Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better, learn faster, and make the most of our mind. George Levin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Hints, an all-in-one knowledge management app to get information captured and self-organized. In this interview, we talked about the biggest challenges faced by knowledge workers, why complex systems tend to fail, the importance of revisiting your knowledge to consolidate it, the power of self-organizing your notes, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi George, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges faced by knowledge workers? I believe that knowledge is an opportunity. Every piece of information — a  note, an article, a link, a screenshot, or a shower thought — is the beginning of something new, a hint that can spark changes in our lives and make us better. Unfortunately, we often miss out on these opportunities. A lot of valuable information is slipping through our fingers. Before launching Hints, we have conducted over a hundred in-depth interviews to understand how people work with new information and what obstacles they face. We identified three stages: capturing, organizing, and revisiting. Each stage has its own challenges. Let’s start with capturing. You have probably heard the saying: “If you didn’t write it down, it never happened.” The biggest challenges here are multitasking and change of context. It’s hard to pause your work, especially if you’re jumping between tasks and calls, to save important info. Then comes organizing. Our notes, screenshots, links, and tasks are often scattered across multiple apps and devices. With a significant effort we can set up complex knowledge management systems, but most solutions require a lot of discipline to maintain. When we run out of time or energy, such complex systems fail.  Finally, we get to the revisiting part. Capturing and organizing are useless without revisiting. Without it, things don’t move forward. Articles you save are not read, TedTalk videos aren’t watched, and new ideas are not developed. This will definitely resonate with readers. When did you decide to tackle those challenges? In December 2019, I sold my advertising technology startup Getintent, where I worked with Alex and Gleb. Then in 2020, I built a video distribution platform for vloggers. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. I decided to slow down and take some time for myself. During my eight years of entrepreneurship, I’ve noticed the importance of serendipity. A sudden conversation in a coffee shop or a “random” book recommendation could change my life for the better. I learned to keep my eyes and ears open to catch small hints.   This approach brought me to the knowledge management and note-taking community. I decided to build something in this field, but I didn’t want to create a better Roam or Notion. I tried to find some unique problem that wasn’t solved yet. I invited Alex and Gleb, and very soon we found it.  As members of a network of business communities, we talked on FB, WhatsApp, or Slack groups, sharing experiences and giving each other recommendations. This valuable knowledge from conversations stayed on the surface for a few days, only to soon be lost. We built a script that scrapped discussions in these groups and created a self-organizing community wiki on the fly.       Then I remembered a story from one of my early investors about how he built a search engine for financial information and happily sold it to a bank, only to later find out that a company named Google did the same but for the whole web. I realized that the problem we solved was relevant beyond our niche communities and applied to all knowledge workers who are dealing with a lot of valuable information around them. So in August 2021, we decided to build Hints.  And how does Hints address those challenges faced by knowledge workers? The Hints app offers users the easiest way to capture, organize, revisit and share new knowledge on the fly. We are mobile-first, but we have desktop and web apps as well.  The main goal of our quick and intuitive capturing is to avoid context switching. If you see something important, you can save it without opening the app in less than a second and stay in your flow. Then all your new knowledge gets auto-organized. Finally, the revisiting stage is where static notes become active hints. Your hints will be shown to you in an interactive story format. Our recommendation engine resurfaces the most valuable hints and reminds you about them. Information can come into many formats. What kind of formats does Hints support? Notes, screenshots, photos, images, tasks, voice-to-text memos, reminders, videos, files, lists, calendar events, links. Every piece of information can be a hint, an opportunity that could change your life. That kind of flexibility sounds incredibly powerful. More specifically, how does Hints work? You can capture notes, URLs, YouTube videos, and screenshots on your phone by forwarding them to the Hints app. Also, we support SMS, WhatsApp, and Telegram bots. You can send a text, convert it into tasks and set a reminder via our bots while in the messenger. The most developed is our Telegram bot. It will allow you to create a calendar invite and add your co-workers. Other bots will catch up soon. You can also capture anything directly from the app or via our Apple Shortcuts widget.    On the desktop, you can capture a selected text from websites, emails, and messages by pressing Command+Shift+J. Or Command+Shift+K for screenshots. Auto-organizing will group your captured hints by common categories such as meeting notes, people, articles, videos, etc. We call these categories flows because you can decide what flow you want to open depending on your mood and needs. Revisiting looks like Instagram stories. You can open your revisiting when you don’t have energy and want to browse something. While browsing you can make a change, archive an old hint, add a reminder, or a tag. This format is very engaging and interactive. I started to use it instead of Instagram and Twitter when I wanted to zone out. You will be surprised how many good hints you captured two months ago and completely forgot about them.  I love the concept of swipeable stories to refresh our knowledge. In general, Hints seems to be a great tool to reduce friction in knowledge management. Absolutely. First of all, with Hints, you stay in your flow and don’t need to jump between apps to write something down. That’s already a significant relief. Then, you don’t need to think about folders and where to place your hints. It’s self-organized, and you know where to find everything. Finally, you don’t need to think about remembering what you saved. You will be reminded about it. Things you capture will be moved forward to change your life for the better.   Amazing. What kind of people use Hints? They are professionals who have a lot of work and valuable information that they don’t want to miss. In my case, the Hints app has already changed my life. Nothing falls through the cracks. I stay on top of my things without relying on my discipline. I can go to bed without thinking about what opportunity I could miss today. And finally… What’s next for Hints? Our next big step is collaboration and B2B. We want to stay free for individuals and rely on B2B pricing when startups and SMBs start using Hints. For them, Hints can be where all new knowledge is captured and distilled before it moves to in-depth project management tools. Without Hints, businesses miss out on the potential opportunities within new ideas and insights that team members encounter every day.  Thank you so much for your time! Where can people learn more about Hints and give it a try? You can sign up on our website and follow our journey on Twitter. The post Self-organized knowledge management with George Levin, CEO of Hints appeared first on Ness Labs.

Humans love patterns. Sometimes that’s helpful, but other times… Not so much. Apophenia is the common tendency to detect patterns that do not exist. Also known as “patternicity”, apophenia occurs when we try to make predictions, or seek answers, based on unrelated events. Apophenia can lead to poor decision-making. For instance, many people choose their lottery numbers based on the birthdates of family members. As the numbers are picked at random, however, this approach won’t increase their chance of winning. In rare cases, apophenia can even be an indicator for some mental conditions. Let’s have a look at how apophenia works, and how you can both detect and manage this phenomenon. The science of apophenia Apophenia is the propensity to mistakenly detect patterns or connections between unrelated events, objects, or occurrences. The term was first coined in 1958 by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad during his study of schizophrenia. However, it is an effect of brain function that is not limited to those with a form of psychosis, and is now commonly recognised in health as well. In schizophrenia, Conrad found that those who developed “apophany” started experiencing abnormal meanings in their daily life. For example, an individual might “see” various signs that they interpret as instructions meant only for them. They might be certain that an experience is proof that they are being watched, talked about, followed, or prepared for an event. In reality, these episodes are unconnected, have no pattern, and do not represent any form of sign or instruction. The delusions of schizophrenia can be all-consuming and sometimes terrifying. In healthy individuals, apophenia may not lead to such alarming consequences, but can still have a significant impact on one’s decision-making processes. For example, if you may sail through three green traffic lights in a row and see this as evidence that you are on a lucky streak. Because of this perceived pattern, you might confidently place a substantial bet on a horse race or football match. Your perception of your likely luck might therefore lead you to make a more reckless financial decision than if you had not noticed an auspicious pattern. This over-interpretation of patterns in healthy individuals could be an evolutionary survival instinct. Our ancestors may have benefitted from pattern interpretation as part of everyday life. For example, upon hearing a rustling in the trees behind them, they could either assume that the noise was due to the wind or a predator. Fleeing because they assumed there was a predator could save their life, and there would be no harm done if the assumption turned out to be wrong. Conversely, assuming the rustling was due to the wind could have put their life at risk. Believing a false positive over a false negative could, therefore, increase our chances of survival. From fun imagery to financial risk Mild apophenia is common and occurs in many domains such as finance, arts, and politics. Although it is not usually dangerous, apophenia can lead to risky behaviours or wrong beliefs about the meaning of a pattern. Here are some areas where you may encounter apophenia: Visual illusions. Have you ever seen non-existent images in clouds, dirt, toast, or household objects? For example, you might see a phoenix in the clouds, a man in the moon, or a face in your sandwich. Pareidolia is a common form of apophenia that involves imagery. For some people, these images become signs of something significant, such as a message from a loved one or a sign of something yet to come. The artist Salvador Dali experimented with pareidolia to create paintings in which faces would be recognised, despite the painting breaking the mould of what a face truly looks like. Financial decisions. In 2017, psychologists Zack W. Ellerby and Richard J. Tunney investigated how we make decisions. They reported that those who notice an illusory pattern may start to believe that the outcome of an event is not determined by chance, but instead by previous outcomes or choices. This can lead an individual to make a choice based on probability matching, rather than by selecting the choice with the highest probability of being successful. For instance, gamblers might start to believe that a win is coming because they see a pattern in lottery numbers, the roulette wheel or on the races. If they make two small wins in a row, this pattern may create the strong belief that they will certainly have a third win. This could lead one to place a large bet, which would be a risky financial decision based on a perceived pattern. The same can be true of trading decisions or business investments. Political theories. By weaving together various signs or coincidences, an irrational set of beliefs can turn into a conspiracy theory. For example, at the height of the pandemic, some individuals believed that the government had an ulterior motive for locking down the population. Psychologists hypothesised that finding a pattern, and therefore a conspiracy theory, to explain the government’s policies was a coping mechanism for those who felt their power or safety was under threat. Believing a conspiracy theory, however, can lead people to shun scientific evidence and make poor choices. Mental health. Occasionally, apophenia can be a precursor to delusional thoughts. Finding meaning in something random was described by researchers as an important factor in the formation of paranormal and delusional beliefs, and has been found to be implicated in vulnerability to schizophrenia. The balance between embracing and managing apophenia Dali showed that apophenia can be an exciting vehicle for discovering illusory patterns that could feed you creativity. However, it is important to embed strategies that will prevent you from making risky decisions or acting on erroneous beliefs because of apophenia. To avoid the pitfalls of apophenia, you must first pay attention to any biased assumptions you make when faced with false patterns. For example, three green lights in a row will not have any connection to your chance of winning the lottery that weekend. Secondly, work on accepting that not everything happens for a reason. Everyone has highs and lows in life, and there may not be any obvious cause for this. You are more likely to be successful in the long run by making rational decisions based on the available evidence, rather than making choices based upon perceived signs from the universe. Finally, perform your own research. If you think a horse might win the grand national because you saw its name appear several times in unrelated situations, do some fact-finding before you place a bet. Compared to following so-called “signs” from the universe, your own research will give you a far more realistic idea of the risk ratios. Apophenia can help you to think more creatively, but big decisions should be made only when the facts are clear. If several signs suggest that you should leave your job and start your own business, it can be very exciting. However, be critical of your thought processes, and give yourself time to assess the reality of the patterns you perceive. If, after doing plenty of market research, creating financial projections or even starting the side-business alongside your day job, you find that this new venture shows signs of being successful, then it might be time to embrace it. Although apophenia may have an evolutionary basis, placing belief in a perceived pattern could lead you to make riskier decisions. To protect yourself from the drawbacks of apophenia, pay attention to biased thoughts, accept that not everything happens for a reason, and ensure you fully research your options before you commit to a decision. The post The dangers of apophenia: not everything happens for a reason 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 achieve more without sacrificing our mental health. Nunzio Martinello is the Founder and CEO at Akiflow, a powerful tool that allows you to consolidate all the apps you use into one place so you can block time for your tasks and see everything you need to get done in your calendar. In this interview, we talked about the power of building a single source of truth for your productivity and time management workflows, how to deal with large amounts of incoming information, how to protect your time and avoid distractions by blocking “focus mode” sessions in your calendar, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Nunzio, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. We often waste lots of valuable time on unproductive tasks. Why do you think that is? Being productive has become more and more complicated. With more than ten apps on average, our workspace is getting bigger, and our to-dos are often scattered between project management apps, notes, calendars, etc. Communication apps are often misused and are a constant distraction. Tasks keep coming from multiple sources throughout the day, and prioritizing and planning them properly is a non-stop job that we often fail at. Even with a consolidated task list, it is very tough to be realistic about how much work you can accomplish without a calendar that provides context on how much time we have in a day at work. And I could list a dozen more reasons why it’s getting so hard to sit and focus on the right thing to do. After years of trying all possible tools, methodologies, and automation to be productive, I figured out that no app was actually helping in keeping myself organized. How does Akiflow address these challenges? First of all, Akiflow is a single source of truth. All your tasks from multiple apps and calendars are consolidated via API, in real-time. We built a bunch of features, such as the Command Bar to make capturing a new task blazingly fast. Organizing, prioritizing, and planning activities is much faster with our keyboard shortcuts and the unified tasks and calendars view. We believe in time blocking, so we made tasks and calendars interact in the best possible way. A task can be added to the calendar for visual planning, it can block time and our smart notifications will help keep you on track and focused throughout the day. We then added a lot of features to make repetitive actions faster and easier, like sharing availability or joining calls. So far our users reported at least one hour of time saved per day, and that’s the metric we are most proud of. One hour each day is a lot of saved time! How does Akiflow work, exactly? Most people start their day by checking their outstanding conversations in their email inbox or Slack from mobile or desktop. There are two types of conversations: those that can be answered right away and those that generate a task and can be saved to go into Akiflow. Once they are done, they open Akiflow, where they find all their tasks coming from their conversations, their PM tools, or tasks added from their phone. Sometimes, a user might find interesting articles online, or some ideas come up. They hit opt+space and use the command bar to add them to the Inbox. They can also assign labels, plan, or snooze for later, all of these actions helping them to get organized even further. At this point, they open their “Today” page, where they find their schedule of the day next to their calendar. Some tasks might have been added to the calendar and locked to ensure no one can book a meeting during their focused time. This helps make time for tasks, being mindful that time is limited and results in better planning. They can adjust their schedule by considering new “urgent” tasks from their Inbox, and then they are ready to start working. As the day goes on, Akiflow sends notifications on what they should be working on as soon as they need based on the calendar events and tasks. That sounds like a powerful workflow. Can you tell us a bit more about your integrations? Nowadays, tasks come from so many different tools that the only way to be well organized and prioritize them properly is to consolidate them in a single app. Unfortunately this activity is very time-consuming and happens multiple times a day. That’s why we built API integrations to do it automatically. Tasks assigned to you on project management platforms are automatically added to your Inbox. For example, with one click you can turn a Slack message or an email into a task in Akiflow. At the moment, we have built nine native integrations, as well as Zapier which allows our user to import tasks from more than a thousand different apps. With so much incoming information, one of the biggest challenges for knowledge workers is to stay organized… I agree! Just bringing in tons of information would not be a good solution. That’s why we added a lot of features like labels and folders, to organize tasks into projects, priority management, external linked content and more. Akiflow makes it very easy to organize your inbox with flexible sorts and filters. We recently added a powerful search feature to quickly find events, tasks, people, and email addresses.  We also made sure to make it the fastest possible experience. We have a keyboard shortcut for every action and a Command Bar to make the whole experience easier and faster. Another big struggle for knowledge workers is distractibility. How does Akiflow tackle this? First of all, not having to jump between different apps such as calendars and task lists helps to avoid distractions. Every time a user works on “imported” content, we send the user straight back to that specific item, which means that you don’t have to go through your email Inbox or Slack app — the most distracting places in your workspace — to check the messages you saved. We also provide a focus mode, to help commit to a single activity and avoid distractions. I personally believe that locking a task in the calendar is a great way to protect your time and to avoid being distracted by colleagues, who are now informed that you are in the middle of your focused time. What kind of people use Akiflow? Clearly, the way that people work has changed in recent years. In the modern workspace,  everybody feels busy. Everybody is working hard and trying to balance their professional, social, and personal lives. Our user base varies quite a bit but is mostly founders, managers, and autonomous workers who have to juggle operational and administrative projects and keep up with their deadlines. Akiflow is for all those looking to organize their routines and schedules without spending too much time on it. What about you… How do you personally use Akiflow? I use Akiflow to keep up with my personal and professional lives. For example, I like to create events for those habits that I do every day, such as going to the gym and having dinner at a fixed time. By doing so, such habits stand out from the other tasks and have their own time blocked on my calendar. As CEO of a startup, my tasks vary between operational and administrative, so I like to set some recurrent tasks for those little things that I have to do constantly but easily forget amidst bigger commitments. Pulling tasks from as many tools as possible also comes in handy, as sometimes someone will tag me on a Notion or Slack comment and I could miss it if not for Akiflow creating tasks about it. And finally… What’s next for Akiflow? We are going to release our mobile apps soon and we’ll add even more integrations! The ability to capture tasks from multiple apps and devices, and always access your to-do list is critical to provide a solid solution. Right after, we’ll work on improving the way people interact and collaborate with each other. Alongside all that, we want to add AI capabilities to the platform to organize and plan tasks and ultimately optimize the user’s to-do list and schedule. Rather than replace the activities of a knowledge worker, we believe that AI and machine learning can help people to accomplish tasks and empower them every day to achieve more. Thank you so much for your time, Nunzio! Where can people learn more about Akiflow and give it a try? You can learn more about Akiflow’s features on our blog and start a free trial on our website. You can also follow us on Instagram and Twitter where we publish content around productivity and the future of work. The post Control your time to free your mind with Nunzio Martinello, founder of Akiflow appeared first on Ness Labs.

We consume an inordinate amount of information, whether it’s blog posts, podcasts, social media content, online videos — a constant stream of data and claims we need to process and assess. When you are pressed for time, how can you quickly tell the difference between a strong argument and a weak argument, and why does it matter? Some weak arguments are more obvious than others. Displays of certitude with little substance are often a tell-tale sign. Michel de Montaigne, one of the most prominent philosophers of the French Renaissance, wrote: “He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.” But other weak arguments can be disguised behind a cloak of seemingly sound statements. For instance, the progression from one point to another seems logical up to a point, but breaks down before managing to provide sufficient support for the conclusion. Let’s have a look at how you can quickly spot these, especially when you need to make a quick judgment. The nature of a weak argument Not all bad arguments are weak in nature. An argument can be bad because it is invalid. A classic example is solving a mathematical equation: if you made a mistake in the proof, it would not be considered “weak”, it would simply be invalid. Invalid arguments are often easier to spot because you just need to look for logical errors in the deductive process. A bad argument can also be strong, but built on false premises. For instance, “Playing video games leads to violent behavior. This person plays a lot of video games, and therefore, they are likely to exhibit violent behavior.” The argument is strong, but it’s still bad, because the premise that playing video games is linked to violence is not true. So what exactly is a weak argument? You need two ingredients. Inductive reasoning. The argument should move from specific observations to broad generalizations. Uncertain premise. The specific observations used to build the argument should either have a low probability or be based on personal opinions rather than facts. Even if the argument sounds logical, the conclusions follow neither with certainty nor with high probability, and it means you are faced with a weak argument. Here is an example of weak argument: “Charlie is a woman. Some women like poetry. Therefore, Charlie likes poetry.” In this case, the premise “some women like poetry” has a low or unclear probability, so the argument is weak. Or the weak argument can be based on a personal opinion rather than a fact: “Charlie is a woman. Most women hate mathematics. Therefore, Charlie hates mathematics.” You may not always have the time to apply all the mental gymnastics to figure out whether an argument is strong or weak, but luckily there are some mental models you can apply to quickly analyze arguments, especially when consuming longer pieces of content. How to quickly spot weak arguments While philosophers have devised many methods to evaluate the quality of arguments, there are three critical thinking tools you can use to quickly distinguish a weak argument from a strong argument. Look for arguments using the “surely” operator. In his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett explains: “The word surely is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument (…) It marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will be sure about.” While it’s not always an indicator for a weak argument, it is still a sign that you need to consider the statement with healthy skepticism. This works with similar words such as obviously, evidently, etc. Compare the conclusion of the argument to a coin toss. If you are better off throwing a coin to know if the conclusion is true, the argument is weak. For instance: “About 50% of humans I met are female. Charlie is human. Therefore, Charlie is female.” In this case, even if the premise is true, you only have 50% chance for the conclusion to be true — you may as well toss a coin! Any argument based on a premise with a low or uncertain probability would not pass the coin toss test, and can be safely classified as a weak argument. Map the argument onto the pyramid of disagreement. In his essay How to Disagree, Paul Graham places types of argument into a seven-point hierarchy going from weakest to strongest. The weakest type of argument is name-calling, followed by Ad Hominem. Graham writes: “An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. It might actually carry some weight. For example, if a senator wrote an article saying senators’ salaries should be increased, one could respond: Of course he would say that. He’s a senator. This wouldn’t refute the author’s argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case. It’s still a very weak form of disagreement, though. If there’s something wrong with the senator’s argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn’t, what difference does it make that he’s a senator?” The hierarchy of disagreement can help you spot weak arguments. The “surely” operator, the coin toss test, and the hierarchy of disagreement are three simple tools to add to your thinking toolbox. Use them whenever you are reading a long argumentative essay to quickly spot potential weak arguments, or at least to know that your alarm bells should go off and that you should tread with healthy caution. The post Weak arguments and how to spot them appeared first on Ness Labs.

Of course, we all have negative thoughts from time to time. After all, our thought processes are affected by what we experience around us, and it’s normal to experience both good and bad times. However, when negative thinking becomes the norm, it can contribute to mental health problems including social anxiety, low self-esteem, and even depression. To avoid falling into that pattern, let’s explore the science of negative thinking and how you can develop a more mindful relationship to your thoughts. The science of negative thinking Our thought processes are intimately connected to the way we feel. When you’re feeling content, your thoughts tend to reflect this. In times of happiness, you may be more satisfied with your career progress, perceive your personal relationships as more secure, or have a better body image. Conversely, if you’re anxious or unhappy, you may notice that negative thoughts start to emerge. This could include feeling stressed about work, worrying about your appearance, or questioning the loyalty of your friends. In the 1970s, psychologist Aaron Beck theorised that negative thought patterns, which he labelled as “negative schemas”, reinforced negative emotions. In his book Cognitive Therapy, Beck explained: “A central feature of the theory is that the content of a person’s thinking affects their mood.” It’s an endless loop: when you’re already feeling anxious or depressed, succumbing to negative thought patterns is unfortunately likely to worsen the way you feel. Beck’s work has been cited frequently in the last fifty years, including by psychologist Leigh Goggins and colleagues, who stated that “negative interpretative bias” could be a factor in maintaining the continuation of a depressed mood. Furthermore, research suggests that amongst university students, automatic thoughts were strongly correlated with self-esteem. If you regularly experience negative thoughts, this cognitive distortion can sadly worsen an already poor mental health, leading to low mood, poor self-esteem, and anxiety. To make things worse, a bias towards negative thinking will increase the likelihood that you’ll spend time ruminating on mistakes or dwelling on things that didn’t go as well as you had hoped. Negativity bias, or the propensity to focus on negative experiences, can cloud your judgement. Decisions will appear more complex than they truly are, which will make it harder to know how to handle difficult situations. Depression and negative cognitions have a reciprocal link in which one worsens the other, and vice versa. With both factors present, a vicious cycle is set in motion. Learning how to recognise and manage negative thoughts could therefore be the key to breaking this cycle of poor mental health, as well as helping you to avoid the pitfalls of negativity bias. The principles of managing negative thoughts We all have negative thoughts, but certain principles have been shown to be beneficial in managing how often they occur, as well as helping to reduce the impact a negative thought might have. First you need to recognise negative thinking when it arises. Automatic negative thoughts often coexist with poor mental health. In some, they will have been present for many years, and recognising them can take some time. When a situation triggers a thought, pay attention to it. Negative thoughts might include: “I am going to fail at this interview”,  “I will never lose weight”, “No one cares about me”, etc. Did you notice how all of these are all-or-nothing, catastrophizing thoughts? Once you are confident in recognising negative thoughts when they arise, you can begin to interrogate your automatic thinking patterns. Rather than allowing a negative thought to control your emotions, ask yourself if the thought is truthful or helpful. If the negative thought provides no value, it’s time to shift your focus by rewiring your thought patterns. It can be tempting to try to force positive thoughts in the hope that they might replace negative ones. However, managing negative thinking involves transmuting our thoughts rather than replacing them. This process requires you to change the way you respond to your negative thoughts, as well as controlling how much impact they have. Let’s have a look at some practical ways to apply these principles. How to transmute your negative thoughts Negative thought patterns can become ingrained. But you can adopt simple strategies to recognise and detach from those negative schemas, making them less influential on your emotions. This in turn may help to break the endless loop of low mood, anxiety and low self-esteem. 1. Create distance from your thoughts. Pay attention to your automatic thoughts and start to label them as subjective thoughts. For example, you may say out loud or internally: “I’m having the thought that I am no good at my job” or “I’m having the thought that I am all alone.” Labelling your thoughts in this way will help you to detach from the critical inner voice that makes a distorted thought seem like the truth. Similar to a meditation practice, this is a way to merely observe the thought, rather than actively engage with it. 2. Start a thought diary. Journaling in a thought diary is a great way to manage negative thinking. Write down the date, the time, the event that triggered an emotion, and the resulting negative thought. In his book, psychiatrist Dr Daniel Siegel explains that you need to “name it to tame it.” Being able to name your emotions and the resulting thought will help you to understand the relationship between external triggers and internal beliefs. 3. Use de-catastrophizing techniques. Negative thinking often leads to catastrophizing. If making a mistake leads you to believe that your worst-case scenario is likely to happen, de-catastrophizing can prevent a spiral of negative thinking. You may find it helpful to ask yourself: What am I worried about? Is it likely that my worry will come true? What is the worst that could happen if my worry did come true? If my worry comes true, what is most likely to happen? Despite my worry, am I likely to be ok in one week (or month, year, and so on)? Once recognised, negative thoughts can be managed to reduce the impact on your emotional wellbeing. This in turn will break the cycle of negative thinking. By paying attention to your thoughts and interrogating their validity you can prevent cognitive distortions from skewing your beliefs and impacting your mental health. The post The psychology of negative thinking appeared first on Ness Labs.

A few weeks ago, I was having dinner with fellow founders, and I learned about a productivity method that’s deceptively simple but incredibly powerful: the TEA framework, which stands for time, energy, and attention. This approach feels appealing because it is rooted in essential human principles, rather than creating the artificial need for a complex productivity system. It may seem obvious that we need time to produce any work, that we need energy to sustain our effort, and that we need attention to focus on the work. But, somehow, we sometimes get so obsessed with systems that we forget about those three fundamental pillars of productivity. While the core tenets of the TEA framework are easy to grasp, it has far-reaching implications for the way you live and work. The three pillars of productivity The TEA acronym was coined by entrepreneur Thanh Pham, host of the The Productivity Show podcast. After studying many productivity systems, he saw the need for a simpler, more holistic framework, comprised of three key pillars: Time. It all starts with the way you manage your schedule, your priorities, and how you invest your time — not only the quantity of time you devote to certain tasks, but the quality of this time. For instance, some time investment today may save you lots of time tomorrow. Energy. Your mind and your body are tools that need fuel. Deep work requires mental and physical energy. No mental and physical fuel, no meaningful productivity. Attention. To direct your attention, you need to know what your goals are. Then, you have to sustain your attention by staying focused on the goal and by avoiding distractions. Any of the three pillars missing, and your productivity and well-being at work will suffer. If you have energy and attention, but not enough time, you will feel overwhelmed. Lots of time and attention, but not enough energy, and you’ll end up exhausted. Finally, lots of time and energy, but not enough attention, and you’ll be distracted. You need all three pillars to be productive without sacrificing your mental health. Some people have expanded the framework and named it TEAM instead to account for the relationship between motivation and productivity, but I would argue that motivation is a factor of your mental and physical energy. The more motivated you are, the more energy you will have to tackle your goals. Conversely, if you feel demotivated, you are likely to experience low energy levels. How to apply the TEA framework of productivity The TEA framework is simple but has implications for many areas of your life and work. In essence, it boils down to three principles: Don’t spend your time, invest your time. What can your present self do for your future self? Answering this question is a great way to decide how to invest your time. For instance, you’ll find that scrolling on social media and revenge bedtime procrastination are probably not it. Instead, you could automate some tedious tasks, or book one full afternoon to record videos in a batch, or plan a trip to visit fellow founders in other cities and learn from them. But don’t overkill it. If you suffer from time anxiety, it may be tempting to try and always invest your time in a directly meaningful way. But idleness can also be a way to invest your time, letting your mind wander to let your imagination run wild and generate new, fresh ideas in the process. Fuel your body and your mind. Whether it is the food you eat, the amount of sleep you get, or the content you consume, make sure to give your body and your mind enough energy. Cook yourself healthy meals (or buy some healthy ready-made dishes if you’re not into cooking), don’t cut down on sleeping, nourish your mind with thought-provoking content and consolidate your ideas with journaling… There are many ways to sustain your levels of energy. Again, sometimes, it means doing absolutely nothing — which may not feel productive, but will recharge your batteries for later, better, more enjoyable work. Plan for distraction. If you find it hard to stay focused, don’t fret: it’s completely normal. Our mind is designed to be distracted, to keep on scanning the room around us for new information — or potential danger. Instead of beating yourself up, try to plan your work around your goals and triggers. If your goal is to write a report for an upcoming meeting, you will need a few hours of uninterrupted work. What triggers could get in the way of your focus? Is it your phone, chatty colleagues? Adapt your workspace to minimize these distractions, whether it’s leaving your phone in another room, blocking distracting apps, or locking yourself up in a meeting room with a “do not disturb” post-it note. Again, these principles may sound obvious, but it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Before you start studying complex productivity systems, consider improving the way you manage your time, your energy, and your attention by applying the TEA framework of productivity. As often, self-reflection is a powerful tool to track your progress and make sure you apply these ideas in a thoughtful way. The post The TEA framework of productivity: managing your time, energy, and attention appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help be more productive without sacrificing our mental health. Francesco D’Alessio is the creator of Bento, a methodology that limits you three tasks per day for better prioritisation. The best way to apply the methodology is to download the app, which is available on iOS and soon on Android. In this interview, we talked about how to design your workflows to balance your energy levels, how limits can help you achieve more, the biggest challenges in personal productivity, why we should be more intentional with our to-do lists, how to go from task overload to true focus, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Francesco, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges people face when managing their productivity? Thank you to everyone at Ness Labs for having me. Personally, I think one of the biggest challenges with productivity right now is prioritising tasks. For knowledge workers, the tasks we assign ourselves are either overreaching or under-whelming, leaving us feeling unachieved by the end of the day.  We add more and more to our lists, naturally without considering the value of each task, this overwhelm can lead to burnout, workplace stress, and a lack of success at the end of your day. This can then compound further, having an impact on your next day’s productivity too. It can turn into a really destructive pattern. Introducing better, more systematic ways to select your tasks with Bento, we hope will change the approach many knowledge workers use to accomplish their most important tasks. Our goal is to help you select more intentional tasks.  Many people have tried to tackle these challenges. What makes Bento different? Bento isn’t just an app, but a methodology. Our key objective is to combine healthy, mindful practices to build a framework first, then an app second. You can use Bento anywhere — though, of course, we want you to do it with the Bento app, as we’ve built it to be the single best place to implement the method. Another big challenge we face day-to-day is balancing energy levels. Many apps that offer a more intentional approach fail to address managing energy alongside workflow elements. With  Bento you can apply simple strategies that order your tasks based on your energy that can be tailored with each box you create. Our vision is that limits can help you accomplish your most meaningful tasks. That’s why Bento has a “3×7 limit” — it limits you to three tasks (one large, one medium, one small) and seven boxes in total. Seven Bento boxes is plenty to build your own Bento for a week of tasks. Was there an “aha” moment that convinced you to Bento into the world? Bento was born from a pain point I saw with many people’s experiences through reading comments, speaking to people in offices, and my own love for everything in Japanese culture.  It was only in early 2021 that I decided to pop my developer friends Karl and Robin a message to see if they were interested in collaborating together to build an app. Many late night calls for the next year then helped us produce a beautiful application and thoughtful methodology, which was a really fulfilling experience for all of us. Okay, so let’s say I have made my Bento for the day. What do I “eat” first? Once you have your three tasks ready you apply a workflow. A workflow is very simply the order in which tasks are completed, with the goal of balancing your energy levels. You can choose one of the three workflows: Eat That Frog is taken from the classic productivity book of the same name by Brian Tracey — with this workflow, you focus on your most largest task first, move onto a medium task, and finish with your small task. Climb The Summit is a balanced approach to your day. You begin your day with a medium-energy task, moving to the biggest task, and finishing with your small task. Slow Burn is perfect for slow-starters to the day. You begin with your smallest task, and then move onto a more demanding task, gradually working your way towards the largest task, which is great for afternoon peaks of energy.  We designed Bento to be flexible, so you can assign a workflow to a box each time you create one, perfect for an ever-changing energy level you might face. That sounds like an incredibly simple and powerful method. But, let’s be honest: even with the best of planning and intentions, we often get distracted. Distraction is something everyone faces, sadly not one of us has escaped it. Whilst it isn’t impossible to remove distractions, inside of Bento, we designed our focus experience around the concept Cal Newport introduced in “Deep Work” — a classic productivity read about the value of limiting distractions. Bento’s one-task focus mode helps you hone into a single  task at a time. The goal behind this is to block the view of every other task and to focus on your one primary goal. A significant challenge with task overload is the element of exposure to what’s next. If you eliminate this by removing the other tasks on your list, you can only direct your mind’s attention to your true focus target. A subtle distraction that gets overlooked is context switching. One-task focus also reduces the occurrences of context switching that commonly come from just seeing your other tasks on your list. So, should people fully switch to Bento and forget about their current to-do lists? Short answer: No, Bento complements existing applications. We believe Bento is a layer you can add to your existing tools and use Bento as the focus framework for getting less done. In the next few weeks, we’ll be introducing the Bento Method course — a framework and guide on how to apply the exact framework to the tools you use everyday. This will allow people to use Bento where they see best, though we still maintain that the Bento app is the best place to apply the Bento Methodology. Looking forward to the course! What kind of people use Bento? Right now, we’re seeing a lot of productivity folks using it alongside their existing tools, thanks to the nature of Bento complementing apps. From our beta testing, we actually discovered that Bento can be used in a wide variety of situations. For example, we spoke with a dad who started using Bento with his daughter who has autism, and found that the timer system and focus on three tasks helped her train her focus — this is something we’re eager to explore more.  The methodology and app are so wide reaching that we’re finding many people who suffer from workplace stress, task overwhelm, or prioritisation struggles getting huge value from Bento, many of whom are knowledge workers. What about you… How do you personally use Bento? Bento is one of those concepts that can be layered over whatever you use. Right now, I’m using Bento daily as I narrow down what matters in my own Sunsama account. Obviously, things are added to my backlog throughout the day, but my Bento box helps me to stay focused on what matters if all else fails. When I complete my Bento box items, I tend to feel a sense of success by accomplishing those intentional tasks I laid out the night before. And finally… What’s next for Bento? Our next goal for Bento is Android, which is set for very soon. In between, we’ll launch the official Bento course with templates for existing applications like Notion, ClickUp and many more to offer people a way to implement the Bento methodology inside of their existing experiences. After that, our goal is to create Bento on more devices, allow synchronisation, and explore how Bento can be suggestive to working more mindfully and effectively on tasks. Thank you so much for your time, Francesco! Where can people learn more about Bento and give it a try? Thank you for sharing this folks, we can’t wait for people to try Bento. Bento is available to download on iOS, and there’s a waitlist for Android. You can also follow our journey on Twitter. The post Unlocking the power of less with Francesco D’Alessio, creator of Bento appeared first on Ness Labs.

You are likely to spend around 90,000 hours at work over your lifetime. If that number doesn’t seem big already, that’s ten years of your life. Depending on where you work, you may have little agency over the design of your workplace — hospital workers and flight attendants are rarely consulted when it comes to sustainability practices — but, in many cases, we do have the ability to make our workplace more sustainable. Whether it’s changing your own habits or convincing the people you work with to make more sustainable choices at work, small changes can have a big impact. Let’s have a look at the benefits of a sustainable workplace, and some simple steps you can take at work to be more mindful of our planet. Save money, save the planet First, why would you want to make your workplace more sustainable? Beyond doing what’s right for our planet and for future generations, designing a sustainable workplace has many practical, and often immediate, benefits: Reduced costs. It may sound obvious, but saving energy will reduce your bill, purchasing second-hand furniture will reduce the cost of decorating your office, and taking public transportation or cycling to the office will save you money compared to using a car. Increased creativity. Upcycling an old desk you found at a thrift shop will require a lot more creativity than buying a new one and following the three-step assembling instructions. Whether it’s to reuse materials, increase the energy efficiency of a project, or figure out how to increase the lifespan of the products you use at work, making your workplace more sustainable often requires creative thinking. Better work satisfaction. This is especially true for bigger companies. The HP Workforce Sustainability Survey reports that 61% of office workers say sustainable business practices are a “must-have” for companies, and a paper suggests that improved sustainability standards can reduce annual quit rates. The good news is: anyone can contribute to designing a more sustainable workplace, whether it’s just you working from home, or if you’re working from an office with your team. Three ways to design a sustainable workplace Of course, making your workplace more sustainable is not about applying a few quick fixes. As Andrew Cameron writes in the journal Strategic Direction: “This is not about a one‐off conference or a newsletter, it is about permanently changing the way decisions are made and the way people work to enable the organization to function, in a different and ultimately more relevant way. You will know when you have succeeded when environmental and sustainability considerations are an instinctive part of the decision‐making process at all levels.” That being said, there are some easy wins that can help you get started. If you work as part of a team or in an office, these small changes can help spark conversations around workplace sustainability. And if you work on your own or at home, you may use these as a starter pack of sustainability practices, which can prompt you to research and improve the sustainability of other aspects of your workplace. 1. Use deforestation-free products Avoid printing documents as much as possible, and if you absolutely must, use deforestation-free paper. And no, that doesn’t necessarily mean recycled paper. A study published in Nature Sustainability shows limited benefits of recycled paper, and even indicates that if all paper was recycled, emissions could increase by 10%! This is because recycling paper relies more on fossil fuels and electricity from the grid compared to producing virgin paper. Maybe that will change and recycling paper will be increasingly powered by renewable energy, but for now, this is not the best way to make your workplace more sustainable. Instead, make sure the paper you use is FSC certified. FSC stands for Forest Stewardship Council. This is a certification confirming that the forest is being managed according to strict environmental, social and economic standards, preserving biological diversity and benefiting the lives of local people. The FSC certification is also helpful for other workplace products. For instance, you may want to check that your bamboo-based laptop stand comes from sustainably managed crops, instead of areas where the land has been specifically deforested to grow bamboo. 2. Save energy There is a direct connection between the amount of electricity you use at work and the environment. Electricity generation takes place in thermal power plants, which burn either fossil fuels, biofuels, or nuclear fuel to heat water and produce steam. When you consume less power, you reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released by power plants. Of course, you’re not expected to reduce your work hours so your computer uses less electricity — though taking more breaks is always a good idea — but there are small steps you can take that will have a big impact. For instance, LED bulbs use 70 to 90% less energy than incandescent bulbs. They also have a longer lifespan: up to 40 times longer than an incandescent bulb! There are other habits you can develop to save energy in the workplace, such as turning off appliances that are not in use, making sure your office is properly insulated instead of relying on the heater or air conditioner, and turning off the lights whenever you leave a room. 3. Go vintage Whether at home or in the office, a common mistake people make when designing a sustainable workplace is to buy more sustainable versions of items they already own. For instance, a new reusable water bottle, new storage containers, or new bamboo shelves to replace existing plastic shelves. Absolutely all new products require resources to produce and transport, whether they are labeled as sustainable or not. If your workplace already has an item that is working as intended, the most sustainable choice is to keep on using it instead of replacing it. When the item doesn’t do the job any more — maybe it’s broken and can’t be repaired — the second most sustainable choice is to purchase a second-hand replacement. This is of course more easily done at an individual level or for small teams, but if you can, it is worth going to a second-hand store, especially when it comes to purchasing office furniture. And vintage works for electronic devices too! French startup Back Market is valued at $5.7B valuation for its marketplace where people can buy refurbished devices without generating additional waste. It’s another good way to save money while making a sustainable choice. Small changes add up Individually, some of these changes may seem like they have a low impact on climate change, but they do add up when everyone chips in. By purchasing workplace products that don’t directly harm the environment and that are made in a socially irresponsible way, we can send a signal to companies manufacturing the products we use everyday at work and collectively encourage a shift towards more sustainable practices. By saving energy, we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. And by going vintage, we can avoid generating additional waste. Designing a sustainable workplace is also an opportunity to be more mindful about the way we work, and to have conversations about the impact we want to have and the legacy we want to leave. The post How to design a sustainable workplace at home and in the office 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 achieve their intellectual and creative ambitions. Kazuki Nakayashiki is the co-founder of Glasp, a social web clipper that allows users to share their highlights and notes as they read, without any back-and-forth between the web and a note-taking app. In this interview, we talked about the nature of human legacy, the knowledge isolation problem, serendipitous spaced repetition, social knowledge management and collective intelligence, learning in public, the impact of social accountability on note-taking, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Kazuki, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Glasp stands for “Greatest Legacy Accumulated as Shared Proof” — can you tell us more about what it means? Thank you so much for having me. I am a huge fan of Ness Labs and I am honored to be here today. First of all, we believe that one of the most noble pursuits is for people to learn, experience, and pass their knowledge on to future generations. The present in which we stand today is built on what our predecessors have built in the past. When we talk about legacy, it does not necessarily mean to leave a successful business or a lot of money behind. Of course, it is wonderful to be able to leave these things to future generations, but I don’t believe that these are the greatest legacies, in that not everyone can leave them behind. Instead, I believe that the greatest legacy is to live a courageous life. It is in the attitude of not being daunted by difficulties, not being overly pessimistic, and betting on the possibilities and hopes of humanity. And I believe this means leaving and weaving our knowledge, wisdom, and history for the next generation. However, even though we are standing on the shoulders of our predecessors, we do not know how or by whom all that knowledge was accumulated. Through Glasp, we want to empower people to leave, share, and weave the greatest legacy. Our mission is to democratize access to other people’s learning and experiences that they have collected throughout their lives. By doing so, we may be able to help others who may try to follow a similar path in the future.  This is an ambitious mission. Was there an “aha” moment that inspired you to build Glasp? I had a near-death experience at the age of 20 when I had a sudden subdural hematoma that paralyzed the left side of my body. My doctor at the time told me that I could have a cardiopulmonary arrest at any moment, and I was hospitalized and underwent emergency surgery. I remember the sense of fear and emptiness that welled up from the depths of my body, which words cannot express, as I was confronted with the reality that the normalcy of yesterday was suddenly taken away from me and that my existence might disappear from this world. Since that time, I have wanted to leave behind a legacy that would allow me to feel that I have made even a small contribution to the future of humanity — a legacy that would be the proof and meaning of my existence in this world. I do not know if what I leave behind is really useful to anyone. It is a matter of subjectivity. However, just as someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure, I believe that by leaving my learning and experiences behind, they can become useful to someone somewhere in the future. If you leave your knowledge, wisdom, and insight in a completely personal space, no one will be able to access it after you die. Given the fact that collective learning has made us humans smarter across generations, I think keeping knowledge in a silo is a huge loss for humanity as a whole. In other words, the problem we are addressing is the isolation of knowledge. The world is full of countless wonderful personal apps, but my near-death experience and the process of searching for the meaning of life led me to the current idea of Glasp. That’s incredibly inspiring, thank you so much for sharing Glasp’s origin story. How does Glasp work exactly? Glasp is a social web clipper that people can use to highlight and organize quotes and thoughts from the web without having to switch back and forth between screens, and access other like-minded people’s learning at the same time. You can get an idea of what Glasp is all about by looking at what our users are saying on the “Wall of Love” on the website. After breaking our mission into specific components, we decided to focus on the overlap between curation, knowledge management, and community. Some of the advice I recently received from Jeremy Brown on Twitter overlaps with these components, as well as with Michael Simmons’ ideas of public note-taking and learning in public. For curation, we currently offer a Chrome Extension and a Safari Extension, which, when installed, display a small popup like the Kindle’s highlighter when you select text, and will allow you to curate text that resonated with you. It allows for easy highlighting and note-taking without interrupting the reading experience. When reading a particular article, all highlights and notes for that article can be viewed from the right sidebar, and be easily copied and pasted into note-taking apps, markdown style. You can also add tags and comments, and see what others have highlighted on that website directly on the page. In terms of knowledge management, as you can see on my page, Glasp organizes your highlights and notes for you and allows you to filter by topic or full-text search, so you can easily access quotes, thoughts, ideas, and insights that you have found important in the past. The social nature of Glasp also allows you to access other people’s highlights and notes on your page (called “marginalia”), so you can build on others’ perspectives and deepen your knowledge. In the future, we plan to add a feature that will allow you to backlink your findings with your past highlights or those of others. I also believe that the uniqueness and fun of Glasp’s approach to knowledge management lie in its ability to resurface what you have learned. Spaced repetition is one of the most proven methods for remembering what you have read, but the sad reality is that reviewing flashcards is tedious and setting up the system is cumbersome. With Glasp, others interact with your highlights, which provides accidental and automatic opportunities for review. This is unique in that other curators resurface your highlights, and I think it is also interesting that the curators resurface the creator’s work. As for community, Glasp allows you to connect and learn from other people with similar interests through the learning byproduct: highlights and notes. Glasp’s home feed allows you to see what the people you are following are learning and what insights they have gained. You can also search content by topic, so you can see what friends, colleagues, influencers, and other people you trust or who share similar interests are learning. You can check each site’s top highlights and find your favorite authors as well. In particular, newsletter writers or content writers can share their learning process with Glasp (called “learning in public”). Deep engagement and direct feedback from audiences and followers can be a great way to get ideas and inspiration for their future content. Having learning partners is very inspiring and fun. Glasp can enhance one’s learning process by making the learning process social. For example, we are collaborating with the Month to Master learning cohort program run by Michael Simmons to help learners weave and share what they learned. When it comes to bookmarking and highlighting, a big challenge is that many people end up building a graveyard of random links they never end up actually learning from. How does Glasp address this challenge? As you say, too often we see the issue of saving random links leading to this dysfunction, and I think this is a problem that is not limited to bookmarking and highlighting, but to our information society in general. One important aspect is the difference between read-it-later apps and Glasp. There are two processes of information selection when we collect information. One is broad and shallow. The other is narrow and deep. The former is an area where the read-it-later apps show their strength as a place to store a vast amount of information that is of some interest, is relevant, or may be useful in the future, in place of your short-term working memory. The latter is an area where Glasp and other highlighter apps can show their strength as a place to store important information that has passed the primary sifting process and that you want to keep for a longer period. If the number of items to be stored is huge and their quality is not checked, it will be difficult to maintain, organize, and manage, and will most likely result in a graveyard of random links. Fortunately, Glasp’s user core action is not bookmarking, but the act of highlighting and leaving notes, so the action threshold for the user is not as light as for the bookmarking apps or read-it-later apps. Furthermore, the possibility that highlights and notes may be seen by others creates social accountability, so the threshold of action for the user is raised even higher. When you hear the word “highlight”, you probably associate it with education. Those familiar with education may know that research shows that highlighting is not a very effective learning technique. However, research also suggests that the probability of effective highlighting increases when moderate incentives and pressure are designed in. In other words, the pressure that someone might see your highlights works as a social accountability function, which can increase the likelihood of saving something better and more valuable to you. While some may argue that the volume of a person’s digital legacy may be reduced by this approach, we place more value on the insight, idea, emotion, and...

Every day, a new video goes “viral”, and an “infectious” idea starts spreading. Mental immunity is a psychological theory that is also known as cognitive immunology. With origins dating back 70 years, this field of research is based on the premise that not only is there an immune system for the body, but an immune system for the mind as well. People with a healthy mental immune system are more likely to detect misinformation. A strong cognitive immune system can also help spot bad ideas at an earlier stage, so you may avoid wasting time, energy or money. Let’s explore the concept of cognitive immunology, together with a list of strategies you can employ to help strengthen your mental immune system. A mental immune system The concept of mental immunity was formulated by Professor Andy Norman, director of the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. Despite the field of cognitive immunology being in its infancy, mental immunity research has deep roots dating back to the 1950s.  The mental immune system is believed to function in a similar way to the body’s physical immune system. The purpose of the physical system of immune cells is to detect pathogens including bacteria and viruses, so that they can be eradicated from our blood stream and organ systems before they have a chance to cause damage. Similarly, a healthy mental immune system will detect harmful or incorrect information that enters our mind, so that it can be recognised as such and then promptly rejected. In a paper about immunology’s theories of cognition, philosopher Alfred Tauber explained that developing an “immune self” requires us to actively distinguish between the self and the foreign, so that foreign information can be interrogated and potentially defended against. This way, the mental immune system sifts through ideas, information and other forms of external stimuli to identify, and therefore protect us from, the adverse outcomes associated with misinformation. The benefits of mental immunity Both factual information and misinformation have the potential to spread through the population far faster than ever before. We have access to constant, real-time updates from online news platforms, as well as information shared via online magazines, social media, and unregulated websites. While factual information is a great asset, unreliable information and the inability to spot bad ideas may lead to poor decision making. Professor Sander van der Linden from the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge published a study which showed that the public could be inoculated against misinformation regarding climate change. In the study, the publics’ cognitive immunity to misinformation was reinforced when they were given a pre-emptive warning about politically motivated attempts to spread misinformation on the human causes of global warming. The results showed that this was an effective way to strengthen their immunity to false information. In his 2021 book Mental Immunity, Professor Andy Norman explains that the immune systems of our minds can be strengthened against ideological corruption and mind parasites, which increases our capacity for critical thinking. This in turn helps us to spot and remove bad ideas before they can cause harm. Furthermore, developing greater cognitive flexibility allows us to change our minds faster when new, better-evidenced information is presented to us. In short, moving away from rigid thinking patterns improves our relationship with information and our resultant actions. How to strengthen your mental immune system You can increase your mental immunity by making your mind more resistant to misinformation, which will lead to better cognitive flexibility and decision making. To keep on using the same analogy, these strategies work in a similar way to vaccination: they support your mind in recognising the threat of bad ideas. 1. Build awareness of misinformation. Misinformation is spread for a variety of reasons. It can be passed on innocently, especially when shared from person to person in a general conversation. However, research suggests that the spread of false content can also occur more deviously for political gain or polarisation, to generate income for media outlets, as a personal or industrial form of propaganda, or as a result of social media algorithms. Remember that misinformation is common, that fake news is designed to appear genuine, and train yourself to immediately interrogate the information or data you are presented with. This will help make your mind more resistant to bad ideas. 2. Develop healthy meta-beliefs. A meta-belief is a belief that one holds following a thorough reasoning process or cognitive interrogation to check the validity of the belief. In their 2020 paper, Gordon Pennycook and colleagues explained that “theories of belief should take into account what people believe about when and how beliefs and opinions should change — that is, meta-beliefs.” The team found that people who were politically liberal were more likely to believe that opinions and beliefs should change according to evidence. Those who were religious, or held paranormal or conspiratorial beliefs, were less likely to agree that beliefs should change. Developing meta-beliefs strongly correlates with mental immunity. To strengthen your mental immune system, be prepared to assess and re-adjust previously held beliefs if new evidence comes to light. This way, your opinions are continuously being amended based on the latest evidence. 3. Practise self-reflection. When practising self-reflection, you should start to pay attention to your patterns of consumption. If this process of reflection indicates that you are drawn to the same news sources, or solely rely on influencers or social media platforms for your updates, your information diet may not be varied enough. For greater mental nourishment, diversify your information sources and dig deeper into the underlying research to fully understand whether you are unconsciously being sold misinformation. It can also be helpful to develop a note-making practice so you can capture your thoughts and consciously reflect on the content you consume. Mental immunity is an emerging theory and more research is needed. However, the initial investigations have shown that a strong mental immune system helps filter external information to avoid falling prey to false data or flawed ideas. This cognitive system can be strengthened by building your awareness of the rampant nature of misinformation, developing healthy meta-beliefs, and reflecting on your patterns of information consumption. Once reinforced, stronger mental immunity will allow you to promptly detect misinformation, reject plans that are unlikely to succeed, and increase your cognitive flexibility to quickly adapt when presented with new evidence. Definitely a concept worth experimenting with! The post How developing mental immunity can protect us from bad ideas 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 achieve more without sacrificing our mental health. Drew McCormack and ​​Alexander Griekspoor are the co-founders of Agenda, a date-focused note-taking tool that allows you to seamlessly plan and document your projects. In this interview, we talked about the nature of time, the delicate balance between design and simplicity, their just-in-time approach to resurfacing of notes, how to make sure formatting doesn’t get in the way of taking great notes, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Drew and ​​Alex, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Let’s start with a bit of a philosophical question. What’s your relationship with time? Trying to predict what will happen is fundamental to science, and for someone like me it is like candy to a toddler. When I was working as a physicist, time was often just a parameter in an equation that I was trying to solve. Dynamical systems like the weather and the stock market have always intrigued me, and I built a whole university career around that. The excitement of building a model or program that attempts to make a prediction, and then testing to see if it works, is hard to match. In my daily life, time feels more like a river, a constant stream. You look forward to something in the future, and before you know it, it belongs to the past, and you almost can’t grasp the anticipation you felt when it hadn’t happened yet. But I don’t look back too often, generally living in the now, with a vague and evolving idea of where I want to go in the future. Despite this complex relationship we have with time and how crucial it is in our daily lives, many tools solely focus either on documenting or planning — how is Agenda different? There are lots of note-taking apps around, and you can ask yourself: do we need another one? We felt there was that room, because none of the offerings have much of a relationship to time. It’s almost like your notes exist in a timeless vacuum, and yet you know yourself that each one has a logical temporal context. The note might be from the beginning of a project, or belong to that meeting on March 3rd when Joan joined the team. Many notes are not timeless, and you miss that context in most note-taking apps. That was the inspiration for Agenda — to add temporal context. Is this a note you are taking in a particular meeting on a particular date? Is it planning for the future? Or is it a record of what happened in the past? Agenda orders your project notes into a timeline, flowing from future to past, giving you that context. Notes usually begin in the future or present, and over time, flow back down the timeline to become breadcrumbs of the past. The timeline is really what makes Agenda unique in the note-taking world. Was there an “aha” moment when you decided to start building Agenda? The idea for Agenda came from my partner in crime, Alex. He was running his own software company, and spent a lot of time in meetings, as well as organizing a team of developers. He found that in his meetings, people would often forget what they wanted to discuss, or would come back after the meeting with “Oh, I meant to ask you…” To make things go smoother, he developed a system of taking notes. Alex would have one text file per project. He would enter new notes at the top of the file, and when he finished with one meeting, he would immediately create the note for the next meeting at the top. During the week, he would add anything that he thought needed to be discussed to that future meeting note.  When the meeting finally came around, he would locate the note at the top, and use it as the agenda for the meeting. Anything postponed during the meeting itself, or requiring a followup action, would be copied into a new note for the following meeting, and so forth. Alex has written a detailed recount of this here. This process worked great, but text files also have limitations, and Alex wanted to build a dedicated app. We have been friends and scientific colleagues for many years, and I was intrigued by the idea, and joined the team. I say “team”, but it really is just the two of us, with some intermittent help from others with design and programming tasks. Anyone who has ever tried Agenda will likely recognize the genesis of the idea in the app. Notes are organized into projects, which are equivalent to the plain text files Alex used before. By default, new notes appear at the top of the project timeline, and can be used for future planning.  As the items in the note are completed, the note becomes history, and you add a new note. If you need to check anything, you scroll down — back through history — and see why you decided to do what you did. Can you tell us a bit more about how Agenda works exactly? I mentioned the project timeline already, and that is directly inspired by Alex’s text files, but when you develop an application, you have the flexibility to add features not easily achieved purely with text. In Agenda, notes can have a date, but they can also be linked to an event in your calendar. You can also link tasks from a list to a reminder in Apple’s Reminder app. Our philosophy is to integrate with the existing apps you already use, rather than trying to build a kitchen sink app that does it all. Agenda is very much focussed on note-taking, but integrates with your calendar and other apps. One of the most important features of Agenda — and one that isn’t really possible to achieve with just text files — is an overview we call “On the Agenda”. You can flag any note as being on-the-agenda by simply clicking on an orange dot at the top. Once you do that, the note appears in an On the Agenda overview in the left sidebar. I use On the Agenda myself all the time. I keep notes there that are current, and which I want to access quickly. It might be a note for a meeting that day; a task checklist for a feature I am programming; or a recipe for the evening meal — anything I want to find quickly. And once something is no longer relevant, I take it off the agenda, knowing that if I need it, it is still there in the project. What also goes well beyond plain text files is the Agenda editor. It supports styles, so your notes have structure, as well as lists and checklists. I actually stopped using a todo app for my tasks, because I find it much faster and easier to use Agenda. I typically only add a linked reminder if I want to be reminded at a particular time to do something. You can add attached files and images to your notes too. One of the nice features of the new release, Agenda 14, is that you can now edit files in your notes. In the past, you could drag in an Excel file or PDF, but you couldn’t change it once it was in Agenda. With Agenda 14, you can double click on the attachment to open Excel, edit your spreadsheet, and save straight to the file in Agenda. Same with PDFs: open in Apple’s Preview, add some markup, and save changes directly to Agenda. Agenda also goes well beyond many note taking apps in terms of organizing, automation and searching. You can include tags in your notes, and link to outside resources or other notes. Agenda 14 improves upon this with backlinking, tag autocompletion, and a tag manager.  And for the real pro user, there are note templates and actions for inserting the date and other useful information. These allow you to build note content dynamically. You can even automate Agenda using x-callback URLs (macOS and iOS) and Shortcuts (iOS). That’s exciting. Many note-taking tools sacrifice design for the sake of functionality, but Agenda offers a beautiful note-taking experience. Can you tell us about your design process? The two of us have always had a strong focus on design in our apps. Alex has won several Apple Design Awards, which are like the Oscars of the app world, and Agenda won one in its first year. That success was largely thanks to our designer, Marcello Luppi. Marcello is also a long time friend who we knew from the scientific world, but who had transitioned into app design.  We originally began the project with no designer, and after around 6 months of programming, we showed what we had to some friends, and… They hated it! They didn’t understand the concept at all, and it looked like it had been designed by a couple of software engineers — go figure! We called in the help of Marcello, and he completely transformed the app, both visually and functionally, into the award winner it became. Marcello was so successful that Apple poached him away from us a year or so after we received the award. Marcello polished the whole appearance of the app, but one aspect we were determined to get right from the beginning was the text editor. There are lots of great markdown editors around today, where you edit plain text files with markdown formatting such as “# This is a heading”, that type of thing. We loved markdown for its ease of entry, but we thought it was a compromise to have that formatting in the final document. With Agenda, we wanted the best of both worlds. Why can’t you type “# This is a heading”, and have the text change instantly into an elegant bold heading style? Why do I have to see the # in my heading? We wanted Agenda notes to look and feel like real, well formatted documents, and that is what we have tried to achieve. In the current editor, you can type “# This is a heading”, and it will become a well-formatted heading. You can type “[ ] Bananas”, and it will turn into a checklist for your groceries. So you have the ease of entering markdown, but you end up with elegantly styled documents. And it goes much further than headings and lists. You can add tags, tables, links, and preformatted blocks, just by entering text. That sounds like such an elegant way to capture all sorts of notes. Now — a big challenge with many note-taking apps is the retrieval of older notes. How does Agenda...

Do you think of yourself as someone who is not creative? Creative work can be challenging, and many people lack confidence in their own ability. Psychologists have reported that being unsure, anxious or defeatist about your creative potential can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that hinders your performance. Creative self-efficacy is the internal belief that you have the ability to complete creative tasks effectively. If you can learn to leave behind the fixed mindset of “I am not a creative person”, you will be able to make more room for personal growth, exploration, and innovation. Believing in your creative potential The concept of self-efficacy was first coined by Dr Albert Bandura. Bandura closely studied the relationship between performance and belief in oneself. He noted that those who had a strong sense of efficacy, or belief in oneself, approached challenging tasks with the determination to succeed. People with high self-efficacy tend to set goals, to become deeply engrossed in the task, and to continue their efforts despite difficulties or setbacks. Rather than feeling threatened by a challenge, they approach it with the confidence that they are in control and will eventually master the task. Conversely, Bandura noticed that those who tend to back away from difficult tasks do so because of self-doubt and a fear of failure. With little determination to succeed, they are more likely to dwell on their perceived weaknesses. For people with low self-efficacy, obstacles can quickly lead to abandoning the task, compounding an internalised belief that they are incapable of succeeding. Creative self-efficacy is a specific form of self-efficacy that was first investigated by Dr Pamela Tierney and Dr Steven Farmer. The researchers described creative self-efficacy as “the belief one has the ability to produce creative outcomes”. The greater the belief in your own creativity, the more successful you will be in pursuing your creative goals. Tierney and Farmer also reported that creativity can be impacted by your confidence in managing the overall demands of your career. If you feel that you are capable of succeeding at work, then you are also more likely to demonstrate good creative performance within your role. The most interesting part is that although job self-efficacy is a predictor of confidence in your personal creative ability, creative self-efficacy is the greater predictor of your creative performance.  This is corroborated by the results of Dr Gay Lemons, who found that creative success is most greatly influenced by belief in one’s own ability, rather than by actual creative competence. As you can see, creative self-efficacy is a psychological attribute that greatly influences creative performance, with the potential to further what we can achieve. How to cultivate creative self-efficacy Learning how to believe in your own creative ability is as important, if not more so, than developing your creative skills. While it is important to practice and explore new creative skills, cultivating creative self-efficacy can have a great influence on your creativity. Here are some practical ways to cultivate your creative self-efficacy. 1. Develop a creative network. By building a strong professional network of people who are driven to produce excellent creative work, you can start imitating part of their creative self-efficacy to increase your own. Remember that creativity is not restricted to the arts. Everyday professional dilemmas can be solved creatively, whether they relate to project management, delivery of information, or organisation of a complex budget. Watch how your peers apply creative thinking to manage everyday tasks, and start emulating some of these patterns. 2. Get creative support. Identify people whose creative efforts are often successful, and ask whether you can work under their guidance. This could be a quick brainstorming session, a creative review, or just sharing some helpful resources. Support should go both ways: consider whether there is scope to offer your co-workers some of your time to help with their creative growth. 3. Cultivate creative autonomy. The professional freedom to expand on your basic duties and responsibilities can increase your creative self-efficacy. As a bonus, perceived autonomy also has a positive impact on our mood. Creative autonomy involves fostering a growth mindset and self-directed ways of working. If you are a manager, take a step back and try to avoid excessively supervising your team. Instead, make your team feel empowered to succeed via their own methods. Remember that your creativity is more closely linked to creative self-efficacy than to your actual creative competence. Beyond its immediate benefits, cultivating creative self-efficacy can help you feel more motivated, productive, and can be an opportunity to build a strong professional network. The post How to increase your creativity by cultivating creative self-efficacy appeared first on Ness Labs.

People think, learn, behave, and experience the world around them in many different ways. Some of this diversity is due to neurological differences. Neurodiversity refers to those variations in neurocognitive functioning. Let’s have a look at the origin of the term, and its usefulness in research and practice. A short primer on neurodiversity The term “neurodiversity” is relatively new: it was coined by social scientist Judy Singer in the late 1990’s in relation to autism, but has since come to encompass many other neurodevelopmental conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, dyscalculia, and more. People of standard neurodevelopmental and cognitive functioning are referred to as “neurotypical”, while “neurodivergent” is used to refer to people whose brain functions differ from what is considered standard — sometimes collectively referred to as neurominorities. Central to neurodiversity is the idea that naturally occurring variations in the human brain should be seen as differences rather than deficits. Some people consider neurodiversity to be related to the concept of biodiversity — a term you will mostly see being used for the purpose of advocating for the conservation of species. In the words of Dr Robert Chapman: “Proponents of the neurodiversity movement […] challenge the pathologization of minority cognitive styles and argue that we should reframe neurocognitive diversity as a normal and healthy manifestation of biodiversity.” There is currently no definitive list of neurodevelopmental conditions  that should be included under the umbrella term of neurodiversity, and some researchers even advocate for an entirely different definition that doesn’t rely on contrasting neurocognitive differences between individuals. As Dr Nancy Doyle explains: “A definition has emerged for psychologists and educators which positions neurodiversity within-individuals as opposed to between-individuals.” The spiky cognitive profile of neurodivergence (adapted from Doyle, 2020) She adds: “The psychological definition refers to the diversity within an individual’s cognitive ability, wherein there are large, statistically-significant disparities between peaks and troughs of the profile, known as a ‘spiky’ profile. A neurotypical is thus someone whose cognitive scores fall within one or two standard deviations of each other, forming a relatively ‘flat’ profile, be those scores average, above or below.” It’s important to keep in mind that neurodiversity has no official definition, and the idea does not align with the usually discrete approach to diagnosis used in medical practice — the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders includes more than 150 discrete diagnoses. However, it doesn’t need to be excessively controversial. Two complementary research models Because the concept of neurodiversity has initially emerged as part of the social sciences, there is currently no consensus within the scientific community as to how to use it in clinical contexts. That’s partly because the clinical model and the social model consider disability from two different perspectives. While the clinical model seeks to cure or manage disabilities, the concept of neurodiversity is based on the social model of disability, which identifies systemic barriers to the social integration of people with functional differences. The two models have their respective critics, but they are not incompatible. In different ways, both clinical research and neurodiversity research seek to contribute scientific evidence to reduce impairments experienced by neurodivergent people: clinical research focuses on treatment, and neurodiversity research focuses on adapting environments to the diverse needs of individuals. In a comment published in the The Lancet Psychiatry, Dr Edmund Sonuga-Barke and Dr Anita Thapar​​ write: “Rather than a complete reliance on disorder-based concepts and related treatment approaches, we can see many advantages of incorporating the concept of neurodiversity alongside mainstream research and clinical practice.” “Indeed, there is no contradiction between traditional approaches that look to give neurodiverse individuals additional resources through clinical treatment and neurodiverse approaches that look to adapt environments and transform neurotypical attitudes: both approaches are beneficial and together will improve the lives of neurodiverse people.” In addition, there is growing support for a “transdiagnostic” approach that cuts across traditional diagnostic categories. Researchers from the University of Cambridge explain: “Removing the distinctions between proposed psychiatric taxa at the level of classification opens up new ways of classifying mental health problems, suggests alternative conceptualizations of the processes implicated in mental health, and provides a platform for novel ways of thinking about onset, maintenance, and clinical treatment and recovery from experiences of disabling mental distress.” Instead of — often artificially — imposing categories onto a multidimensional and complex space, a transdiagnostic approach allows clinicians to account for the massive heterogeneity within diagnoses and for the common co-occurrence of many conditions in a way that makes a rigid taxonomy too limiting to properly support people. The idea is to consider continuous dimensions within the population, as opposed to distinct categorical entities. Supporting neurodiversity The concept of neurodiversity is particularly useful in environments such as schools and the workplace, where changes can be implemented to foster inclusivity and bolster people’s individual strengths while providing support for their different needs. For instance, adjustments can be made to accommodate diverse physical needs, such as letting people fidget, having a dedicated space for quiet breaks, or offering noise-cancelling headphones. A lot of these adjustments may even be helpful for all employees. Clear communication and documentation, flexible hours, and a school or workplace culture that emphasises kindness — all of these are good practices to implement, regardless of initiatives specifically targeted at supporting neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is still an emerging paradigm which has been described as a “moving target”, but it already offers several practical implications for leaders who want to build more inclusive environments and researchers who want to support people across the multitude of conditions that may escape categorical labels. Hopefully this short primer will make you want to learn more! The post What is neurodiversity? appeared first on Ness Labs.

Being “authentic” has become a bit of an overused buzzword, and has lost some of its meaning. However, despite the concept not being fully mature in a theoretical or experimental sense, early research has shown that authentic leadership may improve team performance compared to traditional management. Authentic leadership is an emerging theory that encourages managers to be genuine, self-aware and transparent when guiding their team. Let’s explore ​​the potential benefits of authentic leadership, and the strategies you can employ to authentically support your team in being as successful as possible. The benefits of authentic leadership Authentic leadership is a concept that was first formulated by Harvard professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George, who was adamant that new laws alone could not help to repair the corporate crisis. Instead, he claimed that new leaders and innovative styles of leadership were required to give corporations a chance of financial recovery. Whereas a traditional leader in a large corporation might value profits above people, an authentic leader carefully balances tough ethical dilemmas with financial optimisation.  Bill George considered that there are five essential dimensions of an authentic leader: purpose, values, heart, relationships and self-discipline. According to him, an authentic leader should work compassionately, valuing both the company and its employees. So, why do teams value an authentic leader? Authentic leadership is seen as an antidote to unethical leadership. Fred Luthans and Bruce Avolio noted that an authentic leader is likely to appear more reliable and trustworthy to those who work with them. Instead of a manager with a “work persona”, people enjoy working with a manager that behaves like their true self — a manager who is self-aware, who has developed a supportive professional relationship with each individual in the team, and who has a good understanding of their thoughts, emotions, or belief systems. Traditional leadership might involve a manager working in a way that does not necessarily align with their own personal values. This can be confusing for colleagues, who might be left second guessing what is expected of them. Researchers reported that this lack of clarity or ambiguity of what is expected can lead to a team working without direction. This is likely not only to reduce job satisfaction, but could also lower overall productivity. In contrast, authentic leadership can make it far easier for co-workers to recognise your values, and predict or follow your instructions. It will require less effort to understand what you expect, helping the team to work in a more constructive and cohesive manner. In a study of 51 teams, authentic leadership improved a teams’ drive to being the very best they could be. In turn, increased virtuousness led to greater team potency — the ability to succeed. The researchers concluded that authentic leadership can foster team motivation, thereby improving overall team performance. Win-win! How to become an authentic leader Most people do not undergo leadership training before becoming a leader, and so are learning to lead on the job. Although research into authentic leadership is in its infancy, some principles can be helpful when leading a team. 1) Define your ideals. Authentic leadership lies in upholding your personal and professional values. Before you can lead authentically, you will need to define your own ethical values and ideals of leadership. Although there will usually be a corporate goal in sight, those values should still guide your decisions as a leader. 2) Practise self-reflection. Self-reflection through journaling, self-awareness exercises, or investing in a career coach may help you to identify your strengths, weaknesses, and cognitive patterns such as likely reactions to certain situations. It will also help you to develop emotional intelligence so you can become more aware of how your team is feeling and support them appropriately. 3) Foster relational transparency. People are more likely to enjoy working with you and respect the decisions you make if you are transparent about your thought processes. The line between personal and professional does not have to become overly blurred, but it is important that your colleagues don’t feel like you have a hidden agenda.   It takes courage, but openly sharing your strengths, weaknesses, and thought processes with your team shows them that you have nothing to hide, and that you are — like them — eager to keep on learning and growing. This level of transparency suggests that personal and professional growth is something to be supported and celebrated. Authentic leadership remains an emerging but promising theory. Learning to lead in a new way takes time, but defining your own ideals, practising self-reflection and developing relational transparency with your co-workers is likely to lead to improved cohesion, satisfaction, psychological safety, and performance. Give it a try! The post The emerging theory of authentic leadership appeared first on Ness Labs.

The business and productivity app market is worth billions of dollars. Every day, there is a new productivity tool popping up, a book about productivity being published, and millions of people reading and sharing content related to personal productivity. It started as a measure of efficiency for the production of goods and services. Somehow, along the way, many of us have become addicted to productivity. Why are we so obsessed with being productive? At its core, productivity addiction is based on the same reward systems as other addictions. By providing constant reinforcement — for example financial rewards in the form of salary increases, or social rewards in the form of work recognition — productivity can become a goal in and of itself, resulting in compulsive behaviours. This phenomenon is maybe more common than you would think. Two nationally representative studies carried out in Norway and Hungary reported similar results. In Norway, Dr Cecilie Andreassen and her team found that between 7.3% and 8.3% of Norwegians are addicted to work. In Hungary, a team led by Dr Zsolt Demetrovics suggests that 8.2% of Hungarians working at least forty hours a week are at risk for work addiction. Dr Mark Griffiths estimates the prevalence of work addiction in the United States to be around 10%, mentioning some estimates as high as 15% to 25%. It doesn’t help that being addicted to productivity may be a “mixed-blessing addiction” (a term originally used to describe work addiction in the 1980’s), making it more socially acceptable and potentially hiding the negative effects for longer. Similar to someone who is addicted to exercise, a productivity addict may initially be successful in their career, earn a lot of money, and receive encouraging work accolades. But, in the long term, being obsessed with productivity can have unintended consequences, such as burnout, family issues, and health problems. The BBC ran a story about productivity addiction where Dr Sandra Chapman from Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas explained: “The problem is that just like all addictions, over time a person needs more and more to be satisfied and then it starts to work against you. Withdrawal symptoms include increased anxiety, depression and fear.” Are you addicted to productivity? At least in the Western world, our education has often taught us to tie our self-worth to how much we contribute to society. The more we contribute, the better. “I work, therefore I am.” Being productive feels like a way to improve our self-worth. This positive reinforcement can make it hard to realise we may be falling prey to productivity addiction. However, there are five tell-tale signs you may be addicted to productivity: You don’t want to “waste” any time. Productivity addicts may suffer from time anxiety, an obsession about spending our time in the most meaningful way possible. As Dr. Alex Lickerman described it, time anxiety stems from these recurring questions: “Am I creating the greatest amount of value with my life that I can? Will I feel, when it comes my time to die, that I spent too much of my time frivolously?” Trying to always optimise the way you spend your time and struggling to do nothing may be signs of productivity addiction. You tend to turn hobbies into side projects. Let’s say you become interested in gardening, and really enjoy spending time in the garden, learning about different kinds of flowers and plants, and caring for them. You may be tempted to turn this hobby into something more productive, maybe by starting a newsletter about gardening, or a small business selling gardening guides. You feel guilty when you don’t hit your targets. Whether it’s inbox zero or tackling a long to-do list, being addicted to productivity may result in a hard time falling asleep in the evening because you haven’t managed to be as productive as you had hoped to be. Instead of closing your laptop and forgetting about it until the next day, you may struggle properly disconnecting because of the guilt you feel around not hitting these (sometimes artificial) targets. You always make work a priority. Are you rushing to finish dinner with your family so you can get back to work? Cancelling plans with friends so you can finalise a presentation? Cutting short your night of sleep to attend an early meeting hosted in a different timezone? While it happens to most people to have to make concessions from time to time, productivity addicts will tend to always choose work over other important areas of their lives. You constantly feel busy. Dr Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, describes being “crazy busy” as a numbing strategy that allows us to avoid facing the truth of our lives. She half-jokingly wrote: “I often say that when they start having 12-step meetings for busy-aholics, they’ll need to rent out football stadiums.” This numbing strategy may even give us the illusion of productivity. Luckily, productivity addiction is not a disease, and it is possible to make a few simple changes to avoid falling into its trap for long enough that we start experiencing its negative consequences.  How to manage productivity addiction There is no one-size-fits-all solution to get rid of our obsession with productivity, but practising mindful productivity is a great way to manage productivity addiction. Make space for self-reflection. Recovering from productivity addiction starts from understanding its source and mechanisms. What are the rewards that make you obsess about your productivity? Is it money, recognition, something else? What patterns have you noticed in the way you work that hurt other areas of your life, such as time with your family or sleep? Journaling can be a great way to reflect on your relationship with productivity. Define meaningful priorities. For many, work is an important part of their identity. But it doesn’t have to be the only defining aspect of your worth. What else do you care about? What are areas you would like to explore outside of work? Are your priorities aligned with your values? Instead of automatically creating endless task lists, ask yourself: what would be a meaningful goal I can work towards? Don’t pin the butterfly. Remember that not all hobbies need to become hustles. Try to keep some hobbies that are just that — hobbies. Spaces of self-expression where you can experiment and play whenever you feel like it, outside of the constraints of productivity. Reconsider your relationship with time. Time anxiety can lead to a daily feeling of being rushed that makes us feel overwhelmed and panicky. We think we are making the most of our time, but instead we are rushing through our precious time without savouring every second of it. Take breaks, become comfortable with doing nothing, and most importantly, define what “time well spent” means to you so you can make space for these moments. Create your own system. Instead of relying on prescriptive productivity methods that may not work for you and create even more stress, progressively design your own system by experimenting and iterating. Incorporate your meaningful priorities, hobbies, and insights about the way you work best to ensure you can achieve your goals without sacrificing your mental health. Finally, pay attention to your triggers. As a recovering productivity addict, you may need to always be careful about not falling back into old patterns whenever you start a new job, a new hobby, or set a new exciting goal. Practising self-reflection and paying attention to your mental health will ensure the way you work is more enjoyable and more sustainable. The post Productivity addiction: when we become obsessed with productivity appeared first on Ness Labs.

You may have noticed that if someone pushes you to do something, it often makes you feel less inclined to do it. This is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance: a reflex reaction to being told what to do, or feeling that your freedom is under threat. It can occur in personal, professional or social settings when you feel that you need to regain a sense of control over your autonomy. Controlling someone else’s sense of freedom can trigger anger, and motivate them to regain it. As a decision-maker, it is important to recognise that if you push people too hard, you may end up prompting them to do the opposite of what you wanted them to do. Understanding psychological reactance, and finding ways to positively impact others’ motivation, is therefore important in both professional and personal settings. Let’s have a look. A fear of losing our personal freedom The concept of psychological reactance was formulated by psychologist Dr. Jack Brehm in 1966. He defined reactance as “the motivation to regain a freedom after it has been lost or threatened.” It causes individuals to rebel against the pressure they are put under.  It is often the thought of someone else exerting control, rather than the request itself, that leads to psychological reactance. As individuals, we want to feel that we have the freedom to do as we please. This means that when a circumstance arises which threatens our sense of freedom, reactance emerges as a form of motivational arousal. For example, being told that you cannot use a mobile phone at school may increase your desire to do so, even if you previously did not have any desire to look at your phone. Being forced to pay fees for something that was previously free may reduce your desire to buy a product for which the cost can easily be justified. You may work diligently and conscientiously to complete tasks at work without complaint. However, when your manager specifically requests a piece of work, you may start to feel your resistance growing. Despite completing similar tasks previously without issue, you may now feel the urge to react against the request simply because it has now been mandated by your manager. The perceived threat to your autonomy makes the work feel unappealing and so you may put it to the bottom of your list, or even argue against doing it at all. This reactance is a direct effort to eradicate the new restrictions imposed upon you. Reactance can occur whenever our emotional freedom is challenged. Research suggests that it can be triggered by external threats, such as being asked to complete a chore, or by internal threats or dialogue. Furthermore, the intensity of reactance experienced may depend on how significant you perceive the threat to be. The greater the threat to your autonomy, the more likely you are to refuse to yield to social or professional influence. Similarly, if more than one freedom is threatened simultaneously, reactance will increase. How to manage psychological reactance Threats to freedom, and the resultant reactance, can occur in all facets of our lives. As a decision-maker, it is likely that your role will involve making requests or attempting to motivate others to work in a certain way. Finding ways to support the autonomy of others to prevent reactance from occurring is therefore vital. 1. Accommodate autonomy. Of course, you will sometimes need to make decisions that others have less input on. However, it’s essential to treat the people you collaborate with as autonomous agents. For example, if a new process will be implemented at work, give your team the opportunity to provide their thoughts and suggestions. This way, it will feel less likely freedom is being taken away, and more like power is being given. Research even suggests that “threatened individuals who feel powerful free themselves from the threatening situation and manage to reorient themselves.” 2. Set healthy constraints to breed creativity. It has been shown that having too few constraints breeds complacency, while excessive constraints can be detrimental to creativity and innovation: a moderate level of guidance “frames the task as a greater challenge and, in turn, motivates experimentation and risk-taking.” By finding a healthy middle ground between complete freedom and micromanaging, you can maximise creativity and encourage your team to investigate non-traditional solutions. 3. Use reactance as a motivator. In some situations, it may be possible to encourage others to achieve more by restricting their freedom in some way. For instance, a researcher may be driven to attend more conferences when told that they can only enrol on three per year. However, this strategy must be used with caution, as excessive or unfair infringement on freedom could result in resentment rather than motivation. As you have seen, psychological reactance occurs as a response to a perceived restriction on our personal freedom. Being told not to do something, or having requests made of us, can cause us to rebel against the situation. However, it is possible to prevent reactance from occurring, and even to use it as a motivator. By accommodating autonomy, using healthy constraints to encourage imaginative thinking, and applying reasonable restrictions as a stimulus for action, reactance can be directed in a way that improves creativity and productivity in the workplace — as long as leaders ensure that team members do not feel controlled, but instead feel empowered to achieve more. The post Psychological reactance: how we react to the threat of losing our freedom appeared first on Ness Labs.

Our perception of progress can impact our overall drive to reach a goal. The goal gradient hypothesis posits that our efforts increase as we get closer to achieving a goal: when the reward is in sight, we feel incentivised to reach the finish line. Designers and decision-makers can effectively use goal gradients as a motivational tool. The concept of a goal gradient The goal gradient hypothesis was first introduced by Clark Leonard Hull in 1932. He tested his theory on rats, noting that the rodents ran faster the closer they got to a food reward. This phenomenon can also be observed in marathon runners of all abilities who, despite exhaustion, find a sudden burst of energy once the finish line is in sight. In 2006, researchers Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky and Yuhuang Zheng followed up on Hull’s work. They investigated the goal gradient hypothesis and its relevance to purchase acceleration and customer retention for businesses. Customers were either given a 12-stamp coffee card which included two stamps to get them started, or an empty 10-stamp card. The study confirmed that those given the 12-stamp card completed it faster than those who were given an empty card, despite both groups needing to collect 10 stamps in total. The research team also noted that the frequency of coffee purchases increased as individuals approached their free coffee reward. Motivation therefore intensifies with proximity to a goal.  The impact of the goal gradient hypothesis Goal gradients do not only impact our motivation. In 2013, it was demonstrated that goal gradients could also impact how helpful or socially minded we might be. Researchers found that people were more likely to donate to charitable campaigns if the fundraiser was already close to reaching its target. Donations made in the late stage were made not only out of kindness or to relieve negative emotions, but because donors found “satisfaction from having personal influence in solving a social problem.” Those who make a charitable donation in the late stage of a campaign may feel that their contribution has a more personal impact on achievement of the fundraising target. The prosocial act of donating becomes an “influential source of satisfaction”. However, research suggests that the impact of a goal gradient can be affected by your power status. Those who perceive themselves to be in a position of low social or professional power are more likely to be motivated by proximity to a goal. For example, if a senior member of the team tells you that you can use examples from a previous job as credits towards your current goal, this can boost your motivation to complete any professional requirements.  Conversely, goal proximity may be of less importance to those who feel more powerful. If you are financially comfortable, two extra stamps on a coffee card may have less impact on your motivation to earn a free coffee than it might for someone who must budget carefully.  How you can motivate others to achieve their goals The great thing about goal gradients is that they can be used as an effective tool to motivate those around you to succeed. Whether you are a manager, designer or decision-maker, certain strategies can help you to encourage your employees, customers, or users to reach a goal. 1. Offer a head start. At the beginning of a project, it can feel like there is a marathon ahead. It can be hard to imagine getting to the finish line, and so giving those around you a head start can increase motivation. For example, you could offer a head start by creating pre-filled templates or example answers so that it appears that some of the work has already been completed, while also providing inspiration for the rest of the task, or by acknowledging previous studies and allowing a student to use them as credits for their current training. 2. Track and acknowledge progress. In the depths of a project, it can be hard for someone to see how close they are to achieving their goal. Track your colleagues progress manually or using a project management tool, and show them just how close they are to reaching the finish line. Hearing your manager tell you that you are almost there can be the motivation that is needed to finalise a project more quickly than if your progress had not been acknowledged. Consumers may also be encouraged to achieve a goal more quickly if they are made aware of their progress. If you want to encourage customers back into your coffee shop, sending an email update of the points they have accrued on their online loyalty card will not only tempt them back, but could also increase the rate at which they then reach the required points to qualify for a free coffee. This is also why progress bars are so common in mobile apps and online forms. 3. Break down milestones. Someone who perceives that a project is a long way off completion may feel demotivated. Breaking down the project into smaller milestones and celebrating micro-wins can make the goals feel more achievable. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the volume of work left to do, your team will feel encouraged and motivated by the satisfaction that comes from ticking small victories off each day. Customer loyalty can be encouraged by the insertion of small milestones on the way to the main milestone. For example, a customer might be rewarded with a half-price coffee when they reach 5 stamps, and then a free coffee once all 10 stamps have been collected. Closing the gap between the start and finish line, with small milestones in between, can make the goal feel more attainable. As you have seen, the goal gradient hypothesis increases motivation to cross the finish line. By making projects appear easier, quicker, or simpler to complete, we feel incentivised to strive to reach our goals. But don’t keep this secret to yourself — your team can benefit as well for using goal gradients! To help boost the motivation of those around you, you can offer a head start, acknowledge someone’s progress, and create smaller milestones to help maintain focus and enthusiasm. The post Using the goal gradient hypothesis to help people cross the finish line appeared first on Ness Labs.

Did you know that the more you are interested in how the brain works, the more likely you are to believe in neuromyths? Neuromyths are common misconceptions about the brain. Their source can be innocent — people who genuinely believe in those myths — or plain unethical, such as the case of marketers promoting brain fiction so they can sell dubious products to help customers achieve their full potential. Neuromyths are particularly prevalent in education. Researchers from the Department of Educational Neuroscience at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam explain: “Teachers who read popular science magazines achieved higher scores on general knowledge questions. More general knowledge also predicted an increased belief in neuromyths. These findings suggest that teachers who are enthusiastic about the possible application of neuroscience findings in the classroom find it difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from scientific facts.” As we will see, while the sources of neuromyths can sometimes be innocent, their effects can be harmful, especially in a learning environment. But the good news is: anyone can become a brain myth buster and contribute to dispelling neuromyths, whether in education, at work, or in their daily lives. Brain fact versus brain fiction According to a systematic review of 24 scientific articles investigating the prevalence of neuromyths, some of the most common ones among teachers, educators, and trainers include the beliefs that… People learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style. The first three years of a child’s life determine whether or not they will grow into a successful person (also known as the 3-year myth). Differences in hemispheric dominance can help explain individual differences among learners, for instance “right-brained” people are thought to be better at artistic expression and creativity, and left-brained people to be more comfortable with logical thoughts and calculations. We only use 10% of our brain capacity. Children are less focused after consuming sugary drinks or snacks. Listening to classical music helps make us smarter (also known as the Mozart Effect) And the list goes on. In a fascinating study about brain myths, researchers asked more than 3,800 people whether they believed in specific statements about the brain. Some of the participants were educators, others were scientists and doctors, and yet others were just members of the general public. The results of the study were striking. Almost 80% of scientists and doctors believed in one of the brain myths, 43% of them believed in the Mozart Effect — which, as we’ve seen, has no basis in scientific evidence — and almost 50% of educators believed that people are either right-brained or left-brained. As you can see, neuromyths are very common. The problem is that they are also very dangerous. The dangers of brain fiction There’s a popular saying that goes: “It’s not so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble, it’s the things we think we know that aren’t so.” There are lots of things we think we know about the brain that aren’t so. But what kind of trouble are we talking about? Believing in neuromyths may seem harmless, but it really isn’t. Neuromyths can lead to: Wasted potential. If a student is struggling with mathematics and their teacher believes that people are either right-brained or left-brained, that teacher may just stop supporting the student with mathematics — focusing instead on areas where the student is more comfortable. Many talented people did not find their craft easy at first, and believing that believing that some brains are just not “designed” for certain skills may prevent some students from exploring less obvious learning paths. Misspending. Brain fiction also makes us waste money — whether it’s corporate money, government money, or personal money. Companies are paying for expensive training based on neuromyths, and governments are heavily investing in pseudoscientific educational programmes (a famous example is Brain Gym in the United States). Discrimination. Finally, brain fiction can be leveraged to support discriminatory practices in education. For example, Leonard Sax, who used to run the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in the U.S., said that boys and girls should be taught differently and separately because of differences in their brains (“girls are using the cerebral cortex while boys are using the hippocampus”). Whether it’s to avoid wasted potential, misspending, or discrimination, dispelling those dangerous misconceptions about the brain is important for the future of education. And anyone — that means you too — can join the fight. Becoming a brain myth buster To become a brain myth buster, we need to ask ourselves: why do we believe in brain fiction? Several factors contribute to the emergence and proliferation of neuromyths. First, these are remarkably appealing ideas. To believe in the 10% myth is to believe that we may have some untapped potential which we could unlock should we use the right techniques or tools. To believe we are right-brained or left-brained offers a practical excuse to focus on our strengths rather than aim for a well-rounded education. Researchers have also blamed the inaccessibility of empirical research, which is often hidden behind paywalls, fostering an increased reliance on media reports rather than the original research, as well as the lack of professionals trained to bridge the disciplinary gap between education and neuroscience. Becoming a brain myth buster requires critical thinking, curiosity, and access to evidence-based sources of information about the brain. Whenever you hear a new claim about the brain, look it up using one of the following resources: BrainFacts.org — And in particular their neuromyths database which answers questions such as “Can you learn in your sleep?”, “Does using your non-dominant hand make you smarter?” and more. The website is run by a group of global nonprofit organizations (the Kavli Foundation, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and the Society for Neuroscience)  as a public information initiative, not by marketers trying to sell you a brain-training app. OECD database — The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation at the OECD has published a collection of neuromyths which they thoroughly debunk. These include neuromyths around multilingualism, learning styles, enriched environments, and more. Books about neuromyths — There are two books that are particularly interesting if you want to learn about some of the most common myths. The first one is Great Myths of the Brain, which takes more of a neuroscientific angle, and the second one is 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, which is an easier read and includes many myths rooted in psychology. Blogs of brain myth busters — There are many blogs that are excellent resources, such as Neurocritic, Neurobollocks, and Neurobonkers. Dr Christian Jarrett, the author of the Great Myths of the Brain book has a blog about brain myths. While not updated anymore, Neuroskeptic offers an amazing collection of articles debunking brain fiction and getting the brain facts straight. Applied neuroscience resources — You could also learn more about applied neuroscience by taking a course from a reputable university, or joining one of the many professional organizations offering training that can help you become a brain myth buster. For example, the Centre for Educational Neuroscience regularly hosts events about neuromyths. After you are done checking a claim about the brain, you can even make a note of it by adding it to your note-taking app and tagging it as “brain fact” or “brain fiction” — after a while you will have your own personal database of information about the brain, which you can use to quickly look up a claim while having conversations with colleagues, friends, or family. Finally, of course, there is Ness Labs! To celebrate Brain Awareness Week, we hosted an interactive session about brain fiction where we dispelled some of the most common myths. You can watch the recording here and download an editable template to host your own brain myth busting game. Have fun becoming a brain myth buster! The post How to become a brain myth buster appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview teams on a mission to help us make the most of our minds. Scrintal is an app that combines mind mapping with the power of networked note-taking. It helps you see your thoughts at a glance so you can convert cluttered ideas into connected information. In this interview, we talked about the power of bi-directional linking, the challenges when setting up a Zettelkasten, the anxiety caused by folders systems, the relationship between design and functionality, how to best connect notes together, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Ece, Furkan, and Arda, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Knowledge builders often struggle visualizing how their thoughts connect to each other. Can you tell us more about your mission? Ece: Thanks so much for having us here! The biggest challenge for any thinker is finding connections between ideas. We jot down ideas all day long, but how do they link with one another? What are the opportunities that we miss as we can’t put the puzzle pieces together?  We started with these challenges, thinking that the hardest part in each knowledge management system is to organize and connect things. We designed Scrintal in a way that it combines mind mapping with the power of networked note-taking. Scrintal is powered by the bi-directional links and provides a fully functioning canvas to effortlessly connect ideas. Our mission is to support clear thinking, creative writing, and organized knowledge. I think many research-minded people will love the idea. What inspired you to build Scrintal? Ece: I was doing my PhD on climate change at Stockholm University when I developed an interest in tools for thought. I was reading tremendously and conducting interviews for my research. This was the first time I set up my personal knowledge management system via a Zettelkasten. I was diving deep and then kept switching tools, all in the search for a space where I could both link my ideas and spread them to have a better overview.  After some point, the same thing happened again and again. My notes were not surfacable anymore. I was using bi-drectional links to come across my older notes serendipitously. However, 90% of my time was going into creating these bi-directional links when I only used 10% to go back to these links and have encounters. I wasn’t getting anything out of the graph views, either.   The “aha” moment came when I started talking to my colleagues at the university. Some were even saying they consider spreading all their ideas on papers on the floor to find a structure and a flow. The mind maps were not enough, as creating mind maps breaks the flow, you focus on the visuality more than you want, and the text editors are not powerful enough. Whereas in networked note taking, we miss an essential part of the creative flow, working with ideas freely.  With my co-founders Arda and Furkan, we conducted more than a hundred interviews before we started building Scrintal. In the end we decided to combine the easy organization and findability of the networked tools, while keeping the flexibility of visual tools. And how does Scrintal work exactly? Ece: We solve two challenges; keep the creative float of visual tools, but solve the challenge of searchability and easy organization generally found in visual tools; and keep the networked thoughts, but make them more surfacable, memorable and recognizable.  How we achieve this is that you have a daily visual desk that you can create mid-size cards with one-click. These cards are very flexible, you can make them full screen size to focus on what you are writing or even fold them if you want to make them look like post-its or a mind map.  There is a fully-fetched text editor in these cards where you can add video and images and extract them from the cards if you’d like to open them separately and take notes at the same time. To keep the serendipity, and the Zettelkasten philosophy of “you only have one brain”, you have one daily desk in Scrintal. You bring what you are working on to your desk through the archive where all your notes live. You link cards through bi-directional links, rather than creating arrows in mindmaps. This helps you to be in the flow while writing and sets the base of the visual map without you giving extra effort.  You can then visually organize these cards in the way that you like, if you don’t want to organize them yourself, the built-in graph algorithm does the job for you. When you are happy with the visual organization you create, you can save it on a board and share it with others so they can interact with what you created.  Many note-taking tools treat notes as isolated units. Can you tell us more about how Scrintal makes it easier to connect ideas together? Ece: Knowledge work starts from capturing ideas, then you connect them and then develop them. The biggest problem usually lies in forgetting our older notes and not knowing what to connect with what.  We worked on making it much easier and fun to see the connections between your ideas. Firstly you can link notes bi-directionally to indicate a direct connection. We do not have a folder structure, as folders are rigid and break the possibility to fluidly connect ideas. You have a “where do I put this?” anxiety in a folder system. The second layer of connecting ideas is done through the tags. Tags are for grouping relevant notes. Using tags based on the context you’d like to find them again is the best way to go. In Scrintal then comes the connecting notes in visual ways. You can lay out your notes on your visual desk and change their colors which instantly gives a visual segmentation.   In the end, you can have a final piece of work, showing the whole plot of your next novel, strategic plan of your company, research on a specific topic, or all your meeting notes in one screen. This gives you the power of seeing all your connected thoughts at one glance.  This actually seems to be perfect to apply the Zettelkasten method! Ece: Yes! As you can see the cards on your board, it pushes you to write one idea or topic per card. Scrintal is actually the closest version to a digital Zettelkasten. You can think of the cards in Scrintal as index cards and the nice thing is you can just lay them on your digital desk as if you are overlooking your index cards. Seeing cards visually next to one another makes creating connections much easier. Also not having a folder structure makes Scrintal an ideal tool to implement Zettelkasten. Whenever an idea pops into your mind, you can create a card, tag it if you like, rather than having to think: where shall I put this new note? This bottom-up approach is what makes Scrintal suitable for a Zettelkasten.  Knowledge builders sometimes feel reluctant to invest too much into a specific tool for fear of getting trapped in a silo. How does Scrintal integrate within the existing ecosystem? Ece: I totally understand this concern! In Scrintal we focus on shareability of your knowledge. In terms of being able to share anything you create in Scrintal, you can publicly share your whole desk, or single notes within them. This way anyone, without creating a Scrintal account can interact with your board, go deeper into each note and see the total overview at the same time. We will release the Markdown import and export options soon, which will make our current users very happy I believe. That sounds great. Can you share a bit more about your design philosophy? Furkan: We prioritize a simple and functioning design. Building a tool that is visually appealing is extremely important given the number of hours we spend looking at our screens. Our design principles are… Nothing unnecessary. We remove all the fluff. When it comes to design, less is more. We do not follow the trend of adding more features just because it makes us look cooler. Just because we can do something cool, doesn’t mean we have to do it. Simple is beautiful. We have infinite ways of expressing ourselves — but only a few ways of actually communicating effectively with people. We embrace simplicity in our design and communication because we are here to build trust with our users and this starts with communicating clearly without any white noise. Functionality first. Functionality precedes design because functionality solves the problem for us and our users — design merely facilitates functionality. Almost always there are multiple ways to express the same functionality in design; what matters is that the functionality works well, rather than how it looks on the outside (as long as it looks good). As an inherent philosophy, anything we add in Scrintal should be solving a problem, should be simple, should not be creating new problems while being a solution. And how do you incorporate your user’s perspective in the design process? Arda: Understanding the user’s perspective has been an important part of the product development process since day one. We believe user interviews are a great way to understand what people think and feel about our product, as well as their experience with similar products. Since we have released Scrintal’s first version, we have onboarded several tranches of groups who have been using Scrintal for different use cases. Once they have enough time to try the tool in their daily lives, we meet again to listen to their feedback. This user-centric approach gave us insights into what problems people have, what they appreciated and what crucial features were missing. Once we get those insights, we cluster them into groups and conduct a brainstorming workshop as a tem where each member shares their thoughts. We then decide what to prioritize next and start building those features. We’re in the process of building a community in which our early users are able to send us immediate feedback and request new features. Community building has been an integral component ...

Cognitive distortions are thought patterns that can affect our perception of reality. One such distortion is emotional reasoning. This is a thought pattern in which our emotional reactions, or our feelings, lead us to believe that something is true even when the empirical evidence tells us otherwise.  Emotional reasoning is very common in the workplace. If you have ever found yourself thinking, “I know this project will fail because I feel scared,” or “I know my manager must dislike me because I feel unappreciated,” or “I know my colleague has been hiding something because I feel suspicious,” then you have already experienced emotional reasoning. Taking our emotions as information Recent research described emotional reasoning as a mechanism that “can lead people to take their emotions as information about the external world, even when the emotion is not generated by the situation to be evaluated.” This leads to inaccurate emotional truths which directly contradict any objective, perceptual truths. Emotional reasoning was first coined by the American psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1970s. In a career that spanned more than 65 years, Beck studied cognitive theory and therapy, and is considered the founder of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Beck’s extensive clinical career, and related research, illuminated the way in which our emotions sway the way we feel. For example, Beck found that his depressed patients were plagued by self-criticism and regret, whereas those with anxiety experienced fear-filled thoughts. Beck referred to thought responses to an emotion as “automatic thinking”. His research suggested that the content of automatic thoughts was often linked to the diagnosis a patient had. However, it is likely that automatic thoughts will be relevant to your state of mind, even if you do not specifically struggle with your mental health. For example, if you have been feeling anxious about a project at work, your automatic thoughts may be based on that anxiety. When presenting your findings to colleagues you may assume that they are disappointed with your progress. As a result of emotional reasoning, this automatic thought will occur in the absence of any objective proof to suggest that your colleagues are perceiving your work negatively. Furthermore, studies have shown that isolated automatic thoughts can result in negative thought cycles. Emotional reasoning such as “I am sure I am doing a bad job at work because I feel anxious about it every day,” aggravates your fear or apprehension. Increasing anxiety can begin to negatively impact your performance. You may struggle to focus, make mistakes, or see a decline in your output. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a cycle of negative thoughts is set in motion. How to avoid emotional reasoning If your beliefs have become founded on emotional reasoning rather than logical facts, it is vital to search for objectivity to manage this cognitive distortion. Taking control of automatic thoughts will help to prevent emotional reasoning from derailing your efforts in your professional and personal life. The process involves challenging your emotional beliefs so that automatic thoughts are thoroughly interrogated before being accepted. There are several ways you can investigate the source of any discouraging thoughts to avoid unnecessary negativity or anxiety. 1. Practice validity testing. Validity testing is key to checking whether you are experiencing emotional reasoning. If you feel sure that your work has not been of the expected standard, you must search for objective evidence to prove that this belief is true. Ask yourself if anyone has questioned your work, and reflect on any recent appraisals or informal feedback you have received. In the absence of negative feedback or criticism, you may find that your thoughts cannot be upheld and are therefore unlikely to reflect the truth. 2. Write in a journal. Journaling is a great way to pay attention to your thought patterns. Specifically, you should record the difficult situations you face, and which emotions or thoughts a dilemma provokes. If a colleague requests a meeting with you without giving you any context, use your journal to document the automatic thoughts that appear. You might automatically assume that they want to talk because your performance has been below average, or that you are facing redundancy, despite there being no evidence for this.  Recording your feelings in this way will allow you to reflect on your natural thought patterns so that you can start to identify when emotional reasoning is affecting you. This provides an opportunity to reject negative thoughts before they take hold. 3. Discuss your emotions. If you feel anxious about work, you may struggle to accurately assess your performance. Talking to a trusted colleague or friend about your concerns could give you a much-needed objective view. It can be illuminating to learn that others speak highly of you or your work, and this can help to dispel cognitive distortions. Emotional reasoning is a form of distorted cognition that can lead to an unwarranted negative opinion of your ability or character. By generating negative thoughts, a downward spiral of anxiety can cause a self-fulfilling prophecy of worsening performance. Learning to probe emotional beliefs to check their validity can help to avoid unnecessary negative thoughts and self-talk. Discussing your beliefs with someone you trust, using a journal to understand your thought patterns, and practising validity testing can all help you to avoid the pitfalls of using your emotions as a form of proof. The post The danger of emotional reasoning and using our emotions as proof appeared first on Ness Labs.

Mae Jemison is the first African American woman to orbit the earth. She knew that she wanted to be a scientist since kindergarten. Not only did she grow up reading books about space, but she also loved science fiction books where black women were the heroes of the story. At 16, Jemison graduated from high school and studied chemical engineering and African studies at Stanford University. Eventually, she became a doctor and traveled the world to care for patients. However, Jemison always held on to her love for space and space travel. So when NASA opened a new search for astronauts in 1987, she seized the opportunity and was accepted into the program.  In 1992, Jemison stepped foot on the space shuttle Endeavor as the science mission specialist, a new role for NASA that focused on conducting experiments in space. In seven days on the Endeavor, Jemison and her team conducted 44 experiments on motion sickness and weightlessness. She stayed with NASA for six years before turning her sights on business, education, and writing. Let’s learn from the way she approached challenges and navigated the world. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Mae Jemison’s thinking strategies It takes all types of unique thinking strategies to become the first Black female astronaut in American history. Here are three of those strategies and how we can apply them in our lives and work. 1. Learning from everywhere. Aside from her studies, Jemison learned by doing many activities growing up. She was a part of student government, acted in school plays, and studied dance. She choreographed a performing arts piece called Out of the Shadows in college, which brought attention to the African American experience. She knew the value of learning from everywhere and anywhere, and her experiences in the arts and government taught her how to be graceful and the value of hard work.  2. Becoming a multi-hyphenate. Doctor, astronaut, entrepreneur, writer, teacher, and artist — all of these words describe Jemison and her phenomenal career. Before joining NASA, Dr. Jemison cared for patients in Cuba and a Taiwanese refugee camp. She joined the Peace Corps in 1983 and served as a medical officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone.  After her career as an astronaut, Jemison taught at Dartmouth College and ran the newly founded Jemison Institute for Advancing Tech in Developing Countries. She also founded the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, which supports several programs, including a space camp and the 100 Year Starship program. Jemison even found time to write a book about her life, published in 2001. She was a true multi-hyphenate. 3. Opening new doors. Jemison was bothered that there were no women astronauts when she was growing up. She also experienced racial discrimination in her schooling and her career. Therefore, Jemison created opportunities for youth of color to become a part of the scientific community. For instance, the Earth We Share- Space Race program bolsters science education for teens in Los Angeles, CA. Her memoir, Find Where the Wind Goes, is also aimed at teens to inspire their journeys into science. How to think like Mae Jemison Jemison’s experiences as a performer and choreographer helped her develop hard and soft skills that she used throughout her career. Research shows that participating in the arts can help us with emotional regulation and reduce feelings of isolation. If arts are not a part of your life, try picking up a new craft, pulling out your old guitar, or playing around with your kids’ paints. As Jemison has demonstrated, engaging in creative expression can teach us valuable lessons for our careers and personal growth. Another way to think like Mae Jemison is to “multi-hyphenate” yourself. Odds are, you are already a multi-hyphenate. Consider the different tasks that you do daily in your work life. Identify your descriptors and share those “hyphens” with your personal and professional network. Your unique skill set could open doors to new professional experiences. Next, ask yourself: any other skills that you would like to explore? What are some adjacent areas that may not be obvious but will make your skill set more useful and valuable? Finally, use your skills and your network to be an agent of change. Jemison used her influence to remove barriers and create opportunities for disadvantaged youth interested in sciences. What challenges have you faced in your education, employment, or personal life that you would be willing to share with others? How can you use those experiences to lower barriers for others who may face similar challenges? Brainstorm ways you can contribute to changing the status quo. Mae Jemison’s unique and influential career as a doctor, astronaut, entrepreneur, and artist serves as inspiration for anyone who wants to do it all. To follow her lead, try your hand at something new, embrace all the things that make you who you are, and figure out ways to support future generations. The post Mae Jemison: the power of developing multifaceted skills appeared first on Ness Labs.

Rosalind Franklin was a groundbreaking scientist whose story is tied to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Franklin and her Ph.D. student used x-ray technology to photograph DNA that showed the molecule’s structure. However, when two other well-known scientists published a paper about the double-helix findings, they never gave Franklin credit for her contributions. Those scientists – Crick and Watson – went on to win a Nobel Prize. Franklin was never acknowledged.  While this story is well-known, Rosalind Franklin did much more than DNA research. Many scientists specialize in one field, but Franklin’s research included biology, chemistry, and physics. She studied coal, DNA, and viruses that caused harm to humans and plants. Her thorough work and the practical applications of her findings earned her an international reputation amongst her fellow scientists.  Unfortunately, Franklin died at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer. Her brief life made a lasting impact on the sciences and people’s everyday lives. Franklin used many thinking strategies to earn her reputation across fields, which we can learn to emulate. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Rosalind Franklin’s thinking strategies Rosalind Franklin has accomplished so much during her short life, there are many strategies we can extract from her accomplishments. Let’s explore three of those lessons and how we can apply them to our everyday lives and work. 1. Aim for practical innovation. Franklin always wanted her work to have practical applications, not just sit in a lab or a journal that few people would read. During World War II, Franklin worked at the British Coal Utilization Research Association and studied the porosity of coal. At first glance, that topic may seem a little dry. But her research allowed British troops to estimate fuel performance in their vehicles. Her findings also helped improve the soldiers’ gas masks. The gas masks had activated charcoal filters to protect the soldiers, but Franklin’s work increased their effectiveness. Another example comes from her virus research. Franklin became an expert in creating clear x-ray diffraction images of different viruses. These images paved the way for scientists to break the genetic code and use DNA sequencing to understand viruses. These methods are still used today to investigate viruses such as COVID-19. 2. Be a global connector. Not only did Franklin want to find practical applications for her work, but she also understood the importance of sharing that work with others. For her, that meant working with partners from across the globe and sharing her work at international scientific conferences, which she tried to attend as many as possible.  3. Explore your passions. Franklin never limited herself by studying only biology or only chemistry. Her work across disciplines allowed her to impact many different fields. She also highly valued having hobbies, and would spend her free time playing sports, sewing, and traveling. How to think like Rosalind Franklin One of the keys to emulating Rosalind Franklin is to broaden your impact. Franklin never limited herself to a single subject and made incredible impacts on several fields, including energy and medicine. How can you use your talents, expertise, and experience to impact multiple domains? For example, say you are a marketing expert. Perhaps you can volunteer to write marketing materials for a charity organization close to your heart or offer to help them with data analysis. If you are an online course creator, maybe you can brainstorm ways to convert your educational content into a book. The possibilities are endless. Another important strategy you can borrow from Franklin is to proactively get connected. We no longer need to travel worldwide like Franklin to have a global impact. Social media platforms can help you find potential collaborators and international audiences for your work. There are also many groups whose goals are to foster connections between professionals with similar interests across the globe. Don’t be shy, join one of them and become an active participant. Finally, stay curious! Not everything has to be about work. Franklin followed her passions in what she studied and how she spent her leisure time. What are some things you are interested in learning about or experiencing that are unrelated to your work life? Setting aside time for reading, listening to podcasts, even checking out YouTube videos are a great way to fulfill your curiosity and enrich your life with new knowledge. Rosalind Franklin made significant contributions to science that paved the way for the innovations of today. Her unbounded curiosity had a global impact while still making time to enjoy the activities that she loved. The lessons we learn from her life should encourage us to pursue our interests, seek connections beyond our borders, and consider the ways we can broaden our impact. The post Rosalind Franklin: the power of unbounded curiosity appeared first on Ness Labs.

Vera Rubin was a powerhouse in astrophysics, though she rarely gets the credit she deserves. Rubin is responsible for discovering dark matter, which makes up 84% of the material that exists in the universe. Born in 1928, a young Vera became enthralled with space while staring at the stars outside her bedroom window. After receiving a full ride to Vassar College, Vera went on to study how galaxies move in space and found some unexpected results. Rubin expected galaxies to move in the same way planets revolve around the sun. Objects closer to the sun move faster than those that are further away. However, using her keen observational skills, she discovered that all objects in a galaxy move at the same speed, no matter how far they are from the center. Dark matter is responsible for this phenomenon, and Rubin’s discovery set the course for modern astronomy studies. Her approach to problem-solving and innovation holds many lessons for us today. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Vera Rubin’s thinking strategies Vera Rubin had a unique way to navigate the world, ask questions, and make connections. Three strategies in particular have helped make immense contributions to science. 1. Practicing visual thinking. Rubin’s interest in visual thinking started when she was young. She would stare out of her bedroom window and watch the stars as they moved. She drew maps of meteor showers showing the direction of the streaks that fell from the sky. As her observational skills improved, Rubin continued to rely on drawings to understand what was happening in the universe. While collecting data about galaxies at the Carnegie Institute, Rubin used visual thinking to explain the perplexing results. Using the data printed out on punch cards, she made sketches to help her figure out how to explain the results. Even when she looked at different galaxies, the same pictures would emerge repeatedly. These pictures validated her observations and gave her results even more credibility. 2. Trusting the evidence. Rubin had difficulty convincing her colleagues that her findings were valid. As such, she produced the same evidence for over a decade to quiet the (mostly male) critics. Her years of careful, precise observations and documentation ensured her work was irrefutable. 3. Seeing the bigger picture. Not only did Rubin shape modern astronomy, but she was also a fierce advocate for women in science. She pushed for more women to participate in scientific committees and conferences. She was also a strong advocate for equal pay. Rubin once wrote a letter to Nature, a highly influential scientific publication, to complain about a job listing that explicitly offered women applicants a lower salary than men. She understood that more brilliant minds in astronomy would mean more scientific discoveries. How to think like Vera Rubin Visual thinking may sound intimidating, but you can use various strategies to represent complicated problems or projects visually. Draw a timeline for your projects, use a mind map, or practice your infographic skills to shed light on solutions to everyday issues. No need for museum-quality artwork here! Focus less on drawing skills and more on creating the most useful visuals for you. To think like Vera Rubin is to follow the evidence. Whatever questions you are trying to answer, look for factual information, and keep on analyzing the data from different perspectives, connecting it across various areas of knowledge. Even if your colleagues doubt your results, you will know your work is based on evidence. Finally, another theme that emerges from Vera Rubin’s life is the importance of not only focusing on your own success, but instead stepping up for others. Rubin took her negative experiences as a woman in science and found ways to create change. Ask yourself: what challenges have you faced in your career? How can you turn your experiences into opportunities for newcomers in your field? Rubin’s observational skills, dedication, and persistence made her one of the most influential figures in science. By practicing visual thinking, following the evidence, seeing the big picture, we can also make profound impacts in our fields and on our personal and professional growth. Which strategy will you use today? The post Vera Rubin: The power of evidence-based visual thinking appeared first on Ness Labs.

Born in 1821, Elizabeth Blackwell did not intend to become a physician. In her book Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, she shared that “the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust.” But the course of her life changed when a close family friend became terminally ill. Her friend shared that she believed she would not have suffered as much if her doctor had been a woman instead of a man. This experience inspired Blackwell to become a physician, though most medical schools were not open to women at the time. Blackwell overcame all the challenges she faced to become the first woman to qualify as a doctor in the United States, be included in the British General Medical Council’s medical register, and publish in a medical journal in the US. Blackwell also opened her own clinic and wrote numerous books about women in medicine. Let’s explore Blackwell’s thinking strategies and how we can apply them to the way we navigate our work and life. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Elizabeth Blackwell’s thinking strategies What made Elizabeth Blackwell’s mind remarkable was her ability to get off the beaten path, her efforts to invest in both self-education and traditional education, and her willingness to create learning opportunities for others, thus building a virtuous intellectual circle. Here are three principles she followed throughout her life. 1. Having the courage to be the first. Blackwell’s biggest challenge was getting to medical school in the first place. Every medical school she applied to rejected her because they did not accept female students. The only school that accepted her was Geneva Medical College in New York. However, even this success was mired in sexism; school administrators allowed the male students to vote on her admission, and the majority voted “yes” as a joke. Ultimately, the joke was on them. Blackwell’s commitment and talents ultimately earned the respect of her peers and professors by the time she graduated, becoming the first woman in America to do so. When she had difficulty finding patients and jobs at local hospitals because she was a woman, she opened a clinic with her sister instead. It takes bravery to create your own path to success, but Blackwell did this every single day of her career. 2. Investing in your education. Blackwell understood the importance of investing time and money into her education. To save for medical school, she taught music to children at a school in North Carolina. The school’s leader was a former doctor who knew about Blackwell’s interest in becoming a physician. So, when she was not teaching, Blackwell prepared for med school using her doctor’s old medical textbooks. She ultimately saved $3,000 from her teaching job to pay for her education. 3. Creating opportunities for others. Learning from her experiences as a woman in medicine, Blackwell ensured that other women did not have to go through the same challenges. When she and her sister opened their clinic, their goals were two-fold: care for poor women in the community and provide working opportunities for women doctors. Blackwell was also a consistent advocate for women in medicine, writing several books on the topic and continuing her advocacy even after retiring.  How to think like Elizabeth Blackwell A great way to emulate Elizabeth Blackwell is by carving your own path, even when it is not obvious and even more when it’s not well traveled. Imagine if Blackwell allowed the men in her field to shake her confidence. Elizabeth knew that people’s unfounded opinions should never stop you from achieving your goals. The only person who knows everything that you are capable of is you.  Another important strategy is to focus on your growth. Blackwell invested in becoming a medical pioneer. How can you use your time and other resources to further your professional or personal development? Perhaps now is the time to take that online training or sign up for that class you have been thinking about for six months. As Blackwell shows us, investing in yourself can not only benefit you, but also the people in your community. Finally, make sure to open doors for others. Blackwell carved a path that made it easier for women to enter the medical field. How can you help others get on the same career path? There are many ways to do this, from hiring interns to joining a professional association to connecting with local schools to work with students. Consider how other people have opened doors for you and how you can pay it forward today.  Elizabeth Blackwell was a courageous woman and a pioneer in the medical community. She defied expectations to become a woman of firsts in her field. She also paid it forward to the next generation of women in medicine, helping them avoid and overcome obstacles she faced in her career. To follow Blackwell’s path, we should practice trusting our abilities, invest in our growth, and consider what we can do to welcome the next generation into our fields. The post Elizabeth Blackwell: the power of applied education appeared first on Ness Labs.

Born in 1908, Simone de Beauvoir was an influential writer, feminist, social theorist, and philosopher. She is best known for her 1949 book, The Second Sex, which upended traditional notions of the role of women in society. Beauvoir made the case that women have always been treated as an “other” and advocated for women’s liberation. Beauvoir also authored the Manifesto of the 343, which set the stage for legalizing birth control and abortion in France. The demands came from a gathering of 343 women that she organized to share their experiences with reproduction rights in the country. Beauvoir was also deeply engaged in politics and was one of the original editors of the left-wing French publication Les Temps Modernes, along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lazzman. There are many strategies we can learn from the mind of this revolutionary figure. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking strategies Simone de Beauvoir was known to always challenge expectations, to be comfortable with dealing with ambiguous situations and addressing conflicting ideas simultaneously, and to embrace the “intellectual” label associated with her work. 1. Challenging the status quo. Beauvoir challenged societal expectations of women from the beginning. As a secondary school teacher, she was fired from multiple jobs for teaching about feminism. Schools accused her of “morally corrupting” the youth in the community.  When The Second Sex was published, Beauvoir presented a series of novel arguments to prove the existence of women’s oppression. She tied together creation myths, which suggested women were sinful and weak, with men’s treatment of women based on those myths. She also suggested that the idea of what makes a woman is a social construct, saying that “One is not born a woman, but becomes one.” These claims which challenged the status quo have become extremely influential. 2. Embracing ambiguity. When discussing social ills, some people exclusively blame individual behavior, while others focus only on systemic problems. Beauvoir, who published a book called Ethics of Ambiguity, was known for keeping individual and systemic issues in balance in her work. She recognized that social problems result from systemic oppression and individual actions. Instead of focusing one one perspective only and ignoring seemingly contradictory ideas, she was comfortable addressing conflicting viewpoints simultaneously when dealing with ambiguous situations. 3. Celebrating intellectualism. While some people may associate intellectualism with the negative connotation of a single-minded focus on thinking, Simone de Beauvoir embraced the intellectual quest of deriving knowledge from reason. She was an extremely active presence in the French intellectual community. In addition to her books, she wrote novels, essays, plays, and memoirs, and believed in the power of intellectualism to contribute to societal reform. How to think like Simone de Beauvoir A principle visible throughout Simone de Beauvoir’s work is that great thinking does not need to be neutral thinking. Beauvoir’s activism in the form of her writings brought awareness to the struggles facing women all over the globe. Her ideas paved the way for reproductive rights in France and the second wave of the feminist movement. Ask yourself: what are topics you are passionate about? What are areas where you would like to contribute to changing minds and fostering innovation? Next, write down public engagement skills that you are comfortable with – writing, speaking, teaching, organizing – and consider how you might use them to support causes that are important to you. Maybe you can launch a newsletter about climate change, start teaching decision-makers at your company about mental health in the workplace, or give a talk about the importance of inclusive design. Simone de Beauvoir is a great example of how rigorous thinking is compatible with advocacy. Another way to think like Simone de Beauvoir is to get more comfortable with ambiguity. Beauvoir wrote extensively about ethics in ambiguous situations and took great care to balance arguments in her work. Recognize the role of ambiguity in your life and increase your tolerance to ambiguity tolerance by studying the ambiguity effect. Finally, practice inclusive thinking. In her work, Beauvoir always made sure to include the voices of people who were often excluded from intellectual conversations. Whenever you are working on a project, consider how you will practice inclusion. Whose voices are being overlooked in decision-making processes? What steps can you take to make the project more inclusive? Simone de Beauvoir was an intellectual powerhouse whose stance against oppression sparked a movement. She challenged the status quo with the stroke of her pen and the power of her ideas. We can take inspiration from her by finding ways to use our talents to advocate for causes we care about, to think about our relationship with ambiguity, and to build more inclusive environments. The post Simone de Beauvoir: the power of intellectual advocacy appeared first on Ness Labs.

You have likely heard of Socrates and Plato, two of the most well-known ancient Greek philosophers. The names Pericles and Cicero may also ring a bell. But Aspasia, a little-known female philosopher with the gift of persuasion, is rarely mentioned in history books. However, she was one of the most influential philosophical figures in Athens. Aspasia’s father provided her with an education. However, she was forced to leave her home in Miletus, now modern-day Turkey, and found refuge in Athens. Aspasia could not become an Athenian citizen upon arrival. Since she did not have to conform to expectations for Athenian women, Aspasia could do many things that other women could not. She opened a salon where great thinkers of the day gathered to discuss philosophy and current events. Aspasia was always a part of the discussion and was an intellectual equal. She shared her gift of persuasive speech with Socrates, who later credited her as one of his teachers. Aspasia also taught rhetoric to young girls in Athens and encouraged them to seek more education. There are many lessons we can learn from this fearless philosopher. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Aspasia’s thinking strategies Aspasia cultivated a life designed around productive debate, collective learning, and community building. In particular, there are three strategies she applied to become one of the most connected philosophers of her times. 1. Turning challenges into opportunities. Instead of seeing her lack of citizenship as an insurmountable barrier, Aspasia saw it as an opportunity. She seized the freedom to design her life outside of traditional expectations, hosting her private salons and building her very own school for young girls. 2. Delighting in debate. Rhetoric is the art of speaking and writing persuasively. While the term has come to have negative connotations, it used to be considered a civic art which Aristotle defined as “a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics.” As you can imagine, the art of rhetoric was mostly considered a masculine affair, but Aspasia ignored the traditional expectations of women in Athens, and delighted in the heated conversations she held at her salons. She embraced debate as a powerful learning tool. 3. Establishing a knowledge-sharing hub. Great thinking partners make for great learning opportunities. Aspasia’s logic, debating skills, conversation, and eloquent speech attracted not only fellow philosophers but also artists and scientists. Her followers and supporters held significant positions of power in Athens. Not only did her salons help her grow her own knowledge, but they gave Athenian intellectuals an opportunity to share ideas across disciplines. She also developed an unusual partnership with military general Pericles. While the two could not marry because of Aspasia’s lack of citizenship (and Pericles was already married), the couple lived together and respected each other as equal parties. Pericles often consulted Aspasia on political matters, which was highly unusual at a time when women were not considered equals. How to think like Aspasia Aspasia saw challenges as an opportunity to take the road less traveled. To think like Aspasia is to embrace challenges and to defy societal expectations that can inhibit our ambitions. If you believe the world needs your work, keep on persevering the same way she did with her salons and her school for young girls. Another of Aspasia’s thinking skills you can draw inspiration from is to develop your power of persuasion. The ability to persuade people is an invaluable skill to succeed in your professional and personal life. Some strategies to strengthen your rhetoric skills include understanding what motivates your audience, identifying and bringing up needs your audience may not have thought of, and using storytelling to convey your point. While it is likely Aspasia mostly practiced her verbal skills, you can also write down your arguments to better spot ways to improve them. Finally, create or join a learning community. Aspasia created a space for people to share knowledge across disciplines and debate new ideas. With the ability to create a community online or in-person, the opportunities to gain insights and engage with other passionate people are endless. Try finding communities of diverse people who share your thirst for knowledge. Aspasia was a brilliant philosopher who used her outsider status to defy expectations about what women could accomplish. Even in the face of harsh critiques, she turned challenges into opportunities thanks to the power of persuasion. To follow her influence, we should embrace healthy debates, fight against artificial expectations that limit us, and foster safe spaces to learn together. The post Aspasia: the power of debate and collective learning appeared first on Ness Labs.

Katherine Johnson was always passionate about mathematics. She started taking classes at West Virginia State College at 13 years old and started her career as a math teacher. Then in 1953, Johnson became a part of a group of Black women mathematicians known as “human computers” at the Langley Research Center. Her equations sent the first American into space, allowed John Glenn to orbit the Earth, and let Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explore the moon safely. Johnson developed a reputation for precision and was never afraid to ask questions. However, no one knew who she was for decades until Margot Lee Shetterly documented Johnson’s extraordinary career in the book Hidden Figures. In 2015, Johnson won the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contributions to space programs, and Hidden Figures was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Katherine Johnson’s thinking strategies There are many lessons we can learn from Katherine Johnson’s incredible career and her experiences as a Black female mathematician. Three principles in particular have been recurring themes in her life and work. 1. Questioning the rules. Because things have been working a certain way doesn’t mean they ought to stay the same. Despite being indispensable contributors to space flight programs, Johnson and her Black female colleagues were not allowed to attend meetings about their projects. The reasoning? No girls allowed. Johnson famously questioned her male colleagues about this rule, asking if there was a law against women in meetings. Since there was no such law, Johnson persistently asked her colleagues to attend the meetings until they eventually let her in. She was the only woman to participate in these meetings. As time went on, her male colleagues increasingly relied on her insights. In addition to gender discrimination, Johnson also had to fight against racism. For instance, while the cafeteria was segregated by race, Johnson and her colleagues often ignored the signs telling them where to sit. Consistently questioning the rules was a core principle followed by Katherine Johnson. 2. Learning from the best. Instead of trying to study on her own, Johnson developed a network of mathematicians who supported her and inspired her. As a high school student, Johnson took a class with Angie Turner King. Turner King was one of the first Black women in America to earn a Master’s degree in mathematics and chemistry. She showed Johnson that it was possible to be a Black woman in this white, male-dominated field. While in college, Johnson jumped on the opportunity to learn from William Schieffelin Claytor. He was the third Black person to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in America. Claytor encouraged Johnson to become a mathematician, even though at the time there were only 100 women in the profession. He even developed special classes just for Johnson to prepare her for a career in mathematics. Johnson later expressed gratitude for Clayton for supporting her career path. 3. Becoming an educator. Teaching is one of the most powerful ways to keep on learning. Johnson started her career as a math teacher. After 30 years with NASA, she continued to support the next generation of mathematicians. Johnson advocated for math education, supporting volunteer programs and math teachers. She also visited schools, spoke at events, and even responded to letters from students who wanted to become mathematicians. When she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award, NASA Administrator Charles Boden said that Katherine Johnson “is a big part of the reason that my fellow astronauts and I were able to get to space; it’s also a big part of the reason that today there is space for women and African-Americans in the leadership of our nation, including the White House.” How to think like Katherine Johnson One of the most obvious ways to think more like Katherine Johnson is to always question the rules. Cultivate a mindset of pushing back wherever you witness or experience outdated practices. If you see a colleague falling prey to the authority bias, call them out. Use Katherine Johnson as an inspiration to ask difficult questions and be an agent of change. However, the pursuit of progress does not need to be a solitary journey. Finding your role models and learning from them will accelerate how fast you acquire new knowledge, skills, and even relevant professional connections. Ask yourself: who are the experts in your field that could serve as inspiration, and who you could learn from? Identify these experts, make a list, then spend a bit of time familiarizing yourself with their work. In some cases, you may even be able to contact them and ask them a few questions. Or, even better, if you’re enrolled in a course as a student — whether independently or as part of a formal education programme — you may be able to connect with some of the best instructors in your field and learn directly from them. Finally, make sure to pay it forward. Just as we must learn from those who came before us, we should also share what we have learned with the next generation. You don’t have to wait until you’re an expert to start inspiring other students. It can take on different forms: mentoring a younger colleague, visiting schools, advocating for more educational programs in your field, publishing tutorials, sharing what you learn on social media. You may become the one person to inspire the next Katherine Johnson. Katherine Johnson was extraordinarily persistent, curious, and brave. She refused to let artificial barriers prevent her from making a lasting impact in her field. You can apply some of Johnson’s thinking strategies by always questioning the rules, connecting with the best experts in your fields, and by becoming an educator to in turn inspire the next generation of brilliant thinkers. The post Katherine Johnson: the power of questioning the rules appeared first on Ness Labs.

Scientist Jane Goodall always watched the world around her. As a child, she would spend hours watching jumping spiders and keep all kinds of pets. She also gave her parents quite a scare when she went missing as a child. But her parents eventually found her in the henhouse observing the chickens. Jane just wanted to know how they laid their eggs. Goodall’s curiosity, patience, and powerful observation skills ultimately led her to Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Game Reserve. She established relationships with chimpanzees in the reserve and watched them search for food, find mates, and tend to their babies. She wrote the book The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior in 1986 and completely upended our understanding of chimpanzees’ behavior. Goodall eventually left the field to advocate for captive chimpanzees and sustainable development. There is a lot we can learn from this keen observationist, prolific writer, and environmental activist. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Jane Goodall’s thinking strategies Jane Goodall had a deep understanding of the importance of immersing ourselves in the world around us and the value of taking our time. She also showed trust in her research when faced with rebuttal from fellow scientists. Here are three strategies she applied throughout her extraordinary life and career. 1. Immersing yourself in the world. Like other young women in the 1950s, Goodall began her career as a secretary. So how did she become a renowned scientist? While working as a secretary in Nairobi, Goodall met paleontologist and anthropologist Louis Leakey. Leakey was so impressed by Goodall’s knowledge and understanding of the natural world that he brought her on as a researcher to study chimpanzees in Tanzania. Goodall eventually earned her Ph.D. in Ethology in 1965, becoming one of the only people to do so without a Bachelor’s degree. She is proof that not all groundbreaking scientists start in a lab; there is much to be learned just by looking at the world around us. 2. Taking your time. It took 25 years for Goodall to publish her definitive book on chimpanzees’ behavior. Each discovery she made was the result of patiently looking for patterns. For instance, Goodall once observed a chimp using a blade of grass to pull termites from a mound. If she stopped there, she might have noted that one chimp used grass to feed himself. But the next day, Goodall witnessed the same chimp pull leaves off a twig to get at the termites. The chimp made a tool. That novel discovery would not have happened without a lot of time spent in the field and several focused observations. 3. Having the courage of your evidence-based convictions. In academia, Goodall faced challenges with men who belittled her work or did not accept her findings. In a 2014 interview, Goodall explained that these critiques from men did not matter because she was confident in her work and results. She said: “My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.” How to think like Jane Goodall The outside world can become invisible when we focus on solving specific problems. For example, it is very common for startups to build solutions in search of a problem. To think like Jane Goodall, pick your head up and look around you. Do you see any patterns? How are people navigating the world? You can learn a lot from pure observation. Another important ingredient in Jane’s thinking toolkit is patience. Remember, her definitive book on chimpanzee behavior took 25 years to publish. It takes time to learn new things and develop mastery of a new skill, topic, or process. Give yourself grace when you are still in the knowledge-building phase. Finally, stand up for yourself, especially when facts and data are on your side. Follow the advice from Jane’s mother. If someone disagrees with you, listen to their reasoning. After listening, if you believe you are right, be willing to say so. Be especially wary of those who seem to disagree with you based on factors that have nothing to do with your actual work. Jane Goodall’s patience, curiosity, and confidence made her one of the most influential scientists of our time. The lessons we can learn from her remarkable career should inspire us to be more present in the world around us. Goodall’s life also highlights the rewards that come with taking our time and the benefits of standing firm in our beliefs. What can you do today to follow in her footsteps? The post Jane Goodall: the power of experimentation and conviction appeared first on Ness Labs.

Ada Lovelace is considered the world’s first computer programmer. In 1842, Lovelace translated an Italian publication about Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine into English. However, this was no ordinary translation. Lovelace added extensive notes of her own, suggesting ways the Analytic Engine could be programmed to calculate certain equations using a series of punch cards. Her insights ultimately inspired Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computers in the 1940s. Ada Lovelace is a brilliant thinker because she defied many stereotypes of mathematicians. She was not a “human calculator” who lacked social skills or knowledge of other disciplines. Let’s have a look at Lovelace’s key thinking strategies and how we can apply these to our own lives. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Ada Lovelace’s thinking strategies Not only was Ada Lovelace wildly imaginative, but she also valued her relationships in the scientific community and frequently connected science and literature. Throughout her life, she applied three key strategies to grow her knowledge and make new discoveries. 1. Investing in mentorship. Lovelace understood the importance of cultivating relationships. After attending a house party in her teens at the home of Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor, Ada became enthralled with his plans to develop an early version of the modern computer called the Analytical Engine. Eventually, the relationship grew into one Ada could rely on for mentorship and support. For instance, after her mathematical journey was interrupted by marriage and family, Lovelace reached out to Babbage to return to mathematics. Babbage connected her to a professor at the University College of London, where she learned how to perform calculus by exchanging letters. Her ongoing professional relationship with Babbage was critical to her studies and success. 2. Building bridges across knowledge areas. Ada was the daughter of Annabelle Milbanke and Lord Byron (yes, that Lord Byron, Romantic poet and author of Don Juan, among other works). After separating from Ada’s father, Annabelle ensured Ada received a rigorous education in math and science. However, Ada also studied literature and other disciplines. Ada had the unique ability to use poetic, pattern-based language to describe mathematical insights. She often used metaphors to explain scientific theories, seeing no need to separate poetry from the sciences. For example, when explaining how the Analytical Engine could calculate equations, Lovelace said that the engine “weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” 3. Using your imagination. Ada Lovelace had a unique perspective on the role of creativity and imagination in math and science. She described creativity as having two key components, the ability to find commonalities between seemingly unrelated subjects, and the ability to conceptualize and visualize ideas that do not yet exist. Mathematics is not always about what is in front of us but also shows us what could be. That’s why Lovelace described imagination as a “discovering faculty” that allows us to see unseen worlds in science.  How to think like Ada Lovelace It can be tough for those who are proudly self-reliant to ask for help, let alone to develop a mentor-mentee relationship. Take small steps towards supportive relationships by emulating Ada and making relationship cultivation easier for yourself with those three steps: Identify people you already know whose work you admire and can help you improve your knowledge or assess your ideas. Figure out how to reach out to them you think will be most respectful of their time. You can start by a short message explaining why you would like to connect, and offering some options. Make sure to be specific so you avoid sending one of these vague pick-your-brain requests. If they agree to connect with you, prepare three questions for them in advance of the discussion, as well as your next steps to move the relationship forward after the meeting. Another way to think like Ada Lovelace is to expand your “expertise base” outside of your core discipline. Ask yourself: what are some of your interests outside of work? Increasing your knowledge about other subject areas can help you expand your circle of competence and practice networked thinking by understanding relationships across disciplines. Finally, make sure to regularly flex your creative muscles. Being creative does not mean you need to become the next Picasso. Small practices like spending time outside and getting a good night’s sleep can help you think more creatively and fire up your imagination. In line with what Ada Lovelace was practicing, an article from the American Psychological Association suggests several ways to bolster your creativity, including jotting down new ideas in a notebook, taking on challenging tasks, like developing a new hobby, and developing relationships with people who are outside of your field to diversify your thinking. Ada Lovelace was a pioneer in mathematics who brought the arts and sciences together to bring modern computing to fruition. With support from her mentor and an endless imagination, she was able to accomplish incredible feats in her field. To follow our inner Ada, we should do our best to seek support and mentorship from our peers, connect ideas across disciplines, and purposefully nurture our creativity. The post Ada Lovelace: the power of imagination and poetical science appeared first on Ness Labs.

Marie Curie was a woman of firsts. Born in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, she was a child prodigy in literature and mathematics. She worked as a governess until the age of 24 to save money for school, where she became the first woman in France to earn her Ph.D. She studied uranium, a radioactive element that was not well understood at the time. Curie discovered two new elements, radium and polonium, and concluded that these elements are responsible for uranium’s radioactive properties. She went on to apply her findings to create cancer treatments and advance x-ray technology. Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in 1903. Then, in 1911, she became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and still holds the record as the only woman who has earned two Nobel Prizes in two different fields (Physics and Chemistry). It’s an understatement to say that she profoundly impacted the world with her ideas, and there is a lot to learn from her approach to problem-solving. Let’s have a look at how you can learn to think more like Marie Curie, and apply her thinking strategies in your daily life and work. This article is part of the Brilliant Thinkers series, which explores the thought processes, working habits, and decision-making principles applied by intellectuals who profoundly impacted the world with their discoveries and the way they challenged the status quo. Marie Curie’s thinking strategies An extraordinary scientist, Marie Curie relied on three key strategies to navigate the world, make decisions, collaborate with others, and explore new ideas. 1. Embracing the unknown. Science operates in a world of unknowns. Still, even scientists struggle with accepting new thoughts or approaches that conflict with their understanding of the world. However, Marie Curie was not afraid of new ideas. She proffered her own “daring hypothesis” early in her career that caused a scientific stir.  At the time, scientists thought that radiation came from interactions between two molecules. However, they were not sure which molecules or how the interactions occurred. Curie proposed that radiation did not come from two molecules; instead, it came from sub-molecules. This idea challenged the widely-held belief that atoms did not have any sub-particles.  Undeterred, Curie continued her work and found the two sub-particles that caused radiation: radium and polonium. She won the Nobel Prize for this research in 1903.  2. Making radical bets. Sometimes, the most radical bet you can make is the bet you make on yourself. Marie Curie had the confidence to bet on herself, despite a cascade of misogynistic criticism that gave her husband and lab partner, Pierre Curie, much credit for their work. When Pierre died unexpectedly, colleagues expected Marie to accept her widow’s pension and step down from the lab. Instead, she did the exact opposite; believing in her abilities, she stayed at the university, Sorbonne, and took over the lab herself.  3. Sharing her ideas. Marie Curie was not interested in keeping her research isolated in the laboratories of chemistry or physics departments. Instead, she would work with anyone interested in radiation, including people in healthcare. In fact, during World War I, Curie used her work to equip ambulances with x-ray machines. She even drove the ambulances herself to help soldiers who needed medical care. How to think like Marie Curie We live in an unpredictable world filled with unknowns. However, fear of the future can paralyze us, making it difficult to engage in creative problem-solving and strategizing. Also, if we create work cultures that are too risk-averse, we can unintentionally stymie innovative contributions. Thinking like Marie Curie requires rethinking our relationship with risk. It also requires learning how to bet on ourselves. Marie Curie did not let other people’s prejudices against women get in the way of her work. She made decisions about her career because she valued the power of science. Betting on ourselves means believing in ourselves and making choices based on our values. Finally, we may not want to share our ideas before they are “ready.” However, sharing ideas can be a great way to connect with others inside and outside your field. Sharing also provides an opportunity to receive feedback from many different perspectives. Sharing doesn’t have to be scary. It can mean a call to a trusted colleague or a post in a LinkedIn group; whatever feels the most comfortable for you. Here are three practical questions you can ask yourself in order to think like Marie Curie: What is a small risk that you can take right now to improve your work or personal life? What might happen if you take that risk? Focus on the possible positive outcomes to encourage yourself to act. Are your work, school, or personal decisions aligned with your personal values? Are you making decisions based on these values? If not, what small steps can you take to become better aligned? How comfortable do you feel sharing your ideas with the world, even when they are half-baked? Is there an idea you have been sitting on that you could share with someone to get their feedback? Marie Curie remains one of the most important scientific figures in history. She embraced the unknown, always bet on herself, and took her findings out of the lab and into the world. To follow her lead, we must be willing to face an uncertain future, have the confidence in ourselves to tackle whatever challenge comes our way, and surround ourselves with a community that allows for free, open exchange of ideas. The post Marie Curie: the power of sharing radical ideas with the world appeared first on Ness Labs.