Anne-Laure Le Cunff Most productivity methods will encourage you to focus on one thing at a time. The idea is to avoid multitasking and to concentrate all of your energy one one goal until you achieve it. There is a lot of wisdom behind the “one thing at a time” principle, but is it always the best approach? …
Certainty is reassuring; what we know can be better understood, managed, and controlled. But intellectual certainty can limit our creativity. Where lies a certain path, many alternative doors leading to innovative ideas are ignored. We follow a fixed roadmap, without giving ourselves the opportunity to explore, make mistakes, and learn. In contrast, negative capability is …
Productivity systems often focus on how to do the work. However, it is crucial to understand why we are struggling to do the work in the first place. Often, our procrastination triggers are emotional rather than rational, which makes it hard to analyse them in an objective way. Learning about the most common triggers can …
Most people would agree: praise is one of the most effective ways to build children’s self-esteem. We are told to be generous with our praise, and to find as many opportunities as possible to praise children so they feel good, learn better, and perform well. It’s such common knowledge, we don’t even question it. But …
Do you prefer your yoghurt with 10% fat or 90% fat-free? Should the label on your disinfectant say it kills 99% of germs, or that it only spares 1% of them? Marketers know which framing will result in more sales. This is called the framing effect: a cognitive bias where people decide on options based …
There are many ways to speed up your workflows in Roam, but one of the most efficient ones is to master the keyboard shortcuts. In fact, research suggests that it typically takes half as much time to issue a command to an application using the corresponding keyboard shortcut, compared to performing the same task using …
FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our featured tools for thought series! In this interview with Julia Pierce, we explore a hugely popular tool: Scapple, a virtual sheet of paper that lets you make notes anywhere on the page and connect them using lines and arrows. If you have ever scribbled ideas onto a …
Have you ever felt like you are too tired to make the right choice between several options, especially after a long series of decisions? Decision fatigue can lead to poor choices and irrational trade-offs in decision making. It refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions after a long session of decision making. Too many decisions …
FEATURED TOOL Welcome to a new edition of our featured tools series, where we interview founders of tools for thought to understand why and how they built their product to be more creative, more productive, and to think better. This week, we talked with Michael Hollauf, the co-founder and CEO of Meister, maker of the …
“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist,” once said French author Guy de Maupassant. Whether it’s short-term memory allowing us to perform simple calculations on the fly, long-term memory which can store larger quantities of information, sometimes for a whole life span, …