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
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
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
Every so often a manuscript arrives with a research folder attached that's several times the length of the piece itself: interviews transcribed in full, a dozen papers annotated in the margins, whole books' worth of notes distilled down to a paragraph or two that actually made it onto ...Read More