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Getting stuck on a problem costs more than the minutes spent staring at it. Push through anyway and the same three approaches tend to circle back, none of them any better than the last. Walk away entirely, and there's a real chance of never coming back to it, or ...Read More
Most people who swear by walking for good ideas will tell you it's the fresh air doing it, or the trees, or getting away from a desk and into somewhere that looks less like work. That explanation feels right. A change of scenery seems like the obvious ingredient, the ...Read More
Ask someone to list the punctuation marks in English and you'll get commas, periods, semicolons, maybe a colon if they're paying attention. What ties all of those together is the instruction each one carries. A comma tells a reader to slow down without stopping. A period tells them ...Read More
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