Today I thought I would share some posts I have read and enjoyed. All of them had made me reflect on my own behaviour and I hope to make some positive changes from them – I hope you enjoy them too!
How Willpower Works: The Science of Decision Fatigue and How to Avoid Bad Decisions
I can completely relate to decision fatigue. When I am too busy, some days I feel like I cannot make one more decision, even if it is about something incredibly simple.
In this post by James Clear he examines a research study published by the National Academy of Sciences, where psychologists examined the factors that impact whether or not a judge approves a criminal for parole and how this relates to everyday decision making:
As it turns out, your willpower is like a muscle. And similar to the muscles in your body, willpower can get fatigued when you use it over and over again. Every time you make a decision, it’s like doing another rep in the gym. And similar to how your muscles get tired at the end of a workout, the strength of your willpower fades as you make more decisions.
Researchers often refer to this phenomenon as decision fatigue. When the judge on a parole board experiences decision fatigue, they deny more parole requests.
Click here to read the full post.
What “no” means
As you probably already know, I love the work of Seth Godin and for someone who is working on becoming better at saying no, this post was particularly relevant.
Seth goes through a list of things which no does mean and ends with this:
What it doesn’t mean:
I see the world the way you do, I’ve carefully considered every element of this proposal and understand it as well as you do and I hate it and I hate you.
Click here to read the full post.
On Starting Your Own Business, And Being A Productivity Unicorn
The advice in this post is sound and would relate to anyone who is trying to use their time more effectively. Towards the end of the post they list five secrets for being insanely productive and I particularly liked this one:
1. Don’t spend your best working hours making a to-do list! I try to catch myself when I procrastinate by planning work instead of actually doing any. Even if your to-do list is a total mess and way too long and confusing, I’ll bet you already know what the most important item on it is. Do that one! Then you can clean up the list.
Click here to read the full post.
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My writing around the web
I have been doing some more freelance writing lately. My most recent article is over on the realestate.com.au blog, where I share tips on Planning A Nursery.
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Do you want to help young children have the best possible start to life?
Below is a request from a research team at Deakin University in Melbourne.
Do you have a child aged 2-5 years who hasn’t yet started school? If so, we’d love to hear from you. The Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research at Deakin University in Melbourne is running a really important research project. We’re interested in active play and electronic media use in 2-5 year old children. We’d love it if you could help us out by taking our online survey.
What’s it all about? Our project – Mums, Dads and Kids – is investigating how active young children are, how much time they spend using electronic media and how these behaviours impact some aspects of their development. We’re also really interested in what parents think about how these behaviours might impact on their child’s health, growth and development. There is such little research in this area that we really have very little understanding of how to best support healthy growth and development for our young children. One of the main aims of this project is to get a better understanding of the issues being studied so that we can develop programs and policies which best support a really healthy start to life for our little children.
What do you have to do? It’s really simple! We are asking mums and dads of 2-5 year old children to take our online survey. It’s easy – just click on the link
https://www.surveymonkey.com/
and it will take you to our initial screening survey. This will take only 2-3 minutes of your time. Once you’ve completed that, we can email you your own specific link for our full survey which will take between 10-20 minutes of your time, depending on your answers. Once the project is finished, we will be happy to share with you some of the results if you would like to receive them. If you’re on Facebook, we would also love it if you could like our project page (https://www.facebook.com/
If you have any questions please feel free to contact Jen at healthykids@deakin.edu.au
Kind regards,
Jennifer McCann
Research Assistant – Mums, dads and kids activity and screen time study (Healthykids)
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I am thinking about sharing some links each Friday or maybe every second Friday – would love to hear what you think about this idea. Please let me know in the comment section below! Have a great weekend!