Our brain is wired to reduce uncertainty. The unknown is synonymous with threats that pose risks to our survival. The more we know, the more we can make accurate predictions and shape our future. The path forward feels more dangerous when we can sense essential gaps in our knowle … | Continue reading
We are all juggling multiple obligations, roles, and responsibilities across our personal and professional lives. Multitasking seems like it should be the perfect solution when faced with multiple demands and limited time. Doing two things at the same time is faster than doing th … | Continue reading
A new generation of AI tools is taking the world by storm. These tools can help you write better, code faster, and generate unique imagery at scale. People are using AI tools to produce entire blog posts, create content for their company’s social media channels, and craft enticin … | Continue reading
Notion, Evernote, and Roam have long been the gold standard for online collaboration and note-taking. However, a new player has emerged that promises to be the all-in-one tool for thought everyone has been waiting for. This tool is called Tana. The end of context switching Knowle … | Continue reading
Welcome to this edition of our interview series, where we meet with founders on a mission to help us work better and happier. Marie Ng is a long-time Ness Labs reader and the founder of Llama Life, a uniquely designed tool to manage timeboxed working sessions. The quirky branding … | Continue reading
Why is it that we like having choices, but we don’t like choosing? Being able to decide between several options makes us feel in control. Yet, we tend to exhibit a preference for the default option when presented with a selection of choices. This is called the default effect, and … | Continue reading
Tana is a powerful tool for thought that allows you to easily turn raw notes into tasks. Its goal is to end context switching and copy-pasting, so you can accomplish all of your goals from an all-in-one workspace. You can start experiencing the power of Tana by creating a simple … | Continue reading
Tana is a brand-new tool for thought that claims to put a stop to context-switching. It enables you to begin by entering data and then readily find it using searches rather than figuring out where to place it before you write it. Benefitting from both database-based note-taking l … | Continue reading
Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think and work better. Ahmed Elmasry is the founder and CEO of Walling, a visual workspace to organize your ideas, tasks and projects. Users have been raving about the way … | Continue reading
When your motivation vanishes, what can you do to get it back? Many of us will buy an inspirational book or watch motivational videos, thinking this will help us get our mojo back. But these tricks are unlikely to be successful. In reality, motivation only starts to build again o … | Continue reading
We live in a world obsessed with outcomes. At school, we’re encouraged to climb an artificial leaderboard that reflects our test scores. At work, performance is based on reaching specific targets, sometimes known as OKRs for “Objectives and Key Results.” In this goal-based societ … | Continue reading
These are raw notes from the Maintaining health and wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic King’s College conference on April 2, 2020. This lecture by Dr Joseph Chilcot was titled Health behaviour for COVID-19: The good, the bad, and the ugly. Don’t expect any commentary or addit … | Continue reading
Temptation bundling is a productivity technique that involves combining an activity that gives you instant gratification, such as watching TV, with one that is beneficial but has a delayed reward, such as exercising. | Continue reading
It can be tempting to seek the middle ground. But the false compromise fallacy can lead to misleading conclusions and poor decision making. | Continue reading
My grandma just passed away. Oma was 86 years old. She was born in Algeria, in a small village called Sidi Okba. She had tattoos on her face, which she didn’t like and tried to get rid of several times, to no avail. She also didn’t like drunk people and violence. What Oma liked, … | Continue reading
We take the way we see the world for granted. But our experience of the world is shaped in part by our visual system—which is both extremely complex and limited. Impossible colors, which are sometimes called non-physical colors, are a great reminder to not consider our perception … | Continue reading
Creative self-efficacy is the internal belief that you have the ability to complete creative tasks effectively. If you can learn to leave behind the fixed mindset of “I am not a creative person”, you will be able to make more room for personal growth, exploration, and innovation. | Continue reading
Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us be more productive without sacrificing our mental health. Mohit Mamoria is the founder and CEO of Mailman, a plugin that allows you to decide when and what emails should l … | Continue reading
In this interview, we talked about how to integrate writing and research and avoid context switching, how cryptocurrency can help build an attention market and surface the most relevant content, why we need to build a social knowledge base, the concept of “search gardening”, and … | Continue reading
Many tools for thought offer a single-player experience centered on storing and retrieving information, and don’t integrate well with the biggest multiplayer platform of all time: the Internet. Part of the problem is that we have been idle when it comes to its foundation: the hyp … | Continue reading
Created by Graham Allcott, the founder of Think Productive, DUST is a simple method to identify why you may be procrastinating. | Continue reading
Interstitial journaling is a productivity technique created by Tony Stubblebine. To my knowledge, it’s the simplest way to combine note-taking, tasks, and time tracking in one unique workflow. You don’t need any special software, but Roam Research makes it even easier to do thank … | Continue reading
When reading a book, taking notes interrupts our reading flow. There is a fine balance between taking too many notes and taking too few notes. | Continue reading
Note-taking is fast, uses the original author's language, and feels easier. Note-making is slower, more involved, and uses your own language. | Continue reading
The butterfly effect teaches us to acknowledge chaos, to create the best catalysts for our goals, and to constantly adjust our forecast. | Continue reading
Have you ever found yourself aimlessly scrolling online, then feeling guilty about the wasted time? Twelve years ago, the Webster’s New World Dictionary—which is the official dictionary used by the Associated Press and many leading newspapers such as the New York Times—selected “ … | Continue reading
Sloth is one of the seven capital sins. While it’s hard to define it exactly, most will agree it has to do with laziness: the disinclination to use energy. Whether or not you believe in such moral vices, most cultures see laziness as a negative trait. However, being lazy can have … | Continue reading
One of the reasons why advanced users enjoy Roam Research so much is metaprogramming—the ability to modify Roam’s behaviour inside Roam itself, without ever touching its source code. By using JavaScript blocks via the roam/js feature, you can add new customise your experience. Th … | Continue reading
How many times have you forgotten where you left your keys? What about your friend who always seems to make up events that never happened? Do you ever struggle to remember someone’s name? Don’t worry—you’re not the only one. Our memory is far from perfect, and the memory bias eff … | Continue reading
Unread books are as powerful as the ones we read. An antilibrary is a private collection of unread books capturing the vastness of the unknown. | Continue reading
Stress is not always bad. Depending on the particular stressors and your reaction, stress can be detrimental (distress) or beneficial (eustress). | Continue reading
Using principles from hourly work to define productivity in knowledge work has resulted in highly inefficient work conditions for many employees. Time is not a measure of productivity. | Continue reading
Within our collective brain, the three main sources of innovation are serendipity, recombination, and incremental improvement. | Continue reading
Gone are the days of linear career trajectories. Most people will live several work lives, and careers have become increasingly mobile. While deep expertise in a given domain can lead to a successful career, it is also a more rigid approach which may limit the number of lateral o … | Continue reading
Humanity has lived through several cognitive revolutions already. The development of various writing systems around the world; the invention of the printing press; the formulation of the heliocentric hypothesis by Copernicus; Darwin’s theory of evolution; Einstein’s theory of rel … | Continue reading
There's a note-taking app for everyone. The challenge: it's hard to decide which one's the best for your use case and your note-taking style. | Continue reading
When I first heard about intermittent fasting, my reaction was: “Wait, I’ve been doing this for years!” In fact, I have been skipping breakfast for more than fifteen years, simply because I don’t feel hungry in the morning. More recently, I have started experimenting with other i … | Continue reading
Mental models are shortcuts for reasoning. They are a set of ideas and beliefs that we consciously or unconsciously form based on our experiences to shape our representation of how the world works. While mental models are extremely useful to make decisions in times of uncertainty … | Continue reading
The idea of artificial intelligence taking over the world is at least as old as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was published in 1818. Public figures such as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have warned us against the reckless creation of superintelligent machines. In June 2020, … | Continue reading
To fail like a scientist is to embrace the experimental nature of life. Everything is an experiment, every failure a learning opportunity. | Continue reading
“It’s not rocket science!” people often say. Well, sometimes, projects can be so complex, making the right decision does feel akin to rocket science. Who better to turn to than one of the biggest space agencies in the world to learn how to manage risk? There are few organisations … | Continue reading
This week marked an important milestone: I just sent the 50th edition of Maker Mind, a newsletter about mindful productivity. Countless hours of careful writing, thoughtful conversations with readers, and exploring strange rabbit holes to report back on what I learned. While I be … | Continue reading
Mental maps, cognitive maps, mind maps… Scientists and popular psychologists alike have coined all kinds of thinking maps. What’s the difference? While it may be tempting to consider some of these maps more effective than others as thinking tools, the reality is that we need a co … | Continue reading
We have a limited mental health budget. For some people, daily aggressions make this budget much smaller. If we want to be able to enact change and contribute positively, we need to manage that mental wealth carefully. | Continue reading
Students often try to reduce their cognitive load. But some types of cognitive loads can’t be altered, some are detrimental, and yet others are productive. | Continue reading
As I was chatting with a friend, we noticed that we both felt incredibly excited and anxious about the work we were currently doing. We could not come up with the right word to describe that exact feeling: we were stressed, yes, but not in a negative way. We did worry about the o … | Continue reading
Learning to let go is much harder than holding on. Why do we cling onto past sorrows, bad relationships, old things, meaningless goals? | Continue reading
Confirmation bias is a common type of cognitive bias: the more we believe in something, the more likely we are to search for confirming evidence. | Continue reading