The psychology and philosophy of productivity, procrastination and perfectionism
These posts are more about the surrounding brain issues to do with trying to get things done, from mental health to executive function to culture. These are all my musings on the topic from a life of extreme productivity to extreme procrastination.
The Knowing-Doing Gap
The ‘Knowing-Doing Gap’ is an idea, like Scrum, that I have borrowed from the world of corporate self-help. It is a frustrating human truth that our knowledge does not usually drive our behaviour.
Why accepting help is hard
During my final year studying Music at Cambridge University, I was riddled with perfectionism and careening towards total burn-out. Eventually, I had such a bad anxiety attack that my parents explicit
Feeling safe with others is a tricky business: power dynamics and drama triangles
When Google did some research on teams, the main, and really, only common factor among high-performing teams was a sense of ‘psychological safety.’ This meant that all team members felt able to be
“A sense of poisoned rationality”: our standards and ways of working are emotive, not objective
Ways of working are emotive Over several years of thinking about ‘ways of working’ at both a corporate and a personal level, I’ve come to the conclusion that people care a lot about doing things
The Standard of Standards and the Sword of Ambition: thoughts on two types of goals (and how to set good ones)
Even at a job, work is not just one type of thing. This is even more true at home, where the work of life can vary wildly. So it can help to think about what we want to get done (our goals) in terms o
Things you don’t think of as work that are actually work
What counts as work? Here’s an incomplete list of different types of work: Working for money (a job) School work (or learning in general) Housework Child care Other care (e.g. for elderly relatives)
Procrastination: listen to your own cry for help
I’ve been meaning to sit down and finish this post for the last two weeks or so. I am finally doing it now because my friend Alex has offered to act as an accountability aid by sitting with me while
Aim Low, Do Less, Go Easy: how to be kind to yourself
How do we scour the scourge of perfectionism from our minds? Well, to do that, we need to be asking how to be kind to yourself. Remember, productivity isn’t the be-all and end-all of life. There are
Your requirements (for life) are dumb: how to tell if you’re on the right track
We receive many cultural messages throughout life, and one of these, at least in the West, is ‘be productive’. It’s a loud enough message that it can seem like an obvious requirement
Beware scope creep
When thinking of tasks or projects or goals, it is useful to think about scope. The scope of a task or project means almost the same as its size, but with a bit more subtlety, because it is defined (b