How do we solve hard problems? What are we thinking about as we work? What influences whether we find an answer or remain stuck forever? These are the questions Allen Newell and Herbert Simon set out to address in their landmark 1972 book, Human Problem Solving. Their work has had an enormous influence on psychology, […]

Working hard all day doesn’t matter if it’s on the wrong tasks. The most critical factor in your productivity is what you decide to work on. The question of what to work on is under-discussed. There’s plenty of advice on getting work done: setting up good habits, creating productivity systems, project management and planning. Yet, […]

A key strategy for getting better at things is hill-climbing. The idea is simple: try different things, keep doing the things that work, stop doing those that don’t. The strategy is named because you can envision it as finding the highest spot in a landscape filled with fog. You can’t necessarily see the highest point, […]

It’s been almost a year since I started my current research project. My initial starting point was the intriguing, if somewhat pessimistic, research on learning transfer. However, crawling through citations has gotten me to some of the more interesting science on how people think the mind works. Having now read over 70 books and 250 […]