André N. Meyer

Are you working in an open-space office with a lot of background noise? Can you just focus better if you hear your background mumble, like in a coffee shop? Or are you more relaxed when you hear birds sing or the sound of water?

Then, Noisli is for you! Noisli is a free and very simple service that lets you enable/disable different sounds to listen in the background. You can choose from birds, forest, wind, sea, fire, train waggons, coffee shop, and so on.

I’ve been using Noisli for the past 1-2 years and I’ve found it extremely helpful in times where I have a hard time to focus on my task. Also I cannot listen to music for a whole day when I am in the office, but I can listen to birds much longer.

I recommend everyone to try it out 🙂

The World Economic interviewed Guideon Nave, researcher at Warthon, on the impact of stress on how fast and how good we make decisions.

Find the transcript on the WEF website and learn why you should not go to the supermarket when you are stressed and what a baseball bat math quiz helps to analyze reactions of stress.

An interesting read on TheNextWeb summarizes recent research which has shown that actively pursuing hobbies in the spare time is not only fun and helps with work-life balance, but can also boost productivity and the IQ. These include playing an instrument, playing strategy games and exercise regularly.

Read more on TheNextWeb.com.