The New Crop: Issue #89
how our brain remembers things (and what that means for leaders) + "is punctuality selfish?"
What’s in this issue:
💭 Thought: How our brain remembers things (and what that means for leaders)
📚 Read: Is Punctuality Selfish?
😆 Today’s Laugh
💭 Today’s Thought
Today’s thought is an interesting tidbit about how our brains encode, or store, information so we can remember it later and how this natural process is relevant for leaders.
The way that we encode and store information affects later retrieval.
If we make an effort to encode the same information through a number of different channels, we increase our chances of remembering it later.
For example, if we need to remember a person’s name, we can see it written down (visual).
If we see it and then repeat it (visual and acoustic), we have a better chance of remembering it.
If we see it, repeat it (visual and acoustic) and then find out what the name means or where it comes from (semantic), we significantly increase the likelihood of remembering the name.
- Dr. Helena Boschi, Why We Do What We Do
Lessons for leaders:
Saying something once usually isn’t enough for someone to remember it. When there’s an important message you want your team to deeply understand and reference later, ask yourself: how many different ways and formats can I find to share this message?
Context matters. When you share the “why” behind a decision or direction, you’re actually helping others to more easily retrieve information in the future. When someone asks for more context, be grateful for the opportunity to help them learn and remember. 🙏 🧠
📚 Today’s Read
The precious resource of time is not being wasted — it’s being humanely reallocated on the fly. If that means someone turns up late to an appointment, it is perhaps not them being selfish, my dear, irate northerner. It’s you, for dogmatically insisting that the time theoretically ascribed to your name last week is exclusively and immutably yours.
Life happens. And the way life is allowed to happen here in Southern Europe, and in other cultures around the globe that share a similar social philosophy, is far healthier for all of us in the long run, I now believe.
- Matthew Clapham
As someone who has historically been a stickler for punctuality, Matthew’s article is a great reminder for me that my perspective on time isn’t the only or the right perspective.
See you in two weeks!
xo,
Anne