Two Minds Blog

  The increase in telework since 2020 has led to a corresponding increase in so-called " bossware ," the type of software that tracks employees' behavior. Some of this just reflects a tendency to micromanage, like the exhortation "cameras on, people!" during a Zoom meeting (were they really paying any more attention when you met with them in person?). Some new products introduced in the last 5 years treat knowledge workers like assembly-line workers, rating their "productivity" in terms of mouse clicks and documents opened. Again, this doesn't seem like it will actually increase work completion -- Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen's book Out of Office  argues that it instead probably just increases "performative work" or "LARPing your job" [LARP = "live action role-playing," for my less-geeky friends and colleagues out there]. It also feels pretty intrusive to people who are used to managing their own schedul

High intensity exercise training (HIIT) is increasingly supported by research as a way to improve physical functioning in older adults. In an ongoing study , my colleagues and I are looking at HIIT as a way to prevent age-related declines in health among people with HIV, who are at greater risk for chronic diseases and disabilities than their age-matched peers. Nursing PhD student Harriet Fridah Adhiambo led a qualitative study to better understand our study participants' experiences with exercise, with results that support key propositions of Two Minds Theory. You can read her full paper here . Harriet asked participants several questions: Their current reasons for exercising, their previous experiences with exercise, barriers that they experienced when trying to exercise, and what they saw as the benefits of exercise. Two Minds Theory suggests that people's experiences can be meaningfully differentiated on the basis of temporal immediacy , the extent to which something is d