So many things to do, so little time. When you juggle work, personal projects, and are hoping to have any sort of social life, managing your time can feel like an impossible endeavor. There are many tips out there—the most common one being to focus on the most important task first—but few address the systemic complexities of managing your time and energy when you have a very long list of important and competing tasks as well as other people to take into account. Option 1: You are focusing on a single task and ignoring all distractions and interruptions. You are getting a lot done, but your responsiveness suffers. People who are counting on you are stuck because they need your input. Option 2: You make yourself as available as possible to other people and are extremely responsive when they need your input. They make faster progress with their work, but your own output suffers. Both options are less than ideal. As a knowledge worker, you need to ensure you complete these important tasks while being responsive enough to support your collaborators in their work. The challenge is in finding that delicate balance between optimizing your own output and sharing your input to enable your collaborators to progress. So what do we do? We try to multitask. A mythical activity In computing, context switching refers to the process of storing the current state for one task, so that this task can be paused and another task resumed. It’s basically what allows computers to multitask (fun fact: the word “multitask” was invented by IBM in 1965 to describe a computer capability. It was only later that we started using it for humans). In the same way that context switching comes with a cost in performance for computers, multitasking has its cost for humans too. Research shows that constantly switching context between different tasks has a terrible effect on attention. We’re basically less focused and less performant when trying to do several things at the same time. Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell even described multitasking as a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.” But very few people can afford to stay focused on one single task until it’s done. Emails need to be answered, customers need to be helped. So how can you avoid the terrible impact multitasking can have on your performance? The mindful way to multitask What I call mindful context switching is a strategic approach to task management that emphasizes the importance of staying focused on a single task while maintaining an acceptable level of responsiveness. It involves defining your necessary level of responsiveness based on external demands, breaking tasks into achievable chunks that fit within these response intervals, and scheduling dedicated time slots for them. It was inspired by the work of Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, authors of Algorithms to Live By, who wrote: “You should try to stay on a single task as long as possible without decreasing your responsiveness below a minimum acceptable limit. Decide how responsive you need to be—and then, if you want to get things done, be no more responsive than that.” The aim of mindful context switching is to boost your productivity and improve the quality of your output, all while maintaining healthy relationships at work and outside of work. Ready to give it a try? It essentially boils down to five simple steps: Define your responsiveness: If you have high-value customers who expect to hear back from you in less than an hour, that’s how responsive you need to be. If you sell a SaaS product that’s not business-critical, maybe responding to emails once a day is fine. There is no fast-and-hard rule here, but you need to figure out what level of responsiveness will work for your business. Design manageable chunks of work: Now that you know how responsive you need to be, break down your tasks into manageable chunks that can be done between these response times. Each chunk needs to be realistic, with a beginning and an end. For example, if you need to write an article, one chunk could be to create the outline. Schedule dedicated time: That’s it for this one. Just put these chunks into your calendar. Communicate clearly: Let everyone you work with know that you won’t be able to respond during these deep work time slots. There are several ways to go about this. If you have a shared calendar, that’s fairly easy. When I was working at Google, I also saw people put it in their email signature or inside an email autoresponder if their response time was longer. Although it may feel weird at first, it’s usually best to overcommunicate. Revisit regularly: Don’t simply duplicate your time slots from one week to another. Reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Were the chunks actually manageable? Was your responsiveness appropriate? You can even proactively ask your teammates for feedback. Play with different configurations until you find the one that works for you. That’s it! The first time around will take a bit of work, but mindful context switching will help you do better work, faster, and without alienating the people around you. The post Mindful context switching: multitasking for humans appeared first on Ness Labs.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Adults often as this question when chatting with a kid. Maybe it’s because the answer is often endearing (an astronaut!) or surprising (a YouTuber!), or because it’s a way to connect through a topic that speaks to us—work. We keep doing this to each other as adults too. “What do you do for a living?” and “Where do you work?” are some of the most common conversation starters when meeting someone for the first time. When you’re a kid, the world is full of possibilities. Nothing seems to be impossible. No question or topic seems trivial enough not to wonder about it. It’s a wonderful exploratory phase. You may want to try a different sport every week. You have a new best friend every month. You’re into board games and then realize that painting is more your thing. For now. So why do we later insist on this fabricated idea of having one calling in life? Go forth and specialize Often, as soon as you start showing a sustained interest in a specific area, adults push you to practice and improve. To make it your thing. It comes from a good place, of course, but it stems from the idea that the more “defined” you are as a person, the better. Our education system works in a similar way. We are expected to specialize, going from a generalist curriculum covering everything from arts to maths and history to graduating with a degree in one specific area. Then, at work, we hone in on what sets us apart and create an elevator pitch—a short description that gets our value proposition across in one key point or two. In friendship too. Research shows that the older you get, the fewer friends you have. Growing up is like trying to squeeze through a gradually shrinking funnel, making yourself smaller and smaller until you can describe yourself with as few words as possible. We become more focused in our interests, our work, and even our friendships. In the words of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, a journalist at The Guardian: “Part of growing up is accepting all those things you’ll never be, but which perhaps, in another system or universe, you could have been.” But does it have to be the case? Inverting the pyramid of life In the years since I founded Ness Labs, I’ve had countless conversations with talented, intelligent people who told me they felt lost. Either because they didn’t find joy in their day job anymore, because a project they had poured their heart and soul into didn’t work out, or because the next logical steps in their career were not particularly exciting. For most of them, it seemed hard to find alternative options because, after years of hard work and smart choices, they were sitting at the tip of the pyramid. Here is how the pyramid of life normally works: As a child, you explored. As a student, you specialized. Now, as an adult, you can easily define who you are to yourself and other people. This is the path I have followed for a long time. This is the narrowing path most people will follow. Not because that’s what they want but because that’s what is expected from them. For the rare few ones with a true calling, research suggests that it may work just fine. But what about the others? The same research shows that searching for a calling leaves us confused and uncomfortable. Now, you probably see where I am going with this: Why should we look for our one true calling in the first place? Why not invert the pyramid? Here is what the inverted pyramid of life looks like: As a child, we are full of potential. As a student, we can explore our affinities. As an adult, we open up a world of opportunities. In this paradigm, the potential you have as a child is just the beginning—the tip of a cone of creativity that widens as you grow up. Because you’re optimizing for opportunities and not trying to define yourself through specific expertise, you can keep expanding your playground all your life. The inverted pyramid of life can apply to studies, work, but also friendships. Children have neighborhood friends, school friends, friends from a sports team or an art club. As an adult, we tend to only have a couple of friends outside of work. But we can significantly expand our circles and choose new friends consciously. What if you had a friend who loves hiking, another who enjoys nerding about technology and tools, and another who is always excited to try new foods together? What if you had friends all over the world, who you know you may only meet in years to come, if ever, but who share your interests? This ability to identify yourself across multiple domains and roles, which researchers call “self-complexity”, has been found to support emotional resilience by reducing the impact of failure or setback in any single domain. You may lose your job but still be a great friend. Your startup may fail, but you may run your first marathon with your partner. You may be rejected from your dream school but win a poetry prize. The self-complexity that arises when we invert our pyramid of life also encourages personal growth and self-discovery, as you can explore and evolve across various aspects of your identity, which means a richer, fuller life. When you stop trying to nail down your narrative and focus only on the most obvious relationships, life becomes a giant sandbox where we can learn anything, grow in any direction, and connect with anyone. Maybe then, instead of asking, “So, what do you do for a living?” we’ll start asking: “So, what makes you feel alive these days?” The post Stop looking for The One: The Inverted Pyramid of Life appeared first on Ness Labs.

At Ness Labs, we believe in the power of ideas and the profound impact of continuously feeding our minds with thoughtful content. Each month, we meticulously curate a selection of books that truly stand out in an ocean of books that can be overwhelming. This series aims to highlight the work that can serve as a compass to navigate life and work, so we can collectively learn, evolve, and thrive. This is your guide to discovering the most insightful, inspiring, and transformative books on mindful productivity, creative growth, holistic ambition, and developing a healthier relationship with work. The Good Enough Job Simone Stolzoff’s The Good Enough Job offers a compelling critique of the prevailing culture that places our work and professional ambitions at the center of our identities. Through insightful reporting and interviews with individuals across diverse professions, Stolzoff lays bare the impacts of intertwining our sense of self with our jobs and the cost it exacts on our well-being and even professional success. The book prompts us to question the status quo, challenging the societal expectation of work as a calling, a dream to be chased relentlessly. For those striving to find a healthier relationship with work and ambition, The Good Enough Job provides a refreshing perspective. By exposing the myths that have chained us to our work desks and that underscore the overvaluation of our labor, Stolzoff inspires us to redefine what it means for a job to be good enough. Learn more The Order of Time Time has bemused us since the dawn of consciousness. With his unique combination of scientific insight, philosophical wisdom, and artistic flair, Rovelli takes us on a journey to demystify the enigma of time. He guides us from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, all the while challenging and reshaping our intuitive understanding of time’s very structure and compelling us to confront the startling realities of our universe, where time flows at varied speeds in different places. With his help, we understand that the distinctions between past, future, and present are far less rigid than we perceive. Rovelli’s work is not just an intellectual feast; it’s also a call to introspection. For those obsessively striving to master time management, this book serves as a reminder to reconsider our relationship with time. It urges us to reflect on the interconnectedness of our selfhood and our perception of time. With The Order of Time, Rovelli nudges us to view time not as a foe to be tamed but as an intrinsic part of our existence to be understood and appreciated. Learn more Hidden Genius The book Hidden Genius by Polina Marinova Pompliano is a treasure trove of insights from some of the world’s most intriguing individuals. After five years of studying these high performers through her work at The Profile, Pompliano offers readers a unique opportunity to understand the mental frameworks these individuals use to navigate complex problems, fuel their creativity, and perform exceptionally under pressure. Far from simple tricks or hacks, these frameworks offer profound shifts in perspective that can redefine one’s worldview. This book can be an invaluable resource to enhance your thinking skills or seek inspiration during trying times. The great thing about Polina’s book is that it goes beyond sharing successful people’s stories: it also provides a mental toolkit that you can use to tackle complex problems, navigate relationships, and foster creativity and resilience in the face of uncertainty. Learn more Saving Time Saving Time by Jenny Odell is a riveting investigation into our relationship with time, compelling us to question the societal structures that commodify it and push us towards relentless efficiency. Odell argues that the societal clock we live by was designed more for profit than for people, turning even our leisure into quantifiable, transactional moments. Her book highlights how our distorted perception of time is intricately tied to enduring the climate, social, and mental health crises. Yet, Odell’s book is not a despairing read; it’s a beacon of hope, presenting us with alternative ways to experience time. By saving time from its commodification, Odell suggests that time, in its most authentic and diverse forms, may also save us, offering a profound source of meaning beyond the constraints of the workplace or the dictates of a profit-oriented society. In short, her book is a thoughtful rebellion against reality as we know it. Learn more The Pathless Path The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd takes readers on a deeply personal journey of self-discovery and personal growth. From his beginnings as a small-town Connecticut kid to reaching what he thought at the time was the pinnacle of success at a prestigious consulting firm, Paul had it all by conventional standards. Yet, he chose to walk away, setting off on his life’s “real work”: identifying what truly mattered to him and daringly constructing a life around those values. This book is not a how-to manual filled with life hacks. Rather, The Pathless Path is an intimate account of Paul’s transition from a life focused on professional advancement to one centered on work that genuinely matters. This book should be an essential companion for those contemplating a departure from their current jobs, embarking on a new path, navigating the uncertainties of an unconventional trajectory, or seeking alternative ways to understand work in our rapidly evolving world. Learn more Other books to explore this month: Exhalation by Ted Chiang (this is fiction but relevant to the future of life and work) The Art & Business Of Ghostwriting by Nicolas Cole How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene Do you have any books to recommend for the Ness Labs Best Books series? Please let us know via the contact form. We welcome self-recommendations. The post Ness Labs Best Books of July 2023 appeared first on Ness Labs.

When I was younger, I badly wanted to live in Japan. Japan is a country with very strict immigration laws, but my university had an exchange program where you could go spend a semester and study in another country. There was only one problem: the Japanese university they had a partnership with was one of the most selective in the country. I remember thinking: “There is no way I’ll get accepted.” I told my mom about my doubts. “It’s not your decision to make,” she said. And, as often, she was right. We constantly limit our options by deciding for others. All I had to do was apply, and it then became the university’s job to accept my application or not. You probably have seen this pattern countless times in yourself and others. It’s far easier not to fail when you haven’t tried. It’s far easier to not be wrong when you’re not putting yourself out there. But it’s also much harder to grow as a human being when we avoid getting out of our comfort zone. If this fear of failure is so bad for our personal and professional growth, why is it so common? We all want to be loved Fear of failure starts in early childhood. We are social animals and feel the need to be accepted by others, which begins with the acceptance and love of our parents. In a study looking at the relationship between young athletes and their parents, researchers found a correlation between the parents’ high expectations for achievement and the children’s fear of failure. The more the parents showed a negative reaction to what they perceived as a failure from their kid, the more the kid would fear the consequences of “failing.” In some people, this can turn into atychiphobia, an irrational and paralyzing fear of failure, often accompanied by an intense feeling of panic or anxiety, and physical symptoms such as difficulty breathing, an unusually fast heart rate, and sweating. For most people, though, fear of failure manifests itself in a much more subtle way, mainly self-doubt that prevents us from exploring uncertain paths: We put off doing things because we’re unsure how they will turn out. We avoid situations where we may have to try something new in front of other people. We avoid doing things we know will improve our lives because we don’t have all the necessary skills. We give ourselves the illusion of growth by reading, researching, watching videos… Anything but doing the thing and risking being judged by others. But the good news is that nobody is hoping for you to fail. Most people you know would be happy to see you succeed, and the ones who don’t know you don’t care. So how can you shift your perception and overcome your fear of failure? Your perception of possible When you start reading a novel, you rarely expect to finish it in one go. Instead, you will probably read a few chapters, then a few more, until you’re done with the book. Strangely, we’re not so pragmatic when it comes to personal goals. It’s common to look at a long-term goal and never get started because it seems too far out of reach. But we can reshape our perception of what’s possible by breaking our journey into smaller, more achievable chunks. Achievable, in this case, does not mean something where you are certain of succeeding, but rather something that you can put to the test in the short term, without being able to use any excuse to put it off. Let’s say you have a fear of public speaking and use the excuse that, in any case, nobody has ever invited you to speak at a conference. A small, achievable experiment would be to apply to five local meetups to give a talk. While speaking in public may sound terrifying, filling out an online form is perfectly doable. Similarly, you may be scared to be judged for the quality of your writing. While writing a book is a daunting task that is easy to hide behind (“I’d love to write a book, but I don’t have the time”), writing a blog post is much more manageable. Fail like a scientist If you see life as a giant experiment where your goal is to explore as much as you can to obtain answers to your questions, failure becomes an investment to get closer to these answers. In the words of Seth Godin: “The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.” Scientists often repeat experiments thousands of times to get a conclusive answer. And more often than not, the answer they get is that their initial hypothesis was wrong. Not performing the experiment would have allowed them to stay in a cozy limbo of being not wrong, but then we wouldn’t have any science. This is why approaching failure like a scientist is so powerful. By making decisions that will let you learn something new, you are guaranteed to be successful—where success is learning, evolving, and growing as a human being. Failing becomes a way to cultivate aliveness. Increments of curiosity Another way to approach your fear of failure is to think like a kid. Children tend to experiment just for the sake of it: What will happen if I press this button? How does it feel to touch this thing? Reconnecting with your inner child is a great way to overcome your fear of failure. For example: What will happen if I publish this post? How does it feel to speak my mind? Instead of imagining all the ways you may fail, turn your doubts into questions. Maybe nothing good will happen, but a child would not take the answer for granted. Start with something small, then move on to another iteration—a bigger growth loop. With time, your mind will become increasingly comfortable with trying new things and constantly expanding your horizons. Practically, here is how you can start applying this approach of deliberate experimentation right now: Pick something you’ve been putting off because of your fear of failure. Is it public speaking? Starting a blog? Producing a podcast? Launching your first product? Write it down. Define one small experiment you can design to explore this fear. It should be actionable. For example, apply to a few meetups to give a talk, produce one episode of a podcast, or write an article as a Google Doc and share it with a few friends. It should be simple enough that you can just do it in a few hours at most. Do it! Don’t plan anything. Don’t research the best way to go about it. Don’t announce it on Twitter. Just do it. Reflect on what happened. Any negative reactions? What about your emotions? What did you learn? Write all of these thoughts down. It’s a great way to practice metacognition. Rinse and repeat. Keep defining incremental steps in the form of experiments that fall out of your comfort zone but are not scary to the point of being paralyzing. Again, avoid overthinking it beforehand. Just do it, and reflect only after you have performed the experiment. You may feel some anxiety or discomfort along the way, but addressing your fears and trying new things you care about is the best way to avoid another feeling that’s much harder to manage: regret. The post Turning Fear of Failure into Increments of Curiosity appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us make the most of our mind. Nick Daniels is the founder of Portal, an immersive productivity app designed to help you stay in the flow. Portal uses the latest technology to deliver the most natural reproductions of real-life locations. In this interview, we talked about how physical work spaces can influence wellbeing, productivity and creativity, the potential of immersive technologies, the psychology of how we respond to our environment, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Nick, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Most people believe that nature contributes to our wellbeing, but you believe that nature is at the heart of our health and happiness. How did you form that belief? Thanks so much for having me! The inspiration for Portal was sparked back in 2018 when my wife and I spent 6 weeks camping around New Zealand on our honeymoon. We’d spent the previous 10 years living in London pretty much working ourselves into the ground and I was only just starting to recover from a period of depression and burnout from pushing myself too hard on a previous startup, so we were both very much craving an opportunity to get away from it all. The experience itself was of course amazing — unzipping the tent in the morning to stunning views and experiencing the ever-changing sights and sounds of each location we were camping in was incredible. But the most surprising and unexpected thing was that we actually had some of the best sleep of our lives. When I’d camped before it’s always been for short periods of time, and I’d always found the fact that you can hear every sound and the light pouring in early in the morning less than ideal — and often meant you ended up with less sleep not more. But what we found living in the tent for an extended period of time was that over time we just seemed to naturally sync up with the rhythm of the world around us. We’d start getting tired as the sun went down, the temperature fell and the sounds of the birds got replaced with the sounds of the insects at night. And we’d wake up so fresh and energized in the morning as the opposite happened and the sun and temperatures rose and the birds began to sing outside. It’s a feeling that’s almost impossible to describe — when you feel in sync with everything around you, but this experience completely changed how I viewed the natural world. I no longer felt like it was a place separate from me — a place to visit or an attraction to enjoy. It was more like the feeling of finally being home after a long time away. And at the end of those six weeks we both felt the best we’d ever felt in our lives. The idea for Portal then came on the flight home — cramped, uncomfortable and returning to our hectic, stressful lives in London. I was struggling to sleep and started to think about how we’d slept so well and whether it was possible to “bottle up” and re-create that experience and these amazing surroundings back home in London. It was only once I was home and started to research further around what I’d experienced I realized that there was a growing mountain of scientific evidence drawing the link between nature, circadian rhythms, our surroundings and our mental health. It was then that I realized this might be able to help many others beyond myself and within a week I’d handed in my notice and started coding the first version of the app. Ha, inspiration literally hit you. So the initial version was mostly focused on sleep and relaxation? Yes, not many people know this, but the app actually started off life completely focused on being a sleep aid and natural alarm clock — recreating that camping experience in the bedroom using immersive sound, smart lighting and visuals. The big idea was to take an experience-led approach to designing an alarm clock that was inspired by our trip, so rather than the purely functional approaches to alarm clocks which basically use loud noises to scare you awake at a specific time — it would help you wind down at night using gentle transitions mimicking the natural world and then wake you up gently in the morning. It’s an approach that draws upon a lot of the principles behind Biophilic Design, a design approach traditionally used by architects and interior designers that looks to increase people’s connectivity to natural environments and the benefits this can bring. It’s still quite a niche approach but I’m convinced given the amount of research and the positive impact it can bring in our lives that you’ll see it becoming much more mainstream over the coming years. You’ve just launched the Mac version of the app, which is all about improving focus and productivity. How did this come about? In truth, it was a little bit Inception-like. I’d have the scenes playing a lot while coding and developing the app in the early days and came to realize that it was actually really helping me to concentrate and get into the flow. The thunderstorms especially were game-changing for me! As I dug a little deeper, I discovered a wealth of research has come out over recent years shining light on the attention-enhancing effects of nature exposure both digitally and in the real world, specifically research around Attention Restoration Theory (ART) in the field of environmental psychology. There’s also a lot more investment and research going into the architecture and design of physical work spaces and buildings and how they can influence wellbeing, productivity and creativity using the principles of Biophilic Design mentioned before. Apple Park is probably the best example of this that I’ve come across where they’ve spent billions of dollars creating a physical work environment that takes a very human-centric approach and really does aim to bring the natural outdoor environment indoors as much as physically possible. Another fascinating insight we found when speaking with existing customers who were using the iOS app to help them focus was that 40% of those who we interviewed were diagnosed with ADHD (which normally occurs in around 5% of the population). They reported that Portal had become an essential part of their toolkit in managing their ADHD and helping them pursue their studies, careers and passions. However, despite this, the biggest concern for our customers was actually having to use Portal on their phones as these had increasingly become the greatest source of distraction in their lives. They were a big driving force for us prioritizing bringing Portal to Mac. This is such an ambitious idea. How does Portal work, exactly? The app itself uses immersive technologies to instantly transform your workspace into an environment that’s designed to aid focus and creativity. Most of us are very aware of how different places make us feel — it’s not hard to imagine how different you’d feel if you were sitting on top of a mountain right now, or in the midst of a beautiful ancient woodland or a stunning tropical beach. But what’s often less obvious is that how we feel emotionally has a very direct impact on our thought process and how we actually think. In the words of one of our customers: “It has not only made me more productive, but more importantly, it has brought a sense of joy to my work day.” We essentially tap into the psychology of how we respond to our environment and draw on inspiration from some of the world’s most peaceful and awe-inspiring surroundings to create environments that are attuned to helping us get into the right state of mind to think, focus and create. The beauty of this approach is that it’s very passive — it doesn’t take active effort to enjoy the benefits. How does Portal work under the hood? Our ultimate goal is to re-create environments in the most true-to-life and authentic way possible, while also making it as practical and easy to use as possible. To do this, we’ve really had to really push the use of technologies that allow us to capture and reproduce visuals, sound and lighting as realistically as possible. Firstly we use the visuals of the location to create the feeling of a “window” to that place. Our aim has been to get as close to the feeling of a real window as possible and with Mac we’ve integrated these motion visuals directly onto the desktop. It may seem pretty counterintuitive that putting motion onto your desktop would actually help with concentration and make you less distracted, but when done right it can be really effective and it has a very similar effect to having a real window in your office. We’ve meticulously captured over 80 portals ourselves in some of the most beautiful and peaceful corners of the world. We’ve used 12K digital cinema cameras and an evidence-based approach to our content production to ensure we capture the feeling and detail of these incredible places in a way that can enhance productivity and inspire creativity without pulling your focus away. The second component is the sound. We’ve again put an enormous amount of focus on recreating the most true-to-life and immersive sound experience possible. To do this we not only use state-of-the-art spatial audio microphones but we’ve developed our own Spatial Audio solution from the ground up which is specifically designed for real-life ambiance. Rather than using Dolby Atmos which is the default technology on iOS and Mac we use a technology called Ambisonics which is most often used in VR and represents the soundfield as a sphere rather than the traditional speaker or channel-based sound formats.  Spatial audio better reflects how we actually hear our surroundings in real life, giving a much greater sense of space and delivering the closest experience to actually being there yourself. The effect can be quite subtle, but it’s incredible just how much our subconscious picks up on. We also go to great lengths to capture sound in the field that’s naturally free of noise pollution. It’s ama...

Our culture loves experts. Whether it’s athletes, chefs, or musicians, some of the biggest celebrities are considered masters of their craft, and we admire the long hours they put into practicing over and over again the same skills so they could become second nature. In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published his popular book Outliers, exploring why some seemingly extraordinary people achieve much more than others. The book mentioned a study of violin students at a German music academy. This is from the abstract: “Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years.” Malcolm Gladwell branded this the 10,000-hour rule. Study whichever topic for 10,000 hours, and you will master it. Practice doesn’t make perfect First, the study wasn’t about studying a topic for a specific amount of time. It was about deliberate practice. This is a type of practice that is systematic and purposeful, with the specific goal of improving performance and requires focused attention rather than mindless repetitions. More importantly, the lead researcher of the study himself doesn’t even seem to agree with the magical 10,000-hour rule. “He misread that as every one of them had actually spent at least 10,000 hours [practicing], so somehow they passed this magical boundary (…) They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go at the time of the study.” Anders Ericsson, Psychologist & Researcher, Florida State University (source). Finally, and maybe the biggest problem with the 10,000-hour rule, there is absolutely nothing in the study that suggests that anyone can become an expert in any given domain by putting in 10,000 hours of practice, even deliberate practice. To show this, the researchers would have had to take a random sample of people through 10,000 hours of practice and see if the results were statistically significant. All the study shows is that the “best” violinists had put in more hours of deliberate practice than the “good” violinists. Which is interesting but by no means a promise of expertise. In fact, a research study from Princeton shows evidence that practice accounts for just a 12% difference on average in performance in various domains, specifically: 18% in sports 21% in music 26% in games As Frans Johansson explains in his book The Click Moment, deliberate and repeated practice works better in fields with stable structures, such as chess, classical music, or tennis, where the rules never change. But, when it comes to entrepreneurship and other creative fields, the rules change all the time, making deliberate practice less useful. So if practice doesn’t make perfect, how can we go about mastering new skills? Range over mastery The learning strategy that has been used traditionally in school to teach students consists in focusing on one skill before moving on to the next one and is called blocking. But there is a better way: interleaving, which consists in practicing multiple parallel skills at once. Research has shown that randomizing the information causes your brain to stay alert, helping to store information in your long-term memory. This means that the next time you want to study a new subject, you could benefit from switching things up. For example, a bit of coding mixed with a bit of UX design will work better than one long coding session. Not only will you learn better and faster, but it may also make you more successful in the long run. In his book Range, David J. Epstein shows how generalists, rather than specialists, are more likely to succeed, especially in complex fields. The graph below is based on the Ancient Greek proverb: “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.” Being too much of an expert can even be detrimental. In Expert Political Judgment, Philip E. Tetlock shares an experiment where political and economic experts were asked to make predictions. Turns out, 15% of outcomes that experts had considered impossible came to happen anyway, and a quarter of what constituted virtually guaranteed outcomes were never predicted. The interesting part? The more experience and credentials these experts held, the further off the mark their predictions were. In contrast, the participants who had a wider range of knowledge areas and were not bound to a specific “expertise” domain fared better in their predictions. Being able to see new patterns and generate ideas across fields where people don’t usually make connections is an incredibly valuable skill. This superpower rarely comes with deep expertise in one unique field at the expense of other areas of knowledge. So, forget about the 10,000-hour rule. Forget about sticking to one area of expertise for many years. It may work for a very small subset of people, but there is no rule indicating that this is the best strategy. Next time you feel like studying something new that doesn’t fit neatly into your current “frame of expertise”, go ahead and just do it. The post The false promise of the 10,000 hour rule appeared first on Ness Labs.

You are probably all too familiar with the dreaded creative block: sitting in front of your computer, your mind as blank as the page you are staring at, hoping that some miraculous burst of inspiration will suddenly rush through your fingers so you can finally get back into the flow. You also know of the many techniques to deal with creative block. Find inspiration by changing your scenery—maybe going for a walk or packing your laptop to work from a cafe. Just writing whatever crosses your mind, even if it’s unrelated to the work at hand until your mind starts forming interesting connections. Talk to other creatives to brainstorm some ideas. Experiencing a creative block is always inconvenient and stressful, but it is normally short-lived, and feeling occasionally stuck when working on a project is perfectly normal. Even if it may feel like an eternity, we soon end up finding a way to get our creative juices flowing. But sometimes, the problem runs much deeper. Creative burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion around creative work. The symptoms can be hard to pinpoint, and the potential causes are many. The 8 symptoms of creative burnout Because it’s normal for creativity to fluctuate depending on factors such as sleep and stress levels, creative burnout can easily fly under the radar—masking temporary procrastination, tiredness, or lack of motivation. For people who genuinely care about their work and for those who rely on creative output as an emotional outlet, the insidious nature of creative burnout can have a devastating impact on their mental health: When you can’t seem to be able to produce any good creative work and you don’t know what’s wrong, you start blaming yourself. So I put together a list of eight signs of creative burnout. In isolation, most of these signs are harmless. However, if you have four symptoms or more, it may be time to shake things up. Procrastination. Putting off work for a couple of days because you don’t feel like you have enough mental energy is nothing to worry about. However, if you procrastinate for long periods of time and ignore important deadlines, it may be a sign of creative burnout. Struggle to do basic work. Is your to-do list getting longer and longer, but you can’t bring yourself to check some easy tasks off it? Are you burying your head in the sand and neglecting the growing mountain of little things you ought to get off your plate? This may be another symptom. Constant exhaustion. Sometimes, we don’t get enough sleep and feel sluggish the day after. That’s completely fine. But if the physical exhaustion is sustained over a long period of time despite a decent amount of sleep, you may be burning out. Inexplicable stress. Creative work can be stressful. Deadlines, complicated projects with many moving parts, a pushy client… These factors can cause stress within the Goldilocks curve and remain manageable. But creative burnout may make you feel persistently stressed without being able to pinpoint the exact cause. Unhealthy comparisons. We are more connected than ever, and many creators follow the work of fellow creators online. Some creators are more productive than others, and this productivity usually ebbs and flows. If you look at their output and can’t help but compare their productivity to yours in a negative way, you may be experiencing a symptom of creative burnout. Unbalanced content consumption. As a creator, it’s vital to balance your levels of creative input and creative output. When we burn out, we often find ourselves scrolling endlessly and binging TV shows but not creating much work of our own.  Morning dread. Have you ever experienced that feeling of angst, a sense of doom where your mind is racing into the future, and everything seems bleak? Stressful times in our life can make us dread waking up. If this feeling persists, it may be a sign of creative burnout—or something even more serious. Harmful habits. Eating unhealthy food or eating more than usual, abandoning your exercise routine, drinking more alcohol… If you are experiencing creative burnout, you may be coping through damaging mechanisms which will leave you feeling even worse. Irritability. You may be feeling frustrated with your colleagues, annoyed with your spouse, or snappy at your kids. Being more temperamental than usual can be a symptom of creative burnout. Self-doubt. Finally, you may also think that you will never be good enough, that your work is pointless, or that you lack the necessary imagination—despite having produced good creative work in the past and having received praise for it. Please note that if you are experiencing many of these signs, or even just one of these for a long time, it may be more serious than creative burnout. Many of these signs are also found in mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety disorders, and seasonal affective disorder, or could be caused by sleep problems. In doubt, it’s always worth talking to a professional. How to bounce back from creative burnout Creative burnout can make us feel powerless as if there was nothing to be done about it. But we have agency and can use simple strategies to break the cycle. Of course, simple does not mean easy, but removing unnecessary complexity from our approach makes it more likely for us to succeed. Get support. Because creative burnout impacts our work, our first instinct may be to hide our struggle from our colleagues. However, just grabbing someone and telling them: “I’ve been feeling burned out lately” can be immensely helpful. You will find that most people are more than happy to help, whether by giving you a hand with a project, brainstorming fresh ideas, or just lending an ear. Voicing your struggle is also a great first step in bouncing back from creative burnout. Take a break. Not just a short walk, which may be helpful for a creative block but probably not enough to help with creative burnout. Take a proper break—a few days off, with your out-of-office autoresponder on, where nobody will expect any work from you. The anxiety of knowing you are supposed to work but can’t bring yourself to is a vicious cycle. Taking a break is a way to escape that cycle so you can start afresh. Use the time to do things that have nothing to do with work without feeling any guilt: spend time with your loved ones, read books, take naps, cook, watch movies, go on a weekend holiday in the countryside, take care of your plants… Or just do nothing, that’s perfectly fine. Make space for self-reflection. Replace destructive existential angst with constructive self-reflection. It could take the form of journaling, discussing your struggle with a friend, reviewing your current environment and your schedule, running a motivation clinic, or even just talking to yourself out loud. Burnout can be hard to manage when we can’t define its exact source. Turn yourself into a self-experimenting scientist and try to uncover the roots of the problem. Look at your past work. Because creative burnout often comes with self-doubt, it’s easy to forget all our past accomplishments and focus on our present challenges instead. Go browse your past work, both the good and the bad. If it’s good, remember how it wasn’t easy to produce. If it’s bad, look at how much progress you have made. Channel the feelings you experience while reviewing your past work to overcome your self-doubt. Start with the basics. Choose the smallest atomic unit of creative work you can do to get you started again. Are you trying to write a book? Just write one paragraph. Trying to design a new website? Just work on one wireframe. Instead of looking at the mountain of work in front of you and feeling paralyzed, take your first baby step. Don’t forget to be kind to yourself. Creative burnout does not mean you don’t care about your work; it doesn’t mean you are lazy; it doesn’t mean you are not talented. Creative burnout can stem from perfectionism, external pressure, high expectations, or hypersensitivity. It’s a temporary state, not a permanent condition. Prevention is better than cure Creativity is fragile. It needs to be fed, but not too much, for consuming an excessive amount of information may destroy its delicate balance. It needs space to grow, but should not be forced, for mechanical work may lead to lifeless output. Despite all our care, sometimes, it seems to be gone: the creativity tap has run dry. We experience the dreaded creative burnout. While there are simple strategies to manage creative burnout, the best way to deal with it is to avoid burning out in the first place. Because of all the different causes of creative burnout, it may not always be possible, but creating a mental scaffolding to support your health and creativity can go a long way. Metacognition. Don’t wait until things are bad to start reflecting on how you feel, your progress, your goals, and your motivations. Metacognition means “thinking about thinking”—it’s being aware of your own awareness so you can determine the best strategies for learning and problem-solving, as well as when to apply them. It consists in planning, monitoring, and evaluating your creative work on an ongoing basis, so you can catch any early signs of creative burnout. Mindful productivity. Mindfulness and productivity may seem antithetic, but borrowing principles from mindfulness when you pursue creative work will help you build a sustainable work environment for yourself. Mindful productivity can be defined as being consciously present in the work you’re doing while you’re doing it. It’s not about meditation; it’s about calmly acknowledging and accepting your feelings and thoughts while engaged in work or creative activities. Habits, routines, rituals. Ensure you have the basics covered in terms of mental and physical health. Habits, routines, and rituals all have different levels of intentionality, and are all helpful to help you feel balanced and healt...

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Ben Wisbey is the co-founder of Pylot, the very first wearable to track your productivity, so you can know when you’re ready for deep work, shallow tasks, or need a break. In this interview, we talked about the fallacy of time management, how to quantify work quality, the key questions to achieve deep work, the science of cognitive performance, how to manage mental fatigue, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Ben, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Most people associate productivity with time management, but you think differently. Can you tell us more? This is a great question. The age-old quest to optimize our time and make the most of our day often leads us to neglect a crucial factor: not all hours are created equal. In fact, an hour of deep, focused work can yield far better results than multiple hours of grinding through tasks when we’re not at our best. After years of managing my time, I learnt that it was more important to manage my energy. If I could do my priority tasks when my mental energy was high, I was producing better work in less time.  As a performance scientist with a background in monitoring professional and Olympic athletes, I’ve always been passionate about helping people perform at their peak. This interest eventually merged with my obsession for productivity, and I embarked on an ambitious project to quantify energy management. What started as a few months of work quickly turned into a two-and-a-half-year research journey, during which the Pylot team and I monitored brain wave activity and physiological responses during work and other mentally challenging tasks like video gaming. Our research led us to quantify the mental aspects that impact performance. The most significant determinant of mental performance is flow. Flow, often referred to as “being in the zone,” is a state of relaxed concentration where you’re fully immersed in your work and not easily distracted. Scientifically speaking, this state is associated with specific brain wave frequencies. Another critical factor we identified was mental fatigue. When mental fatigue is high, it’s difficult to maintain a flow state, and achieving another quality work block within the same day becomes highly unlikely. While quantifying work quality is no easy task, our research demonstrated that serious gamers playing competitive online games had significantly higher win rates when they were in high flow states and managed to avoid fatigue. So, the next time you find yourself striving for maximum productivity, remember that managing your energy and tapping into your flow state may just be the key to unlocking your true potential. And this is what inspired you to build Pylot. After the acquisition of my previous business, I found myself working remotely for a large organization. My mornings were filled with back-to-back meetings, and when I finally sat down to tackle my “real work” in the afternoons, I hit a wall. I couldn’t seem to get into the groove, and I wondered if I was just being lazy or if my endless meetings had left me mentally drained. Even worse, I’d reach the end of each day feeling unsatisfied, questioning what I had truly accomplished. As a self-proclaimed productivity nerd, I decided to dive deep into the data I had been tracking for years on RescueTime. While apps like Rize and RescueTime are fantastic at providing insights into computer activity and behavior, they couldn’t quite answer why I struggled to engage in deep work. That’s when a few colleagues and I embarked on a mission to unravel this mystery by using sensors to measure what was actually going so, so we could answer three crucial questions: What time of day is best for my deep work? How long should these deep work sessions be? When do I need a break? How does it work under the hood? Pylot utilizes a lightweight and comfortable headband to gather EEG and HRV data. EEG tracks brain wave activity, while HRV measures variations in heart rate. By capturing this information, Pylot can assess mental fatigue and flow—two key elements of optimal cognitive performance. The collected data is then sent to the Pylot app, available on Mac and Windows devices, where it offers real-time feedback along with recommendations for engaging in deep work, tackling shallow tasks, or taking a break. As you continue to use the app, it learns about your unique patterns and can suggest the best times of day for your deep work sessions and their ideal duration. Although the concept may sound straightforward, developing the algorithms that power this process took us three years. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of heavy lifting happening on the data side to transform raw sensor information into valuable feedback. They say hardware is hard. Building the first wearable for productivity must have come with many challenges—what were some of the design challenges you had to resolve? Developing hardware is no easy feat, especially when it comes to creating devices that accurately collect scientific data. Fortunately, our founding team brought invaluable experience from working on various wearable devices. We knew that our product had to be comfortable, lightweight, visually appealing, energy-efficient, and provide accurate data—a challenging combination to achieve. As a pioneering wearable in its field, we faced our fair share of trial and error. Some of our early prototypes were uncomfortable to wear and not aesthetically pleasing. We also had to ensure compatibility with glasses and headsets. After exploring multiple form factors and sensor placements, we’ve arrived at a design that is even better than we had hoped. The end product is incredibly lightweight and flexible to the point you forget you’re wearing it. Moreover, it delivers high-quality data, boasts a ten-hour battery life, and maintains compatibility with glasses and headsets. We couldn’t be more thrilled with the final product and are eager to share it with the world. This is such a thoughtful approach to hardware design. So, what does the user experience look like? The terms “productivity wearable,” “EEG,” and “HRV” might seem complex and scientific, but we’ve made sure that our product is user-friendly and straightforward. All you need to do is turn the band on and wear it. The apps will automatically record your work session and offer live feedback. There is an overlay, or widget, on Windows/Mac so you can see live feedback without interrupting your work. The app then provides a summary of each work session, and each day, while also allowing you to see trends over time.  The experience of wearing the band is similar to using headphones. You might be aware of them for a few minutes after putting them on, but soon after, you’ll forget they’re even there. What kind of people do you think would most benefit from using Pylot? Pylot is designed for individuals seeking to maximize the quality of their workday. Rather than focusing on doing more work, it emphasizes doing one’s best work. To accomplish this, users need some control over their work schedules, allowing them to adapt their work hours based on what suits them best. This flexibility may apply to remote workers or those with adjustable schedules, making it particularly relevant for founders, developers, designers, writers, and many other knowledge workers. We’ve been testing Pylot with some of these users and encountered intriguing results. One memorable example involves a founder who used Pylot to adjust their daily routine based on the app’s recommendations. During an unusually busy week, they pushed through a demanding day despite experiencing mental fatigue on Thursday. Come Friday, and their mental fatigue was high all day, making it difficult to perform at their best. However, they adapted their work plan according to Pylot’s feedback and shifted to a day focused on administrative and procedural tasks. What about you, how do you use Pylot? I use Pylot daily, being a productivity enthusiast myself. I was already aware that I worked best in the mornings, but Pylot has helped me refine my schedule further by identifying my optimal time for deep work as 7am to midday, working in 90-120 minute blocks. However, with these early starts comes a decline in the afternoon. My flow diminishes significantly after 2pm, so I focus on shallow tasks and try to schedule meetings and emails during this period. Although this structure generally works well for me, not every day is identical. So, I monitor my fatigue levels to incorporate more breaks when necessary. We have already begun examining the influence of sleep and exercise on cognitive performance. In the future, you might see a feature where the app integrates with data from devices like Apple Watch. How do you recommend someone get started? Right from the start, Pylot offers instant feedback on your flow and fatigue levels. However, its accuracy improves over time as it learns what’s normal for you. We recommend using Pylot for two weeks to receive suggestions on your ideal deep work hours and session lengths. By continuing to wear Pylot, you can monitor how these factors change over time and receive live recommendations on when to switch to shallow work or take a break. Since no two days are the same, this real-time feedback proves invaluable in adjusting your work schedule to achieve the best outcomes. And finally… What’s next for Pylot? Our mission is to help people design their day for success. We aim to assist users in making the most of their time by engaging in the right tasks at the right moments. This approach not only leads to improved work outcomes but also ensures there’s time for other important activities in life. This principle applies not only to work but also to any activity where cognitive performance is crucial, including s...

Picture this: You’re at work with a big deadline coming up. Unfortunately, someone made a mistake, and part of the project needs to be completely redone in a rush. As the pressure mounts, you can feel the tension gripping your mind and body, causing your patience to wear thin. In those stressful situations, it’s not uncommon to experience automatic negative responses that arise from the complex interplay between our thoughts and emotions. We may find ourselves snapping at a colleague or retreating into quiet as we try to cope with the crushing weight of anxiety. So it’s not surprising that we tend to perceive stress as a negative phenomenon that should be minimized at all costs. In fact, a common misconception is that stress is inherently bad. But stress is just your body and your mind’s response to external challenges. Depending on the particular stressors and your reaction, stress can be detrimental (distress) or beneficial (eustress). The prefix -dis in “distress” has the same root as words like disconnect, dissatisfaction, and disingenuous. In contrast, “eustress” literally means “good stress.” It was coined by endocrinologist Hans Selye in 1975 to describe a positive cognitive response to stress. Distress versus eustress Distress can have a terrible impact on productivity, creativity, and mental health. On the other hand, eustress has been found to enhance performance and overall well-being, especially in the workplace. When you experience eustress, you’re pushed to do your best. In short, distress results in anxiety; eustress is exciting. Distress leads to procrastination, while eustress is a source of motivation. Overall, distress has a negative impact on performance. On the other hand, eustress acts as a performance enhancer. Here is an overview of the key differences between distress and eustress: Experiences that lead to eustress are usually perceived as challenging but still within our coping abilities, leading to heightened focus and motivation. That delicate balance is where lies the secret to eustress. A balancing game You need just the right amount of pressure to unlock the benefits of eustress. This is known as the Yerkes–Dodson law, originally developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908, which states that performance increases with mental or physiological arousal—but only up to a limit. But if you manage to strike that balance, eustress offers many benefits, especially for ambitious people who enjoy an interesting challenge. Some of the benefits of eustress include: Flow. Researchers described flow as the “ultimate eustress experience—the epitome of eustress.” When in flow, we are focused on the challenge and fully present. We become so fully absorbed in what we are doing, we lose track of time and can effortlessly ignore external distractions. Resilience. Because eustress is based on perception, cultivating eustress can help in reacting more positively to challenging situations, resulting in higher emotional agility. It can help us build better coping skills and boost confidence by reframing stressors as valuable learning opportunities. Self-efficacy. Your judgment of how you can carry out a required task or take on a specific role is a measure of your level of self-efficacy. Experiences of eustress allow you to accumulate evidence of your abilities and competence, and in turn, encourage you to explore more ambitious ideas. The good news is: Though not all stress can be reframed as a positive experience, you can proactively manage many external stressors, so they result in productive eustress instead of paralyzing distress. How to foster eustress As eustress is a positive reaction to stress based on perception rather than objective stressors, the potential sources of eustress vary greatly between people. These are examples of stressors that are commonly perceived as positive: Learning a new skill. Working hard to learn something new is, for many, a safe source of eustress, creating the right amount of challenge while staying in control of the learning experience. Starting a new job. Because it’s a combination of using existing skills and learning new ones, while quickly forming relationships in a new environment, starting a new job can be challenging in the best ways, resulting in eustress. Similarly, receiving a promotion or moving teams can create good stress. Going on a holiday. Traveling to a distant place with a different culture can create eustress by forcing us to leave our comfort zone. Although travel can bring about distress—canceled flights, stolen items—many people view it as a fulfilling challenge. Starting a family. Whether getting married or having a child, starting a family can be a source of eustress by offering a novel challenge and many opportunities for personal growth. Moving. Finally, moving houses implies leaving the comfort of a familiar place behind to start a new life. The process is a source of negative stress for many people but can lead to eustress because of its inherently adventurous nature. There are many other potential sources of eustress, such as playing competitive sports, some challenging video games, participating in a tournament, or having a complex but constructive debate with someone. In order to find your own sources of eustress, the key is to experiment with positive stressors and to practice metacognitive strategies to reflect on their impact on your stress levels. A simple method to keep track of your stressors—whether they result in distress or eustress—is the Plus Minus Next method. If you only remember one thing: Not all stress is bad and it can be a healthy source of motivation as long as you find your own positive stressors. The post The two sides of stress: distress and eustress appeared first on Ness Labs.

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we talk to founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Jim Kleban is the Head of AI at Supernormal, an AI-powered app that helps you create amazing meeting notes without lifting a finger, saving ten minutes every meeting. In this interview, we discussed the underpowered value of taking notes, the importance of building memory over the knowledge contained in meeting discussions, the critical relationship between note-taking and decision-making, how AI will shape the future of work, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Jim, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Most people know the value of taking meeting notes, and yet in most cases, notes are sent around and never used again. Why is that?  Thanks for having me! I’m excited to share what we’re building at Supernormal and how I think these tools are going to change how we work. Supernormal provides detailed meeting notes automatically that you can tailor to the type of meeting you’re having. This frees people from the mental effort of having to write out notes so we can be fully present in our meetings. Meetings are a critical part of how work gets done, but how the world approaches meetings hasn’t really evolved so much. Meetings are still conducted similarly to the pre-remote work era, and we may even have gotten sloppier. In many cases meetings don’t have an agenda, nobody takes notes, and action items are forgotten. The lack of rigor is making meetings less productive and workers are feeling it. A recent survey from Zippia found that organizations spend ~15% of their time on meetings, with surveys showing that 71% of those meetings are considered unproductive. When people do take notes for meetings, it is true that they are often sent and then effectively lost. I think this is due to a lack of structure for building an organizational memory for what has been discussed over time. How does Supernormal address those challenges?  The tools we’re building at Supernormal are aimed at making meetings a much more valuable use of time. We consider how we can help people before, during, and after their meetings. Ahead of time, we make it easy to add the Supernormal notetaker to meetings by syncing it with your calendar. It’s simple to turn the notetaker on or off for a meeting both beforehand or when a meeting is happening. During the meeting, Supernormal will automatically transcribe the conversation and create meeting notes. The product works today for Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams so it is flexible to cover meetings when you use a different remote meeting platform. The set of meeting notes people receive includes a short summary that we call “the gist”, a longer summary with all the details, and a list of action items. And for specific types of meetings like customer discovery calls, interviews, and business pitches, we provide custom notes that are tailored to what people most want to learn for that type of meeting. When the meeting ends, the transcript and notes can be automatically shared with meeting participants. They can also be viewed, edited, and shared from inside the Supernormal web app. Here is where Supernormal helps teams build memory over the knowledge contained in their meeting discussions. On Supernormal, we organize past meetings for easy reference and make it easy to find meetings by searching over transcripts and notes. We even help people make progress on the action items they’ve been assigned in their meetings. Can you give us an example of how that would work, let’s say with a customer discovery call?  Sure! Let’s say you’re a product manager and you’re trying to validate your product idea. To conduct a customer discovery call using Supernormal, you would first identify potential customers who fit your target market. You then send the usual meeting invite to have them participate in a call and include the Supernormal notetaker. On the call, you would ask the customers a series of questions that helps you better understand whether your product idea addresses their needs. With Supernormal in the meeting, you can stay fully focused on what the customer is telling you and not be distracted by the need to write notes. For this type of call, Supernormal will generate custom note sections based on who is speaking that summarize the customer’s needs and pain points. Afterward, anyone you share the meeting with can access the transcript and notes. You can highlight customer insights from this call to compare with other customer discovery calls, and you can easily share out the notes via email or message. People who weren’t present on the call can quickly learn by reading the notes and diving into the relevant parts of the transcript.  Overall, the Supernormal app helps you conduct customer discovery calls more efficiently and effectively by automatically providing real-time analysis and insights from the conversation, making notes easy to share, and centralizing notes in a single place. That sounds great. I guess a common problem with meeting notes is that we often just forget to take them.  Yes, and this is the first problem Supernormal is designed to solve. We automatically take detailed meeting notes for you so it’s no longer an annoying task or tradeoff.  I also want to mention that what sets Supernormal apart is that we have invested heavily in improving the Supernormal AI. The notes are designed to be accurate, concise, and not miss any of the important discussion points. And to improve on this we have built user feedback and quality controls. The AI learns to provide better notes for people the more they use our tool. Unlike other transcription tools, Supernormal accurately summarizes the meeting so you don’t have to comb through a transcript. The transcript and notes work for meetings in languages other than English, too. And in some ways, because the AI is a neutral observer, the notes generated may indicate or remind the participants of important points or tones that happened during the meeting that may have been missing in the notes otherwise. So, it’s practically impossible to forget about taking notes during meetings. What about sharing those meeting notes?  Sharing notes really is a key behavior. Notes can be much more than a record of what has been discussed, for instance, they are often a way teams formalize key decisions. Supernormal gives meeting participants the ability to take the output notes from the AI as a starting point and then refine them as they see fit, by editing them or applying custom templates to get notes for specific kinds of meetings. And I’ve mentioned we make it easy to automatically share with participants, copy the notes and send in an email, or just share a link to the meeting.  All of your meetings are securely stored and discoverable on Supernormal, so you never have to spend time searching docs or flipping through calendar invites to find them. Supernormal also integrates with Slack, Hubspot, and Pipedrive so you can save and share meeting notes in the tools you already use.  What kind of people use Supernormal to capture and share meeting notes?  The world has shifted to remote or hybrid work since the pandemic, and even though we started building Supernormal before COVID-19 the changes in how we work have opened up the possibilities for tools like ours. People also are excited about what is possible with AI and the ChatGPT explosion, and they want to find tools like Supernormal where the AI helps but does not replace the human in our work. This was also personally very important to me as I considered the type of AI product I want to be contributing to the world in my own work. So the people who use Supernormal are often remote work oriented. They feel they are gaining a superpower at work from the tool. Their teams often have important external meetings that not everyone attends so the notes and transcripts are critically valuable.  As an example, there’s a product manager from a startup in the Pacific Northwest. Her team is working on a years-long project with multiple customer discovery calls that she can’t always attend. But, she uses Supernormal to review each of those calls, and finds it helpful to get the insights from the notes and then is able to read the direct user quotes from the transcripts. For meetings within her team, she is using Supernormal as a way to make a record for the entire team to access. This streamlines team-wide communications so everyone always knows what’s going on and nothing happens behind closed doors.  What about you, how do you use Supernormal?  At Supernormal we’re pretty serious about meeting notes. I spent more than a decade of my career as a product manager and most of my workday has been in meetings. I always wanted a tool to help make the pain of follow-ups and sending notes less toilsome. As our company has been growing, you can also imagine the number of meetings I have now as Head of AI is increasing.  We dogfood our own product at Supernormal and typically use it to capture and share all our meetings. One of the features we really love is tracking the action items assigned to each of us as tasks. It even feels fun to check out the new tasks that have automatically appeared for us to do after a day of meetings. These are helpful reminders of the things we said we’d do in our meetings, and I’d imagine we’d forget at least some of them otherwise. The other key part of how we use Supernormal is that it frees people on the AI team from feeling like they have to attend every meeting that gets scheduled. Everyone has access to every meeting, so this means they won’t lose context when a meeting is something they skip attending. They can focus instead on completing their engineering work instead. This has greatly reduced meeting bloat and opened up work time for our AI team. How do you recommend someone get started?  Getting started is...

It seems obvious that the amount of time you spend on a task is a terrible indicator of how productive you are. And yet, a lot of our work culture is fixated on time. We often feel pressure to prove our productivity by working long hours or responding to emails outside of regular work hours. Using principles from hourly work to define productivity in knowledge work has resulted in inefficient and often unhappy work conditions for many teams. Faster individuals are frustrated, useless meetings are filling time, and instead of taking mindful breaks, people stay sitting at their desks at home or in the office even when there is no meaningful work to do. The pandemic has forced many companies to switch to remote work, and many of them intend to keep it this way in the future. As working remotely is becoming the norm for many knowledge workers, our practices need to change. We need to abandon time as a measure of productivity. The dangers of passive face time In a famous study conducted by researchers from the University of California and the University of North Carolina, 39 corporate managers were asked about their perception of their employees. During the interviews with those managers, the researchers explored two topics in particular: Expected face time. Being seen at work during normal business hours. Extracurricular face time. Being seen at work outside of normal business hours. These are two forms of passive face time—“passive” because there is no real work interaction; the manager simply observes the amount of time their employee spends at work. What the team member is actually doing and how well they are doing it does not matter. The researchers found that these two forms of passive face time resulted in better perceptions from corporate managers. People who would spend more time at their desks or work during the weekends were seen as more “committed”, “trustworthy”, “dependable”, “hard-working” and “dedicated”. Here are some quotes from the interviews so you can judge for yourself: “I know I can depend on someone that I see all the time at their desk.” “This one guy, he’s in the room at every meeting. Lots of times, he doesn’t say anything, but he’s there on time, and people notice that. He definitely is seen as a hardworking and dependable guy.” “Arriving early and staying late in the office makes a good impression. I think of those workers as more dedicated than most.” “Working on the weekends makes a very good impression. It sends a signal that you’re contributing to your team and that you’re putting in that extra commitment to get the work done.” “If I see you there all the time, okay, good. You’re hard-working, a hard-working, dependable individual.” “I would bump into my supervisor at 7 o’clock in the evening. She knows I’m there working. In those cases, I get extra points just for being there late. I’m seen as having an extra level of commitment.” These comments were not surprising in 2010 when the study was conducted. But peeking over the shoulder of an employee to check whether they are working, bumping into a supervisor at 7 pm to get extra points, being perceived as hard-working just by sitting in front of your desk — these do not make sense anymore, especially in a distributed company where it’s physically impossible, except with some regrettably popular tracking software. However, cultural remnants from the industrial age mean that to this day, many managers still rely on presence — whether online or in-person — to measure performance. This is despite the fact that time is a terrible incentive for productive work: On one hand, someone who manages to finish their work faster may get penalized compared to a slower employee who will be perceived as more zealous. On the other hand, some people keep busy in order to project an image of productivity. Beyond time measurement Instead of the hours of work, we should focus on the results. Instead of passive face time, we should strive for mindful productivity. Whether you are a manager, an employee, a freelancer, or an entrepreneur, these five strategies can be helpful to stop using time as a measure of productivity: Avoid unnecessary meetings. Always ask yourself: “What’s the goal of this meeting? Could the goal be achieved in a more efficient manner?” You will often realize that a meeting does not have a clear goal. Out of insecurity or habit, people organize meetings to show they are working publicly—that they are “dependable” and “dedicated”. If the meeting doesn’t have a clear goal, ask for clarification or ask to cancel it. If the meeting has a clear goal, consider whether sending a memo around or having everyone send a quick update over email may not be a way to avoid wasting time. Define purposeful goals. Human beings like to keep busy. When we don’t have clearly defined goals, it’s easy to fill our time with ill-fitted tasks to maintain the illusion of productivity. For short-term goals based on predictable outcomes, you can use the SMART goals framework. For long-term personal growth goals which are more flexible, use the PACT framework instead, which stands for Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable. Having clearly defined goals will ensure the focus is on achieving these goals rather than passive face time. Reduce repetitive tasks. We waste a lot of time repeating the same tasks at work, which can keep us unnecessarily busy and fill up our time without progressing toward our goals. Review such tasks and consider whether you can automate, simplify, or outsource some of them. For instance, tools like Zapier can help you build workflows and connect all your apps together. Or you could hire someone to take care of repetitive tasks on one of the many freelancing platforms out there. Focus on the 20%. The 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto Principle after economist Vilfredo Pareto, states that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. At work, 80% of your success will come from 20% of your efforts. Identify these key efforts, try to eliminate as much of the noise in the 80%, and focus on the 20% that really matters. Be protective of your time. While passive face time encourages people to participate in meetings and sit at their desks longer, mindful time blocking ensures you have time to focus on the 20% that matters and achieve your goals. Whether you share your calendar with a team or work independently, add blocks to your calendar for important tasks. Just make sure not to go overboard, as time blocking starts losing its meaning when everything is blocked in your calendar! And, most importantly: if you finish a task ahead of a deadline, give yourself a pat on the back and take a break! You deserved it. Sitting in front of a desk should never be seen as a sign of hard work and commitment. Focusing on results rather than hours has always made sense. In today’s distributed world, it has become inevitable. Hopefully, managers will embrace the change. The post Time is not a measure of productivity appeared first on Ness Labs.

We all have goals. They can be big or small; professional or personal. But obstacles get in the way. External obligations such as social events, unforeseen additional work, and demanding customers can drain our energy, so there’s little left to focus on what really matters to us. If only that was the only issue. To make things worse, we’re also constantly fighting an internal battle against our brain, which background mechanisms we’re unconscious of. You don’t feel anything every time a neuron fires, and you have little control over the activity inside your brain. But those processes have a huge impact on how you manage your goals and how it feels to work toward your goals. Understanding these mechanisms won’t magically allow you to achieve your goals, but it will help you be kinder to yourself when things don’t seem to go as planned, and you struggle to focus on your goals. Your three frenemies Three main neurochemicals have been identified in people experiencing a state of flow: dopamine, noradrenaline, and acetylcholine. As you’ll see, these are akin to little tricksters that can sometimes help you and other times work against you. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in the reward system. Releasing dopamine is one of the ways your brain has to make you feel good and encourage you to do more of whatever you’re doing. Research has found that behaviors such as sex, eating, and playing video games tend to increase dopamine levels in the central nervous system. When it comes to productivity, dopamine is a double-edged sword. It can increase or decrease your productivity depending on what exactly triggers the reward system. Let’s say you check how many words you wrote in the last hour, or finally get a new feature to work in your app. Boom, you get a hit of dopamine. But let’s say you get a notification on your phone and see someone liked your latest Tweet. Boom, you also get a hit of dopamine. In order to make the most of that nice feeling you’ll get from increased levels of dopamine, you need to ensure you trigger your reward system in a way that’s aligned with your goals. This means putting your phone away, focusing on the task at hand, and designing ways to reward yourself for a well-done job. We’ll look at practical strategies to achieve this later in this article, but first, let’s look at the two other neurochemicals involved in productivity and procrastination. The second neurochemical is noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine in the United States. It’s a neurotransmitter that makes you feel “ready for action” — it’s involved in the fight-or-flight response and makes you more alert and vigilant. Again, there is a tricky balance to find with noradrenaline. The right amount of pressure can be beneficial in order to increase your productivity — this is why many procrastinators report performing better when a deadline is approaching. But if you keep on waiting until the last minute to complete your tasks, the resulting chronic stress can be damaging. Finally, acetylcholine is the third neurochemical of productivity and procrastination. It was the first neurotransmitter ever discovered and is abundant in the nervous system. Besides being involved in the autonomic nervous system — all of the involuntary and unconscious activity in your body, such as heart rate, digestion, or respiration — it also plays an important role in focus, learning, and memory. Studies found that increased acetylcholine levels have a positive impact on performance. On the flip side, an acetylcholine deficiency often means that you’ll have trouble focusing your attention and remembering things, and damage to the cholinergic system — the system in the brain that produces acetylcholine — has been found to be associated with the memory deficits observed in Alzheimer’s disease. That’s a lot to remember, so how can you make the most of this knowledge in a practical way in order to achieve your goals without sacrificing your mental health? A practical neuroproductivity framework Dr. Friederike Fabritius created a handy framework to remember the three neurochemicals of productivity and procrastination based on the general areas of cognition they affect: fun, fear, and focus. Fun. That’s dopamine. As mentioned earlier, it’s a tricky one. It’s all about finding the right balance between having fun without getting distracted. The best strategy is to ensure there’s some reward in the process of working on your project. Sometimes, the reward is intrinsic: you genuinely enjoy what you’re working on. But sometimes, you need to work on something you don’t find as interesting. It’s a good idea in these cases to create extrinsic rewards you genuinely care about. For example, promise yourself to go see a movie you’re excited about after you’re done with the project. It also helps to design an environment that doesn’t include distracting rewards, for example, by leaving your phone in another room so you don’t see anytime someone likes your latest tweet. Fear. Living in constant fear is not good for you, but just the right amount of uncertainty will increase your levels of noradrenaline and, thus, your productivity. Instead of waiting until the last minute to start working on a project, create positive pressure by getting out of your comfort zone, for instance, by working on something new. Or, if you’re working on documentation or something tedious, tell the team that you will present your work to them at your next stand-up meeting. This will trick your mind into feeling just the right amount of positive pressure and help you avoid procrastination. Focus. Finally, make sure to give your brain everything it needs to increase your levels of acetylcholine and, thus, your focus. Some ways to increase your levels of acetylcholine include eating foods rich in choline — which is needed to synthesize acetylcholine — such as lean meats, fatty fish, milk, yogurt, kidney beans, green beans, peas, and broccoli. You can also gently exercise before working, such as going for a walk. But don’t overdo it: research suggests that lengthy exercise sessions, such as marathon training, reduce your acetylcholine levels. All combined together, fun, fear, and focus will help you get in the flow. And if you really can’t seem to be able to be productive, consider taking a break. Staying busy for the sake of staying busy can give you the illusion of productivity and lead to anxiety. Prolonged procrastination is not your enemy — it’s a signal sent by your brain that something is not quite working well. The post The neurochemicals of productivity and procrastination appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Dom Zijlstra is the founder of Traverse, the only tool with mind mapping, note-taking and spaced repetition flashcards in one place. Traverse uses science-based features to help you deeply grasp complex topics so you can remember them for life. In this interview, we discussed how cognitive science can help us learn better, the different types of effective mind maps for learning, using spaced repetition as a powerful learning technique, the best way to create, connect, and consolidate knowledge, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Dom, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Combining mind mapping, note-taking and spaced repetition flashcards in one place is an ambitious endeavor. What inspired you to start building Traverse? Thank you for this interview opportunity! I’m thrilled to share my story and the inspiration behind Traverse, a science-based learning tool that combines mind mapping, note-taking, and spaced repetition flashcards in one place. It all started around six years ago, when I faced a learning challenge bigger than I could handle. I always thought of myself as a pretty smart guy, having studied physics and worked as a spacecraft engineer. But when I met my Chinese wife and tried to learn Mandarin, I realized that my learning method wasn’t up to the test. At the time, I had just completed my studies in Germany, having learned German and Portuguese. I had traveled to Sweden on an exchange program and later moved to Brazil for a while. I had always been excited about new challenges and learning new things. But learning Mandarin turned out to be a whole new level of difficulty. I spent countless hours using different tools and ineffective methods to learn the language, wasting precious time and energy. At some point, I realized that if I wanted to succeed, I needed a method based on how humans actually learn. This led me to dive into learning science and put together the method that later became Traverse, a research-based learning tool that can help anyone master complex topics. Using Traverse myself, I was finally able to get fluent in Mandarin, live in China, and chat with my wife’s family and friends. The app has since helped tens of thousands of learners, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to build the best learning tool for complex topics together with our users. When I look back at my life, there’s a thread that connects my experiences and the inspiration that led to Traverse. As a child, I was fascinated by books, nature, games, movies, and programming. Throughout my life, I’ve enjoyed learning new things and adapting to new environments. Even before going to college myself, I taught college students math and engineering, and developed a programming course for them. I loved thinking about how to teach and help others learn. Today, as the founder of Traverse, I aim to be kind, helpful, knowledgeable, and inspiring. I want to be a go-to person for those who seek to learn and grow. The possibility of financial freedom and inspiring others to join me on this mission has been a driving force behind Traverse. My vision is to be at the forefront of a revolution in education, helping people from all over the world become “superlearners” and create deep connections with others that bring happiness and fulfillment. In conclusion, my journey in creating Traverse has been fueled by my own experiences, challenges, and the desire to help others learn and connect. The app’s foundation is built on cognitive science, my passion for learning, and the experiences I’ve gathered throughout my life. Traverse is not just an app, it’s a manifestation of my life’s mission to empower people to learn anything, anywhere, and share the joy of learning with others. How would you describe Traverse to someone who has never used it? Traverse can be described as a powerful fusion of Notion, Miro, and Anki, but with a focused approach on deep learning, understanding, and memory. It is not a to-do list tool like Notion, nor is it a personal knowledge management tool. Traverse is a learning tool, specifically designed to enhance your brain. It is especially useful for those determined to learn something defined. Traverse is an all-in-one app that combines the best features of mind mapping, note-taking, and spaced repetition flashcards, offering an integrated learning experience. Unlike other tools, it is not designed for merely gathering thoughts from books and articles. Traverse is built on a solid foundation of cognitive science and is tailored for those who are serious about learning and mastering complex topics. By integrating the best of flashcard apps like Anki, note-taking apps like Notion, and mind mapping apps like Miro, Traverse provides a comprehensive and efficient learning experience. It offers user-friendly spaced repetition flashcards, note-taking features, and a visually organized mind map that allows learners to express their thoughts and knowledge in a vibrant and colorful manner. Let’s start with mind mapping. How does it work in Traverse? Mind mapping is a visual learning technique that helps individuals organize and represent information in a structured and interconnected manner. Traverse is a mind mapping application that goes beyond the traditional tree-like structures offered by many other tools, providing a comprehensive set of features for deep learning of complex topics. Traverse employs a science-backed approach called GRINDE, which has been borrowed from Dr Justin Sung, and stands for Grouped, Reflective, Interconnected, Non-verbal, Directional, and Emphasized. This method guides users in creating effective mind maps for learning: Grouped: Traverse encourages users to organize information into several boxes, forming larger concepts that offer more flexibility, similar to tree branches that can be rearranged. Reflective: The app promotes a reflection of what’s going on inside the user’s mind, as opposed to linear note-taking, which doesn’t effectively represent one’s thought process. Interconnected: Traverse allows users to form a big picture by connecting related ideas and concepts. Non-verbal: The app encourages the use of arrows, sketches, and other visual elements instead of text-heavy notes, fostering creativity and reducing time spent on note-taking. Directional: Traverse helps users give order and flow to their mind maps, creating cause-and-effect relationships and a logical framework for deeper learning. Emphasized: The app supports the use of thicker lines and larger fonts for main points, reducing cognitive load and making it easier to identify important connections at a glance. Traverse features an infinite canvas where notes can be grouped, linked, and freely arranged. Users can create customized links and use freehand drawing to express ideas visually. The app avoids auto-linking to prevent messy and overwhelming mind maps, promoting deliberate connections instead. With Traverse, users can see the big picture, stay organized, dive deeper without losing context, and experience the joy of learning and discovery. The app incorporates key principles such as visual encoding, cognitive load optimization, spaced revisions, and spatial memory to enhance the learning process and promote long-term retention. Traverse also allows you to take notes. Why should users take their notes in Traverse? Traverse offers a unique and powerful approach to note-taking by integrating notes within visually organized mind maps. This combination effectively bridges the gap between traditional note-taking and mind mapping, allowing users to take advantage of the benefits of both techniques. Using Traverse for note-taking provides several advantages: Visual organization: Notes in Traverse live within a mind map, similar to sketchnoting, but with the ability to add more information, sources, and references. This visual organization makes it easier to understand and remember the relationships between various concepts. Markdown-based and powerful embeds: Like Notion, Traverse supports markdown formatting, which makes it easy to create well-structured and visually appealing notes. Additionally, it offers powerful embeds such as YouTube videos, LaTeX math equations, and code blocks with syntax highlighting, enriching the learning experience. Visual Zettelkasten: Traverse functions as a visual Zettelkasten, a note-taking system popularized by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. By incorporating bidirectional links and visually organizing notes, Traverse enables users to connect ideas, fostering a deeper understanding and generating new insights. All knowledge in one place: With Traverse, users can store all their notes and mind maps in a single, unified platform. This eliminates the need to switch between multiple applications and allows users to manage and consolidate their knowledge more efficiently. Bridging mind maps and retrieval practice: Traverse combines the power of mind maps with the benefits of retrieval practice, a proven learning technique that involves actively recalling information from memory. By integrating notes within mind maps, Traverse supports both the organization of knowledge and the active retrieval of information, leading to better comprehension and long-term retention. In summary, Traverse provides a versatile and effective note-taking solution by combining the best aspects of mind mapping and traditional note-taking. By using Traverse for note-taking, users can enjoy a visually organized learning experience, a powerful feature set, and the benefits of having all their knowledge in one place. Something exciting is that you can quickly create flashcards from any note. Can you tell us more about spaced-repetition in Traverse? Spaced repetition is an incredibly powerful learning technique when implemented correctly, and Trav...

It’s common to see progress as linear. When thinking about success, many people imagine a ladder or stairs going up. To progress, you need to climb each step one by one and get closer to the top. But that’s not the only model you can apply to visualize personal growth. Linear model: A then B then C then D. Circular model: A feeds B feeds C, which in turn feeds A. In a linear model of personal growth, you can only go up or down. By design, there are people below and above yourself. This model can be falsely reassuring, as it seems to offer a clear path to success. It’s used by many organisations as a way to manage their employees’ careers. In a circular model of growth, nobody is more advanced than anyone. There is no “up” or “down.” People are at a particular point of their own, unique growth loop. Everyone only competes against one’s self. The circular model can be more daunting, as there is no predefined direction — you need to design your own personal growth process — but it can also be infinitely more rewarding. Designing growth loops The circular model of personal growth is not too dissimilar from the concept of circular economy, where the goal is to make the most of resources and to create self-sustaining loops. It forces people to learn how to learn by designing feedback mechanisms that will allow them to continuously improve. Here is an example of the circular model of personal growth applied to learning: Learn something new Write about it and share it Connect with new people … and learn something new from them. As you can see, there is no clear “winning” end goal. When using the circular model of growth, you need to fall in love with the process. Success becomes a by-product of your learning journey, and it’s all about celebrating the small wins rather than chasing a big final victory. From single loops to double loops Growth loops are not intrinsically good if we keep approaching the same problem with no variation of method and without ever questioning the overarching goal. This is called “single loop learning.” A better approach is “double loop learning”, which is easily understood using the thermostat analogy from Teaching Smart People How To Learn: “A thermostat that automatically turns on the heat whenever the temperature in a room drops below 68°F is a good example of single-loop learning. A thermostat that could ask, “why am I set to 68°F?” and then explore whether or not some other temperature might more economically achieve the goal of heating the room would be engaged in double-loop learning.” Chris Argyris, Business Theorist and Professor at Harvard Business School. Unlike single loop learning which is simple and static, double-loop learning is more complex and dynamic, taking into account external factors and the changes in your environment, and adjusting the mental models on which a decision depends. Double loop learning is a model that encourages people and organisations to continuously challenge their assumptions and goals instead of blindly repeating the same loop. While the idea seems simple, it can be hard to implement double loop learning because of a natural need for control, a fear of failure, or an overall resistance to change. Mental models are hard to change, which is why double loop learning is more challenging to implement at first, but also more rewarding. If you’re struggling to get out of linear learning or single loop learning, try to understand the true nature of your resistance and to implement double loop learning in a small area of your life where you already feel quite comfortable. The post Growth Loops: From linear growth to circular growth appeared first on Ness Labs.

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a journey to help us think better and work smarter.  Josh Nicholson is the co-founder of Scite, an award-winning platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles. Scite allows users to see how a publication has been cited by providing the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim. In this interview, we talked about the nature of research, the research lifecycle, the problem of trustworthiness and reproducibility in science, how to navigate retractions, the importance of discoverability, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Josh, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Let’s start with a big question. What makes scientific research so challenging to work with in the first place? Thanks for letting me chime in! Scientific research is complex by nature. When I describe my work on aneuploidy and chromosome mis-segregation, almost immediately 99% of the population tunes out or can no longer understand me. The terms used in scientific research are often specialized and while necessary to communicate accurately, can leave a lot of people lost. With that said, scientific research is amazing and affects everyone in some way. There is research on how video games affect spatial reasoning, how Peppa Pig influences children learning English, and how SPG20 on chromosome 13 affects cytokinesis. Research touches all of our lives, mostly in a positive way. I got into cancer research to try to understand the etiology of cancer better so that we as a research community improve the outcomes of cancer patients. My work now focuses on making all of research more understandable, accessible, and trustworthy so that people, whether they are a researcher or not, use research to make better decisions in their life and work.  Peppa Pig and chromosomes — you got a point. It’s an age-old problem. So, why do you think now is the right time to tackle that challenge? With COVID-19 upending the world, we all fully understand how scientific research can impact our lives. Now with the rise of ChatGPT and other large language models, we all fully understand the need to be able to verify information online. Is that COVID-19 study trustworthy? Is that ChatGPT output factual? Scite addresses these problems head on through the development of Smart Citations — citations that make it easy to see how any research paper has been cited, how any topic has been cited, and basically how anything is cited!  While Scite was born out of the frustration of researchers trying to determine if a study was reproducible or not, the use cases have been more than we could have imagined. One of the more exciting applications of our Smart Citations is validating the output that ChatGPT and other AI based tools are generating. The timing of what we’re building couldn’t be better. People have been trying to build something like Scite since the 1960s, but failed because the technology just wasn’t there yet. And given the rise of ChatGPT as well as the general explosion in research volume in recent years, there’s a compelling need for more streamlined, efficient solutions to engage with the scholarly literature. Agreed, the time is now. Next, can you explain how Scite actually works? In one sense, you can think of Scite as like Rotten Tomatoes for research: take a paper, topic, author, etc. and easily read what research says about any of them. Could those findings be replicated by others? Did someone discuss this piece of research in the Introduction section to give background to their own work, did they mention it in the Methods section because they used similar methods, or did they cite it in the Results section to compare their findings? Without Scite, all this information is really hard to get because it requires you to read through hundreds, if not thousands of papers. With Scite, you can easily see at a glance what the research says about any topic. We accomplished this by partnering with most major academic publishers, who give us access to the full-text of research articles. Our system, which we’ve published the details of, is able to extract, link, and classify the citation statements–textual context that happens when citations are made in text– from articles and make that information available to our users. Of course, as we’ve developed the product, we’ve discovered other ways to leverage our unique data of Citation Statements to fulfill other needs — from our unique Citation Statement search experience to verifying claims made by ChatGPT. Scite also allows users to look up any research topic directly. Can you tell us more? One of the pivotal moments in our product journey was the realization that our database of Citation Statements could be searched directly. Typically, when we index those statements, we take the sentence where the reference was made and also include the sentences before and after. The resulting statement is long enough that it offers a good contextual overview. So, we designed a search experience around it. It started by letting anyone query keywords against our database of statements. As a personal example, I live in Brooklyn and often think about the rising rents in New York. Well, it turns out you can query “Rising rents in Williamsburg” in Scite and we have a few Citation Statements that cover that exact topic! One of our colleagues is a physician and travels for Doctors Without Borders. Part of his fieldwork involved the Rohingya people in Myanmar and he was curious what the rate of hypertension was in that demographic. It turns out Scite had answers. There are a few things worth pointing out here. First, we’re not restricted to life sciences but have good coverage across fields including the social sciences. While the statements and sections are useful when deciding what papers to read, we enable you to chain ideas at the level of claims instead of papers. Each citation statement from a paper makes one or more claims and has a number of other in-text references that we link by DOI. So when you’re reading a statement, you’ll see that the original authors cited e.g. 6 papers in-text which are likely related to the claims made in that statement. You can click on each of those in-text references to see more information about those papers and quickly trace ideas. Chaining ideas like this creates a natural filter for relevance in the papers you read because they’re about the specific claims you’re interested in. In addition to listening to users and developing a tool that helps meet their needs, we are also very focused on meeting our users where they are. We know how fragmented the ecosystem can be, so we have a free browser extension and Zotero plugin that researchers can add that shows our badge wherever they read and manage research. They can always click through to dig into it through Scite, but it’s often a nice integrity check that offers a little more information than a simple citation count. What about evaluating that research? It can be incredibly time consuming to compare and contrast the literature. Yeah, so properly evaluating research is time-consuming; you have to get the queries right to make sure you’re filtering for a relevant list of papers, then go through citation lists, abstracts, and even the full-texts (ideally) and track which ones are relevant and reliable for your review. Sometimes you have access to proxies of quality like citation counts, social media mentions, and so on, but they’re not always the best measure of the most fundamental thing we’re worried about when reading a set of papers: how reliable are these claims, and can I base my ideas on them? And thinking of all the tabs and notes involved is nightmarish! Scite is designed to streamline these tasks. I mentioned earlier that you could chain citations at the level of claims, and I think regardless of whether you start on our search or on a report page, this is a really special way of finding papers that are worth evaluating. Even better is the fact that this workflow places more of an emphasis on the actual claims rather than things like citation counts, which improves the discoverability of lesser known authors or publications,gives you confidence that you’re actually being thorough, and offers a voice to more underrepresented groups in the field. It doesn’t stop there, though. Often we do a literature review project and have to come back to update that information. Maybe in a few months or years. In that time, more research has undoubtedly been published and we’ve been juggling a bunch of other projects. Scite can reduce the cost of this context-switching through features like Custom Dashboards and Alerts. A very typical use case is for researchers to sync their Zotero library into Scite — essentially the list of relevant DOIs, and set an alert to be notified when new citation statements are published about any of them. This makes new qualitative information — the statements — come directly into your inbox, so you can search for them or be notified when something relevant is published. This is pretty commonly used for pharmacovigilance monitoring in pharmaceutical companies, or even individuals looking to be notified about new therapies or advances in a field that’s personal to them (think diabetes management). A big challenge in research is how difficult it is to track retracted papers. How does Scite address this challenge? Scite’s mission is to improve how researchers evaluate the reliability of research — whether it’s a reference in their manuscript or a paper or topic they come across. Besides reading any contrasting statements we’ve indexed about a paper, another quick check is to ensure it hasn’t received any retractions or other concerning editorial notices. We have our own system for detecting these notices and s...

Most people want to be happy. In other words, the majority of human beings are engaged — consciously or unconsciously — in actions designed to improve their levels of happiness. Despite our best efforts, these actions can sometimes have the opposite effect. For example, chasing a promotion at work only to realize we have become burned out in the process. Other times, our actions can make us happy in the short term but unhappy in the long term. For example, earning a large sum of money only to realize later we have over-indexed on financial success at the expanse of our relationships. These complexities are partly why there are many definitions of happiness, and the concept has changed so much over the centuries. Happiness can in fact be described as very different things depending on the time scale you consider: Short-term: your current feelings and emotions, such as pleasure, joy, or sadness. This is what you experience here and now. Medium-term: your subjective life satisfaction. In a study about how happiness differs across cultures, it was described as the “overall appreciation of one’s life as-a-whole.” Long-term: your conscious approach to thriving as a human being. Aristotle called it a life of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason.” The first two are probably very familiar to you, so it’s the third vision of happiness — the long-term one — that we will explore in this article. Aristotle coined it eudaimonia in Greek, which is sometimes translated as “human flourishing”. Aristotle’s philosophy was that, because reason (logos in Greek) is unique to human beings, the ideal goal of human life is the fullest exercise of one’s reason. According to Aristotle, it’s not enough to be skilled or talented in order to live a good life. To achieve happiness, we must be engaged in activities that are intellectually stimulating and that drive us to excellence. But Aristotle did not dismiss other important dimensions in one’s life, such as friends, wealth, and power. In fact, he doubted that we could achieve eudaimonia if we were completely missing one of these crucial aspects. For example, he found it hard to imagine a happy life if you were missing “good birth, good children, and beauty.” In more modern terms, it’s hard to conceive being happy if you’re without money and without friends. And this is exactly one of the most known theories of happiness in psychology, the pyramid of Maslow, is all about. It’s an elegant theory, but Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has been heavily contested. While research does seem to validate the existence of universal human needs, their ranking seems to wildly vary from one culture to another, and even from one individual to another. So what are some alternative theories of happiness that better capture the diversity and complexity of the human psyche? Theories of happiness in psychology Measuring happiness is hard. First, is happiness objective or subjective? Is it about how you feel right now, or in general? Is it rational, or emotional? Psychologists are still debating these questions. To highlight how important this field of research is, there is even a dedicated Journal of Happiness Studies. But there are three main theories towards which many researchers are gravitating: Freedom of Choice Theory: according to research by Ronald Inglehart, a professor and scientist, the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on people’s happiness. When their basic needs are met, their degree of happiness depends on how much free choice people have in how they live their lives. Self-Determination Theory: evidence suggests that the ability to make choices without external influence and interference is also an important factor to live a happy life. Intrinsic motivation and the willingness to grow — basically being self-motivated — can determine how happy you are. Positive Psychology Theory: finally, positive psychology considers that instead of trying to fix things when they get broken, we should spend more time improving our mental wellbeing in a more positive and proactive way. This theory is backed by solid research showing the beneficial impact of self-help interventions. I’ll talk a bit more about it later in this article. While these theories offer solid guiding principles, it’s also worth noting that seeking happiness at all cost can also have adverse effects. For example, scientists found that failure to meet overly high expectations can leave you depressed. And research shows that happiness is way less valued in Eastern cultures than Western ones. For example, harmony is ranked higher in many non-Western cultures when it comes to the most important goals to pursue in life. It makes it worth asking ourselves: shouldn’t we accept and fully experience all of the range of our emotions, both positive and negative? Could we seek happiness in a more balanced way? A balanced approach to happiness Sometimes, life objectively sucks. And sometimes, things are fine, but for some reason we still don’t feel quite happy. This is why there’s more to happiness than comfort and managing our levels of happiness is an art in itself. I’m saying “art” and not “science”, because neuroscience has not made a lot of progress so far when it comes to understanding the biology of happiness. This great paper was published a few years ago and gives an overview of the current state of affairs when it comes to the neuroscience of happiness. In short, we have made lots of discoveries around the hedonic aspects of happiness—what brings us pleasure. We know what parts of the brain get activated when we feel pleasure, but the research trying to understand what happens in our brain when we’re happy and why is still highly speculative. So, for now, it’s psychologists that are leading the dance. Dr Carol Diane Ryff, an American academic and psychologist, has been studying psychological well-being and psychological resilience for decades. Based on her research, she created the Six-factor Model of Psychological Well-being, a theory that outlines the key factors to our happiness. Self-acceptance: this is about acknowledging and accepting all aspects of yourself, the good and the bad. It’s being aware of your strengths and weaknesses, and trying to be realistic in the way you assess your own skills and talents. It’s the daily work of loving yourself despite your mistakes and imperfections. Autonomy: being independent in the way you think, and having confidence in your opinions despite social pressures. It indicates that you are able to make your own choices. Environmental mastery: this means you are feeling in charge. You are able to use opportunities as they arise to address your personal needs. You can manage external factors and activities in your day-to-day life. It comes with a feeling of being in control of the situation in which you live. Personal growth: this is the conscious effort to continue to improve yourself through new experiences and constantly trying to become a better version of yourself. Positive relations with others: Friends, family, colleagues—in order to be happy, it’s important to have meaningful relationships with others that include reciprocal empathy, affection, and various levels of intimacy. Purpose in life: finally, and this one is a grander factor, finding meaning is about pursuing goals you deeply care about, and creating significance and value in your life. For some people, this is achieved through religion, but you can find your purpose in life through meaningful work, philosophy, or even human connections. This model was developed into a psychological well-being questionnaire used to measure how happy people are by asking them to rate statements on a scale from 1 to 6. For example, “I think it is important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself and the world” for personal growth, or “I like most aspects of my personality” for self-acceptance. If you would like to take the test, I have uploaded a PDF of the questions and scoring instructions here. This is all well and good if all you want to measure your happiness, but what about improving it — being happier? Can it been learned? Teaching and learning happiness Twenty years ago, Dr Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, decided to try to answer this question: can happiness be taught? In an essay which I strongly recommend reading, he explains how the field of psychology mostly focuses on treating conditions such as depression. How would one go about helping people nurture their positive emotions instead? He started running a seminar, where he would review the scientific research in positive psychology, and also give students a bit of homework that was quite different from what they were used to. “When one teaches a traditional seminar on helplessness or depression there is no experiential homework to assign; students can’t very well be told to be depressed or alcoholic for a week. But in Positive Psychology, students can be assigned to make a gratitude visit, or to transform a boring task by using a signature strength, or to give the gift of time to someone they care for.” Dr Martin Seligman, Psychologist & Author. His conclusion was that, while happiness itself cannot be taught, we can master the skills that make us happier. In his seminar, he teaches the skill of disputing unrealistic catastrophic thoughts, the skill of savoring and taking mental photographs, the skill of contemplation, the skill of getting in the flow, or the skill of figuring out your key strengths. “Gratitude is a skill, too little practiced, that amplifies satisfaction about the past,” he says. He gives students exercises to teach them how to connect to things larger than their own successes and failures. The students learn to mentor younger students. They read Man’s Search for Meaning. He also notes that school curriculums are not currently designed ...

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Chad Thiele is the founder of Chibi AI, a creative and versatile AI writing tool for bloggers, marketers, and storytellers. Chibi AI seamlessly weaves in prompts and automatically analyzes your text to offer suggestions to improve, including fact checking, so you can focus on crafting great content. In this interview, we talked about the role of AI as a creative copilot, how prompts can help elevate content, using AI to overcome writer’s block, transforming the task of editing into a breeze, the future of AI writing assistance, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Chad, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. There’s lots of conversations going about how AI will replace writers. What do you think? Can I say first, thank you so much for this opportunity. I’m a big fan of Ness Labs and the work you do. That’s an important question, and I understand the concerns surrounding AI’s impact on the writing profession. However, I firmly believe that AI will not replace writers but augment their abilities and enhance their creative process. AI is not here to replace writers, but to be their copilot towards greater heights of creativity.I envision a future where AI works in tandem with writers, acting as a copilot in their creative journey. Rather than taking over the writing process, AI is a valuable tool that supports and empowers writers, helping them overcome common challenges, such as writer’s block or time-consuming editing tasks. I understand the concern though. It’s a valid worry, especially with companies out there willing to create AI tools promising to deliver entire works “in a click.” This will lead to an overcompensation in the market where low-cost content will be relegated to AI (or to a VA using AI to generate lots of mediocre content). But as this sort of content starts to fail, the need for great writers will surface. However, it’ll be a symbiotic relationship where writers bring their unique voice, perspective, and creativity to the work (some might say nuance), while AI tools like Chibi provide valuable support, guidance, and inspiration to empower the writer. With AI’s help, writers can quickly generate a first draft. You could think of this quick draft like a sculptor’s block of clay, waiting to be shaped and molded by the writer’s chisel. But just as a sculptor’s true artistry comes from the intricate details and unique flourishes they add to their work, so too does a writer’s imagination and creativity. It is the writer who brings the work to life with their unique voice and perspective. Together, they create something truly remarkable. So you’ve designed Chibi to be that perfect creative copilot. Indeed, I’ve designed Chibi to be the perfect creative copilot for writers. I aimed to create an AI-powered writing app that actually complements the writer. Writer’s block is obviously a thing of the past. Chibi has decimated that (as most decent AI writers have). But there’s a lot more to the writing process. Ideation, brainstorming, editing, reviewing, summarizing… all things Chibi helps with. I’m sure most are familiar with ChatGPT by now. The difficulty of writing with ChatGPT is that it is a dialogue; a chat bot. You get the content then you must copy it out piece by piece. And it can be a challenge to get the best results from a chat dialogue. Everyone is talking about finding the best prompts to use in ChatGPT. Prompting is exceptional in Chibi. Writer’s can use prompts anywhere within their document. Need to insert content after a certain paragraph? Easy. Not quite happy with how a particular sentence is worded? Rework it inline. Chibi is designed with the classic writer’s experience in mind, offering a suite of tools and features that support  various aspects of the writing process—all in a familiar document format. It can adapt to the writer’s style and preferences, ensuring the generated suggestions and assistance align with their creative vision. Ultimately, my goal with Chibi is to help writers create content they can be proud to publish and share with their readers. At the end of the day it is the writer who knows their audience. Chibi is just there to help the writer make their impact. That does sound like the perfect copilot for writers. Specifically, how does Chibi work? I couldn’t continue with features without first stating the intuitive, clean interface is a key feature itself. The focus on simplicity and ease of use, allowing writers to concentrate on their writing without being distracted by the tool… it cannot be understated how powerful that is. The real star is the ChibiNLP engine. We combine large language models like GPT-4, AI21’s Jurassic 2, and others with our custom-built natural language processing engine. This fusion overcomes the limitations of individual models and provides writers with an enhanced copilot for their creative process. And this all works in the background while the writer writes. Then our unique memory feature is a special area for writers to enter information they want Chibi to remember. This helps keep Chibi’s output consistent and relevant to the story, making writing easier and faster. Smart menus offer just the right tools at the right time. No need to overwhelm writers with a ton of options if they’re not necessary. For example, when you select a passage of text you’ll see a menu where you can review or summarize it. Or you can choose the powerful rework tool. This tool is literally magic. You can tell Chibi to do whatever you want to the selected passage. Such as ‘rewrite in the first person’, ‘exchange ramen for sushi’, ‘introduce a huge but lovable grizzly bear to the story’. Check this out. Here’s a passage from one of my articles about sushi in Tokyo: “Sushi Iwa, located in the heart of Ginza, is a must-visit for any budget-conscious traveler looking for an authentic sushi experience. This hidden gem is known for its traditional Edomae-style sushi, made with fresh fish caught in Tokyo Bay. The chef, Hisayoshi Iwa, has over 20 years of experience and takes great pride in his craft. The menu changes daily based on what is available at the market, ensuring that each visit is a unique experience. Despite its high quality, Sushi Iwa offers affordable prices.” After I select it, choose rework, and tell Chibi: “Do something completely random. Be creative” this is what he changed it to: “Sushi Iwa, located on the moon, is a must-visit for any space-conscious traveler looking for an authentic sushi experience. This hidden crater is known for its traditional Lunar-style sushi, made with fresh fish caught in the Sea of Tranquility. The chef, Hisayoshi Iwa, has over 20 years of experience and takes great pride in his craft. The menu changes daily based on what is available from the intergalactic market, ensuring that each visit is a unique experience. Despite its high quality and astronomical location, Sushi Iwa offers affordable prices that are out of this world.” The editing possibilities are endless; limited only by the writer’s imagination. And you can do this completely in the flow of working on your document—no chat dialogue format to deal with. Honestly, there’s so much Chibi has to offer I really can’t go into it all in detail. Here are a few… Custom templates allow you to train Chibi to write precisely the content you need. Variables save time when you find yourself writing the same things over and over. Leads can speed up your writing. Kickstarters help you get your content started quickly. Summarize can summarize tens of thousands of words in one shot. Chibi also offers completely customizable canvas you can set up how you prefer to write, and more. What makes Chibi different from other writing tools? Ah, with so many AI apps popping up all over, this is an excellent question. Chibi AI stands out from the crowd in several ways—as you saw in the previous section. But I absolutely must start with the Community! Without a doubt it’s the Chibi community that sets Chibi AI apart. Is it weird that I immediately refer to the community rather than some tech within Chibi AI? Our community is a dedicated space full of like-minded writers—away from social media like FB groups; away from “prying eyes.” We run monthly challenges, share helpful guides, support our users, and just have a blast. We like to think of it as our little neighborhood where we all help each other succeed. Okay, back to technical ways Chibi is different. Our custom NLP engine and its ability to enhance large language models gives Chibi the ability to “see” your entire document, whereas other AI writing tools have what is often called a “look back” limit.  Another major feature that sets us apart are our artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) models. These are models custom built/trained purely to do one thing exceptionally well. These are different from the fine-tuning you might have heard of. Our ANI models are not just fine-tuned large language models like those from OpenAI. The huge benefit of doing this is we get to set our own quality and performance standards to meet. The result for writers is seamless. We sprinkle our ANI models all through the writing experience in the background to enhance the writing experience in many subtle ways. The big players are entering the market. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Canva, and others. We set ourselves apart by focusing on our writers. These companies have such a large and diverse user base they’ll remain rather generic. Whereas we’re able to continually fine-tune the writing experience specifically for our community of users and offer the absolute best results for them. I guess when you combine the Chibi community with the ChibiNLP engine, ANI models—all wrapped up in a beautiful writing experience… That’s what truly sets Chi...

Since we are born, a set of defaults influences our goals, our relationships, our tastes. From fashion to friendship, many of the choices we make in life are imperceptibly constrained by default definitions. For example, the default definition of education is formal schooling. The default definition of love is monogamy. The default definition of success is wealth and power. The default definition of aging is decline. Those default definitions are the invisible puppeteers quietly manipulating our actions and directing our lives. Fortunately, even though those are the most commonly accepted definitions, we don’t have to stick to them. We can create our own definitions. Questioning our default definitions To prosper in the vast liminal space that is life is to create our own definitions of what is good, not based on top-down rules dictated by society, not based on biased moral imperatives, not based on the rigid path to success we have been told to follow, not based on the expectations of our peers — but based on our intimate experience of the world. To do so, we need to turn our default definitions into deliberate questions. Instead of simply accepting the defaults that govern our lives, we can ask ourselves what we truly want and what we truly believe so we can discover our authentic ambitions. We need to turn our default definitions into deliberate questions. Here are some examples: Default Definitions Deliberate Questions • Education is formal schooling. • Success is wealth and power. • Love is monogamy. → What do I want to learn? What do I want to teach my children? → What brings me joy in life? → What values are important to me in a romantic relationship? To do this exercise, grab a piece of paper or open your note-taking app, and go through the following steps: Audit your default definitions. What are the default definitions in my life? What are ideas that I treat as facts, without ever questioning them?  Turn them into deliberate questions. Take each default definition, and rephrase it into a question. The focus of these questions should be what is truly meaningful to you. Answer each question. Write down your truthful answers. Be honest when you don’t know the answer: it’s okay to admit that you haven’t all figured it out yet. Of course, it may be that the answers to these deliberate questions resemble the ones found in default definition. For example, faithfulness may be an important value to you in romantic relationships, or you may believe that formal schooling is the best way to study what you want to learn. I personally went back to university to study how the brain works because I believed that working alongside neuroscientists would help me learn better and faster. The aim of deliberate questions is not to turn your life upside down. It’s to have a more mindful approach to your goals in life. A bottom-up approach to life Default definitions are not inherently bad — you just want to get rid of their “default” aspect and make your answers deliberate instead. It may be that you decide to pursue what is considered a conventional career path because stability is important to you — maybe you have other projects with higher levels of uncertainty, or maybe you need to take care of a loved one. It may be that you do want to buy a house, not because it is a commonly accepted marker of success, but because you are genuinely excited to build a home for yourself and your family. It may be that building wealth is indeed a fundamental factor in your definition of success. Think about the founder of Patagonia, who gave the business away to an environmental trust and non-profit. Patagonia continues to produce outdoor clothing and camping supplies, but now all profits will go to organizations to fight the climate crisis. This would have not been possible if the business wasn’t successful in the first place. Equally, you may discover that you don’t want to stay in the same city where you grew up, and that you would like to explore the world for a while. You may realize that the career you have been pursuing is not the one that truly excites you. Asking these deliberate questions may open the door to new ideas and directions for your life. Whatever the answers you find, what matters is that these are now bottom-up definitions you have deliberately crafted for yourself. As Terry Pratchett said: “World building from the bottom up, to use a happy phrase, is more fruitful than world building from top-down.” Because the world is changing and so are we, we can play with the rules and decide what really matters to us. The post From Default Definitions to Deliberate Questions appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our interview stories, where we talk to founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Kim Dan-Yutin is the founder of BOOX, a suite of products designed to simplify e-reading and facilitate digital workflows through user-friendly e-readers. In this interview, we talked about integrating your note-taking workflow with your tablet, the importance of using eye-friendly devices, how to boost productivity by using split-screen displays, how tech companies can collaborate together to meet the needs of specific user groups, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Kim, thanks for agreeing to this interview! E-readers are notoriously hard to get right. What inspired you to create BOOX? Our story began in 2008, at a time when smartphones and tablets had hardly emerged, and people had to gain knowledge with few resources and limited digital tools. It’s in that context that BOOX was founded by a group of ambitious young geeks, driven by a deep desire to simplify and digitize the reading process. We started with a question: “How can we help people study and work productively without experiencing eye strain?” Our goal was to invent reading tools that could alleviate these challenges. After much hard work, we achieved our first major milestone: the creation of our first e-reader. This accomplishment remains one of our proudest moments to this day. Building helpful hardware is known to be a difficult challenge, so you should definitely be proud! What are the advantages of using BOOX for consuming content? E-readers have become popular due to their eye-friendly screens and paper-like feel, making them ideal for reading and note-taking. With BOOX, you can enjoy the benefits of an electronic paper display to read or write while using your favorite apps without straining your eyes. This means you can implement similar workflows as you would with other tablets — like highlights and annotations — but with the added advantage of a more comfortable viewing experience. Additionally, most BOOX E Ink tablets come with dual tone front lights, making them easier to use in low light conditions without causing eye fatigue, which is a common issue with backlit OLED/LCD displays. In addition to native highlights and annotations, many people rely on note-taking apps to capture and process information. How does BOOX integrate with their existing note-taking workflows? BOOX strives to provide our users with a variety of note-taking capabilities. With the built-in NeoReader, you can scribble directly on ebooks without any extra effort, and highlight, underline, or annotate the sentences that interest you. Our Notes app is an independent notepad with versatile tools to let you freely jot down your ideas. If you’re accustomed to popular note-taking platforms like Evernote and OneNote, we’ve implemented handwriting optimization to ensure a lag-free experience. We also have people using other apps like Obsidian. Another innovation we have made is the split-screen function, allowing you to read and take notes simultaneously with two separate windows side by side, providing a seamless and efficient note-taking experience. Just to dig a little bit deeper… Many e-readers only work well with specific proprietary formats. Can you tell us what kind of documents people can read with BOOX? BOOX devices has a native support of 24 document formats, which include nearly all popular ebooks (PDF, DJVU, CBR, CBZ, EPUB, MOBI, TXT, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX…), images (PNG, JPG, BMP, TIFF), and audios (WAV, MP3). Of course, you are always welcome to download any third-party apps to gain compatibility of more documents. What’s more, we have several preset navigation modes to optimize large-format PDF files so that users can conveniently view them in small-screen devices. That sounds great. What kind of people use BOOX devices? BOOX devices are the perfect companions for productivity enthusiasts, as we’ve heard from users worldwide. From university students and professors to musicians and researchers, our devices have helped many different people achieve their goals. One such story that particularly impressed me was that of Javier Del Águila, a Spanish epidemiologist working with the World Health Organization. He shared his workflow with the BOOX Note Air2 Plus and his achievement in studying the Omicron variant of COVID-19. We’re proud to have played a role in his research on the pandemic and improved his work process. It’s stories like these that motivate us to continue creating innovative and effective devices. This is an incredible story. Another exciting one is your collaboration with Connected Papers. Can you tell us more? The collaboration between BOOX and Connected Papers is a great example of how technology companies can work together to enhance the user experience and meet the needs of specific user groups. We have 10.3″ A5 and 13.3″ A4 sized models which are excellent for reading papers in PDF and other formats. With BOOX’s optimized reading and note-taking capabilities and Connected Papers’ advanced visual tool, we aim to simplify and streamline the workflow for academic users. We are proud of this partnership and look forward to exploring further opportunities to support the community. What about you, how do you use BOOX? In my daily routine, I rely on three BOOX devices: the Leaf2, Note Air2 Plus, and Tab X. For my daily commute, I carry the Leaf2 with me to browse the news feed as it fits perfectly in my handbag. Its page-turn buttons are exceptionally useful and save me the effort of tapping or swiping on the screen. During the day, I attend daily briefings with the product engineers in the morning and the marketing team in the afternoon, where I use my Note Air2 Plus to take notes. I love the writing feel of this device. On my office desk, I use the Tab X to read and reply to business emails and organize my work. It has a 13.3″ A4 size, similar to other tablets or laptops. At the end of the day, I spend my time with the Leaf2, reading my favorite books before bedtime. It’s a treasured moment when I can relax and enjoy some solitude. You use three different BOOX devices. If people had to choose only one to get started, how can they decide which BOOX device is right for them? BOOX offers a comprehensive product line to cater to all types of users. For those new to eReading, I recommend the Leaf2, a compact and lightweight e-reader that comes with built-in page-turn buttons and the option of black or white colors. If you are a sophisticated E Ink tablet user, the Note Air2 Plus is an excellent choice. It offers a close-to-paper writing experience and a 10.3″ A5 size, making it easy to carry around. For professionals, we have introduced the brand-new Tab Series, which is a premium selection and a game changer in the industry. It features the BOOX Super Refresh Technology, achieving ultra-smooth refresh rates. We have currently released two models, the 10.3″ Tab Ultra and the 13.3″ Tab X, with more to come in the future. Please stay tuned for updates! Once they have chosen a BOOX device, how do you recommend someone get started? When you receive your BOOX device, the first step is to get familiar with its user interface and explore its functionalities. It is packed with many possibilities to improve your workflow. To help you get started, we have an introductory video available on our YouTube channel that explains how to set up your new BOOX. We encourage you to check it out and take advantage of all the features and tools that BOOX has offered. And finally… What’s next for BOOX? Our top priorities now are to keep innovating and promote BOOX as an eye-friendly device to boost your productivity. To achieve this, we plan to release new devices tailored to different purposes and scenarios this year, while refining the user experience with a couple of firmware updates. We are also excited about the advancements in E Ink screen technology and are exploring how we can incorporate them into our new products. Thank you so much for your time, Kim! Where can people learn more about BOOX? Thank you for the interview. The pleasure is all mine. If you would like to know more about our brand and products, please feel free to visit our official BOOX Shop. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit to catch up with all our updates and join our community. The post Perfect your workflow with Kim Dan-Yuting, founder of BOOX appeared first on Ness Labs.

Being alone can sometimes feel pleasurable. A good book, some quiet time to ourselves, just us and our thoughts, away from the hustle and bustle of daily work and social obligations. But, other times, it can feel isolating. We are not simply alone, we are lonely. Why is it that being alone can lead to such dramatically different experiences? The difference between loneliness and solitude While loneliness and solitude share their basis into the same fundamental experience, the way we interact with this experience gives rise to two different mental states. Loneliness is a common but uncomfortable human emotion. Loneliness is the subjective experience in which a person is alone and which produces a feeling of desolation. When fleeting, it’s perfectly fine to feel lonely. It can be a way to process some feelings, which can be difficult but necessary. However, when loneliness becomes a constant feeling, it can actually be harmful to your health. A review of the research literature suggest that loneliness increases mortality risk by 26%. And the experience really hurts. We are social animals and we need to feel that we belong. Researchers have found that pain from loneliness and social rejection activate the same parts of the brain as physical pain. “Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves,” wondered Haruki Murakami in one of this novels. Isolation is the key word here: loneliness is a sense of isolation that can persist even when other people are present. That’s why knowing more people will not alleviate feelings of loneliness. It has become a common trope — but a true one — to say that we’re more connected but also more lonely than ever. The rates of loneliness have doubled in the United States in the last fifty years only. Scientists speak of a loneliness epidemic. In contrast, solitude is just the state of being alone. The concept of solitude doesn’t have any negative feelings attached to it. Which is why it can actually be enjoyable, or just neutral. There is a wonderful poem by Robert Duncan called “Childhood’s Retreat” which perfectly captures the beauty of solitude: It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree out of blue sky the wind sings loudest surrounding me. And solitude, a wild solitude is revealed, fearfully, high I’d climb into the shaking uncertainties, part out of longing, part daring myself, part to see that widening of the world, part to find my own, my secret hiding sense and place, where from afar all voices and scenes come back —the barking of a dog, autumnal burnings, far calls, close calls—the boy I was calls out to me here the man where I am “Look! I’ve been where you most fear to be.” How we perceive being alone makes all the difference in whether we will experience it as loneliness or solitude. When we focus on the feeling of isolation from others and world, being alone can produce a spiral of negative thoughts. When appreciated as a generative moment of self-discovery and reconnection with oneself, being alone can yield powerful insights and support your mental health. The science-based benefits of solitude It’s hard to consider inserting a little solitude in our busy schedule, but spending time alone is far from being a waste of time. In fact, the busier you are, the more likely you are to benefit from some quiet time. And research shows that solitude has lots of benefits, which include: More meaningful relationships. It may sound paradoxical, but research suggests that being able to feel comfortable on our own helps us become more comfortable when around others. Better resilience. Studies show that your ability to tolerate alone time is linked to increased happiness, better stress management, and improved life satisfaction. Basically, spending time alone makes you happier and less anxious. Increased creativity. Being in a private, secluded space, allows you to be more creative. That’s why artists, authors, and musicians seek solitude when they want to generate ideas and focus on their creative work. Self-discovery. By spending time alone and taking a moment for self-reflection—to think about our goals, our concerns, and our self—we are able to define and confirm our identities with less influence from other people, researchers found. Increased productivity. This may be the most counter-intuitive benefit of them all, but spending time alone makes you more productive. Many people work better when on their own compared to when working in a busy and noisy office. In the end, it all boils down to being intentional in the way we approach solitude. Loneliness is time alone that we didn’t choose, and therefore don’t appreciate. Solitude can be a mindful activity, if you decide to dedicate time to it and approach it as a constructive experience. On seeking solitude The good news is that you don’t need to set aside huge chunks of time to be by yourself in order to benefit from solitude. Just ten to twenty minutes of alone time a day could be enough to help you recharge. And if you think you don’t have time to dedicate to intentional solitude, you probably need that alone space more than ever. To go from simply being alone to creating space for mindful solitude, make sure to put your phone and laptop away. You won’t get any of the benefits of solitude if you spend your time scrolling on a screen. Here are a few suggestions of things you could do in your alone time. However you decide to spend your alone time, the goal is to be fully immersed in the moment, whether you actively think about interesting questions or let your mind wander. Go for a walk. Walking alone can be a simple way to clear your mind and take time to reflect on your thoughts, while getting some exercise. Bonus points if you can do it in nature. Meditate. Meditation allows you to focus on your inner self so you can find a sense of calm and clarity. It can help reduce anxiety and improve focus. Journal. Writing down your thoughts and emotions can help you process them more effectively. Journaling is also a great way to gain valuable insights into the inner workings of your mind. Listen to music. Music can be an amazing way to relax and unwind, especially if you listen to music that resonates with you and aligns with your current mental state, which can help you feel more connected to your emotions. Read a book. Besides being a lot of fun and a way to gain knowledge, reading a book alone can be an uncomplicated way to escape into another world and, if it’s fiction, get lost in a good story. You can also try gardening, working on a DIY project, dance in front of the mirror, do yoga, or practice an instrument. Any activity that allows you to enjoy your time alone will help you appreciate those precious moments with yourself. Or you could, you know, do nothing. Just think, or let your mind wander. If you’re not used to solitude, silence can feel uncomfortable at first. But allowing yourself to be alone with your thoughts is powerful, and can be a great addition to your mental gym. So trying setting aside a bit of alone time and making it part of your daily routine. The post Loneliness or solitude? The case for being alone appeared first on Ness Labs.

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us work smarter. Tommy Barav is the founder of Magical, a new way to manage your time using AI. It allows you to schedule meetings and take meeting notes directly from your browser tabs, and it’s fully integrated with Zoom, Notion, and Google, so you don’t have to worry about how to make the most of your time anymore. In this interview, we talked about their ambition to build a Time Operating System, how scheduling is just the tip of the time management iceberg, how to cut down on time-consuming context switching, how time connects to impact, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Tommy, thanks for agreeing to this interview. What’s wrong with the way we currently manage our time and schedule conversations? Excited to chat with you today! While most people could benefit from learning about better time management techniques, the great problem is that we’re all dealing with outdated productivity tools. These legacy tools were designed for a workforce and work culture that doesn’t exist any more. As such, we’re all using products that aren’t actually built for our regular daily workflows… and therefore, most of us aren’t nearly as productive as we should be. It’s the modern day equivalent of companies designing better horse carriages instead of trying to build automobiles. You’re on a mission to build the world’s first time operating system – what does that mean?  Our ambition is to build a Time Operating System for the modern worker. We want to revolutionize how we think about time. It’s our most valuable asset resource, and one that we all wish we knew how to spend more efficiently. We’re building a Time Operating System that keeps you focused and productive by being ubiquitous. Your time is everywhere, and your tools for time, such as your calendar, notes, and scheduling, should be everywhere as well. We’ll do this in two ways. First, like most companies, we’re going to deploy the latest AI to automate as many time tasks as possible. We think of AI as a digital intern; it should handle all of the remedial tasks so you can devote your energy and time to items that deliver the biggest impact. The second is to create an all-encompassing workspace where you can access your time whenever and wherever you need. Just imagine if you had Google Calendar, Notion, and Salesforce intertwined. That would be an incredible workflow! That’s what we’ll deliver in the long-term. Right now, we’ve begun this process by creating various “Time Templates” that let you design workflows to optimize your time tasks. Such an exciting plan! Right now, how does Magical work?  Magical empowers users to manage their meetings, scheduling, agendas, and notes directly from browser tabs. Users connect to Magical with their work Google account, and can access Magical with either our Chrome Extension, or our web app that works on all browsers. With Magical, you just open a new tab and can schedule meetings, join meetings, review your daily calendar, as well as take meeting notes. We have great integrations with Zoom and Google Meet so you can join those sessions straight from Magical. We also have a wonderful integration with Notion that lets you take meeting notes in Magical and sync them directly into your Notion account. Let’s say I would like to schedule a meeting with Magical. What would that look like?  Our scheduling functionality allows you to share your availability with a single link. You can share your general availability or share preferred meeting times. We have a unique feature called Dynamic availability that lets your invitees overlay their calendar and pick alternative meeting times if they’re not available during the preferred times you suggested. You can also create and edit your personalized scheduling templates. They provide the functionality I just listed, as well as various time protections to prevent people from scheduling last minute meetings, or meetings too far in advance. Finally, we have an AI scheduling feature called “AI Time Suggest” which will identify ideal meeting times based on your preferences and availability.  That does sound magical! Scheduling is not the only tedious aspect of meetings. How else can Magical help?  Scheduling is just the tip of the iceberg! We have amazing workflows around agendas and meetings notes. First, our AI Agenda feature lets you generate detailed and bullet-pointed agendas for all of your sessions. Just enter in your meeting topic and/or goals and it will automatically create agendas. Second, our AI Notetaker is an awesome tool for meeting notes. It’s easy to get distracted jotting down notes during meetings. AI Notetaker transcribes your session and then emails you a detailed summary immediately after your meeting ends. We also have two great calendar features called Day Peek and Time Peek. Day Peek lives inside Magical on the right of your screen. Using key commands, you can toggle on/off a daily view of your calendar, which is great for staying on top of your day. Time Peek works very similarly, except it shows up as a small tab on the side of your screen when you’re browsing on the web. Again, it’s an amazing way to have your time with you everywhere.  Still, the average knowledge worker uses countless apps and has many tabs open at any given time, which can make scheduling a bit of a nightmare. The great thing about Magical is that it lives with you in browser tabs. We’ve done an immense amount of research into how people spend their time at work and found that an extraordinary number of people will spend over half of their workday in their browser.  By having your time with you in the browser you’re able to cut down immensely on the context-switching that happens when you’re constantly switching between different apps and programs. With Magical, there is literally no need to switch because everything related to your time (scheduling, meetings, and notes) is with you in a single place.  Many could benefit from less context switching and more streamlined time management. What kind of people use Magical?  We have a diverse user base with people from a host industries and roles. I’d say the core of our users are tech savvy professionals who are time-hackers or productivity enthusiasts. They are people who demand tools and solutions that optimize their time. Perhaps I’m biased, but I like to think of them as the high-performers at their companies. They are people who want to create a large impact as efficiently as possible. They value their time more than most and want to optimize as much of their lives as possible. What about you, how do you use Magical?  As for me, I use Magical to manage my packed schedule. As the Founder and CEO of a young startup I have a million tasks to do every single day. I rely on Magical to keep me organized and focused. Right now my two favorite features are Time Peek and AI Notetaker. Time Peek is amazing as it lets me take my time everywhere. No matter what I’m doing, Time Peek lets me quickly see my upcoming meetings and sessions, and also jump directly into Zoom sessions as well. And AI Notetaker is just amazing. I’m a big advocate of meetings and religiously take them in every session I’m in. That can become problematic if someone is speaking and I’m constantly having to type while trying to process everything they’re saying. With AI Notetaker I literally don’t type in meetings anymore. I can devote my full focus towards the session because I know I’ll get a full summary sent to me right after it ends. The other great thing about Magical is that all of the key workflows and features can be accessed just by using key commands. This is a godsend for someone like me as I hate having to constantly switch between the keyboard and mouse.  So many great use cases. How do you recommend someone get started?  We recommend scheduling a meeting with Magical first to get a feel for the product. Thankfully, this is a breeze. Just connect your Google account to Magical and then click “Share Times”. From there, you can quickly schedule your first meeting. Our AI Agenda will create an automatic agenda based on your meeting’s topic, and you can then invite with preferred meeting times, or let our AI Time Suggest do it for you. Next, just copy your link and send it to your invitee. Not only is it a fast scheduling experience, it’s a better scheduling experience that will make sure you find the ideal meeting time for both you and your invitee. And finally… What’s next for Magical?  The future is bright for Magical. Without revealing too much, I can say that we’re working on more innovative features and integrations that we’ll roll out later in the spring. Some of these will be expansions and improvements on current workflows, while others will be brand new. We’re a community-driven product, which means we’re constantly learning from the incredibly engaged base of Magical users. Their communication and feedback drives our product development. As we like to say… we’re building the time tool of our members’ dreams! Thank you so much for your time, Tommy! Where can people learn more about Magical? Everyone can learn more on our website and follow our updates on Twitter. The post Schedule smarter and work faster with Tommy Barav, Founder of Magical appeared first on Ness Labs.

You have a deadline. You know you should get to work. But instead of focusing on what’s urgent and important, you spend your time on something else. Despite the inner voice telling us to get started and the rising anxiety, you keep on procrastinating. Humans have always struggled with procrastination. Thousands of years ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates asked how it is possible that, if one judges an action to be the best, one would do anything other than this action. Why we act against our better judgement? Still, as irrational as it sounds, we do procrastinate. And when it happens, no amount of rational thinking will help getting unstuck: that’s because we already know we should be doing the thing! So what can we do instead? Procrastination is an emotional process Procrastination arises from a fight between the limbic system — the ancient part of the brain influencing many our our automatic behaviours — and the prefrontal cortex, which is a newer part of the brain involved in cognition and higher-order thinking. Because of this fight, there are often several emotions at play when we procrastinate. The neuroscience of procrastination: A short primer Researchers found that procrastination is often associated with negative emotions such as anxiety and hopelessness, and could even lead to even depression. Considering how ashamed and stressed we feel when we procrastinate, it’s no wonder that we see procrastination as an enemy to get ourselves rid of. But a lot of the distress we experience when we procrastinate actually arises from our resistance to it. We feel ashamed that we procrastinate; we feel stressed about the fact that we procrastinate. Instead, we should treat procrastination as a source of information. Procrastination is your body and your brain trying to communicate a state of emotional struggle. Ignoring that message leads to more negative emotions, but embracing procrastination and trying to decipher the message can help you get unstuck while protecting your mental health. Making friends with procrastination There are many complex emotions underlying procrastination. While more organic forms of self-reflection such as free-flow journaling can help, it can also be useful to follow a more structured approach, especially if you are feeling paralyzed and don’t know where to start. Created by Graham Allcott, the founder of Think Productive and author of A Practical Guide to Productivity, DUST is a simple method to identify why you may be procrastinating. It stands for the four most common reasons why we procrastinate: Difficult, Unclear, Scary, and Tedious. Difficult. You may find the task too challenging, which may be caused by a lack of confidence, a lack of skills, or both. The solution is to move the starting point a bit earlier. For example, if you want to build an app but find it too difficult, you could take an online course that covers a very similar type of app. It’s important to not use an earlier starting point as a way to procrastinate even further. Clearly define what the first action step will entail, commit to it, and do not create an endless list of “pre-tasks” before you can get started with the main task. Unclear. Sometimes, we procrastinate because the task is not clearly defined. We often use vague one-word items in our to-do list, leaving our brains to fill in the blanks. In order to be productive, it’s important to have clearly defined actions. The solution is to make your tasks more detailed and to break them down into simple, actionable, clearly defined items. For example, “presentation prep” could be replaced by “record myself presenting the talk by Tuesday so I can get feedback from my manager on Wednesday.” Scary. Our fear of failure can get in the way of our productivity. The biggest changes we want to make and the most exciting projects we want to work are also the most daunting. Our brain is designed in a way to keep us safe. Comfort is good, risk is bad. Procrastination is a way to stay in your comfort zone. A solution is to create an even bigger fear to trump the original one. For example, announcing your deadline in public may trigger your fear of being judged, helping you overcome procrastination to avoid disappointing your peers. However, it’s better over the long term to embrace these fears, which are perfectly natural reactions to have when building something meaningful. Tedious. Some tasks are just boring. Need to copy-and-paste lots of numbers into a spreadsheet? Need to clean up some data? Need to write a hundred handwritten notes for an event? There’s no way to change the nature of the task itself—even though learning some automation tools can be useful in many cases—but you can change your environment. For example, you could listen to a podcast while doing copy-and-pasting work. Or you could create a reward for yourself when you get the task done in order to make it more exciting. To use the DUST model of procrastination, just grab a piece of paper, or open your notebook or note-taking app. Then, consider each emotion in the model to identify whether you’re procrastinating because the task is difficult, unclear, scary or tedious — it can be a combination of several emotions. Finally, apply the corresponding strategy in the model. If that strategy doesn’t work, it is also possible that the problem doesn’t come from the task itself and you need a break. The task isn’t difficult, unclear, scary or tedious, you’re just tired. Instead of feeling guilty about procrastinating, let it go for now and focus on resting and recharging your batteries. Procrastination is a way for our body and our mind to tell us we don’t feel comfortable with the way forward. It’s perfectly natural, and it’s okay at times to just go with it. But when procrastination becomes recurrent and prevents you from achieving your goals, it’s good to ask yourself why without beating yourself up in the process. You’ll avoid unnecessary distress and you’ll be able to get unstuck much quicker. The post Why we wait: Understanding the emotions behind procrastination appeared first on Ness Labs.

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this new edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Chris Reinberg is the founder of Mindsera, an AI-powered journal designed to train your thinking skills. Mindsera makes thinking with mental models actionable with journaling templates that guide your thought process. In this interview, we talked about the power of thinking from first principles, building a personal board of advisors, writing as a thinking tool, using mental models to generate personal insights, why we should focus more on inducing quality decisions, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Chris, thanks for agreeing to this interview! You believe in the power of bringing together cognitive psychology with software and design. Can you tell us more? Thank you for having me. I believe the world’s most valuable skill is clarity of thought. When you start to think about it, thinking is the most powerful tool you can possibly have. Thinking makes you act effectively in the world. It helps you get what you want out of life. Whenever we want to accomplish something, there are obstacles in our way. Thinking is what sets humans apart as expert problem-solvers who can find solutions to overcome these obstacles. It’s all within our heads. Thinking made us go from fighting with sticks and stones to smartphones, artificial intelligence, and launching reusable rockets with the mission of becoming a space-faring civilization. That’s quite spectacular. My own background is kind of a peculiar one. I’ve been a professional mentalist for over ten years. Mentalism, in other words, is the art of getting inside people’s heads. It’s about how to use the biases in our minds to create seemingly impossible feats of mind reading. That got me obsessed about how the mind works in general. I went from mind reading to mind building and started investigating the thinking habits of geniuses and to what degree it’s possible to optimize the software in our heads. On one side, we have a mental health crisis; on the other hand, we need to reskill for the future. To succeed, we must become mentally fit, not just mentally healthy. When we look at various research about the essential work skills in the next decade, they all point to cognitive skills like critical thinking, decision-making, problem solving, creativity, self-leadership, mental resilience, and continuous learning. It’s no surprise that these are the same skills that underlie the success of the most accomplished, creative, and prolific people on earth. So I asked myself, how do you keep yourself mentally healthy and improve your cognitive skills? What would be this piece of software that you can build if you think about it from the first principles? And this is what inspired you to create an AI-powered journal. Exactly! Many people do not understand who they are, where they are, or where they are going. In consequence, instead of attempting those actions that would make their lives as valuable as possible, things just happen to them, and they’re often not good. The antidote to that is becoming thoughtful about your life, and you do that through journaling. Reflecting on your thoughts and feelings makes you understand yourself better, find uncovered self-knowledge, and improve your overall mental health & fitness. Also, the best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write. There is no difference between writing and thinking. Writing is a sophisticated form of thinking. If you make your thoughts visual with words, it becomes so much easier for your brain to organise information and make sense of things. Mindsera is kind of a supercharged journal. It analyses your mindset, helps you structure your thinking, and has an integrated AI mentor to explain things, brainstorm, and give actionable advice. It’s a copilot for thinking. While writing is helpful in and of itself, it can be hard to generate insights from journaling. How does Mindsera address this challenge? That is a problem a lot of people have. We all know journaling has massive benefits, but how do you do it? The act of sitting down to write can be daunting, and the blank page is a well-known trigger for writer’s block. Fortunately, there is a solution to that. The human mind is a problem-solving tool. To get the mental juices flowing, all you need to do is ask a question. Questions focus your thinking because every question is a little problem for your mind. Everyone is constantly trying to give you answers, but the reality is you don’t need better answers, you need better questions. The better the questions, the more insightful and robust the answers and possibilities created. So, where do you find good questions? We all have tried journaling prompts, but the problem with them is that they are too general and get repetitive very fast. This is where our curated list of mental models and frameworks becomes useful. Tiago Forte explained it well: “Our creativity thrives on examples. When we have a template to fill in, our ideas are channelled into useful forms instead of splattered around haphazardly. There are best practices and models for almost anything you want to create.”  But it’s one thing to read about mental models and another to apply them, so we turned the most useful mental models into journaling templates. They make thinking with mental models actionable by guiding your thought process. Have a long-term decision you need to make? Use the Regret Minimization frameworks from Jeff Bezos. Want to find purpose and meaning in life? Think with the Ikigai framework. Need to build habits and achieve goals? Well, there are frameworks that help you to do that. We have frameworks for almost every occasion used by the absolute top 1% to make better decisions, solve complex problems, and be more productive. Some famous people who are vocal about the benefits of clear thinking, mental models, and writing include Elon Musk, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Naval Ravikant, Jordan Peterson, and Paul Graham. You are in good company! That’s such a powerful feature. Mental models can be a great way to generate insights. Then, the next step in better thinking is to go from insights to decisions. I’ve always liked this concept of a personal board of advisors. Whenever I have an important decision to make, I tend to go to an imaginary meeting room in my mind. Around the table, there are Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Steve Jobs, and other great minds. I explain the situation to them and listen to what they have to say. It’s a way to trick myself into seeing things from new perspectives. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, you can actually talk with digital minds that imitate the thinking of those cognitive giants, past and present. Marcus Aurelius to develop stoic qualities. Elon Musk to build a start-up. Alan Watts to find purpose and meaning in life. Carl Jung to assist in personal growth, and so on. You can have your own personal board of advisors to explain things, brainstorm, and give actionable advice. Basically, you get the power of a personal coach without paying hundreds of dollars per hour. This makes it accessible to everyone, not just a selected few. Another exciting feature is “mindset analysis” – can you tell us more? This is something I’m personally very excited about. I have always thought, what would happen if you write all of your experiences and reasoning into a personal journal and then give it to the world’s top psychologists, entrepreneurs, and philosophers to assess? What insights could they distil for you, and how beneficial would that be? Now with AI, it’s possible. When you finish your journaling session on Mindsera, click analyse. The mindset analysis measures your emotional state, gives a percentage to each emotion, reflects on your personality, and provides you with a list of personalised suggestions. One of our user’s favourite features is the original artwork generated based on your journaling entry. I’m always excited to write my thoughts down because I want to see the visualisation of those thoughts. It’s a really great incentive for positive habit-building and kind of feels like magic. I find the act of creating generative art from personal thoughts gives meaning to the resulting images. It also makes journaling social, as you can share the artwork with your friends. So, each time you sit down to write, you build up a personal art gallery of your mind. Also, I want to stress that we are big believers in freedom and privacy of thought. We are an independent company and do not sell your data or see what you have written. With the latest privacy update from OpenAI, your data will also not be used to train future AI models, so Mindsera truly is a private space for your thoughts. What kind of people use Mindsera? Just like people who go to the gym care about their physical health and fitness, people who use Mindsera care about their mental health and cognitive fitness. They understand the importance of keeping their minds sharp and agile, just as athletes understand the importance of keeping their bodies in top shape. Most of our users tend to be some kind of makers – startup founders, solopreneurs, indie hackers, digital creators, and investors. The most important asset you have as an entrepreneur is your mind, so improving your cognitive skills is the single most powerful thing you can do. It makes you better at solving problems, navigating uncertainty, making decisions, managing stress, and staying focused and productive. What about you, how do you use Mindsera? Mindsera, for me, is all about staying in a state of clarity. It’s the most powerful thing. When you operate from a place of clarity and intention, your thoughts and actions have leverage. Success in life depends on your ability to make good decisions. The quality of your decisions depends on the quality of...

Despite the best intentions, a group of people make unwise decisions because of a collective desire to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions. In striving for conformity, there can be a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. This phenomenon is called “groupthink”. Here is a personal example. When arranging to meet up with friends for dinner recently, everyone proclaimed to be happy to make a flexible and spontaneous restaurant choice on the night we met. With our party collectively agreeing to not make a reservation, on our arrival in the food quarter every restaurant was full, and we couldn’t find anywhere to eat. If one person had suggested that we make a table booking beforehand, this situation could have been avoided. But nobody said anything. This was not a big deal, but groupthink can lead to harmful business decisions, as well as impacting your personal life. Fortunately, this phenomenon can be managed with some simple strategies. The science of collective decisions The term groupthink was first coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte Jr, with most of the initial research carried out by Irving Janis, a research psychologist from Yale University. Theories of social conformity and social influence suggest that as humans, we are often averse to acting contrary to the trend of a group. Going against the grain can induce fear that our opinion might be wrong, or that we will incite conflict or even be rejected by the group. In 1998, researchers Marlene Turner and Anthony Pratkanis evaluated the research around groupthink theory. They found that it is most likely to occur within groups that are highly cohesive, especially if there is a strong leader, high levels of stress within the group, and low self-esteem within members. These conditions reduce the chance that a group will find a better solution to a problem than the one presented by influential group members. In another paper published by Turner and Pratkanis, it was highlighted that groupthink serves as an attempt to protect a collective identity by helping to maintain positive social characteristics. This may be especially true when the group feels under threat. Rather than share alternative views, the group effort is directed towards “maintaining a shared positive view of the functioning of the group”. This is achieved by ensuring consensus at all times, regardless of how sensible the decision is. However, as Dr Paul Hart argued, a group that’s caught up in groupthink may fail to notice important events, ignore serious threats, and disregard potential alternative actions. With a breakdown in group communication, and the desire for group harmony prioritized over rational decision making, dysfunctional outcomes can occur. According to Hart’s research, “groupthink, in short, is a recipe for policy fiascoes.” In short, groupthink can impact rational collective thinking, leading to poor decision making. The desire for a collective identity within the group can stifle independent thinking, with life-changing consequences. How to avoid groupthink When making collective decisions, there are some strategies that can be employed to avoid groupthink and its associated risks. Rather than accepting group conformity, it’s helpful to challenge the status quo. Assign one or two people in the group to play “devil’s advocate” and encourage them to interject with potential pitfalls and alternative solutions. Incorporating this specific role into the group will ensure other options are always raised and explored. When an idea is first raised, treat it as a transitional placeholder rather than a final decision. A group leader should refrain from offering ideas that may inadvertently sway others too early in the process. Instead, aim for the remaining group members to generate multiple ideas in the early stages of planning to avoid unnecessary conformity. It’s also helpful to proactively foster psychological safety during discussions. Irrational decisions based on the desire to conform can be avoided when group members have the freedom to think creatively without fear of ridicule. When individuals feel comfortable sharing unfiltered thoughts, a far greater breadth of ideas can be deliberated.  Ensure those who think innovatively are rewarded, even if another plan is eventually followed. Offering the opportunity to make suggestions anonymously can help contributors feel safer. Once a range of ideas has been voiced, encourage people to think critically and ask questions about the options. Invite an outsider to consider the possible options for objectivity and to mitigate the risk of the wrong decision being made due to group cohesion, low self-esteem or a strong leader. Groupthink can be responsible for collective decisions that are irrational, risky or even illegal. In a group setting in which cohesion and a positive social opinion of the group are highly valued, members put a lot of energy into ensuring harmony within the group. However, this form of mismanaged agreement is avoidable when group members can safely share their creativity, explore the pros and cons of various options, and seek objective opinions. If you’re in a position of leadership, make sure to encourage your group members to share their ideas — even if they don’t align with yours! The post Groupthink: when collective decisions go wrong appeared first on Ness Labs.

We are obsessed with optionality. Not sure what to do with your life? Get a degree. Not quite sure what to do with this degree? Go to grad school. Still not quite sure? Get a consulting role at a big firm so you can decide what kind of job you enjoy. And so on and so forth. We fall prey to the optionality fallacy. The problem is not with optionality itself. The problem is that we tend to assume optionality is built by keeping as many doors open for as long as possible. As Erik Torenberg puts it, it can be “like spending your whole life filling up the gas tank without ever driving.” The conventional path of accumulating optionality gives you reassuring but fragile options. In contrast, the best options — which involve lots of experimenting and tinkering — may feel riskier in the short term but will help you thrive through uncertainty. Optionality as convexity Traditional approaches to optionality assume a linear life curve, with a linear dependence on the parameters — if do this, you get that. People “follow safe paths that cap their downside, not realising that they also cap their upside,” says Torenberg. He adds: “Many ambitious people, even though they understand this intellectually, still prefer the more conventional paths of accumulating optionality.” It is often true that if all goes to plan, that is, if the actual parameters do end up looking highly similar to what they anticipated, following the traditional path will result for most people in a mostly predictable result. But the reality is, life’s curve is non-linear. There are few things more uncertain and complex than your life path. Each day brings its own unpredictable challenges and random events. Inject an adverse event, such as losing your job, or a lucky one, such as inheriting a large sum of money, and the pains or gains will often be amplified in a non-linear way. So, how can you design a life that embraces the random nature of reality? By having an approach to life which will result in larger gains than pains in a random environment. Functions with larger gains than pains are “nonlinear-convex”. The graph below shows the effect of a random event which causes more gain than pain. Things go well? Great upside. Not so well? Limited downside. The performance curves outwards, making it convex. And optionality is what gives it these crucial properties. Because you have options, you can discard the results when something doesn’t go well, thus limiting your losses. This allows you to experiment more, take more risks, and increase your chances of a big upside while capping the potential downsides. “It is in complex systems, ones in which we have little visibility of the chains of cause-consequences, that tinkering, bricolage, or similar variations of trial and error have been shown to vastly outperform the teleological* — it is nature’s modus operandi. But tinkering needs to be convex; it is imperative.” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb. “Critically we have the option, not the obligation to keep the result, which allows us to retain the upper bound and be unaffected by adverse outcomes.” *From the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “A teleologist attempts to understand the purpose of something by looking at its results. A teleological philosopher might argue that we should judge whether an act is good or bad by seeing if it produces a good or bad result, and a teleological explanation of evolutionary changes claims that all such changes occur for a definite purpose.” Taleb calls the difference between the results of trial and error in which gains and harm are equal (a linear function), and one in which pains and gains are asymmetric (a non-linear convex function) the “convexity bias” — the more convex the function (bigger difference between potential harm and benefits) and the more random the environment (higher volatility), the larger the bias. As humans tend to hate uncertainty, we have a propensity to miss the volatility property. In random, complex environments, convexity is easier to attain than knowledge. “Under some level of uncertainty, we benefit more from improving the payoff function than from knowledge about what exactly we are looking for,” says Taleb. In other words, when the future is uncertain, we benefit even more from performing experiments with a convexity bias that could lead to a big pay-off but have limited potential downside. Optionality through thoughtful tinkering Most ambitious people spend a lot of time and energy accumulating what feels like optionality by competing for a degree from a reputable university, then a prestigious work placement, and so on. Accumulating popular skills may feel like a path to more optionality, but the issue is: we don’t know what we don’t know. We cannot guess what skills will be helpful in the future, what random events (positive or negative) life will throw at us. In a complex system such as life, where you have limited visibility of the chains of cause and consequences, you are better off using trial and error. Tinkering and experimenting is a more efficient investment of your time than following a set path of learning which assumes an intrinsic value in specific skills and ignores the non-linear way life works. Experimenting does not mean giving something a quick try and abandoning it if you don’t see immediate results. Taleb gives the example of technologists in California who instead of investing based on narratives that look good on paper (assuming linearity), opportunistically switch or ratchet up their investments. This whole process takes many years of tinkering. “Typically people try six or seven technological ventures before getting to destination — note the failure in strategic planning to compete with convexity,” writes Taleb. To increase your optionality, apply the same to your life. It may mean taking a job in a new, unproven industry; investing in an emerging skill; learning an uncommon language; understanding a lesser-known culture; solving a hard problem few people are looking at. Rely on a series of experiments rather and avoid following a pre-defined narrative. Take these experiments seriously. Stay focused and give them your all. Go through a full cycle of deliberate experimentation before you decide whether you want to continue following this path, or if you would rather explore another path. And remember—you don’t only live once. One day you will be dead, but it takes about seven years to master something. If you live to be 88, after age 11, you have 11 opportunities to be great at something. Most people never let themselves die and cling onto that one life. But you can spend a life building things, another life writing poems, and another life looking for facts. You have many lives. Each of them is an opportunity to learn and grow. Live them. The post Unlocking the power of optionality appeared first on Ness Labs.

Children have an incredibly inquisitive mind. “Why?” they keep asking. They explore new things for no other reason except that they just want to know. Researchers tried to figure out how often kids ask questions. Turns out, a lot: on average, children ask 107 questions per hour! But it seems that as adults we tend to fall into fixed and convenient cognitive patterns. “Schools do not always, or even often, foster curiosity,” says Susan Engel, author and senior lecturer in psychology. Her research shows that what she calls “episodes of curiosity” — such as asking direct questions, manipulating objects, or intent and directed gazing — occurred 2.36 times in a two hour stretch in kindergarten, and only 0.48 times in a fifth grade classroom. So, what’s going on, and is it ever too late to rehabilitate your curiosity? Creativity gets unlearned When NASA was looking at hiring highly creative people, they hired Dr. George Land to devise a test that would accurately measure creative potential. Dr. Land collaborated with another researcher, Dr. Beth Jarman, to create a test which measured divergent thinking, or the ability to look at a particular problem and devise multiple solutions. The test worked well and is still a cornerstone of research around curiosity. But Dr. George Land, being curious (see what I’m doing), wanted to go further and understand the underlying mechanics of curiosity. Where does it come from? How does it evolve through our lives? To answer these questions, he led a large-scale observation study of 1,600 children. He got the kids to take the test at age 5, 10, and 15. The first time they took the test, 98% scored the highest possible score on the creativity test. The second time they took it, five years later, only 30% of the very same children scored well on the test. Even more depressing, the third time they took it — by now in high school — it was only 12% of kids that did well. What about adults? Well, it’s not getting any better. Based on a sample of 280,000 people, less than 2% of all adults are defined as creative based on their answer to this standardised test. Some evidence suggests that this dramatic decrease in curiosity could be caused by our increase in knowledge as we grow up. Once we feel like there’s no gap between what we know and what we want to know, we just stop being and acting curious. But why should we care? 3 surprising benefits of curiosity Based on the results above, it seems like most adults go about their lives without any effort to foster their curiosity. You might think, maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all. But curiosity has magical properties which have been extensively studied by scientists. Curiosity keeps you young: research shows that keeping a sense of wonder throughout life and as well as a novelty-seeking behaviour helps people to stay young. A study which followed aging individuals while tracking their curiosity levels found that those that showed high levels of curiosity were more likely to be alive five years later. Curiosity helps you learn: there is strong evidence that curiosity helps you better remember new information. The more curious you are about a topic, the more likely you are to remember it. Curiosity fosters better relationships: being genuinely interested in other people helps build more robust relationships, research shows. This means a greater feeling of intimacy and creating the foundation for meaningful relationships. Convinced you should do more to cultivate your curiosity? The good thing is that low levels of curiosity doesn’t mean your curiosity is just gone. In most adults, it’s mostly suppressed. In fact, every time you go to bed to sleep and you start dreaming, you let your curiosity run wild. How to cultivate your curiosity There are a few simple activities that will help you foster your curiosity and by extension increase your creativity. Try a few and see which ones feel most effective for you personally. Ask questions: randomly ask yourself questions like why? and how? when reading something or chatting with friends. You can even write down some of these questions to take the time to find the answers later. Read outside of your field: pick a type of book you would never naturally buy in a bookstore. Is it classic poetry? Non-fiction? A cookbook? Something about geology? Read it just for the sake of reading it, even if it doesn’t directly contribute to your work. Be inquisitive with people: choose someone in your entourage that you haven’t seen in a while, and invite them for coffee. Make it your goal to learn as much as possible about their interests. Take that approach any time you meet a new person. Practice saying less: this is linked to the previous one. Try to talk less and to listen more. Immerse yourself in a topic: select a topic that you find interesting, and push the limits of your curiosity by going deep. This means reading lots of articles, books, and research papers, watching TED talks, listening to podcasts. Write: take it to the next level by writing about this topic. This is exactly what I’m doing here. By committing to write on this blog, I get to explore new topics and cultivate my curiosity. Carry a notebook: it will make it easier to remember topics you’re curious about and want to either research or write about later. Learn about yourself: curiosity doesn’t need to only be outward. Explore your feelings, ask yourself about your goals and behaviours, or even research your past and family history. Slow down: productivity can be the enemy of creativity. Take the time to let your mind wander and let questions pop into your head. Hang out with a child: playing and talking with a child is probably one of the best reminders of our potential for curiosity. We were all born curious. As adults, it’s our choice to be curious or not. It does take some conscious effort, but it’s worth investing in our curiosity so we can make the most of the extended liminal space that is life. The post The science of curiosity: why we keep asking “why” appeared first on Ness Labs.

Although we would like to think we have a realistic perception of ourselves and the world around us, many of our thoughts are actually inaccurate representations. These so-called cognitive distortions can trick the mind, impacting our sense of self, our mental health, and even the integrity of our decision making. How can we learn to think more clearly? Binocular tricks of the mind A cognitive distortion is a mental phenomenon where we develop an inaccurate perception of reality. Cognitive distortions are often described as “pop-up” thoughts that quickly appear, but then start spiraling in a negative loop. They can be triggered by traumatic events such as difficult events in childhood.  The American psychiatrist Dr Aaron Beck worked with patients experiencing a wide range of mental health conditions, and discovered that distorted thinking patterns could impact the way we experience reality, which could in turn affect our mood. A collaborative study between psychologists in Australia and Brazil confirmed Beck’s findings. The research teams agreed that the distortion of facts leads to the maintenance of negative beliefs, which can lead to low mood or even depression. David D. Burns defines cognitive distortions as “a highly misleading way of thinking about yourself and the world”. He also describes the “binocular tricks” of magnification and minimization — two common forms of cognitive distortion. In magnification, our mistakes, fears and shortcomings become exaggerated, as if we are looking at them through a pair of binoculars. This can lead to catastrophizing, whereby small errors feel all-consuming or seem far more impactful than they truly are. Conversely, minimizing causes us to shrink the positive aspects of our lives down until they seem insignificant, barely worth noting, or even invisible. As if looking through a pair of binoculars backwards, you may minimize your own success or personal qualities so that you no longer recognize their value. You might also minimize others’ mistakes or imperfections, causing you to inaccurately believe that your peers are superior to you. The impact of magnification and minimization It is widely acknowledged that those who struggle with an intensely low mood are likely to show cognitive distortions. These errors of thinking contribute to the continuation of anxiety and depression, creating a vicious cycle. In addition to giving anxiety and depression stronger roots, cognitive distortions such as magnification and minimization can negatively impact your decision-making and overall well-being. Maximizing your mistakes, as if scrutinizing yourself through a pair of binoculars, can cause poor self-esteem, feelings of low self-worth and an unbalanced view of yourself.  For example, at work, you might make a small mistake, but due to cognitive distortion, maximize its potential impact. Seeing a small mistake magnified could lead you to ruminate on the potential for disciplinary action, dismissal, or the end of your career, even though this is far from likely. If you are interviewed for a role but are ultimately unsuccessful, you might go back through each interview question with a fine-tooth comb, and find holes or weaknesses in every one of your answers. You may start to believe that you are useless at interviews, and that you will never be successful in acquiring another job.  Conversely, minimizing your achievements will turn you into your harshest critic. If you pass an exam, are offered a new job, or receive a promotion, rather than seeing your success as being the result of your own hard work, you may downplay it as nothing more than luck. This belittles the effort you have put into succeeding, so that you do not recognize your own dedication or talent. Many of us also fall into a trap of minimizing compliments paid to us. By automatically rejecting someone else’s opinion that we are hard-working, talented, or creative, we do not leave space for positive self-belief to blossom. How to avoid binocular tricks It is important to investigate whether the beliefs you hold might be distorted, as beliefs that are strongly inaccurate can negatively influence one’s overall thinking and behavior. Fortunately, there are several strategies that you can follow to avoid magnification and minimization. Here is a simple exercise to reduce the impact of the binocular tricks your mind may play on you. For any situation you face, you can draw two columns and then document the relevant pros and cons, trying to keep the list of pros longer than the list of cons. For example, if you are unsuccessful at an interview, try to tease out the positives of the experience. This might include the recruitment process being beneficial for future applications, the interview being an opportunity to network with other professionals, or the chance to further narrow down your job search. By keeping the list more positive than negative, you can avoid setting up a vicious cycle. Whenever something good happens, or someone says something positive about you or your work, make a note of it. You can keep your notes in an app, in your journal, or even on small pieces of paper that you store in a jar. In collecting these memories, you create a resource that you can pull from whenever you next experience magnification or minimization. Finally, talk with your friends about your experiences and general mental health. Those close to us can often offer a far more balanced perspective, enabling them to point out when our perception may be positively or negatively exaggerated. Although it may feel natural to bat their compliments away, try to accept them and see yourself in the same light that others do. Binocular tricks of the mind can damage your mental health, propagating anxiety and depression, and even negatively impacting your decisions. Putting these strategies in place will help you focus on areas in which you have excelled, rather than dwelling on the things that have not gone as well as you hoped. Rather than harshly critiquing yourself, you can start to adopt a more self-compassionate mindset. The post Magnification and Minimization: Two “Binocular Tricks” of the Mind appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Rohan Gupta is the co-founder of QuillBot, a suite of AI-powered writing tools that include a paraphraser, a grammar checker, a summarizer, a translator, and more — all in one place. In this interview, we talked about the challenge of integrating every step of the writing process, how AI can unlock our creative potential, how technology can support English language learners, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Rohan, thanks for agreeing to this interview! You started building tech-enabled tools from a young age. What was driving you? As a child, I was fascinated by the endless possibilities that technology could offer and was eager to explore them. This interest in technology may have led me to experiment with coding and building software tools from a young age. It was amazing being able to exercise my creativity to build tools and products that people would genuinely use and love. And you were still a student when you launched QuillBot. Can you tell us about the early days? Yes, Jason and I were both students pursuing different startups at the time, and we met at a startup accelerator. The first version of QuillBot was quite janky. It was a single page web app, effectively a demo. It went live on Reddit and got great reception, even though the first version of our AI was not that good. People loved the concept and it was quite novel at the time. It was helpful to writers who used English as a second language in particular. QuillBot started going viral, and we had to figure out a way to cover the costs. So we built out a premium subscription and bootstrapped the business to over one million monthly active users before raising venture funding. QuillBot is now an advanced AI writing companion that provides everything from a paraphraser to a summarizer and a grammar checker. How does it work exactly? QuillBot is unique in that it caters to every writer’s needs, whether those are simple or more complex. It’s there for writers through every step of the writing process, which includes brainstorming, research, outlining, drafting, editing, and creating citations. Instead of focusing on a singular problem, QuillBot aims to alleviate every pain point a writer might face while writing.  However, if a writer needs specific help in just one area of the writing process, they can choose to use just a specific tool for their needs. For example, if a writer doesn’t have the best grammar, they can choose to write the paper on their own and run the final draft through our Grammar Checker. People complain about the proliferation of writing tools and how disjointed the writing process has become. How does QuillBot address this challenge? A good writing tool will simplify and ease the writing process, not make it more difficult or disjointed. Not all writing tools can achieve this. QuillBot prioritizes a streamlined experience, which is why you’ll never see an ad on the site. Every tool works with just the click of a button, which takes away any convoluted steps that might confuse our writers or eat up their time. QuillBot also offers an extension for both Google Chrome and Microsoft Word, ensuring that our users will be able to write well wherever they write. The extension allows for quick edits and suggestions without going on the website, making it easy for users to perfect their writing across the web. An exciting feature is the QuillBot Co-Writer – can you tell us more? At its core, the Co-Writer is a writing space that employs the features of the Paraphraser, Summarizer, and Citation Generator to correct and perfect the user’s work as they write. The “Suggest Text” button helps users who are experiencing writer’s block by recommending the next sentence based on existing text. The Co-Writer also includes online research capabilities, a space for note taking, and an outline generator, allowing the user to complete a paper from start to finish without ever leaving the tab they’re on. What kind of people use QuillBot? Our two largest demographics at QuillBot are students and English language learners (ELLs), and those groups have a tendency to overlap. Students are usually focused on the content of their essays, so they find the Citation Generator, Summarizer, and Grammar Checker particularly useful for automating tasks that would otherwise take them a lot of time, such as creating citations. Students are very busy people, so saving time on writing projects goes a long way for their overall success in school. ELLs find that tools such as the Paraphraser and the Grammar Checker are particularly useful when sending communication. For those who are still learning English, these tools help smooth out and correct their language so they are able to speak, or write, effectively. Now they are better equipped to integrate into their new community and improve their lives moving forward. However, QuillBot’s clientele is not limited to those two demographic groups. QuillBot users range from content creators to businesspeople to researchers, and beyond.  Users find the Summarizer to be helpful when conducting research, because it condenses any article or piece of text into its most important points, effectively cutting out all of the filler material.  The Paraphraser is great for online content creators, because it helps them write original content that will rank well on search engines. The seven writing Modes help narrow each piece of content down for its respective audience, ensuring that tone is consistent throughout the text. What about you, how do you use QuillBot? I do all of my writing with QuillBot. In particular, Compare Modes is a great feature found within our Paraphraser that allows a user to compare text that has gone through our different Modes, which change the tone and style of the text depending on which Mode is in use.  I like to use this feature to ensure that I’m coming across the right way in everything that I write, whether that be a company-wide message, private correspondence, or an interview such as this one. I find seeing all of the different outputs laid out next to each other helps me to weigh my options and pick the perfect Mode for any occasion.  This feature works hand-in-hand with Freeze words, which lets the user keep a word or phrase the same when paraphrasing. This is particularly handy when I’m writing something that includes a branded keyword or proper noun that cannot be changed or rephrased in any way. For example, QuillBot’s tagline is “Make writing painless.” That has to be frozen to ensure brand consistency and an understanding of our core mission and values.  How do you recommend someone get started? The best way to get to know QuillBot is to play around with all the tools. Grab a sample text and run it through the Paraphraser, using the different Modes to create different paraphrases. Run it through the Summarizer and go through all of the available settings and options. Our Co-Writer has tutorials available for all of the tools within the broader Co-Writer space, which includes the Paraphraser, Summarizer, Grammar Checker, and Citation Generator. It’s a great place to learn, play around, and create something new — or tweak something that already exists! Within that space, you can draft a new project, edit a work-in-progress, and work through every step of the writing process. It’s a great option for those new to QuillBot, because it showcases a number of our tools in an easy-to-use setting. In the future, what role do you think AI writing companions will play in the creative process? We’re already seeing AI improve people’s writing skills. With tools like the Grammar Checker and Summarizer, writers are able to produce content more efficiently than ever before, with little to no mistakes.  Other AI writing companions, like the Co-Writer, help users brainstorm and research. It’s easier than ever to create and expand upon an idea in order to bring it to fruition. The entire creative process is already being impacted positively by AI, and I don’t see that slowing down any time soon. And finally… What’s next for QuillBot? We are on a mission to better streamline writing and fundamentally redefine the writing process. We plan to do this by incorporating new generative AI tech, improving UX/UI, and building out multilingualism as part of the writing journey. There is a huge opportunity to redefine writing and we intend to capture it! Thank you so much for your time, Rohan! Where can people learn more about QuillBot? Everyone can go to QuillBot.com to learn more about our brand and product. You can also follow our journey on Twitter. The post Building the most powerful AI writing companion with Rohan Gupta, co-founder of QuillBot appeared first on Ness Labs.

If you add up the number of hours are your disposal during a given week, the total will be the same for every single living human being on the planet, whatever their occupation: 168 hours per week. Remove the weekends, and that’s 120 hours. Get some sleep, and you’re left with at most 90 hours of awake time during the weekdays. Eat, shower, and do all the basic things human beings need to do on a daily basis, and you get a maximum 80 hours per week to play with — that is, if you don’t have kids or other irreducible obligations. So little time, and yet, we waste a lot of energy on low-leverage tasks that leave us tired and dissatisfied. We confuse hard work for high-leverage work. These low-leverage tasks don’t meaningfully contribute to our success, and they certainly don’t contribute to our well-being. Instead, how can we focus our time and energy on high-leverage activities that are both productive and good for the mind? More than moving the needle Unnecessary paperwork, long meetings, chasing down deliverables, fixing typos in an article… What do all of these activities have in common? They are tedious, frustrating, and often avoidable. The expression “moving the needle” originating in the indicator of measuring instruments such as the speedometer. It has become one of these overused bits of business jargon you will hear in many organizations, used to describe work with a small yet noticeable impact. While it makes sense for a massive organisation to pursue many such “needle-moving” activities, it can be exhaustive and counterproductive for an individual to follow such a strategy. Moving the needle may imply a corresponding level of hard work; which is not the case with high-leverage activities. This is the basic principle of leverage: using a lever amplifies your input to provide a greater output. Good levers work as energy multipliers. Instead of moving the needle, you want to operate the most efficient levers. High-leverage activities are energy multipliers Based on skills, experience, network, and many other factors, everyone’s levers are different. What they have in common, when activated, is their ability to turn a relatively smaller amount of time and energy into outsized results. Not sure what such energy multipliers can look like? Here are ten examples of high-leverage activities you could experiment with: Automating part of your work Creating and publishing original content Joining a public speaking club Taking a writing workshop Mastering a critical tool Implementing metacognitive strategies Learning a new language (including how to code) Looking for a great coach or a great mentor Pushing back on unnecessary (-ly long) meetings Investing in personal and professional relationships You should obviously not aim to pursue all these activities at the same time, and many may not even be right for you. These are for illustration purposes — what a high-leverage activity is for someone may be a low-leverage activity for you. The main question to ask yourself is whether these activities have an outsized impact compared to the amount of effort they require, and whether they seem to provide you with more time and energy to focus on what really matters. By purposefully choosing which levers to activate in your life and work, you can reclaim your time and energy so you can achieve your goals without sacrificing your mental health. Clarifying your highest leverage activities As investor George Soros wrote in his book The Age of Fallibility: “It is much easier to put existing resources to better use, than to develop resources where they do not exist.” High-leverage activities are not about making more time or using more energy; instead, the aim is to better optimise your resources to focus on work that goes beyond moving the needle. In order to identify these high-leverage activities, you need to reflect on how to allocate your resources. Document your daily activities. The first step is to get an idea of the way you currently spend your time and energy. We very often overestimate or underestimate the time we spend on certain activities. Time seems to contract when we’re having fun, and to expand for boring tasks. But time perception doesn’t correlate with leverage. Spend a few days tracking how you spend your work days. You can even install a time-tracking app to help with accuracy. Highlight the tasks you feel best suited for. Better yet: focus on the tasks only you can do. Because of your unique set of skills, interests, and connections, some tasks will be both easier and more enjoyable to you than to somebody else — as well as better performed by you in some cases. For instance, someone on your team may be better suited to create and design a business presentation; another team member may be the strongest person for cold emailing and conducting initial meetings; but you may be the best person for the final negotiation. Choose your levers. First, be selective. While high-leverage activities lead to outsized results compared to the time and energy investment, you still only have a limited number of hours available to you. Ideally, try to keep your list of high-leverage activities to 2-3 items at most. Then, make sure to commit to these levers: let your team know about your focus areas; delegate tasks you are not the best suited for; automate repetitive and energy-draining activities; hire contractors for what cannot be automated. Remember: hard work is not necessarily high-leverage work. Do not measure your productivity based on time and energy—time in particular is not a measure of productivity. Focus on activities with oversized output compared to your input. Learn to delegate. Use your time to invest in yourself, your systems, and your relationships – these investments compound. While we all have an absolute limit on time, high-leverage activities can multiply our energy. The post High-leverage activities: how to identify your energy multipliers appeared first on Ness Labs.

“You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” The traditional saying remains true even in modern society, and we’d like to think that when we perform a favor for someone else, they will return it in the future. But this is not always the case. Research shows that reciprocity has a very narrow window, and our desire to give back wanes rapidly before disappearing altogether. About three weeks ago, I met a friend for coffee. When she had to rush off, I happily covered our bill and assumed that next time, she would do the same. However, “reciprocity decay” forewarns me that, as three weeks have already passed, I should probably forget about that coffee ever being repaid. Understanding reciprocity decay can provide us with valuable insight into both our expectations of others and the way we collaborate with them. The science of reciprocity Reciprocity is a deeply rooted dynamic of human relationships. Reciprocity of both benefit-for-benefit as well as harm-for-harm was a cornerstone of relationships in ancient Greece. Extensive research has shown that the principle of “voluntary requital” was a form of transaction in a time when there was no formal system of trade. There is some evidence demonstrating that it’s not only humans who are capable of reciprocity. Rats have been shown to set up “food-exchange programs”, vampire bats partake in high levels of reciprocal grooming, and capuchin monkeys show reciprocal provision of food from food-rich to food-poor environments. These mechanisms enhance survival of the species. In recent years, cultural anthropologists have discovered that human relationships are based on a “web of indebtedness”. American researchers reported that reciprocity can include rewarding kind actions or punishing unkind actions. Researchers from the University of Zurich noted that reciprocity has powerful implications for economic domains. They found that reciprocal behavior can determine both the enforcement of contracts and social norms, as well as greatly enhancing collective action. Through reciprocity, sophisticated systems of aid and trade have become possible, bringing immense benefits to societies that utilize them. In professional circumstances, employees may work above and beyond their role to provide additional services, if they believe that they may later be reimbursed with praise, promotion, a pay rise or another benefit. In one’s personal life, reciprocity can be linked to the frequent exchange of favors between family or friends, the existence of customer loyalty, and the tradition of tipping in restaurants. Writing with Benedikt Herrmann, Simon Gächter summarized that the human web of indebtedness created through direct and indirect reciprocity is crucial to successful human cooperation. The impact of reciprocity decay As we’ve seen, reciprocity is essential for a modern society that functions well, and many of us are happy to give when we feel confident that, in the future, we will receive something in return. However, studies by Amanda Chuan, Judd Kessler and Katherine Milkman suggest that if reciprocity is not triggered within a specific timeframe, any sense of obligation can vanish, leaving the initial donor with nothing at all. The researchers examined data from a university hospital that had sent more than 18,000 donation requests to patients following hospital care. Patients were most likely to donate if the request was sent within 30 days of their visit, with a significant decline when it was sent between one and four months later. They concluded that economic behavior is time sensitive due to reciprocity decay. It is therefore important to capitalize on opportunities to receive payment for any “debt” promptly, rather than leaving it too long to ask. Reciprocity decay is likely due to the memory of a generous act fading in time. Something that was significant initially may not feel as valuable one week later. My friend who was grateful to avoid having to wait for the bill may now be consumed by a busy work schedule or a mountain of life admin. While making it to a meeting on time was important three weeks ago, this may no longer hold any significance. Furthermore, in the normal chaos of life, she may simply have forgotten about the bill. Older research agreed that reciprocal decay was likely due to the fading memory of a favor. However, this study also highlighted that the sense of obligation to repay a favor is likely to depend on how valuable the initial favor was. One coffee is of little consequence, whereas saving someone else’s life could “produce a sense of obligation that lasts a lifetime.” Fostering balanced cooperation By taking reciprocity decay into account, it’s possible to foster more balanced cooperation. When someone is indebted to you, avoid waiting too long to make a request for reciprocal action. If the repayment of a coffee had been very important to me, I could have messaged my friend the following day to arrange another catch up. Similarly, if you want customers to provide feedback on your service, make sure your request is timely. Asking for immediate feedback can be off-putting, while waiting too long may reduce your chance of a response. It is therefore advisable to wait a day or two before exploring reciprocity. Conversely, if you recognize that you have waited a long time for a favor to be repaid, make sure the first correspondence you send triggers the recipient’s recall of your past act of kindness. If you helped a colleague plan a workplace event, you can spark fond memories by gently reminding them of how enjoyable the day was. This may make them feel more inclined to help you out in return, despite the delay. Although in some cases, an equally weighted favor might be returned despite time passing, you will often need to accommodate for reciprocity decay. While hospital patients may be less likely to make financial donations many months after treatment, they may be willing to share a link to the hospital’s charitable causes on their social media instead. Finally, it’s important to recognize when you have missed the boat. If a long time has passed, draw a line in the sand and accept that a favor won’t be repaid once an individual no longer feels indebted. This may help to minimize any sense of disappointment you may feel around the favor you provided. For instance, buying a coffee for a friend is no big deal. Rather than feeling I have been fleeced or that my minor generosity went unnoticed, it’s better to forget it altogether. Reciprocity is an ancient phenomenon that is essential for the healthy functioning of society. Although we expect others to remember our kind deeds and repay them, as time passes it is likely that reciprocity decay will occur. Fortunately, we can foster more balanced cooperation by not waiting too long to request that a favor is repaid, making allowances for the other party when some time has passed, and knowing when to accept that it is time to simply let go. The post Reciprocity decay: How our desire to give back wanes over time appeared first on Ness Labs.