Productivity

A Few Slow Ways to Consume My Media Favourites

by

Reading Time: 6 minutes I recently updated my About page with new content I follow alongside old favourites. All resources are available on the About page. Blogs old favourites –  Bill Gates, Cal Newport, Bellingcat new content – Five Books publishes interviews with experts on various topics and asks for their recommendations. For example, the article The Best Agatha Christie Books recommended by Mathew Prichard, is an interview with Mathew Prichard, a grandson of Agatha Christie and a Chairman of Christie’s estate. This website has hundreds of interviews, so you can easily spend hours browsing …

Read more

Brandon Sanderson’s Framework to Achieve Hard Things 

by

Reading Time: 5 minutes In 2020, Brandon Sanderson, an epic fantasy and science fiction writer, delivered an excellent keynote called The Common Lie Writers Tell You. This session was a map of achieving difficult things disguised as writing advice.  The first thing that jumps from this video is the lie we usually hear “you can do anything if you just set your mind to it”. In Sanderson’s words: Some things are simply impossible, and even for the things that are possible, luck plays a bigger role in accomplishments …

Read more

How to Reduce Biased Thinking

by

Reading Time: 7 minutes The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any.  Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson – Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)   Every day an overflow of thoughts dashes through our minds as we must adapt as efficiently and quickly as possible to everchanging environments. We can’t process all streams of information around us at once, so we turn to mental shortcuts …

Read more

How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2)

by

Reading Time: 12 minutes Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) This article will present other techniques that women (who usually experience gender stereotyping or/and are caregivers) choose to follow in their work aspirations. As in the previous article, most of this research is based on Mason Currey’s excellent books, Daily Rituals and Daily Rituals: Women at Work.   Hidden in plain sight   Costume designer Edith Head created the …

Read more

How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1)

by

Reading Time: 15 minutes Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) As I mentioned in the previous article, the focus of this article is adding more examples of women (who usually either experience gender stereotyping or are caregivers or both) to the deep work philosophies Cal Newport identified in his book Deep Work. To recap some work strategies, Newport categorized four types of work philosophies …

Read more

The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction

by

Reading Time: 16 minutes Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) In his Deep Work bestseller, Cal Newport coins the term “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 contrast, Newport defines shallow work as “non-cognitively demanding, …

Read more

Mastering a Crucial Skill for Adaptation: Learning How to Learn

by

Reading Time: 15 minutes Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson. Frank Herbert, Dune  An article published by the World Economic Forum says that we are “in the middle of a global reskilling emergency” as AI will automatize some of our …

Read more

Proven Strategies against Procrastination

by

Reading Time: 12 minutes Etymologically, procrastination comes from the Latin word procrastinare, meaning “deferred till the morning” or “belonging to tomorrow “. Naturally, there is a better side of postponing work where we can use purposeful delaying of our work as a creative way to let ideas and concepts grow arms and legs. The difference between meaningful task delaying and procrastination is when a tomorrow to accomplish that specific work never quite arrives.  A common opinion is that procrastination is about poor time management skills or that procrastination is related …

Read more