Overview: Psychology

I do like a challenge."We live in the most distracted time in human history. Can we reclaim our attention spans?... A new book by the British journalist Johann Hari, called Stolen Focus, takes a close look at what’s happening — and what’s happened — to our collective attention... we’re all becoming lost in our own lives, which feel more and …

"Feeling stuck?" This YANSS podcast is with "professor, author, therapist, and speaker Britt Frank, a trauma specialist who ... helps clients to get out of the feeling of being stuck."This was well-timed, because stuck is something I've been feeling for a while now. Perhaps unjustifiably, but nevertheless her book's d…

"the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable"Great piece, although I'm unsure that "a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic", it is true that:productivity geeks exist, develop their system and then try to sell it.speaking from experience, it is really, r…

Andy Matuschak's daily routine and content strategy appear similar, but much more complex, than my own. It starts with something we share: "When my days don’t go well, it’s often because something derailed me in the morning, and I never really got back on track", and manages his day so that he spends the first two hours of the day f…

Here's a good question: "If we carefully closed the right feedback loops, could we construct a creative flywheel that generates finished works?... knowledge gardening. You collect and plant idea seeds, returning periodically to water and weed... As a kind of self-organizing system, it can’t happen without some kind of feedback loop... …

Subconscious is "a creative oracle that helps provoke ideas. It also captures those ideas, and remixes and resurfaces them, provoking more ideas... in a feedback loop that powers a flywheel of divergent creative thinking."Whereas spaced repetition tools like Anki "close feedback loops to help memorize facts", Subconscious will …

What did I learn about learning as I explored using Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management to write five newsletters about disinformation in the 2020 US elections?

"A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar".A "second brain" provides easy access to all the resources you've ever Liked or ideas you've ever Thought. @ExGenesis' Threadhelper brings a subset of this (just Tweets) right into the twitter UX - it looks brilliant.Check out the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?…

Books on note-taking... always too vague and boring, full of platitudes ... never an overarching system for turning notes into concrete results ... [but]How To Take Smart Notes ... is by far the most impactful and profound book I’ve ever read on the subject... most books are a few morsels of real insight wrapped in... fluff... I systematically unr…

I needed to review everything I had ever Hubbed relevant to surveillance capitalism, polarisation, social media and society... As I cast around for something interesting to say, I realised a MyHub.ai Service Page could help organise and clarify my thoughts: I would use it to create a Zettelkasten Permanent Note...While not a blog post, it is defin…

when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing... scarcity... leads you to take certain behaviors that in the short term help... in the long term only make matters worse... robs people of insight... in a hole, we sometimes dig ourselves even deeper...human brain is wired to respond to scar…

Juggling full-time responsibilities, family life, and the stress of confinement makes the risk of burnout greater than ever... time to deconstruct the underlying cultural sources of burnout and ... Work less...our relationship to work ... tied to our ... self-worth ... But ... research says ... for knowledge workers to do their best work, they ne…

Scroll, scroll, scroll... it’s got a name: zombie scrolling syndrome... Consider parasites... some have the power of mind control. Or... zombification... the jewel wasp... grabs a cockroach twice her size... injecting nonlethal venom... dopamine... alters the roach’s behavior... cleaning itself instead of running for its life...zombifying parasite…

Luhmann... published more than 70 books and over 400 scholarly articles... one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century ... “I’m not thinking everything on my own. Much of it happens in my Zettelkasten”...adopt his method and ... learn better, think better, publish more, and be more creative... A Zettelkasten is ... a box of not…

for iPhone users, but all optimizations are transferable...Your phone is... trying to suck as much energy out of you as it can. Today... we’ll turn your phone into a mindfulness enhancer... designed based on how I aspire to behave... Great tools share three characteristics...:only trigger you when it actually benefits you to use them.require as li…

Your subconscious never rests... your goal is to direct your subconscious mind to create the outcomes you seek... unlock connections and solutions... Here’s a simple routine to get started:... Take a few moments before you go to bed to meditate on and write down the things you’re trying to accomplish. Ask yourself loads of questions ... Write tho…

You never know what your falling apple will be, but you have to be out of your office to see it.... put on your calendar that you’re going to take unstructured thinking time ... When all else fails, take a shower. Showering ... can help cultivate creativity... release dopamine... relax us, which lets our attention turn inward to find free associa…

Focusmate — a free virtual co-working service that pairs you with a complete stranger for 50 minutes of silent, mutual labor over a webcam... harnesses pillars of psychology proven to boost productivity 200-300 percent... just telling someone I was going to do something made me get it done... because it layers various productivity hacks like soci…

Newport defines Deep Work as “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”... in an average office setting such a state of prolonged “distraction-free concentration” is all but impo…

To #DeleteFacebook is to throw the baby out with the bathwater without solving the underlying problem.This is not another post on the benefits or evils of Facebook — you can figure that out for yourself…- my latest post accepted into The Mission

“If your job consists of Tweeting for someone else, you owe it to yourself to think of something else in 2018. Particularly if you’re under 35."It’s early January, and so time to add to the slew of “What you should do in 2018” posts sloshing around the Net.

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…

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

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.

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…

Yet another variation on the Top3ics format: exploring three facets of one topic, highlighting one outstanding resource (plus a few extra links) for each.  Today’s theme... psychology

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 …

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…