Writer at Silicon Canals

Mal James

Writer

Mal James is a writer at Silicon Canals covering psychology, productivity, and the patterns that determine whether ambitious work compounds or burns out. His coverage draws from a teaching background, broad reading across behavioural science and business, and a working interest in what separates short-term effort from durable performance. He writes primarily for the Mind pillar with cross-coverage on the people inside the technology economy.

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Mind

I asked ChatGPT why reaching every goal still leaves me flat. The answer wasn’t the one I was expecting.

I typed it out plainly: "Based on everything you know about me, why does reaching my goals still leave me feeling flat?

Jun 21, 2026

As AI eats into paid creative work, people are taking up the same skills — drawing, writing, crafts — on their own time, for no money, just to feel human

I'm not a psychologist, an economist, or a labor researcher.

Jun 20, 2026

Mind

Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.””

Somewhere on campaign, probably in a tent on the Danube frontier, Marcus Aurelius wrote a note to himself about wanting to be elsewhere.

Jun 20, 2026

Mind

5 concepts that completely changed how I think about focus and productivity

I had a morning recently that, on paper, should have been a good one.

Jun 20, 2026

Mind

We treat the eight-hour day as an acceptable day’s work, but many celebrated figures did their best thinking in just four or five hours a day — and that deliberate rest may have been key

Sit down to do real work, the kind that asks something of your brain, and notice how long you can actually hold it.

Jun 20, 2026

Mind

After combing nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 workers, researchers found that the strongest force behind motivation and creativity wasn’t the lever managers reach for — pay or praise — but something quieter: progress on work that mattered

Ask most managers what makes for a good day at work and you'll probably get a predictable list.

Jun 20, 2026

Mind

Juggling several tasks at once feels efficient, but researchers have found that each switch quietly costs time and accuracy — via hidden mental stages of shifting goals and reloading rules that compound

Here's how many of my mornings go.

Jun 19, 2026

Mind

Thought of the day from author Booker T. Washington: “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”

For a long stretch of my life, I measured myself by the rung — what title sat next to my name, and how that lined up against the people I started out with.

Jun 19, 2026

Mind

By July 2025, ChatGPT had reached roughly 10% of the world’s adults and 700 million weekly users sending about 18 billion messages a week — but the bigger shift was that most of it wasn’t work, with non-work use rising past 70%

Here is the number that stopped me.

Jun 19, 2026

I let Chat GPT plan my workdays down to the minute for a week — the shock wasn’t my output, it was realizing how much of my old schedule had been performance

By eleven fifteen on the second day, the morning's writing was done.

Jun 19, 2026

Mind

There’s a particular exhaustion reserved for people who poured their entire twenties into a life they were sure they wanted, only to hit their thirties and discover they’d been chasing someone else’s vision and mistaking it for drive

I left a finance job in Ireland in my early twenties.

Jun 18, 2026

The art of staying human in an AI age

The cursor blinks. The research is open in nine tabs, the coffee has gone lukewarm, and I have read enough to write a competent summary of the thing.

Jun 18, 2026