Welcome to this edition of our interview series, where we connect with founders on a mission to help us achieve more without sacrificing our mental health. Craig Doig is the co-founder of Markee, a white-label collaboration tool that allows you to meet, chat, and share files with your team or whoever you would like all under your own logo, brand colors, and domain. In this interview, we talked about the importance of privacy and simplicity, the challenges of working with external partners, the debate of remote versus hybrid work, the future of online collaboration, the benefit of properly disconnecting from work, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Craig, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Between Zoom, Slack, and other communication tools, people feel overwhelmed when collaborating with their team. Can you tell us a bit about what makes Markee different? It’s my pleasure, thanks so much for having me! We have been interested in the communication space for quite some time. Before Markee was a real startup company we were a group of creatives and developers remotely collaborating across six timezones. Between the core team, it’s likely we have used or tried over fifty tools. Nothing ever ticked all of our boxes. The most prominent reason was the lack of ownership. We never felt like we had a sense of ownership over any cloud-based tool. That became one of our core focuses: allowing our customers to experience a cloud tool that was fully brandable. That said, what makes us unique actually comes from a deeper but simple philosophical frame. We believe people deserve the right to enjoy and explore something as simple as a SaaS tool without feeling lost or tracked. That’s why simplicity and privacy are two of our core values. We want to remove as many negative barriers or complex dopamine triggers from work tools as possible. Everything is two clicks away fully encrypted. We are never storing personal data other than name and email. And if you ever leave, you can ask us to destroy everything. Those are great core values. What inspired you to build Markee? Originally, Markee was built as an event management and collaboration tool that could be used as a totally white labeled experience, something for people to differentiate themselves from the ubiquitous Zoom and Hopin events. We started building a rough prototype early with a few not-for-profits and local businesses who helped guide the design process. For example, we worked with a disabilities charity where the team was keen to stand out in the new digital fundraising space, and that encouraged us to add font options and access controls. After tons of feedback from these early partners, we decided to focus on the collaboration aspects of our tool, and thus the current version of Markee was born. And how does Markee work exactly? We see Markee as an all-in-one collaboration solution for remote and in-house teams, it allows you to host video meetings, chats, and share files with anyone. Our goal was to take the core features that people need every day at work and make them simpler. If you think of tools like Slack, you can only chat with your team members and you need to deal with confusing permission systems. This can make externally sharing spaces, chats, and video calls externally complicated or even impossible. Markee combines video and text chat rooms into one, and allows you to share it like you would a Notion or Google document. We think this makes things simple and accessible for even non-technical users both inside or out of your team. We are also browser based, so you don’t have to download anything or ask your customers to do so. For companies using Slack to communicate internally, Zoom to host meetings, and Dropbox to share documents, Markee is a completely new way to collaborate. Our goal is to make collaboration about meaningful discussions rather than being a notification machine that follows you everywhere. Now for a more high-level question. Business owners are still debating whether they should go fully remote, hybrid, some are considering asking everyone to come back to the office. What’s your view regarding this debate? We built Markee to enable remote and hybrid work, but if you look at most of our branding we tend to promote hybrid work. We believe human interaction and real life engagement is important for the development of ideas and growth, but certainly not a total necessity. Personally, I believe it should be optional to engage in person, and that businesses should promote “opt in” spaces or hubs where there is a concentration of employees. I think this helps the more extroverted on your team thrive without putting any pressure on teammates to come in, particularly if you have a culture that uses their communication tools in a healthy way that keeps everyone abreast of critical developments.  Markee is a relatively new product and you have been rapidly iterating and working on new features. Can you tell us about your approach to product development? We simply listen to our customers’ feedback. We very actively listen and engage with our customers and try to solve their core issue rather than just releasing a workaround or patch. We enjoy going back to them and gathering their feedback on the solution as well before we push anything live. This has allowed us to stay transparent with everyone and implement features that are always well received.  Listening to your customers is so important indeed. You have also put together a team of “Collaboration Experts” — what exactly do they do? When you sit down with one of our experts, the first thing they are going to do is create a vision of what clear and easy collaboration looks like for your team. Once they have a better idea of the desired outcome, they will evaluate your tech stack and provide you with recommendations on how you might optimize it, as it exists, to achieve those goals. If they think Markee makes sense, they will recommend and provide context for processes that could be winning plays in the long run. But they only do that if they genuinely think it would be a good fit. We have an empathetic sales team that believes in solving problems rather than providing solutions to problems that do not exist. We see this approach as an opportunity to transcend the traditional business model of selling at all costs. This is a very refreshing approach. You are also taking security very seriously. Can you tell us more? There are really two different threads here, there is user and data privacy and there is security from outside threats. First, every video chat is secure — our video calls are HIPAA-compliant and all our chats and file sharing are secure. To the second point, Markee doesn’t track any user behavior or personal data on the platform. Your files and private information remain yours, so you will never have to worry about vague terms and conditions or unreliable security. Upon request, we even destroy all copies of your files and information so you can tie up loose ends without liability concerns. That’s great to hear. I also wanted to ask you: what kind of people use Markee? We run the gamut when it comes to customer composition. For example, we have a charity that uses Markee to conduct therapy in a secure environment while also facilitating ongoing conversations with multiple members of the communities they support. Another awesome customer is a local software company using our tool for sales calls, then turning those calls into ongoing asynchronous conversations with their clients. What’s super cool is they also use our tool for internal collaboration which means it’s easy to connect their clients with other team members with a few clicks rather than meeting with them in another tool like Zoom. Almost all businesses need a secure platform that their clients can trust, and at the same time, they need an all-in-one workspace that holds all the files, information, and conversations for a project in an organized manner. That’s what we aim to offer with Markee. What about you… How do you personally use Markee? We really try to “eat our own dog food” by implementing it into our day-to-day routines. Everyone in our team’s ecosystem, friends, family, and close customers are using it and sharing feedback. Going through a typical week can give you an idea of all of the unique ways to use Markee. We do a standing meeting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with the team in our general room, which we use to greet each other via text chat in the morning and announce things during the week. During various department breakout meetings we hold our video meetings in the same team rooms where we keep the asynchronous conversations going and store our files and links. For the sales team and myself, we like to use the “Schedule Meeting” function to set up a meeting for each of our potential customers and automatically send it through Google calendar. My favorite part is the “Direct Messages” feature, where we create groups with custom names and do a lot of the intricate small team projects with all the power of a normal room. Other features I love are the user locations that you can see moving around the product, and of course the fact we can change the branding in real time. I already mentioned that Markee is browser based, but it’s also notification free. You have push notifications when you have it open in the browser, but not when you close the tab. This kind of thing is very important to us, setting work boundaries and making sure people are able to disconnect when they need to. We think more business tools should apply a similar philosophy. I completely agree. There’s still so much work to improve the way we collaborate online. Where would you like Markee to be in the next few years? We hope to continue to help others connect in a simple, healthy, and personal way. I think we have a bright and vibrant future with a growing community of users that just ...

Can you imagine a pink elephant? Is it big or small? Hot pink or pastel pink? Does it look happy, sad, tired, or excited? Give your pink elephant as much detail as you can. Now that you have got your pink elephant clear in your head, it is time to stop thinking about it. Think about any other topic for 30 seconds, and observe where your thoughts take you. How long did you last without the pink elephant creeping back into your mind? For most of us, that pink elephant will appear back in our thoughts within seconds. The same is true of unwanted and intrusive thoughts: the more you try to suppress them, the more they will bother you. This is called the Pink Elephant Paradox. Learning how to manage obsessive or intrusive thoughts can help you to avoid the associated pitfalls of negative emotions, distractibility, and poor decision-making. From white bear to pink elephant In 1987, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper entitled ‘Paradoxical effects of thought suppression’. The study involved participants taking part in two experiments in which they verbalised their stream of consciousness for five minutes. As part of the first experiment, the participants were asked not to think about a white bear. In the second experiment, participants were asked to think about a white bear.  The researchers found that participants were more preoccupied with thinking about a white bear in the first experiment, despite being asked to not think of one. This suggests that trying to suppress a thought “has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy,” and can lead to obsession or preoccupation despite an individual’s best efforts to ignore the thought. As writer Fyodor Dostoevsky famously put it in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Whether it’s a white bear, a pink elephant, or any other thought, this psychological process whereby our deliberate attempts to suppress certain thoughts make them more likely to surface has been named “ironic process theory” by scientists. For example, when your life hits a bump in the road, family or friends may recommend that you “just stop thinking about it”. However, their advice to suppress your thoughts could paradoxically serve only to strengthen your intrusive thoughts. The Pink Elephant Paradox can not only intensify intrusive thoughts, but it can also impact the way we think, feel and make decisions. You have probably experienced this phenomenon if you have ever felt more distracted or less productive at work because of a ruminating thought or unresolved issue. The impact of the Pink Elephant Paradox There are three ways that the Pink Elephant Paradox can affect our thoughts and emotions. 1. Propagation of persistent negative emotions. Intrusive thoughts might include “repetitive thoughts, images or impulses.” Unfortunately, intrusive or unwanted thoughts are associated with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and obsessive compulsive disorders. However, individuals who are otherwise healthy can also develop intrusive thoughts that are comparable to a clinical obsession.  There is also evidence that rumination and intrusive thoughts are associated with negative thought patterns. Negative thought patterns were also found to be more common in those who did not practice mindfulness. Mindfulness requires an individual to become more aware of sights, sounds, thoughts and emotions, rather than trying to suppress them.  Without mindfulness, the opportunity to address difficult thoughts or feelings does not arise, and instead we attempt to suppress the emotions. This attempt at suppression, rather than acknowledgement, feeds into the Pink Elephant Paradox, causing the thoughts to become intrusive. 2. Increased distractibility. A study found that those who are plagued by negative thought intrusions, and individuals who have a propensity to worry, show increased distractibility when trying to focus on a specific task. Furthermore, the more an individual struggles with intrusive thoughts, the more distractible they tend to be.  The accessibility of social media, emails and other forms of communication or entertainment can distract even the most dedicated worker. However, if you are managing intrusive thoughts on top of technological distractions, staying focused poses an even greater challenge.  Being easily drawn away from the task in hand, by any form of distractor, disrupts focus and prompts the brain to try to multitask. Any form of disruption will stunt your professional creativity and development. It also means that each task could be taking you far longer than it should. Being easily distracted could be making it harder for you to establish and nurture professional and personal relationships, too. 3. Poor decision making. Intrusive thoughts can be so intense that it becomes difficult to focus on anything else. Although these thoughts or emotions can appear salient, they can be masking other, more important factors or considerations. With the intrusive thought taking centre stage, your decision making can become skewed. Rather than being able to make rational, carefully considered judgments, you may instead be swayed by persistent thoughts that lead you to make the wrong decision. How to manage The Pink Elephant Paradox There will be times when almost all of us experience the intrusion of thoughts that we have tried to suppress. Psychologists have shown that directly trying to suppress the thoughts is likely only to make them more persistent. Instead, there are other ways you can manage intrusive thoughts to remove their power and make them less noticeable. Use self-reflection to reduce the impact of intrusive thoughts. Self-reflection and mindfulness have been proven to protect individuals from the negative impact of intrusive thoughts. In particular, becoming more aware and accepting of negative thoughts or feelings can help to reduce the frequency of intrusive thoughts, as well as making them feel less distressing. Mindfulness shifts the focus from the intrusive thought to the present moment, helping to alleviate the fear or anxiety associated with the thought. By accepting a thought, and trying not to see it as negative, an individual’s perceived distress at the impulse or emotion can be minimised. Engage in constructive distractions. When an intrusive thought arises, finding a constructive distraction is healthier than ruminating on it. Refocusing your energy on a different task can help you to engage your brain in a different activity. Find something that requires almost all of your attention, such as reading, chatting to a friend, going for a run, painting or watching a film. By concentrating on something else, your mental energy is used elsewhere, leaving less room for intrusive thoughts. Find a positive thought substitution. If you find yourself ruminating on negative thoughts, try to replace them with a positive. On a blank piece of paper, draw two columns. When a negative thought persists, counterbalance it with the corresponding positive response. For example, if you think “I am a failure”, you might counteract the thought with “I made a mistake, but I am learning from it now”. If something is “too hard”, your positive substitution could be, “I will work hard to get better at this.” By turning negative ruminations into positive pledges, the intrusive thought loses the power it has over you. Thinking of positive solutions also helps you to make any appropriate adjustments or improvements. The Pink Elephant Paradox illustrates that trying to suppress a thought is likely to make it more intrusive. This can negatively affect your emotions, focus and decision-making abilities. Rather than suppress negative thoughts, it is healthier to acknowledge the emotion. Finding a constructive distraction that works for you, and reflecting on positive thought substitutions, can also help you to stop ruminating about intrusive, distressing, or unwanted thoughts. The post The Pink Elephant Paradox: how intrusive thoughts impact our emotions and decisions appeared first on Ness Labs.

Can you imagine a pink elephant? Is it big or small? Hot pink or pastel pink? Does it look happy, sad, tired, or excited? Give your pink elephant as much detail as you can. Now that you have got your pink elephant clear in your head, it is time to stop thinking about it. Think about any other topic for 30 seconds, and observe where your thoughts take you. How long did you last without the pink elephant creeping back into your mind? For most of us, that pink elephant will appear back in our thoughts within seconds. The same is true of unwanted and intrusive thoughts: the more you try to suppress them, the more they will bother you. This is called the Pink Elephant Paradox. Learning how to manage obsessive or intrusive thoughts can help you to avoid the associated pitfalls of negative emotions, distractibility, and poor decision-making. From white bear to pink elephant In 1987, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper entitled ‘Paradoxical effects of thought suppression’. The study involved participants taking part in two experiments in which they verbalised their stream of consciousness for five minutes. As part of the first experiment, the participants were asked not to think about a white bear. In the second experiment, participants were asked to think about a white bear.  The researchers found that participants were more preoccupied with thinking about a white bear in the first experiment, despite being asked to not think of one. This suggests that trying to suppress a thought “has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy,” and can lead to obsession or preoccupation despite an individual’s best efforts to ignore the thought. As writer Fyodor Dostoevsky famously put it in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Whether it’s a white bear, a pink elephant, or any other thought, this psychological process whereby our deliberate attempts to suppress certain thoughts make them more likely to surface has been named “ironic process theory” by scientists. For example, when your life hits a bump in the road, family or friends may recommend that you “just stop thinking about it”. However, their advice to suppress your thoughts could paradoxically serve only to strengthen your intrusive thoughts. The Pink Elephant Paradox can not only intensify intrusive thoughts, but it can also impact the way we think, feel and make decisions. You have probably experienced this phenomenon if you have ever felt more distracted or less productive at work because of a ruminating thought or unresolved issue. The impact of the Pink Elephant Paradox There are three ways that the Pink Elephant Paradox can affect our thoughts and emotions. 1. Propagation of persistent negative emotions. Intrusive thoughts might include “repetitive thoughts, images or impulses.” Unfortunately, intrusive or unwanted thoughts are associated with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and obsessive compulsive disorders. However, individuals who are otherwise healthy can also develop intrusive thoughts that are comparable to a clinical obsession.  There is also evidence that rumination and intrusive thoughts are associated with negative thought patterns. Negative thought patterns were also found to be more common in those who did not practice mindfulness. Mindfulness requires an individual to become more aware of sights, sounds, thoughts and emotions, rather than trying to suppress them.  Without mindfulness, the opportunity to address difficult thoughts or feelings does not arise, and instead we attempt to suppress the emotions. This attempt at suppression, rather than acknowledgement, feeds into the Pink Elephant Paradox, causing the thoughts to become intrusive. 2. Increased distractibility. A study found that those who are plagued by negative thought intrusions, and individuals who have a propensity to worry, show increased distractibility when trying to focus on a specific task. Furthermore, the more an individual struggles with intrusive thoughts, the more distractible they tend to be.  The accessibility of social media, emails and other forms of communication or entertainment can distract even the most dedicated worker. However, if you are managing intrusive thoughts on top of technological distractions, staying focused poses an even greater challenge.  Being easily drawn away from the task in hand, by any form of distractor, disrupts focus and prompts the brain to try to multitask. Any form of disruption will stunt your professional creativity and development. It also means that each task could be taking you far longer than it should. Being easily distracted could be making it harder for you to establish and nurture professional and personal relationships, too. 3. Poor decision making. Intrusive thoughts can be so intense that it becomes difficult to focus on anything else. Although these thoughts or emotions can appear salient, they can be masking other, more important factors or considerations. With the intrusive thought taking centre stage, your decision making can become skewed. Rather than being able to make rational, carefully considered judgments, you may instead be swayed by persistent thoughts that lead you to make the wrong decision. How to manage The Pink Elephant Paradox There will be times when almost all of us experience the intrusion of thoughts that we have tried to suppress. Psychologists have shown that directly trying to suppress the thoughts is likely only to make them more persistent. Instead, there are other ways you can manage intrusive thoughts to remove their power and make them less noticeable. Use self-reflection to reduce the impact of intrusive thoughts. Self-reflection and mindfulness have been proven to protect individuals from the negative impact of intrusive thoughts. In particular, becoming more aware and accepting of negative thoughts or feelings can help to reduce the frequency of intrusive thoughts, as well as making them feel less distressing. Mindfulness shifts the focus from the intrusive thought to the present moment, helping to alleviate the fear or anxiety associated with the thought. By accepting a thought, and trying not to see it as negative, an individual’s perceived distress at the impulse or emotion can be minimised. Engage in constructive distractions. When an intrusive thought arises, finding a constructive distraction is healthier than ruminating on it. Refocusing your energy on a different task can help you to engage your brain in a different activity. Find something that requires almost all of your attention, such as reading, chatting to a friend, going for a run, painting or watching a film. By concentrating on something else, your mental energy is used elsewhere, leaving less room for intrusive thoughts. Find a positive thought substitution. If you find yourself ruminating on negative thoughts, try to replace them with a positive. On a blank piece of paper, draw two columns. When a negative thought persists, counterbalance it with the corresponding positive response. For example, if you think “I am a failure”, you might counteract the thought with “I made a mistake, but I am learning from it now”. If something is “too hard”, your positive substitution could be, “I will work hard to get better at this.” By turning negative ruminations into positive pledges, the intrusive thought loses the power it has over you. Thinking of positive solutions also helps you to make any appropriate adjustments or improvements. The Pink Elephant Paradox illustrates that trying to suppress a thought is likely to make it more intrusive. This can negatively affect your emotions, focus and decision-making abilities. Rather than suppress negative thoughts, it is healthier to acknowledge the emotion. Finding a constructive distraction that works for you, and reflecting on positive thought substitutions, can also help you to stop ruminating about intrusive, distressing, or unwanted thoughts. The post The Pink Elephant Paradox: how intrusive thoughts impact our emotions and decisions appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help make the most of our minds. Jennifer Smith is the founder of Scribe, a tool to help knowledge workers share their specialized know-how. Her goal is to make it as easy as possible for teams to increase their collective intelligence. In this interview, we talked about enabling everyday experts to scale their knowledge, the power of peer-to-peer learning, the biggest productivity sink for knowledge workers, how knowledge-sharing results in big efficiency gains, how staying agile is crucial in our rapidly changing world, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Jennifer, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. One of your mottos is that “everyone is an expert” — what do you mean by that? I truly believe everyone is an expert. Everyone knows how to do something special, something that adds value in some way.  Work is now more specialized than ever before. There are more software tools at this moment than at any point in history; digital workflows are the most complex they’ve ever been, and no one person can ever know everything. Rather, you’ve now got a phenomenon where, with specialization, everyone is now an expert in something more specific. Whether that’s how to generate a report in QuickBooks, or configure a Shopify account, or track prospects in Salesforce — everyone has some kind of special know-how. With Scribe, we think about how to make it really easy for anyone to share what they know how to do. We always say: “You’ve done the hard part already. You know how to do something special, valuable, and unique. We’re just here to make it easy and automatic for you to share what you know how to do.” Scribe will just watch you work and automatically generate step-by-step tutorials that you can share with others to show them what you know how to do. Our hope is that this enables “everyday experts” to scale their knowledge — and to get recognized for the cool things they already know how to do! Knowledge workers spend thousands of hours documenting their work and sharing what they know with others. What makes Scribe different from other approaches to sharing a process or workflow? You’re a knowledge worker and you have some specialized know-how. If you want to share that with someone else right now — a colleague, a customer, or your community — you only have two options: either take precious time away from doing actual work to write down what you know how to do, maybe in a Google Doc, or an email, or copy-pasting screenshots, or explain it to someone else who does the first option for you. Both are really manual and time-intensive, and the information you create can become outdated pretty quickly. With Scribe, all you have to do is hit the “start” button, and do the work you would normally do.  Let’s say you want to explain to someone how to generate an invoice in your CRM. You would hit start, and just generate the invoice. When you’re done, you hit “stop.” Scribe will immediately and automatically generate a step-by-step, written tutorial with screenshots showing exactly how to generate an invoice. You can share that Scribe with someone who can now replicate that process themselves; or save it for later whenever someone has a similar question in the future. You’ve magically created documentation without actually doing any additional work. You didn’t have to take time away from doing productive output to explain to someone else how to do something. We really focused on how to make it as simple, easy, and fast as possible. We look at the time it takes someone from the moment they first land on our website to when they’ve created and shared their first Scribe, and it’s under four minutes. We’re focused on how to help people get time back in their day, so we didn’t want to design a product that had a learning curve. We all have too many tools where we have to invest time to learn how to use them. With Scribe, we’re constantly trying to push the time-to-value to be nearly instantaneous. Four minutes from signing up to creating their first Scribe is impressive. Was there an “aha” moment that inspired you to build Scribe? I have been obsessed with processes and efficiency for pretty much my whole life. I’m always trying to see if there’s a better, faster way to do something. I spent seven years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, mostly in the Org & Operations practices, which meant eight hours a day in ops centers documenting processes. I quickly learned the name of the game was to find the best agent, sit next to them, and just ask them what they did differently. And they would tell me! “Oh, I was trained to do it this way but I found these thirty shortcuts.” And we would dutifully write that up in powerpoint and sell that back to our clients. But I always thought to myself — if these people had just had a platform to share what they had figured out how to do, they could have a really big impact on their ops center. They didn’t need me and my team saying it for them. This always kind of nagged at me, but I figured it was a problem for someone else to solve some day. Fast forward a decade and I’m working at Greylock Partners on Sand Hill Road. I talked to 1200 CXOs of Fortune 500 companies to understand what they wanted and where they saw gaps. And to my surprise, I realized that the state-of-the-art hadn’t really evolved. If you wanted to improve your operations, you still had some version of a 28-year-old Jennifer with her Lenovo ThinkPad running around manually documenting processes to find best practices. Sure, maybe it’s someone in the company and they’re using a wiki instead, but the task is just the same: highly manual and not scalable. And that was crazy to me. So much technological advancement in the world, and we still had not solved something that is so core, so fundamental, to how millions of people work every day. So you decided to solve that problem. How does Scribe work exactly? The concept behind Scribe is simple: what if software could watch you do a task, and automatically generate a step-by-step guide on how to do that task? It’s almost like the documentation is just digital exhaust — a by-product of you doing your normal course of work.  As I said, when you go to do a task, you hit “start” and just do the task. When you are done, you click “stop.” And Scribe will immediately and automatically generate a step-by-step, written guide with screenshots showing exactly how to do that task. You have a bunch of advanced options for how to edit the Scribe, but the point is, you don’t really need to — all the info someone would need to replicate that task is automatically contained in that Scribe. And then you have several options for how to share that Scribe — whether it’s one-click sharing a persistent link, downloading a PDF, or embedding the Scribe in any of hundreds of your favorite tools. The average Scribe takes 54 seconds to create.  It’s designed to have nearly no learning curve at all. Anyone can just get started and create their first Scribe in a matter of seconds. We really focused on how we can take the friction down to nearly zero, for nearly anyone, regardless of digital literacy. This seems like an amazing way to encourage peer-to-peer learning. What are some of the benefits teams have experienced? When you think of learning in companies traditionally, people often think of formal training programs —  maybe one you attended when you first onboarded or as part of ongoing professional development. But most of what you need to know to actually be productive every day is learned on the job, mainly by observing your peers and asking them questions about how things are done. This happens very informally today. You shadow a colleague when you first start, you pop your head over the proverbial cubicle to ask a question, or you call a teammate to ask them to walk you through how to do something. This is often the most effective kind of learning, but it is not very scalable. With Scribe, you can capture what your best people know how to do — once — and share it with anyone, in perpetuity. If a colleague has learned a new tool, or found a better way to do something, they can Scribe it and share it with their team; it scales their knowledge and up-levels their team, but in a way that takes no additional time for them. In this way, you’re able to tap into the best knowledge within your organization and surface it to anyone who needs it, at any time — with big productivity and efficiency gains that cost little to no time to generate. Staying agile is crucial in our rapidly changing world. How does Scribe help teams quickly adapt to change? Research from McKinsey estimates knowledge workers spend about 20% of their time searching for information they need to do their job. This is a huge productivity sink. Layer on to this the Great Resignation, more people changing jobs, companies switching to a remote environment, and you’ve got a lot of wasted time — not to mention frustration — trying to find out how work gets done. With Scribe, you now have all of the process knowledge for how work gets done captured in a central repository.  Now, rather than having to track down the right person who has the info you need, ask them to explain it to you, and wait for them to write it up or call you back — you can simply find what you need in a matter of seconds. New practices, or best practices, can spread much more quickly within a team. That makes sense. What kind of people use Scribe? Anyone who has to explain “how-to” — to a colleague, a customer, a friend, or a community.  So, in short, a lot of different kinds of people. Pretty commonly, this looks like customer-facing teams, be they sales, support, or customer success, who want to show customers how to use a product or complete a process; technology teams who are rolling out a new tool to colleagues; or operations te...

Gratitude is an efficient way to increase the appreciation we have for the things that we could otherwise take for granted. Practising gratitude might make us feel more thankful for the circumstances we find ourselves in, such as where we live, the work we do, the people we have in our lives, and the gifts we receive.  However, things are not that simple. Although practising gratitude is generally seen as a positive practice, forcing gratitude could lead to what is known as gratitude traps. These traps could have a detrimental impact on your wellbeing, especially if artificially induced positivity causes you to deny yourself from experiencing a full spectrum of emotions. The pitfalls of gratitude Practising gratitude consists in finding ways to appreciate experiences that are valuable or meaningful to you. This might include feeling thankful for a job opportunity that arises, appreciating someone else cooking a meal for you, or the relief of commuting to work without hitting rush hour. Many psychologists agree that practising gratitude can foster positive feelings which will boost our sense of wellbeing. But recent research has revealed that looking on the bright side can also have its pitfalls. If you feel that you should be thankful by default, you may be at risk of others exploiting your grateful nature. Psychologist Alex Mathew Wood and colleagues have written about the dark side of gratitude. They have raised concerns that the benefits of positive, personal gratitude can be outweighed by the exploitative behaviour of others. For example, if you feel that you should be grateful to your boss for giving you a job and allowing you to support yourself financially, this emotional reasoning may prevent you from even contemplating that their controlling nature is concerning. While you focus on trying to be thankful, you may become blind to the ways in which they harm you. Dr Ruida Zhu and colleagues reported that gratitude could also lead to what is called moral violation: those who are grateful to someone may be more “willing to violate the norms of honesty and justice”. In the above example, being grateful to your boss could increase your willingness to lie for them if it might protect them or the business from harm. Furthermore, Dr Inna Ksenofontov and Dr Julia Becker found that when low-power group members are grateful to high-power group members, the power hierarchy becomes solidified. If someone in a high-power group behaves badly but then offers thanks to someone with less power, this expression of gratitude pacifies those with less power. The least powerful are then less likely to protest their poor treatment. In this case, the expression of gratitude leads to the justification of bad behaviour for those who hold the power. The three types of gratitude traps Gratitude traps come in many forms and shapes, but there are three big categories of common ways they can occur.  1. Inauthentic gratitude. Inauthentic gratitude describes the display or feeling of gratitude for something that you do not truly feel grateful for. If you feel that you should be grateful for a gift that was thoughtlessly chosen, you risk belittling your own sense of self-worth. Subjectively accepting that you are worthy of someone’s time and effort will improve your sense of wellbeing more than forcing feelings of gratitude will.  2. Shame-based gratitude. This type of gratitude trap occurs when we feel that we ought to be grateful for something. For example, you may tell yourself that you should feel grateful that you have a job and therefore a steady income. However, if you are facing workplace bullying or feel chronically stressed, focusing on the positives does not leave room for interventions to improve the situation or your personal wellbeing. 3. Comparative gratitude. By comparing ourselves to others, we attempt to force gratitude. By internalising statements such as “it could be worse”, or “at least I still have a roof over my head” we forget about the satisfaction we have in life and instead focus on feeling gratitude for not being in an even less desirable situation. Comparative gratitude is an attempt to make us feel better about ourselves, but it does not help us to see the positives in our lives. How to avoid gratitude traps Gratitude has many benefits, but you want to avoid falling prey to its potential pitfalls. If you use gratitude to boost your wellbeing, it is important to take steps to avoid gratitude traps that could have a detrimental impact.  First, embrace a variety of emotions. Throughout life, it is natural to experience a full range of emotions, from happiness to grief and even to despair. If we try to look only for the positive in every situation, we may be forcing ourselves to swallow our true feelings. Leaving such emotions unresolved can negatively impact our mental health.  Dr Jainish Patel and Dr Prittesh Patel recommend exploring one’s true feelings to help regulate emotions for greater emotional stability. They reported that “expressing one’s true emotions is crucial to physical health, mental health, and general well being, while a reliance on concealment gives rise to a barrier to good health.”  Then, Clinical psychologist Dr Ellen Kenner recommends finding the root of our “unearned guilt”. This is the guilt that you feel when someone else tries to induce it in you, rather than guilt for something you have done and want to make amends for. Dr Kenner explains that self-reflection and questioning the motivation behind your gratitude can help to reveal unearned guilt.  You should also question the source of your gratitude. As we have seen earlier, gratitude can increase the risk of exploitation or moral violations. If you are attempting to feel grateful for something, question your motivation for doing so. If you do not truly feel grateful for the gesture, gift or experience, or your gratitude is based on obligation, guilt or shame, then your gratitude may be misplaced. Recognising when your gratitude is misplaced is already a powerful first step in managing gratitude traps. However, if gratitude traps are prominent within your life, you may benefit from cognitive restructuring. Research suggests that those who emotionally involve themselves in the honest expression of their feelings will reap long term physical and mental benefits, and those who enlist the help of a counsellor or therapist in exploring emotional or distressing events will benefit the most. Practising gratitude has become a popular way to develop a deeper appreciation of your life. However, gratitude traps can negatively impact your mental health. If you feel grateful, or think you should feel grateful for something, it is important to critically investigate whether the gratitude is well-founded. The wide range of human emotions should be embraced, and frustration, anger, and upset should not be stifled in the pursuit of thankfulness. If your gratitude is inauthentic or based on comparison or shame, then it is wise to seek guidance from an expert in cognitive restructuring. The post Gratitude traps: why we should be critical of gratefulness appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our interview series, where we meet with founders on a mission to help live more fulfilling personal and professional lives. Zach Hamed and Matthew Achariam are the co-founders of Clay, a beautiful and private home for all your relationships which is populated using your calendar and social history. As you know, at Ness Labs, we care a lot about nurturing authentic relationships and building thoughtful learning communities, so it was fascinating to learn about Clay’s approach to helping us remember who you’ve met and what matters to them. In this interview, we talked about how we rely on relationships to make sense and meaning of the world, the power of serendipity, the problem with social media feeds, how the team at Clay designed a holistic and cohesive solution for thoughtful relationship management, and much more. Enjoy the read! P.S. Zach and Matthew are kindly offering two months of free membership to Clay to Ness Labs readers. Just use this link to unlock this special offer. Hi Matt and Zach, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Despite being more connected than ever, we still struggle to nurture our relationships with others. Why do you think that’s the case? Thanks for having us! We’re longtime readers and fans of Ness Labs, so we’re really excited to be here. It’s a great question. We talk about this exact tension constantly at Clay. How do we take these incredibly important things — relationships — and give them the real care and attention they deserve? Because we know that relationships are important. And they’ve only gotten more important in the past few years as everyone has been spread out and often isolated.  Still, people feel like they’re falling behind with their friendships, professional relationships, both online and offline — and there’s data to back that up. The average professional meets 3500 people over the course of their professional career, and that’s only increasing. Our friends and coworkers are changing careers more often than older generations. And so we have more relationships in more contexts — with a lot of relational turnover. So it’s not surprising that people spend 63% less time with coworkers in 2012 than they did in the mid-1970s, and 49% of professionals say it’s hard to keep in touch with their network. The tools and systems we use to connect with others have increased from in-person meetings, phone calls, and text messages to an arsenal of social platforms and apps where everyone we know has equivalent standing based on a ‘follow’. The end result is that now you’re wading through engagement pictures of someone that you aren’t sure how you met — right next to updates from really important relationships. Those changes have only been exacerbated by the pandemic. People met 20% fewer people at work over the past two years, and the time spent on personal relationships has also dropped significantly since people have been unable to meet in social settings.  Based on personal experiences and data-driven research studies, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we’re devoting less time to more relationships, and we’re feeling worse about it. Our networks are larger and more spread out than they’ve been. So, people feel spread thinly because they are! Yet, paradoxically, relationships are more important than they’ve ever been, too. As the world of possible jobs, entertainment, ideas, etc. gets larger, our relationships act as guides and curators to what we should pursue and how we should process our life.   We rely on relationships to make sense and meaning of the world, to find opportunities for work and recreation, to examine ideas. Even though relationships are more important than ever, we are using tools which are not specifically designed to nurture relationships in the current ecosystem where relationships live. And so we built Clay to be a modern tool that can help people feel thoughtful with the people in their life, without feeling overwhelmed or stressed. I think that’s a struggle everyone can relate to. What about you… What struggles did you face in maintaining your relationships before you built Clay? We built Clay out of a deeply personal need. We’re both immigrants or first-generation, and our relationships were the most important things we had growing up. Our jobs, our internships, our biggest opportunities in high school, college, and beyond — they all came from people. Relationships formed the center of our lives, but we realized they didn’t really have a home. They were all over the place: scattered in notes, apps, text messages, social media, email, different jobs, or company accounts. We tried everything. We started with a spreadsheet, with columns for names and locations and tags. We signed up for countless tools. And they each had their benefits. But over time they were acquired, or shut down, or went dormant. Matt and I, at various points, built solutions for ourselves, separately, out of pure frustration. We just wanted a home for our people. Evernote and Apple Notes were our solutions at the time, but we also coded our own version with a local database and a simple frontend. Lots of people try building their own solution for this problem, only to find out that (1) it’s a *lot* of work, and (2) your homegrown solution grows stale almost instantly when you start adding info to it manually. People move locations, APIs become deprecated, and over time things become messier and messier until you no longer check it. So after years of thinking “there has to be a better way!”, we talked to hundreds of professionals across myriad industries, and we realized that this is a fairly universal problem with a million different solutions. It’s a very personal problem to a lot of people. For some, it could be a physical notepad where they write down quick notes or birthdays, very similar to an old-school Rolodex. For others, it’s digital notes apps. Some use a spreadsheet and a few use actual CRMs like Salesforce. Everybody sort of gravitated towards the solutions that resonated with them or the tools that they use in their professional life and sort of tried to shoehorn other types of relationships into them.  And so we said, let’s carefully design a product that pays attention to the nuances of relationships and helps people be more thoughtful with the many different types of people they interact with, personally and professionally. And that’s how Clay was born. I've had "make a personal CRM" on my list since the April, but never did and and boom! I'm scrolling Twitter and learn about @ClayHQ ! Life changing — cyrina (@cyrinathomas) July 16, 2021 Scratching your own itch is often a great way to get started, and it looks like you’re not the only ones feeling that itch. There has been a surge in personal CRM tools recently. What makes Clay different from other solutions? We’ve built Clay around a system of values and principles for deepening relationships that we designed from countless hours of research, interviews, and experimentation. Because we established those values and the method first, and then built out the features that naturally flowed from them, Clay actually helps you be more thoughtful. It feels holistic and cohesive.  In addition to the system that our members pick up by using Clay, there are a few more reasons why they love using the software. First, after you connect your email, calendar, Twitter, LinkedIn, and iMessage, Clay does a ton of work automatically for you. There’s no data entry or manual upload that other software tools make you go through.  If you ever need help, or need us to import something for you, we’re just an email away. We do 1:1 onboarding calls to answer any questions, from how to set up Clay to power user pro-tips and best practices. And we ship new features and improvements multiple times a week, to the point where we’ve pushed a feature in the afternoon for an onboarding call we had in the morning.  Clay is also beautifully designed. The small interactions that save time and make things easier matter, and we intentionally design every last detail. Our members tell us Clay is the most stunning tool they use daily and that we’re incredibly responsive when they have questions or feature requests. We care. And that’s increasingly rare in tech and software nowadays. Our goal is to help you think about that person that you may have forgotten. To remember that birthday. To reconnect if it’s been a few months. Our entire team is singularly focused on that, and the product is tailor-made to make that easier. And we have a sustainable business model so we can focus on improving that over time. lastly, i personally have really enjoyed refactoring my own work style over the past year to 100% work from home. i added @ClayHQ and @sunsamaHQ to my daily routine. these apps genuinely brought organization and structure to my work and personal life without a huge effort. — spencer (@skerbz) December 9, 2021 We tend to appreciate thoughtfulness even more when we don’t expect it. How does Clay help cultivate serendipity in its users’ relationships? We’re big believers in serendipity — unexpectedly running into someone you needed or a chance encounter with someone new that blossoms into a lifelong bond. Clay is designed to amplify that by resurfacing people, notes, and updates. It’s baked into every part of the product. Social media feeds, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, are presented in order of what those companies think will engage best — what will cause you to like or comment. But that content is often from influencers or people you barely know, not people you actually care about.  So when designing our Explore view, we decided to focus on content that most people want to pay attention to, but isn’t easy to find for everyone you’ve ever met.  If you’ve ever been reading a blogpost or magazine article and come across the name of someone you know, you know ho...

Do you tend to focus on negative details? Mental filtering is a cognitive distortion that leads us to magnify the negative details of a situation, while filtering out the positives. Also known as selective abstraction, this bias for dwelling on your shortcomings could lead you to focus on one piece of negative feedback, while disregarding or disbelieving the ten other positive comments received.  The problem with mental filtering The psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck frequently referred to mental filtering during his work in cognitive therapy in the 1960s, when he found a link between focusing on negative details and both depression and anxiety, and recent research has backed up Beck’s findings. Dr Carl Weems and colleagues at the University of New Orleans described mental filtering as “focusing only on the negative aspects of an event, such as I ruined the whole recital because of that one mistake.” This blinkered thinking was found to be strongly associated with anxiety and depression. Mental filtering also shares a close relationship with self-esteem. The more distorted our reasoning becomes, the less confidence we have in ourselves.  The following are common examples of negative filtering: Upon submitting a project for approval, the overwhelmingly positive feedback is quickly overshadowed by one piece of constructive criticism. This can lead you to believe that you are doing a poor job, even though this is not what you were told. A colleague fails to greet you when you walk past each other in the street. Rather than consider that they simply may not have seen you, you assume that they dislike you, or that you have done something to offend them. A friend does not wish you a happy birthday. You reason that they no longer value your friendship, rather than considering that their card may be delayed in the post. This can leave you feeling unnecessarily angry or upset. As you can see, mental filtering can have a detrimental impact on your self-confidence and personal growth. If the one piece of advice your boss gave you after a presentation led you to feel that you were no good at public speaking, then you may internalise that any future attempts will be a disaster. This vicious cycle can lead to intensification of anxiety and worsening of your mood. Furthermore, it will do little to improve how you feel about your next attempt at public speaking. Aaron T. Beck conducted interviews with patients who were moderately to severely depressed. He found that many of these patients had a distortion of reality and “a bias against themselves.” This led to “negative expectancies as to the probable success of anything they undertake, and a massive amount of self-criticism.” Some people use this self-criticism and negative self-talk to avoid disappointment when things do not go as well as they might like. However, this negative mindset can further compound low mood, and expecting failure may also stunt your personal growth. How to manage mental filtering To manage this cognitive distortion, you must consciously start to manage negative thought patterns so you can begin to see your efforts and achievements in a more positive light. First, recognise when mental filtering occurs. A key step to managing a cognitive distortion is to acknowledge its presence. Reflect on how you respond to life events, professional feedback, and social situations. If your glass tends to be half-empty, explore your feelings further by journaling, creating a log of voice notes, or using a habit tracker. Then, conduct a cost-benefit analysis. In psychology, a cost-benefit analysis is a technique used as part of cognitive behavioural therapy. It can be used to support you in challenging the patterns of thinking that have led you to focus on the negative elements of a situation. On a piece of paper, create two columns for costs and benefits. Think about whether mental filtering benefits you, as well as what it costs you. Write each point down in a column and assign it a value of importance from 1 to 10. It is likely that filtering costs you far more than it benefits you. The next step in the analysis is to think about alternative thought or behaviour patterns you could employ to see situations more positively. Finally, ask for objective opinions. Asking your friends or colleagues for an objective opinion on your performance or achievements is a good way to gauge your ability or progress. If you have become entrenched in negative self-talk, listen carefully to what others objectively report. Write down all of the positive opinions your friend or colleague shares, and focus on each one individually. Start forming positive habits and mindsets, and allow yourself to believe in your own ability, rather than focusing on the negatives. Remember that if you are prone to mental filtering and negative self-talk, you are more likely to focus on the negatives and ignore any positives of a situation. Challenging unhelpful thought patterns and becoming more objective can help to avoid the automatic descent into unwarranted negativity. Journaling and keeping an open mind when receiving feedback can help you recognise the positives. By avoiding mental filtering, you will be better equipped to mitigate the anxiety and low mood associated with any difficult challenges you may encounter in life. The post Mental filtering: when we focus on negative details appeared first on Ness Labs.

Self-love is seen by many as a futile, even narcissistic pursuit. With influencers urging you to love yourself without much substance to their advice, the concept of self-love may seem like an empty one. However, there is lots of scientific evidence suggesting that self-love can have a positive impact on your mental health, self-esteem, and overall life satisfaction. Modern society creates so much pressure on people — whether it’s pressure to achieve status, wealth, or beauty — that it can sometimes feel easier to focus on our failures and ignore the areas where we have grown. This strive for perfection can make us forget to take care of our basic needs, such as psychological safety, companionship, and personal creativity. Self-love is not selfish. Self-love is about acknowledging the need to take care of our needs, not our wants, and to work towards self-betterment instead of sacrificing our needs to prioritize the happiness of others. The self-positivity bias Nowadays, the definition of self-love has moved away from its traditional negative connotations such as narcissism and selfishness. It is seen as a positive psychology practice which can help people better manage their emotions and their mental health. As Jeffrey Borenstein, President of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, puts it: “Self-love is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological and spiritual growth. Self-love means having a high regard for your own well-being and happiness. Self-love means taking care of your own needs and not sacrificing your well-being to please others.” The scientific term for self-love is self-positivity bias, which is defined as the way people rate themselves as possessing more positive personality traits and displaying more positive behaviors than the average population. Cultivating this self-positivity bias has many evidence-based benefits. Eric Fields and Gina R. Kuperberg, both researchers from the Department of Psychology at Tufts University, explain that: “Positively biased self-views are argued to be a key component of healthy psychological functioning, influencing self-esteem, motivation, and determination. Indeed, a lack of a self-positivity bias (or even a self-negativity bias) may contribute to mood and anxiety disorder.” Here are some of the evidence-based benefits of self-love, or self-positivity bias: Better mental health More self-acceptance Higher self-esteem More motivation Stronger determination Increased self-awareness Less anxiety Better sleep The great news is that, even though it may be more difficult for some people compared to others, anyone can learn how to practice self-love. Five ways to practice self-love Fundamentally, self-love is mostly about managing our inner critic so we can develop a more nuanced view of our failures, and appreciate all our effort and personal growth in a kind, loving, and respectful way towards ourselves. Avoid negative self-talk. In her book, Dr. Kristin Neff asks: “What type of language do you use with yourself when you notice a flaw or make a mistake? Do you insult yourself or do you take a more kind and understanding tone? If you are highly self-critical, how does that make you feel inside?” Paying attention to how you internally talk to yourself is the most important step in learning how to cultivate self-love. Create personal rituals. The main difference between habits and rituals is how aware and intentional you are. Rituals are meaningful practices with a deep sense of purpose. Take time out of your busy day for self-care rituals, whether it’s giving love to your body by exercising, or giving love to your mind by meditating. Set healthy boundaries. It can be hard to love yourself when people around you are not respecting your time or acknowledging your value, whether at work or in your daily life. Getting out of the yes autopilot and learning to say no to protect your time and energy is a powerful way to practice self-love. Be compassionate towards yourself. Self-compassion is very similar to being compassionate towards other people. It consists in noticing that you are suffering and offering yourself understanding and kindness. As Dr. Kristin Neff puts it: “​​You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are.” Make space for self-reflection. Sometimes, things don’t go to plan. Instead of blaming yourself, fail like a scientist so you can learn from these failures and use them as an opportunity for personal growth. Self-reflection can take the form of a journaling practice, a weekly review, or a regular meeting with a trusted friend to reflect on your recent experiences and challenges. As you can see, just a few changes can nurture more self-love. These changes can be as simple as appreciating our hard work and efforts without being overly or harshly critical, adopting healthy rituals, and setting healthy boundaries. Self-love can lead to better mental health, higher self-esteem, more motivation, and many other evidence-based benefits. It doesn’t need to be cheesy. Give it a try, and don’t forget about the power of self-reflection. Failure is not the end of the world, it’s an opportunity for learning and personal growth. The post The science of self-love: the evidence-based benefits of loving yourself 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 become more productive and more creative without sacrificing our mental health. Rishank Pandey is the co-founder of Workduck, a self-organizing work hub for modern product teams. Workduck helps you automate your tasks and augment your work so you can focus on what really matters: building great products. In this interview, we talked about the networked nature of product work, the difference between discovery work and delivery work, how to unlock serendipity in the product development process, accessing tacit team knowledge, the principles of building a modern agile workplace, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Rishank, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Let’s face it: building a product can be incredibly stressful — can you describe some of the challenges commonly faced by product teams?  Thanks a lot for the opportunity! That’s a deceptively simple but great question. The core problem is information overload. On average, a software team uses 106 different SaaS tools, a problem that some call “SaaS sprawl” — and that has been exacerbated by remote work. This results in tons of work metadata that’s spread haphazardly across sheets, emails, people’s brains, issue tickets, chat threads — all of this is hard to find and nearly impossible to keep in sync. Product work is highly networked and has lots of interconnected moving parts. What doesn’t help further is that there are currently almost no tools to help augment product-building workflows. For example, let’s say a product manager wants to keep their launch checklist updated, following some key insights derived from user research or feedback which itself is scattered across Slack threads, customer support tickets, and forums. Traditional automation tools built for sequential processes don’t cut it for such iterative and dynamic processes which are getting more intertwined by the day. So, a large part of a product person’s day is spent searching for information, attending additional meetings for context sharing, logging information into multiple tools, and the list goes on. These folks spend almost one third of their time looking for or recreating information that already exists! As you can see, product work largely consists of “discovery work” and “delivery work” — while delivery work has historically been the center of attention, tools that support discovery work and help to link the two together is where there is a huge void today. At Workduck, we think that writing is the way to most clearly bridge this gap. After all, every action that you perform can actually be expressed as a Note! And Words are the most persistent data structures! Continuously re-reading what you have written and editing it for better accuracy for as long as that piece is relevant to your team — even if it’s in months or years — is powerful, but sadly no platform promotes such behavior. Shared knowledge bases quickly become stale or irrelevant if they are not updated and connected to new ideas. This leads to the company depending on a few stakeholders to document all the relevant information the team needs. A good proxy to understand the scale of this problem is to look at the rise of ResearchOps and ProductOps roles who maintain this central source of truth for product teams. That’s fascinating. How is Workduck addressing those challenges? If I ask you to picture a productive person, what image springs into your mind? Probably someone who is waking up very early, a hacker who is gulping down vitamin shakes for breakfast and hustling all week long? The overarching problem that needs to be addressed to solve these broken product workflows is to work on changing this perception. At Workduck, we feel that the new productivity metric is not just time. Instead, empowered product teams — the ones who would strongly hate the term “feature factory” — rely on another productivity metric: “time to insight”, which entails smartly augmenting your present work and automating your common repetitive tasks across tools that traditionally have not talked to each other. The cornerstone to achieving this is unlocking serendipity in your work by consolidating all your knowledge that’s scattered and fragmented, and putting it to work for you. This quote by the ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Lew Platt, is a good summary of what our vision is: “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” Love this HP quote. More specifically, what are some of Workduck’s most unique features? Our guiding light is slightly contrarian. We feel your work should be independent of the tools you use as part of your “backend”, and we want to be the “middleware” that promotes this. After all, we are in the business of selling speed and digital fulfillment. Think of us as an embedded assistant in your workflow, something that’s at the back so you can be in your deep state of work — or “flow” — while we automate away all the complexities in the background. The less time you spend on our platform while we help augment your work, the more successful we get as a platform. So what does this translate to in terms of user journey? First, Workduck is keyboard optimized. We’ve designed it to help you work at the speed of thought. You press a key and the work gets done. That’s it. Then, we surface relevant insights. Haven’t we all secretly wanted the power of Google Photos but for our personal and professional knowledge? With Workduck, we get a step closer to that. For instance, you can get insights and additional context right when you’re in a stream of consciousness looking at an artifact that other members of your team might have shared a while ago. Finally, Workduck is bringing code like reusability to your workflows. We link artifacts together, sync data across tools together, and allow you to share these just like you share your notes. You can also experience the power of backlinks across your tools and daily workflows. It’s that simple. Personally, what’s your favorite feature? That would be quick capture, by a mile. You can essentially call a keyboard shortcut to smartly “capture” a piece of content from anywhere you are, whether it’s Gmail, Slack, Figma, Twitter, etc. and either turn it into a backlink, perform an action (like sending it to a particular tool, seeing related ideas and insights, adding context) or integrate it into a pre-built contextual workflow. This feature comes in very handy everyday when I’m in research mode. In the grander scheme of things, modern product work is largely defined by how fast you can get to qualitative insights or what might be more commonly referred to as “continuous discovery” work, and that’s where our quick capture feature shines. You are building Workduck for the “modern agile workplace”, what does that mean?  To be agile means being able to ship fast and learn iteratively. It’s a topic that’s been part of public discourse since ages.  But if one had to sum up the essence of an “agile workplace” across the different frameworks, debates and discussions, it is one that promotes constant experimentations and the need to periodically learn, unlearn and relearn everything. In principle, doing this has never been easier than today. But, ironically, it has become much harder to put into practice. That’s primarily because it’s very easy to zoom so much into iterative processes that you start to perceive events as linear in nature, losing out on its intertwined essence. Our brains, our interests, our potential and the project we work on have never been single-threaded nor confined to one unique stream of actions. Everything is networked. A modern agile workplace is one that promotes cross-functional collaboration in such a networked environment. A lot has been written and is being written on what this would entail process-wise. But sometimes it’s not so much about the very explicit things as much as the subtle, implicit things ingrained in every team in an org that creates the main difference.  Similarly, the solutions to making a team agile should not be defined by fixed processes, but rather as a series of checklists on how to make every function or role feel equally empowered within a team and make knowledge transfer among these as seamless as possible. Concise and updated documentation, being open to rapid experimentation, and knowing the difference between data-driven and data-dependent decisions are some of the key defining characteristics you’ll find in a modern agile workplace. The culmination of that is shipping delightful products truly fast. Talking about quickly shipping delightful products, Workduck is a big proponent of the low-code and no-code movement — why do you believe this is the future? This question reminds me of this one time Steve Jobs was asked about Visual Basic and the future of low-code applications in the Apple Developer Conference in 1997 and he responded saying: “The way you increase programmer productivity is not by increasing the lines of code per programmer per day — that doesn’t work. The way you increase programmer productivity is by eliminating the lines of code you have to write. The line of code that is the fastest to write, that never breaks, that doesn’t need maintenance is the line of code you never had to write. The goal is to eliminate 80% of the code that you have to write for your app.” So the discussions and buzz around low-code and no-code are not new. But recently there have been two macro-trends coming together that make us excited about low-code and no-code tools, and especially their applications in product workflows. Traditionally, no-code and low-code tools used to exist in silos to code-based and more intensive product development tools. This meant that as the actual use cases for them became more complex — which is to be expected as teams and their processes grow — the too...

When faced with a difficult decision, copying the actions of others can feel reassuring. We are social animals, and following the crowd can lead us to believe that we are benefitting from the wisdom of others. This may be especially true if we emulate the behaviour of those we consider to be authority figures. This informal fallacy of making choices that fit with those of our peers is known as social proof. While social proof can help us to make everyday decisions, it is vital to learn how to use it wisely rather than blindly following the crowd into what could turn out to be a bad choice. Seeking safety in numbers First coined by Robert Cialdini in 1984, social proof is also known as informational social influence. In his book Influence: Science and Practice, he discusses social proof as one of the influential psychological principles that persuade us to behave in certain ways. In ambiguous situations, decision making is made difficult by uncertainty regarding the potential outcomes, which may result in decision anxiety. Social proof therefore becomes a powerful influencer of decision making if we feel that others are better qualified to decide than we are. Researchers Elliot Aronson, Timothy Wilson and Robin Akert explain: “We conform because we believe that others’ interpretation of an ambiguous situation is more accurate than ours and will help us choose an appropriate course of action.” Safety in numbers, or reliance on the authority of others, can give us the courage to commit to a decision that we might otherwise struggle with. Social media influencers, for example, have an impressive impact on the buying decisions of their followers. Their perceived authority and belief in a product can persuade people who might otherwise have felt indifferent otherwise to make a purchase. The power of positive endorsement This impact has been corroborated in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. David Wooten and Americus Reed found that when consumers felt ambiguous about a product, positive endorsement from others was likely to sway their conclusion to align with others’ opinions. That’s why retailers use social proof to further encourage spending. Positive public reviews and ratings persuade us that a company or their product is trustworthy. Endorsements from specialists such as doctors or dentists also encourage consumers to choose a recommended product rather than one with no professional testimonial, even if the products are otherwise comparable. It’s interesting to note that we don’t tend to seek safety in any kind of numbers. When we see ourselves as similar to those around us, we are more likely to view their behaviour as correct, and therefore adopt it as our own. For instance, in a study of canned laughter, participants were found to “laugh longer and harder when they perceive the people laughing to be similar to themselves.” The dangers of relying on social proof Although there are many benefits of using social proof in decision making, especially as a quick rule of thumb for unimportant decisions, there are also dangers to be aware of. Herd mentality can prevent us from practising critical thinking and exploring new, innovative ideas. Even if an opinion is held by a large group of people, this does not necessarily make it correct. In argumentation theory, argumentum ad populum, Latin for “appeal to the people,” is the fallacious belief that when the majority approves of something, then it must be real or better. Following the crowd can lead people to make poor decisions that they would not have made without the encouragement obtained from social proof. For example, in Arizona, stealing of rare wood from the Arizona Petrified Forest only worsened when officials put up notices highlighting the high prevalence of theft. Rather than deterring theft, the notices seemed to act as social proof that stealing the rare wood could be justified, because many other people had already committed the act. In addition, social proof can cause you not only to act, but also to fail to act. Robert Cialdini reported in his book that upon witnessing the attack of a woman, a crowd of over thirty people failed to intervene to assist the victim. This inaction was thought to be the result of mass uncertainty. Because no-one had the confidence to intervene, everyone failed to act. How to wisely use social proof Many of us will have been persuaded by social proof, whether in making moral, social, professional, or purchasing decisions. When used carefully, you can unlock the benefits of social proof in everyday decision making, without succumbing to its pitfalls. Be mindful of influencers. Successful influencers are incredibly persuasive. When you see a product or argument being advertised, be aware of the underlying mechanism of influence at play rather than allowing yourself to blindly follow their lead. Reflect on whether you truly respect their opinion, or if you are being persuaded by powerful marketing. Interrogate your own beliefs. It can feel easier and quicker to adopt the beliefs of others, rather than interrogating your own opinion on a subject. Requesting advice or an opinion of a friend or colleague can be helpful, but the decision you later come to must also align with your personal values. Know when a decision matters. Decision anxiety can cause you to adopt someone else’s opinion to avoid making a decision for yourself. This can be helpful in avoiding becoming bogged down in minutiae. Choosing the same water bottle as a celebrity endorser will likely save you time, with minimal consequences if the bottle does not meet your expectations. However, moral decisions, choices that will affect your income or career, or expensive purchasing dilemmas should be made with more than just reliance on social proof.  If a decision really matters, you should ensure that you give it careful consideration. Social proof may help, but it should not be the deciding factor. Social proof can be a beneficial way to make decisions when you feel ambiguous about a choice or its outcome. Drawing wisdom from external sources can make a choice seem less risky or give us more conviction in our own actions. However, social proof can lead us to act in ways that do not align with our beliefs, and that morally may not be defensible. Learning when and how to use social proof to make decisions will allow you to benefit from the wisdom of others, without encountering the associated pitfalls. The post Social proof: is there always safety in numbers? 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. Welf von Hören is the founder of Potential, an app that helps users reclaim their attention by giving them back agency over what they do, how they feel, and who they become. In this interview, we talked about the misused power of persuasive technology, the impact of the attention economy on our well-being and productivity, how to turn intentions into habits, how to implement fallback strategies, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Welf, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Let’s start with a big question. What does it mean to you to live intentionally?  It means choosing and acting consciously, rather than being driven by mindlessness and compulsion. It means knowing the long-term consequences of my actions. It means living a life that you can look back on without regret. It means living in a way that is true to my values, my aspirations and my purpose. It’s a quest for wisdom, meaning, and fulfillment. It’s striving to live up to my potential, to live to the best of my ability. To deepen my idea of who and what I truly am and could be. To take a good look at the world at this moment in history and do what I feel called to contribute. Practically it means figuring out how to integrate those aspirations with the reality of our monkey minds in the context of endless entertainment and cheap dopamine. In that sense, living intentionally means figuring out how we can systematically become more capable of living up to our higher intentions.  Technology often seems to get in the way of intentional living. What inspired you to build Potential?  A few years ago, it occurred to me that everything I want out of life is on the other side of overcoming the intention-action gap. Some people struggle with this more than others. For me it was the existential struggle. Why am I not doing the things that I want to do, that I know are good for me? What can I do to change that? That’s what led me down the rabbit hole of personal development, behavioral psychology, and eventually persuasive tech. I learned that technology can be designed to change human behavior. There I was, struggling to wake up early, meditate, read, go to the gym. And then I realized that there’s a trillion dollar industry using the power of persuasive design to make us scroll more, watch more, click more. That seemed like an incredible mismatch. Fast forward five years and we have persuasive technology pointed at more than three billion minds, optimizing for advertising revenue and addiction. It undermines human dignity and freedom at the most basic level: the agency to direct our attention towards what’s important to us. At this scale and pervasiveness, it damages our well-being and productivity, and it debases our shared capacity for solving the world’s hardest problems. It’s sick. It’s disrespectful of the human spirit. And I believe there’s a good chance that future generations will literally judge this as crimes against humanity. The question is, what do we do about that? If we have digital environments that inevitably condition the minds and behaviors of billions of people, what’s an ethical way of relating to this reality? How can we make technology that’s a worthy steward of our attention?  With Potential, we are exploring what I call “Augmented Intentionality” — technology that supports our capacity to do the things we truly want to do. Interfaces that allow us to choose consciously, from our own menus, based on our values and priorities. Instead of countless random distractions, a few meaningful real-world choices, made as easy and joyful as possible. And how does it work exactly? Potential is centered around your intentions. It has elements of a daily planner and a habit tracker, and it is supercharged with integrations. It doesn’t just keep you accountable, it actually makes your desired behaviors 1-tap easy. You can add your intentions and either group them together in schedules (e.g. Morning, Deep Work, or Wind Down) or just add them independently. You can tap them to open integrations, and swipe to complete or skip. The idea here is not to make an overwhelming todo list of “25 things I need to do every day”, but instead make your own menu with the kinds of things you might want to choose from. There’s what we call ‘fallback’ intentions that enable you to add tiny versions of a habit as a fallback. If you have the intention of lifting weights, you might add 20 push-ups as a fallback intention. That way, instead of skipping it, you replace the intention with the tiny fallback. With our widgets, you’ll see the menu of intentions for the current time on your home screen, and you can tap the integration to jump right into your desired behavior.  Can you give us some examples of integrations and how they can fit in a user’s life?  Integrations are a really big part of Potential. You can add them to your intentions to open apps and links or run shortcuts. Shortcuts are great for jumping right into your daily meditation, recording a new activity with Strava, putting your phone into airplane mode, and so much more. And then there are our auto-complete integrations. You can connect Apple Health, Oura, and Duolingo, to set conditions for automatically completing your intentions. We recently also shipped Waking Up courses, enabling you to jump into the next session of any Waking Up series. There’s a lot more custom integrations coming up That sounds amazing! Can you tell us a bit more about the accountability aspect of Potential? The history of your completions gets aggregated on the Insights screen, where you can see a weekly and monthly overview of your activity. On the social side, we currently have a very simple activity sharing: you can share completed intentions with friends. We believe social accountability can help many people stick to their intentions. We are exploring a lot of possibilities in this direction, and you can expect features like groups, commitments, and public profiles to be shipped over the coming months. At the end of the day however, the question of single-player or multiplayer is one of personal preference. With our upcoming Attention Settings features, you’ll also be able to hide all social features. What kind of people use Potential?  Many of them are engineers, designers, psychologists, or entrepreneurs. They all want to live intentionally and better manage their attention. They are highly aware of the role their digital environment plays in that project… They use meditation, fitness, and productivity apps.  Many have built their own systems and workarounds: elaborate habit tracking sheets, using grayscale, iOS Shortcuts, Notion and Roam templates, distraction blockers. There’s probably few better places to nerd out about intentionality-related software than our Discord community! What about you… How do you personally use Potential? I love a good morning routine. I always adapt it to my day-to-day moods and available time: waking up early, and then some combination of exercise, yoga or stretching, breathwork, meditation, and sometimes journaling. I have a work schedule with intentions that are relevant throughout the day, like deep work sessions or a meditation timer, and an evening schedule with options for winding down. I get a lot of value from fallback intentions. Sometimes I don’t feel like doing a workout, but I’m happy to do 25 push-ups instead. Or I don’t have the time for a full yoga session, but squeeze in 5 minutes of stretching. Keeps the habit alive and is a vote for the person I want to be. James Clear would be happy to read this! What kind of results have users seen so far? We have only launched the beta 6 weeks ago, so we are still waiting for those newsworthy testimonials, like someone doing an ironman or having a thousand day streak on meditation. Our early customer shared that it helps them actually act on their intentions and some have reported that they’ve seen a significant change in their behavior. Potential is a premium app. Can you tell us a bit more about your business model? The attention economy is driven by a business model that misaligns the company’s incentives with the user’s best interest: Advertising. We don’t like it. At Potential, you’re the customer, never the product. We’re on a mission to make technology that is deeply aligned with your best interest. We take that seriously. And the only way to do this sustainably is if we’re funded by the very people we’re serving. There’s still so much work to do if we want to take back control of our attention. Where would you like Potential to be in the next few years? We want to make Potential into the best digital tool for intentionality that we can imagine. Over the course of this year, Potential will become much better at what it’s already doing. From a super smooth UX for setting intentions and scheduling your day, to a social layer and powerful integrations across multiple platforms — we are really excited for what’s ahead. Beyond that, there are more questions than answers… What would it take to build the inverse function to the attention economy? Can we repurpose this stack of technologies that are currently exploiting our psychology, to support and advance our well-being and development instead? Can we make technology that helps us understand what our actual needs are, and what we can do to meet them effectively? Can we have a world-class AI coach that asks us all the right questions on our path to wisdom and fulfillment? Can we build a brand that makes our collective self-actualization more attractive than the hell of eternal dopamine that the metaverse inevitably will become? And while these questions guide our work, we’re aware that this is a project much bigger than any one product or company. We’ll continue to dedicate ou...

Should you stick to what you know, or is it wiser to broaden your abilities? Some people may tell you to only take on projects that fall within your circle of competence, while others will advise you to get out of your comfort zone. Who’s right? The circle of competence model states that everyone has an area, or circle, of expertise. However, the circle of objective competence may be surrounded by a larger circle of subjective, and often over-inflated, belief in your ability. Your circle of competence represents what you really know, versus what you think you know. Discovering your circle of competence A circle of competence is a mental model that helps mitigate the risk of failure associated with overconfidence by having a realistic view of your strengths. The term was first coined by Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most successful financial investors. Buffett advised: “Know your circle of competence, and stick within it. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.” Alongside his business partner Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett found success in only making financial investments in sectors that he had a comprehensive grasp of. In this way, Buffett avoided overconfidence in his knowledge or abilities, and instead relied on objective competence. By mapping his circle of competence, he reduced the risk associated with making poor investment decisions in sectors he had little experience of. Buffett has since attributed his overwhelming financial success to adhering to this mental model. To determine your circle of competence, you have to understand where your true competence lies, without allowing subjective beliefs to create undue assurance in your abilities. To determine the breadth of your circle of competence, you need to have an honest look at your background, training, qualifications, or personal familiarity in a subject.  This self-reflection process will allow you to discover the areas in which you have deep, well-rooted knowledge and experience, versus the ones where you only have basic or surface-level knowledge. Stepping outside of your circle of competence Buffett and Munger believe that staying within your circle of competence is vital for success. According to them, understanding your strengths and avoiding unfamiliar areas is an effective way to mitigate risk. If a challenge falls outside of your circle of competence, you can minimise the risk of failure by declining that opportunity. Sticking with what you know could also give you an edge on your competitors, and prevent you from making mistakes. Chief investment analysts Rusmin Ang and Victor Chng write: “Remaining within one’s circle confers a number of benefits, such as an unfair information advantage, the narrowing of available options, and the reduction of poor decision making.” However, there may be times when stepping outside of your circle of competence can be a good idea. Although there may be risks associated, new discoveries can be fostered when experimental and innovative approaches are employed. Or, as some may say, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. In 2015, Dr Ikhlaq Sidhu of UC Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, and Dr Paris de l’Etraz, Professor of Entrepreneurship at IE Business School, investigated the effect that remaining in their comfort zone had on entrepreneurs. They hypothesised that people who stayed in their comfort zone would not feel at risk, leading to an anxiety-neutral state, and their progress would remain steady. However, Sidhu and de l’Etraz found that the steady, low-risk approach was unlikely to truly benefit entrepreneurial individuals. They explain: “The potential of an entrepreneur or innovator is much more correlated with higher tolerance for uncertainty than it is with their field of study.” In other words, if your goal is to avoid risk, you should stick to your circle of competence; however, if your goal is to innovate, you will be better off stepping outside of your circle so you can come up with non-obvious solutions. Although some very accomplished businessmen suggest that success lies in never stepping outside the boundaries of your circle of competence, this may stunt your creativity and ability to discover new ideas. How to make the most of your circle of competence To take advantage of your circle of competence is to find a balance between honestly acknowledging your capabilities, and strategically striving to expand your knowledge and horizons. The Pareto Principle states that 80% of all output results from just 20% all inputs. Spend 80% of your time working from within your circle of competence, and 20% expanding your boundaries and exploring new territories that may feel less comfortable. Here are few steps you can take to make the most of your circle of competence: 1. Ensure predictable progress. Define the limits of your circle of competence to ensure progress. By spending 80% of your time in your area of expertise, you are likely to make steady progress that will benefit your career and personal life. The time spent working within your circle of competence is akin to creating a safety net for yourself. 2. Push your boundaries. The remaining 20% of your time can be spent exploring new, exciting areas that may have a higher potential for risk.  Acquire new skills, set ambitious goals, offer your help on a project you are unfamiliar with. The time spent working outside of your circle of competence is when your performance has the chance to improve in an exponential fashion. 3. Reassess your circle of competence. By leaving your comfort zone for just one-fifth of the time, there is potential for learning, growth, and behavioural change. Your objective circle may therefore grow to encompass your newly developed expertise. Make sure to regularly reassess your circle of competence and to incorporate this knowledge into your decision-making process. As a result of your drive to grow, some professional or personal decisions may now be less risky. The circle of competence model serves to indicate a person’s true strengths and expertise, while preventing overconfidence and related risk-taking behaviours. Remember that your circle does not need to be big for you to be successful. You just need to know its boundaries so you can be smart about when to stick within it, and when to step outside of it. The post Your circle of competence: should you stick within it or step outside of it? 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, work, and collaborate better without sacrificing our mental health. Alexander Embiricos is the co-founder and CEO of Remotion, a virtual office that connects hybrid-remote teams like everyone’s together with quick calls, coworking rooms, emoji badging, live selfies, and more. In this interview, we talked about the challenge with traditional portfolios of culture initiatives at work, how virtual coworking can help build trust and momentum within a remote team, designing online communication tools for people who are “somewhat social”, managing online distractions, how remote remote companies can foster a more inclusive culture, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Alexander, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. What do you think are some of the main benefits of virtual coworking? Thank you so much for having me. Virtual coworking is an essential tool for any distributed team to build trust and momentum. It makes work more fun and productive!  Many distributed team leaders we talk to find that it’s harder to develop relationships and culture remotely. A potential cause: no office chit-chat and small talk. Unfortunately, trying to recreate the watercooler remotely doesn’t work, but we think there’s something there: small group, casual conversations are incredibly helpful in building relationships. That’s where virtual coworking comes in. It’s a shared experience that doesn’t get in the way of work, and creates space for the casual conversations that build relationships. It’s definitely harder to stay connected while working remotely. Lots of tools are attempting to tackle that challenge — what makes Remotion different? If you’re a remote founder, people leader, or even a manager on a small team, you have a portfolio of culture initiatives. The biggest one is probably a recurring offsite. Then you have your all-hands programming, happy hours, social events, 1:1 roulettes… These are great, but they are meeting blocks for your team to find on their schedule and carve out time to participate in. Remotion is unique in that it’s not a specific meeting or moment that takes you away from your work. Just like the physical office, it gives you a background awareness of what your team is up to. That helps you feel like you’re a part of something, and also fosters opportunities for those small group casual conversations that build relationships. We have also kept Remotion’s UI footprint incredibly small so that it’ll also work for people who are on hybrid teams, running around with laptops in the physical office. You mentioned a portfolio of culture initiatives for the work environment. Beside doing actual work together, how can Remotion users connect in authentic, human ways? Great question. You have basically described our product goal in a nutshell. We aim to create spaces that are lightweight and comfortable enough for people to naturally want to hang out in while they work. The main way we do that is with coworking rooms, which are audio-first spaces with shared music.  The shared music creates a shared non-work experience — music as a connective agent is a thousand-year-old secret. But more importantly, the music takes the edge off feeling like someone needs to fill silence with talking. And that “silence” creates space for more authentic conversations about someone’s day, family, pets, feelings, or whatever comes to mind. Another unique feature of Remotion is the live selfies. Can you tell us a bit more about them? Yes, we have had selfies in the product from day zero, and we even considered pivoting to a selfie tool instead of a virtual office! Live selfies are another way we try to bring your team to life. With a couple clicks on your avatar in Remotion, you can replace it with a three-second recording from your webcam. It’s great for sharing a bit of personality in a low-stakes way. Selfies with kids or pets tend to be a favorite that get celebrated. And that’s how you look to your team for the rest of the day — giving everyone a sense of your presence vs. a stale headshot or green dot that indicates you’re online. My cofounder Charley and I are both “somewhat social” — we like to see and be around other people, but we don’t like to be “always-on”, and we need breaks between interactions. When we were building the first prototype of Remotion, we were exploring the spectrum between building a fully asynchronous app, an always-on video app, and everything in between. That included wacky options like automatically taking selfies every few minutes. We realized that we wanted to have our teammates “a glance away” like in an office, but it didn’t need to be a live video. We wanted people to be in full control of how and when they were seen, so we made a dead-simple selfie flow behind a user click. Online communication tools sometimes make it harder to stay focused when working. How does Remotion address this challenge? Today’s productivity stack is overloaded with notifications and unread messages. Frankly, it’s harmful to our attention spans and well-being. Notifications should be reserved for truly urgent times. However, we’re constantly getting unread notifications for information that might be useful in the moment, but are otherwise not worth the distraction. With Remotion, we hope to reduce the need for shoving that information into your inbox. Instead, we present it as something you can be aware of in the background. If you notice something and act on it, that’s great! If not, there’s no unread message to check. Tactically, Remotion has very few notifications and no concept of unread messages. Remotion only comes out of the background when someone is reaching out to you. Most conversations in Remotion happen in rooms, so even that is rare. Finally, we have prominent calendar integrations and focus mode that you can use to be actively unavailable. That sounds great. What are some other features you are particularly proud of? The Remotion dock is the first thing that comes to mind: It’s like the macOS Application Dock or the Windows Taskbar, but for your teammates. We have obsessed over this tiny piece of UI so that you don’t have to switch windows or open a new browser tab to connect with your team. They’re just a glance away. I’m also proud of our automated status updates. Our strategy is to update your status with anything that affects your real-time availability: are you talking to someone in Remotion, Zoom, or Meet? What’s your calendar status? When you can see when your teammates are hopping in and out of conversations, you can spontaneously squeeze in short, energizing conversations.  On the other hand, we’ve explicitly decided not to update your status based on what app you’re in, or what web page you’re on. We think that would incur a major loss of privacy without much corresponding value to you or the team. Do you have any tips to share for people who want to improve remote collaboration with their team? It’s hard to share general advice without knowing specifically what folks are trying to achieve, but a common mistake is to focus on tools and tactics without aligning on the intention behind them. Here is how I would begin. Start by aligning on what type of remote culture you want to create. There are folks on the internet who’d have you believe that there are clear-cut answers on how to collaborate remotely, but this isn’t a one-size-fits-all question. Next, assess how you’re measuring up to that ideal remote culture. It can be difficult for remote leaders to empathize with the rest of the team’s experience, so it takes effort. I recommend breaking down your goals into questions and surveying the team anonymously. That gives you a prioritized list of problems to find solutions for — a great place to start. A great place to start indeed. To go a little deeper, how do you think remote companies can foster a more inclusive culture? For leaders, I think the foundation of an inclusive culture is bringing curiosity to people’s challenges. That helps us lean on the whole team to surface issues and solve them collaboratively. And I think there’ll always be places to improve: An inclusive culture is constantly evolving. On our team, we try to encourage candid conversation about the team’s culture as a tangible thing that we are shaping together. This takes many forms but my favorite is our quarterly culture survey. First, it’s a highly visible reminder to the team that their thoughts matter. Second, I always learn something new during the sync writing follow-up, where we play music and type in a doc at the same time. Finally, it was conceived of and is run by an engineering leader on our team. The story of how we set the quarterly culture survey up was a big learning moment for me: During a one-on-one with that engineer (one of our first teammates), she was sharing concerns about our culture. I will admit — in the moment I felt pretty defensive and it took some time to channel the surprise into curiosity. But we dug in and decided to run the survey. The results came back not-so-stellar, as we’d feared. We leant in again and shared with the team. The ensuing discussion was one of the best we’ve ever had in the company, and led to major improvements. Bringing this back to curiosity, when I hear about an issue I resist the initial urge to problem solve and instead wait to tease out underlying causes. When people see leaders leaning into feedback, it creates a safe space for calling out bigger or more delicate problems, such as those around inclusivity. I find that after new teammates see this a few times, they’re much more willing to call out problems and enlist the team in solving them. This is amazing. Besides your team, what kind of people use Remotion? 80% of the teams in the product are created by people who lead teams, usually managers. This makes sense to ...

Our beliefs can help us navigate the world around us. However, when our beliefs do not line up with reality, they can cause harm to ourselves and others. Also, these beliefs can become so deeply ingrained that they become very challenging to unlearn, even when presented with new information. This phenomenon is called belief perseverance. When we cling to false beliefs Our beliefs about ourselves, others, and how the world works come from many places. In part, formal instruction and education inform our belief systems. The ideas we hold about ourselves and others also come from our experiences interacting with the world and secondary sources like the media. Belief perseverance happens when a person holds onto a belief even when presented with evidence that this belief is false. There are three types of belief perseverance. First, self-impressions, which are beliefs about yourself, such as “beliefs about your athletic skills, musical talents, ability to get along with others, or even body image.” The second involves social impressions, which are beliefs about specific other people, such as “beliefs about your best friend, mother, or least favorite teacher.” Finally, the third type is called naive theories — these are beliefs about how the world works, including beliefs about the causes of war or poverty, stereotypes about teenagers, lawyers or other cultures, and any other social theories. A common way researchers study belief perseverance is through the debriefing method. For example, the first study of belief perseverance involved an experiment that asked participants to complete a task. Once the task was complete, researchers gave the participants feedback on their performance. Either they completed the job successfully, or they failed. However, after sharing the initial feedback, researchers told the participants that the feedback was fake. Logically, if researchers asked the participants how they would do on the task a second time, they would ignore their initial false results in their self-assessment. However, that’s not what happened. The researchers report: “Participants who received fake success feedback continued to believe that they were pretty good at this task, whereas those who received fake failure feedback continued to believe that they were pretty bad at it.” Again, this is despite being told the feedback they initially received was wrong! Multiple similar studies that followed found the same results. So, why do we stick to beliefs even after being told they are not true? Researchers have offered several propositions. First, psychologists Corey Guenther and Mark D. Alicke suggest that our brains tend to stay “stuck” on the initial feedback we receive. An important source of cognitive biases relevant to belief perseverance is that people’s brains are wired to seek coherence and order. When that coherence is disrupted, we sometimes seek information that better aligns with our existing beliefs. This is a form of confirmation bias. Or, we interpret the new information in a way that works with our belief structures. For example, illusory correlations mean that we tend to remember times when we were successful more than when we failed/performed poorly. The availability heuristic also shows that we tend to assess our beliefs based on the most available memories in our minds. In the debriefing example, it appears that participants relied on their most recent memories about how they performed in the past to predict how they would perform in the future, despite being debriefed on the experiment. The impact of belief perseverance When our belief systems align with reality, belief perseverance can help us predict outcomes and feel some sense of control over our social environment. However, if we cling to false beliefs, we risk causing harm to ourselves and those around us. Researchers Morgan Slusher and Craig Anderson give multiple examples of how clinging to false beliefs results in adverse effects: People with negative belief perseverance about their social abilities may avoid interpersonal interactions and develop problems such as loneliness and shyness. Employees with a belief perseverance in their superior skills may fail to request the needed assistance when faced with a given challenge. Dangerous decisions may be made because of a belief in perseverance in one’s ability to manage risk. Using the example of the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger and the deaths of seven crew members, they write: “The expertise for the proper decision was available but ignored (several engineers on the project strongly recommended against a launch attempt in the abnormally cold weather).” Giving people the correct information about their beliefs may even backfire. For instance, a study with participants expressing their concerns of the side effects of flu shots found that they became even less eager to accept them after being told that the vaccination was completely safe. In other words, they used the updated information reinforcing the idea that they already had before, distrusting the vaccine even more as a result. How to manage belief perseverance You would think that belief perseverance can be managed by explaining that other factors that may have influenced a person’s success or failure that are outside of their control, giving a person new information that contradicts their beliefs, such as sharing news articles or research about a given topic. Or maybe by asking a person to be more open-minded and aware of their environment to see if new observations change their minds, or by interacting with others and using the experiences to challenge their beliefs. However, research shows that these four methods fail to reduce belief perseverance, though they seem the most logical ways to address it. The only way to somehow manage belief perseverance is to become aware of it. So, congratulations – you have completed the first step! The next step is to increase your self-awareness about your beliefs and where they come from. If you want to increase your self-awareness and challenge your beliefs about yourself and others, consider trying this short exercise, with only five questions: What beliefs do I have about myself and my abilities? What assumptions do I hold about other people? Where did these beliefs come from? (e.g., childhood experiences, feedback from authority figures, interactions with friends) Are the beliefs I hold about myself and others accurate? What experiences have I had that counter these beliefs? Remember that our minds are prone to cognitive biases that may discord the way we consider these questions. Our need for coherence, combined with cognitive biases, make it very difficult to unlearn our false beliefs. Trusted friends or colleagues can help jog your memory to moderate the availability bias, the confirmation bias, and stay clear of illusory correlations. Remember: when left unaddressed, belief perseverance has serious consequences for ourselves and others. Awareness and self-reflection are the best ways to address this phenomenon. Questioning our false beliefs can help us all grow and better achieve our goals. The post Belief perseverance: why we cling on to old 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 think better, be more productive, and more creative. Martin Schneider and Moritz Wallawitsch are the founders of RemNote, a powerful note-taking tool that features flashcards, PDF management, backlinks, and much more. Their goal is to build the go-to app to help you learn, stay organized, and think. In this interview, we talked about the difference between storing knowledge in your head and storing knowledge in your external brain, the power of spaced repetition, the importance of long-term personal knowledge management, how to foster concept-driven thinking by breaking ideas into “mind-sized bites”, and more. Enjoy the read, and when you’re done, go give RemNote a try: Moritz and Martin are also offering one month of free Pro features to all Ness Labs readers! Hi Moritz and Martin, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Let’s start with a bit of a philosophical question… Why do you think long-term personal knowledge management is important? Thanks for having us! Let me focus on each part of the phrase “long-term personal knowledge management.” First, “long-term” — the goal of any knowledge-management system should be long-term focused! Taking effective notes or learning something properly is hard work, and it’s only worth it if you become more effective in your work and become more likely to achieve your goals. If you’re learning for a class, for example, your notes should prepare you for your career or future project goals (not just your short-term assessments). If you’re organizing knowledge on the job, your notes should help you accomplish your future goals more effectively — solving problems, being creative, etc. While this may seem obvious, it’s pretty challenging to do in practice — our current tools just aren’t good enough. Too much information is filed away, never to resurface. In fact, most people I talk to still use paper and pencil for every note they take and study by cramming. So for us, the “long-term” focus is a core part of any learning or thinking tool and is strongly emphasized in RemNote. Second, the term “knowledge-management” — when done properly, I think that note-taking and long-term personal knowledge management are effectively superpowers that can dramatically expand our ability to be more effective problem solvers, thinkers, and creators. Human beings have the unique ability to manipulate and understand complex symbolic information. We leverage these capabilities to write, speak, draw diagrams, connect ideas, and more. No other animal can do this! It’s really remarkable. However, this native capacity is significantly limited if it is not leveraged properly. It’s only in the past few decades that we’ve begun to explore how to best use knowledge-management tools and processes to unblock and augment our learning and symbolic manipulation capabilities.  Finally, “personal” — there are already great products designed to help groups and teams work together more effectively. These tools solve an important problem, but the most important input to any team are the skills, creativity, etc. of the people on the team. We need to build tools that enable individuals to individually optimize their own thinking and learning so that we can collectively become better and more creative problem solvers. Furthermore, individuals’ systematic and ongoing development of knowledge will also grow society’s knowledge and accelerate innovation, progress, and solve more complex problems. As David Deutsch once said, all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. We are in an age of technological acceleration and constant innovation, in which professionals are forced to keep up to date with the latest technology and build on top of existing knowledge. It’s important that we have tools that enable individuals to match the pace of their learning with the pace of knowledge growth. You mentioned our current tools aren’t enough… What gap exactly inspired you to start RemNote? RemNote originated from a place of personal frustration. In 2017, I (Martin) was at MIT, studying Computer Science. I have always loved to learn and to conduct research but struggled with two persistent challenges. First, classes felt artificially constrained by the four month time span of a semester. I would work hard to master course content, but would then forget what I learned a few months later. Second, I was frustrated with how hard it was to keep my thoughts, research, and projects organized. I needed a tool to streamline my thinking, connect ideas, and optimize my learning for the long term. Fortunately, these problems weren’t novel. I started to experiment with a variety of proven learning techniques and tools designed to address these challenges. I used Anki to explore spaced repetition, explored mnemonics through the USA Memory Championship, tried Evernote for my poor-man’s Zettelkasten, and more. I continued to search for an “all in one” thinking and learning tool and workflow but couldn’t find it. Soon, I realized that my workarounds and hacky automation scripts would never be sufficient for the fast, clean, and highly customizable “extension of my brain” that I wanted. I started to write RemNote’s initial code version in 2017. For three years, RemNote was a personal project. I worked on it a few hours a week while taking classes, working on other projects, and doing research. I think it’s critical for tool designers to personally and deeply engage with real problems as they design. This happened organically through this “side project” setup where I could implement an idea and directly assess and reflect on impact a few weeks later in my studies, research, and projects. It wasn’t until 2020 that I began to seriously wonder if others might find the tool useful as well. I released RemNote’s initial version online, teamed up with Moritz, and we’ve been hard at work refining, improving, and scaling the tool ever since!  We still feel that there’s a big gap around effective learning and thinking tools, and believe that we’ve only scratched the surface. We have a full team around the product now, and it’s really exciting to know that we can make a real dent here.  That’s exciting! And what exactly makes RemNote different? RemNote is different in both philosophy and focus. Every aspect of the tool is designed to support learning and long-term knowledge growth. We aim to make it easy for you to learn something once and then remember and leverage it forever. There are two sides to this: storing knowledge in your head and storing knowledge in your external brain. For “getting knowledge into your head”, we support the entire learning pipeline. You might start with organizing and capturing raw source materials using our PDF Annotator and Web Clipper. Leveraging our bullet-point editor, you can break down ideas hierarchically into notes, flashcards, and concepts. Next, you can use RemNote’s deeply integrated spaced repetition algorithms to practice and internalize what you’ve learned. Finally, you can use our knowledge-organization features (transclusion, linking, etc.) to structure and compound knowledge over time. The learning and idea generation processes all happen in one tool, with maximum speed and minimal friction. But, you don’t need to memorize or internalize everything! That’s where RemNote’s approach to knowledge management and long-term knowledge growth comes in. For example, I don’t need to memorize my friends’ phone numbers. I rely on my phone’s memory for this task. RemNote serves as a customizable and highly personalizable external brain for many types of knowledge — we want you to be able to organize and structure your rough ideas, long-term plans, Zettelkasten notes, scratch notes, and more. Our challenge is doing this in a way that enables super-fast access and organization, and we’ve tackled this with a unique mix of structure, linking, and transclusion features that we can talk about later. We have experimented a lot with figuring out how to help you organize knowledge in a way that scales effectively. Our concept-driven knowledge structure enables you to break down and organize ideas to keep your notes organized and automatically find insights even as your knowledge grows. For example, I have about 200K Rems and about 40K flashcards, collected over the last four years — and we have quite a few users with even bigger Knowledge Bases.  We want you to have 100% confidence that anything you put into RemNote won’t get lost, disorganized or unused. I think we’re a good part of the way there, and we are committed to continuing to innovate on top of our unique knowledge structure to get the remaining few percent. Information getting lost or unused is actually a major challenge with most note-taking tools. How is knowledge structured in RemNote? Everything in RemNote is a node in a graph — a “Rem”. This is true for bullets, flashcards, PDFs, documents, etc. We think our “everything is a Rem” approach is simple but very powerful. First, it enables easy linking and integrations with different kinds and types of media. For example, highlights made in our PDF Annotation tool can be directly linked or transcluded anywhere in your Knowledge Base using the exact same mechanism that you’d use to reference any other idea. A recent update allows you to capture web links and also reference, transclude, and organize them just as if they were another bullet in your graph (which they are). Second, this principle enables concept-driven thinking. When learning, a core goal should be to break ideas into “mind-sized bites” that you can then link back together. In RemNote, you can use the bullet hierarchy to break down ideas into “concepts”. These concepts can have definitions (which can be turned into flashcards), and can then be linked or transcluded to re-use and apply your ideas elsewhere. Third, thi...

Are you more of a glass half full or half empty kind of person? Those who develop the ability to see the world from a positive point of view can reap significant benefits including improved health, lower stress levels, increased career success, and even a longer lifespan. This is the surprising power of learned optimism. Learned optimism is the concept that a positive mindset can be cultivated, even in those with pessimistic tendencies. Heavily influenced by psychologist Martin Seligman, learned optimism is part of the positive psychology movement. By learning how to cultivate positivity in everyday life, you can improve your productivity and your mental health. The 3 P’s of pessimism Even though optimists and pessimists are faced with the exact same events, pessimists may be more likely to predict negative outcomes. Whereas an optimist might bounce back when things go wrong, pessimists can be dissuaded from trying again due to nagging doubts and perceived stress. This is due to a different outlook on permanence, pervasiveness, and personalisation. Permanence. Whereas an optimist believes that the darker days will pass, a pessimist may ruminate during a negative time in their life and see the darkness as permanent. When knocked down, the optimist can get back up and try again, because they know that life will get better. The pessimist will lack this motivation, because they have no belief that their circumstances will improve.  Pervasiveness. An optimist might experience a failure at work yet still be able to see that they have been successful in other areas, such as their personal life. The pervasiveness of pessimism leads a pessimist to believe that failure at work is evidence of, or will lead to, failure in all other aspects of life. It is therefore no surprise that this all-encompassing pessimism can lead to increased stress and an increased risk of mental health disease. Personalisation. An optimist has learned to attribute success in life to their own efforts and abilities. They are also much better at finding an external force or situation to blame when things go wrong. Conversely, a pessimist will see their successes as being due to something external to them, and disappointments as being solely their own responsibility. With negative personalisation beliefs, the cycle of pessimism continues. Conversely,  These are known as the “3 P’s of pessimism” as formulated by Martin Seligman, who is considered the father of positive psychology. Martin Seligman has been studying psychology since the 1960s, authoring more than 20 self-help books and publishing 250 articles. His research has illuminated the power of positive psychology to fight the 3 P’s of pessimism by practising learned optimism. The benefits of learned optimism For decades, researchers have explored the benefits of learned optimism. Seligman’s book Learned Optimism explores the power of optimism in enhancing quality of life, as well as constructive tips on breaking negative habits and nurturing a more positive internal dialogue. Some of the benefits of nurturing such a positive internal dialogue can seem surprising. First, learned optimism leads to higher motivation. According to psychologists Charles Carver and Michael Scheier: “Optimism is a cognitive construct (…) that also relates to motivation.” With more motivation to succeed, optimists exert more effort to guarantee achievement, in contrast with pessimists who are more likely to give up. But it does not stop there. Carver and Scheier’s research found that optimism can predict good health, better career success and superior social relations. All of these outcomes reflected the motivation an individual had to pursue their goals. Even the better social connections of optimists are likely due to their sustained effort to maintain professional and personal relationships. Dr Heather Rasmussen and colleagues also found that optimism was a significant predictor of health outcomes. An optimist is likely to live longer, have superior immune function, and complain of fewer physical symptoms including pain. Furthermore, in those who had a positive outlook, better health outcomes were also observed in those undergoing treatment for cancer or cardiovascular disease, as well as during pregnancy. Not limited to physical health outcomes, the cultivation of positive thinking can also improve markers of mental health. An optimists’ expectation of positive outcomes leads to upbeat feelings. Conversely, when pessimists expect a poor outcome, it can cause negative feelings including anxiety, anger, or sadness. In one study, a group of children were identified as having risk factors for depression. Some of these children were taught the skills required to develop a more optimistic outlook. After two years, those who had not received the training in optimism were more likely to have developed moderate to severe depression. Receiving training in learned optimism could therefore protect against poor mental health. In another study of twins, “pessimism contributed independently to the prediction of depression and [poor] life satisfaction.” A negative mindset also increased the likelihood of hostility and cynicism.  Finally, Professor Antony Manstead of Cardiff University and his colleagues noted that there is a relationship between learned optimism and lower stress levels. Optimism is strongly associated with the presence of active coping mechanisms and positive reinterpretation of a stressful situation. Optimists also tend to be better at acknowledging the source of stress without becoming emotionally fixated on it. The mechanisms of coping associated with learned optimism therefore counteract stress. Learned optimism can contribute to higher motivation, good physical and mental health, better career success, superior social relations, lower stress levels, which all taken together translate to a longer life span. So how can you go about learning optimism? How to learn optimism It is clear from the literature that learned optimism has far-reaching benefits for holistic living. Pessimism is a mindset that can feel pervasive and persistent, but it is possible to break the cycle with optimistic models and approaches that can increase self-belief and your drive to succeed: Carver, Scheier and Segerstrom confirm that anyone can learn optimism. Furthermore, optimists’ behaviours are almost always beneficial and therefore provide excellent models of living for those wishing to reap the benefits of positive thinking. The good news is: it doesn’t have to be hard. Martin Seligman has developed a simple ABCDE approach to go from learned helplessness to learned optimism. Let’s use the hypothetical example of fearing you will fail a professional exam to explain each step of Seligman’s method. It can be helpful to grab a pen and paper while you go through these steps. Adversity. Start by describing a recent experience of adversity. Be as specific and factual as possible in your description. Using our hypothetical example, you could write that you are procrastinating and having difficulty doing any preparation for an upcoming exam. Belief. Then, write down all the thoughts running through your mind while thinking about this adverse experience. Record the exact sentences, for example: “I’m not good enough to pass this exam” or “I’m not cut out for this job” — don’t try to be positive at this stage, the goal is to capture the essence of your pessimism so you can change your outlook in the next steps. Consequence. Now, consider the impact of these beliefs on your feelings and on your behaviour. For example: “These beliefs made me feel overwhelmed with anxiety” or “These beliefs made me procrastinate” — and don’t judge yourself, these consequences are perfectly natural given the negative beliefs they are based on. Disputation. It’s time to put your beliefs into perspective. You can either find a piece of evidence that disproves the negative belief (“This belief is inaccurate because I have already succeeded at such stressful exams in the past”) or an alternative view of the belief (“Another way to see this is that I care a lot about this job, and this is why this exam is making me feel anxious”). Energisation: Use the newfound energy from the disputation step to cultivate a more positive outlook on the challenge you are facing. Consider the progress you have made, and how this exercise has helped you better manage your negative beliefs. It is important to note that optimism and pessimism are not binary, absolute concepts. In his research paper “The Neural Basis of Optimism and Pessimism”, David Hecht of University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience explains that positive and negative expectations of life are part of a continuum. Optimism in one part of your life, such as your career, can be contrasted by pessimism in another area, such as physical health. In addition, absolute optimism should not become a goal. While pessimism can lead to avoidance behaviours and even low mood, over-optimism can lead to reckless, risk-taking behaviours. Hecht notes that to live successfully, a fine balance must be found between the two states of expectation. This balance can be cultivated. To begin developing optimism, take time for self-reflection using the ABCDE method. Consider your natural response to difficult or stressful situations, as well as your motivation to return to better days. Even if your glass seems half-empty today, you can learn optimism to improve your expectation of the future and your drive to achieve it. The post Learned optimism: how to cultivate a talent for positive thinking appeared first on Ness Labs.

What is something we only become capable of doing after age eleven, that helps us solve complex problems and write poetry, but needs to be yielded carefully? That’s abstract thinking, a powerful tool for creativity and innovation which anyone can learn how to use better. The difference between concrete and abstract thinking Concrete thinking is closely related to experiences that can be directly observed. It involves everyday, tangible facts and physical objects. On the other hand, abstract thinking is a higher-order reasoning skill. It deals with conceptual ideas, patterns, and theories. For instance, thinking about the Statue of Liberty is a concrete thought, but thinking about what it represents — the idea of liberty — is an abstract thought. Listing the names of everyone on the team who are working on a specific project is concrete thinking, but questioning whether this is the best team for the project is abstract thinking. Another way to put it is that concrete thinking asks how whereas abstract thinking asks why. In the words of researchers from Tel-Aviv University: “Focusing on the means required to achieve a specific goal ultimately entails transforming an abstract idea into a concrete action and thus primes a concretizing mindset; likewise, focusing on the purpose of an action primes an abstracting mindset.”  According to famous psychologist Jean Piaget, it is not until around eleven years old that children become able to think abstractly and to use metacognition. Before that age, we are only able to think logically about objects we can physically manipulate. Our ability to think abstractly keeps on expanding as we grow up, but most people take this ability for granted, and very few proactively practice their abstract reasoning skills. Three concrete ways to practice abstract thinking It is possible to improve your abstract reasoning skills. Reframe the question. Go from “how?” to “why?” in order to take a step-back and tap into your abstract reasoning skills. For example, if you feel stuck trying to write a blog post, ask yourself: why am I writing this, who is this for, what exactly am I trying to achieve? This higher-order approach may help you discover a fresh angle to tackle your project. Look for patterns. Instead of looking at each concrete element in isolation, practice networked thinking to uncover abstract patterns and underlying dynamics in the relationship between those elements. Don’t be afraid to use your imagination. Sometimes patterns can be hard to detect, but the simple process of looking for them will help you improve your abstract reasoning skills. Take inspiration from abstract thinkers. Philosophers, artists, and scientists are great abstract thinkers. Like a philosopher, examine the nature of ideas such as success, reality, or community. Like a poet, go from concrete thinking to abstract thinking by using metaphors, simile, analogies, and symbolism. Like a scientist, formulate a theory by going from the particular to the general. Is the concrete event you are currently observing an occurrence of a wider phenomenon? Could you test your hypothesis? Abstract thinking is essential in order to solve complex problems, come up with innovative ideas, and collaborate with other people. It allows us to analyse situations, understand new concepts, formulate theories, and to put things in perspective. Without abstract thinking, we would not be able to grasp concepts such as friendship, hope, democracy, imagination, success, wisdom, happiness, or even love. However, while it’s a powerful tool to add to your thinking toolbox, it should not be the only tool, and it should be used wisely. A balancing game As with any powerful tool, abstract thinking can be a double-edged sword. First, abstract thinking without concrete thinking amounts to imagination without execution. Creativity requires an ambidextrous mindset which balances exploration and exploitation. Once you have figured out why an idea needs to see the light of day, you need to think about how you will make it happen. In other words, you need to go from abstract thinking to concrete thinking. It can also be dangerous for your mental health to always default to abstract thinking, especially when thinking about past events. Psychology researchers explain that “abstract rumination is characteristic of depressed individuals, as is the tendency to experience post-decisional regret.” It is particularly true of thinking about traumatic events, where concrete thinking has been found to be much more helpful than abstract thinking. Despite these caveats, abstract thinking skills are particularly helpful in situations that require thinking outside the box, uncovering hidden patterns, and generating innovative ideas. Just make sure you are balancing it with concrete thinking and monitoring your thought patterns so abstract thinking doesn’t turn into abstract rumination. The post The art and science of abstract thinking appeared first on Ness Labs.

Most people feel that, within the constraints they need to navigate, they are in control of their decisions. But we often automatically follow a train of thought or an external cue without noticing the selective factors in our attention. This phenomenon is called the attentional bias, and it affects many of the decisions we make. When our unconscious takes the lead The attentional bias can be defined as our tendency to focus on certain elements while ignoring others. Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, explains: “Attentional bias can be understood as failure to look for evidence against an initial possibility, or as failure to consider alternative possibilities.” Our attention can be biased by external events as well as internal thoughts and emotions. For instance, being hungry may make you pay more attention to food, and holding certain beliefs will skew your thinking towards decisions that are aligned with these beliefs. A famous example of attentional bias based on external events is found in cigarette smokers. Research using eye-tracking technology shows that, due to their brain’s altered reward system, pay more attention to smoking cues in their environment. That’s partly why ​​a staggering 75% of quitters return to smoking within a year. We tend to pay more attention to salient information, whether it’s relevant or not. In an experiment, Dr. Jan Smedslund, Professor Emeritus and Specialist in Clinical Psychology, asked a group of nurses to look through a hundred cards representing what they were told were excerpts from the files of a hundred patients.  For each patient, the card indicated whether the symptom was present or absent, and whether the disease was then found to be present or absent. Some patients had symptoms but no disease, others did not have symptoms but had the disease, some others did not have any symptoms nor the disease, etc. The nurses were asked to figure out whether there was a relationship between a particular symptom and a particular disease. Now, let’s have a look at the table below, which shows the repartition of the cases: Disease present Disease absent Symptom present 37 17 Symptom absent 33 13 Based on this table, Pr. Jonathan Baron points out that it is possible to determine that “a given patient has about a 70% chance of having the disease, whether this patient has the symptom or not.” In other words, “the symptom is useless in determining who has the disease and who does not, in this group of patients.” And yet, after going through the cards, 85% of the nurses concluded that there was a relationship between the symptom and the disease. Dr. Jan Smedslund concludes that “they tend to depend exclusively on the frequency of true positive cases in judging relationships.” Pr. Jonathan Baron adds that “many other experiments have supported [the] general conclusion that subjects tend to ignore part of the table. (…) People who have the chance do not inquire about the half of the table to which they do not attend.” But attentional bias can arise from within our minds as well. In a similar experiment, researchers Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross asked participants the following question: “Does God answer prayers?” Potential answers can be explored with a similar table: Prayer No prayer Manifestation Yes No No manifestation No No Again, people who pray will be more likely to answer “yes” to this question, justifying it by saying “​​many times I’ve asked God for something, and He’s given it to me”, and ignoring the other possibilities. Pr. Jonathan Baron explains: “If you think that God answers your prayers, it stands to reason that some piece of good fortune is a result of prayer.” However, he doesn’t think attentional bias is a fixed trait. He adds: “Further thinking might involve looking for alternative possibilities (such as the possibility that the good fortune would have occurred anyway) and looking for evidence that might distinguish these possibilities from our favored possibility (what happens when you do not pray). Attentional bias can therefore be correctable by actively open-minded thinking.” How to manage the attentional bias While it is impossible to completely get rid of the attentional bias, being aware of the existence of these unconscious processes that act like an invisible puppeteer behind our choices is a first step in reducing their impact on our decision-making. By applying metacognitive strategies to the management of your attention, you can take back control of some of your train of thoughts. Pay attention to your attention. Whenever you feel your attention being automatically pulled into a specific direction, ask yourself why this is the case. Is it a particularly salient piece of information, a cue that is linked to a past or current addiction, an answer that perfectly aligns with your existing values and beliefs? Go beyond the most obvious answer. If you find the answer to a question completely obvious, chances are some of your thinking is based on heuristics that may not be the only way to approach the problem at hand. Are there any alternative explanations? Did you fail to consider a different point of view? What answer would someone with different pre-existing beliefs give to the same question? You can take notes while you brainstorm, and list all of the alternative explanations you come up with. If you are in a work environment, this exercise also works well as a team. Cultivate open-mindedness. None of the previous metacognitive strategies will work if your tunnel vision prevents you from honestly considering the unconscious processes that guide your decisions, and if you are unable to consider alternative ways of thinking. Being open minded is not something you just decide to become. It can be cultivated by asking good questions, reading books outside of your usual interests, and connecting with people who think differently. Proactively managing your attentional bias requires a bit of effort, but it will make you a better thinker, leading to better decisions and a higher sense of self-awareness. It’s worth giving it a try! The post Attentional bias: the invisible puppeteer behind our decisions 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 better manage our thoughts, emotions, and knowledge. Kai Koch is the co-founder of Ahead, a mobile application designed to help people master their emotions in just five minutes a day. Developed in partnership with psychologists, Ahead uses behavioral science to teach emotional habits, so you can become more calm and conscious. It features short lessons, a progress tracker, and a space for guided reflection. It’s a bit like an emotional pocket coach. In this interview, we talked about the science-based benefits of emotional intelligence, the problem with traditional self-help content, the ripple effect of a high emotional quotient, the key difference between IQ and EQ, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Kai, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Emotional intelligence has only recently been put on the map. What does it mean exactly to be emotionally intelligent?  Thank you for having me. Great question. There are many definitions of emotional intelligence flying around. A simple one is this: the ability to notice and manage emotions. For example, an emotionally intelligent husband would notice when he’s getting angry and stop himself from doing anything stupid — like calling his wife a rhinoceros. Or an emotionally intelligent wife would be able to motivate her husband with charm, not pressure, to take out the trash. Most of us quickly recognize people with high EQ: they are highly respected, connected, and successful. I would disagree though that emotional intelligence has only recently been put on the map — it’s just been called different names in the past: social skills, manners, behaving like a grown up. What’s new is that people realize that improving their EQ is far more impactful for their lives than, for example, improving their Excel or French skills. That’s a great point about the long history of emotional intelligence. Now, what’s the origin story behind Ahead’s mission of mastering your emotions? My co-founder John and I have known each other for fourteen years and this is our second venture together. The idea for Ahead was born in a very intense period while in that previous company. I lost a lot of my hair and we both lost our relationships at the time. It became obvious to us that we — like most — have some quirks and unhelpful habits that were standing between us and success, both in our private and professional lives. But as we tried to get emotionally smarter, the self-improvement books, TED talks, and courses we used were a huge disappointment. Lots of inspiring words, but when it came to actually making it work in real life, they sucked. We’re living in the 21st century, but we still try to teach cognitive skills by making students listen to a teacher’s wise words — when what’s really needed is to practice those skills yourself. You can’t teach children to ride a bike by giving them a “ride-a-bike” book to read. Why try to teach how to stay cool, content, or charming that way? But people do keep on trying to acquire these skills by reading books, and personal development in general is a massive market. How is Ahead’s approach to self-improvement different from other solutions? We don’t need bogus gurus selling us their 3, 5 or 10 secrets to a better me by tomorrow, and still, that industry is $70 billion large. We need a learning environment that helps us try things out ourselves and learn by doing. A book lying on our nightstand or a coach we see once a month can’t help us do that. Our smartphone on the other hand can: it’s with us when emotions actually happen, allowing us to improve right then and there. It adjusts to what we need, giving us tailored advice and reminders when we need them. And it connects us with people on the same journey. Ahead is not about passively consuming advice. It’s about you finding what works for yourself: how to notice your (or others’) emotions are rising, how to best manage them? All of that put into an app that’s interactive and fun, that feels like a game, not like a chore. Because as soon as things become complex or boring, we all quit, even when it comes to our deepest dreams. Talking about complexity… It can be difficult to quantify something as complex as emotions. How exactly does Ahead monitor progress and suggest improvements? You are right. It’s harder to measure how much better you learned to handle your emotions than how much weight you lost. But it can be done. We’ve worked hard to build tools that help you gain clarity on your emotional moments and on what to improve. We’ve developed fun surveys that show you how those close to you already see the progress you’re making. We’ve designed your journey so you notice how you’re solving harder and harder challenges as you level up. And whenever you learn something about yourself, we use that to give you a learning path that’s even better tailored to your experiences, needs, and goals. Do you think there are any instances where EQ trumps IQ? I personally don’t think we should look at this from the angle of “which is better”. What’s exciting is that our IQ is more or less set in stone from birth, but our EQ can be trained like a muscle throughout our lives. None of us is at mercy of our emotions. Some research suggests that up to 60% of our job performance depends on our EQ. Of course our romantic relationships and friendships rely on it almost entirely. And even our health benefits from worrying or screaming less. And the better your EQ, the better you can improve other skills: once you know how to overcome emotions that keep you from getting better, you can learn anything. Then you know how to floss regularly or exercise — even if you don’t feel like it. The ripple effect sounds amazing. Why do you think people start using Ahead in the first place? The motivations to use Ahead are manifold. We see people looking to improve their (romantic) relationships or further accelerate their career. The unifying characteristic is that they all have a growth mindset. They believe that EQ can be improved. They believe they have what it takes to improve: They’ve made their way through challenging studies and jobs, built trustful relationships, and raised kind children. We have a channel where we collect all feedback from our users. It still awes me to read all the messages from people around the world that managed to get their frustration and anger outbursts under control — this is incredibly motivating for us in the team. What about you… How do you personally use Ahead? For me, Ahead has become a tool that helps me to understand myself better. I use it every day as an “extension” of my emotional brain. By now, observing myself and understanding what triggers my behaviors has become a little bit of a game to me. And I’m always excited to learn new techniques from our community of users to help me better recognize and manage emotions. There’s still so much to achieve around emotional intelligence. Where would you like Ahead to be in the next few years? We see it this way: evolution created emotions to keep us safe from lions and reproduce. But today emotions like fear, anger, sadness, etc. often doesn’t help, but hinders us. The good thing is: we are not at the mercy of our emotions — we can learn to manage them. We can learn the most helpful skill there is to be happy, successful, and connected. The bad thing is: So far we never did. We don’t learn EQ skills at school, university, or at work – and only if we’re lucky, do we randomly pick up a trick or two before we’re old. We want to change that and enable all of us to better manage emotions. So that we can all be happier together. Thank you so much for your time, Kai! Where can people learn more about Ahead and give it a try? You can download Ahead here and give it a try. We would love to hear your feedback! The post Become more calm and conscious with Kai Koch, co-founder of Ahead appeared first on Ness Labs.

Whether you are trying to create an online course or write an article, it can be hard to generate good ideas. Whenever you feel stuck, it can be helpful to boost your creativity with a systematic approach. The Zwicky box is a simple and effective way to create many unique ideas by breaking the problem down into categories, adding values to each category, and combining these values to create unique answers. The secret behind the man who discovered dark matter Fritz Zwicky was one of the most prolific scientists of the twentieth century. The Swiss astronomer wrote over three hundred articles, ten books, held fifty patents, developed jets and rocket propulsion systems, and discovered dark matter. He also found over a hundred supernovae by himself, and he was credited with coining the term “supernova”. For his work in astronomy, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1973 for “his many distinguished contributions to the understanding of the constituents of the Galaxy and the Universe.” He also received the Medal for Freedom in 1949 from President Truman for his innovation. To say that Zwicky had the incredible ability to generate unique solutions to the problems he faced is an understatement. Yet, many do not know his creativity, problem-solving, and ideation method. His secret sauce is the Zwicky Box (also called “morphological analysis”), a simple yet powerful strategy for generating ideas and solving problems. In 1971, Zwicky wrote: “I feel that I have finally found the philosopher’s stone in what I call the morphological outlook and method.” According to him, the Zwicky box could increase the efficiency of our brains by 100 times. Zwicky’s strategy for solving problems and generating answers is simple. Take a problem, break it down into categories, add various values into each category, and link the values together to create unique combinations. Here is an example of what a Zwicky box for building an app looks like: The problem with how we think “Zwicky believed that if only we could free ourselves from our pedestrian patterns of thought and learn to think morphologically, the future could be shaped by our images – however bold – rather than by the inertias of existing institutions and investments.” — Jesse L. Greenstein in Remembering Zwicky. When it comes to solving problems, our brains often jump to familiar answers. For example, if your phone is low on battery, charge it. If it’s cold outside, turn the heater on. While these familiar solutions are good in certain situations, they may not be enough to navigate more complex areas of our lives. Sometimes, the problem does not lie in coming up with ideas, but stopping too early when you only have a few solutions. Only when all the possible solutions are exhausted can we find the best answers. Thomas Edison had 1093 patents, while Mozart had 600 musical compositions. However, we only remember a few, and the groundbreaking ones were only possible thanks to the number of ideas they generated. Prolific creatives such as Ed Sheeran and John Mayer also attributed their success to coming up with many ideas before selecting the best ones. Zwicky’s work also involved solving complex and challenging problems. These are not problems you can answer with conventional answers. Instead of squeezing his brain to develop unique solutions, Zwicky used the morphological box to generate many ideas. Thanks to this approach, he could come up with a set of diverse answers and select the best possible solution. And the good news is: you can use his method as well. How to create your own Zwicky box A Zwicky box is powerful but is not hard to build. Break your problem into categories and add values to each category. Then, create unique combinations by combining the values from each category. Let’s say you want to come up with a new app. You can follow the steps along here by downloading our Zwicky box template. Step 1: Figure out your categories. The first step is to define our categories. Here is what your Zwicky box might look like at the start: Finding your categories is simple: take an example of a similar existing solution, list each part, and ask if you can turn it into a category. For instance, let us take Roam Research, and break it down into its components: Note-taking app – Product Knowledge workers – Demographic Subscription model – Revenue model Bi-directional linking – Unique feature Networked thought – Brand message Then, add each category into its column. You should have something like this: Step 2: Add the values Next, brainstorm values for each category. If you have a problem coming up with values, try looking for inspiration from existing solutions, searching online, or brainstorming with your team. As long as it is workable and realistic, add it into the Zwicky box. Step 3: Create unique combinations Next, combine the values to create a brand new idea. Randomly pick one of the values from each category and link the values together. For example: Combination 1: To-do list app, for students, one-time payment, language processing, and organize it all Combination 2: Read-it later app, for writers, subscription model, team workspace, fastest app Combination 3: CRM, for students, subscription, team workspace, think better Continue to create these combinations even if you don’t find anything valuable at first. The power of a Zwicky box comes from the many ideas it creates. Suppose you have a Zwicky box with five categories. Each category contains five values, leading up to 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 3125 unique combinations. With this many options, you are bound to generate at least one or two high quality, innovative ideas. Using the Zwicky box in your everyday life The process may sound quite theoretical, but the Zwicky box has many practical applications. Here are four ideas on using a Zwicky box in your everyday life: Creativity. From story planning to content creation, creatives can utilise the Zwicky box to generate original ideas. Innovation. You can use a Zwicky box for market innovation, business model creation, product development, and prototyping. Decision making. A Zwicky box can help you with strategizing, financial modelling, and daily decision making. Brainstorming in a team. It can be helpful to brainstorm ideas with your team with a Zwicky box where everyone can contribute to creating and filling the Zwicky box. The Zwicky box is a simple tool to improve your creativity and problem-solving. Simply break down your problems into their components, add values and link them together to create new ideas. It’s easy to set up and can be used for many situations, from creating your next business model or article. Get started by downloading our free Zwicky box template. The post The Zwicky box: a powerful method for problem solving and creativity appeared first on Ness Labs.

We often hear advice about how self-reflection can help us learn more about our true inner selves and can help resolve interpersonal conflicts. However, self-reflection should not be reserved for our personal lives only; it can also be richly rewarding for our professional careers. Self-reflection can be defined as the process of replaying recent experiences in our minds to discover insights about ourselves. Researchers describe it as “a personal process that can deepen one’s understanding of self and can lead to significant discoveries or insights.” These insights can include clues to our values, clarity about our behaviors, and the sources of our knowledge. Self-reflection is also a tool that helps us understand where we come from and how we define successes and failures for ourselves. It is an opportunity to test our assumptions about the world around us and uncover where we can grow and improve. Essentially, time spent on self-reflection creates a chance to learn more about ourselves and what we need to grow personally and professionally. Self-reflection for job performance When it comes to job performance, people tend to believe that practice always makes perfect. The more often we practice learning a new skill, the more likely we will be to master relevant tasks. However, a study suggests that reflection is a much more powerful learning tool when it comes to job performance. In the study, 101 employees at a large company were assigned to two groups: reflection or practice. The practice group spent the last 15 minutes of their day participating in regular job training, while the reflection group spent their last 15 minutes journaling about their experiences that day and the lessons learned from their training. All participants completed a skills test at the end of their training. Researchers found that those in the reflection group scored an average of 15 more points on the assessment than the practice group. The study shows the value of allocating time for reflection to increase new employees’ skills and knowledge. Engaging in self-reflection may also improve your job performance by protecting your mental health, and more specifically by helping you avoid burnout. In a study of English teachers in Iran, researchers found that teachers who spent more time reflecting on the day’s activities were less likely to experience burnout. In addition, the researchers suggested that those who engaged in self-reflection had a stronger emotional attachment and dedication to their job It may feel counter-intuitive, but self-reflection doesn’t have to be a solo process. ​​Having a colleague willing to help you can strengthen your reflection process. It can also allow you to form closer bonds with trusted colleagues and give you the chance to hear insights from others that you may not have seen yourself.  Dr. Rebecca Finley from Thomas Jefferson University suggests that mentors and colleagues can assist you by asking prompting questions such as: what happened, why does it matter, and what do you want to do now? Or: where are you right now, and where do you want to be? Reflecting on your professional experiences and learning from them can influence your career choices. Perhaps reflecting on a presentation you gave makes you discover you may need to take some public speaking classes, or perhaps you decide to hire an executive coach after you struggle to handle a conversation with your manager. You may also find a mismatch between what you value and the career path you have chosen, and you must make decisions about what you will do next. Reflection prompts action, so you can use the lessons you learned about yourself to take the next step forward in your professional life. How to practice self-reflection at work Researchers created a multi-step process for individuals who wish to reflect on their experiences. Based on their approach, here are some tips that can help you reflect on your work experiences. Find a quiet place: A quiet location with no interruptions is crucial for reflection. If the office is too loud during the day, consider waiting until the evening to sit down and review what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what you plan to do next. Record your thoughts. Journaling is a powerful reflection tool. Whether you decide to use an app or a good old notebook, make sure to write down your thoughts so your self-reflection practice becomes an actionable thinking tool. Examine everything. As you are replaying what you experienced at work in your mind, think about each decision you made along the way. What was the context when you made the decision? What did you accomplish or not accomplish by making this decision? What knowledge did you have that contributed to your choice? Imagine the alternatives. Ask “what if” questions. What would have happened if you made different decisions during the process or project? Would you have gotten closer to your goals or not? Organize your insights. Do you see any trends or patterns in your discoveries? Group them to analyze them more easily and decide which ones are the most relevant to your work. Turn your reflection into action. Decide if there are any actions that you need to take as a result of this process. Some situations may call for immediate next steps, while others can be integrated into your professional life over time. Self-reflection is a great tool that can help us learn more about ourselves on our career journey. The process can help us better understand our beliefs and behaviors, and inform the next steps of our professional growth. Self-reflection is also helpful if you are questioning some of your recent decisions, are experiencing a disconnect between your values and your actions, or are in the middle of a high-stress situation. Remember, whether you decide to reflect on your own or with a colleague, it is essential to find a quiet space without distractions. While we all have competing priorities, carving out time to learn more about ourselves is crucial for guiding ourselves towards our career dreams. The post The power of self-reflection at work appeared first on Ness Labs.

Internationally, pandemic-related stressors and social media are converging in an 'epidemic within a pandemic' of Tourettes-like tics in young people.

Identifying those psychological traits may help health officials convince the sizable minority of Americans who don’t want a coronavirus vaccine. Simply sharing information hasn’t worked.