Betterment

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?

Shortly after the Second World War ended, the United States set up a strict non-fraternization policy. American G.I.’s in occupied Germany were not to

I use four different note-taking apps. Crazy, did you say? Perhaps. Let me explain what note modes are.

I have been a writer long enough to know this in my bones: jargon sucks. It is a crime against writing. It abuses your readers and your listeners. And it is a sure sign you do not know what the hec…

I have been seeing an increasingly prevalent trend of people showing up in online spaces flaunting that they are writing with the assistance of AI. They seem to be proud of this. They shouldn't be.

I recently came across an interesting academic article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. It was titled, ​“The relationships between social media use, time management, ... Read more

Kaeden is a 22-year-old print specialist at a Staples in upstate New York. She started making TikToks about her job because she genuinely loved it. She

Next week, I’m opening registration for my new course Everyday Energy. In the last essay, I discussed why we’re living through a crisis of human energy. Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on how to fix that, with insights drawn from the first month of the three-month curriculum. Energy starts with biology. All human […]

In 1429, an illiterate 17-year old French peasant defined the fate of kings and successfully redefined global power politics. During the Hundred Years’

You do not know what your life is or what you are doing or who you are. Dionysus to Pentheus, Bacchae, Euripides (trans. Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library,

Participants in a meeting of the Japanese OD Network self-organizing in a dialogic container to discuss what they learning from an embodied experience of constraints, Kanzan University, Nagoya, 201…