Self-Improvement

How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2)

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Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) This article will present other techniques that women (who usually experience gender stereotyping or/and are caregivers) choose to follow in their work aspirations. As in the previous article, most of this research is based on Mason Currey’s excellent books, Daily Rituals and Daily Rituals: Women at Work.   Hidden in plain sight   Costume designer Edith Head created the …

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How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1)

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Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) As I mentioned in the previous article, the focus of this article is adding more examples of women (who usually either experience gender stereotyping or are caregivers or both) to the deep work philosophies Cal Newport identified in his book Deep Work. To recap some work strategies, Newport categorized four types of work philosophies …

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The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction

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Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) In his Deep Work bestseller, Cal Newport coins the term “deep work” as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”   In contrast, Newport defines shallow work as “non-cognitively demanding, …

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Cognitive Reappraisal or How to Cope with Unpleasant Feelings through Reframing

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In psychologist Guy Winch’s book The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships, and Enhance Self-Esteem, I came across one of the most descriptive explanations of how to handle the emotional load of uncomfortable situations.  What we call feelings are complex experiences composed of several elements. Anger, frustration, sadness, rage, exasperation, etc., are our subjective experiences (“feelings”) of particular events in our life. First, these emotional experiences are always accompanied by physiological reactions: potential elevated heart rate and blood pressure, stress hormones …

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Mastering a Crucial Skill for Adaptation: Learning How to Learn

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Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson. Frank Herbert, Dune  An article published by the World Economic Forum says that we are “in the middle of a global reskilling emergency” as AI will automatize some of our …

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What is Creativity?

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One way to define creativity is to look at the same things as anyone else but see them differently. Or, as Stephen King remarked in his book On Writing:  Two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.  Similarly, Adam Grant wrote in his Originals book: I once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very …

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Proven Strategies against Procrastination

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Etymologically, procrastination comes from the Latin word procrastinare, meaning “deferred till the morning” or “belonging to tomorrow “. Naturally, there is a better side of postponing work where we can use purposeful delaying of our work as a creative way to let ideas and concepts grow arms and legs. The difference between meaningful task delaying and procrastination is when a tomorrow to accomplish that specific work never quite arrives.  A common opinion is that procrastination is about poor time management skills or that procrastination is related …

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A Practical Framework to Create and Break Habits

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Habits are behaviours we repeat regularly or automatically. The good side of habits is that they can act as energy savers. We don’t focus on them while performing them. Take, for example, brushing teeth: we have to remind ourselves to be mindful of this action. Change your hand, and suddenly, brushing teeth becomes something novel and no longer a habitual activity. Imagine the mental load of getting ready in the morning if we hadn’t encoded each step of the morning schedule as a habit. …

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