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Procrastination Revisited: The Effect of ADHD
When I started this blog a few years ago, one of my most popular posts was about procrastination. In that post, I argued that I procrastinate to deal with the anxiety that accompanies decision making. (You can read the original post here.) What I didn’t know, though, was that I had ADHD. Everything I wrote in that post is still true. Increasingly difficult tasks still cause me increasingly high levels of anxiety. I still find it best to start with an easy task involving little to no decision making. That helps me get the ball rolling. But, now I know that there’s more to the procrastination story for me. During…
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Information Sources: Deciding What’s Trustworthy
For my first post since the blog re-launch, I want to discuss something that’s becoming increasingly more important: evaluating your information sources. The internet is a great thing. We all have so much information available to us. And now, with smart phones, that information is literally available in the palms of our hands. How long does it take to hard boil an egg? A quick Google search will tell you the answer. But, how do you know whether the answer is correct? In this day and age, finding trustworthy information sources on the internet is actually more complicated than it seems. For better or for worse, social media has given…
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The Fundamental Attribution Error: It’s All How You Look At It
Today I want to talk about a nifty concept called the Fundamental Attribution Error. This concept helps explain why we view the causes of certain situations differently, depending on whether the situation is happening to ourselves or to someone else. Before I dive into the nitty gritty of explaining the Fundamental Attribution Error, though, I’d like to tell two short stories. Situation 1 Not too long ago, as I was heading to work, I was sitting at a stop sign and waiting to turn out of my neighborhood onto the main road. It was a dreary day in the Chicago metro area—gray skies, a misty drizzle, and very foggy. Car…