metimes “productivity” feels like a country you’ve heard a lot about but never thought you’d get a chance to visit. Articles, Twitter threads and YouTube Vox Pops all claim to have answers – which never seem to hold up when subjected to real life. It’s amazing you’re still sitting at a desk instead of shrieking on a ledge. Well, distractedness is nothing new. And we can get some answers from people who struggled valiantly with the issue a long time…
remember a time when someone, possibly me, had a lot of trouble getting motivated. This was not fun. Three years ago, I starred in a suspense film titled Oh Good God I Have To Write My Second Book. Some might be thinking: “That must have been easy, you’ve done it before.” Oh No No No No -- that’s not how it works. First time out you have no idea what’s going on. It’s stressful but you can naively jump…
There were 5 goals I wanted to accomplish by the end of the year… and I only have 8 to go. It’s December. How are you doing in terms of what you wanted to achieve for 2021? It’s hard. I look at it like the “Zeno’s Paradox of Productivity”: feels like…
In 1930, famed economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century nobody would work more than 15 hours a week… Yeah, I’m giggling too. He didn’t take into account that human desires just never level off. There’s always a shiny new thing to buy and always new Joneses to keep…
Fixing the plumbing on a toilet is far from exciting. But Chris didn’t mind... But that’s probably because he was in outer space. It’s not a stretch to assume common household chores take on another level of interestingness when you’re on a space station. And so Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian…
George was late again. It was 1939 and math PhD student George Dantzig arrived to find he had already missed much of the lecture. The two homework problems were already up on the chalkboard. He scribbled them down. But this day only got worse. When he got to work on the…
Why do we do the things we do? Aristotle said everything we do was in service of happiness. We weigh the options and pick the thing that is likely to make us happiest… Boy, was Aristotle wrong. Your brain just does not work like that. How many times a day do…
Living a good life means managing your time. Problem is, we don’t understand time at all. Go ahead, explain time to me; I’ll wait. (Eric hums to himself and drums fingers on the tabletop.) Don’t blame yourself. To be fair, the nature of time has been a matter of some debate…
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