The right font choice along with the absence of sidebars and popups makes everything feel easier and better to read.

Websites like Medium, Signal vs. Noise, and Zen Habits are like yoga studios for content. Their presentation of content puts me at peace while reading, allowing me to fully focus on the stories without distraction.

Just look at the difference between Medium and Cracked:

Exhibit A) Medium.com

Exhibit B) Cracked.com

When you compare the two, it’s obvious which one makes you feel like crud.

The Cracked layout is painful to look at. Your eyes squint and dart, constantly second-guessing what you’re reading now with what you should be reading next.

After experimenting with how we display content on the ooomf blog, I discovered there’s an element of science behind why we feel this way toward certain typefaces and layouts.

How we read

When we read, our eyes follow a natural pattern called a Scan Path.

We break sentences up into scans (saccades) and pauses (fixations). Here’s the Scan Path for a typical reader:

Your eyes typically move across a page for between 7-9 letters before needing to pause to process what you’re reading. As you scan a sentence, no useful visual processing is happening in your brain. Visual processing is completely dependent upon the information taken in when you pause.

So why does this matter? Understanding the way we read is important for designing how words look because you can directly impact someone’s connection to your writing with the right font and layout.

Why the right font layout makes you feel good

When I set out to write this post, I wasn’t sure I’d find scientific backing for why we feel a certain way toward certain fonts.

I thought choosing font was mostly art, with a sprinkle of science.

That was until I came across a study by psychologist Kevin Larson. Larson has spent his career researching typefaces and recently conducted a landmark study at MIT about how font and layout affect our emotions.

In the study, 20 volunteers- half men and half women- were separated into two groups. Each group was shown a separate version of The New Yorker- one where the image placement, font, and layout were designed well and one where the layout was designed poorly:

The researchers found that readers felt bad while reading the poorly designed layout. Sometimes, this feeling would be expressed physically with a frown.

The corrugator supercilii facial muscles that help produce a frown have been linked to the amygdala, an area of your brain responsible for emotion.

Meanwhile, the participants who read content from the good reading layout, felt like it took less time to read and felt better.

People exposed to the well-designed layout were found to have higher cognitive focus, more efficient mental processes, and a stronger sense of clarity.

The researchers concluded that well-designed reading environments don’t necessarily help you understand what you’re reading better, but they do make you feel good, causing you to feel inspired and more likely to take action.

Culture impacts your preference for fonts

One explanation for why some fonts make you feel a certain way is because of deep links in culture.

For instance, Courier fonts were designed to resemble old memos written on type writers:

Many people relate Helvetica with the US Government because it’s used in tax forms.

These associations are difficult to remove and should be considered when deciding on a font choice. Here’s how Bank of America’s website would look with the Impact font associated with News headlines:

Original Bank of America website:

Bank of America website with Impact font (associated with newspaper headlines):

When the fonts are changed to Impact, Bank of America doesn’t exactly seem trustworthy.

Because fonts are designed by humans, there is usually some meaning attached to them. You don’t want to choose a font that is easily associated with something in our culture that’s markedly different than the vibe you’re trying to give off.

How to design better content

The quality of your content is the most important thing but how you present that content by choosing the right font and layout still has its place.

As French poet Paul Claudel put it, ‘The secret of type is that it speaks.’

So how can you design your words to help elicit positive feelings in people? Here’s a few techniques from typography experts that you might find useful:

1. Choose an anchor font
Type designer Jessica Hische recommends first selecting a typeface for the content that is most prevalent in your project (most likely your body copy).

This will be the typeface that you base your other font decisions on like headlines and subheads.

There’s four main categories of fonts to choose from:

Serif Fonts – Letters with short lines coming off the edges. Viewed as more formal and traditional. Best suited for print.

Sans-serif Fonts – Letters without serifs. Viewed as informal and playful. Best suited for digital.

Script Fonts – Resembles handwriting and often used in formal invitations. Not ideal for body copy.

Decorative Fonts – Informal fonts viewed as original. Best suited for headlines but not body copy.

For reading on the web, it’s best to stay away from script or decorative typefaces. Most Script and Decorative fonts have low legibility which slows down your reading because you are busy trying to figure out what letters are.

You don’t want your readers asking, “was that an ‘a’ or an ‘e’” every word.

If you’re scrunching your eyes trying to figure out a word that’s a signal that your brain is dedicating unnecessary energy to identifying words.

Decorative typefaces should be used for content that is meant to be seen at a glance, like in a logo, rather than read as multiple paragraphs in body text.

When choosing a font for body text, it’s usually best to stick with a Serif font or Sans-serif font.

Some typography experts recommend sans-serif fonts for reading online because the quality of screen resolutions is less than in print. But, as screen resolutions dramatically improve, Serif fonts are becoming easier to read on the web. Content-heavy websites like Medium use a Serif font (probably to give off the vibe of a print editorial).

The most important thing with choosing a font is to make sure the letters are easily decipherable from one another so your readers don’t have to spend precious mental energy identifying letters.

There’s a trick that Hische uses to make sure your font choice is a good one. She recommends that you make your fonts pass the Il1 test:

2. Pick a font size bigger than 12pt
In 1929, a study was conducted called the “Hygiene of reading.” One thing researchers were trying to determine was which font size would be best for reading. The study looked at 6pt, 8pt, 10pt, 12pt, and 14pt type sizes.

The researchers concluded that a font size of 10pt font is the most efficient for reading but a lot has changed in how we consume content today compared to the 1920s.

However, as more reading shifts to digital and screen resolutions improve, the way we read content is changing. Many designers mention that 16pt font is the new 12pt font. A recent study has also shown that larger font sizes can elicit a stronger emotional connection.

Medium has one of my favorite reading environments online and they use a 22pt font size. Several of my other favorite websites have adopted a font size over 20pt for their content:

Medium – 22pt
37Signals: Signal vs. Noise – 22pt
Zen Habits – 21pt

While having a huge font over 30pt most likely wouldn’t make sense, many blogs have font in the 10pt-12pt range. Try increasing your font size. If you’re using 12pt font, try increasing to 16pt font. If you’re using 18pt font increase to 22pt.

You can feel the difference.

3. Watch your line length
The line length is how far your sentences stretch across the page. The ideal line length should be between about 50-75 characters.

Here’s an example of the longest line length from Zen Habits. It’s 78 characters, about 6.5 inches:

This line length has been shown to be most effective in helping readers move through their Scan Path.

If the line length is too short, your reader’s rhythm will break because their eyes must travel back to the left of the page too often.

A line length that is too long makes it hard to find where lines of text start and end. It can make it difficult for your reader to get to the next line without accidentally jumping to the wrong place.

Research shows that your subconscious mind gets a boost of energy when jumping to a new line (as long as it doesn’t happen too often) but this energy dwindles as you read over the duration of the line.

Here’s the line lengths from the sites mentioned above:

Medium – 75 characters
37Signals: Signal vs. Noise – 76 characters
Zen Habits – 78 characters

4. Mind your spacing
Adequate spacing between letters is important for your readers to be able to move through sentences fluidly. The tighter your letters are together, the harder it is for people to identify the shapes that make up different letterforms.

Take a look at another example from Jessica Hische of the readability of Helvetica versus Avenir. Hische recommends Avenir because of its more open spacing:

Proper spacing makes your readers feel good. Here’s 5 recommended font combinations from Google Web Fonts that have good spacing for reading long blocks of content.

I decided to put these tips into practice with our ooomf email newsletter campaign. Here’s a comparison between our original campaign and our new design:

By changing the font and increasing its size, our email content felt much better.

Packaging content the right way is important and knowing why we feel the way we do about the look of content will hopefully help next time you design content for a project. As Aarron Walter, author of Designing for Emotion, writes,

“People will forgive shortcomings, follow your lead, and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion.”

It’s important to remember that while there is a science connected to how your words are designed, no amount of good design can save bad content.

Write well first. Design well second.

The benefit of properly setting up a project is that the resulting product is often much better because the expectations of both client and maker are established clearly and early on, before any work is done.

Typically, a text document often called a Project Proposal (or Project Brief) is one of the core pieces of a successful project and having one from the start is probably the single-most important thing you can do to ensure your project runs smoothly.

It might take you a couple meetings or phone calls to get your Project Proposal right with the professional developer or designer you want to work with, but it will most likely save you time and money.

Why projects go wrong
There are typically two main reasons why projects go wrong:
1. The wrong person was hired for the job
2. The communication of expectations was never talked about before the work was started

We’re going to breakdown exactly what we’ve done in the past from when we were independent web professionals and from our time working with independent developers and designers at ooomf to help make your next project run like a dream.

Hire the right person
It can be very challenging to judge quality work of a developer, designer, or any profession for that matter when you don’t have a lot of experience in that field.

When we need to hire an independent professional on a project at ooomf, here’s an outline of our process of how we review a potential candidate:

1. We look for a personal website or past project examples. Because we often are hiring for web & mobile professionals, an online profile with samples of work is a requirement.

2. Have an experienced professional in the field review their work. For example, if we’re looking to work with a frontend web developer, we have our frontend developer review the code of their past project examples. If you don’t know anyone in the field of the professional you’re looking to work with, feel free to shoot me a message at mikael(at)ooomf.com and we’ll see how we can help.

3. Start off with a small piece of the overall project. Once we’ve found the professional we want to work with, we typically start them off with a piece of the overall project that lasts 1 week or 2 weeks to get feel for what it’s like working together.

This short project is paid by the hour and works well for both parties because if for some reason you end up not wanting to work together, you only lose a week or two and a small portion of your budget rather than potentially losing all your funds on one poor hiring decision.

Create the perfect Project Proposal
The right Project Proposal outlines things like work to be done, the budget, payment, and timeline. Most importantly, it makes it clear what the expectations are upfront from the project owner and independent professional.

Here’s an outline of what to include in a Project Proposal:

Project summary
Your project summary should be a short, specific 1-2 sentence summary of your project. For example, if you were going to build a mobile app, your project summary might be “Design and develop an iOS iPhone app”

Project description
Your project description should include:
– A 1-2 sentence pitch about what your app does
– Current project progress (i.e. if you have a prototype built, or any previous work done)
– An idea of how big or small the project is (i.e. how many pages of your website you need designed or developed)

Expected deliverables
Your expected deliverables should be a bullet point list of all the work that you’ll need to get done.

The deliverables are exactly what you want to receive at the end of the project.

For example, if you’re looking to have the homepage of your website designed and developed, your expected deliverable would most likely be an Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator file of the design and the source code.

Timeline
You should discuss the expected timeline for the project with the independent professional you’d like to hire. Coming up with a fair timeline for completed deliverables is a good collaborative process.

It’s important that your project timeline takes into account not just the time to design or develop your project but also time to test the work after it is completed. If this step is missed, it can lead to a ton of headaches, like your website looking like crap on a mobile device. So don’t forget to include this in when estimating your timeline.

Budget
Creating a quality website or mobile app is important for success. Development and design costs have been compared to buying a car, and the costs vary dependent upon how complex of a product you’re looking to have built.

Even apps or websites that seem basic can take 50-100 hours to make from scratch and quality designers/developers typically charge upwards of $60 an hour.

The best way to think about setting a budget for your website and app is to think about your project goal. For example, are you looking to create an app or website that:

– you want to become a full-time business
– doesn’t require day-to-day management
– is just for fun, not for profit

In the end, whether you want to build a full-time business with your project or it’s just something on the side, you have to decide if you want something built right from the start or if you want just something that works. But keep in mind, if you get something built on the cheap, it may be hard to improve on as your product adapts over time.

My opinion is it’s better to have something done right the first time than to have a first version built poorly because it was inexpensive and you have to re-write the code or redesign everything from scratch.

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
– John Wooden

Payment
When handling payment, you can typically choose from one of three options:

1. Pay the full project budget upfront
This puts all the risk on your shoulders and is a less common way to pay, especially for large projects.

2. Pay by milestone
This is more common and can be fair for you and the professional. You define key milestones where payment will occur.

For instance, if your project was designing a mobile app, you could break payment into 3 chunks based on completed tasks:

Payment 1    Design of the app icon
Payment 2    Design of the main screen of the app
Payment 3    Design of all remaining app screens

Each payment should relatively reflect the amount of work done. In the example above, Payment 3 should be more than Payment 2 and Payment 1 because it is requires much more work.

3. Pay upon delivery
The pay upon delivery model puts more risk on the professional and for longer projects can be unfavorable.

We typically go with number 2, the “pay by milestone” option. We think it’s the most fair, and allows for everyone to get a feel for what it’s like working together without too much time or money at stake if something were to go wrong.

Legal
This part of the document can vary quite a bit based on where you’re located or what type of business you are in. The gist of the Legal portion of the Project Proposal is to make it clear how payment will work, what happens if things come up that are outside of the original description of the project or deadlines are missed, and who owns the the work that is created. See the sample project proposal below for more.

Free Sample Project Proposal

The most important thing to remember is to put together your Project Proposal before any work is done and use it as a guide throughout the project.

When you’re planning a project to build a website or mobile app, the best thing you can do to make sure your project goes well is to find the right person for the job and make sure that a clear Project Proposal is laid out on the table before any work is done.

What are your best tips for a successful project? Have you had any experiences working on projects with or without a brief? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this topic in the comments.

Before co-founding ooomf, I had a huge fear of speaking in public. Any time I had to present something in front of more than a handful of people, my stomach would turn to knots and my throat would get so tight I wouldn’t be able to speak.

The reality is, if you’re planning on presenting pretty much anything in your life (which you most likely will), you’ll need to be able to effectively communicate your ideas in front of at least a few people.

To get over my fear of public speaking, I realized a good place to start would be to understand why I was getting stage fright in the first place.

I thought it would be interesting to share with you my research for how I learned to overcome my fear of public speaking in the last year while founding a company.

What is stage fright really

Sometimes, even weeks before a presentation, I would think, ”What happens if people think I suck or someone thinks I don’t know what I’m talking about?”

As humans, we’re hardwired to worry about our reputation above almost all things. There are primitive parts of your brain that control your reaction to threats on your reputation, making these reactions extremely difficult to control.

These reactions to threats are precisely what Charles Darwin tested when he visited a snake exhibit at a zoo in London. Darwin tried to remain perfectly calm while putting his face as close to the glass as possible in front of a puff ader snake that was ready to strike.

However, every time the snake would lunge toward him, he would grimace and jump backward. Darwin wrote his findings in his diary,

My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.

He concluded that his response to fear was an ancient reaction that has not been effected by nuances in modern civilization. This response is know as the “fight or flight” syndrome, a natural process that is designed to protect your body from harm.

What happens in our brain

When you think about negative consequences, a part of your brain, the hypothalamus, activates and triggers the pituitary gland to secrete the hormone ACTH.

This hormone stimulates the Adrenal Glands in your kidneys and results in the release of adrenaline into your blood:

It is at this point in the process when many of us experience the reactions of this process.

Your neck and back muscles contract (forcing your head down and your spine to curve) moving your posture into a slouch. This results in a Low-Power position as your body tries to force itself into the fetal position:

If you try to resist this position by pulling your shoulders back and lifting your head up, your legs and hands shake as the muscles in your body instinctively prepare for an impending attack.

Your blood pressure increases and your digestive system shuts down to maximize efficient delivery of even more nutrients and oxygen to your vital organs. When your digestive system shuts down, this is what leads to the feeling of dry mouth or butterflies.

Even your pupils dilate, which makes it hard to read anything up close (like presenter notes) but improves long range visibility, making you more aware of your audience’s facial expressions.

Your experience of stage fright is also affected by 3 main things:

1. Genes

Genetics play a huge role in how strong your feelings of anxiety are in social situations. For instance, even though John Lennon performed on stage thousands of times, he was known for throwing up before going on stage for his live performances.

Some people are simply genetically wired to feel more scared when performing or speaking in public.

2. Level of task mastery

We’ve all heard the saying, “practice makes perfect.” The main benefit of practice is to increase your familiarity of a given task. As this familiarity increases, feelings of anxiety decrease, and have less of a negative impact on performance.

In other words, the anxiety you feel about speaking in public will be less, the more comfortable you feel with your presentation.

To support these findings, in 1982, a team of psychologists watched pool players play alone or in front of crowd. The study found that:

Stronger pool players sank more shots when performing in front of a crowd, while poor pool players performed worse. Interestingly, the stronger pool players performed even better when people were watching them versus when they were playing alone.

What this means is if you know your presentation inside out, it’s more likely that you’ll give an even better presentation in front of a large audience than when you rehearsed alone or in front of a friend.

3. Stakes

If you’re giving a presentation where your business is on the line or the whole nation is watching you speak, there’s an increased chance that your reputation could be massively damaged if you screw up.

As the stakes increase, there’s a chance your reputation could be completely ruined if you perform poorly, which triggers the release of more adrenaline, and can result in paralyzing fear and anxiety.

We’ve seen the effect of stakes on reputation in online communities as well. For example, many eBay sellers worry about their reputation a ton because it directly effects how much money they make. One piece of negative feedback can ruin an eBay seller’s profile and cause them to lose sales.

In fact, one study found that a good reputation for a seller on eBay added 7.6 percent to the sale price of their items.

Having a good reputation is important to protect but, this also leads to having a fear that one slip-up could ruin your reputation and cause the loss of future opportunities.

How I learned to cure stage fright – a 4-step guide

So now that we know the root causes of why public speaking is scary, here’s what you can do to dramatically improve and overcome your on-stage jitters.

1. Preparation

I’ve been to many conferences where I see speakers organizing slides a few minutes before their talk. That’s not the optimal way to prepare for a quality performance. Would you see a musician learning their song 10 minutes before going on stage to perform it? No way.

This way of preparation is also not fair to your audience who is giving the next 10, 20, or 60 minutes of their attention to you.

When I’m preparing to give a presentation or a talk at a conference, here’s my process:

About a week before, I draw out a storyboard of about 15-20 slides, thinking over the content using stick figures or a few words that I may put on my slides. Here’s one of my storyboards:

Creating this storyboard helps me feel comfortable that I know the major points I want to cover and still leaves me plenty of time to rehearse and perfect slides.

I then layout my talk like this:

introduction

main topic 1

point

example (something unique from my experience)

point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 2

point

example (something unique from my experience)

point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 3

point

example (something unique from my experience)

point (with key actionable take away)

conclusion

Formatting your talk in this “point, example, point” format not only helps you visualize your entire presentation but also allows you to think deeply about the subject matter you’re covering so you don’t leave your audience wanting more.

I start by filling in each main topic point first and then skip back to the introduction and finish with the conclusion.

When working on the introduction, I start with a story that covers who I am and why the audience should care about my talk. Tell your audience right away how you are going to help them so they tune in.

I then rehearse each of these individual parts (introduction, main topic 1, main topic 2, etc.) between 5-10 times each.

Once that’s done, I recite the presentation content from start to finish at least 10 times.

This might seem like a lot of preparation but keep in mind, Steve Jobs was known to rehearse for hundreds of hours and prepare weeks in advance for his epic Apple keynote presentations.

2. How to practice like it’s the real thing

It’s important while preparing your presentation to setup your environment in the same way you plan on giving your actual presentation. This removes unknown variables and requires you to spend less mental energy thinking about details when you’re on stage for the actual presentation.

In 2009, a group of MIT researchers found that when there are many visual stimulants in front of you, only one or two things tend to get activated in the brain, indicating that we’re really only able to focus on one or two items.

You want to get to a point where all you have to focus on is connecting with the audience and enhancing the delivery of your story, rather than worrying about what slide is coming up next or where you need to stand on stage.

When I’m rehearsing, I set up my computer on the same side it will be during the actual presentation, I use the same clicker, and deliver my presentation every time as if it were the real thing.

Another tip to help prepare for unknown variables is to say your presentation in front of someone or at least record yourself to replicate the effect of someone watching you. This will help you feel less anxious when you get up in public, knowing that you’ve already said your presentation in front of at least one person.

3. Breath, stretch, and let it go.

The most nerve-racking part of public speaking for me is always those last few minutes before heading on stage. What I do to combat those feelings is I head into the bathroom, stretch my arms up, and take three deep breaths in and out. Here’show this stretch looks:

This exercise activates the hypothalamus, and sends out hormones to trigger a relaxation response.

In fact, researchers tested a single session of slow breathing on 46 trained musicians and the results of the study found that one session of slow breathing helped control arousal, especially for musicians that had high levels of anxiety.

The feelings associated with stage fright are usually the strongest during the lead-up to the presentation rather than during it, so take a minute to breath and stretch before heading out on stage.

4. After you present, book another speaking engagement right away

If you want to get better at public speaking, you have to do it more. Each time you speak, you will get less nervous and more comfortable.

At first, try to book speaking engagements that have lower stakes. For example, maybe it’s a presentation to your family members about the importance of taking a vacation. Anything to help you rehearse the behavior of getting up and speaking in front of people.

Quick last tip: How to stop saying “ums” and “ahs”

A few “ums” or “ahs” won’t kill your presentation but if they begin to fill every slide transition or each time you pause between points, they can become a distraction.

Training yourself to stop saying “um” or “ah” can be difficult, especially if it’s a part of your everyday speech.

One of the best ways to knock these filler words out of your vocabulary is to use a technique called chunking. Chunking means splitting your presentation up into short burst of words followed by a short break and then continuing on with another short burst of words.

For example, group 1-2 related sentences together followed by a 1-2 second pause, then another 1-2 sentences, and so on. This will help you develop a speaking rhythm, making it easier to avoid filler words.

Public speaking can be scary but it’s a necessary part of almost every career. Hopefully, knowing why stage fright happens and using these tips on how to overcome it will help you own your next presentation.

What other tips do you have for becoming a better public speaker? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

By: Mikael Cho , co-founder of ooomf

Top photo credit: Flickr

This post originally appeared as a guest post on the Buffer blog.

More resources:
Steve Jobs iPhone launch video
Presentation Zen book
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs book

One of the biggest challenges of the entire project process (and where a ton of time was often spent) was putting together an estimate for how much the project should cost.

You need to consider things like budget constraints, what functionalities you need, and then figure out an estimate for the amount of time it will take (including the time to test bugs, design iterations, and minor tweaks).

The estimation process isn’t exactly a science but we thought there could be a way to simplify it.

Today, we’re launching howmuchtomakeanapp.com, a tool that makes it easier to estimate the cost of any iPhone, Android, or tablet app.

We’ve designed the site to take you through the process in less than a couple minutes and it also works on all devices, so you can use it on the go.

Our goal is to de-mystify a process that is typically filled with guesswork and provide a way that makes it easier to understand the cost and value of quality development and design.

Give it a whirl. We’d love to hear what you think.

Because of the situation with the web today, it’s never been easier to start a business. That’s awesome for entrepreneurs, except it also means there’s more competition for attention.

For instance, there will be more apps submitted to the App Store this week (over 26,000 apps) than there were in the entire App Store for all of 2008.

When there’s so much noise, how do you stick out? One of the most common answers to this question is typically advertising.

But for most companies just starting out, the budget required to make a dent in getting customers through advertising is out of reach because there’s too much competition.

37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson voiced a similar philosophy on promotion that has guided 37signals, one of the most successful software companies today:

We will never have the resources to outspend a Google or a Microsoft in promoting itself. Instead, 37signals tries to out-teach.

At ooomf, we’ve tried many different things to grow our customer base – from search advertising to ad networks and partnerships. But nothing has proven to be a larger source of quality traffic than creating useful content.

We’ve figured out ways to make content that our audience enjoys, how to use guest blogging to increase the spread of our content, and even incorporate “mini-products” to grow our customer base.

I’m going to share with you what we’ve learned and how to use content to out-teach your competition and grow your business.

The psychology behind content and why it works

Many marketers know the importance of creating quality content.

For companies like Buffer, content marketing is their main source of traffic, accounting for over 70 percent of their user growth in their first 6 months.

But how can something as simple as blog posts drive so much growth? Part of the story lies in what happens in our brains when we learn something new.

Traditionally, the thinking has been that tangible rewards – like eating and sleeping – were the types of rewards that caused the release of the neurotransmitter, Dopamine, the brain’s universal signal for pleasure.

In 2011 however, a landmark study was conducted that found that abstract rewards – like listening to music – could also cause the release of Dopamine.

Another type of abstract reward is learning something new.

What this means is by offering content that helps you learn something new, your brain recognizes this content as rewarding and dopamine levels increase to recall the information.

This release of dopamine also makes you want to seek out more content in the future to repeat these feelings of pleasure.

People want to share practical advice

When you create content that is practically useful, it helps build an audience better than any other type of content.

That’s exactly what a study done by two University of Pennsylvania professors found when they looked at the New York Times most emailed articles.

The results of the study found that people like sharing content that teaches them something new the most – even more than content that might be surprising or interesting:

Helping someone learn something new increases your chances for your content to spread because practical advice is what people love to share the most.

Give to get: Reciprocity principle at work

When you receive something useful from someone, you feel an obligation to return the favor.

This is the principle of reciprocity and creating useful content (for free) without an expectation of anything in return falls into this psychological model.

When you write a blog post for instance, your aim is to help hundreds or thousands of people to do something better.

If you succeed, there’s an opportunity that some of those people may sign up for your service or email list because they want to repay you for the content you created that helped them.

Consistency is king: Why trying to go “viral” with 1 post is not enough

A big part of building an audience over time is consistency.

To build an audience, one hit piece of content isn’t enough. You need to repeat that quality content on a regular basis.

In fact, results from this survey found that once a blog reaches over 23 posts, there’s a 30 percent increase in lead generation that occurs:

This isn’t to say that if you post more blog posts you will get more traffic.

What this means is, if you consistently create high quality posts, once you hit around 20 posts, you should see a significant increase in traffic coming from your blog as more of your blog posts get indexed by Google, attracting traffic from search as well as links from other sites.

What’s even better, if you keep delivering quality content, consistency breeds authority and trust, says science:

Someone with [consistency] is viewed as rational, assured, trustworthy, and sound. – Author Robert B. Cialdini, PH.D.

The science of consistency: how to develop the habit of writing

I started off a bit too ambitious when I began writing for our blog. My aim was to write 2-3 articles per week but after the first week, I noticed the quality of the articles weren’t where I wanted them to be.

I realized that my sweet spot for what I could sustain starting out was writing one article per week.

When I made this change, my focus shifted from worrying about reaching a certain number of articles to focusing on the quality of the content.

Here’s what I did to help develop the habit of writing regularly:

1. Start by writing one article per week.

If you think that’s too difficult to sustain, commit to writing an article once every two weeks and once you start feeling more comfortable, then work up to one article per week then two articles per week, etc.

Slowly expand until you’re writing at the target number of articles per week that you want to sustain.

This strategy happens to plays right into the science behind how willpower works. It’s well-supported that willpower is like a muscle, and the growth of it takes time.

This explains why a diet where you cut out your favorite junk food usually fails in the long-term.

Starting small makes it much easier to develop a habit.

2. Make it the first thing you do.

I found that my best and most efficient work would come early in the morning (before 9am) when there are almost no potential distractions.

To help make sure I’m efficient when I’m working on new content, the night before, I leave my laptop on sleep with only the blank text file open with the current draft open. Here’s a shot of my laptop when I open it in the morning:

This minimizes distractions and reminds me that working on this post is what I should be doing first thing in the morning.

It also helps because you’ll start reading your draft and instantly feel the urge to make edits and begin writing.

3. When you write, just write.

It’s hard staring at a blank page and curser, knowing that you’re expected to turn it into a work of art that drives customers to your business.

That’s scary.

A way to change this thought process is to focus on just writing for your first draft and not doing research at the same time.

What helps me get started, is I layout a text document like this:

title

introduction

main topic 1

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 2

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 3

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

conclusion

I then write my first draft of a title and fill in the “Main 1″, “Main 2″, “Main 3″ points that are the most important to cover.

Once you’ve done that, break each main point down into “point, example, point” format.

This format makes it easier to organize your thoughts and just be able to write freely.

I make notes as I go along where I’d like to adding a supporting source or example that I don’t recall the details of and will look up later.

This way, rather than having to flip back and forth between doing research and writing, you’ll be able to focus simply on capturing your thoughts on the subject matter.

You can go through and add supporting sources later when you start editing.

But I hate writing!

If you really don’t like writing, it isn’t the only form of content that works.

You may have seen the “People Are Awesome 2013″ YouTube clip:

It was created by a band from the UK named Hadouken. Hadouken cleverly posted their new single as the background music to the YouTube video, which is a compilation of short YouTube clips of people doing awesome things. 

The video now has over 70 million views (number 33 on the YouTube 100) and Hadouken’s single “Levitate,” which was playing in the background, made it into the BillBoard Hot 100 this year.

Experiment with what form of content you think you can stick with over time and start with what type of content you think makes the most sense for you.

If you hate writing blog posts, try creating short YouTube videos or a Slideshare Presentation instead. Just make sure to focus on sharing useful information for your audience.

When having no audience is an advantage

If you haven’t consistently created useful content before, it may seem like it’s not worth it to start when you have no audience.

For example, it took us 2 months before we got more than 10 retweets on a single article from our blog but those first two months were helpful in establishing our content schedule and learning what type of content resonated the most with our audience.

Something that might help to shift your mindset when you have no audience is to think that you get to create content with no expectations so it’s an opportunity to experiment with the topics you want to cover and you don’t worry so much about the number of views, tweets, or likes.

Those will come with time and actually might come sooner than you expect.

When Hubspot reviewed the data from over 5,000 online businesses, they found that 85 percent had increased traffic from content creation within 7 months.

This is further proof of the importance of creating content early because it can start to pay off in just a few months.

What topics should you make content about: 4 easy places to find ideas

When I was just starting out, one of the hardest parts for me was figuring out what to write about. I remember after writing our 10th blog post, I felt there was nothing left to write about.

But, after seeing the type of the content put out on successful blogs run by Buffer and 37 Signals, I realized there were so many other opportunities to write about that would interest our target audience.

Here’s places where I began to look for inspiration on content topics:

1. Experiences at our company or conversations with team members

For example, I wrote about our experiences of launching and getting press coverage and how I learned to overcome my issues with stage fright while founding a company.

In each of these instances, there was something unique that we experienced that I thought would be practical advice for our audience.

2. Experiences in your life outside of your company

Sometimes there’s things you notice while you’re waiting in line or traveling that relates to a topic you cover on your blog.

For instance, David Heinermeier Hansson at 37signals wrote about his recent experience flying with American Airlines and dealing with their customer service department. He brilliantly related it to how caring organizations should work with customers:

A natural, caring organization designed to create passionate customers stretches and bends. A rigid business bureaucracy looks to nail every T on policies, procedures, and practices—customers be damned.

3. Articles you retweet or bookmark

If you retweeted or saved an article to read it later, the content of that piece had to have been interesting to you.

This is a great opportunity to think about how you could add to the conversation around that topic that interests you and perhaps go deeper, share an experience you had, or give your perspective.

4. Emails you send to customers

One of our most popular articles on how to get press, actually started as an email to a customer.

We turned that email into a blog post and within a few hours it shot to the top of the Startups subreddit, lead to opportunities for guest posting, and it became an article that we often referred to when other customers asked about how to get press.

If there are multiple customers asking you the same question, it could be validation that turning that common question into a blog post topic will perform well.

Bonus: Standing out from the crowd: The “mini-product”

When you make content, the goal is to create value for your audience.

At ooomf, our most favorite thing to do is create useful products. Sometimes, we create “mini-products” which are small websites (usually 1-2 pages) that we think would be useful for our customers.

For instance, this New Year’s Day, we released a campaign called Launch This Year:

We collected all the most useful information about how to go from idea to launching an app in the App Store and put it in one place.

This campaign ended up being covered by VentureBeat, Digital Trends, Lifehacker, and Tech Vibes, and resulted in over 17,000 signups within a week.

**Psst. We’ve got another “mini-product” in the works. Sign up here for an early peak.**

Content doesn’t just have to be a blog post. Creating something useful for your customers is the most important thing to remember, how you do that is up to you.

We want to write about you on ooomf!

Getting customers is tough so we want to help share your story.

Once you’ve completed a project on ooomf, you’ll have the opportunity to be featured in front of our email subscriber base of 15,000+ and our Twitter following of 40,000+.

We’ll also feature you on ooomf.com, and cover your project on our blog.

Email hi@ooomf.com when you’ve complete a project with a link or image of the work and we’ll take it from there!

If you haven’t completed a project on ooomf yet, submit your project here to connect with thousands of handpicked, first class developers and designers from around the world in less than 48 hours.

When this happens, normally I grab a coffee to help get the ideas flowing, but for the last few days in Montreal, no one’s been allowed to drink the water due to a bacteria leakage, which also means, no coffee.

So instead, I grabbed the next best thing to help me get going – a beer.

This got me wondering about coffee and beer and which one would actually help me be more creative and get work done. Hopefully, this will help you decide when it’s best to have that triple shot espresso or ice cold brew.

What is creativity really?

From a scientific perspective, creativity is your ability to think of something original from connections made between pre-existing ideas in your brain.

These connections are controlled by chemicals called neurotransmitters. One of these neurotransmitters is adenosine, which alerts your brain when you’re running out of energy and reacts by slowing down the connections made between neurons by binding to adenosine receptors.

Adenosine is kind of like your brain’s battery status monitor. Once your energy levels get low, adenosine starts to slow your brain functioning down.

This is why after a few hours of intense work, you begin to feel tired, like your brain has run out of juice.

The only way to recharge it is to take a break; unless, you’ve got a secret weapon handy.

Your brain on coffee

Every coffee drinker is familiar with the feelings after drinking a fresh cup of java.

I know after I’ve had a latte or espresso, I feel more focused.

If I’m having a conversation with someone, words seem to flow without pauses, ums, or ahs.

If I’m writing, my fingers never stop typing.

This happens because caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, preventing adenosine from binding to it’s receptors and tricking your brain into thinking you have lots of energy.

Here’s a comic illustration of what caffeine does when it makes it to your brain:

This effect happens within just 5 minutes of drinking your coffee.

When adenosine receptors are blocked, chemicals that increase the performance of your neural activity, like glucose, dopamine, and glutamate, are allowed to work overtime.

So while you may feel that coffee is giving you more energy, it’s simply telling your body that your energy reserves are good to go even when they’re long gone.

Coffee is like a bottle rocket

The peak effect of caffeine on your body happens between 15 minutes and 2 hours after you consume it.

When caffeine from your coffee enters your bloodstream, you become more alert from an increase in the production of the hormones adrenaline and cortisol.

The problem is, if this over-stimulation of adrenaline and cortisol occurs too regularly, your adrenal glands, which absorb adrenaline to help make you feel energized, gradually begin to require more adrenaline to give you the same ‘pick-me-up’ feeling as before.

When researchers at Johns Hopkins University looked at low to moderate coffee drinkers (as little as one 14-ounce mug per day), they found that even this little amount of coffee can cause your body to develop a tolerance to caffeine and require more of it to get the same stimulation.

Just like the thrill of lighting a bottle rocket and watching it explode all within a few seconds, the good feelings associated with coffee are short-lived and pretty soon you need another hit to feel good again.

Why there are lots of famous drunk artists, but no famous drunk accountants

While caffeine pulls a number on your brain to make you feel like you have more energy, alcohol has it’s own way of influencing your creativity.

After you’ve had a couple beers, drinking makes you less focused because it decreases your working memory, and you begin to care less about what’s happening around you. But as researchers at the University of Chicago discovered, this can be a good thing for creativity’s sake.

The researchers devised a game where 40 men were given three words and told to come up with a fourth that could make a two-word combination with all three words.

For example, the word “pit” works with “arm”, “peach”, and “tar”:

Half of the men drank two pints of beer before playing the game while the other half drank nothing. The results showed that men who drank, solved 40 percent more of the problems than sober men.

It was concluded that a blood alcohol level of 0.07 (about 2 drinks) made the participants better at creative problem-solving tasks but not necessarily working memory tasks where they had to pay attention to things happening in their surroundings (like driving a car).

By reducing your ability to pay attention to the world around you, alcohol frees up your brain to think more creatively.

It looks like author Ernest Hemingway was on to something when he said:

When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

Alcohol produces better ideas

In an interesting study on the topic of alcohol and its effects on creativity, author Dave Birss brought together a group of 18 advertising creative directors and split them into two teams based on their amount of career experience.

One team was allowed to drink as much alcohol as they wanted while the other team had to stay sober.

The groups were given a brief and had to come up with as many ideas as they could in three hours. These ideas were then graded by a collection of top creative directors.

The result? The team of drinkers not only produced the most ideas but also came up with four of the top five best ideas.

While alcohol may not be the drink of choice when you need to be alert and focused on what’s going on around you, it seems that a couple drinks can be helpful when you need to come up with new ideas.

A creative prescription: The optimal way to drink coffee and beer

Both coffee and beer (in moderation) have shown to be helpful when you’re working on certain types of tasks, however, you shouldn’t drink either when you need to do detail-oriented or analytical projects like your finances.

The increase in adrenaline from caffeine and inhibition of your working memory from alcohol will make you more prone to make mistakes.

Beer for the idea

The best time to have a beer (or two) would be when you’re searching for an initial idea. Because alcohol helps decrease your working memory (making you feel relaxed and less worried about what’s going on around you), you’ll have more brain power dedicated to making deeper connections.

Neuroscientists have studied the “eureka moment” and found that in order to produce moments of insight, you need to feel relaxed so front brain thinking (obvious connections) can move to the back of the brain (where unique, lateral connections are made) and activate the anterior superior temporal gyrus, a small spot above your right ear responsible for moments of insight:

Researchers found that about 5 seconds before you have a ‘eureka moment’ there is a large increase in alpha waves that activates the anterior superior temporal gyrus.

These alpha waves are associated with relaxation which explains why you often get ideas while you’re going for a walk, in the shower, or on the toilet.

Alcohol is a substance that relaxes you so it produces a similar effect on alpha waves and helping us reach creative insights.

Coffee meanwhile, doesn’t necessarily help you access more creative parts of your brain like a couple pints of beer.

Coffee for the execution

If you’ve already got an idea or an outline of where you want to go with your project, a cup of coffee would do wonders compared to having a beer to execute on your idea.

The general consensus across caffeine studies is that it can increase quality and performance if the task you are doing seems easy to you and doesn’t require too much abstract thinking.

In other words, after you have an initial idea or a plan laid out, a cup of coffee can help you execute and follow through on your concept faster without compromising quality.

This graphic pretty much sums up when you should drink coffee:

Quick tip: If you drink coffee, do so before noon so it doesn’t effect your sleep. On average, it will take between 5-10 hours for the caffeine from a cup of coffee to be removed from your system and messing up your sleep cycle can have a negative impact on your creative output for days to come.

Always in moderation

If you decide to drink coffee and beer while you’re working, you should stick to no more than 2 cups of coffee or a couple beers per sitting and try to do this no more than once or twice per week.

Coffee and beer shouldn’t be thought of as magic bullets for creativity.

They are ways to create chemical changes that occur naturally in your brain with a healthy lifestyle. Quality sleep patterns and allowing yourself to take breaks by splitting your day into sprints will do the same trick.

But, if you have to choose between coffee or beer, think about what type of task you are about to do and make sure you don’t over-drink.

Too much of either and you’ll lose the benefits of both.

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Nothing has a more negative impact on my day than showing up to our office without them.

Like most people, music is a huge part of my life and my tastes are constantly changing based on how I feel or what I’m doing.

I listen to the most music while I work, sifting through playlists, from jazz, to indie pop, to electronica, on what seems to be a never-ending search for the perfect tunes to keep me in the zone.

When I looked back at all my favorite playlists, I wondered what effect music has had on my work and more specifically, which types of music have had the most impact.

I thought it’d be interesting to take a dive into the science behind the deep power of music to find out if it actually helps you work better.

Why you love music

Whether you’re listening to the driving beat of a Daft Punk song or the opening chords of a mellow Jack Johnson track, both have an effect on your brain that is not seen in any other animal.

When you listen to music, a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens activates. This triggers the release of the “pleasure chemical” dopamine, that lives in a group of neurons in your brain called the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA):

This pathway in the brain is called the Reward System and Dopamine is strongly associated with it.

Dopamine is the same chemical that gets released when you eat your favorite food or when you get a new follower on Twitter, causing you to want more, more, more.

This is why Dopamine is also responsible for the saying:

“Two cheeseburgers equals one orgasm.” – PBS

The amount of dopamine that gets released and the feelings of pleasure we get from it are also largely dependent on the element of surprise.

For instance, when you stumble upon a new song that you love, more dopamine is released and you get even more excited than if you were to listen to one of your favorite songs that you’ve heard multiple times.

Music was meant to keep you alive

From the perspective of evolution, there’s something deeper about why you feel pleasure when you listen to music.

Neuroscientist and musician, Jamshed Bharucha noted that creative domains, like music, allow humans to connect in a synchronized way, helping us develop a group identity and makes us more likely to work together – which was an immensely important advantage for keeping the human species alive.

This development of group identity through music was seen in a recent study of preschool children.

The study paired children together in sets of two and showed them toy frogs. The researchers said these toy frogs needed to be woken up by either a song or exercise.

Psychologists then split the children up into two groups of 24 sets of children.

One group sang a song as they walked around a collection of toy frogs while the other group walked (or crawled) around a separate set of frogs without any music:

Afterwards, the children were presented with tubes filled with marbles. When the children were given their tubes, the bottoms would fall out, causing the marbles to fall on the floor.

The researchers noted if the two children paired together would help each other to pick up the marbles.

The results of the study showed that children who sang the song together, were more cooperative in helping to clean up the marbles.

The researchers concluded that music may have evolved as a way of fostering a sense of community and developing immediate empathetic concern.

Music’s power is deeply rooted in our brains and developed out of a need to empathize, create harmony, and more importantly, survive.

Does listening to music actually make you better at your job?

Music has a powerful relationship to our primal need of connecting with others, so how does this translate over to listening to music while you work?

Music helps you finish boring tasks faster

If you’re not looking forward to cleaning out your email after getting back from a vacation or filling out that nasty excel spreadsheet at the end of the month with your finances, music can help.

Because listening to music you like is pleasurable, it will not only make the task seem more fun but as research shows, it can actually help you complete the task faster.

In a study published in the journal of Neuroscience of Behavior and Physiology, it was found that a person’s ability to recognize images, letters, and numbers was faster when rock or classical music was playing in the background compared to when there was no music.

A similar effect was noted when workers on an assembly line listened to music. The workers who listened to music were more happy and efficient and made fewer errors.

So whatever type of music you like, as long as you’re listening to something, you’ll enjoy repetitive or boring tasks more and get them done faster.

Press pause when learning something new

When you’re presented with new information that’s complicated, it takes more focus and mental energy for you to grasp and apply that knowledge.

For instance, if you’re learning how to drive a stick shift car or writing your first lines of programming code, it’s best to shut the music off.

In 2010, researchers at the University of Wales Institute showed that when adults were asked to complete a relatively complex task of recalling a series of sounds presented in a specific order, their performance decreased while listening to music.

The study concluded that your ability to learn something new that is cognitively demanding decreases when you listen to music.

So when you’re tackling something new and complex, put your headphones down and learn without distraction.

If you’re good at what you do, music works

The magic of music comes into play the most when you’re an expert at what you do, even if it’s something as challenging as surgery.

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Associationreported that surgeons worked more accurately when music they liked was playing in the background (music that they didn’t like was second best, and no music was least helpful of all).

If you’re working on something that you have done many times before, even if it’s complicated, your performance can increase and errors become less likely when you listen to music you like.

The perfect mix tape: How to use music to create flow

While musical tastes vary greatly, listening to your favorite type of music, whatever it is, lowers feelings of tension.

Author Stephen King said that he preferred to work while listening to hard rock music (which for some of us, would be too noisy to concentrate on anything).

Whether it’s hard rock or acoustic jams, as long as the music makes you feel like doing things that’s what you should choose to listen to.

Choose music you’ve heard before

If you’re listening to new music (especially with lyrics) while working, your brain may release too much dopamine especially if you find a song you love.

You’ll start to focus more on the music rather than the work you’re actually trying to do.

When you learn something new, dopamine levels increase and can cause you to lose focus and interest in your work because it’s not as interesting (and therefore not as pleasurable) as the new song you just discovered.

Stick to your favorites list when you work but, if you must have something new, play songs that have little or no lyrics.

Instrumental music works best

There are a few types of music that have proven to be effective in establishing flow for most people.

Classical or instrumental music has been shown to enhance mental performance more than music with lyrics.

For strong focus, music that has little variety and little to no lyrics are best.

Tip: For creative tasks, the noise from a coffee shop can be enough to do the trick says a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Moderate background noise (about the volume of a vacuum cleaner) can create enough distraction to allow you to think more imaginatively. To re-create the sounds of a coffee shop, try Coffitivity:

While music helps you breeze through simple tasks and things you are well-trained to do, when it comes to taking on something new that’s challenging, it’s best to ditch the tunes until you know your stuff.

Everyone’s experience of music is different but now that you understand the why and how of its effects, hopefully your quest for creating the perfect playlist will be much easier.

I heard that I better watch out for the “Freshman 15″ (the 15 pounds you can expect to gain after a year of consuming nothing but pizza and beer). I knew this would probably be a good time to start caring about what I ate.

I began experimenting with different eating regiments to try and find the balance between being healthy while not entirely sacrificing foods I loved (Chicken burritos with guacomole and Cholula sauce – I’m looking at you).

After almost a decade of attempting a wide range of things from “I’ll just eat what seems like it’s good for me” to strictly following the Slow-Carb Diet, I feel like I’ve finally found an eating lifestyle that I can follow forever.

This lifestyle is not about forgetting all the food you love and trading it in for a regimental diet that you must live and die by.

What it is about is how to create a sustainable way of eating healthy that you can do for life (with the help of some clever tricks).

How food impacts your energy

When you’re hungry, a hormone produced in the stomach called ghrelin, interacts with the neutrotransmitter NPY in the brain, signaling to you that your body’s energy levels are low and you need food:

NPY lives in the hypothalamus, a part of your brain that controls your energy levels, memory, and emotion.

In the context of food, the hypothalamus is like a 24-hour bouncerlooking out for your energy, keeping constant tabs on when you need your next meal.

Once you eat, your food breaks down into glucose, which is like fuel for your brain. In order to maintain alertness, your brain functions best when there is a consistant amount of glucose in your blood.

Leigh Gibson, a researcher from Roehampton University in England, noted:

The brain works best with about 25 grams of glucose circulating in the blood stream – about the amount found in a banana.

You can get this short-term glucose fix from a Snickers bar or a t-bone steak, but the trick to keep your energy levels functioning at peak performance is knowing which foods help you maintain optimal glucose levels while at the same time making you feel full longer.

In 2012, researchers at the University of Sydney created the satiety index, a guide for choosing foods to eat based on how full you’ll feel after and whether or not you’ll experience an energy crash.

Here’s a visual chart of the guide, showing how different foods stack up in terms of how you can expect to feel after eating them:

This chart takes into account how quickly glucose from certain types of food get released in your bloodstream (also called a food’s glycemic index).

To maintain your energy levels, you want to eat food like beans, fish, and most types of vegetables because they release glucose slowly into your bloodstream.

Meanwhile, high-carbohydrate or high-sugar foods like white bread, potatoes, and candy bars cause a rapid rise in glucose levels followed by a crash in energy.

This crash happens because of a spike in the release of insulin, a hormone that tells your body to suck up as much glucose as possible; which leads to you feeling tired and unmotivated.

To make matters worse, when you eat more food that’s high in carbohydrates and sugar, you need to eat even more of them to feel full.

Our love affair with junk food

Food psychologists believe that energy rich foods (like those high in fat and sugar) were attractive to early humans and needed to be taken advantage of if they became available:

As a result, these foods became more desirable in order to survive.

The problem is, recent research indicates that continual intake of food that’s high in fat or sugar, overrides your body’s ability to tell you when you’re full.

So the more unhealthy food you eat, the more you desire it.

Why you crave “crispy”

As if it weren’t already hard enough to stop eating food high in fat and sugar, certain foods we would describe as being “crispy,” like potato chips or french fries,are even more hard-wired to be attractive to you.

Millions of years ago, early primates ate a lot of insects and plants. If something our ancestors ate was crispy, it was a sign of freshness and meant that it was safe to eat.

When John Allen, a research scientist at the University of Southern California, looked at brain scans when the word “crispy” was said, he found that areas in the brain started lighting up in the same way as if the crispy food was actually being eaten.

This finding was noted by Celebrity chef Mario Batali in his book The Babbo Cookbook,

“The single word ‘crispy’ sells more food than a barrage of adjectives…”

So when a menu describes a type of food as being “crispy”, you begin to have the same experience as if you are actually eating the food because of an innate desire for the sound of a crunch.

Diets suck

The crash diet always fails. Why? Because you’re trying to break years of your own eating habits while going against human evolution all in one swoop.

When researchers looked at the results across 31 studies on eating habits, they found that dieting doesn’t work in the long run. Within five years, about two-thirds of dieters gain the weight back (and sometimes more).

If you regularly skip a meal as part of a diet, you’ll be hungry and your brain makes even worse food choices when you haven’t eaten in a while.

That’s exactly what a team of researchers found when they asked people to fast overnight on two different days.

The first day, the participants were fed breakfast before looking at photos of high-calorie food.

The second day, they were not given breakfast and then had to look at the same photos.

The results of the study found that participants who were shown photos of high-calorie food without eating breakfast, showed more activation in areas of their brains that indicate desire, suggesting that fasting or dieting makes it harder to resist high-calorie food.

Solving the food-life balance

Whether you’re starting a new career or a family (or one of the other thousand moments that will inevitably occur in your life), making what you eat a priority is the single biggest change you could make to improve how you feel, the work you do, and how you treat the people around you.

I founded a company a year ago and getting my eating habits right has been a continuous experiment. It’s a work in progress but here’s what I do to sustain a healthy eating lifestyle.

1. Cut sugar and starch (gradually)

Eating too much high-sugar and high-carbohydrate food makes you feel like crap.

The challenging part about trying to cut these foods out of your eating schedule is you realize that pretty much everything sold at the grocery store or made in a restaurant has either a type of sugar or starch in it.

Here’s a guide that I use when buying food:

Cutting the majority of sugar and starch out of your diet is a dramatic change so you need to treat it like building a habit.

When you’re creating a new habit, it’s best to start small so you don’t become overwhelmed and feel guilty if you slip up.

Willpower is like a muscle, and the growth of it takes time.

When it comes to restructuring how you eat, the best thing to do is eat no high sugar or high starch foods for 4 days a week.

After two weeks, move to 5 days a week. Repeat this cycle once more so you’re at 6 days a week of healthy eating.

2. Removing guilt with a Cheat Day

I don’t want to go through life not being able to enjoy a Tim Horton’s cheese croissant once in a while (Yes, I’m an American-Canadian).

Because we are modern humans and have been living with tempation from fast food restaurants and vending machines our whole lives, letting yourself go one or two days a week won’t kill you.

On your Cheat Day, you can eat whatever you want, but stop when you feel full, rather than stuffed (don’t try to eat enough junk to make up for a week or you’ll feel awful for days).

If you can workout on your Cheat Day, even better. My Cheat Day foods are usually ones that have a high glycemic index (things like potatoes, french fries, and ice cream) which help in recovery from exercise.

3. Use a mint to master portion control

One of my biggest challenges is eating just enough to the point that I get full.

I have the tendency to overeat so one way I fight this is by having a mint or chewing gum once I feel full after a meal.

Because of mint’s strong scent, it naturally suppresses your appetite.

That’s exactly what psychologists at the University of West Virginia found when they gave people mints to sniff throughout the day.

The results of the study showed that people who inhaled mint, ate 3,000 fewer calories over the week.

Your sense of smell is a big part of your experience of food, so by controlling your scent you can somewhat control your appetite.

4. Replacing “crispy”

I have a mild addiction to chips. So one thing I’ve done that has worked well is replacing crispy chips with a healthier alternative that is also crispy – like a cucumber or bell pepper.

Granted, a cucumber may not offer the same explosion of flavor as chips, but after I’ve eaten it, I feel better and more full, curbing my desire to want more food.

5. Never skip breakfast

To regulate glucose levels, you should eat within 30 minutes of waking up. Research also shows that skipping breakfast may increase how much food you end up eating at lunch.

For breakfast, I’ll aim for something high in protein like an egg white omelet or oatmeal with blueberries, which keeps me feeling alert and full for hours.

What you eat reflects in everything you do. Eating well helps you be more creative, productive, and enjoyable to be around.

The hard part with eating right is there is no plan that is perfect for everyone. There’s no simple prescription. The only way to find what works for you is to experiment with what you eat and find something you can sustain that makes you feel alive.

I wouldn’t consider myself a developer (yet), but I thought I’d offer the best advice I could based on my experience learning web design.

Here was my response:

(I) love your ambition. I don’t yet know how to code that well but I’ve tried to learn a ton of times.

For me, the best way to learn is to have something practical that I want to build and teach myself how to do it.

For instance, when I left my full-time job, I taught myself how to design in a week because’ I knew I would need a portfolio site.

I would recommend that you think of an idea or a single page website that you would want to build and try and build it.

You’ll learn by failing, which is usually the best way to learn because failure helps make things sticky’

After sending this email, I thought about how some of today’s most successful founders got started.

Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. When we see Zuckerberg’s success with Facebook, it sometimes feels like he was simply an extraordinary talent who knew what the world wanted and he just went out and built it.

While it’s reported that Zuckerberg is uniquely intelligent (top 1% of minds in the world), Facebook was not the first and only thing Zuckerberg made.

Prior to Facebook he built Facemash, and before Facemash he built this music app.

Before Zuckerberg could build any of these things, he tinkered by writing a simple program that was fun for him and his sisters.

The reason this example is interesting is because it shows that everyone, including so-called geniuses like Zuckerberg, have to start at the same spot as you when learning something new – being pretty sucky.

Starting is scary

At the beginning of anything, you won’t be great, and this is why many people never get started because the unknowns of doing something new are uncomfortable.

When you sit down to write your first blog post and the first few paragraphs don’t flow right, you’ll probably want to stop.

When you try to code your new idea for a website, you’ll get to a point where you don’t know how to do something that seems trivial and you’ll want to give up.

The trick is to keep trying to figure it out.

Even if you fail ten times trying to figure something out, you’re learning what things don’t work, which is infinitely better than doing nothing.

Starting simple is less scary

If you have an idea that you want to exist, try to create the first version yourself even if you have limited experience.

If you want to make video trailers one day in Hollywood, start by trying to shoot your own video. It doesn’t have to be the best thing ever.

Even legendary film director James Cameron’s first movie was terrible. But Cameron kept improving his film-making techniques.

He eventually was hired as special effects director on Piranha II, another terrible film from which he was fired from the set, but he stuck around to assist with the shooting.

Cameron then caught food poisoning and had a nightmare about a robot sent from the future that was trying to kill him, which ultimately led to the making of The Terminator, launching Cameron’s career.

Once you’ve got something live and out in the wild, there’s a sense of accomplishment that pushes you to continue tinkering on the project to make it better, or try something new on your next project.

Through doing, you learn important details that you can’t get from sitting on the sidelines which accelerates your learning, helping you to get better, faster and leads to opportunities for inspiration.

Embrace the crappy parts

Everyone usually starts out being pretty awful when they do something new, but one of the most efficient learning techniques is to learn by doing and improve through constant experimentation.

An important part of constant experimentation however, is actually wanting to experiment in order to improve a skill.

This is why working on projects that interest you are so important.

Learning through building things that are interesting to you is a key point because it answers the ‘why’ of what you’re doing and gives you a purpose.

Do you think you’d be more likely to build a website if it solves a problem you have or if you started by reading a book that tells you to begin by making a website that says ‘Hello World?’

Everyone learns best in different ways but I’ve found that building something that scratches an itch of my own makes me want to figure out how to build it so much more.

Giving a damn forces you to learn fast

Another benefit of building something that interests you is if something isn’t working in your project, you’ll probably want to figure out how to fix it that much more.

Occasionally at ooomf, shit hits the fan.

For example, when we launched this project around New Year’s Day, an articlefrom LifeHacker brought down the site. It sucked but we learned more about server administration and handling traffic loads that day than many of us had in our entire careers.

Even if the next thing you create doesn’t become the next Facebook, the point is to keep trying new things.

You don’t have to be ‘right’ about everything (and you likely won’t be on your first shot). Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox put it best when he said:

Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.

Everything you make won’t strike a cord with everyone and that’s fine. But, if you keep trying to do things in the field that you love, you’ll inevitably find yourself learning and retaining knowledge faster.

Never stop tinkering. Spot a problem you have, look to fix it, and start with something simple.

Many of today’s successful founders began by building small applications or fun side projects that seemed trivial. But oftentimes, it was this experimentation that became a defining piece in their big breakthrough.

‘As long as you get your eight hours in.’

I used to hear this phrase a lot.

The thinking is that as long as you put in a set amount of time working (usually at least eight hours or more) you will do well at your job and be successful.

We learned that eight hours of work a day is what we’re supposed to do almost as soon as we step foot into a classroom. School days are eight hours long and classes are usually structured by slots of time rather than what is accomplished in that time.

When you get a job, usually part or all of your pay is based on hours worked.

Since starting ooomf, I’ve made huge strides in how I approach my day to be more productive, but sometimes, I still catch myself looking at the clock, calculating how much time I should be working rather than focusing on what I’m getting done in that time.

On days where I put in less than eight or ten hours of work, I feel a bit guilty, like I’m not pushing hard enough. But, this is the wrong way to think.

At ooomf, we don’t work set hours.

Two of my co-founders prefer to work late into the night while I enjoy starting work early in the day.

Because we have different energy levels at different times, it would be counterproductive for my co-founders to work at 9AM (just like it would be inefficient for me to be working at 2AM).

Granted, there are times when scheduling a time to meet during the day to discuss important matters is needed (and there are many days when we all work through the night), but the importance is our work schedules are rarely managed by a set number of hours; rather, they are guided by our energy levels.

Most importantly, we’ve seen the results of working without a set schedule in the quality of our work, our productivity, and our health.

But, working set hours is typically the norm for full-time professionals, so I wondered where this 40-hour work schedule came from and if there’s any scientific backing as to why we’ve been working this way for almost a century.

How the 40-hour work week came to be

During the Industrial Revolution, factories needed to be running around the clock so employees during this era frequently worked between 10-16 hour days.

In the 1920s however, it was Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, that established the 5-day, 40-hour work week.

Henry Ford next to a 1921 Model-T

Surprisingly, Ford didn’t do it for scientific reasons (or solely for the health of his employees). Rather, one of the main reasons he came up with the idea to reduce the working hours of his staff was so employees would have enough free time to go out and realize they needed to buy stuff.

In an interview published in World’s Work magazine in 1926, Ford explains why he switched his workers from a 6-day, 48-hour workweek to a 5-day, 40-hour workweek but still paid employees the same wages:

Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles.?’?Henry Ford

So the 8-hour work day, 5-day workweek wasn’t chosen as the way to work for scientific reasons; instead, it was partly driven by the goal of increasing consumption.

Night owls vs. early birds

Your body keeps track of time in a section in your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (or SCN).

This part of the brain is located behind your eye, where the optic nerve fibers cross, which allows your brain to use cues from light in your environment to help you keep track of time:

Source: Wikipedia

Light and genetics are the two main factors that help your body tell time, establishing a natural a cycle of energy levels (a circadian rhythm) throughout your day.

Here’s a few of the main events that happen in your body as part of a typical 24-hour biological clock:

Source: Wikipedia

The length of your 24-hour cycle may be longer or shorter due to genetics.

If your cycle is a bit longer, you would be considered a night owl but if yours is a bit shorter, you’re most likely an early riser, says Katherine Sharkey, MD, PhD, associate director of the Sleep for Science Research Lab.

Researchers have even pinpointed that the length of a particular gene called Period 3 or ‘clock gene,’ could be largely responsible for your sleep-wake cycle.

Night owls outlast early birds

A typical workday for most of us usually starts at 7AM and ends around 5PM. This lifestyle design really only works well for one type of person. The early riser.

If you prefer working nights (like 44% of women and 37% of men do), then you’re often stuck slugging away at a time when your energy levels are low and your work ultimately suffers.

Because night owls wake up later, they sometimes get a reputation for being lazy because they’re asleep while the rest of the world is hustling.

But, recent research from the University of Brussels suggests that night owls may beat out early birds in the length of time they can stay awake and alert without becoming mentally fatigued.

Researchers conducted a study with ‘extreme’ early or late risers. Early risers awoke between 5AM-6AM while late risers awoke at noon.

The participants spent two nights in a sleep lab where the researchers measured their brain activity, looking at alertness and ability to concentrate.

After ten hours of being awake, the early risers showed reduced activityin areas of the brain associated with attention span and completed tasks more slowly than late risers.

‘It’s the late risers who have the advantage, and can outperform the early birds,’ said Philippe Peigneux, one of the publishers of the study.

Forcing someone to work early (or late) doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.

A night owl can be just as productive (if not more) than an early riser, they’re simply more productive at a different time.

The importance of taking a breather

Because our bodies were designed to work in rhythms, not for endless hours on end, breaks are often just as important as the work we do.

Research discussed in the landmark book Creativity and the Mind showed that regular breaks significantly enhance problem-solving skills, partly by making it easier for you to go through your memories to find clues.

Focusing only on your work for four or five hours straight limits your chances to make new, insightful neural connections, which won’t help you when you need to be creative.

A few companies have embraced this need to remove work to improve production and creativity.

In his TED talk, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister explains the importance of time off and why he shuts down his design studio for a year. Sagmeister says this removal of work allows him and his colleagues to gain new perspectives and refresh, ultimately producing better work.

Quirky, a web company is working on an experiment to shut down operations for four weeks every year. Here’s an excerpt from an email Quirky CEO, Ben Kaufman sent to Quirky staff (full email here):

We are going to shut down the entire machine for 4 weeks next year. Instead of running for 52, it will run for 48.

This is a full, mandatory shutdown of all internal activities. Lights out. Deep breath’

Our thesis is centered around the fact that this will lead to better work, more beautiful products, and an emotionally balanced team.

Take a breather not just for creativity (but for your health)

Giving yourself a break not only can benefit your creative juices but also your health.

Dan Buettner, a writer for National Geographic recently assembled a team of researchers to look at three communities around the world that have the longest, healthiest lives on the planet.

In his TED talk, How to live to be 100+, Buettner showcases one of these communities, the Seventh-Day Adventists in California.

The members of the Seventh-Day Adventists must take one day off a week from work completely, no matter how busy they may be.

Buettner points out this opportunity to reconnect with people and the world around them relieves stress and is likely part of the equation for why the Seventh-Day Adventists have five times the number of people who live to be over a hundred than the rest of the country.

4 steps to work-life bliss

I’ve experimented a lot with different techniques to improve the way I work. A couple weeks ago, I tried to not look at a clock for a day and instead, just rely on my energy levels to tell me what I should do (I found it nearly impossible and failed within the first couple hours).

Through trial and failure however, I’ve found a system that has worked wonders for me.

I will continue to try more things to constantly improve the way I work and report my findings, but here’s what I’ve figured out so far that has produced the best work of my career.

1. Write a realistic to-do list

Make a to-do list for the day that has 3-4 major tasks that you want to get done.

Because your days will naturally fill up with other things, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, recommends,

‘Plan for 4-5 hours of real work per day.’

Laying out your daily tasks knowing this, helps you create a to-do list that you can consistently complete, rather than one that has too many items and leaves you feeling bad, like you’re constantly falling behind.

2. Create cycles with your work

You probably have lots of different types of tasks to worry about.

To accomplish more of the important things while maintaing balance in your energy levels so you don’t burnout, try breaking your day up like this:

• A creative task. Starting with your most creative or important task before that urgent email pops up will help you feel accomplished. For me, I usually wake up and work a 90-minute session on my most creative task before I feel my brain and concentration start to fatigue.
• An un-timed break.Your break could be 20-minute run, a nap, lunch,or simply doing nothing for a few minutes. This gives you a chance to refresh and regain mental power before starting your next task. By keeping it un-timed, you’re using your energy levels as a guide to when you should start work again, rather than a rigid set amount of time.
• A mundane task. By bulking your mundane tasks together and doing them all at once, you’ll save time. Check all your emails or try to schedule multiple phone calls in a row. This way, when you switch back to a creative task, you won’t have the cloud of a hundred emails hovering over your head.
• Another un-timed break.
• Repeat. Try going through this cycle 3-4 times in a day.

3. One day with no work

Steve Blank, the pioneer of the Lean Startup Movement uses a Date Night every week to remove from work completely. My fiance and I do this same thing.

One night a week, we have a planned time where we spend time not talking about any work (no checking of iThings allowed).

Try removing work completely for a day.

When you return to work the next day, you’ll probably feel inspired and driven, helping to keep distractions at bay.

4. Find a true metric to measure your tasks

It’s easy to count hours but not so easy to figure out another way to measure the work you do that encompasses the true goal of what you’re producing.

For example, it’s easy to measure how many hours you wrote today but what is the goal of your writing?

Is it to simply get your thoughts down? Then maybe you should be measuring how many days in a row you are writing.

Is it to grow your audience so people purchase what you’re selling? Then maybe you should track the sales that result from each blog post you write rather than the number of posts you write.

Track your progress using one of these metrics and your mindset may shift from ‘I worked x hours to do this thing’ to ‘I did this thing and it produced x results.’

This system is hard to maintain because a lot of things in the world are designed to steal your attention and I’ve found myself falling into the busy trap once in a while.

But, if you give it a shot (even just for a day or a few hours), you may uncover one of the most productive ways you’ve ever worked, like I did.

If you work at a company that requires you to be there for a set number of hours I’m not saying you should quit or that it’s a bad gig.

The important thing to remember is it’s not about the amount of hours you work, but what you do in those hours that counts.