Pineapple on pizza: innovation or abomination? Coffee or tea? Bears or Packers? Heck, I don’t even follow football, and I kind of have an opinion on that last one (which I will not share, because I’m not out here trying to lose half my readers in the first paragraph).

Point is, modern life forces us into a funny corner where we’re all reflexively forming opinions—even about things that don’t matter much to us. This week, we’ll hear about the virtues of having fewer opinions. Then we’ll explore some new research that quantifies the impact of job vacancies on a company.

A matter of opinion

Over on LinkedIn, Adam Waytz, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, had an idea for an unexpected New Year’s resolution: try to develop fewer opinions. Once a position is formed, Waytz writes, “it can become an unwanted responsibility, an annoyance, or worse, a stimulus for conflict with those who hold different opinions.” In fact, after quitting Facebook and Twitter, Waytz found that the biggest upside was not having more time, but rather having fewer judgments to manage. When you don’t know about the latest tempests in teapots, you don’t have to decide how to feel about them.

And the real problem with opinions, Waytz explains, is that we form them really easily—and then start fighting about them. His own research has shown that our brains process seemingly trivial opinions (e.g., “waffle cones make ice cream taste better”) and politically charged moral beliefs (e.g., “buying clothing made with sweatshop labor is morally unacceptable” or “Americans are ethically obligated to buy American cars”) in similar ways.

“Processing these pure opinions and moral beliefs (compared to considering factual statements) recruited brain regions involved in thinking about the self and the social world,” he writes. This suggests that opinions are powerful in part “because they reflect something about the self and what others think about us.”

And sure, debating some opinions can be fun. (To return to our very first question, I do, personally, love pineapple on pizza and have engaged in many enthusiastic discussions about the overall merits of savory/sweet combos. Dip a fry into a milkshake and tell me I’m wrong!)

But often, Waytz argues, such back-and-forth turns divisive and downright exhausting: “That so much of modern life is spent on digital platforms that ask us to upvote, downvote, subscribe, cancel, and provide a rating has further pushed us into a collective state of opinion fatigue.” His advice? “Surrender some of your likes and dislikes, and experience the freedom that comes with it.”

You can read his entire post here.

How vacancies affect the bottom line

We all know that job vacancies cause headaches—your remaining workers are covering someone else’s responsibilities, your managers are spending their days sorting through a big stack of résumés instead of taking care of everything else they’re supposed to be doing, and productivity suffers. But quantifying precisely how much empty positions hurt firms financially is surprisingly tricky. That’s because most data about recruiting difficulties come from small-scale surveys, which researchers can’t easily match with information about the health of individual firms.

A new study by Maddalena Ronchi, an assistant professor of finance, tackles this challenge by analyzing job-posting data from the French government. Ronchi and her coauthors found that doubling the time it takes to fill a job vacancy results in a 3 percent drop in profits; a company facing the average amount of hiring difficulty can expect a 5 percent drop in sales. And it’s not just already-ailing companies that are vulnerable to these effects. “Even productive, large, growing firms are negatively affected by this type of [hiring] friction,” Ronchi says. “If anything, even more so.”

You can read more about the study in Kellogg Insight.