The terms that come up across the site, defined in a sentence or two. A definition tells you what a word means; the article it links to tells you what it is worth, where the evidence is thin, and what to do about it.
A US workplace retirement plan in which employees save part of their pay, often with a matching contribution from the employer and tax advantages. Contribution limits, vesting of the employer's money and plan terms are set by US rules and each plan's documents.
See also: compound interest, index fund
Listening to grasp a message from the speaker's point of view, including how they feel about it, then saying it back in your own words and checking you have it right before giving your view. The term comes from Carl Rogers and Richard Farson.
See also: nonverbal communication, employee voice
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a condition, usually present from childhood, marked by persistent inattention, hyperactivity or impulsiveness that affects daily life. In adults it can show up as disorganization or trouble finishing tasks, and a specialist makes the diagnosis.
A way of running projects that delivers work in short cycles and changes the plan as people learn, rather than fixing everything up front. It comes from software, from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, and Scrum is its best-known framework.
See also: Scrum, stakeholder
AI software that pursues a goal by taking steps on its own: it keeps track of what has happened, calls tools such as email or a browser, and repeats until the goal is met or someone stops it. Because it acts rather than only answers, its mistakes can have direct effects.
See also: generative AI, chatbot
The skills, knowledge and understanding to use AI systems in an informed way, including how they work, where they fail and how to check what they produce. In the EU, the AI Act requires organizations that provide or use AI to take steps on their staff's AI literacy.
See also: EU AI Act, generative AI
The tendency for an estimate or decision to be pulled toward a number seen beforehand, even an irrelevant one. It is one of the effects that held up when large teams ran the original experiments again.
See also: cognitive bias, heuristic
A mental health condition in which worry or fear is persistent, out of proportion to the situation and hard to control, and gets in the way of daily life. It differs from ordinary anxiety, which passes, and it is diagnosed by a clinician.
See also: depression, stress response
Software employers use to collect job applications, store candidates' details and move them through the stages of hiring. Most can also read resumes and filter or rank applicants by rules the employer sets, such as answers to screening questions.
See also: structured interview
Thoughts about one task that linger after you switch to another and take attention away from it. Sophie Leroy named it; in her experiments it was stronger when the first task was left unfinished, and a brief plan for how to resume it reduced it.
See also: task switching, unfinished goal, Zeigarnik effect
How far a behavior runs by itself, triggered by a familiar context with little thought or effort. Habit researchers use it to measure how strong a habit has become, usually by asking people to rate it.
See also: implementation intention, self-control
How often something happens in general, across all similar cases, before you know anything special about your own. Judgments that ignore it, a mistake called base-rate neglect, tend to be too confident about the case in front of them.
See also: heuristic, planning fallacy
Keeping participants, and sometimes researchers, from knowing who received which treatment in a trial, so that expectations cannot sway the results. Double-blind means neither side knows; some treatments, such as exercise, cannot be blinded at all.
See also: placebo, risk of bias
A loan to a government or company that pays the lender interest, usually at a fixed rate, and repays the amount lent on a set date. Bond prices move when interest rates change, and the borrower can fail to pay, so a bond can lose value.
See also: diversification, inflation
The profit from selling an asset, such as shares, for more than you paid; a sale for less is a capital loss. Whether and how gains are taxed, and how losses can offset them, depends on the country and the kind of account.
See also: dividend
A detailed look at one organization, group, project or event, often with interviews and documents. It can show how something happened in context, but with no comparison group it cannot show that a change caused the result or that it would work elsewhere.
See also: qualitative research, observational study
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia: a structured program that changes sleep schedules, habits and the thoughts that keep people awake, delivered over several sessions. Guidelines recommend it as the first treatment for chronic insomnia, and parts of it need a clinician's guidance.
See also: insomnia, cognitive behavioral therapy
A rating of how confident we can be that a body of research has an effect about right, graded high, moderate, low or very low. It grades the evidence, not the stakes: low certainty means little is known, not that little is at risk.
See also: risk of bias, systematic review
A program that holds a conversation in everyday language, replying to what a user types or says. Most of today's AI chatbots run on large language models, which can give fluent, confident answers that are partly or wholly wrong.
See also: generative AI, prompt
The idea that being offered more options makes choosing harder, leaving people less likely to choose or less satisfied with what they pick. Meta-analyses find little effect on average, with overload appearing only under particular conditions, such as complex options or a hard decision.
See also: heuristic, cognitive bias
A structured talking therapy that works on the links between thoughts, feelings and behavior, usually over a set number of sessions with practice between them. It is given by a trained therapist or through guided programs, and versions exist for specific problems.
See also: CBT-I, depression
A predictable way in which judgments depart from a standard such as logic or probability. Most are ordinary mental shortcuts applied in the wrong setting rather than defects, and some well-known ones have not held up when tested again.
See also: heuristic, anchoring, sunk-cost effect
Using something outside your head, such as a note, a calendar alert, a search engine or a chatbot, to cut the mental work a task needs. It usually helps you do the task, though you may remember less of what you handed over.
See also: working memory, second brain
A study that takes a group of people, records something about them, and then follows them to see who ends up with a given outcome. It can show that the outcome is more common in one group; it cannot show that the recorded thing is the reason, because the groups may differ in other ways.
See also: observational study, longitudinal study
Interest worked out on the original amount plus the interest already added to it, so the total grows faster over time. It works for savers and against borrowers, whose unpaid interest itself starts to attract interest.
See also: inflation
A range of values within which the figure a study is estimating, such as an average effect, can reasonably be expected to lie. Its width is about precision: how tightly the study pinned that average down, not how much individual results vary.
See also: effect size, statistical significance
A quality researchers assume people have and measure indirectly through their answers to a test or questionnaire, such as burnout or engagement. Because the name is assigned rather than observed, whether a measure captures the thing it is named after is a real question.
See also: self-report, prevalence
The group in a study that does not get the treatment being tested, so its results show what would have happened anyway. It may get nothing, usual care, a placebo, a place on a waiting list or a different activity, and which one it gets shapes what the comparison can show.
See also: randomized controlled trial, placebo, blinding
A group of study participants chosen because they were easy to reach, such as students, app users or online volunteers, rather than drawn at random from the population of interest. Results from such samples may not hold for other people.
See also: self-selection, nationally representative
A measure of how closely two things move together, running from minus one, where one rises as the other falls, through zero, meaning no link, to plus one. It says how strong the relationship is, not what causes it, and it is not a percentage.
See also: observational study, effect size
A hormone made by the adrenal glands that helps regulate energy, blood pressure and the body's response to stress. Its level follows a daily rhythm, high on waking and low at night, so a single reading says little on its own.
See also: stress response
Help with budgeting and debts from a trained counselor, which in the US usually comes from a non-profit organization and may include a debt management plan. Not every provider is non-profit or free, and some have defrauded people, so check fees and credentials first.
See also: debt management plan
A record of how a person has borrowed and repaid, kept by a credit bureau (credit reference agency): accounts, balances, payment history and some public records. Lenders read it when deciding whether to lend, and in many countries you can check your own for free.
See also: credit score
A number calculated from a credit report that estimates how likely a person is to repay borrowing on time. Scoring models, score ranges and what they include differ between companies and countries, and lenders also weigh income and other details.
See also: credit report, credit counseling
Describes a study that measures everyone in its sample at a single point in time. Because the possible cause and the outcome are recorded together, it can show that two things occur together but not which of them came first.
See also: longitudinal study, correlation
A trial in which each participant receives every condition being compared, one after another in random order, often with a gap between them. Because people are compared with themselves, fewer are needed, but the design only suits effects that wear off.
See also: randomized controlled trial, placebo
In burnout research, a distant or negative attitude toward one's job, the people in it or its purpose. The WHO's description of burnout names it as mental distance from, or cynicism about, one's job.
See also: occupational phenomenon
An arrangement, usually set up by a credit counselor or debt advice service, to repay unsecured debts through one regular payment that the provider shares out among creditors. It does not cancel the debt, and some firms selling these plans have defrauded people.
See also: credit counseling
A common mental health condition in which low mood or loss of interest lasts most of the day, nearly every day, for weeks, along with changes such as poor sleep, tiredness or trouble concentrating. It is diagnosed by a clinician, and effective treatments exist.
See also: anxiety disorder, cognitive behavioral therapy
A study in which people record what they do or feel repeatedly, often daily or when prompted at random moments, close to when it happens; the prompted form is called experience sampling. It relies less on memory, but it is still self-report.
See also: self-report, longitudinal study
Spreading study or practice of the same material across several sessions with gaps between them, rather than cramming it into one. Also called spacing, it tends to give longer-lasting learning than the same time spent in a single block.
See also: retrieval practice
Spreading money across many investments, and across different kinds of investment, so that a fall in one has less effect on the whole. It reduces the risk tied to any single holding but cannot remove the risk of the whole market falling.
See also: index fund
A portion of a company's profit paid out to its shareholders, usually in cash. A dividend is not free money: the share price tends to fall by about the payout when the share goes ex-dividend, and the tax on it depends on the country.
See also: index fund, capital gains
A pattern in which more of an exposure goes with more of an outcome, step by step. In observational research it is one of the signs that makes a causal link more plausible, though on its own it does not prove cause.
See also: observational study, cohort study
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, the American Psychiatric Association's handbook of criteria for diagnosing mental disorders; the current version is the text revision, DSM-5-TR. Burnout and impostor feelings are not diagnoses in it.
See also: ICD-11, anxiety disorder
A number saying how big a difference a study found, not just whether it found one. Standardized forms such as Cohen's d and Hedges' g scale it by how much the people studied varied, so results on different measures can be compared and the same value can mean different things in different groups.
See also: statistical significance, confidence interval
The idea that self-control draws on a limited store of energy that runs down with use, so resisting one temptation makes the next harder. A large preregistered test across many labs found no clear effect, so the idea is not well supported.
See also: self-control, replication
Money kept in an account you can reach quickly, to cover unexpected costs or a drop in income without borrowing. How much to hold depends on your circumstances, and official guidance differs by country.
Feeling drained and used up by work, with little energy left. It is the exhaustion dimension of burnout, one of three, and on its own it is not a diagnosis; persistent exhaustion is worth raising with a doctor.
See also: cynicism, occupational phenomenon
A term with two main meanings: in research, an ability to perceive, understand, use and manage emotions, measured with tests that have right answers; in popular use, a broad mix of self-rated traits and skills. Results from the two kinds of measure are not interchangeable.
See also: self-report, construct
A confidential service an employer pays for that gives staff free assessment, short-term counseling and referral for personal or work problems. It is a route to help, not a replacement for a doctor or for fixing problems in the work itself.
See also: psychosocial risk
A term with two main meanings: in research, a positive state of energy, dedication and absorption in one's work; in workplace surveys such as Gallup's, the conditions thought to produce it. Figures from the two kinds of measure are not interchangeable.
See also: job satisfaction, construct
Employees speaking up with ideas, questions or concerns meant to improve how things work, especially to people above them. How often it happens depends heavily on how open managers are seen to be.
See also: psychological safety, supervisor support
The first stage of memory, in which an experience is turned into a form the brain can store. How deeply something is processed at that stage, such as thinking about its meaning, affects how well it can be recalled later.
See also: working memory, retrieval practice
The European Union's law on artificial intelligence, adopted in 2024, which sorts AI uses by risk: some practices are banned, high-risk uses such as screening job applicants carry duties, and others need only transparency. Its duties start on different dates.
See also: AI literacy, generative AI
A pooled fund whose shares are bought and sold on a stock exchange during the day, like a company's shares. Many track a market index, but some are narrowly focused or use complex strategies, and fees, risks and tax treatment differ between funds and countries.
See also: index fund, market index, diversification
An experiment run in a real setting, such as a workplace, shop or website, with people going about their ordinary lives, usually with random assignment. It shows how an effect plays out in practice, though often for one setting and one group at a time.
See also: laboratory experiment, randomized controlled trial
The sense of being able to keep up your current and expected standard of living and of having financial freedom. Researchers measure it through how people feel about their money, which income or wealth alone does not capture.
See also: net worth, emergency fund
Complete absorption in a challenging task, with action and awareness merging, less self-consciousness and time seeming to pass differently. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named it; it tends to appear when a task stretches your skills and gives clear feedback.
See also: task switching, time blocking
The tendency for a choice to change when the same facts are described differently, for example as lives saved rather than lives lost. It is one of the effects that held up when large teams ran the original experiments again.
See also: prospect theory, anchoring, cognitive bias
The General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union's main data protection law, applied since 2018. It sets rules for how organizations collect and use personal data about people in the EU, including organizations based elsewhere, and gives people rights over that data.
See also: EU AI Act
AI systems that produce new text, images, audio or code in response to a request, by generating output that resembles the data they were trained on. Chatbots built on large language models are the best-known kind.
David Allen's productivity method: capture every commitment in a trusted system, decide the next action for each, sort them into lists and review them weekly. Its central step has experimental support, but no trial has compared the method as a whole with another.
See also: unfinished goal, Pomodoro technique
Short, task-by-task paid work, often found through an online platform, such as ride-hailing, delivery or small freelance jobs. Gig workers are usually treated as self-employed, so pay, costs, tax and legal protections depend on the platform and the country.
See also: side hustle
The belief that abilities such as intelligence can be developed through effort, good strategies and help from others; a fixed mindset is the belief that they cannot. It names a belief, and programs that teach it have shown small or no gains in school results.
See also: self-efficacy
When an AI system states false or made-up content, such as an invented fact or citation, as confidently as true content. NIST calls it confabulation; it follows from how these systems generate plausible text, so answers still need checking.
See also: generative AI, chatbot
A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that gives a quick, usually good-enough answer without weighing all the information. Heuristics often serve people well; they produce biases when used where they do not fit.
See also: cognitive bias, anchoring
A working arrangement in which people split their time between the employer's workplace and another location, usually home. Definitions differ between surveys and countries, so figures on it are not always comparable.
The World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, eleventh revision, the global standard for recording diseases and health conditions, in effect since 2022. It also lists some factors that are not illnesses, such as burnout, classed as an occupational phenomenon.
See also: occupational phenomenon, DSM-5
A plan in if-then form that ties a specific action to a specific situation, such as 'if it is nine o'clock, then I open the report.' It hands the decision about when and where to act to the situation itself.
See also: unfinished goal, time blocking
A mutual fund or exchange-traded fund that aims to track a market index by holding the securities in it, or a sample of them. Tracking an index does not protect against losses, and funds tracking the same index can charge very different fees.
See also: market index, diversification
A general rise in the prices of goods and services over time, so that the same amount of money buys less. Returns are often reported after inflation, in real terms, to show what a gain is worth in buying power.
See also: compound interest
Trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or waking too early despite having the chance to sleep, with effects on how you feel or function during the day. It is called chronic when it lasts for months; short spells after stress are common.
See also: CBT-I
Doing something because it is interesting or enjoyable in itself, rather than for a separate outcome such as pay, a grade or approval. Self-determination theory contrasts it with extrinsic motivation and sees motivation as a range, not a fixed trait.
See also: self-efficacy, flow state
How much say workers have over their own work, such as what they do, how and when, and over decisions that affect it. Heavy demands combined with low job control is the pattern researchers call job strain.
See also: job strain, psychosocial risk, supervisor support
How positively a person judges and feels about their job, as a whole or in parts such as pay, colleagues or the work itself. It is usually measured by questionnaire and is related to engagement, but it is not the same thing.
See also: employee engagement
The combination of heavy job demands with little control over how the work is done, from Robert Karasek's job demand-control model. Long-term studies link it to later health problems, though they show associations rather than proof of cause.
See also: job control, psychosocial risk
A way of managing work on a board of columns, such as to do, doing and done, where new work is pulled in only when there is room and the number of tasks in progress is kept to a set limit. It comes from Toyota's factory system.
See also: Getting Things Done, task switching
An experiment run under conditions the researchers set up and control, often with students doing short tasks. Control makes cause and effect easier to pin down, but the tasks are simpler than real life, so results do not always carry over to work or home.
See also: field experiment, randomized controlled trial
The popular belief that each person learns best in one preferred mode, such as visual or auditory, and should be taught in it. Tests of matching teaching to a person's style have found little or no benefit, so it is best treated as a myth.
See also: retrieval practice, distributed practice
A study that measures the same people more than once over a period of time, so it can see how they change and which thing came first. Following people over time still does not show that the earlier thing caused the later one.
See also: cohort study, cross-sectional
A defined list of securities, such as the shares of a country's largest companies, whose prices are combined into one number to show how that part of the market is doing. The index itself cannot be bought; funds that copy it charge costs.
See also: index fund
The middle value when numbers are put in order, so half fall below it and half above. Unlike the average (mean), it is not pulled up or down by a few very large or very small values, which is why it is often used for incomes and wealth.
See also: standard deviation
A variable that carries the effect of one thing to another: the first changes the mediator, and the mediator changes the outcome. When all of it is measured at the same time, the result shows a pattern that fits such a chain rather than evidence that the chain is real.
See also: moderator, cross-sectional
A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.
See also: systematic review, effect size, publication bias
Paying attention to what is happening in the present moment, including thoughts and sensations, on purpose and without judging it. The word covers both a state of mind and the courses that train it, and most research tests the courses.
A variable that changes how strong an effect is, or whether it shows up at all, for different people or in different settings: who or what it works for, rather than how it works. Unlike a mediator, it is not a step in the chain between cause and outcome.
See also: mediator, meta-analysis
A review in which an expert summarizes a body of research in prose, choosing which studies to discuss. It can be a good map of a field, but without a stated search and pooling method it is easier for selection and opinion to shape the conclusions than in a systematic review.
See also: systematic review, umbrella review
Describes a sample drawn by random selection from a country's whole population and weighted so its results stand for that population. The label describes how people were picked, not how many of them agreed to take part.
See also: cross-sectional, prevalence
Everything you own on a given day minus everything you owe that day. It is a snapshot of wealth rather than income, and much of it can be tied up in things that are hard to turn into cash, such as a home.
See also: emergency fund
Communication without words, through facial expression, tone of voice, gesture, posture and eye contact. The popular claim that nearly all of a message's meaning is nonverbal is a misreading of two small experiments on judging feelings.
A study in which researchers record what people already do or are exposed to, rather than assigning anyone to anything. It can show that two things go together, not that one causes the other, because the groups being compared may differ in other ways as well.
See also: randomized controlled trial, cohort study, correlation
The WHO's label for burnout in its International Classification of Diseases: something that affects health and leads people to seek care, but that is not classified as a medical condition. The classification also limits the word to work.
See also: cynicism
Being more sure of your knowledge, skill or forecasts than the results justify, for example rating yourself above average or giving too narrow a range for an estimate. It is broader than the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is about how the error varies with skill.
See also: cognitive bias, planning fallacy
A sudden surge of intense fear or discomfort that peaks within minutes and brings physical symptoms such as a pounding heart, sweating or shortness of breath. Chest pain can also be a heart attack, so new or severe symptoms need urgent medical help.
See also: anxiety disorder, stress response
The checking of a study by independent experts, usually arranged by a journal, before it is accepted for publication. It screens for weak methods and unclear reporting, but reviewers rarely see the raw data, so passing it does not prove a finding is right.
See also: preprint, replication
A dummy treatment, such as a sugar pill or a decaffeinated drink, made to look like the real one so that people in a trial cannot tell which they received. Comparing against it separates a treatment's effect from the effect of expecting to be treated.
See also: blinding, control group
A four-step loop for testing a change: plan it with a written prediction, try it on a small scale, study what happened against the prediction, then act by adopting, adapting or dropping it. It comes from the quality methods of Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming.
See also: case study
The tendency to underestimate how long your own tasks will take, even when you know similar tasks ran late before. Estimating from your track record on past tasks, rather than from the plan, tends to correct it.
See also: base rate, cognitive bias
A work method devised by Francesco Cirillo in which you work in short, fixed intervals, traditionally timed with a kitchen timer, each followed by a short break. Studies comparing it with breaks people choose for themselves are few and small.
See also: time blocking, Getting Things Done
A research paper posted publicly before it has been peer reviewed or published in a journal; in economics and finance the same stage is usually called a working paper. Its findings may change, or fail to hold up, by the time it is published.
See also: peer review
Filing a study's hypotheses and analysis plan publicly before the data are collected or examined. It stops a planned test from being rewritten once the results are in, so a reader can tell a real confirmation from a hunt through the data.
See also: replication, publication bias
The share of a population who have a given condition at a point in time or across a set period. Every prevalence figure depends on the case definition behind it: loosen or tighten the criteria for counting as a case and the figure moves with them.
See also: nationally representative, cross-sectional
The finding that exposure to one thing, such as a word or image, can change how people respond to something that follows, often without their noticing. Priming of word recognition is well established, but many famous behavioral priming effects have failed to replicate.
See also: replication, System 1 and System 2
In Scrum, the one person accountable for getting the most value from the team's work, mainly by setting the product goal and ordering the product backlog. The role belongs to a single person, not a committee, though others can shape the backlog.
See also: Scrum, agile, stakeholder
The instruction or input a person gives a generative AI system, such as a question, a description of a task or a block of pasted text. The same request worded differently can produce noticeably different answers.
See also: generative AI
Kahneman and Tversky's account of how people choose under risk: outcomes are judged as gains or losses from a reference point, and losses weigh more than gains of the same size. Its main patterns have held up when the original questions were run again in many countries.
See also: framing effect, cognitive bias
A shared belief within a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, such as asking questions, admitting mistakes or raising concerns, without being punished or embarrassed. It is about candor, not about everyone being nice.
See also: employee voice
A feature of how work is designed, organized or managed that can harm mental or physical health, such as heavy workload, low control, poor support, bullying or job insecurity. Guidance puts changing these conditions ahead of asking workers to cope better.
See also: employee assistance program, emotional exhaustion
The tendency for studies with striking or statistically significant results to be published, while quieter ones stay in the drawer. Since the missing studies are mostly the unimpressive ones, a pooled result tends to overstate the effect until it is corrected.
See also: meta-analysis, effect size, preregistration
Research that collects words, observations or images, through interviews, focus groups or fieldwork, rather than numbers. It is good at showing how and why people experience something, but it is not designed to say how common that experience is.
See also: self-report, observational study
Describes a study that compares a group that got something with a group that did not, where the researcher did not do the assigning: a policy, a rollout or people's own choices did. Because the groups were not formed at random, they may have differed before it started.
See also: randomized controlled trial, observational study
A study that assigns participants to the treatment or the comparison group at random, so the groups start out alike and a difference in what happens next can be put down to the treatment. Random assignment makes the two groups comparable; it does not make the people in the trial representative of anyone else.
See also: observational study, quasi-experimental
Changes an employer makes so that a disabled job applicant or worker is not put at a disadvantage, such as extra time in a test or changed hours. Great Britain calls them reasonable adjustments and the US reasonable accommodations; what the law requires depends on the country.
See also: structured interview
In hiring, a recommendation of a candidate by someone who already works for the employer, often through a formal employee referral program. Referred applicants tend to be likelier to be hired, but referrals are one channel among several, not a shortcut for every job.
Two ways to state the same difference. Relative risk compares the chance of an outcome in one group with another, as a ratio; absolute risk says how many extra or fewer people per hundred it affects. A large relative change can be a small absolute one when the outcome is rare.
See also: effect size, confidence interval
Work done fully or partly away from the place the job would normally be done. The ILO keeps it separate from telework, which also needs digital devices, and from work at home, which is about the place; there is no single international definition, so surveys draw different lines.
See also: hybrid work
Running a study again with fresh data and the same method, to see whether the original result comes back. A finding that fails to replicate is not automatically wrong, but it stops being something you can lean on.
See also: preregistration, statistical significance
Learning by recalling material from memory, for example by quizzing yourself, instead of rereading it. Pulling information out makes it easier to recall later, a result also known as the testing effect.
See also: distributed practice, encoding
A rating of how much room a study's design, conduct and reporting leave for its result to be systematically wrong. It judges the method, not the motives of the researchers, and a high rating means the result may be off, not that it is.
See also: certainty of evidence, systematic review, randomized controlled trial
Not knowing clearly what is expected of you at work: your duties, your authority or how your work will be judged. Its opposite, role clarity, is linked in workplace surveys to better satisfaction and performance, though most of that evidence is cross-sectional.
See also: job satisfaction, psychological safety
Repetitive, passive dwelling on problems, feelings or their causes and consequences, without moving toward a solution. It is linked to depression and anxiety, and when it is about work it can keep the job on your mind long after the working day ends.
See also: depression, mindfulness
The number of people, or other units, a study measures. Small samples give noisy estimates that can swing a long way by chance, so a striking result from a small study is less certain than the same result from a large one.
See also: statistical power, confidence interval
A review that maps what research exists on a broad question, what kinds of studies were done and where the gaps are. It uses a systematic search but usually does not rate or pool the results, so it describes the evidence rather than saying what works.
See also: systematic review, narrative review
A framework in which a small team works in fixed cycles called sprints, each lasting a month or less, with set events such as sprint planning and a short daily check-in. Its rules are written down in the Scrum Guide.
Tiago Forte's name for one trusted digital notes system that holds what you want to keep, run through four steps: capture, organize, distill and express. It is a personal method from a course seller, and research supports parts of it, such as offloading reminders, more than the whole.
See also: cognitive offloading, Getting Things Done
Time spent awake sitting, reclining or lying down while using very little energy, such as desk work, driving or watching screens. It is measured separately from exercise, so a person can be both physically active and highly sedentary.
See also: cohort study
The ability to override an impulse or habit in favor of a longer-term goal, often called willpower. The popular idea that it runs on a limited fuel that each hard task burns up has not held up in large preregistered tests.
See also: self-efficacy, replication
A person's belief in their ability to carry out a particular task or reach a particular goal. It is specific to the task, so someone can feel capable at work and unsure with money, and it goes with how readily people start and keep going.
See also: self-control
A measure in which people describe their own behavior, feelings or circumstances, usually by answering a questionnaire. When the same person supplies both of the things being compared, shared habits of answering can make the link between them look stronger than it is.
See also: construct, risk of bias
When the people in a study chose to take part, or chose the thing being studied, rather than being picked or assigned. Volunteers and choosers can differ from everyone else, so the result may not apply more widely or may reflect who chose rather than what they chose.
See also: convenience sample, nationally representative
Paid work done alongside a main job or other main activity, such as freelancing, gig work or selling goods online. Income from it is usually taxable, and the rules depend on where you live.
A condition in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep, often with loud snoring, gasping and daytime sleepiness. It needs a sleep test and a doctor to diagnose; a phone or watch alert can prompt a test but cannot rule it in or out.
See also: insomnia
A checklist for writing goals, most often read as specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, first proposed by George Doran for managers. The words behind the letters vary between versions, and research supports specific, challenging goals more clearly than the acronym as a whole.
See also: implementation intention
In project management, anyone who can affect a project, be affected by it, or believe they are affected by it: an individual, a group or an organization. That includes users, suppliers and colleagues whose work changes, not only the people paying.
See also: agile
A measure of how widely values spread around their average: small when most values sit close to it, large when they are scattered. Effect sizes are often given in standard deviations so that results measured on different scales can be compared.
See also: effect size
The chance that a study will detect an effect of a given size if the effect is real. An underpowered study is too small to do this reliably, so it tends to miss real effects and to exaggerate the ones it does find.
See also: sample size, effect size, statistical significance
A result that a statistical test says would be unlikely to turn up if there were no real effect. It does not carry the everyday sense of significant: it says nothing about how big the effect is or whether it matters in practice.
See also: effect size, confidence interval
The body's reaction to a demand or threat: a fast alarm through the nervous system that raises heart rate and alertness, followed by a slower wave of hormones that includes cortisol. It is useful in short bursts; the concern is when it stays switched on.
See also: cortisol
A job interview in which every candidate is asked the same questions, drawn from an analysis of the job, and each answer is rated against a scale written in advance. It predicts job performance better than an unstructured conversation.
See also: reasonable adjustments
The pull to keep putting time, money or effort into something because of what has already been spent on it, rather than because of what it will bring from now on.
See also: cognitive bias
How far employees feel that their manager values their contribution and cares about their wellbeing, usually measured by asking them. In research it is often called perceived supervisor support.
See also: employee voice
Kahneman's labels for two modes of thinking: System 1 is fast, automatic and effortless, and System 2 is slow, effortful and deliberate. They are a way of describing thinking, not two parts of the brain, and some researchers dispute the neat split.
See also: heuristic, cognitive bias
A review that fixes its question and its rules for including studies in advance, then searches out every study that fits and weighs them together. Some systematic reviews pool the results into a meta-analysis; others describe what the studies found without combining the numbers.
See also: meta-analysis, risk of bias, certainty of evidence
Moving attention from one task to another and later back again. What people call multitasking is usually rapid switching of this kind, and each switch and return tends to cost some time or accuracy.
See also: working memory
Planning the day by giving each task a fixed slot on the calendar, rather than working down a list. The plan is meant to be redrawn when the day changes, not followed at any cost.
See also: implementation intention, Pomodoro technique
A style of leadership in which the leader sets out a compelling vision, leads by example and encourages people to grow and think for themselves. Research on it has been criticized because the label mixes what leaders do with the effects they are meant to have.
A review that gathers and compares existing systematic reviews and meta-analyses on a broad question, rather than individual studies. It gives a wide view quickly, but it inherits the limits of the reviews it collects.
See also: systematic review, meta-analysis
A goal or task a person has committed to but not yet completed. Experiments suggest it can keep coming to mind and pull attention from other work, and that making a specific plan for it can quiet it before the work is done.
See also: implementation intention, Getting Things Done
Relationships with little shared time, emotion, confiding or exchange of favors, such as a former colleague. Because acquaintances move in other circles, they are more likely than close friends to pass on news you have not already heard, including about jobs.
See also: referral
A cap on how many work items can be in progress at once, used in kanban so that new work starts only when something is finished. The aim is to finish work sooner and see where it gets stuck, not to keep everyone busy.
See also: kanban, task switching
The small mental workspace that holds and handles the information you are using right now, such as a phone number you are about to dial. Its capacity is limited, which is why juggling several things at once quickly overloads it.
See also: encoding, task switching
The claim, from Bluma Zeigarnik's experiments in the 1920s, that people remember interrupted, unfinished tasks better than finished ones. A 2025 meta-analysis found no general memory advantage, though people did tend to go back to tasks left unfinished.
See also: unfinished goal, attention residue