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The best (and worst) times to do things at work
The Washington Post: Plenty of well-worn time-management advice tells us how we should plan our day. Do the most important thing first. Never check email in the morning. Make a to-do list the night before. Don’t schedule meetings right after lunch when everyone will be half-asleep. But what if we organized tasks by when research shows it’s actually most optimal to get them done? That’s a question we started asking at On Leadership after coming across a recent study that shows the ideal time of day to make moral or ethical decisions is in the morning. And so, we pored over additional research (some academic, some perhaps less so) on tasks and timing.
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When to Make the First Move
When Michael Jordan’s agent set out to negotiate a new contract with the Chicago Bulls for his client back in the mid 90s, he anticipated that the team’s managing partner would lowball the salary offer. So the agent opted to move first and requested an ambitious $52 million per year for Jordan. After a series of back and forth talks, the parties settled for an annual paycheck just above $30 million. By making the first offer — and doing so aggressively, at that — Jordan’s agent landed his client the single highest annual salary in the history of the National Basketball Association.
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Here’s One More Reason To Play Video Games: Beating Dyslexia
NPR: Most parents prefer that their children pick up a book rather than a game controller. But for kids with dyslexia, action video games may be just what the doctor ordered. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities, affecting an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the world's population. Many approaches to help struggling readers focus on words and phonetics, but researchers at Oxford University say dyslexia is more of an attention issue. So programs should emphasize training the brain's attention system, they say, something that video games do.
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Loneliness twice as unhealthy as obesity for older people, study finds
The Guardian: Loneliness can be twice as unhealthy as obesity, according to researchers who found that feelings of isolation can have a devastating impact on older people. The scientists tracked more than 2,000 people aged 50 and over and found that the loneliest were nearly twice as likely to die during the six-year study than the least lonely. Compared with the average person in the study, those who reported being lonely had a 14% greater risk of dying. The figure means that loneliness has around twice the impact on an early death as obesity. Poverty increased the risk of an early death by 19%.
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Teens feeling stressed, and many not managing it well
USA Today: Teens across the USA are feeling high levels of stress that they say negatively affect every aspect of their lives, a new national survey suggests. More than a quarter (27%) say they experience "extreme stress" during the school year, vs. 13% in the summer. And 34% expect stress to increase in the coming year. ... In addition, a study about depression published in 2012 in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, found that rates of suicide attempts were significantly higher in adolescents ages 13-17 than in emerging adults (ages 18-23) or adults (24-30).
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Do you play as Voldemort or Superman? Study shows virtual roleplay affects behaviour
The Independent: The alter-egos that players adopt in online games can affect how individuals act in real life, according to new research published in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science. "Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers," says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois. According Yoon and his co-author Patrick Vargas, virtual environments provide them with “a vehicle for observation, imitation, and modelling” as well as offering individuals the chance to act and feel in a way they cannot in real life.
