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How to rest well

Rest helps you feel better, work more effectively, and become the person you aspire to be. Yet, for a myriad of reasons, many of us find it difficult to rest well (myself included). Sometimes, all we need is a simple reminder, which is far better than the alternative of collapsing after being pushed beyond our limits. Hopefully, this article can serve as that reminder.

Rest is as essential to a good life, and a productive career, as work. Overwork is bad for individuals and organisations: a long period without adequate rest burns people out and wrecks company productivity. A deep dive into the lives of history’s most accomplished scientists, writers and even generals reveals that they laboured far fewer hours than do many people in today’s industrialised Western societies, and they crafted daily routines that balanced periods of intensive labour with downtime.

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Efficiency is the Enemy

This post was initially titled "Slack," though not the Slack you might be thinking of. A few years ago, I realized that being optimally efficient rarely made me optimally productive. I need to build time into my schedule for letting my mind wander, exploring ideas, and prototyping things that may not be directly applicable today. It all pays dividends in the long run. This post resonates with me today more than ever, as I now work for myself and have complete control over how I spend my time.

Trying to eliminate slack causes work to expand. There's never any free time because we always fill it. Amos Tversky said the secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you're headed in the right direction.

"Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0 percent busy. Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively and to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in creative use of slack. And bad ones only obsess about removing it."

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Why short-sightedness is on the rise and what can be done

When I was a kid, we were warned that sitting too close to the TV would ruin our vision. More kids than ever now need to wear glasses, and you might think it's because of all the screen time. However, it turns out that the reason for the growing vision issues in this generation is a bit more pernicious than that, it has to do with time spent outdoors.

Myopia – the medical term for short-sightedness or near-sightedness – is on the rise. And perhaps most worryingly, this trend also affects children.

Around 2.6 billion people were short-sighted in 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which anticipates that this figure will rise to 3.4 billion by 2030.

Meanwhile, a third of children and adolescents globally are affected by myopia, according to a recent study published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

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Experts vs. Imitators

Shane Parrish’s blog post starts off with a simple assertion:

If you want the highest quality information, you have to speak to the best people. The problem is many people claim to be experts, who really aren’t.

How do you tell the difference between an expert and an imitator?

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São Paulo: The City With No Outdoor Advertisements

Ads are everywhere — on every corner, in your browser, and even staring you in the face while you're 35,000 feet in the air. There is no escaping them these days, and it pains me to see people plaster an ad anywhere there’s a blank space. It feels like nothing can be done about this ever-present nuisance of ads, but São Paulo had other ideas and in 2006, they passed the Clean City Law to outlaw the use of all outdoor advertisements. Since then Paris removed a third of their outdoor ads, Grenoble has replaced ads with trees, and Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, and Alaska have all gone billboard-free. It just goes to show the change you can make when you think outside the frame.

In September 2006, the mayor of São Paulo passed the so-called “Clean City Law" that outlawed the use of all outdoor advertisements, including on billboards, transit, and in front of stores. Within a year, 15,000 billboards were taken down and store signs had to be shrunk so as not to violate the new law. Outdoor video screens and ads on buses were stripped. Even pamphleteering in public spaces has been made illegal. Nearly $8 million in fines were issued to cleanse São Paulo of the blight on its landscape. Seven years on, the world's fourth-largest metropolis and South America’s most important city remains free of visual clutter and eye sore that plagues the majority of cities around the world.

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How The Guinness Brewery Invented The Most Important Statistical Method In Science

You may have heard the term “sample size” before, usually in the context of election polling, clinical trials, or even market research. I'm a big sports nerd, so I've been using the term since I was 14, trying my hardest to predict how my favorite players would perform next season. Despite using the term for over 20 years, I never knew that the “sample” in sample size was… a sampling of beer.

The Guinness brewery has been known for innovative methods ever since its founder, Arthur Guinness, signed a 9,000-year lease in Dublin for £45 a year. For example, after four years of tinkering, Michael Edward Ash, a mathematician turned brewer there, invented a chemical technique that gives the brewery’s namesake stout its velvety head. The method, which involves adding nitrogen gas to kegs and to little balls inside cans of Guinness, led to today’s hugely popular “nitro brew” styles of beer and coffee.

But the most influential innovation by far to come out of the brewery has nothing to do with beer. It was the birthplace of the t-test, one of the most important statistical techniques in all of science.

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An argument for logging off

It might be time to log off, or at least to drastically reduce your information intake. The real question isn’t about how much screen time is right for you though. Aaron’s argument is about control, that you should focus your energy on what you can control. But what can you actually control? Aaron has some very useful guidelines around that.

In the excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author, Neil Postman, quotes Thoreau as saying:

“We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Writing in 1854 (!!), Thoreau pretty much nailed it. Having all information instantly accessible everywhere all the time has led us to be consumed by things that we'll never encounter, have no influence over, and in many cases don't change our lives at all. Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough! Yes, and?

A love story, a transatlantic essay, and a lesson about time, walk into a bar.

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What France and America Know About Each Other