Productivity and wellness advice isn’t so different after all
Image by Riad Tchakou from Pixabay
I was doing some research on a big project the other day and listening to one of my favourite podcasts.
I listen to a LOT of podcasts (the nerdier the better). I consume lots about productivity, lots about wellness, most that overlap.
It occurred to me that productivity and wellness advice we get is more similar than it is different. So I set out to investigate if the language data would reflect this.
I did no lit reviews, and this whole project took half a day. None if this is perfect. Not even close. But my goal is to take a curious glance at things. Not submit it to Nature.
Take me to the TL;DRPurpose
See if there is a difference in how we talk with each other when we're trying to learn how to be more productive compared to when we are trying to learn how to be mentally healthier.
Hypothesis
I won't find meaningful differences between frequencies of words associated with *feeling* compared to words associated with *thinking*, *knowing*, or * doing*
Methods
I looked at two broad categories:
Category 1: Productivity
Category 2: Mental Health and Wellness
I developed a robust methodology to find transcripts from all the leading podcasters. I did the best I could to find topical episodes from popular shows that I could download on the spot, for free.*
I used R-studio to
Load 5 podcast transcripts per category
Create Document Term Matrices for each**
Clean the data and normalize it (by total words per episode)
Do some basic stats. Nothing fancy, just standard t-tests, adjusted for multiple comparisons because that's what ChatGPT said was good enough.
Make word clouds.
* It's impossible to find listening data (readily available and for free). Business models and all that.
** A fancy term for a dataset of words and their frequencies
Key Results
Rank order of keywords was the same for both datasets:
know
think
feel
There were NO instances of do in either dataset.
There were no significant differences in word frequency for any of the words I analyzed.
In fairness, a power analysis showed I'd need to analyze 64 articles to find a difference if there is one. I don’t have time for that and it’s not the point.
The word clouds both give me pause and make me chuckle:
Wellness words that jump out: “Just know [what you] like.”
Productivity: “One can get things just like people really want. About half the time.”
It cracks me up that "time" got cropped off.
TL;DR
Productivity Advice is not so different from wellness advice, after all.
Productivity advice summed up: One can get things just like people really want. About half the time.
Wellness advice summed up: Just know what you like.