Habits
The business of New Year's resolutions is worth somewhere between $30 and $60 billion globally — gym memberships, nutrition apps, productivity tools, self-help books, language-learning subscriptions. Most of the economic value is generated in January and is gone by mid-February, because 92% of new resolutions, according to University of
Productivity
Inbox Zero, as a concept, was invented by Merlin Mann in 2006. By 2009, Merlin Mann was publicly arguing that Inbox Zero was a lie — or, more precisely, that the cultural version of Inbox Zero had become the exact opposite of what he'd intended. The original idea was
Time Management
The CEO of a 200-person SaaS company in Dublin shared his calendar with me in March. It was, by any objective measure, a disaster. Sixty-three meetings in the week, average length 38 minutes, gaps between them rarely exceeding 15 minutes. He had recently read Cal Newport's Deep Work,
Productivity
Francesco Cirillo invented the Pomodoro Technique in 1987 using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. The method — 25 minutes of focused work, 5 minutes of break, repeat — was designed for a specific person: Cirillo himself, a university student trying to study for exams with a short attention span. It worked for him.
Learning
The number 30 is arbitrary. I didn't choose it by research — I chose it because it was the highest number I could sustain without my marriage or my work suffering, and it turned out to be achievable with about 35 minutes of reading per day. Most people overestimate
Productivity
You know the pattern. A big report is due Friday. It's Tuesday, and you've got the time, the brief, the data. You sit down, open a blank document, and immediately feel a vague dread — not panic, not boredom, something closer to a low-grade nausea. You check
Deep Work
A friend of mine — a VP at a SaaS company in Munich, 38, two kids, a wife who runs a legal practice — told me last month that he hadn't done four hours of uninterrupted thinking since 2022. Not in one sitting. Not even split across a day. His