We believed that procrastination was a time management problem. Neuroscience has shown that it is a survival instinct

Almost all of us have been in the situation of being faced with a task that must be done no matter what, such as studying an exam or handing in an assignment. We know that it is something important, and that we should start addressing it now, but suddenly we are doing something totally different and insignificant like reorganizing the drawer or watching a video on YouTube. What seems so common is what we call procrastinationand we understand more and more why we do it. The context. For decades, popular culture has told us that procrastination is a time management problem or, worse yet, simple laziness. However, neuroscience has a very different message when it points out that procrastination It is not an organizational failure, it is a crisis of emotional regulation. The brain. To understand procrastination, we must first look at the anatomy of our brain, which often functions as a large battlefield divided into two sides. On the one hand we have the limbic system, which is one of the most primitive parts of the brain and whose function is simply to keep us alive, away from pain and seeking immediate pleasure. On the other hand, we have the prefrontal cortex, which is the most evolutionarily ‘modern’ area, located right on the forehead. This is where we have rational thinking, long-term planning and logic. What is known. Already a 2021 review pointed out that these areas are activated when you have to do a task that generates anxiety, boredom or insecurity, such as studying an exam. And it is no wonder, because the limbic system detects this situation as a “threat”, and automatically hijacks the prefrontal cortex to prioritize immediate emotional relief by looking at Instagram over the long-term benefit of starting to study to pass. We know more. Now, this year, a new study has taken a new step to understand this brain system, by identifying in primates a specific neuronal circuit that functions as a “brake” for motivation, and that connects two parts of the brain: the ventral striatum (VS) with the ventral pallidum (VP). The researchers discovered that when we face tasks associated with discomfort or the possibility of failure, this VS-VP circuit is activated, inhibiting the action, as if it were an emotional protection mechanism taken to the extreme. The most striking thing about the study is that, by interrupting this circuit in the laboratory, the subjects immediately restored their motivation, “releasing the brake” and tackling the difficult task. It’s not laziness. This new line of research is consistent with previous research that associated procrastination with stress, fear of failure, and anxiety. In this way, when seeing a blank document or a very complex Excel sheet, the amygdala activates a flight response. In fact, it has been seen that chronic procrastinators tend to have worse connectivity between the amygdala. the anterior cingulate cortex, which makes them less able to filter negative emotions and distractions. In short, the brain will procrastinate to protect itself from the psychological discomfort caused by a task. Hacking. Seeing how complex this all is, blaming yourself or calling yourself “lazy” is of no use. But it is true that you have to follow a strategy to be able to hack our perception of stress and reward, starting to break up the work, making it so that, instead of setting out to “write the entire work”, you should opt for “write only the title and the first paragraph for five minutes” to trick the amygdala. It is also possible to block sources of easy dopamine with a blocking system on your computer or mobile phone that makes it difficult to access Instagram or YouTube to watch a video. This way, if the immediate reward requires an effort like going to the next room for the phone, the prefrontal cortex has time to intervene and put us in concentration mode. Images | Ashkan Forouzani In Xataka | Procrastinating is a death trap for your brain in the form of anxiety. The problem is that we don’t know how to avoid it.

the great waste management fraud

In the early 1980s, some North American cities began to realize that the waste generated by plastic was enormous and uncontrollable. Technicians and activists began to talk about regulations and prohibitions, but the industry found another way to solve it: recycling. The standard. For 50 years, the petrochemical industry has promoted recycling as the ‘gold standard’ for solving plastic pollution. Today, We know that only 9% of all plastic produced historically has been recycled. It was not a miscalculationnor a display of naive optimism: it was a large-scale industrial fraud. A documented fraud. In 1973, ahead of the regulatory wave, the Society of the Plastics Industry commissioned a report to see what could be done with the plastic they made themselves. The study’s conclusions were devastating: not only did it recognize the inherent degradation of resins in each reprocessing cycle, but it made clear that (even in the best of cases) there was no market for the final product. And, of course, the industry didn’t care. A report from the Center for Climate Integrity and the summary of a macro-case by the California attorney general against ExxonMobil give us the keys to understand it. Because it’s not exactly a secret. An Exxon employee recognized in 1994 before the American Plastics Council that “the company was committed to recycling activities, but not to their results.” The founder of the Vinyl Institute (one of the sector’s lobbies) admitted in 1989 that recycling could not be continued indefinitely and that, of course, it did not solve the problem of solid waste. We have proof. What’s more, for decades, we have known that there are internal documents that show patterns of investments in recycling plants that were closed or abandoned once they had fulfilled their public relations function. The tests go on and on. However, no one paid much attention. The parallelism with climate denialism ands patent: the documentation is crystal clear. The industry knew recycling wouldn’t work, but spent millions and millions actively promoting it with the idea of ​​avoiding regulations. And why is it news now? Because there are doubts that this is over. Yes, the average citizen has internalized that separating waste and depositing it in the yellow container (or the equivalent system) is an effective environmental action. In fact, the better the citizen recycles, the more effective the industry’s alibi is to continue producing plastic without restrictions. Recycling actually displaces regulatory pressure. Because the data (and recycling rates whatever the approach) is not as good as we might think. And the problem is volume. Plastic production is going at such a speed that even by significantly improving recycling rates we would not be able to reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in the environment. And what do we do? That’s the big question: what do we do. Our society has become so dependent on plastic that the most effective solutions are outside the realm of possibility. But if the situation continues like thisthey will stop being so sooner rather than later. Image | Nick Fewings In Xataka | We have known for years that our recycling system is broken. It seems that we are finally going to fix it

video store management and video game repair simulators

Micro-niches are one of the most fascinating phenomena on Steam: coming from no one knows where, putting developers thousands of kilometers apart from each other, thanks to them a handful of games come together that share thematic, aesthetic or mechanical features (what is known in the indie scene as multiple discovery). Now, surfing the wave of the nostalgia millennialseveral games from a new micro-niche coincide: management and work with retro overtones. Long live plastic. Long live the video store. In March 2026, two games about 90s video stores were released on Steam by two development teams who didn’t know each other within six days of each other. Neither knew of the other’s work, but both succeeded: they climbed the Valve store’s sales rankings and accumulated thousands of positive reviews. And the whole phenomenon says a lot about the cultural moment we are in. Retro Rewind. With the subtitle ‘Video Store Simulator‘, this game arrived on Steam on March 17, 2026. It was developed by Blood Pact Studios, a two-person team in Canada, and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first four days. The reviews, in the “Overwhelmingly Positive” category. Its mechanics are deliberately simple: you open a video store in the early 90s, order tapes from a catalogue, fill shelves by genre, charge fines for late returns and serve the customer who wants ‘Terminator 2’, of which there are no copies left. There’s even an adult section hidden in a corner and a pirate tape dealer that appears twice a week in an alley. Rewind 99. Six days before,’Rewind 99‘ entered Early Access with an almost identical premise but a different tone. Developed by Gunmetal Games, the game places the player in charge of the last video store in the city in 1999, fighting against the expansion of a streaming service called RentNet. ‘Retro Rewind’ is committed to pure single-player management, but ‘Rewind 99’ it is more complex: RPG-like progression, open world, side missions and online cooperative mode. Reviews within the framework of “Very Positive” and complete exit from Early Access in 2028. ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs. Let’s go to another somewhat more cozy aspect of nostalgia millennial. ‘ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs‘, developed by Mandragora and published by tinyBuild, is not about renting retro technology, but about manipulating it. Disassembling, cleaning, soldering and rebuilding cartridges in a Tokyo repair shop in the early 2000s is the central task of the game, which also not short of iconic ambitionas it includes officially licensed Atari consoles such as the 2600 and Jaguar, as well as mobile phones, cameras, digital pets and music players. The player’s work also affects the customers and the destiny of the store. There is a demo in limited playtest on Steam and the launch is scheduled for this year. Stores for millennials. This coincidence is explained by two phenomena that collide and whose fruits sprout here: on the one hand, the store simulator subgenre, which has been established on Steam for years thanks to titles such as ‘Supermarket Simulator’ or ‘Gas Station Simulator’, with thematic inventory management and customer service (with countless variants, from dating games to visual novels) as central mechanics. And on the other hand, nostalgia millennial which is now beginning to miss the latest developments in physical formats, such as cartridges, VHS or DVDs. Result of the pairing: the most endearingly turbocapitalist indie games of the moment. In Xataka | The internet has decided that 2016 was great and worth remembering. But there’s a problem: it wasn’t at all.

Spanish Clevergy has just lifted 3.2 million to expand its energy management model

The relationship between marketers and households is changing: it is no longer going on invoices, it goes from apps that explain what your home consumes and what you can optimize. In that day -to -day landing stands out Clevergya Spanish startup founded in 2022 that has just closed 3.2 million euros To make your European leap. Its proposal allows companies to offer not only a personalized application with real -time monitoring, alerts and savings recommendations, but also a set of solutions to digitize their business. The promised result: customers who better understand their energy consumption and companies that modernize their offer without starting from scratch. Founded in Madrid in 2022 by Beltrán Aznar, Álvaro Pérez and Juan LópezClevergy has moved quickly in a sector where digitalization is already a demand. In just three years he has managed to arrive, according to the company, “hundreds of thousands” of Spanish homes through their agreements with marketers. Its role is clear: it acts under a B2B2C model, that is, it offers technology to companies so that it is the ones that put it in their end customers. This combination of speed and adoption has given visibility in a market in full transformation. Clevergy seeks to convert energy management into a daily experience Clevergy’s proposal for marketers goes beyond an app for its customers. The company has developed a portal that allows to centralize operations and support, in addition to identifying business opportunities and cutting costs. It also offers one API to integrate consumption data and generation from counters, solar panels or connected devices. To this are added white brand applications, adaptable to the identity of each company, and modules that can be inserted into existing platforms. For homes, all this deployment is concretized in functions designed to give more visibility about the energy they consume. Customers can monitor their real -time spending, receive notifications when inefficiencies are detected and adjust their consumption habits. The system also includes comparisons with other users, calculation of potential savings and remote control of connected equipment. In this way, marketers seek to add a tangible value to their offer and generate confidence in a market where the price is no longer the only decisive factor. Clevergy’s growth has been fast. In just three years he claims to have tripled its growth and, in just 18 months, has closed two rounds of financing: the first of 1.5 million euros in 2024 And the second, of 3.2 million, is the one that has just been announced in 2025. The latter is the one that marks a turning point, when arriving at a time when marketers intensify the search for digital services to improve their relationship with customers and reduce costs. For the company, it is a validation of its role in this transformation process. Clevergy has closed two rounds of financing: the first of 1.5 million euros in 2024 and the second, of 3.2 million The round of 3.2 million euros has been led by Racine2 (managed by Serena and Makesense) together with Axon Partners Group, with the participation of Satgana, Wayra (the CVC of Telefónica) and Angels, Juan Roig’s investment society. With these funds, Clevergy seeks to accelerate its international expansion and improve the capabilities of its platform. The declared objective of the company is to continue refining its technology and progressively take it to other countries of the continent. The challenge is now to check how far Clevergy can go outside of Spain. The company has shown traction in the national market, but the jump to Europe implies integrating with different regulations and compete in a stage with other technological and energy actors. It will be key to see how it manages to deploy its platform in new countries and if the marketers really transfer that proposal to the final customer. Its evolution will mark to what extent this digitalization model can be consolidated beyond the domestic market. Images | Clevergy In Xataka | Juan Roig believes that in the future no one will have cooking at home. Mercadona is conquering the market thanks to it In Xataka | A Basque startup of AI has just lifted 189 million euros with a great idea: compress the AI

“I have created more billionaires in my management team than any other CEO in the world”

Jensen Huang is In the epicenter of one of the industries with the greatest Growth potential in which some are managed dizzy investment figures. That flow of money, also permeates higher wages, especially in those strategic positions such as It has shown well Mark Zuckerberg with his last rounds of signing of talent. Within the framework of a round of interviews with AI as a central axis, the CEO of Nvidia has presumed how well paid its closest collaborators. So Huang does not fear that his competition comes to steal his best talent. “They are very good. You don’t have to feel sorry for anyone in my management team,” Huang said. The Nvidia billionaire club. In a thematic days about organized AI by all-in podcastJensen Huang answered a question of moderators about the recent signings and millionaire hiring between AI specialists: “I have created more billionaires in my management team than any other executive director of the world.” Under the stock market results From the company, this statement is absolutely true since a good part of the remuneration of Nvidia’s responsibility positions have a package of actions linked to their position, and the rest of the company’s employees can take advantage of the Share purchase plan for employees (ESPP for the acronym in English of Employee Stock Purchase Plan). Through these plans, much of its template has become a millionaire. Working in the most profitable company has advantages. The price of Nvidia’s shares have not stopped growing in recent years, so any employee who had invested a minimum initial capital, would have increased substantially. According to published data by Fortunesince 2019, the company has increased 3,776% in the price of its shares, with a 170% rise in the last year. With a heritage valued at about 151,000 million dollars, Huang has made Nvid Become Millionaires. Small and well paid teams. Nvidia is one of the companies with Greater profitability by employee. That is, it is able to generate huge benefits with a relatively reduced template. Huang ensures that this is the formula for success in AI investigation. “Some 150 researchers in AI, with sufficient financing, can probably create an OpenAi. There is something elegant in small teams,” said the CEO of Nvidia. Huang said that this approach not only maximizes the performance of the teams, but also facilitates to make its “extraordinarily rich” members if they reach the expected success, putting as an example the OpenAI researchers or to the development team of Deepseek. Nothing moves in Nvidia without knowing Huang. Another feature of Huang’s leadership is that CEO knows everything that happens in your company thanks to a peculiar system Email -based that allows him to be aware of what he does or worries to the last employee of the company. This proximity allows Huang to affirm that it personally supervises “the compensation of all employees until today … and always increases the company’s expense on operational expenses.” According to Huang, there is a reason for weight to take care of your employees, “if you take care of people, everything else takes care of themselves.” The CEO has declared a joke: “Yes, I carry Stock Options In the pocket right now. “ Nvidia’s “gold wives”. However, these economic incentives of Nvidia are associated with a Extreme labor demandwhich implies eternal days seven days a week. Despite this intensity, Nvidia has registered a personnel rotation index below the average of its peers. According to his 2024 sustainability reportin that year it was only 2.7%, compared to the 17.7% that the semiconductor industry records on average. Bloomberg defined This phenomenon has been described as “gold wives” for those employees and managers who access these actions packages. In Xataka | Jensen Huang hates individual meetings with his team. There is only one exception: “If you ask me, I will leave everything” Image |Nvidia

In the era of hybrid work there is a new unicorn of business management: the Barcelona factorial startup

In 2020 and in full pandemic a technological startup of Barcelona called Factorial He lived his particular turning point. The company had an attractive and versatile online platform for human resources management, and the confinement gave a unique opportunity to make potential clients known: it offered its platform for free until confinement passed, and that made many known and realized how well that platform could work while the teleworking became strength. His CEO, Jordi Romero, explained So how many of the new clients who registered in factorial maintained their management in local files or at most “in a dropbox folderbut nothing more. “In April the firm achieved an investment of 16 million dollars of CRV, but that was a stressful round. Just before the pandemic came the company had” an agreement between knights (with CRV), so to speak, “Romero commented,” but the money had to be transferred yet. “ The decision to offer its platform for free was a success, and many companies verified the benefits of that comfortable online management that allowed everything very well organized and accessible in a simple way. At that time that round was the largest that was seen in Spain, and it happened at a time when the labor market was in a certainly strange situation. Factorial took advantage of something that no other company in the sector had previously taken advantage of: His platform was perfect for companies that or did not have HR professionals for being too small, or that if they had them were overcome by the workload or by having to make those tasks with others of management. The factorial solution precisely solved the problem, and that marked a before and after for her and her clients. New and important investment rounds After that round starring CRV, 18 months later factorial became one of the protagonists of the Spanish technological sector. In September 2021 the general investment firm Catalyst bet 80 million dollars for her and confirmed her remarkable projection. This bet was a success: the factorial growth has made it one of the most promising technological startups in our country. A year later, factorial lifted another 120 million dollars in a round with the majority participation of Atomico, but also of GIC, Tiger Global, CRV, K-Found and Creandum. That made it a de facto “unicorn”: its valuation was already 1,000 million dollars, twice what was a year earlier with the previous round. The company, which then had 7,000 clients in Europe and in Latin America – where those first years had its great focus— has not stopped growing And he has had a especially notable 2024. His number of customers is now 13,000 SMEs, and has just given another great news: General Catalyst, which as we said already invested 80 million dollars in it, has expanded that investment at $ 120 million, so that the total bet It becomes 200 million dollars. It is striking that this extension of the investment is carried out without diluting the capital of its shareholders. Jordi Romero, CEO of Factorial (on the left in the image with Bernat Farrero, another of the co -founders) explained how that is “something uncommon in hypercrection companies that, in addition, are financially sustainable.” Pau Ramón, the third co -founder and exco from the company, abandonment Factorial in 2023 for personal reasons. The funds, as those responsible for Factorial point out, will go to the expansion of the firm in Germany – where it is growing especially fast – France and Italy. Not only that: they will allow this firm to give the final impulse in a transition in which they have been working for years: to go from being a human resources software to a large business management platform. SANNED ACCOUNTS AND OWN RISK CAPITAL FUND They hope to reach about 20,000 clients before the end of the year, Romero said In the countryand its forecast is to exceed 100 million dollars of recurring income this year. As indicated in that article, 2024 has been the first year in which the company has grown up without consuming its own resourcessomething especially important to consolidate the profitability of the company. Bernat Farrero, Pau Ramón (now outside the company) and Jordi Romero, co -founders of the company. Source: Factorial. The firm had at the end of 2024 with 90 million dollars of cash reserves, something striking because it shows the financial solidity of a company that is capable of growing without practically boxing of cash. The investment round seemed almost unnecessary, but according to Romero that allows factorial to “continue its expansion without compromising its financial stability or diluting the capital of its shareholders,” as we mentioned earlier. The company has no immediate plans to go over – “We are not in a hurry,” Romero explains – and does not seem interested in inorganic growth inking or buying other companies. What they do, explained those responsible In araIt is to bill 1,000 million euros in five years. And although the exit to the parquet is for now an unknown, what those entrepreneurs have done has been, as they pointed out In the avant -garde, Create a risk capital fund of 15 million euros with which they want to finance emerging companies. It’s called Itnig Capital, and He has already invested One million euros in nine Spanish companies. The “Startup factory” of Factorial seems to have started with good foot, and is helping that new firms created by former factorial employees take their first steps, as pointed out expanding A few months ago. Growing, but with comparatively low wages During all this factorial time it has evolved. Its creators began working on a human resources platform to manage both employees and various administrative tasks, but in recent times they have become a “Comprehensive Business Management Platform“That allows the management of projects, training and control of expenses. Romero, Farrero and Ramón shared the same frustration when creating factorial: that in many companies there was little technology that helped to climb … Read more

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