Patrick Ozoh (PhD)

Everybody would like to get more of the right things done. But how does Stoicism fit into all of this? The word “productivity” seems new and sleek and shiny. And Stoicism is old. Really old. Like older-than-grandpa-old. I have news for you: Facebook and email may be recent but people have always wasted time. And smart people have been thinking about how to stop doing it for almost as long. Most productivity advice is focused on work. Following it makes you feel like you’re turning into a machine. Nobody wants to be a Transformer. (On second thought, being a Transformer would be pretty cool, but you get my point.) A more philosophical approach to getting stuff done is nice because sometimes the things you wanna do aren’t work. You wanna see friends, have fun, and all the stuff that gets shoved off the calendar by work. And as we’ll see, the Stoics’ ideas are actually backed by a lot of modern science and expert advice. Alrighty then, t...

Less than 1% of people are living according to the principles/science described herein. However, I’m confident that if you apply these recovery principles to your life, you’ll live a more engaged, meaningful, and productive life. Being busy and being productive are far from the same thing. Most people are trying to do too much. The desire to “keep up” has them doing more, living less, and deceiving themselves into believing they’ve actually made progress. True growth and success is always sustainable . It’s not a short sprint with an inevitable physical, mental, and emotional crash. All goals are means, not ends. Each succeeding stage of your progression should clearly build one-upon-another, leaving you stronger and more able, not weaker and permanently damaged. In order to do this, you must properly “recover” from the following things on a daily basis: Work Technology People Food Fitness Being awake Unless you adequately recover in these areas, your life i...

Do you have anxiety? Have you tried just about everything to get over it, but it just keeps coming back? Perhaps you thought you had got over it, only for the symptoms to return with a vengeance? Whatever your circumstances, science can help you to beat anxiety for good. Anxiety can present as fear, restlessness, an inability to focus at work or school, finding it hard to fall or stay asleep at night, or getting easily irritated . In social situations, it can make it hard to talk to others; you might feel like you’re constantly being judged, or have symptoms such as stuttering, sweating, blushing or an upset stomach. It can appear out of the blue as a panic attack, when sudden spikes of anxiety make you feel like you’re about to have a heart attack, go mad or lose control. Or it can be present all the time, as in generalised anxiety disorder, when diffuse and pervasive worry consumes you and you look to the future with dread. Most people experience it at some poi...

Practicing paying attention can boost performance on a new task, and change the way the brain processes information, a new study says. This might explain why learning a new skill can start out feeling grueling, but eventually becomes more natural — although right now, the study’s findings are limited to a simple pattern-recognition game. “The brain is still figuring out ways to make itself better.” There’s a long-standing debate about how exactly paying attention helps us learn. One theory is that focusing makes the critical piece of information stand out. If you imagine trying to pick out a single instrument in an orchestra, that would be like turning up the volume on the violin to make it easier to hear. Another theory is that focusing actually dampens the background noise, like turning down the volume on the rest of the instruments to make the violin clearer. The question is: which part of this attention equation is more important for learning, and how i...

Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush. One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website. What happened afterward was often just as disturbing, the women told The New York Times. Many times, the investors’ firms and colleagues ignored or played down what had happened when the situations were brought to their attention. Saying anything, the women were warned, might lead to ostracism. Now some of these female entrepreneurs have decided to take that risk. More than two dozen women in the technology start-up industry spoke to The Times in recent days about b...