Motivation fades.
Hacks break.Boring work compounds.
Self-improvement that survives contact with real life — systems instead of sprints, sources instead of vibes, honest testing instead of promises. A library, not a feed.
- 62 articles
- Six clusters
- Publishing since 2007
- Zero stock photography
Start where you actually are
Six entrances. Pick the sentence that sounds like your week, not the topic that sounds impressive.
I know what to do. I don’t do it.
Perfectionism correlates with procrastination at −.03 — essentially nothing. Every common explanation, ranked by the evidence behind it.
EnterI open my phone to check one thing and lose forty minutes.
The randomised trial everyone quotes found the smallest effect on attention, not the largest. What two weeks without mobile internet actually changed.
EnterMy habits die in week two.
One word hides four different problems: no anchor, avoidance, effort, changed context. Find which one is yours before picking a method.
EnterI read the famous book. Nothing changed.
38 books read with one question: what still holds up once the evidence caught up? Six worth reading, fifteen we tell you to skip.
EnterEveryone repeats this advice. Is it true?
The 21-day rule came from a 1960 plastic surgeon writing about faces, not habits. Claims traced back to the source that started them.
EnterI sleep fine and I’m still exhausted.
Tired, sleepy and burned out are three different states with different fixes. Sorting yours is why rest has not been working.
EnterFour numbers this site will not let you unsee
Every chart below is drawn from a paper you can open. No illustration is decorative, and none of these figures appear on the sites that give you the same advice.
Start with these
Three pieces that show what the rest of the library is like.
Why We Really Procrastinate
The longest piece on this site. Delay as short-term mood repair, the neurobiology underneath it, and a protocol for the state you are actually in.
12 Natural Laws, or How to Preserve Your Vital Energy
The most-read page here. Twelve rules on where energy leaks and what actually refills it — the full audit of the hours nobody counts.
How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit?
The 21-day rule traced to its origin: a 1960 note by a plastic surgeon about patients adjusting to a new face. The first real measurement found a median of 66 days.
Eighteen years of being wrong in public
In 2015, two hundred and seventy researchers repeated a hundred psychology experiments. Thirty-five of the ninety-seven that had originally reported an effect produced one again. Some of the studies that failed were in books this site once recommended.
This project has been publishing since 2007. Five things it got wrong, by name:
An author who has never been wrong isn’t a sage. He’s someone who never checked.
- Twenty-one days to a habit.The figure belongs to a plastic surgeon writing in 1960 about how long patients took to stop flinching at a new face. He was not writing about habits at all.
- Ten thousand hours.A rounded average from one study of violinists, turned into a law by a book the researcher publicly disowned.
- Willpower as a muscle that tires.Twenty-three laboratories ran the same preregistered test on 2,141 people. The effect came out at 0.04, with a confidence interval straddling zero.
- Visualising the finished goal.Picturing the outcome reliably lowers the odds of reaching it. Picturing the obstacle does the opposite.
- The law of attraction.No mechanism, no measurement, no failed prediction it could not absorb.
Latest entries
The feed lives at the bottom on purpose. A library is organised by subject, not by date.
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Why Is My Attention Span So Short All of a Sudden?
This article is part of the attention pillar, where the evidence on focus is kept in one place. TL;DR “Suddenly” is the…
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The Goldfish Myth: Your Attention Span Is Not 8 Seconds
This article is part of the attention pillar, where the evidence on focus is kept in one place. TL;DR The claim that…
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How Long Does It Take to Get Your Attention Back?
This article is part of the attention pillar, where the evidence on focus is kept in one place. TL;DR Nobody has established…
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Are Learning Styles Real? What the Evidence Actually Says
TL;DR The VARK questionnaire was built from its authors’ own observations, and they wrote in the original 1992 paper that testing it…
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Does Habit Stacking Actually Work?
TL;DR Habit stacking has been put to the test head-to-head, once. In a preregistered randomized trial, anchoring a new behaviour to an…
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Does the Pomodoro Technique Actually Work?
TL;DR The exact 25-on, 5-off split has been through a randomized experiment once, in 2025. It produced no advantage in task completion,…
One email. One tested idea.
The newsletter
No fireworks, no funnel, no course at the end.
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