the NoPhone, a plastic rectangle resembling a smartphone, now exist... raised $18,000 on Kickstarter... people who report using seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than their peers who use zero to two ... Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ... delivering ... “variable rewards.” Messages,…

Read it when you need it... ... you can make up a reason to need it... As long as it leads you to directly apply what you learn and turn it from nothing into something... Only then will learning be meaningful.... from reading to retention, I see five phases. Let’s walk through them... waiting for a few days until you extract a book’s lifeblood...…

Decades of studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between writing (particularly journaling) and health.... lower blood pressure, improved immune function, and fewer visits to the doctor... better relationships, improved memory, and more success at work... therapists often use journaling to get their patients to better understand how part…

people performed worst when their phones were nearby, and best when they were away in a separate room ... merely having their smartphones out on the desk led ... impairment of individuals’ cognitive capacity — on par with effects of lacking sleep... our smartphones can adversely affect our ability to think and problem-solve ... even when they are …

The “forgetting curve,” ... is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something... unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain ... leaving you with a fraction of what you took in... those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week... most common…

“death by PowerPoint,”... sucks the life and energy out of ... meetings... spreadsheets rife with errors and macro miscalculations. Email and chat facilitate ... inbox overload ... So what makes artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) champions confident that their technologies will be immune to comparably counterproductive outcomes? ... …

non-stop activity isn’t the apotheosis of productivity. It is its adversary.... the work we produce at the end of a 14-hour day is of worse quality than when we’re fresh... undermines our creativity and our cognition... make us feel physically sick... For people over 40, research found that a 25-hour work week may be optimal for cognition... elite…

The open-plan office continues to doggedly spread, despite study after study suggesting it makes employees more miserable, more ill, less friendly and less productive... if a company is determined to inflict this woe on its workers, it should observe some basic rules...:

waking up early has nothing to do with the alarm clock, but it has everything to do with these elements... Let’s go through one thing at the time.

four “stages of control”: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification... The unconscious mind “Incubates” the information collected, and finds connections that lead to “Illumination”... If you arrange your creative work according to these seven categories, you can ease creative insights through the four stages of control.

Scientists have conducted a fair bit of research on the factors that can make people more (or less) focused, productive, and creative.

asking the following question of a given activity: will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?... is this activity “the best” way to add value to this area of my life? ... focus on finding the small number of activities that offer the most such value... Many of the best uses of the online world s…

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours... lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime... great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately... engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improv…

In today’s work environment, with multiple responsibilities and an abundance of sources of distractions, it is difficult to stay focussed. Here are some of the strategies that I’ve used successfully in my own work and in helping my clients be more productive.

Bill Gates. At the end of each day, he would look at what he had worked on, and asked himself “what is on this list that somebody else could have done?”... we should be asking the following questions each day: What’s really important here? How am I using my gifts? What is my genius and how I can I bring it forth to impact my family, culture, a…

Journaling daily is the most potent and powerful keystone habit you can acquire. If done correctly, you will show up better in every area of your life ... We’ve become addicted to input... to reactively being guided by other people’s agendas... wakes up and immediately ... journal for 30 minutes... sleeping, his subconscious mind has been brewing…

employees have little faith in their leadership:22% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization has a clear direction for the organization.15% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization makes them enthusiastic about the future.13% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization communicat…

the deeper I went into my own work, the more I realized how my always-on, always-connected state had rendered me largely useless... The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole. I want my attention back...I could live on Twitter all day, everyday, convincing myself I was being productive. Or, at least inducing the chemicals in the …

A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.

Many of the world's busiest leaders "have set aside at least an hour a day for ... deliberate practice or learning... share my personal deliberate learning practice that I've developed so far... an Evernote doc each month and recording everything I read that I want to ingest. Then at the end of the month, I scan back over what I recorded ... think…

All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed ... if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster... if you are among the growing ranks of t…

a fascinating inquiry into how our subjective experience of time’s passage shapes everything from our emotional memory to our sense of self....the disorienting sense that time isn’t something which happens to us — rather, we are time.... Distracted by the obligations of everyday activities, we are no longer aware of ourselves…... loss of contact …

cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explores how work schedules, behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time is spent in a state of boredom, anxiety, or creative flow... High-intensity noise that exceeds 95 decibels disrupts performance on complex tasks b…

the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not ... Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag ... The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is dubious ... snake oil and flimflam... why not also expose your…

We all have the same number of hours in the day.... Some find the time to be strategic, while others spend their whole time fire-fighting... here are 32 small changes you can make which will find you the time you need. 14. Set a time limit for everything Many tasks grow to fill the available time. You can spend weeks agonising over a design if y…

Google Docs now supports Action Items, a specialized sort of comment that is indicated by an @mention and leads to various new use cases.

cortisol is released between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m... helps us get up and seize the day but if you add the stimulation of coffee when cortisol is already active the effect is lessened... we build up a tolerance to caffeine and its effects on us diminish over time.

If your meetings are like most, there are two or three people who always speak up and a handful of others who hang on the sidelines. ... a drag on your meetings' productivity... It's not enough just to bring a more diverse workforce in through your doors. You need to get everybody talking—meaningfully, collaboratively, and regularly—in order to m…

To feel most joyful and satisfied, you need to not only accomplish certain priority items but also prioritize certain experiences of time... Here’s how to reclaim your desired experiences of time ... make it a rule to have at least 15 minutes between meetings to wrap up your notes, get a drink of water, and have a moment to breathe... you’ll end u…