For many of us, making time for exercise is a continuing challenge. Between work commitments and family obligations, it often feels like there's no room in our packed schedules for a dedicated workout. But what if the workout came to you, right in the midst of your daily routine? That's where the beauty of integrating mini-exercises into household chores comes into play. Let's be realistic; chores are inevitable. Whether it's washing dishes or taking out the trash, these tasks are an essential part of daily life. But rather than viewing chores as purely obligatory activities, why not seize these moments as opportunities for physical activity? For instance, practice squats or engage in some wall push-ups as you wait for your morning kettle to boil. Incorporating quick exercises into your daily chores can improve your health.

When we see something, we naturally and automatically break it up into shapes, colors, and concepts that we have learned through education. We recode what we see through the lens of everything we know. We reconstruct memories rather than retrieving the video from memory. This is a useful trait. It's a more efficient way to store information—a bit like an optimal image compression algorithm such as JPG, rather than storing a raw bitmap image file. People who lack this ability and remember everything in perfect detail struggle to generalize, learn, and make connections between what they have learned. But representing the world as abstract ideas and features comes at a cost of seeing the world as it is. Instead, we see the world through our assumptions, motivations, and past experiences. The discovery that our memories are reconstructed through abstract representations rather than played back like a movie completely undermined the legal primacy of eyewitness testimony. Seeing is not believing.

In his Cornell laboratory, David Dunning conducted experimental tests of eyewitness testimony and found evidence that a careful deliberation of facial features and a detailed discussion of selection procedures can actually be a sign of an inaccurate identification. It's when people find themselves unable to explain why they recognize the person, saying things like "his face just popped out at me," that they tend to be accurate more often. Sometimes our first, immediate, automatic reaction to a situation is the truest interpretation of what our mind is telling us. That very first impression can also be more accurate about the world than the deliberative, reasoned self-narrative can be. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes a variety of studies in psychology and behavioral economics that demonstrate the superior performance of relatively unconscious first guesses compared to logical step-by-step justifications for a decision.

Digital technologies are essentially related to metaphors, but digital metaphors are different from linguistic ones in important ways. Linguistic metaphors are passive, in the sense that the audience needs to choose to actively enter the world proposed by metaphor. In the Shakespearean metaphor "time is a beggar," the audience is unlikely to understand the metaphor without cognitive effort and without further engaging Shakespeare's prose. Technological metaphors, on the other hand, are active (and often imposing) in the sense that they are realized in digital artifacts that are actively doing things, forcefully changing a user's meaning horizon. Technological creators cannot generally afford to require their potential audience to wonder how the metaphor works; normally the selling point is that the usefulness of the technology is obvious at first glance. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is beloved in part because the meaning of his works is not immediately obvious and requires some thought on the part of the audience.