When I get on an airplane, I usually follow the same ritual. I take my seat and open up my laptop to do some work. When it’s time for takeoff, I begrudgingly put the laptop away. I twiddle my thumbs until the plane reaches 10,000 feet and that comforting chime …
Productivity
You’re doing better than you think
You know the feeling. You’re sitting at your desk as the clock ticks toward 5 pm. There’s a half-drunk, lukewarm coffee and a blinking cursor on the computer screen in front of you. As you get ready to call it a day, you think to yourself: What did I actually …
How to find the unexpected
After his father died, the physicist Richard Feynman went into a deep depression. He found himself unable to work on research problems. So he told himself that he’d instead play with physics—not for immediate practical results, but for its own sake. One day, he was eating in a cafeteria at …
Don’t fill the void
Nature, Aristotle once said, abhors a vacuum. He argued that a vacuum, once formed, would be filled by the dense material surrounding it. I also abhor a vacuum. Whenever I find a vacuum in my life, I fill it—no, stuff it—with the dense material surrounding it in an attempt to …