Feed your brain with these life-saving hacks

Did that headline catch your attention?

In today’s world of shorter attention spans and clickbait, doomscrolling and everyone and everything vying for our time, content creators will post just about anything to draw us in.

With the attempts to capture our valuable time, misinformation can run rampant. The amount of false claims and just completely wrong info that takes seconds to discredit floods social media feeds and even pours into what are supposed to be reliable news sources.

That’s why Steve Lombard and I talk to experts and get factual information for our reporting. It’s also why we tap industry experts to sit on our panel discussions, mainly our annual Breakfast Series, held five times throughout the year.

If you’ve been able to attend these in the past, you’ll know that the conversations pack a lot into one hour. If you attended our most recent Breakfast Series on April 9, titled Business Views on Legislation, you noticed that we went over by about 15 minutes. There was so much to talk about that we didn’t cover even half of the topics we wanted.

Five panelists from five different industries talked about how this year’s legislative session would not only impact the bottom line of businesses in Idaho, but how bills impacting health care, education and other sectors would affect the current and future workforce.

The panelists were Lisa Raye Anderson, the director of advocacy at AARP Idaho; Mollie McCarty, chief external affairs officer at the Idaho Transportation Department; Wendi Secrist, executive director of Idaho Workforce Development Council; Brenna Summers, chief governmental affairs office at the Idaho Department of Education; and Corey Surber, the regional vice president of advocacy and government relations at Saint Alphonsus, Trinity Health.

Prior to these events, I meet with each panelist, and we go over the topics they can speak about. More often than not, we are unable to get to every topic in the course of an hour. Our panelists are always passionate about their areas of expertise and it’s obvious that we could run these events for two hours and still not cover everything.

Attendees have told me they leave the Breakfast Series discussions feeling better informed and educated. And even though I speak with the panelists prior to the events and come away having learned something, I get even more knowledge at the actual event.

I spoke with one of the panelists after we wrapped things up, and it was said there was so much more that could have shared about what’s happening in a particular industry.

Even though we are a small team here at IBR, we endeavor to bring you as much information as possible, and to make sure that it’s relevant to a large cross-section of industries. And I have found, whenever I interview someone for a story or for a Q&A piece (by the way, have you checked out our Interviews of Highly Effective People?), there is so much that needs to be cut from the conversation because of space limitations and modern attention span consideration.

To that end, we have been kicking around the thought of launching a regular podcast in which we speak to those experts, leaders, creators and just downright interesting people to bring you more information that you can listen to while working out, on the way to work, while at work or just about anywhere (even if work isn’t involved).

It’s still in the development stages, but once we launch, we will come out strong, bringing you content that we guarantee will be worth your attention.