Hey there,
I recently came across a study where researchers found out that increased air pollutants and CO2 in workplaces hampered worker productivity.
Poor indoor air quality hampered people's cognitive function and thus, resulted in a dip in overall productivity.
I've experienced this first-hand.
Whenever I work in my apartment with poor fresh air circulation and little natural light, I feel clumsy.
It didn't matter if it was early in the morning or late in the evening.
Fresh air circulation seemed essential to feel energised while working.
So:
If you're in a similar spot, here's what you can do to make things better:
Also:
I found it incredibly helpful to go out to the balcony and take a few deep breaths of cool fresh air during my break time.
When you're working in a locked up office space with no proper air circulation, the air becomes stale and impairs your decision-making skills.
Make sure you carve out time to go out and take a breath of fresh air during your day.
You'll have a more productive workday.
Before we move on, here's an announcement:
I'll not be sending this newsletter next Friday as I'll be away to attend the Indian festival of Durga Puja & Navaratri. 🪔
The next issue of this newsletter will come out on 22nd October 2021. 🥂
Now, grab a coffee, sit tight, and enjoy this week's issue:
Book to Read
Range
Deliberate practice, putting 10,000 hours into a specific field can make you an expert in that field. But, to be better equipped at handling the ever-changing world around us, it's fruitful to be like a swiss army knife. Expand the range of your abilities.
View it on Goodreads
•••
Apps & Services
Lens Distortions is a fantastic photo editing app that lets you add cinematic effects like lens flare, particles, smoke, and more with a couple of taps. You can stack layer upon layer of effects to create the look you want. I loved their exporting feature,
where apart from exporting high-quality photos, the app let me export a before-after movie for my photo. This is perfect for sharing your photos and before-after steps on Instagram. Lens Distortions is available for Android and iOS and is free for limited editing.
Commotion lets you create beautiful embeddable forms that use one of your selected Notion databases as the storage. Connecting your Notion workspace with Commotion is super-easy, and you can generate a form based on your Notion table in minutes. The form
fields are set according to your Notion table column types automatically. Commotion is free to start with, but for features like file upload and custom branding, you need to pay $10/month.
Koi Watch is a web app that lets you create a virtual room for watching YouTube or
other online videos in sync with your friends. This is quite similar to what Apple launched as part of SharePlay. But, you don't need an Apple device for this app. Videos start, pause, and skip across devices seamlessly, and the app is straightforward to
use. Koi Watch is free to use for up to 5 rooms and a
$9.99 one-time purchase for unlimited rooms.
Email Routing is an upcoming service by Cloudflare where you can set up email forwarding on your custom domain. For example, you can create individual email addresses on your domain name and have each address forward emails to a specific email address.
Or, you can set up a catch-all email address and have everything forwarded to your primary email address. This service gets rid of the need to juggle multiple inboxes for different email addresses. Email Routing is in beta, and you can
signup for early access here.
Taking the Shortcut
Insert a curled apostrophe mark (’) anywhere on macOS.
•••
Interesting Reads
I've been talking about Apple's new Focus feature in this newsletter for quite some time now. And now, I've written a comprehensive blog post documenting my experience with this fantastic feature. Read this post to learn how I'm using Focus every day
on iOS 15 to reduce digital distractions and get uninterrupted time for my work and recreation.
Success or the general idea of winning doesn't have to be tied to a specific event like winning a medal or acing a test. Those are short-lived wins, and the winning rush usually crashes in a day or two. What lasts is focusing on small wins every day and
finding happiness in the journey of your goals rather than the finishing line. This article explains this idea with examples from life in sports, including the Olympics.
Overcommitting is a common problem in our lives. We often say yes to everything coming our way. This can be because we don't want to look bad, or we have a general FOMO. And, if you've already committed to something, it seems like a wrong move to uncommit.
However, doing something poorly because you're stretched thin is worse than not doing the activity at all. This article will help you uncommit excess commitments and reduce overwhelm in your life.
News has become a shallow source of temporal information that might not even matter to you. And yet, we spend so much time reading and following news like it's essential. Here's the thing: you don't have to follow the news. Major
news usually makes its way to you anyhow. You can instead use that time to read something meaningful, like a good article or a book.
Grant Sabatier, a
FIRE expert, lists down 50 of his learnings
about money over the years that can shift the way you think and handle money in your life. These one-liner learnings are big on impact. Here's an example: "
Money is a tradeoff. You need to choose what you’re willing to trade it for."
Thread
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