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#276: 4 Features of Summer That Cloud Your Thinking
3 tips from a cognitive scientist on how to beat decision fatigue
Jenae Spry
April 10, 2026
Productivity Stacks Newsletter
Issue No. 276
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
4 Features of Summer That Cloud Your Thinking
25 executives share their benefits of automation
3 tips from a cognitive scientist on how to beat decision fatigue
I tried dozens of note-taking apps and I keep coming back to this open source tool
Google Workspace apps just got a Gemini-powered brain upgrade
👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here
🔥Quote/Prompt
Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as may days in the year as you make use of.
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
I've watched so many small business owners spend more energy PLANNING when they'll finally get organized than actually getting organized. 😬
And honestly? I get it. There's something comforting about […]
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
When I moved to San Diego I kept hearing you don't need A/C if you live near the water. Three blocks from the ocean? Done and done. Then a real heat wave hit and the inside of my house got past 100°F (the thermometer maxed out, so who knows). The first couple of days I worked from 5am to beat the heat and called it quits before noon. That lasted about three days before I gave up and bought a window unit. In the meantime, everything felt like it took 10 times longer. If you’ve worked during a heat wave, you know what I mean. This research from Psychology Today breaks down four specific summer conditions that actually impair cognitive performance. The science on a couple of these is still developing (the author presents it as a bit more solid than it is so just FYI), but the practical advice is solid regardless.
"Studies show that high temperatures impair both simple and complex cognitive tasks. However, it's much worse when doing something more demanding — activities like doing mental arithmetic, planning how to solve a problem, and driving."
Key Insights:
Summer sleep is genuinely shorter and lower quality because longer daylight disrupts melatonin timing and compresses the sleep stages your brain relies on for memory consolidation, like REM sleep.
Dehydration hits hardest on the tasks that matter most to running your business, such as focused attention and executive decision-making. Research suggests staying hydrated may help reverse some of those effects.
If you're in wildfire country, smoke is a real cognitive tax too. A longitudinal study of over 10,000 adults found that increases in wildfire smoke and particulate matter tracked directly with measurable drops in focused attention scores.
Read the full article for four practical countermeasures, including the one piece of advice you'll actually want to follow (hint: it involves exercising less).
⚙️ Optimization
Repetitive tasks are productivity killers, and most of us know it. The problem isn't knowing we should automate, it's figuring out where to actually start when everything feels like a priority. This roundup from Fast Company's Executive Board skips the theory and goes straight to what 25 real business leaders are actually doing, which makes it a lot more useful than your average "just automate more!" advice.
"We push automation by starting with one question: 'What's the most annoying thing you did this week?' Then we fix it... People don't resist automation when it removes pain. They resist it when it feels like surveillance."
Key Insights:
The best place to start is friction, not strategy. Identifying the tasks that genuinely irritate your team, such as routing approvals, summarizing calls, or generating weekly reports, surfaces the highest-value automation targets without needing a big process overhaul.
Automation works best when it removes repetition, not judgment. Across all 25 responses, the consistent theme is keeping humans in the loop for decisions, client relationships, and creative work, while letting tools handle scheduling, data movement, and reporting.
Staff buy-in matters as much as the tool itself. Leaders who involved their teams in identifying what to automate, like hosting an "AI Day" or weekly sharing sessions, saw faster adoption and less resistance than those who rolled out changes top-down.
Read the full article for all 25 executive strategies, organized by use case, covering everything from healthcare workflows to sales outreach to internal approvals.
⏲️ Time Management
By the end of a long workday, some decisions that should take five minutes somehow take forty-five. You pick whatever's easiest, avoid the hard call, or just say yes to things you'd normally push back on. That feeling is real and it affects your work. Fair warning though: if you click through to this Fast Company piece, the advice is solid, which is why I’m including it, but the author opens by explaining why it happens using a theory called ego depletion, basically the idea that your willpower runs on a fuel tank that empties over the day. That specific theory has actually fallen apart pretty badly when researchers tried to reproduce it across dozens of studies. BUT the three strategies he recommends are still solid on their own, just the explanation he wraps around them is shakier than he makes it sound.
"Habits are actions you take that directly associate the situation with the action. That bypasses the need to make a decision at all. When you act habitually, your behavior may become routine and predictable, but you also don't have to engage in effortful decisions on things for which your habits would suffice."
Key Insights:
Not every decision deserves the same mental energy. Matching your effort to the actual stakes of a choice, like spending real time on a major client decision but not on what to order for lunch, saves your thinking for what actually matters.
When you're running low, defer instead of decide. Do the groundwork, form some initial preferences, then sleep on it. Things that felt murky the night before genuinely tend to look clearer in the morning.
Research suggests making a big decision as if you're advising a friend rather than choosing for yourself takes some of the emotional weight out of it and makes the process feel less draining.
Read the full article for the effort-accuracy tradeoff framework and specific tactics for building habits that take low-stakes decisions off your plate entirely.
💻 Tools & Technology
If you've ever spent more time researching note-taking apps than actually taking notes, this one's for you. The hunt for the "right" tool is real, and it's a productivity trap all on its own. This piece from The Verge is a tech writer's honest account of what finally made him stop looking, and the answer is Standard Notes, a free, open-source app that's been around for years but doesn't get nearly enough attention in the small business space.
"Unlike other solutions, Standard Notes doesn't just rely on a single feature to stand out. It's the perfect balance of all: cross-platform access, deep organizational capabilities with nested tags, a dedicated focus mode, and the peace of mind that comes with open-source and end-to-end encryption."
Key Insights:
Standard Notes runs natively on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux, plus a web app, so it actually works across a messy multi-device setup without forcing you to compromise anywhere.
The organizational system uses nested tags rather than traditional folders, which sounds like a small distinction until you're managing hundreds of notes across multiple clients or projects and suddenly it matters a lot.
Security is where it genuinely stands apart from Notion, Evernote, and most of the other usual suspects: the notes are end-to-end encrypted on your device before they ever hit a server, and the code is open-source so anyone can verify that claim. Proton (the privacy-focused email company) acquired it in 2024, which is a good sign for where it's headed.
Read the full article for a breakdown of the editor options, focus mode, and what the free plan actually gets you before committing to a paid tier.
🤖 AI
If you live in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, things just got a lot more useful. Google rolled out a wave of new Gemini-powered features across its Workspace apps in March 2026, and a few of them are genuinely worth paying attention to if you're running a small business. This piece from Android Police breaks down what's new across each app. The catch: most of it is currently only available to Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers, and Drive's new search feature is US-only for now.
"You can select all your tax-related files and ask, 'What should I ask my tax advisor before I file this year's tax returns?' to get a detailed response based on your actual data."
Key Insights:
Docs now has a Match Writing Style tool that edits AI-generated text to sound like you wrote it, which is genuinely useful if you're someone who can dash off rough thoughts quickly but struggles to shape them into something polished and consistent.
Sheets' new "Fill with Gemini" feature can pull real-time information from the web and populate entire columns automatically, so if you're tracking anything research-heavy like vendor options, competitor pricing, or event details, you may be able to skip a significant chunk of the manual lookup work.
Drive's Ask Gemini lets you search your files in plain language and get a summarized answer with citations, without having to actually open anything. Less hunting, more finding.
Read the full article for the specific prompts Google suggests for each app and the current rollout timeline by region and subscription tier.
🎉 Celebration Corner
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Wishing you much productivity!
- Jenae :)
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