Playing With Time

Welcome to Conscious Culture, a weekly newsletter full of interesting reads for curious, intelligent people who want to sharpen their minds

Hi everyone,

This week we're talking about Playing with Time, Availability Bias, Learned Helplessness, and The Perfect Number of Hours to Work Every Day.

Plus Apple has introduced lossless audio and spatial audio but can you can tell the difference? There is a quiz in fun stuff for you to test yourself.

Feel free to hit reply and let me know what you think.

Interesting Reads

The Availability Bias: How to Overcome a Common Cognitive Distortion

“The availability heuristic explains why winning an award makes you more likely to win another award. It explains why we sometimes avoid one thing out of fear and end up doing something else that’s objectively riskier. It explains why the five people closest to you have a big impact on your worldview.”

Learned Helplessness: How to Stop Feeling Like Everything Is Out of Your Control

“Learned helplessness is a state of mind where someone believes that they are unable to act effectively, especially when it comes to avoiding negative outcomes, following their past experiences.”

The Perfect Number of Hours to Work Every Day? Five

“Research indicates that five hours is about the maximum that most of us can concentrate hard on something,” says Alex Pang, founder of Silicon Valley consultancy Strategy and Rest and author of several books examining the links between shorter working hours and productivity. “There are periods when you can push past that, but the reality is that most of us have about that good work time in us every day.”

Will note:

This means everyone would be working about 25 hrs a week, which would be part-time. Back in January, I shared an article on how Gumroad operates with no full-time employees. After reading about how Gumroad operates and armed with new research on the perfect workday, I think we should all be rethinking the way we work, especially since offices are starting to open and people are expected to be there eight or nine hours a day.

Learning

Practical Deep Learning for Coders

“Deep learning is a computer technique to extract and transform data–-with use cases ranging from human speech recognition to animal imagery classification–-by using multiple layers of neural networks. A lot of people assume that you need all kinds of hard-to-find stuff to get great results with deep learning, but as you'll see in this course, those people are wrong.”

Tools and Resources

Becoming time-efficient: 50+ methods for being efficient and productive

“Research shows that people get distracted every 40 seconds when working on a computer that's connected to the internet. Our inability to focus takes a large toll on our ability to be productive. And as founders, time is incredibly precious.”

Fun Stuff

Playing With Time

The True Size Of

“Drag and drop countries around the map to compare their relative size. Is Greenland really as big as all of Africa? You may be surprised at what you find! A great tool for educators.”

How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?

“A hi-def test for your ears (and your audio equipment): Listen to these songs and see if you can tell the difference between an MP3 and an uncompressed audio file.”

Quote of the Week

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”

— Helen Keller

🎉End

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With gratitude,

Will