Written: January 23, 2019 | Released: September 16, 2021 There is a simple formula for thinking about how to be more productive that most people aren't familiar with. It breaks down productivity into the product of three factors, namely: PRODUCTIVITY = TIME x EFFICIENCY x OBJECTIVE More explicitly:PRODUCTIVITY(i.e., the total value - according to your own values - of your work each week ...

There is a vast number of hypothetical traditions that could be practiced, compared to the few that actually are. If you were inventing a new tradition that you and millions of others would practice one day each year for many years to come, and you wanted it to produce positive effects on the participants, what would your new tradition be? Below are a few ideas for hypothetical traditions. I’m...

TLDR: become a looper of questions to know how to program the machine that will polish the stone while you outlast the jungle. 1. Looping the Question “What don’t I know that I must know?” This Meta Question is your obsession. The answer to that Meta Question is itself a question, and it leads you to create your first data loop (say, conducting a series of interviews with experts). Afte...

Many of us spend a lot of our time at our computers. Yet how efficiently do we really use them? Memorizing the most useful keyboard commands might save you minutes a day. Here are some of the most useful ones I've found: Switch windows within a single application (Command-` on Mac)Paste while using the formatting of the document you're pasting into (Command-Option-Shift-V on Mac)Skip to next/p...

What's the relationship between personality and life satisfaction? We took a stab at figuring it out! We conducted a study of 999 people in the United States; recruited through our study platform at Positly.com. We looked for a correlation between 18 different personality traits (each trait being assessed with two questions) and life satisfaction. We examined the association each trait had w...

Are you looking for a good non-fiction book to read? Yesterday I asked people to share one of the best non-fiction books they've ever read, that may be lesser-known. The request yielded 102 unique recommendations, only 18% of which were familiar to me. Incidentally, there was very little overlap between this list and Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Best Non-Fiction Books" (found here: ht...

Here's a social characteristic that divides us that I think few people are aware of: how often, during a typical face-to-face conversation, do you pay attention to or visualize what your facial expressions must look like to the other person? I first became aware of this distinction during a conversation with friends, where we stumbled on the realization that we are very different from each oth...

Written: November 3, 2018 | Released: July 23, 2021 Here are eight common and slick-sounding claims that I think are misleading, along with a very clunky alternative for each that I think is truer and more useful: "You'll regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did" -> don't try to minimize the amount of regret you'll have - try to maximize the total amount of the things...

It's remarkable the degree to which language can paint a picture of something being good or bad, or someone being trustworthy or unreliable, without actually making any factual claims. The more aware of this you become, the more you start seeing it all over the place. Language is often not neutral and objective even when it professes to be. We all know that language can have positive or negative ...

There are a LOT of ways to make inferences. Many more, I think, than is generally realized. And they all have their weaknesses. You can make inferences using… (1) Deduction: As a consequence of the definition of X and Y, if X then Y. X applies to this case. Therefore Y. “Plato is a man, and all men are mortal; therefore Plato is mortal.” “For any number that is an integer, t...