Why is it harder to watch a physics lecture than Netflix? Why does a cognitively demanding activity, like playing a video game, create a pleasurable state of flow, while math problems rarely feel that way? What makes something effortful? At first glance, these questions seem too obvious to ask. Of course video games are less […]

Flashcards, especially in their digital incarnations, are some of the most powerful learning tools. They can also easily be a complete waste of time. Powerful, because retrieval and spacing are key to memory. If you want to learn a topic with a lot of stuff to memorize, flashcards will help you do it better than […]

Last summer, I decided to stop using Twitter. I gave up YouTube as well as part of my own digital declutter in the fall, during the first session of Life of Focus. Since it’s been several months since I’ve stopped using social media, I thought I would reflect on some of my experiences. It’s possible […]

I’m working on a new writing project, based on some of the ideas I’ve written about in Do the Real Thing, The Hard Way is the Easy Way and the chapter on directness in Ultralearning. The basic idea is that instead of doing the real thing we need to improve, we often get stuck on […]