Something happens the moment someone shares their screen to walk through a presentation. Their face disappears. The other participants turn into an audience. The content plays out in a straight line instead of being worked through together. From that point on the meeting is over as a conversation. What is left is a recording with witnesses. Reading and interacting are two different activities, and…
When you see a text a second or third time you recognise it, and that feeling of recognition is easily mistaken for actual understanding. This is the fluency illusion : the ease of processing something gets read as a measure of how well you know it. Rereading and highlighting raise how easy something feels right now ( retrieval strength ), but they barely build the deeper storage that remains once…
You’re on holiday and something breaks at work. You drive back, you fix it, everyone applauds. And you feel it too: you were needed, and it worked. That applause is where it goes wrong. Praise is a signal: it tells the whole organisation what actually gets rewarded. You learn that you’re the one who always shows up. Your team learns that the call is yours, not theirs. Your own boss…
Does your AI work for you or is it the other way around? Whenever you’re pasting the output the AI gives you into another application, you’re just acting as a meat proxy (the next Times Word of the Year?). By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior…
Your body has a natural chronotype: a morning type, an evening type, or something in between, driven by the circadian rhythms of cortisol and testosterone. It determines when in the day you perform best, physically and mentally, and the gap between a clear morning type and a clear evening type runs up to eight hours. Evening types reach their aerobic peak around 20:00, roughly eleven hours after…
AI is a Swiss Army knife. It does everything and excels at nothing. That’s exactly why it wins. The best tool is not the sharpest one, it’s the one already in your pocket.
Finished reading: Offerdjuret by Henrik Fexeus 📚 First non-fiction book in a long time. I enjoyed the experience, even though the book is medium level.
The ever-thoughtful @HG21C gives us the dictionary: Beware the words and phrases that try to disguise the non-effectiveness of an individual or team. For example, they use ‘urgent’ but you know ‘they forgot to anticipate this’ Nicholas Bate https://huntergatherer21c.com/2026/07/01/the-weasel-words-of-modern.html
Sometimes I wonder how I got things done before AI…
Finished reading: The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown 📚
📸 Cala Santes Creus The perfect spot to disconnect…
You finish the day with thirty things still on your list. You ask your AI assistant to prepare a summary of the week’s meetings to send to the team. You give it five minutes, trust the output, and hit send. The next day, three replies. None positive. What went wrong? Not the AI. The AI did exactly what you asked. The problem is what you asked, how you asked it, and what you expected without…
Miss the days when we all watched the same episode and talked about it the next day. Now everyone’s at a different point in the season. That shared TV excitement is getting harder to find.
Living in Catalonia as a Dutchman means I navigate four languages daily: Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, and English. When it comes to my devices, though, I have a clear preference: Dutch. That’s the language in which I think most deeply, and I want my interface in my native tongue. That preference ran into a wall when we installed a HomePod. Since Siri doesn’t support Catalan, my wife and I…
Currently reading: I’ve Got Time by Paul Loomans 📚
Currently reading: The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown 📚
Finished reading: El infinito en un junco by Irene Vallejo 📚 A fascinating trip through the history of books.
Nicholas explains the master list: How do you use it? Capture everything on it at any time, day or night. Work or play. For that reason, I prefer a paper notebook. It can be on my desk, in a vacation roller bag in a gym back-pack. It does not need electricity; it does not need wi-fi; it can’t ‘go down’. Towards the end of the day, scan it and break down sizeable items into smaller ones so that…
Niklas Luhmann, the prolific sociologist behind the Zettelkasten method, often described his note-taking practice as having a conversation with his system. He would write a note, and the system would “respond” by surfacing related ideas, unexpected connections, unexpected tensions. It was a metaphor. A beautiful one, but still a metaphor. But what if it didn’t have to be? At the…
Nicholas Bate (@HG21C) on Eufriction: Don’t aim to remove all friction from your day. Remove unhelpful friction such as bureaucracy, ineffective tools, and unclear messages. Keep the friction that brings value such as pausing before you send or the effort that leads to quality and better thinking. Nicholas Bate https://huntergatherer21c.com/ Working slower promotes deeper thinking processes and…
🛫EIN – BCN 🛬 I’ve had a blast at the PKM Summit ! Still wrapping my head around everything I saw and heard.
🛫BCN – AMS 🛬 Ready for the PKM Summit !
Two of my productivity tips made it into the March issue of Forbes España: on beating procrastination and taming your inbox.
So true: if you need an alarm to wake up, you are sleep deprived. Nicholas Bate https://huntergatherer21c.com/2026/03/11/sleep-what-is-the-cheapest.html (This is a note to myself)
Multitasking is a common phenomenon in our modern society, but research shows that we are much worse at it than we think. The problem lies not only in the fact that we struggle to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, but especially in our inaccurate assessment of our own capabilities. Studies show that people who frequently multitask wrongly believe they are doing so effectively. They…