Editorial Policy

The promise behind the site

Publishing about Habits, focus and daily motivation without saying how you work is asking for trust you have not earned. This is how we work.

How we date articles

The date on an article is the date it was published. When a change alters the advice, we update the modified date and say what changed. Cosmetic edits do not reset the date, because pretending a page is fresher than it is helps nobody.

The names on the work

Bylines are real people with real archives attached. If you disagree with a piece, you can see what else the same person has written and judge accordingly.

Lachlan Mbeki, Habits editor. Lachlan coached amateur runners for eight years and keeps a notebook of every habit he has started and dropped, which is a long notebook.

Priya Venkataraman, Focus and work writer. Priya is a software engineer who plans her day in ninety minute blocks and writes about what happens when the plan meets real meetings.

Ines Halvorsen, Games writer. Ines played ranked online games competitively through university and now studies why streaks, quests and leaderboards keep players going.

Where topics come from

Topics come from three places: reader mail, our own notes, and gaps we notice while reading what else is published. Nothing gets written because a keyword tool suggested it.

How a draft is built

1. Draft from experience, not from a page of search results.
2. Underline every claim that rests on memory rather than a source.
3. Support it or lose it. Each underline is backed by something we can name, or it comes out.
4. A cold read by a second person catches the confident guesses the writer stopped seeing.

Where money enters

Yes, some outbound links pay. What they pay for is the hosting bill, not the wording of the assessment sitting next to them.

A request to pull a criticism gets a flat no and a place in our records. Sometimes that request is more revealing than the thing complained about, and it says so in a later piece.

Our refusals

• Anything promising a result we cannot demonstrate.
• Pages written backwards from a search term.
• Advice we would not repeat to somebody sitting across a table.

Putting things right

Write to [email protected] with the page address and what is wrong. Factual errors are fixed quickly. If the correction changes the conclusion of a piece, we add a short note at the foot of the page rather than quietly editing it.