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
Somewhere across the manuscripts I've turned back to writers over the years — a rough count puts it near forty, though I stopped keeping an exact tally a long time ago — a pattern eventually became hard to ignore. Almost none of them were rejected because the underlying idea ...Read More
Writers tell me some version of the same thing often enough that I've stopped being surprised by it: they do their best work with a deadline bearing down, and their worst work when a project has no fixed end date at all. It sounds like a confession of bad ...Read More