Feel Better Blog

Photo by Nick Raniga In Douglas Adam's brilliant book The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, a great computer called Deep Thought spends seven and a half million years computing the answer to "life, the universe and everything". The answer, it declares, is 42. The computer then recommends that an even greater computer be constructed so that they may work out what the question actually is. I have now spent just over a year researching, developing and dogfooding the tool I call ZealPad and I'm delighted to report that it works! But what problem is it actually trying to solve, you might ask. Coming up with a clear and concise answer to that question, dear reader, is my current challenge. This is the second part of a blog post that I published back in January How to organize a scatterbrain - part one where I describe the shortcomings of existing productivity tools especially where there are executive skill weaknesses. In this post I hope to explain how ZealPad address...

  Is your mental health app backed by science?  Photo by Sarah Gualtieri via Unsplash.com When choosing a mobile app to help you in your mental health journey, look for features and design choices that are supported by scientific evidence. In this blog post, you will read about which mental health app features are common in apps according to a 2017 meta-analysis study, some of which are backed by scientific evidence. You will know which features are supported by science and which need further studies. Look for an app that uses data-driven design and contains evidence-based activities that improve mental health. Use an app in conjunction with a licensed therapist to get the most out of your mental health journey. After reading this blog post, you will be able to make evidence-based and informed decisions about the apps you choose and trust with their mental health. We looked at a meta-analysis that identified common features in mental health apps across 45 research articles an...

One of the things that has struck me in the past few years is how much of a symptomatic overlap there is between a wide array of mental health disorders and syndromes. One such symptom is the Impossible Task that I’ve seen described as a symptom of depression, a symptom of anxiety and a symptom of ADHD. The Impossible Task could be anything: going to the bank, refilling a prescription, making your bed, checking your email, paying a bill. From the outside, its sudden impossibility makes ZERO sense. — M. Molly Backes (@mollybackes) August 28, 2018 Impossible Tasks are small every-day simple tasks that everyone, including the person experiencing the problem, knows are not difficult but are surrounded by an invisible but impenetrable barrier preventing their completion. They are generally very mundane such as making a doctor’s appointment, taking out the garbage or cleaning your desk. This impenetrable barrier can take on many different compositions including: The expectation of signific...

“I find it hard to believe you are leaving just to build a crappy task list” I spent nearly all of the previous decade taming the chaos of a successful online dating system, namely PlentyofFish. I joined a very small tech team in 2011 and together we learned the hard way how to turn a startup into a mature software development shop. In those early days we all wore multiple hats and spent much of our time putting out fires and averting disaster. In the years to follow we expanded (and incessantly reorganised) the team and introduced (and frequently circumvented) new process. Scaling the software was trivial, scaling the operation, not so easy. In the latter half of the decade, PlentyofFish was acquired by the Match Group and I accepted two new challenges. The first was to join the executive team with a grand new Chief Architect title, and the second was to begin work on tearing apart the monolithic system we wrestled with each day, and attempting to rebuild it as a set of event-driv...