Twitter was buzzing yesterday after the BBC Horizon episode on How we really make decisions (iPlayer link). It mostly focussed on the work of Daniel Kahneman who wrote the seminal Thinking Fast and Slow. I’ve read the book and its hard going, describing dozens of different studies, the Horizon episode...
I’m an expert at what to do when I’m feeling rough (body wide pain, brain fog, exhausted). But everyone can improve, at least that’s the message of Heidi Grant Halvorson: The Incredible Benefits of a “Get Better” Mindset (video at the end of this post) I have to agree. When...
I’m feeling terrible today, aching all over and wading through brain fog. The number of mistakes I’m making typing this post is just crazy. Still the topic under discussion is ‘progress’ prompted by three events: the demise of my almost brand new, top of the range, ThinkPad Twist, which forced...
There are few topics in science as fascinating as the placebo effect, I’ve been following the studies for years as the effect has gone from the sidelines to become one of the most promising areas of mind-body medicine and I’ve been hacking the ‘principles’ myself, here are some of the...
I wrote this post yesterday and lost it due to some random combination of problems with WordPress, Chrome and my laptop. It’s ironic because the fact that I lost an hours work, and maybe key ideas that I won’t be able to remember didn’t get flagged to my companies service...
After lots of walking and dieting over the last few days, I’m tired and needed a day at home and some time catching up with my domestic chores. I also have a huge and growing backlog of work reading. I try and keep up with several broad areas of research,...
I’ve tried a few of the so called ‘virtual assistants’ over the years, crude applications that run in the cloud, on my smartphone or both and they never fail to disappoint. I’m afraid my expectations are high, set by the character Jane, created by Orson Scott Card in the Ender...
I’ve always loved to sketch at work, either on the whiteboard, or my preference on an A3 pad around a table. The A3 pad is perfect, because it’s large enough for complex diagrams and unlike a whiteboard infinitely scalable, or at least as scalable as the size of the table....
I my personal life I’ve always been most comfortable with predictability, I like my habits and I’ve worn deep grooves following them. It’s slightly ironic then that in my job I’m the complete opposite, striving for novelty, building new things, navigating my company through disruptions. Over the last few years...
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my boss today, just watching him is exhausting, but unusually I’ve been exhausting myself as well. My day started early at 6:30 followed by 30 minutes meditation and chasing around sorting the house out, then it was into the car to drive...