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A plan sitting untouched in a notes app. A resolution that made it three weeks. A folder of half-started projects, each one still technically "in progress." Nearly everyone has some version of this, and the usual explanation is a shortage of willpower or discipline. The research on people who ...Read More
Somewhere between deciding you should do something and actually doing it, most people lose the thread. A 2016 review by psychologists Paschal Sheeran and Thomas Webb looked at decades of research on this exact gap and found that intentions get translated into action only about half the time. ...Read More
Here are two things that are both true, according to recent research. People who choose harder, more effortful words when they apologize are perceived as more sincere. People whose apology sounds too smooth, too rehearsed, are perceived as less sincere. Set those two findings side by side and they seem ...Read More
Here is the contradiction sitting inside one of the most commonly used words in English. "Literally" exists to do one job: to tell a listener that what follows is not an exaggeration, not a figure of speech, not a colorful way of putting things, but the plain truth. And ...Read More
The common assumption is that a deadline is a deadline. Whether the date comes from a boss, a client, or your own calendar, the theory goes, a deadline is a deadline: a fixed point that forces the work to get done. As long as something is due on ...Read More
Picture the message landing in your inbox. It opens with your name, maybe even a pleasant enough greeting, and then, three words in: "Per my last email." Nothing about the sentence that follows is rude on paper. It is polite, grammatically clean, and technically just a pointer back to ...Read More