Working less is better for everyone involved, including the employer. Iceland just ran a multi year experiment from 2015-19 to find out if a four day work week would damage productivity or improve it. Unsurprisingly, productivity didn’t go down and in some jobs it even went up. Tell your boss
Continue readingTag: Mind Space
Things Are Good: Protect Your Wisdom by Leaving Facebook
American adults who got their news about COVID-19 from Facebook were less knowledgeable and more likely to believe falsehoods about the pandemic. The solution is to spend less time on the site and more time getting your news from other sources. The good news is that most adults agreed that
Continue readingThings Are Good: You Make Choices to Have a Good Life
How you think about the world around will influence what you do in the world, which in turn impacts how you react to what’s happening around you. It’s a cycle, and you can influence it. Positive thinking won’t work, instead you can use tried and tested ways to better your
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Toolkit for Addressing Misinformation
Democracy functions best when the people are well educated and the group Evidence for Democracy wants exactly that: a smart public. With COVID vaccinations well underway it’s important to understand what exactly is happening with the vaccines and other public health solutions. First, we need to understand that a lot
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Meta-Analysis of Well Being Reveals how to Help Your Mental Health
Many people are feeling worn out, down, and stressed after living through a year of the COVID-19 pandemic. People in nations which reacted swiftly and took scientific approaches to containing the spread are doing better, but those of us in areas with poor leadership (I’m in “Conservative” Ontario) the pandemic
Continue readingThings Are Good: You Don’t Have to Love Your Job
Too many people are told to follow their passion and find their dream job above all else. This is bad advice. Instead, go get a job that you can do, pays you well, and is filled with respect. There is no reason to be a sycophant at work. Sarah Jaffe
Continue readingThings Are Good: Want to be Successful? Spend Time with Your Friends
Are you worried you aren’t successful? Don’t be! The greatest success one can have is found in their social network, and size doesn’t matter. According to a 75-year long study done by Harvard the path to success is spending time with friends. Take a moment out of your day today
Continue readingThings Are Good: Solving Problems is the New Life Goal
It’s now February and those of you that decided to commit to a New Years resolution have probably given up on them, that’s ok. Trying is always the first step. One of the reasons you may have missed your resolution goal is because it was a goal. Instead of focussing
Continue readingThings Are Good: Practicing Mindfulness Reduces Bias
Mindfulness training can reduce the biases one has according to a new paper published today in Nature. The researchers had a control group which was given a bias test but received no mindfulness training, the other group got training and then tested. The results are clear: being mindful can reduce
Continue readingThings Are Good: Stay Sane in Quarantine by Going Outside and Being Positive
Many of us need to stay inside as much as possible to reduce the spread of COVID this winter, and with less sun and no end in sight of the pandemic staying positive can be hard. You can do it though! We can learn from places that are cold and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Deleting Facebook Improves Your Health
You’ve probably heard that Facebook is bad for you and shrugged it off thinking that it’s not a big deal. Turns out it is, and you really should get off of Facebook. We all know how Facebook spies on use and profits from our secrets by selling our data. Tracking
Continue readingThings Are Good: Want to Help People Escape Crazy Conspiracies? Read This
2020 witnessed the rise of an absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory based around some anonymous internet poster. You may know somebody who believes the illogical thoughts that led to the insurrection in Washington last week and are concerned for their mental well being. If you know somebody deep into illogical and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Stop Interrupting People to Lower Stress
If you want to be a good boss please don’t interrupt your workers. If you are coworkers, please don’t interrupt each other. A recent study has shown that we physically react to stress in the workplace cause by interruptions. We can use this nugget of knowledge to create workplaces which
Continue readingThings Are Good: Be More Successful by Practicing Self Awareness
Self awareness helps in many aspects of one’s life, from romance to learning new things; it can also help you be successful in your professional life too. Let’s be honest though, self awareness is hard and is something that needs to be practiced everyday. Over at Fast Company they put
Continue readingThings Are Good: It’s Time to Get Crafty for the Winter Pandemic Months
In North America and Europe we are bound to have to spend the winter mostly in our own domiciles due to political mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic alongside the scourge of ignoramuses who don’t wear masks. Being stuck in one environment all the time will inevitably lead to boredom, so
Continue readingThings Are Good: In Canada Your Doctor May Tell You to Walk it Off
Doctors in Canada may soon be prescribing the oldest medicine in the world: walking it off. Thanks to the work of family doctor Dr. Melissa Lem in British Columbia the province will allow a walk in nature to be prescribed by doctors. It’s been proven time and time again that
Continue readingThings Are Good: More Good News from Web Summit
Dealing with “fake news” is a challenge for all of us due to the last four years of people in power blatantly telling untruths. Sadly, in regions like Ontario and others, the response to COVID-19 has equally been marred by people in power denying reality. This information environment makes it
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Mediator Explains How to Have Difficult Conversations
Adar Cohen knows how to have difficult conversations and he wants you to be able to exercise the same skill when you need it. By mediating for corporations, politicians, and families Adar has figured out the commonalities between all these different levels of disagreements. They all share the same characteristics
Continue readingThings Are Good: Independent Bookstores Succeeding Despite Pandemic and Amazon
This century bookstores have been struggling to survive due to the rise of Amazon and changing entertainment consumption patterns. When the pandemic started many bookstore owners thought it would be the event that ends the local bookstore. It turns out, the pandemic has actually helped independent bookstores. Bookstores have started
Continue readingThings Are Good: What Fiction We Read Matters Politically
The fictional worlds we engage with can change how we think about politics and how we justify our political beliefs. According to a study published in the Cambridge University Press people who read dystopian fiction are more likely to support extreme political reactions to things. The point? Read something that
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