three ways to level up beyond the career plateau:

Get curious—and a little vulnerable. Ask a trusted mentor or colleague for their take on why you haven’t found the right opportunity, role change, or next step at the company. The more you open yourself up here, the more likely you’ll get a valuable diagnosis.

• And if you’ve built out a personal board of directors, now’s the time to tap into that network too.

Expand your reach. Get creative on ways you can further show off your skill set and take on more responsibilities in your current role.

• Volunteer to work on a cross-functional project, ask to sit in on a strategic planning meeting, start a new initiative on your own—whatever you choose, it helps remind people that you’re ready to take on additional duties.

Get out. In order to move up, sometimes you need to move on. Even if you love the company mission and the people you work with, you may need to jump on another train to regain momentum in your career.

• Are any competitor companies offering better growth opportunities? Would you want to pivot into another industry entirely? Would a different location make a difference?
• If you’re not ready to make the full leap, sometimes moving to another division within the co can get you unstuck without having to reroute your commute.

The best way off a career plateau is progress, so don’t forget to reward yourself for all the small steps along the way. Who’s to say that midafternoon affogato isn’t what finally gets you unstuck at work?—CS

The next time you justify eating a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s by citing the seven grams of protein in each serving, say a quick thanks to Burkey Belser. He invented the nutrition label you see on pretty much every food product except loose fruits and veggies. Sadly, last week he died at age 76.

• Belser was known as “the Steve Jobs of information design” because he simplified the Wild West of nutrition facts into an easily digestible, standardized format.
• “The words are left and right justified, which gave it a kind of balance,” he had told the Washington Post. “There was no grammatical punctuation like commas or periods or parentheses that would slow the reader down.”
• The ultimate goal was clarity for the consumer, and that’s what we’ve been getting since the OG label was unveiled almost 30 years ago.

The good news for you is that all those years you spent reading the backs of cereal boxes probably made your writing better, you just didn’t know it. Here are three ways to channel the nutrition label and design your comms as simply as possible:

Use headings—and more than you think. Headings and subheadings add a road map to your writing while also flashing a big neon arrow at your key points.

Bold the important stuff. Do we need to say more?

Use bullet points a lot. And we’re not talking about the dinky dash key. Use that Command + Shift + 8 trick to break up large chunks of text.

• Bonus: Bullets help you categorize and focus your thinking.

Basically, design your writing to make it as easy as possible for your reader to skim and still get all the important info. They’re going to do it anyway, so why not lean in?

And if you’re ready to get a little spicy, try transfiguring your next meeting recap email into a true nutrition label—fingers crossed the convo was more fiber than cholesterol.

Turns out, downloading a meditation app and then never opening it is not the solution to handling our stressful jobs.

• Neither, apparently, is eating an entire bag of Twizzlers after a client pitch (Charlotte) or binge-watching Love Island (Kaila).

Clearly we don’t know how to manage stress, but Alex Auerbach does.

• He’s a certified mental performance coach working in professional sports from the NBA to the Olympics.
• And he has the secrets to changing your relationship with stress.

Alex is joining the Brew for a one-week virtual course, Performing Under Pressure, that will teach you how to leverage the same science-based tactics used in professional sports to make your own life less miserable and panicky and sweaty.

The course starts Monday, October 16. Reserve your spot today.

Project management: the system that makes task handoffs seamless, aka the unsung hero of everyone’s workday.

• The trouble: Who’s running point on all this running point? And even if you’ve got a dedicated point person, how do you hold people accountable for their deliverables?

Finding the right project management tool can make the difference between a well-oiled machine and a passive-aggressive “I was under the impression this was your responsibility” email.

Save yourself the work drama—here are five tools for when your team to-do list no longer fits on a sticky note:

🟩 Monday.com is great for: colorful workflow boards, multiple ways to view progress, and a very satisfying celebration graphic when tasks are completed.

Notion is great for: linking timelines to the actual work product pages within the same platform.

Google Sheets or Excel is great for: anything you want it to be. Spreadsheets are the blank canvas of project management tools, so go get your Picasso on.

Airtable is great for: bringing external partners into your timeline instead of emailing clients 15 different decks.

Smartsheet is great for: customizing a project like you would in a spreadsheet, but with the added capacity of integrating other software like Slack, DocuSign, Tableau, and Miro.

Honorable mentions: Jira Software for consistency as your company scales and Asana for tracking biz goals alongside individual projects.