I create science-based content to answer the question: “How can we make the most of our lives without sacrificing our mental health?”
This page shares my best posts about creativity, productivity, mental wellness, and more. You will find articles about mental models, learning how to learn, the science of curiosity, how to manage your fear of failure, your time anxiety and your impostor syndrome, the joy of missing out, or how to build your own mental gym.
Mindful productivity
- Are we too busy to enjoy life?
- From productivity porn to mindful productivity
- Time anxiety: is it too late?
- Mindful productivity: a sustainable way to work and think
- The illusion of productivity
- Time management: do the things you actually want to do
- How to get in the flow
- The difference between habits, routines, and rituals
- Mindful context switching: multitasking for humans
- Building intrinsic motivation
- The focused mind
- The 3 components of motivation
- The Eisenhower matrix of prioritisation
- The ten minute rule of productivity
- Being prepared is overrated: start before you feel ready
- Understanding the emotions behind procrastination
- The optionality fallacy
- How much work is enough work
- Motivation beyond money
- Sustainability over speed: adopting asynchronous communication
- Self-competition: only compete with your past self
- Don’t pin the butterfly: not all hobbies need to become hustles
- Interstitial journaling: combining notes, to-do and time tracking
- Productive cognitive load: make the most of your working memory
Mindframing
- The complete mindframing curriculum
- Mindframing: a personal growth framework
- Turning goals into growth loops: the PARI system of mindful productivity
- SMART goals are not so smart: make a PACT instead
- Writing is the best personal growth tool
- From fixed mindset to growth mindset: the complete guide
- Metacognition: how to think about thinking
- How to develop your self-authorship
Purposeful creativity
- Fail like a scientist
- You and your mind garden
- From inspiration to idea sex: how to generate ideas on demand
- Inner child and inner critic: a battle for creativity
- Thinking in maps: from the Lascaux caves to knowledge graphs
- How to build a better writing habit
- Systematic inventive thinking: the power of thinking inside the box
- The science of curiosity: why we keep asking “why”
- Writing as a thinking tool
- Brainstorming: how to generate new ideas
- Some hard truths about soft skills
- How to balance your creative input and output
- How to ask good questions
- The case for sharing your work in public
- Increments of curiosity and your fear of failure
- The art and science of mind wandering
- Programmed creativity: generate ideas on demand
Continuous learning
- The false promise of the 10,000 hour rule
- How to learn anything with the Feynman Technique
- Learning how to learn
- Self-education: how to leverage the end of credentialism
- The science of mind mapping
- How to better remember what you read
- Circular growth vs linear growth
- The generation effect
- The science-based benefits of writing
- Active reading: how to become a better reader
- The science of note-taking
- The art of memory: mnemonic techniques
- The speed reading fallacy: the case for slow reading
- How to use Roam Research: a tool for metacognition
- How to read a book
- Science-based methods to improve your memory
- The power of spaced repetition
- The anatomy of a perfect educational article
- Productive cognitive load: make the most of your working memory
Mental well-being
- The joy of missing out
- The psychology of happiness
- Worrying well: how to bring wisdom to your worries
- Emotional agility: how to build resilience in times of crisis
- Dear Diary: the science-based benefits of journaling
- How to deal with negative triggers
- Build your own mental gym
- FOBO or the fear of a better option
- Burnout vs boreout
- Impostor syndrome
- Taking note of nature
- How to go on an information diet
- Loneliness or solitude: the case for being alone
- Dealing with anxiety at work
- The science-based benefits of gratitude
- Untranslatable words and your well-being
- How to manage conflict: reframing your anger
- Why we worry
- Learning to let go
- How to build a support group
- The rational benefits of emotions
- Creating calm: how to manage stress
- Mental wealth: managing your mental health budget
Mental models
- 30 mental models to add to your thinking toolbox
- How to evaluate the validity and reliability of your mental models
- The Dunning–Kruger effect: you don’t know what you don’t know
- The science of decision making
- How to make better decisions with second-level thinking
- Illusory correlations: how to identify your hidden assumptions
- The Occam’s razor fallacy: the simplest solution is not always the correct one
- The Cobra Effect: how linear thinking leads to unintended consequences
- Ethos, Pathos, Logos: how to persuade people
- The ambition trilemma: freedom, stability, wealth
- The Pygmalion Effect: an invisible nudge towards success
- Parkinson’s law: how constraints can create freedom
- Beyond facts: divergent thinking
- Confirmation bias: believing what you see, seeing what you believe
- The planning fallacy: why we underestimate how long a task will take
- Temporal discounting: the battle between present and future self
- Managing risk with the NASA Risk Matrix
Neuroscience
- Neuromyths: debunking the misconceptions about our brains
- Why we wait: the neuroscience of procrastination
- Beyond human consciousness
- Neuroproductivity: how to be more productive using neuroscience
- Is there a limit to the human brain’s capacity?
- 5 books to understand how your brain works
- Neuroeducation: exploring the potential of brain-based education
- Science-based tips to sleep better
- The neuroscience of ikigai
- Somewhere over the brainbow: a beautiful neuroimaging technique
- The science-based benefits of reading
- Free will: the mind’s best trick
- Impossible colors: our vision’s incomplete palette
- Brain-training games are BS
- You can eat your mallow: debunking the marshmallow test
- The genetics of happiness: does happiness really depend upon ourselves?
Roam Research
- How to use Roam Research: a tool for metacognition
- A beginner’s guide to Roam Research: getting started in 5 easy steps
- How to style Roam Research with custom CSS
- The best CSS themes for Roam Research
- Getting compound interest on your thoughts with Conor White-Sullivan
- Browser extensions for Roam Research
- JavaScript plugins for Roam Research
- 10 ways to speed up your Roam Research workflow
- How to use templates in Roam Research