Fine-tune your judgement

• The employee cannot invest in a career if there is no visible sign of a career in the first place. The employee feels disposable and undervalued in the organization, with the manager ghosting him at times.
• Important information is thrust upon the employee, rather than taking his opinion first.
• There is no interest of the employer in employee development or empowerment.

When consumers are faced with many alternatives, they often experience choice overload that increases anxiety and hinders decision-making.

Consumers try to reduce this anxiety by selecting only a couple of criteria (say price and quantity) to determine the best value for money.

A decoy steers you in a particular direction while giving you the impression that you are making a rational, informed choice.

Consider the price of drinks at a well-known juice bar: a small (350 ml) size costs $6.10; the medium (450 ml) $7.10; and the large (610 ml) $7.50. The medium is a slightly better value than the small, and the large better still. The medium is designed to be the decoy, steering you to see the biggest drink as the best value for money.

If you buy the biggest, was it because you made a sensible choice, or have you been manipulated to opt for bigger than intended?

Carpool to work if you can to significantly reduce wear and tear on your car, save on gas, and take advantage of carpool lanes that might make it easier to get to work.

Check at least once a month to keep the tires on your vehicle properly inflated. Doing so can improve your gas mileage.

Refinance your home or automobile at a lower rate to save money over the life of the loan and lower your monthly payment.

If your student loans are locked in at a high-interest rate, figure out whether it makes sense to consolidate all or some of them.

Decisions are a cost-benefit analysis of risking something small for the opportunity to gain something big.

• Good decisions can be: Exercising, meditating for 10 minutes daily, finding the courage and striking up a conversation with someone, applying for jobs that you may or may not get.
• Bad decisions can be: lying or pretending to someone, driving unsafely, sending angry text messages, or staying up late drinking before an important meeting or exam in the morning.

Trade-offs are not something as simple as flipping a coin. Our values guide us towards what we want in life, and it is not the same for all. Example: Buying a house has a trade-off of mortgage for the next ten or more years. This is subjective and depends on what we value in life.

Indecisive people suffer because they don’t know their inner values and what they care about.

While we are on a flight, there are plenty of changes that we can experience:

• Change in brain chemistry and memory due to the deficiency in oxygen.
• Cognitive deficits in people who are already ill.
• Increased tiredness and more yawning during the flight.
• Deterioration in vision, dryness of skin, change in taste of food due to a reduction in the sensitivity of our taste buds and a decrease in the sense of smell.
• Change in air-pressure makes passengers generally uncomfortable with the sitting.

Mood swings, along with general anxiety or nervousness are common among flight passengers.

• Less oxygen can increase the effects of alcohol and the overall anxiety. These factors contribute to emotional changes, which can make people less friendly, more stressed out and lethargic.
• People are also prone to severe mood swings, like having extreme emotional reactions to movie scenes which would otherwise appear normal to them.

It's a thinking mistake and it occurs when we confuse selection factors with results. 

Professional swimmers don't have perfect bodies because they train extensively. Rather, they are good swimmers because of their physiques.

It plays on this tendency of ours to emphasize loss over gain.

The term sunk cost refers to any cost that has been paid already and cannot be recovered. The reason we can't ignore the cost, even though it's already been paid, is that we're wired to feel loss far more strongly than gain.

There are now many things to consider before ordering something:

• Should we add to the burden of the ‘essential workers’ already toiling hard?
• Shouldn’t we save the money for the uncertain future?
• Shouldn’t we give it to a homeless charity, to those less fortunate in these troubled times?
• Is ordering safe?

This seems to be the new mantra among the responsible people who are worried about themselves and their families. Large supply chains have a greater chance of transmitting diseases. Small shops also need our business to survive this catastrophe.

These small shops are also trying very hard to follow all CDC recommendations regarding protective gear and social distancing.

• The Dunning-Kruger Effect: You believe that you're smarter or more skilled than you are, which prevents you from admitting your limitations and weaknesses.
• Confirmation Bias: When you welcome information that you agree with while disregarding evidence that doesn't suit you — even if it's accurate.
• Self-Serving Bias: When you blame external forces when things are bad, but credit yourself when it's good.
• Optimism Bias: You believe you are more successful than others and won't experience any misfortune.
• Availability Heuristic: You believe that whatever comes to your mind quickly is the right decision.
• Attentional Bias: You only focus on some points while ignoring other aspects.
• False Consensus Effect: When you overestimate how much others will agree with you.
• Misinformation Effect: Your memory has been interfered with, changing how you recall past events.

Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.

This acronym can be used by anyone to help you master self-care and self-awareness. It encourages you to pause and ask how you're feeling. Feeling hungry, angry, lonely, or tired makes you more vulnerable to self-destructive behaviors.

• The level of positive emotions. This includes pride, joy, contentment, and curiosity we experience on a day-to-day basis. How happy you are on an immediate basis fluctuates by the day or even the hour.
• The overarching sense of contentment. How happy you are overall, generally remains the same. When you rate your happiness on a 10-point scale, if you are a seven kind of person, you will often stay around seven.

Buying time by outsourcing unpleasant or disliked tasks can benefit our well-being. 

Unfortunately, we're not great at valuing time over money. To change our spending habits, it helps to value time more than money. It could mean that we seek a job for its flexibility rather than the salary and prestige.

Taking a structured approach to note-taking is the best way. Put the outline notes by choosing four or five key points of the lecture, followed by in-depth sub-points. One way to review is to use the Cornell Method, which divides the note sheet into three sections:

• Cues: It includes key questions and main points.
• Notes: Which you write during the class using the outline method. 
• Summary: Which you can write after class while reviewing.

The mind map is a visual diagram of abstract concepts.

It works best in subjects like chemistry, history and philosophy, subjects having a neural network like interlocked and complex topics.