From To-Do List Hacks To Overconfidence’s Upsides: This Week’s Top Leadership Stories

This week we picked up some old-timey productivity methods that still pack a punch, and learned why the brain may be hardwired to make us overconfident.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of August 22.

1. This 100-Year-Old To-Do List Hack Works Like A Charm

Long before that nifty task-management app on your smartphone, an industrialist paid a hefty sum for this stupidly simple productivity method. A century later, it’s still as useful as ever. Here’s why and how it works.

2. This Is Your Brain’s Default Setting—Here’s How And When To Change It

Is overconfidence always a bad thing? Scientifically speaking, it depends. There may be more than one psychological source of overconfidence, which researchers suspect may be our brains’ way of saving us mental energy. This week we learned how to hack that system when we need to.

3. Do Female Athletes Get Stiffed By The Sports Industry?

The Rio Olympics offered a brief moment of equality for women’s athletics, which on average draw far less coverage and, subsequently, fewer fans and sponsorship dollars than men’s teams do. Here’s a look at the vicious industry circle in which the world’s top female athletes are caught.

4. Three Surprising, Science-Backed Ways To Improve Your Decision Making

Want to make bolder and better choices? Who doesn’t? This week we took a quick tour through some of the more outlandish research on the psychology of decision making, and found how how dimming the lights and waiting to pee may influence how we assess our options.

5. How To Tell If You’ll Fit Into A Company’s Culture Before You Take The Job

“As the new employee,” one expert explains, “you have to adapt to the culture rather than the culture adapting to you.” So for all the talk of employers hiring for “culture fit,” job seekers still have a responsibility to make that assessment from their side of the table, too. But the trouble is that a job interview isn’t always the best setting to do to that. So here’s what to do instead.