goddessoflists

I'm curious about which other industries/roles this has worked for. Anyone here with examples?

It was too pretty and fancy for me. I wasted hours customising it instead of getting things done.

Pen and paper works best for me. At most, I use Google Docs.

That's one of my favorites too.

I find this a very frustrating topic. I've studied psychology so I always feel compelled to look at the data first, but here I'm going to focus more on personal experience.

For me, the short answer is: it depends. Somtimes, I do have a short attention span--I'll start watching a video but then also look at the comments and suggested videos at the same time.

But if I find a truly interestng article or video, I will give it complete attention, even if it's a longform article or a half-hour documentary. I listen to hour-long lectures and podcasts.

What I don't like about this entire phenomenon is that people saw attention spans were declining and then decided to create stuff that doesn't require much attention.

I think instead of creating more short content, we should have made it scarce. People will consume what is available. There is much more short-form content available today than it was 5 years ago, because social media turned it into an advantage.

We should have continued creating long-form content. People would have paid attention to it if that was the only thing available.

I'd also partly blame the idea that you must be reading a lot, watching a lot, keep up with everything, and in general get more things done. So people turn to summaries and bullets, just to avoid being "left behind."

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0110...

You’ll Never Guess Who Wrote That: 78 Surprising Authors of Psychological Publications

https://scottlilienfeld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/lilie...

Interest as the Missing Motivator in Self-Regulation

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dustin-Thoman/publicati...

Lots of interesting comments reminding me not to side 100% with something just because it was said by someone whose work I love.

I have a degree in Applied Psychology so I have some idea about how stuff works, although perhaps not as much as someone who's done a PhD.

Mastroianni didn't specify exactly what you should be investigating. Anything that involves hurting others is out of the question, be it medical research or psychological.

But I guess there is literally no harm in observing the growth of the plants in your garden, the behaviour of the pigeons that visit your balcony every day, in conducting online surveys to guage attitudes and opinions (as long as the surveys are well-designed, a skill that can be learned online), putting a dead butterfly under a microscope and then sharing what you learned with the world.

We can share such "findings" and observations without claiming that our research is on par with those done by professionals. As long as the ones sharing these notes and the ones reading them understand that amateur exploration of an idea isn't a replacement for rigourous research, I see no harm in more people taking notice of the world around them and bringing other people's attention to it. Perhaps one of these amateur observations might be read by a professional, inspiring them to investigate it properly.

As for me, I'm thinking of publishing the findings from my dissertation on my blog. I'm not interested in conducting research, but I do enjoy reading research papers and explaining their findings. I guess that counts too.

Many congratulations!

I've wasted too much time on planning everything and not actually getting started. It's unrealistic to expect everything to change at once. I'd suggest start with one thing you want to improve (diet, physical exercise, writing practice, etc.) and work on that for a while--ideally 30 days. Unless we get really lucky (or unlucky) things don't turn around completely. You make small changes while trying to find good in the life you already have. That's how I'm trying to work on it.

I highly recommend checking out Oliver Burkeman's posts to help you with this:

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/posts

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/thiscolumnwi...

I keep a Google Doc where I copy the link of the article and any quotes underneath. I try to go through it regularly because I don't like accumulating a lot of stuff and nothing's more dreadful than the idea of scrolling through a long document. My goal right now is to reduce it to five pages (Arial, 12 pts, single-spaced) by summarising most of the stuff and using the quotable stuff in my blog posts (or writing them down in my commonplace notebook). It's too easy to accumulate things if I'm using a digital tool, so I try to take as much of it offline as possible.

I wrote two guest posts for Submittable's blog, Discover, in 2019. That was the year I started college.

They paid US$50 per post, although I got a little less than that because of bank charges (I live in India). It was the first time I got paid for my writing. I wish I'd kept writing for them and other platforms more regularly; I wouldn't have had to start from scratch when I started working as a freelance writer this year.