Discover the full collection of #ThinkfullyHabits
Is it better to specialise and focus on one thing or broaden your activities and interests? It turns out that having at least one stimulating hobby or interest outside of work, or more than one area of focus within your work, is likely to increase your career success.
Read MoreStruggling to keep focused? Especially when doing systematic, logical and methodical tasks? This should come as no surprise to anyone. The very nature of the thinking processes involved in this type of activity are effortful and slow. Our brain often kicks against it, craving distraction and ease from effort. A simple technique that recognises this reality is the ‘Pomodoro Technique’. It proposes that we break down effortful thinking and activity into bite-sized chunks.
Read MoreWhen was the last time you wasted time? When did you find the space to start thinking about something, not knowing what will come of it?
Read MoreIt’s well known that being exposed to lots of noise is harmful – it raises blood pressure, increases stress levels and hampers performance. However, in contrast, the benefits of silence for our brains are more recently being established.
Read MoreHow often do your thoughts become clearer once given a bit of time to settle? Or an idea emerges from what originally seemed like a confusing mess of information? If we understood what occurs in our minds, perhaps we wouldn’t be so surprised when this happens.
Read MoreRubber ducking is a concept that is likely to be most familiar to those in the computer programming world as a way to help debug codes. The term comes from a story in the book ‘ The Pragmatic Programmer'* in which a programmer carries around a rubber duck and forces themselves to explain their code line-by-line to the duck, with the aim of helping find the bugs.
Even if we don’t write code, many of us will have had the experience of explaining a problem out loud, only to be hit by an idea for a solution part way through. Somehow, simply talking the problem out loud and in detail helps get to a new idea.
Read MoreWhat's your typical doodle? Flowers? Houses? Stars? Faces? These are amongst the most common. Or are you someone who finds themselves scribbling the same abstract or geometric shapes over and over in different ways? Whatever your preference, you’re not alone in your doodles.
While scribbling in the margins, shading in the shapes and creating random patterns doesn’t sound particularly productive, there may actually be cognitive benefits of doodling.
Read MoreWhen was the last time you were bored; when those little moments and tiny cracks in the day were left unfilled – while waiting for the lift, queuing for a sandwich or arriving early for a meeting? Do you allow boredom to creep in, or are spaces quickly filled with snippets of news, a quick text or a catch up post?
We crave stimulus and it’s only when we can’t find it externally that our minds tend to create it internally; sparking innovative ideas and solutions.
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