The more pressure we feel, the more we tend to stick to our old routines – even when these routines caused the problems and the stress in the first place. This is known as the tunnel effect (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013). But Mullainathan and Shafir, who examined this phenomenon thoroughly, also found a way out of it: Change is possible when the so

Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking.

The most reliable predictor of our behaviour in the immediate future is – surprise, surprise – the intention to do it.

we will do in a month, a year or two years from now exactly what we have done before:

But the biggest difference lies in the task you are facing to start with. It is much easier to get started if the next step is as feasible as “writing a note,” “collect what is interesting in this paper” or “turning this series of notes into a paragraph” than if we decide to spend the next days with a vague and ill-defined task like “keep working o

According to the

famous law of Parkinson, every kind of work tends to fill the time we set aside for it, like air fills every corner of a room (Parkinson 1957). While this is almost a universal law for longer time frames, the opposite is true for tasks that can be completed in one go. This is partly due to the aforementioned Zeigarnik effect (Zeigarnik 1927), in wh

overconfidence bias,

setup in which the inevitable by-product of one production line becomes the resource for another, which again produces by-products that can be used in other processes and so on, until a network of production lines becomes so efficiently intertwined that there is no chance of an isolated factory competing with it anymore.[40]