Betterment

In the 1970s, the late academic, Thomas McGovern who was well known in environmental circles at the time proposed a nice explanation for why the Norse

Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism. Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even mak…

Word salad is actually nutritious when consumed in small amounts. Placebos are real, they’re effective and they often help us find solace or perhaps to heal. If they do no harm, there’s…

It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it. Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are setti…

We all make them from time to time. You might not know what you need to know. This is where experience is created. You might have an identity that pushes you to make those choices. If you’re …

If you want to drink more herbal tea, get a hot water dispenser that keeps it handy and on tap. On the other hand, if you want to watch less television, disconnect the TV after every viewing sessio…

If it’s just the right amount of necessary kindness, it’s not really kindness. It’s pleasantness. If the people in our circle begin to experience behavior that’s kinder than…

Withdraw, endure, or laugh? The ancients have some advice about facing disillusionment.

The internet has stopped being a place we visit — it’s now an environment we inhabit.

Robert Trivers died last week, perhaps the greatest evolutionary biologist of the last century. Though not as famous as his colleague, Richard Dawkins, he

If it’s important, don’t ask the team to try harder. Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises. If quality is a problem, look at…

Ten years ago, I published ​Deep Work​. It was my second mainstream hardcover idea book. The previous title, ​So Good They Can’t Ignore You​, hadn’t ... Read more

It’s often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much. Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.

Joseph Brandlin is a scofflaw. After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate,…

You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It’s possible to be a great chef with…

"AI isn't lightening workloads," The Wall Street Journal reported last week. "It's making them more intense." Well, yes. This is, in fact, how "workload" works under capitalism: labor is perpetually squeezed to do more, to generate more surplus value, to create more profit for the boss. Technological advancements -- that's

April 13, 1970. 200,000 miles from Earth. An oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13. “Houston, we've had a problem.” It could have been the end. It wasn't.

On Monday, I’ll be opening registration for my new course, Everyday Energy. The course is a three-month program designed to help you build practices into your life that promote greater vitality—and productivity. In case you missed it, I’ve written a brief essay series discussing our human energy crisis, the biological roots of our exhaustion and […]

The case for why self-improvement is real but it doesn't lead to fast takeoff.

How do you measure product-market fit for a developer tool? A PMF scoring model from Evil Martians—a product development consultancy for developer tools startups—built on data from 37 devtools companies across AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Five metrics, real benchmarks, and a dual score that tells you whether to invest in product or go-to-market.

Back in 1990, the appointed head administrator for the recently bankrupt Eastern Airlines, Martin Shugrue gave an all hands speech in front of employees

Give yourself the gift of friction

We talk about link contexts a lot. The idea comes from where you place footnotes in scientific writing. Here is a simple explanation with examples so you can get the hang of it, too.

My favorite movie star wears Chanel. I, too, will wear Chanel. All the cool kids live in Brooklyn. I, too, just moved to Brooklyn. Everyone knows houses

I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me ​an essay​ he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century ... Read more

My story of burnout, and some resources/analysis for spotting, mitigating and treating burnout.

In the opening chapter of War And Peace, Pavlovna sets the stage at an 1805 social gathering in St Petersburg.  The top elite of Russian court life:

When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human attention to complete. Our database migrations were run manually, too. Developing good software is very possible in those circumstances, but it takes a remarkable attention to detail to do it. It was also possible to develop good software using Subversion and developing by ssh’ing into a remote server to edit PHP files, but the goal is making things easy rather than possible.

Why does work seem to fill the space made available to it? And what do the world-record splits of endurance athletes have to teach us about mental effort?