Dan Ariely:
The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People/a>:
Procrastination....
The planning fallacy... our tendency to vastly underestimate the amount of time we’ll require to complete a task...
Texting while driving... in my class of 200 Master’s students, 197 admitted not only to doing this regularly, but also to having made driving mistakes while doing so. Also, one of the three abstainers in the class was physically blind, so we should not really count him as a saint, and who knows maybe the other two were liars.... The basic issue has to do with succumbing to short-term desires and foregoing long-term benefits...
Checking email too much.... Checking email is addictive in the same way gambling is... we distract ourselves from work by constantly checking and checking and waiting to hit the email jackpot...
Relativity in salary. The fatter a sea lion is, the more sea lionesses he has in his harem. He doesn’t need to be immense, just slightly bigger than the others.... The first sad thing about our desire to compare is that our happiness depends less on us, and more on the people around us...
Overoptimism. Everyone, except for the very depressed, overestimates their chances when it comes to good things.... [O]veroptimism... helps us take risks.... Ironically overoptimism often tends to work out well for society (new restaurants, cures for disease) while endangering the individuals who take them (financial ruin, stress-induced insanity).
