How to decide what to work on next

Many people manage their tasks using a to-do list. Everything they need need to work on at some point ends up on that list, and they measure their productivity by looking at the number of tasks completed in a certain amount of time. While I’m a big fan of checklists—which have a clear objective—I don’t … Read More

Fostering psychological safety with a personal user manual

When you buy a new product, it usually comes with a user manual. It’s a document designed to help you make the best use of that particular product, with detailed instructions. It’s a guide to using a specific system. But when we meet a new person, we need to figure things out through trial and … Read More

The neuroscience of procrastination: A short primer

Procrastination makes it difficult and stressful to finish certain tasks or to meet deadlines, so why do we do this to ourselves? When we get stuck into an akratic loop, we know we “should” do something, but we resist doing it. The sister word “procrastination” itself comes from the latin “pro”, which means “forward”, and “crastinatus”, which means “till next day.”

Neuralink and the future of knowledge work

Yesterday evening, Elon Musk gave the first public presentation about Neuralink, a company he founded in 2017 to build brain-computer interfaces. While most of the research in that field has been focused on restoring functionality lost due to paralysis, Elon targets healthy and able-bodied people. Elon considers that artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence is not … Read More