What a year 2020 has been. We’re very grateful that Clearer Thinking has been able to continue working on what we do: researching strategies to help you improve your life and condensing them into fun, free, interactive tools that you can use to improve your life. Below is a quick summary of all the tools and projects that we launched this year, so you can easily try out any that seem valuable to you that you may have missed.
The tools that we launched this year were designed to help you improve your daily routine, get better sleep, and understand your deepest values, among other things. We also started several projects aimed at connecting more with our community of users. Read on to discover how!
Here are four interactive programs that we launched in 2020:
Daily Ritual: A Habit Creation System - designed to help you quickly introduce new, beneficial habits into your daily routine, this tool walks you through simple techniques for behavior change so that you can create your own custom habit formation strategy. It’s perfect for introducing simple behaviors, like exercise, meal preparation, or skill practice, to your day.
40 Winks: Better Sleep Made Easy - this tool provides you with a personalized list of strategies for improving your sleep hygiene. Based on your answers to various diagnostic scales, you’ll receive evidence-based recommendations for improving the quality of your sleep, which can lead to drastic improvements in other areas of your life.
The Intrinsic Values Test - this insightful, detailed quiz identifies the things that matter most in the world to you. You’ll discover what your personal value system says about your philosophical outlook, your political alignment, and how it compares to the values of the U.S. population at large.
Program Yourself to Improve Your Life - using simple “implementation intentions”, this quick tool helps you train yourself to introduce positive, automatic actions into your day. Whether you want to drink more water or save more money, practicing these “if-then” rules will make adopting new behaviors much easier.
But these weren’t the only free tools that we launched on our site this year. The events of 2020 saw the realization of the Clearer Thinking Micro Grants project, which funded the creation of 15 new, interactive tools on critical thinking topics built by selected applicants. You can read more about this project here, and find all the tools on our website. They cover topics like reframing negative thoughts, accurately estimating the frequency of events, handling confrontation effectively, and understanding how memory biases work.
In October, we launched Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that truly matter. Every week, our founder Spencer has a conversation with a brilliant person, exploring four or five fascinating ideas and powerful concepts that we hope will help you better understand yourself and the world you live in. To hear these discussions on scientific progress, comfort languages, enlightenment, and philosophical thinking (and many, many more topics), head over to the podcast website or subscribe by searching for it on your preferred podcast platform.
In September, we ran our first series of digital community events, Clearer Thinking meetups in collaboration with the 52 Living Ideas meetup (which conducts daily Zoom meet-ups on Psychology, Philosophy and Self Improvement, weekdays at 9pm ET & weekends at 2:30pm ET). These meetups covered topics in decision-making, personal insight, and learning from mistakes, and they also involved interactive exercises that could be practiced with other members of the Clearer thinking community. We hope to run more of these events in 2021! To sign up to be reminded when these events happen, go here.
If you don’t read our newsletter or blog regularly, you might have missed some of our most popular posts this year: these included 40 meaningful things to do in a pandemic, how to cope with fear and anxiety, a guide to misleading statistics, and the four states of distress.
As always, we’re incredibly grateful to you, our users, for supporting our projects and providing feedback on our tools as we work to create the most helpful and effective interventions for self-improvement. We wish you all the best for the upcoming year!