For years, I was obsessed with getting to Inbox Zero on my email (meaning that I had dealt with every email in my inbox, leaving it completely empty), so much so that I would often spend four to six hours engaging with email in a single day.

I got incredibly fast and efficient at dealing with email, but email became my entire job. I needed more people on my team. I corrected that problem, and sometime in the fall of 2018 I let go of email as a measure of my productivity.

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Explaining is not teaching, but it’s usually a tool that teachers rely on anyway. It comes in handy in some situations, like giving multi-step directions.

But what do you do when you can’t explain something because you don’t speak the same language? It’s one thing to tell a group of kids what’s expected of them in an obstacle course, but what about a mouse?

In that case, you rely on shaping. Essentially, you reward any steps in the direction (sometimes literally) of what you want the training subject to do, even if they bear little resemblance to the desired behavior.

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The art that people have made in quarantine is incredible.

Musicians are collaborating on complex multi-track recordings from afar — and sharing impromptu live concerts from their living rooms.

People are drawing and painting like crazy, setting up elaborate obstacle courses for their pets, and dancing up a storm.

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When working with a group of inexperienced singers, I use a favorite trick to instantly elicit a rich, powerful tone, no matter how weak and lackluster their voices sounded before.

It’s simple: I ask them all to try to sing as ugly as possible.

With that, the ensemble is transformed. Freed from the constraint of trying to sound pretty, every singer drops their inhibitions and actually sings. The result is immediately, undeniably superior to what they were doing before.

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When you’re writing an essay, you have to organize your thoughts, create an outline, and incorporate your research, while crafting sentences and paragraphs — and these skills depend on solid handwriting or typing skills, confident spelling and punctuation, and strong mental stamina.

This is a lot to manage. So whenever possible, we want to isolate skills. To do this, we use Tiny Tasks. We want to tell the student exactly what’s expected, ask them to carry out the task, and praise them for a job well done. Then we do the next thing, and offer praise. 

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