Design Your Work: Praxis Volume 1

by Tiago Forte

the conclusion that project creator Matt Killingworth came to after analyzing many thousands of participants’ data (as told on this NPR podcast) especially intriguing and personally relevant: the single factor with the highest correlation with unhappiness across the entire study was mind-wandering. The more someone had their mind on something other than what they were doing, regardless of whether they were thinking about something more pleasant or less pleasant than what they were doing, the more unhappy they were likely to be both while mind-wandering and in general. This is powerful evidence for the importance of what crunchy types would call “presence.” It’s also difficult to imagine how such a conclusion could be reached without random sampling via mobile devices.