Kristen Berman is the co-founder of Irrational Labs and co-founder and principal at Common Cents Lab, a non-profit behavioral consulting company, with Dan Ariely. They work focuses on the financial well-being of low-to-middle-income Americans.

She was also on the founding team for the behavioral economics group at Google and hosts one of the top behavioral change conferences globally, StartupOnomics. She co-authored a series of workbooks (with Dan Ariely) called Hacking Human Nature for Good: A Practical Guide to Changing Behavior.

Our conversation with Kristen began with some straightforward tips on boosting productivity while working in isolation, including intentional coordination and informal things like virtual lunch meetings. And she pointed out how too many emails and Zoom meetings crowd out time to think, analyze and, well, work.

She also suggested a framework for creating “Quaranteams” and how we need to develop new social norms on how non-nuclear families can work and play together.