5.4 times every hour: Schooler et al., “Meta-awareness, Perceptual Decoupling and the Wandering Mind.”

“possible future events”: Daniel L. Schacter, Randy L. Buckner, and Donna Rose Addis, “Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future: The Prospective Brain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8, no. 9 (2007): 657–61.

Another random, fun finding from this study: we do the greatest number of rote tasks on Thursdays (about a third of the routine tasks we do throughout the entire week). If you find you fall into this pattern, it might be worth seeing Thursdays as your “Maintenance Day”—when you do all the tasks you’d rather not focus on during the rest of the week.

intelligence and creativity are very similar constructs. Both intelligence and creativity involve connecting dots, but in different ways. Intelligence involves connecting dots so we understand a given topic more intricately. Creativity also involves connecting dots—but in new and novel ways. Seen this way, intelligence and creativity aren’t somethi

31 An interesting observation: the less a person is motivated by money, the more money they end up making in the end. Money, fame, and power are extrinsic goals—they’re external to you and far less motivating than intrinsic goals, such as growth, community, and helping others.

it’s worth highlighting spending time in nature to help you feel rested and recharged. This activity makes you up to 50 percent better at creative problem-solving tasks, lowers levels of stress hormones in your body by around 16 percent, makes you calmer, and elevates your mood. One study even discovered that “[t]hose living on blocks with more tre

29 If you’re curious, your brain’s “task-positive” network supports hyperfocus, and your “task-negative,” or “default mode,” network supports scatterfocus. Your task-positive network is activated when you’re paying attention to something external, while your default mode network is activated when your internal focus is high.

One study found that when a distraction is about twenty seconds away from us—when it takes twenty seconds to retrieve a bag of chips from the basement, unlock a drawer to get our cellphone, or restart our computer to access distracting websites—it provides enough of a temporal distance for us to not fall victim to these distractions, and we’re bett

be wary of walking meetings. Walking—including while you work, such as on a treadmill desk—has been shown to decrease cognitive performance. Performance increases after a walk, however.)