Despite the rapid increases in digital adoption and use that we’ve seen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic more than a year ago, the latest update in the Global Digital Reports series reveals that digital growth rates remain elevated as we move into the second half of 2021.

DataReportal ‘s Digital 2021 July Global Statshot Report – published in partnership with Hootsuite and We Are Social – shows that social media continues to drive connected activity around the world, with global social media user numbers fast approaching another impressive milestone.

This quarter’s data reveals some potential challenges ahead for marketers though, with the impact of changes in Apple’s privacy policies and the rollout of the EU’s ePrivacy Directive starting to appear in some of our numbers.

You’ll find a handy summary of this quarter’s top stories in the video embed below (you can also click here ), but read on below for the full report, and for my in-depth analysis of the latest essential trends.

Just before we dive into the data, I’d like to say a big thank you to the partners who make our Global Digital Reports possible: GWI , Statista , Semrush , Skai (formerly Kenshoo), SimilarWeb , Locowise , and App Annie .

Full report

You’ll find the complete Digital 2021 July Global Statshot Report report in the SlideShare embed below (you can also click here ), but read on past that to understand what all these numbers might mean for you.

  

Essential headlines

Let’s start with the key figures for digital adoption around the world in July 2021:

Global mobile users have reached 5.27 billion , equating to just under 67% of the world’s total population.

The number of mobile users has grown by 2.3% over the past year, increasing by 117 million in 12 months – that’s almost 10 million new users per month.

Internet users have increased by more than a quarter of a billion since this time last year, registering year-on-year growth of close to 6%.

There are 4.80 billion internet users around the world today, equating to almost 61% of the world’s total population.

Social media user numbers have jumped by more than 13% since this time last year, with the latest data showing an increase of more than half a billion users in just 12 months.

There are now 4.48 billion social media users around the world, which is equal to almost 57% of the world’s total population.

Social media growth continues

Despite COVID-19 restrictions easing in some parts of the world over recent months, the pace of growth in social media users shows few signs of slowing.

The global unique user total grew by 520 million over the past year, representing annual growth of more than 13%.

For context, that means that more than 1 in 9 of today’s social media users started using social platforms for the first time within the past 12 months.

Furthermore, today’s user total is 147 million higher than it was just 3 months ago, equating to quarter-on-quarter growth of nearly 3.5%.

This is one of the fastest quarterly growth rates that we’ve reported in the Global Digital Reports series , but it’s important to stress that the latest figures have benefited from a meaningful upward correction in Facebook’s ‘family active people’ numbers.

As the company noted in its 2021 Q1 earnings announcement ,

However, while this correction may have inflated the latest quarterly growth rates, Facebook appears to update its models and metrics on a regular basis, so the 13% annual growth rate that we’re reporting this quarter should still be representative of actual year-on-year trends.

At an individual platform level, Facebook is pushing ever closer to the 3 billion monthly active user milestone, with current trends suggesting that it may reach this level by early next year.

However, the company’s investor reports indicate that roughly 3.5 billion people already use at least one of Facebook’s ‘family’ of platforms – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

There were no updates to user numbers from YouTube, WhatsApp, or Messenger this quarter, but the latest data from Instagram suggests the platform has enjoyed significant growth over recent months – a story that we’ll explore in more detail below.

TikTok is still keeping its latest user numbers close to its chest too, so we’re unable to report any ‘official’ updates to its monthly active user figure this quarter.

However, data from Sensor Tower indicates that the TikTok mobile app was downloaded roughly 57 million times in June 2021 alone, so there’s a good chance that the platform’s active user base continues to grow ( note that we’ve removed figures for China from Sensor Tower’s total, because we treat Douyin as a separate app).

Reporting of internet user growth continues to lag

Despite the latest data showing that internet user numbers have increased by more than a quarter of a billion over the past year, it’s clear that internet user data continues to be impacted by research limitations caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

In particular, many countries in the developing world haven’t published updates to internet user numbers since the outbreak of COVID-19 more than a year ago, and these are the countries where we’d expect to see the most significant increases.

As a result, we continue to anticipate a meaningful upward correction in internet user numbers once research and reporting can return to normal.

Internet time decreases

The average amount of time that people spend using the internet each day dipped slightly in the past 3 months, compared with the values we reported in our Digital 2021 April Global Statshot Report .

Data from GWI shows that average daily internet use dropped by almost a minute per day, with people spending roughly 30 seconds less online on computers, and 30 seconds less online on mobile devices.

People are still spending close to 7 hours per day using the internet though – more than twice the amount of time that they spend watching television.

However, it’s worth noting that people have been spending more time watching television in recent months.

The ‘typical’ internet user around the world says that they watched an average of 3 additional minutes of TV per day compared to the previous quarter, which equates to more than 5 additional hours of television content over the past three months.

Meanwhile, despite the drop in overall internet time, people say that they’ve been spending more time using social media.

GWI’s most recent survey found that people spent roughly 2 minutes longer on social platforms each day over the past 3 months, compared to values for the previous quarter.

Interestingly, GWI also found that people have been spending more time with ‘conventional’ media in recent months.

Survey respondents’ self-reported values for time spent reading physical newspapers and magazines increased by 8.5% over the past three months, equating to an additional 4 minutes per day – faster than the increase we’ve seen for online press consumption.

Similarly, the amount of time that people say they spend listening to broadcast radio has increased by 3.5% over the past 90 days, equating to an increase of 2 minutes per day.

An increase of just a few minutes per day might not sound like a lot, but added up, these increases mean that the typical global internet user spent an additional 6 hours consuming print media over the past quarter, and an extra 3 hours listening to broadcast radio.

Social media dominates the world’s online activities

New data from GWI reveals that more than 95% of the world’s working-age internet users now use social networks and messaging services each month.

Interestingly, this data suggests that the use of social networking platforms like Facebook outranks the use of messaging services like WhatsApp, albeit only by a tiny margin.

More than 5 in 6 internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 also visit search engines and web portals each month, but this figure is more than 10 percentage points lower than the figure for social networks.

Meanwhile, roughly 6 in 10 internet users say they’ve visited some kind of online shopping platform in the past month, and more than 50% of internet users say that they shop or browse for products online every week.

Instagram reach soars, but points to potential trouble ahead

Recent months have seen some interesting changes in the numbers that Facebook’s tools report for Instagram’s advertising reach.

Overall, these tools show that Instagram’s advertising reach has jumped by 100 million users over the past 90 days, representing quarter-on-quarter growth of more than 7.5%.

However, this growth rate is all the more impressive when we look at changes in reach figures for countries in the European Union.

For context, changes in EU legislation – including the roll-out of the ePrivacy Directive – are already starting to impact companies’ ability to target and track audiences across the EU and the UK.

As a support article in Facebook’s Business Help Centre states,

It’s worth noting that these changes will affect all advertising platforms that are active in the EU – not just those owned by Facebook.

But despite Facebook’s expectation that the impact of these changes will “ unfold gradually ”, it seems they may have already started to affect Instagram’s advertising reach numbers.

Compared to the figures that the company’s self-service tools reported just 3 months ago, Instagram’s advertising reach has dropped by a whopping 5 million users (14.7%) in the United Kingdom, and by 3 million users in Italy, Germany, and Spain.

Overall, Facebook’s data suggest that advertisers can now target 25 million fewer users across Europe than they could as recently as April of this year.

However, these drops only seem to have affected countries in the EU and the UK.

It’s also critical to stress that these figures likely only affect the degree to which advertisers can target ads to users in Europe, and they most likely do not represent a drop in actual users.

Indeed, given the rapid growth in Instagram’s reach across all other markets over the past three months, there’s every chance that Instagram has grown its active user base in Europe since April.

Moreover, the company’s latest numbers show no evidence of a drop in Facebook’s advertising reach across the region, which may provide some level of reassurance for investors.

But it’s not just marketers in Europe who face mounting challenges.

In a separate advisory within Facebook’s advertising tools, the company warns that potential reach figures all over the world “ may vary significantly as people opt out of tracking on iOS 14.5, or use other data controls .”

The tone of these messages suggests that Facebook expects Apple’s recent iOS changes to have a meaningful impact on the performance of its advertising products over the coming months.

These changes will affect many other platforms too – not just Facebook.

Despite these challenges though, it’s worth reiterating the point that I made at the start of this section: overall, Instagram’s advertising reach has increased by more than 100 million over the past 3 months – despite that big drop in EU reach.

So, the takeaway here is that changes to privacy policies, cookie support, and online tracking regulations may have a significant impact on marketers’ ability to target ads over the coming months – at least until publishers and platforms find ways to adapt.

However, those changes don’t diminish the broader opportunities available to marketers within digital and social media platforms.

Recent data from eMarketer shows that digital channels now account for nearly 6 in every 10 ad dollars spent around the world, and we don’t anticipate that the challenges outlined above will make a significant dent in that share.

Marketers will need to change how they use digital and social media platforms over the next few months though, to ensure that their activities are as efficient and as effective as possible.

For example, you may want to experiment with contextual targeting opportunities, instead of relying solely on audience demographics – at least until you’re better able to identify how new policies and laws will affect your advertising strategy.

Mobile connection speeds accelerate

The latest data from Ookla shows that the average mobile connection speed around the world has increased by 60% over the past 12 months.

The typical mobile user now enjoys data download speeds in excess of 55 Mbps, compared to the 35 Mbps that the company reported this time last year.

Based on Netflix’s guidance , these figures indicate that the typical mobile user can now simultaneously stream two 4K movies via a single mobile connection.

According to Ookla’s latest findings, only two countries in the world now suffer from average mobile connection speeds below 10 Mbps: Afghanistan and Venezuela.

At the other end of the spectrum, 13 countries now enjoy average mobile connection speeds in excess of 100 Mbps, with average speeds in the United Arab Emirates already close to 200 Mbps.

To put that figure in perspective, the typical mobile user in the UAE can now download internet content 3,450 times faster than they would have been able to by using a 56K modem just 20 years ago.

The latency of mobile internet connections continues to improve too, with Ookla’s latest data showing that the ‘lag’ between a device sending a data request and it starting to receive the requested data has fallen by 7.5% over the past 12 months.

The latency of the average mobile connection continues to be almost double that of the average fixed connection though, so there’s some way to go before mobile gamers can enjoy the same speed advantages as their peers who use a fixed connection.

When it comes to fixed internet connections, a total of 10 countries now enjoy average download speeds of more than 200 Mbps, with Monaco and Singapore enjoying average speeds in excess of 250 Mbps.

However, 7 countries continue to suffer from average fixed connection speeds below 10 Mbps, and Ookla’s data reveals that mobile connections now outpace fixed connections in more than 40 countries.

Chinese websites move up the rankings

The latest data from Alexa (the analytics firm, not the voice assistant) suggests that the share of global internet traffic attributable to Chinese websites continues to grow.

The company’s latest rankings show that websites managed by companies based in China now account for 7 of the 10 most-visited sites in the world, and half of the global top 20.

Chinese ecommerce platforms are particularly popular, with three of the country’s online merchants – Tmall, Taobao, and JD – all ranking above Amazon’s om’ store at a worldwide level (note that Alexa treats each top-level domain separately, so traffic to Amazon’s local country stores are not included in the values for its om store).

However, almost all of the traffic to Chinese websites appears to come from within China itself.

Alexa’s data shows that more than 95% of Tmall’s traffic comes from its home market, while that figure is 94% for Taobao, and 95% for JD.

Across each of these three sites, visitors from the United States and Japan account for roughly 3.5% of total traffic, meaning that the rest of the world accounts for barely 1.5% of each site’s worldwide total.

This data clearly demonstrates just how quickly China’s connected population is growing, but it also illustrates just how different China’s internet behaviors are to those of the rest of the world.

People increasingly rely on internet translation tools

The latest data suggests that online translation tools are becoming increasingly popular with internet users around the world.

Google Trends data shows that 3 of the worldwide top 20 Google search queries between April and June 2021 related to converting content between languages, with “translate”, “traductor”, and “Google Translate” all now top queries at a global level.

GWI data reinforces this finding, with the company’s latest survey revealing that roughly 1 in 3 internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 use online translation tools every week.

However, GWI’s data reveals some fascinating differences between countries and cultures.

Internet users in Latin America are the most likely to make use of online translation tools, with more than half of internet users in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina saying they use these tools on a weekly basis.

However, internet users in countries where English is the dominant language appear to be far less likely to want to translate content from (or into) other languages.

For example, fewer than 1 in 5 internet users in the United Kingdom and the USA say that they’ve used an online translation tool in the past week.

Even more tellingly, searches for ‘traductor’ rank relatively highly amongst Google queries in the United States, suggesting that many of those who do use online translation tools in the US are not native English speakers.

Around the world, younger people are also more likely to want to translate content than their parents’ generation.

GWI’s data shows that Gen Z internet users are almost twice as likely to have used an online translation tool in the past week than Baby Boomers are, with nearly 4 in 10 female internet users aged between 16 and 24 translating content online in the past 7 days.

Overall, these findings indicate that people are increasingly consuming content in languages other than their own native tongue, which represents some interesting new opportunities – and challenges – for marketers.

For example, as we reported this time last year, we’re seeing increased prevalence of cross-border online shopping, especially outside of North America.

However, as international content becomes ever more accessible, and as more people visit online merchants outside of their home country, brands may find it increasingly difficult to justify different prices – and even different product ranges – across different countries.

It’s also worth noting that Amazon appears to have increased the visibility of reviews from shoppers in other countries – some of which may be in different languages – which adds a whole new dimension to the factors that marketers need to consider when it comes to online shopping.

Digging deeper into video game behaviors

We’ve teamed up with GWI to bring you some detailed insights into gaming activities this quarter, taken from the company’s new Gaming dataset .

85% of the world’s internet users say that they play video games, so gaming environments represent a huge opportunity for marketers.

Moreover, 1 in 3 gamers around the world say that they play video games on a daily basis, with that figure rising to more than 40% in the USA, Japan, and the Philippines.

Meanwhile, more than 5 in every 6 gamers (84%) around the world say that they play video games at least once per week, with that figure rising to 87% in Mexico and India.

As you might expect, younger people are more likely to play video games, but GWI reports that more than 2 in 3 internet users aged 55 to 64 also identify as gamers.

Men are also slightly more likely to play video games than women, but amongst older age groups, women are just as likely to be gamers as men are.

The gaming ‘gender gap’ is also much smaller than many marketers might think, and when it comes to certain ‘casual’ game genres – particularly those on mobile devices – female players often outnumber their male peers.

The data also shows that people play a wide variety of different kinds of video games.

Action adventures like Assassin’s Creed and shooter formats like Call of Duty top the global rankings, with more than half of all gamers saying that they’ve played at least one title in these genres over the past year.

However, 10 distinct gaming genres have attracted more than a quarter of the worldwide gaming audience during the past 12 months, including puzzle formats like Limbo , simulation games like The Sims , and role-playing games like Mass Effect .

This highlights the fact that gaming opportunities cover a wide variety of contexts, making video games an even more compelling opportunity for marketers.

Opportunities aren’t limited to in-game activities either; gaming livestreams and related social media conversations are often just as compelling as the games themselves.

YouTube attracts the largest share of social media activities related to gaming, but – perhaps surprisingly – Facebook ranks ahead of Twitch and Discord, despite those platforms’ strong association with gaming communities.

Gaming environments are quite different from other kinds of media though, so it’s important for marketers to invest time in understanding which kinds of gaming genre and marketing activity will be most relevant to their specific audiences, as well as to their brand.

Online news behaviors

To round out this quarter’s analysis, let’s take a look at some key headlines from the 2021 edition of the Digital News Report , published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

This annual study provides a wealth of insights into how the world consumes news, which has particular importance when we consider GWI’s finding that “ keeping up to date with news and events ” is one of the top 3 motivations driving global internet use.

This year’s Digital News data shows that 82% of adults aged 18 and above now consume news online – significantly more than the 64% who say they watch news content on television.

Moreover, people are now more than twice as likely to get their news from social media as they are to look for it in newspapers and magazines.

Overall, 56% of respondents in the Digital News survey say that they use social media to access news content, but that figure rises to more than three-quarters of all adults aged 18 and above in Thailand, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

Younger people are particularly likely to turn to social media for news, with two-thirds of respondents aged 18 to 24 saying that they use social platforms to access news content.

However, roughly half of all adults aged 55 and above say that they use social media for news too, so this behavior is by no means limited to Gen Z audiences.

Once again, these findings reinforce the data in GWI’s survey, which shows that news content is a strong draw for social media use.

Indeed, GWI’s latest data reveals that news content is a primary reason why more than 1 in 3 internet users aged 16 to 64 visit social platforms.

The Reuters Institute’s new report shows that Facebook continues to be the top social destination for news, with 44% of worldwide respondents saying that they use the platform to discover and consume news content.

YouTube ranks second at 29%, while WhatsApp is now the third most important social channel for news, with almost a quarter of survey respondents citing the platform as a regular feature in their news repertoire.

This year’s data also highlights Twitter’s outsized role when it comes to news content.

Despite claiming three times fewer monthly active users, Twitter is almost as popular as Instagram when it comes to news content.

However, people have significantly lower levels of trust in the news content that they find via social channels, compared to news in other kinds of media.

Overall, 44% of survey respondents say that they feel they can “ trust most news content most of the time ”, but positive sentiment falls to roughly half that figure (24%) when it comes to news content in social media.

So, while social media continues to play an important role in people’s news habits, it’s critical to remember that social media environments may have a negative impact on news credibility.

As a result, marketers and publishers may want to think carefully about how they use social channels to promote and distribute news content, especially if that content relates to potentially sensitive or contentious topics.

Perhaps ironically though, despite the relatively low levels of overall trust in news, people are still reluctant to pay for digital news content.

Fewer than 1 in 5 adults aged 18 and above around the world say that they currently pay for digital news, with that figure falling to less than 10% in Germany, the UK, and Croatia.

Outlook for the second half of 2021

Once again, the data in this quarter’s report demonstrates elevated growth in digital use and adoption around the world, creating a variety of opportunities for marketers everywhere.

However, I confess I’m surprised by these sustained high levels of growth, especially when it comes to social media user numbers.

The initial spikes in user growth that we saw at the start of the coronavirus pandemic were perhaps to be expected, but I’m unsure as to why those growth rates haven’t already returned to the levels we saw prior to the outbreak.

So, while my expectation is that we’ll start to see quarter-on-quarter growth rates fall from their recent highs later this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if that deceleration is still a few months away.

Furthermore, with ongoing delays in reporting updates to internet user numbers, we may see a significant jump in those metrics as new data starts to become available.

But what does this mean for marketers?

Here are my top tips for the second half of 2021:

Focus on macro trends: it’s easy to get distracted by short-term changes in the numbers, especially when fluctuations make for great headlines. However, the underlying story seems clear: our audiences have significantly increased their use of connected devices and services over recent months, and it’s unlikely that they’ll completely return to their pre-COVID habits. As a result, growth trends in digital activity don’t face the same risk of a downward ‘correction’ that we might expect to see in areas such as stock market prices.

Prepare for change: new privacy policies, the demise of third-party cookies, and changes to online legislation are combining to create ideal conditions for advertising’s ‘perfect storm’. Of course, this may all turn out to be another Millennium Bug , but with evidence of change already visible in some of this quarter’s numbers, I’d recommend opting for safe instead of sorry. If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to review which of your marketing activities depend on data and targeting practices that may be affected by these changes, and to develop contingency plans that will ensure your marketing efforts can continue.

Embrace digital utility: many of today’s most successful digital companies focus on two key industries – communication and entertainment. However, the next wave of digital innovation will likely focus on everyday utility, with the rapid digitization of education, banking, and healthcare leading the way. These industries offer fewer advertising opportunities than a new form of entertainment might do, but the changes they’ll bring to people’s everyday activities will likely have a knock-on effect on people’s digital expectations. As a result, I’d recommend exploring how you might use digital channels to create new kinds of value for your audiences, rather than using them solely to promote existing products and services. Entertainment will always be a compelling option, but with a bit of careful thinking, inspirational content and how-to videos can be just as engaging as the latest dance craze on TikTok.

That’s all for this quarter, but we’ll be back with another Statshot report in October.

How to manage stress as a developer

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I was describing, in the first article of this series about stress , one of my panic attacks when I was working at my first job as a developer, 10 years ago.

I was basically a mess at the time: I had a very stressful job and, in order to relax, I was partying a lot. I was mainly drinking and smoking, at a point where I could not even remember half of the evening.

I was just following what I thought was true: partying hard with my friends was the best way to relieve my stress. Without it, I thought I wouldn’t be able to deal with my professional situation anymore. I was working like crazy not to lose my job: 10 to 12 hours a day, and sometimes the weekends.

Even if I was partying with many friends, I was feeling very isolated at the same time.

One year and a half later, exhausted, unhappy, feeling deeply unsatisfied, I burned out. Nothing was really important anymore, especially related to my job. I used to love programming since I was a kid but, at that point, I hated it.

I put all the fault on the industry itself.

After taking a break, I understood that I needed to do some changes in my life. Making everybody around me responsible for my condition was too easy. It wasn’t totally wrong, but it wasn’t totally right either: I knew I could be in control of some aspects of my life, and I was determined to regain that control.

I experimented with other ways to deal with my stress, trying to come back to more healthy habits . It took me many years. I failed many times but, today, I’m more than happy about the results.

I would like to share what I found during these years concerning this very important topic: stress and anxiety. It has been more than two years now that I have implemented very strong habits in my life in order to be happier on a daily basis, more effective, and more energized.

As always, I don’t ask you to follow my advice blindly. You need to try them by yourself and see if it works for you.

Step by step is the best way to improve.

Enough mumbling. Let’s begin.

Social support

During periods of stress, you need to rely on your social environment. Unfortunately, in our field, we have tendency to hide our struggles, especially mental related ones.

We don’t speak about it. We don’t want to feel weak, unworthy, and not in control. We pretend to ourselves, and, therefore, to the others, that everything is fine.

This is a big mistake.

Chronic stress can lead you to dark roads: more serious mental health issues like anxiety and burnout, depression, or hate of your job and everything attached to it.

Support from your relatives

Speaking with the persons close to you about your stress will be the most effective: your girlfriend / boyfriend, your family, your close friends.

One of the longest studies on happiness shows that mental health is strongly correlated with the people who are close to you. Seek their help.

Why is it good to externalize your problems by speaking about them, you might ask?

Explaining your struggle can cast a different light on them. You will see them differently if you articulate them with words.

Other people might have dealt with the same problems, even if you would never believe it. We often feel isolated, alone on our Problems’ Island. This is wrong: everybody has problems, and they might have precious advice and experience to tell.

We’re all humans. We all have emotions. Don’t be ashamed of them.

Speaking out at work

If your stress is related to your work (constant death march, psychological pressure, and other joys), you need to talk about it with your colleagues and your managers as well.

If you know (or feel) that your managers think a “good stress” is beneficial, remember that your health is the most important: if they don’t want to understand your struggles, find another job.

I’ve never been afraid to be very clear on my stress-related in the past. If I feel that the burnout is coming, I speak about it loud and clear. We need to show that it’s not a taboo. Others might follow our path and finally speak about their struggling as well.

Speaking about them is a good way to show that there is a problem. It should not be tackled on the individual level, but on the company level. After all, if you are in the path to burn out , others might be as well. It means that something is wrong in the company: it can be the company culture, the processes, and so on. Whatever it is, it needs to be found, addressed, and fixed.

Seeking professional help

Our brain is a very, very complicated organ we don’t fully understand. There is no shame to admit that something doesn’t work as well as we want, up there. We don’t create consciously our problems and struggles, and sometimes we need to accept we can’t solve them consciously either, only by ourselves.

Our pride won’t improve our stress or mental health.

In that regard, you can seek help from professionals if you feel that you can’t manage your stress anymore. Better sooner than later.

Keeping control

What can be quite stressful in our daily life?

You’re right! The good answer is 1. Dinosaurs 3. Unknowns . Things we don’t know are frightening and stressful. Simply because we have no knowledge or experiences about them, and, therefore, everything can happen. The better and the worse. Since we have part of our brain which is in a survival-oriented mode, the worst will come in mind very quickly.

In short, stress can kick in when we’re not in control.

It has been proven multiple times that a perception of control , that is if you think you are in control, can help to lower stress, significantly.

Control in your work

How to gain more control, or, at least, having the impress of control?

You could take more responsibilities in your daily job. Even if it can be seen as a source of stress at first, it can give you a great sense of purpose and, when you will begin to understand and master your new tasks, a sense of accomplishment as well as a sense of control.

See for yourself if the stress caused by more responsibilities doesn’t outweigh the stress relieved with more control. Again, as we’re all different, you need to experiment.

Ask as well some general results about the company you’re working for, or ask how your colleagues, in other departments, do their work. Even if you won’t control all of them, you will have a broader understanding of what’s going on, in general. The company you work with won’t be a total dark unknown anymore, but something which has a name, an explanation, a number attached to it.

If you never ask anything, you will never know if it’s possibly interesting for you and, ultimately, if it can help you in your day to day job.

After all, coding means, most of the time, mapping the business domain of your company with code. Beyond lowering your stress, knowing what happens in your company can make you a better performer too.

Control in your life

Stress can come from the company you’re working with of course, as we saw it, but it can come as well from your day to day life. Precisely, tiredness can increase your level of stress very quickly.

After all, tiredness is a lack of control on yourself.

It happens to me quite often: I really want to work and be productive, but my mind doesn’t follow. I stay in a mental fog, not able to solve the simplest problem.

You need to be aware that trying to have a healthy life will impact your energy level and, as a result, your level of stress significantly:

Eating healthy will give you the energy (including mental energy) you need. More on that below.

You need to sleep enough, and well. There is no magic recipe here: you need to know how much time of sleep you need, in order to feel rested and energized. On average, an adult needs 7 to 8 hours of sleep per day.

Try any kind of physical exercise, on a regular basis. It could be as simple as some body weight exercises every evening for 10 minutes. Walking a bit more. Climbing or swimming. Try, and find what suits you the most and, more importantly, what you think is fun!

More energy will bring you an insane amount of control on yourself.

You can’t control everything

You need to know what you can control and what you can’t. Spot and accept the uncontrollable sides of your life, and don’t let them have a stressful power on you.

Trying to work on yourself to be able to accept and let go what you can’t control, beginning with your thoughts and your mood, is a real challenge. If you know you can’t have any incidence on some part of your job, on some external project which affects yours, for example, stressing about it won’t change anything.

Easy to say, hard to do.

The best exercise I know about accepting the uncontrollable is awareness and, more precisely, meditation.

Awareness? Meditation? Welcome to the buzzword fest!

However, if everybody speaks about this meditation thingy, it’s for good reasons. It has been very powerful for me to learn how to simply choose what to handle and what to let go, what I can control, and what I can’t, beginning with my own thoughts.

Don’t think that meditation is attached to any religion or faith: at its core, it’s a pure mental exercise. I consider it as a workout for my brain, equally beneficial as learning or solving problems.

I meditate daily for more than two years now. I began by 5 minutes every morning. Then, when I felt comfortable, I increased to 10 min. At the date of this writing, I meditate 25 minutes per day. Sometimes more.

Using a timer can help you create boundaries for your practice. It helped me to create a strong habit.

There is no immediate goal in meditation. You can’t be “good” or “bad” at it. The most important is just doing it. Here’s a very good and simple resource explaining how to do so.

What are the benefits?

You will be able to take a step back from your own thoughts and emotions. You will be able to anticipate them before reacting on them . The key is to accept these thoughts or emotions and let them go, without letting them affect you.

You will feel more in control of your mood, your emotions, and your thoughts. You will be able to choose what you want and what you don’t, to some degree.

You will understand the bizarre reality that emotions and thoughts are not you . You are somehow a witness to them.

It will increase your overall focus.

It can teach you a more relaxing way to breath.

You could meditate a few minutes per day, doing it consistently, to know if it can help you. Then, after a while, you can increase the duration.

I won’t make you a superhero. It might not improve anything for quite some time. Patience, as often, is key here.

Predictability

As I was saying above, the unknown is stressful because we can’t control it. We can’t anticipate it, either. Predictable situations are, by definition, easy to anticipate.

Predictability in your job

Consistency is the best friend of predictability. If the culture of the company you work for is consistent, you’ll know what you can do, what you can’t, and what consequences will have your actions.

You’ll know that everybody at your level must follow the same rules and, as a consequence, they will have the same rights, for everybody to feel equal. This is very good for balanced company culture.

Conversely, if your management seems to react randomly, that your company has no rule, and everybody is not really sure what they can do, what they can’t and why, it can be problematic. If some people allow themselves more rights than others, expect a higher level of stress, doubts, and jealousy. An explosive mix.

If your company lacks rules and consistency, try to explain to the people above you the benefits of knowing what can happen, what is allowed and what’s not. These rules need to be written somewhere, to prevent everybody to forget them, intentionally or not.

You don’t want to go to work, never knowing what your day will be made of. If it’s always for the best, it shouldn’t be a problem; my experience, however, showed me it can be for the worst too.

That’s why you should choose wisely the companies you work for .

Predictability in your life

Habits are keys to have a consistent life.

Even if we don’t necessarily realize it, we are creatures of habits, that is, we do mainly the same things every day, automatically. These automated actions save you a lot of energy: you don’t have to make any decision, almost any thinking, you do because you’re used to do it.

The true power we can have on our life is to be able to build and maintain the habits we want to have. I don’t speak about the habits we have, without even knowing it, because some people try to build, without our consent, through very ingenious and manipulative applications on our phone or simple advertisements, tons of habits we never asked for.

You don’t want to use your willpower and energy reserve all day long, forcing yourself to do what you really want or what you have to do, going against your reptilian brain screaming to you that having an easy life on your couch with a lot of ice cream is the best. It’s not true. At all. I tried extensively.

I won’t go into habit building here, it’s not the subject. In that regard, I would recommend the book The Willpower Instinct . It’s a pretty short and practical read on how to build willpower. It has less fluff than many other “auto-proclaimed self-help books”, and can teach you a ton about habits and willpower.

You might think: consistency is boring! Doing the same things every day? I will never try! I don’t have time, anyway!

Consistency can be boring, that’s true if it’s pushed too far: after all, we need the unexpected in our life. It’s a question of balance, balance you need to find for yourself. How? By trying, discarding or adopting, and repeating the process. Iterative, step by step approach is the way to go.

Our brain tries constantly to order the chaos which surrounds us by categorizing, trying to find patterns or signs, in everything. Embracing this fact, understanding that we have habits, and recognizing what they are, is the first step. Then, you need to replace the habits you don’t want anymore by the one which will help you to improve or accomplish your goals.

This will improve the predictability in your life and relieve a lot of stress.

Compulsive behaviors

Even if it’s a very common belief that some compulsive behavior release stress, my experience shows me exactly the contrary. It’s not only my experience: the Mighty Science show the same.

What do I mean by compulsive behaviors ?

Any sort of drugs, prohibited or legal, like alcohol , tobacco, cannabis or even refined sugar.

Behaviors that are difficult to change but not necessarily considered as drugs, like gambling, addiction to food, or to shopping. It can be anything and everything, depending mainly on your personality and experiences.

Personally, I smoked for more than 10 years, drank alcohol at least once a week pretty heavily, and I was addicted to sugar. I could not eat one cookie without eating everything, whatever the quantity.

Nothing exceptional, you might think, and you’re right. Unfortunately, I’m no exception. Nevertheless, I tried to discard all of these behaviors from my life, one by one, step by step.

The conclusion is without doubt:

Even if drinking can relieve stress on a short term basis, it increases my stress level in the middle and long term. How? Alcohol makes me very tired and very anxious after a while. With tiredness, I feel less in control, and therefore I feel more stressed. Obviously, the more you consume alcohol, the worse it is, but I noticed the same pattern only drinking two beers a week.

It’s known that alcohol act pretty badly on our prefrontal cortex , the part of the brain which is the center of our willpower and self-control.

Smoking had a tendency to lower my energy, making me sometimes very tired, with the same consequences.

What I’m trying to say here is simple:

Today, I rarely drink alcohol (and I want to push down my consumption even more) and I stopped smoking for years.

It was difficult to pull off these behaviors (and I still struggle sometimes), but it was the best decision I made these last years. I feel more energetic, more in control, and less stressed.

Alcohol and tobacco are not the only legalized, highly used drugs out there. Let’s speak about another classic: refined sugar.

This study shows that refined sugar is more rewarding than cocaine . The bad new: It’s everywhere!

I tried to stop consuming it for days, then weeks, and I saw again a big improvement in my mood and in my general stress level. No sugar craving anymore and, even better, no sugar crush.

Of course, if you eat refined sugar every day, you would not see the effect it has on you. It’s the same for everything: you’re likely to be so used to your compulsive behaviors, you might miss their negative effects. As a consequence, you might link the causes of your stress to something else.

When I was smoking and drinking, I didn’t see the cigarette and alcohol as a problem: everything else was.

Since sugar is everywhere nowadays, my recipe for a healthy food consumption is easy: I try to avoid processed food as much as I can. I always read the ingredients quickly when I need to buy a transformed products, and I look particularly to any added sugar, which can have many confusing names . Why so many names? To make people even more addicted, without them knowing about it. Sweet!

Enough with the sugar. Let’s take some other examples of possible compulsive behaviors:

Social Media and our phone in general push you to spend our days on it. Ask yourself: How many times do you watch your phone per day? Does it help you in any way? Would you like to do something else instead, with this time?

Compulsive shopping and consumerism are presented to us as the solution to every single of our problems. Look at your orders on Amazon: how much do you buy there? Do you really need everything you possess? Do you use it? Do you try to buy your way to happiness? Is there any other problem in your life you try to hide with mountains of things? Would it be better to solve these root problems?

Food habits can be very strong. For how long do you have the same food habits? Did you try to change it, by curiosity, to see the possible positive effects?

What I encourage you to do: trying to look at your habits in your everyday life. Try to modify them slightly and see the effects on your mood and on your stress level. Does this habit contribute to your bad mood? Are you angry sometimes, and why? Is it link to something you’re doing day after day?

If you want to get rid of some of your compulsive behaviors, you need a lot of patience and resilience . The little things we put into place in our everyday life can have big consequences on the long term, but you need to be really aware of it. You need to know it and to experience it for yourself.

Finding fulfilling hobbies

Outside of your daily job, it’s very important to have other hobbies than coding. Something which fulfills you, differently.

For example, I love photography: it gives me a totally different sense of accomplishment when I shoot a picture I like. It’s an escape from the 8-hours-daily-routine, it’s outside (and not on a screen). In short, it’s different and, therefore, it brings me a feeling of “freshness”.

I believe as well that these other hobbies can help you to be a better developer, by bringing you some unique concepts and points of view. Mixing disciplines, learning from one area to apply the new knowledge to another, can create quite unique approaches and help you to innovate.

When I speak about breaks and hobbies, I think mainly about all these things which can really bring you some feeling of accomplishment: drawing, painting, taking picture, backing, writing, and so on.

As an example, I’m pretty addicted to Youtube. When I open it, I can stay for hours and hours on it. When I do, I feel even more mentally tired and stressed than before. I didn’t do anything which brought me any deep reward . It depends on what I’m watching of course, but most of the time it will be a silly video where I don’t learn anything.

The way Youtube is made is to blame here, of course, but not only: the responsibility is mine as well. I need to take action to lower my craving.

I don’t say that relaxing with trivial things is bad: I say that doing it for a long period is stressful. It comes back to procrastination, and this is, by itself, very stressful.

That’s why I’m always trying to come back to something creative or, in general, fulfilling.

The last point: try to avoid putting too much stress on yourself for your work or your hobbies: enjoying the process rather than the goal is really important as well!

Journaling to relieve stress

Writing about our thoughts and emotions can relieve stress and improve our mood.

I would recommend writing bullet point journals. It’s a very easy way to write the essential, without losing yourself into the labyrinth of verbosity. It’s easier to read as well, afterward.

As an example:

You can write about everything which could be relevant for you.

Here are some ideas:

A journal about your feelings

Externalizing your emotions, by writing them down, can have a real impact. You might be able to understand them better and accepting them more, for you to move forward.

You can focus only on the positive, to give you some motivation and to show to yourself that your life is not that bad. You can take a more realistic approach by writing the positive and the negative emotions you had throughout the day, how you react to them, and how to fix what you want to fix.

Don’t forget that we have a tendency to see the negative more than the positive. You should make an extra effort to be as honest as possible about the state of mind you had during the last day, week, or month, depending on the frequency of your writing.

A journal about your job

You can write in your journal the successes you had at work, even if it was “only” a bug fix or a good advice given to a happier colleague. These little things add up overtime and help the company you work for to move forward.

Writing the mental process you went through to solve a particular problem can be valuable as well. It can be useful if you stumble later into a similar problem. Knowing that you have a whole reference of the solution you found can bring you more control and less stress.

You can write the ideas you have, how you communicated them, and how your colleagues or your management reacted to them.

After a while, you can recognize patterns to see what works and what doesn’t. It will increase your confidence and your value.

A journal about your decision process

It can be very useful to know why you took this or that decision at a precise point in time, to understand where you are today and why.

Again, you might lower the unknown surrounding your life by understanding how your decisions are taken, their consequences and the what you would have done differently, after taking some steps back.

Writing this kind of journal is even more valuable for decisions that will be impactful on the long term. You can trace the progression of that impact, see if what you intended really happened, and the unexpected popping up along the way.

Change your life to lower your stress

Since we can be stressed without even knowing it, considering it’s the normal state of everybody, it’s important to try to experiment , changing slightly part of our behavior and habits we think bring stress in our life.

To summarize what we learned together:

Social support might be the most important and effective way to manage and lower your stress. Don’t hesitate to speak about your moods, your feelings, your doubts.

Having an impression of control in our life and in our work can lower the feelings of unknown, which are sources of stress.

Predictability at work and in your personal life can have a positive effect on your stress level. It means being as consistent as you can, trying to build the habits which will help you to go where you want to go.

Patiently try to avoid the behaviors which bring negativity to your daily life, lower your energy, make you more tired, and therefore more stressed.

Taking breaks from your work and having creative hobbies can bring a feeling of freshness and lower your stress. Try not having too many expectations! The process should be enjoyable, without thinking about the destination.

Writing a journal, on a consistent basis, can help you to deal with your stress, bringing more control in your work and in your life. Again, it externalizes your sources of stress and makes it easier to reflect upon them. In general, externalizing your feelings, by any means you see fit, can be very good to lower your stress.

Stress is a complex and personal matter. Annihilating entirely our stress is not possible, or even wise. However, our chronic stress is usually too high for us to ignore it.

Lowering your stress and, therefore, feeling simply happier in your day to day life will make you more productive and will definitely increase your value as a developer and as a human being.

This article was written by Matthieu Cneude and was originally published on The Valuable Dev , a blog focusing on the important and timeless concepts in software development. You can read the piece here .

How to email an investor you’ve never met — and get a response

It might seem incredible that an unsolicited email from a startup founder to an investor they’ve never met could result in a response, let alone a multimillion-dollar deal, but it does happen. I know because we’ve made investments this way, including one of the most valuable companies in the Storm portfolio, which came to us through a cold email.

In this post, I’ll explain the qualities that can make a cold email successful — at least for me — so let’s dive in.

Target your email appropriately

If you’re thinking about blasting out a mass email to every investor you can find an address for, you’re wasting your own time, not to mention that of any potential investors. If I see a message that I can tell has been sent or Bcc’d to 3000 other investors, I’ll probably delete it without reading, as I imagine you would too.

We all get a ton of email, and drawing from my own inbox as an example, I get a shocking number of emails from entrepreneurs who shouldn’t have targeted me for whatever reason. For starters, it’s no secret that my focus is B2B SaaS; if you’re working on a life sciences or consumer product business, I wouldn’t know how to build that business, and I’m certainly not the right fit.

This advice isn’t limited to a specific sector, either — it also applies to the stage of your business. If you’re just a team with a prototype or an idea and no revenue, you need a seed investor who gets involved pre-revenue.

Again, it’s no secret that the seed stage isn’t my game: Storm is generally looking for companies that have some early evidence of product-market fit in the form of revenue.

There are many seed firms that want to be the first check into a business; if you’re not at this stage, why target them with a note? No matter how great your email prose, you’re not going to convince me to change my investment strategy. It’s just not a great use of time.

Personalize your message

Now that you’ve reduced your investor list down from the entirety of all venture investors, you start to have more time to personalize your message. Don’t try to literally make it personal; you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. However, you can tailor your message in a way that lets me know you’ve put a little work into convincing me to read on.

The best bit of homework you can do for this is to look at what your target investor has put their money behind already. Look for companies in their portfolio that are relevant to your business, or other CEOs they’ve invested in.

In my firm’s case, maybe you’ve read something someone here has put online or watched one of my videos; maybe something resonated that you want to mention or generated some questions you want to ask. Adding touches like this makes a difference in an investor‘s willingness to respond.

To be clear: I’m not talking about flattery or stoking an investor‘s ego, but displaying an interest that shows you’ve done just a bit of homework.

We’re buried under a constant deluge of emails, so we’re always developing filters. An email that shows an entrepreneur has invested a little time is a positive indicator of fit. It’s only possible if you target.

For instance, one of my favorite SaaS metrics is sales efficiency; I’ve made videos and published blog posts about it that anyone can see. If your email tells me you saw one of my videos and your sales efficiency is great, you’ll get a response from me — and if you don’t, that means I dropped the ball.

Put your best metrics forward

Except in early cases where a product or team hasn’t yet come together, every business has numbers. This is the universal language of business.

Find the ones that will get an investor interested, put them into a format and context that any investor can understand, and make sure they go into the email. Some typical examples:

Churn rate

ARR growth

Number of customers

Upsell

Gross margin

Sales efficiency

Use bullet points, so it’s easy to digest. Ultimately, every investor is looking for a certain profile when it comes to business metrics. Your job as a founder is to achieve that profile, and you either have it or you don’t. Putting the relevant metrics into your email in a concise format lets the recipient know straight away whether there’s a fit.

Maybe you’re worried your numbers aren’t good enough and you just want the meeting; I get it. The problem is that even if you get a meeting, you’re not going to get an investment. Just get the metrics out there and qualify your time.

Less is more

I’ve lost count of the number of entrepreneurs who’ve told me they’re going to change the world or disrupt an industry. I love that there are people out there willing to take on huge challenges, but wanting to be a disruptor and change the world isn’t enough for me to take a meeting — I need to see why your business is a good fit for Storm Ventures.

You should be able to explain it in 100 words or less. This word limit helps you focus on the relevant metrics and less on extemporizing about changing the world or disrupting an industry. Save that for your PR strategy.

If you’re worried about sending detailed, confidential information, then the good news is: you don’t need to send it. There’s little point to sending a discounted cash flow analysis or whatever in a cold email, because the objective of the message is to get to the first meeting, not to give any potential investor all of your data.

But if you truly think you need to send more details, put together something simple and enticing and attach it as a PDF.  I personally am not a fan of Docsend — it’s a hassle and feels intrusive — but that’s just me. Maybe others are fine with it. It doesn’t work well on a phone either, which is probably where 50% of my email gets consumed.

Send the email yourself

Having your admin assistant write the email sends a message: “This wasn’t important enough to me to send it myself.” This means I don’t have to read it.

Investors only have so many hours in a day, and small things like this make a difference when they hit our inboxes. If you’re so busy that you need your admin assistant to write the email, at least make sure they log into your account and send it from there. It’s an easy hack.

For early-stage companies, bankers and brokers raising money isn’t a great way to get introduced either. Maybe they can help you in the background, but this is your business, and raising the next round is critical: make it your priority.

Who to target at the firm

You may have heard advice to the effect of: “Only target senior partners within a firm.” Ignore it.

This may vary from firm to firm, of course, but as far as I’m concerned, an opportunity that comes from elsewhere within Storm has just as much value as one that crosses my desk personally. Find whatever way into a firm you can.

We have a team at Storm because we all work together, and leveraging others at the firm can sometimes be an even more effective way to get noticed. With that said: avoid sending notes to everyone at the firm. It’s aggravating because you’re effectively asking everyone to read the same note, think it through, and respond. We don’t talk collectively about opportunities as a team until they’re fully qualified and someone has already met the founder.

Every venture investor I know makes their email address fairly easy to find, including me. My job is to meet the founders I don’t know yet. For me, Linkedin is fantastic as a tool, but terrible in terms of messaging. It’s not my workflow. I don’t want another inbox to deal with, and you’re less likely to get a response from me there (see the sections on targeting and personalization above again if you need a refresher).

Following up

It’s difficult to gauge how long to wait before following up because it depends on the way a particular investor works or where they may be that week. My rule of thumb is to wait a week, and if you haven’t heard back, send another message — but not the exact same one you sent initially; reply to your sent email with a couple of polite lines.

If another week goes by and you don’t receive a reply, it’s safe to assume they didn’t think you were a fit. And don’t let it bring you down that you didn’t get a response: everyone is trying to do their job, and it’s not personal. It’s certainly possible they were too busy and missed it, but that’s why you’re targeting more than one investor.

While some of this might sound demotivating, remember one thing: cold pitches do work.

My job as an investor is to deliver returns to my LPs. The only way I can do that is by making the best investments I possibly can in entrepreneurs and companies with the best potential. I’m positive that there are amazing entrepreneurs out there who I haven’t connected with yet, founders with companies that would be a great fit for our firm.

The global pandemic makes cold emails even more important: I want to meet entrepreneurs in any country, and as far as I can tell, email is the best way to do it going forward. You live in rural Georgia? No problem.

Keep in mind that the goal of the first interaction isn’t to close a deal — it’s to get the next meeting. Build interest in what you’re making and move along step by step from there.