Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
Structuring attention and time.
11 topics · 19 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Good and Bad Procrastination
Paul Graham · 2005
Argues that avoiding an important, ill-defined problem in favour of well-defined small tasks is worse than doing nothing, because the small tasks…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity
Francis Heylighen & Clément Vidal · 2008
Reads David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology against cognitive science on working memory and stress, arguing its core moves — externalising…
+7 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework
Douglas C. Engelbart · 1962
Proposes that human intellect can be systematically augmented by co-evolving working methods, language and tools together, and lays out a concrete…
+6 more at this level
12 of 19 works
Paul Graham
Argues that avoiding an important, ill-defined problem in favour of well-defined small tasks is worse than doing nothing, because the small tasks feel like productivity while the real work never starts.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Tim Urban
Argues that chronic procrastination is driven by an 'instant gratification monkey' overriding a rational planner, and that only a looming deadline's panic restores control — which is why work without deadlines never gets done at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Adam Grant (TED)
Argues that originals are not faster but slower — moderate procrastination and a high volume of discarded ideas are what separate them, not confidence or first-mover speed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026NASA
Sets out a standard method for decomposing a project into a hierarchy of deliverables rather than activities, arguing that organising work by product avoids the ambiguity and duplication that task-based breakdowns produce.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Francis Heylighen & Clément Vidal
Reads David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology against cognitive science on working memory and stress, arguing its core moves — externalising commitments, defining the next physical action — track real limits on attention rather than folk wisdom.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gloria Mark, Daniel Gudith & Ulrich Klocke
Observing knowledge workers in their own offices, finds interrupted work gets completed just as fast by working faster afterward, but at a measurable cost in stress, frustration and perceived effort.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Matthew A. Killingsworth & Daniel T. Gilbert
Using experience-sampling from thousands of people, finds minds wander from the task at hand nearly half of waking hours and that this wandering itself predicts lower happiness regardless of what it wanders to.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu & Daniel M. Wegner
Finds that people remember where to find information better than the information itself once they expect it to stay accessible online, treating search engines as an external memory partner rather than a mere reference tool.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Andrew K. Przybylski, Kou Murayama, Cody R. DeHaan & Valerie Gladwell
Develops and validates a scale for fear of missing out and links higher scores to lower need satisfaction and mood, tracing habitual checking behaviour to anxiety about others' experiences rather than to the platforms themselves.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy & Maarten W. Bos
Finds that a smartphone within sight or reach measurably lowers available cognitive capacity even while switched off and unused, because part of attention is spent resisting the urge to check it.
James Williams
Argues that digital design now competes for attention against a person's own long-term goals, so persuasive technology is a problem of will and self-governance rather than merely one of distraction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Meng Zhu, Yang Yang & Christopher K. Hsee
Shows that people habitually choose an urgent task with small stakes over an important task with larger stakes purely because a deadline is attached, even when the urgent task is objectively worth less.
link checked 17 Sept 2026