Being very productive is usually confused with being very busy, but the evidence…
The hardest workers often produce less per hour than those who stop earlier, suggesting that the modern cult of busyness has it backwards.
Work & Money
Work, careers, companies and money: how organisations, incentives and markets shape the way people work, earn and decide.
134 articles · Work & Money
A 2020 study of Hungarian retirees found that people who chose to retire stayed…
The difference between choosing to leave work and being forced out shapes happiness for years, a chasm that neither time nor circumstance can bridge.
Retirement doesn’t always feel like freedom
The bank account is finally healthy and something still feels wrong. Why the first year of retirement is often the hardest, and what psychologists say the emotional plan should have included from the start.
Nedra Glover Tawwab’s book on personal boundaries spent four weeks on the New York…
When burnout became a bestseller, the architects of the diagnosis were still trying to convince us the problem wasn't personal willpower—it was broken systems.
The people who make retirement look easy aren’t the ones with the biggest savings…
The happiest retirees don't retire from work—they retire to something, having already rebuilt their sense of purpose, community, and daily structure elsewhere.
People who become intensely private about money in old age aren’t being secretive…
A lifetime of watching inheritance conversations destroy relationships teaches a hard lesson about what numbers should stay hidden.
Researchers studying what people miss most after retiring have found that it is…
The unexpected grief of retirement isn't losing a paycheck—it's losing the moment someone notices you're no longer there.
People who take the long way home even when they’re tired may not be wasting time…
For many working adults, the drive home has quietly become the last unstructured space in the day — the one stretch where no role is being performed and no one is waiting for an answer. Psychology suggests that detour isn't wasted time at all.
Why retirement can make silence and lost identity arrive together for some men
When work disappears, so does the language men used to describe themselves—and finding new words proves surprisingly difficult.
Nobody talks about why some of the most competent people at work are also the most…
The weekend exhaustion of highly competent people is rarely about overwork. It is about a nervous system trained to feel normal only when something is being asked of it — and the quiet strangeness of environments that ask nothing back.
Sara Blakely spent seven years selling fax machines door-to-door for an…
Sara Blakely built a billion-dollar company on $5,000 of her own money and never took a cent from outside investors.
In 2023, two researchers whose earlier work had reached opposite conclusions about…
For a few years I carried a tidy little fact around.