All Articles & Guides
How the curious, ambitious, and kind are making the most of their minds. Learn faster, think deeper and stress less with these crisp evidence-based guides.
How Our Memories Mislead Us
Memories aren’t replayed, they’re rebuilt, which is why the ones you keep revisiting can grow kinder or crueller. Here’s the science behind the drift, and five ideas for steering it.
Building an AI Newsletter Assembler
With plain English and no technical experts, I built a AI Agent to turn a Notion newsletter into a website post and email campaign, saving me hours of manual work.
Escaping Your Phone’s Gravity: Part 3
There’s a free dumbphone hiding inside every iPhone. Here’s how to find it, and why it beats every app promising to do the same thing.
The Creative Cost Of Remembering Too Much
Getting stuck on a wrong answer and getting stuck on a grudge are the same failure in disguise. Here’s the science, and three ways to force the redirect.
Future Forgetting: Understanding The Most Common Form Of Forgetting
With past forgetting well-covered in previous pieces, let’s focus on the greatest cause of memory frustration and unpack the anatomy of future forgetting, why it’s vulnerable, and how to use the If-Then Technique to more effectively keep our promises.
How To Write Satire: A Practical Guide To Being Funny
Satire is never just a joke; it’s a thought-provoking challenge to the status quo, making it a skill worth learning. Whether your goal is to be more engaging, invoke change, or both, let’s unpack how to write something sharp and funny about the world.
Why You Keep Forgetting (and How To Fix It)
Our memories are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in any meaningful general sense. Instead, they are specifically fallible. They fail in particular ways, under particular conditions, for particular reasons. And these reasons are largely diagnosable.
The Art of Magnetic Conversation: Build Up, Not Out
Learning to bring a conversation to life turned out to be simpler than I expected, and the insight came from an unlikely place: improv.
Specifically, from realising I’d been misreading its foundational principle, ‘Yes and…’. Once I corrected my understanding, I started noticing it everywhere, especially in the people I find the most magnetic to talk to.
The Comforts of Muscle Memory and The Man Who Came Back For His Son
Your past effort is never wasted. Even after injury, illness, or years of neglect, your body and brain retain far more of what you built than feels possible and, when you return, you recover it far faster than the first time you built it. So let’s get into the consoling truth and change how you approach your next comeback.
The Actor’s Memory Trick: The First-letter Technique
Actors don’t memorise lines through repetition, they make lines memorable by understanding the intention and meaning behind the words. That’s the engine behind their incredible feats of memory.
Escaping Your Phone’s Gravity: Part 2
A few of my friends saw my new habit and followed suit, so I thought you’d also enjoy my trick for being less of a doomscrolling phone-zombie.
The trick is well-known: turn your phone screen black and white. But how I do it is different.
The Oldest Memory Trick: Acronyms and Acrostics
Acronyms and acrostics are the oldest memory tricks in the book for creating and recalling long lists of information. While they are powerful, creating them is tedious; with the AI workflow I teach, you’ll be able to take advantage of their power without the tedium, and create enduring mnemonics that make new lists of information unforgettable.
Vegan, But Bacon: How To ‘Cheat’ Your Way Forward
50% is better than 0, especially when 100% isn’t possible. Embracing this attitude is one of the most useful tricks for “cheating” your way towards your goals, building new habits, and ditching old ones.
Closing Loops, Re-energising Your Life
With no other obvious culprit, we blame our exhaustion on our modestly packed schedule. Yet, when we check our maths, the numbers don’t quite add up. There’s another factor at play. We have too many open loops.
The unanswered message.
The unfolded clothes.
The unframed art.
The unwanted, still‑uncancelled toothbrush subscription.
This family of unfinished business beeps away in the background, like a ceiling full of smoke alarms with low batteries. Every loop demands a slice of attention, a sliver of guilt, and carries a haunting worry that we’re falling behind.
Capacity, Not Character: Rethinking ‘Domestic Failure’
There’s a mean story many of us carry around: if you can’t keep up with the dishes, the laundry, the bathroom, there is something wrong with you. Not with what you’ve been through. With you.
Of course, that’s not true. You’re suffering because you’re moralising your domestic chores. You believe that your self‑worth is tied to the crumbs on the kitchen counter. You believe that whether you are good or bad, a success or a failure, is informed by your performance at completing your chores.
The Energy/Money Matrix: A Better Way to Manage Your Life
Most advice about productivity quietly assumes you have plenty of energy and not enough time. It shouts ‘swim harder’ when you’ve already swallowed half the pool and is blind to the exhaustion you feel after years of standing up only to get knocked down again.
In this state, the issue is not that you’ve mismanaged your time, but that your nervous system is fried and your capacity has been hacked to a stump.
A common misstep during these tough times is to use the classic Important/Urgent prioritisation matrix.
Temptation Bundling: Beating procrastination at its own game
Is there a way to get through the more miserable tasks on my to-do list?
Self-control Is Overrated and How To Play The Long Game
The importance of using self-control to reign in our impulses is often overstated. Pop psychology has spread this myth by misinterpreting The Marshmallow Test. We’ll debunk The Marshmallow Test by using new research to show how impulse control is relatively unimportant when predicting positive educational outcomes after socioeconomic factors are taken into account.
Untucking Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
How can I stop procrastinating before bed? It’s turning me into a zombie during the day, but breaking the habit is hard.
4:6 Breathing for Focus and Calm
The quality of our feelings affects the quality of our thinking. How we feel, however, based on an increasing wealth of clinical studies, is a skill. We can, far more than we might expect, direct our mood to overcome challenges like procrastination, anxiety, short attention spans and a lack of motivation.
A Strategic Way to Make Sense of New Topics
When problem-solving, how do I make sense of new topics efficiently?
Understand What You’re Reading Faster
When reading heavy academic texts at university, I find myself getting lost trying to follow the author’s argument. Any tips on how to be found?
Breadth and Depth: A Practical Workflow for Efficient Note-taking (Pt 5)
When reading, I move as slow as a snail. I’m paranoid that I’ll miss something important, so I take a lot of (often unnecessary) notes. Do you have a way I can be more efficient?
Evening Pages: Procrastinate Less and Sleep More
Whenever I try to sleep, my mind decides to start solving problems and listing all the things I have to do tomorrow. When I wake up, all that energy is gone and I struggle to get started. Any advice?
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📮Jamie's Journal
Written for kind, curious, and ambitious readers who believe there's a better way than the default. We just need to find it.
Every other Sunday, receive one unguarded true story and one practical tool, habit, or reframe for better ways to think, feel, and live fully.
No noise, just a little hindsight to guide your foresight.