Mindframe

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an extra hour in each day? Imagine how much more you could get done with another 60 minutes of free time. Unfortunately, the earth’s rotations never got the memo, and we’re stuck with our 24-hour system—and once you pull eight hours of sleep out of that, you’ve got just 16 waking hours left to make the proverbial donuts. Or do you? A study by the Council for Research Excellence suggests that on an average day, adults are exposed to 8.5 hours of screens—TV, computers, smartphones, and so on. Now most of us are committed to a certain amount of screen time; we can’t exactly tell our bosses we’re on strike from answering work emails or looking at spreadsheets. But even factoring out our work-related usage, it’s still likely that each of us is spending about three hours of our precious downtime on screen-related activity. When you think about how nice it would be to find some extra time in the day, you don’t generally think about this time as negot...

Allegedly, this year Noah has knocked out Michael as the most popular baby boy name in the US. Perhaps among the names least likely to make a comeback any day soon is Otis. And yet we owe some debt of gratitude to at least one Otis. Although he didn’t invent the elevator, in 1853 Elisha Graves Otis hit upon an equally key innovation: the elevator brake. The technology to make an elevator—a box on a rope on a pulley—had existed for centuries. The technology to make an elevator that didn’t carry with it the distinct risk of sending innocent people careening towards their deaths, however—this was an exciting new development made possible by the ability to stop quickly and gently. This in turn made early skyscrapers more feasible, and less deadly. Otis’s rather unglamorous creation literally shaped the American skyline. It also shaped this article; the popularization of elevators also led to the popularization of elevator-based metaphor. Let’s look at skill acquisition. Canadian...

Taraxacum is not some newly found dinosaur. It is the scientific name for the pesky weed commonly called the dandelion. The dandelion industry is a billion dollar business—not growing them, eradicating them. This despite the fact that they are rich in vitamins, A, B, C, D and important minerals like zinc, potassium and iron. If that weren’t enough, a dandelion plant yields a beautiful bright yellow flower. Despite the battle waged by the chemical conglomerates, each spring the dandelion sprouts up defiantly, sunny little weedy disposition intact, as if to say, “I’m still here!” Which, of course, brings us to the weed in your brain commonly called procrastination. We all grow it. It’s estimated that 20% of us are habitual hardcore procrastinators. Procrastination can be broadly defined as putting off until tomorrow what you know you should be doing today. Countless books on time management give you instructions that usually include the following: Make a difficult task A1 on ...

“Oh, the thigh bone’s connected to the leg bone and the leg bone’s connected to the…” You probably learned some version of this  classic spiritual “Dry Bones” in grade school. It’s a clever way to teach basic skeletal anatomy. Author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson was actually referring to the prophesy in Ezekiel 37:1-14, but for our secular purposes, the point is that all of your bones connect to create a structure that serves as the functional foundation for everything you do. Chiropractors build their entire livelihood on this vary concept. You throw your back out of joint and it effects your lifting power in a dramatic way. It’s amazing how the simple act of reaching for a bag of groceries in your trunk can compromise your skeletal system and jeopardize your ability to live a normal life for weeks afterwards. Like the skeletal system, we tend to think about diet, exercise and sleep as three separate systems, each vital to the success of the body. But there is an...